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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2013
On the Philosophy & Theology Segment
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself
as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions,
and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from
time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by examining the
readings of the Philosophy & Theology segment.
The subject of this convocation address – which I mean to be the first of five, each
treating one of the segments of the Graduate Institute – follows from a claim that I made in an
earlier address, delivered in Spring 2012, titled “What is a Segment?” I said then that the
program of the Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent
arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these
segments should be taken as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for
wonder, rather than as names for the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each. Now
I hope to make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised
by the segment title “Philosophy & Theology”? And before I proceed to answer my own
question, I should caution that the threads that I mean to follow for the next few minutes –
threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected
to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I
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�only insist that these threads are present in the segment readings, and truly worth following. So
again, what are the wonderful questions raised by “Philosophy & Theology”?
Let’s begin with the ampersand. It suggests that there is something dual about the
segment, and prompts us to wonder what this duality is. The things joined together by the
ampersand, of course, are philosophy, which any good dictionary will tell you comes from the
Greek for ‘love of wisdom,’ and theology, which comes from the Greek for ‘an account about
the god.’ In what way, then, are the ‘love of wisdom’ and ‘an account about the god’ two?
It’s tempting to answer this question summarily, by noting that three of our segment titles
have ampersands in them, and that each segment has two classes whose readings are required:
the seminar and the tutorial. Could it be, then, that the dual segment titles reflect the duality of
the seminar and tutorial readings? Not every segment title has an ampersand, admittedly,
whereas every segment has a seminar and a tutorial. But we could attribute the exceptions, the
one-word segment titles, to exhausted imaginations on the part of the graduate Program’s
architects. We could then correct the title of the Literature segment, calling it the Greek &
English Literature segment. The History segment would become the Ancient & Modern History
segment, and our work would be done.
At first glance, there seems to be something to this somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘division
of labor’ theory. For if we survey the readings of the tutorial and the seminar, we see that the
former is full of great books ordinarily taken to be works of philosophy – Plato’s Meno,
Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and On the Soul, Descartes’ Meditations, Hume’s Enquiry,
Kant’s Prolegomena, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil – whereas the latter is full of great
books ordinarily taken to be works of theology: the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, and
Augustine’s Confessions. The presence of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica on the seminar reading
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�list could be taken as conclusive evidence in favor of the division of labor between seminar and
tutorial, were it not for the disappointing fact that Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments is also
among the readings of the so-called ‘theology seminar’ – not to mention that, with the
Prolegomena in tutorial and the Groundwork in seminar, Kant seems to be playing for both
teams.
Indeed, the more one thinks about this division of labor theory, the more problems
appear. Take the very first reading from the so-called ‘philosophy tutorial’: Plato’s Meno. It
begins, as we all know, with Meno challenging Socrates to say whether virtue comes to be in
human beings by teaching, by practice, by learning, by nature, or in some other way [70a]; and it
ends, as most of us know, with Socrates claiming that virtue comes to be by “divine allotment”
[100b]. In between, we find an account (logos) about divine matters (ta theia), one that claims
that “what we call learning is recollection” [81a-81e]. Is the Meno not in some way, then, a
theological dialogue? If we are tempted to dismiss this thought, on the ground that Socrates is
being playful when he speaks about the gods, what should we say about Aristotle’s account of
the unmoved mover, or about Descartes’ proof of the existence of God, or about Hume’s
discussion of miracles, or Kant’s theological Idea, or Nietzsche’s reintroduction of Dionysus?
Are these really not accounts about the god? What is worse, if we consult Aristotle’s discussion
of wisdom (sophia), found in the Nicomachean Ethics – which we read, alarmingly, in the
Politics & Society tutorial – we find that it is “the science of the things that are valued most
highly” [1141a20-21]. How could the love of such a science not include an account about the
god? How could philosophy not include theology? From the perspective of the so-called
‘philosophy tutorial,’ then, it seems that the ampersand in the Philosophy & Theology segment
title only marks and apparent duality, a hendiadys, a two that is really one.
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�Problems arise from the perspective of a so-called ‘theology seminar’ too; but they are
more grave, and more interesting. Should we seek a definition of theology, we can find one, but
unfortunately, it is also in Aristotle. In two passages in the Metaphysics that we don’t read for
tutorial, Aristotle calls theology the kind of contemplative philosophy that concerns things that
are eternal, separate, and motionless [1026a10-20; 1064a30-b5] – should such things exist. By
contrast, the term is not found in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures. It first appears among the
seminar authors in Augustine’s City of God – parts of which we read in the History tutorial – and
then among the seminar readings, most obviously in the title of Aquinas’ magnum opus. So the
Greek term ‘theology’ seems applicable to at best half of the so-called ‘theology seminar’
readings, in the sense that the authors of roughly half of these readings were aware of, or made
use of the term. Since the authors of the other half of these readings had a different name for, or
a different understanding of, what they were doing, it seems like the so-called ‘theology seminar’
is in fact composed of theology, understood as a branch of philosophy, and something else.
What, then, is this something else?
Another look at the first readings for tutorial and seminar will be helpful here. In one of
the most memorable passages in the Meno, Socrates says that while he will not insist very much
on the other parts of his argument, he would do battle, if he could, for the view that it is better,
more courageous, and less lazy to inquire into the things we don’t know, rather than supposing
that it is impossible to discover them, or that we ought not to inquire into them [86b-c]. (By the
way, I take Socrates’ conditional here not to imply that he can’t battle for this view, but to
provide an opening for Meno, who is very interested in what Socrates can and can’t do, to ask
him to battle for this view. It’s an opening Meno fails to exploit.) Socrates does not outright say
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�that we can know all the things we don’t know; but he does imply that he has reason to think that
we should try – that the attempt will be neither fruitless nor dangerous.
Now contrast this beginning with the beginning in the first Genesis reading from the
Philosophy & Theology seminar, where we learn that God created heaven and earth, and what he
created was “very good” [1:30]; but Adam and Eve nonetheless ate of the prohibited tree of good
and evil knowledge, and were punished for it [3:1-24]. Leaving aside the more sophisticated –
we might say, more theological – interpretations of these events, which try to interpret this
punishment in accordance with the presumed characteristics of God, the serpent, Eve, and Adam,
the naïve message is clear: we ought not to inquire into at least some of the things we don’t
know, namely the prohibited things, as the attempt to do so could be both fruitless and
dangerous.
The first readings of the Philosophy & Theology tutorial and seminar thus make opposite
claims. And we should not let our prejudices in favor of one or the other of these claims muddy
the wonderful, terrifying question that wants to rise to the surface through this opposition. There
are things that we don’t know. It is good to try to know them? Is knowledge possible, and is it
good? With these questions we have at last gripped two threads that run, in my view at least,
throughout the segment’s tutorial and seminar readings. In the tutorial, the Meno is followed by
Aristotle, who in the Metaphysics practices theology as the science of the intrinsically most
knowable and best things; by Descartes and Hume, whose reasoning about God is calculated to
protect the possibility of knowledge; and by Kant, whose reasoning about knowledge is
calculated to protect the possibility of God. This tutorial thread terminates, after its brief Kantian
crossing into the seminar, in Beyond Good and Evil, with Nietzsche’s alarming claims that
knowledge in the Aristotelian theological sense is neither simply possible, nor simply good.
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�The seminar thread, by contrast, runs through the Hebrew scriptures, with the examples
of Abraham’s exemplary fear [Genesis 22:12], which makes him a worthy father of multitudes
and a blessing for nations [22:17-18]; the Israelites’ exemplary law, obedience to which is
wisdom and understanding in the eyes of peoples [Deuteronomy 4:6]; and Job’s exemplary
ignorance, which in the end confesses that knowledge of God is impossible, and so speaks
rightly [Job 42:2-8]. It is found also in the Christian scriptures, for example in Jesus’ claim that
the most needful knowledge depends solely on revelation – “no one knows the son except the
father,” he says; “and no one knows the father except the son, and anyone to whom the son
wishes to reveal it” [Matthew 11:27]. But with the rise of theology, starting with the writings of
Paul, this thread becomes tangled. Paul, who confesses himself a debtor just as much to the
Greeks as to the barbarians, to the wise as to the unwise [Romans 1:14], is willing to claim that
“the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood
by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” [2:20]. And Augustine and
Aquinas both find themselves in the same boat, using the philosophical arguments of theology as
paths to belief in the Christian God, all the while denying the sufficiency and even doubting the
necessity of these paths. In Book Ten of his Confessions, for example, Augustine laments the
soul’s “vain and inquisitive greed” for experience, which “cloaks itself in the name of ‘research’
and ‘knowledge’” [10.35.54]; but soon thereafter he qualifies his lament, saying that he has been
able to curb his “curiosity for superfluous knowledge” [10.37.60; emphasis added]. For his part,
Aquinas begins the Summa by insisting that sacred doctrine is a science in the Aristotelian sense,
even though it is beyond human knowledge and may not be sought by human reason [q.1 a.1].
This seminar thread finally becomes untangled, and then terminates, with Kierkegaard, who
asserts in the Philosophical Fragments that thought wants to discover something that thought
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�cannot think [IV.204]: namely, the, eternal historical moment of god become man [IV.227], the
faith that is different in kind from, and infinitely more needful than, any knowledge.
Having traced these threads in this way, what can we say about the meaning of the
ampersand, and the duality of the Philosophy & Theology readings? The apparent duality of the
love of wisdom and an account about the god is only apparent: every lover of wisdom, every
lover of the science of the most valuable things, will seek an account about the god. But behind
this apparent duality is a real duality, between the love of knowledge – with all the sometimes
irrational attachment that the word ‘love’ can connote – and doubt about knowledge. The drama
of this duality comes from the encounter between these two views. Since doubt about
knowledge nonetheless wants to insist that its doubt is grounded in knowledge, it is easily
seduced by the appeal of love of knowledge, tries to incorporate it, and is corrupted by it. Once
this corruption is understood, attempts are made to recover the original insight, the original
tension between love of knowledge and doubt about knowledge. Beyond Good and Evil, with its
consideration of “The Religious Being,” its assertion of the necessity of religion to a flourishing
society [61-62], and its Dionysian conclusion, and the Philosophical Fragments, with its radical
rethinking of the meaning of Christian faith, are two attempts to restate the original questions – is
knowledge possible? Is knowledge good? – in their originally wonderful and terrifying force.
I hasten to repeat that the story I have told here about the readings of the Philosophy &
Theology tutorial is not a history, and certainly not a Hegelian one. There’s no necessity, to my
mind, that Kant follow Hume, nor that Jesus follow Moses; there’s no necessity that the threads
I’ve tried to grasp begin and end untangled. (Indeed, they seem quite tangled to me in our
contemporary, everyday world.) But there is a necessity that the authors of the great books that
we read confront, in more or less clearsighted ways, what it means to be the kinds of beings that
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�we are: beings that both stretch out, and stretch out toward knowing. It is this durable necessity
that ensures the connection of these threads to the threads that run through the readings of the
other Graduate Institute segments. The scope and character of political and social life depend,
for example, on our answers to the questions of whether knowledge is possible and good, as do
the scope and character of mathematics and natural science. And the durable basis of this
durable necessity is human nature itself, that homogeneous though multiple subject matter that is
the true content and concern of the graduate Program here at St. John’s. Without some account
of the whole that lies behind the graduate Program, without some attempt to follow the threads
that run through and between its segments, the education we are all pursuing in the Graduate
Institute will not acquire its full value.
I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be two Graduate Institute-hosted
study groups this term. One group will meet on Tuesdays, from 3:00 to 4:30, beginning on June
25, to read Xenophon’s Memorabilia – his recollections of Socrates. The other will hold an
organizational meeting in the Hartle Room this Tuesday, June 18, from 2:00 to 3:00. The
purpose of the group is to study techniques useful for the math section of the GRE. Schedules
for these groups will be circulated by email. Lastly, I would like to invite you all to take part in
the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to preceptorial.
The summer 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
13 June 2013
Delivered 17 June 2013
Note
The numbers cited in the text refer in each case to the standard divisions of the work in question,
never to page numbers.
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�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2013
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Philosophy & Theology Segment".
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Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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"We shall be monsters" : Frankenstein and the ugliness of enlightenment
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Audio recording of a lecture given on March 2, 2018 by Jeff Black as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein
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20014431
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<a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3693">Transcript</a>
Deans
Friday night lecture
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“We Shall Be Monsters”: Frankenstein and the Ugliness of Enlightenment
[F]or a person who is altogether ugly in appearance,
or of poor birth, or solitary and childless cannot
really be characterized as happy.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099b1-5.
I hate books.
Rousseau, Emile, CW 13:331.
�Two hundred years ago, in January 1818, the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was
published anonymously in London [F 311, 334].1 Over the next two centuries Shelley’s
“hideous progeny” [F 173] grew to mythic size, siring offspring in film and print, birthing the
science fiction genre, and updating the story of Prometheus, which cautions us about the dangers
of science and technology, of ambitious philanthropy, and of ‘playing god.’
Here is a sketch of Shelley’s story. A young chemistry student named Victor
Frankenstein makes and animates a monster.2 Horrified by his work, he abandons it, and the
monster flees. A few months later, Frankenstein is called home by the murder of his youngest
brother. He returns to see a household servant accused, tried, condemned, and executed for the
crime; but he suspects that the monster is the real murderer. During a hike in the Alps, his
suspicion is confirmed: the monster confronts him, tells his story, and demands that Frankenstein
build him a companion.
To Frankenstein the monster’s demand at first seems just, despite his crime.
Frankenstein travels to England to do research and gather his materials. After several months, he
nearly completes an artificial woman; but at the last moment he tears his work to pieces, fearing
she will birth a species of monsters to war on humanity. Seeing this betrayal, the monster vows
revenge and departs, leaving Frankenstein to return home. During his return he discovers that
his friend Henry Clerval has also been murdered; he is accused of the crime and tried, but
acquitted. Home at last, Frankenstein prepares to marry his childhood companion Elizabeth
Lavenza, promising to share with her his dreadful secret once they are wed. The night of his
wedding, he sends Elizabeth away in order to confront and fight the monster. But he has
misunderstood the monster’s vow: he hears two terrible screams, and Elizabeth is dead.
Frankenstein vows revenge, and pursues the monster north.
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�Victor Frankenstein tells this story to an explorer named Robert Walton, whom he meets
on the ice of the Arctic Ocean. Walton records the details, reporting some of them in letters to
his sister in London. Though Frankenstein is close to catching the monster when Walton finds
him, he is also near death. He is too weak to continue his pursuit, and once he has told his story
he dies on Walton’s ship. Soon afterward, Walton finds the monster crouching over
Frankenstein’s corpse. They speak briefly, then the monster exits the ship and disappears.
Walton sails for London, bringing the story of Frankenstein and his monster back to society.
Many monsters have been assembled from the materials Frankenstein furnishes. Mine is
animated by what strikes me as Mary Shelley’s chief question in the novel: is enlightenment
good? This monster’s homogeneous parts are ugliness, solitude, reading, science, ambition,
philanthropy, beauty, family, and nature. To learn how to mix these materials, I will trace the
four enlightenments depicted in Shelley’s novel: those of the monster, of Frankenstein, of
Walton, and of Shelley herself. These enlightenments make up the four proper parts of this
lecture, parts neither proportionate in size, nor ordered as in the novel. I mean to build this
monster from the inside out.
Part One: The Enlightenment of the Monster
Enlightenment makes the monster a monster. So he tells Frankenstein on the alpine sea
of ice. Abandoned by his maker, lacking other guidance, he is at first shaped only by his
confused sensations. When he sees light, he closes his eyes; when he sees darkness, he feels
pain, and opens his eyes again. When he wakes in Frankenstein’s apartment, he feels cold, and
grabs some clothes to cover himself. When he feels hot, he hides in a forest. Then there is
hunger, which leads to berries, thirst, which leads to a stream, and fatigue, which leads to sleep.
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�At night, the dark and cold return, and he weeps in pain. But then he sees moonlight, feels
pleasure, and wonders. All this happens mechanically in response to sensations. The monster’s
mind is empty of distinct ideas [F 68].
But soon, distinct ideas follow his distinct sensations. The monster finds a fire that some
travelers have abandoned. Its warmth is pleasant, but it burns when he touches it [compare CW
2: 12 note *]. He learns to feed the fire, to fan it to life, and to cook nuts and roots over it [F 69].
But food is scarce, so he must abandon his fire to forage. This brings him to a shepherd’s hut.
The shepherd, seeing the monster, shrieks and flees, leaving behind his breakfast and another
fire. The monster remembers this hut as a kind of paradise;3 but hunger forces him to leave it
too. He comes to a village, where signs of food draw him into a cottage. The terrified villagers
assemble to repel him with a hail of missiles [F 70].
Now the monster suffers the first of three accidents. He hides in a hovel, improving it so
that it shelters and conceals him, like the shepherd’s hut. But this hovel happens to adjoin an
inhabited cottage. This guarantees the monster a source of food and water; but it also allows him
to observe the cottagers unseen [F 71-72]: a blind old man, a young man, and a young girl. They
seem kind, sad, and poor, and their relations give him “sensations of a peculiar and overpowering
nature… a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced, either from
hunger or cold, warmth or food” [F 72]. This experience of beauty stops the monster from
stealing their food; instead, he gathers wood for them while they sleep. He becomes an invisible
family member. Noticing his benefactions, they call him “wonderful,” and “a good spirit” [F 77;
compare 65].
The monster also listens to his cottagers, and learns that they can communicate pleasure
and pain through speech. Observing with care, he begins to acquire this “godlike science”: the
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�old man is “father,” the young girl “Agatha” or “sister,” and the young man “son,” “brother,” or
“Felix” [F 75]. But he also contrasts “the perfect forms” of his cottagers, “their grace, beauty,
and delicate complexions,” with his own ugliness, which he first sees in a pool of water.
Terrified by his own looks, the monster begins to call himself ‘monster’ [F 76].4
This, the monster tells Frankenstein, is the less moving part of his story, explaining how
he became what he once was [F 77] – namely, good. His survival and flourishing do not require
him to harm others: he is a vegetarian who will not steal food from those worse off [F 99].5 He
admires beauty and benevolence, wants to imitate them, and wants to be admired in return. The
more moving part of his story, which tells how he became what he now is [F 77], begins when
he learns how to read.
One day, a beautiful woman comes to the cottage. The monster hears that her name is
Safie, a form of Sophie. At the very middle of the novel, then, Sophie comes to the abode of
Felix and Agatha, that is, wisdom comes to the happy and the good. This moment is the peak of
the monster’s life. Since Safie can neither speak nor write the cottagers’ language, Felix teaches
her, and the monster listens in. He boasts to Frankenstein that he improved more rapidly than
she did: he is a quicker study than wisdom herself [F 79]. Felix’s lessons are readings from a
book of history, Volney’s Ruins of Empires,6 followed by explanations. The monster wonders at
the many stories of murder, and at humankind’s need for laws and governments. Vice and
bloodshed disgust him, and when he hears of the fate of the native Americans, he feels sorrow [F
80]. He learns about “the strange system of human society” [F 80], based on property, social
standing, and inequality. He learns about male and female, about the birth and growth of
children, and about family. Since Felix and Agatha are brother and sister, and the old man is
their father, it takes Safie’s arrival to teach the monster about sex.7
4
�These lessons make the monster reflect. He lacks both social rank and riches, the only
possessions human beings esteem. He admires beauty, but he is “hideously deformed and
loathsome” [F 80]. He may not even be human; he has yet to see anyone like him. He has no
family, and remembers nothing of his previous life. “I can not describe to you the agony that
these reflections inflicted on me,” he says. “I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased
with knowledge,” and knowledge “clings to the mind… like lichen on a rock” [F 81]. He wishes
he could shake off thought and feeling, and return to his life of sensations in the woods. But he
knows only death can release him from his sorrow: a fate he fears and does not understand.
Now a second accident befalls the monster.8 While seeking food and wood in the forest,
he finds copies of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s
Sorrows of Werther, all in the language he can read. He studies these books, taking each for a
“true history” [F 87]. Reading Goethe, he judges Werther a divine being with a deep and honest
character, wonders at his suicide for love, weeps at his death, and shares his opinions without
understanding his fate.9 This book throws the monster into “despondency and gloom” [F 86],
and renews his sorrowful reflections.10 Reading Plutarch, he finds “the histories of the first
founders of the ancient republics,” and learns “high thoughts,” and “to admire and love the
heroes of past ages” [F 86]. He prefers the peaceful lawgivers Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus to the
violent founders Romulus and Theseus, but only by accident. Had he first observed humanity in
the form of a young soldier, rather than of his cottagers, the monster tells Frankenstein, “I should
have been imbued with different sensations” [F 87].11 But reading Paradise Lost moves the
monster most strongly, because it depicts situations similar to his own. Like Adam, the monster
sees himself “apparently united by no link to any other being in existence” [F 87]; though unlike
Adam, “no Eve soothed my sorrows, or shared my thoughts” [F 88]. Like Satan, he envies the
5
�happiness of his cottagers [F 87]. About Eve’s fall, the situation that most resembles his own,
the monster is silent.
The monster also deciphers the journal pages he finds in a pocket of the clothes he
grabbed from Frankenstein’s apartment [F 87; compare 68]. They detail his “accursed origin,”
the “disgusting circumstances” that made his “odious and loathsome person” [F 88].
Frankenstein’s notes also make the monster think of Adam and Satan. “God in pity made man
beautiful and alluring, after his own image,” he tells his maker, “but my form is a filthy type of
your’s, more horrid from its very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to
admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested” [F 88].
Having tasted, through his reading, from the tree of knowledge, the monster quickly falls.
He wants to become a visible member of his cottagers’ family, so he decides to reveal himself to
them [F 85]. Since his “unnatural hideousness” causes the horror he inspires, while his voice,
“although harsh, [has] nothing terrible in it” [F 89; compare 69],12 he plans to address himself
first to the blind old man. He hopes the old man will defend him to the other cottagers, convey
his admiration for them, and provoke their compassion, despite his looks [F 88]. When the old
man is alone, the monster knocks, enters, and speaks with him. He argues sincerely that he is a
victim of injustice, and throws himself on the old man’s mercy, just as the cottagers come home.
Seeing the monster, Agatha faints, Safie flees, Felix attacks, and the monster retreats to his hovel
[F 91]. This reception makes the monster rage and despair. He declares “everlasting war against
the human species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me, and sent me forth to this
insupportable misery” [F 92]. To open hostilities he burns the cottagers’ home, and sets off to
find Frankenstein, to demand pity and justice [F 94].13
6
�Now the monster suffers a third accident. Arriving in Frankenstein’s home town, and
pondering how to address his creator, he meets a small child. He thinks, “this little creature [is]
unprejudiced, and [has] lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity” [F 96]. If
he can educate the child to be his friend, he will not be alone. He seizes the child, who screams,
calls him “monster,” and threatens punishment from his father, “Monsieur Frankenstein” [F 9697]. Hearing the name of his maker, the monster makes the child his first victim. He grasps his
throat, and William Frankenstein is dead. When the monster finds a locket on William’s body,
he slips it unseen into the pocket of a nearby girl [F 97]. Soon enough this girl, Justine Moritz, is
executed for the murder of Frankenstein’s brother [F 44-58].14
This concludes the more moving part of the monster’s story. Here he first refers to his
own “malignity” [F 97]. These murders, he thinks, have completed his fall from goodness to
wickedness. But while the hated name ‘Frankenstein’ provokes him to murder, he continues to
hope for his maker’s pity and justice. The monster’s mere thought of Frankenstein is not enough
to explain William’s murder. A contributing cause must be William’s revulsion at the monster’s
ugliness, which shows the monster that the horror he inspires is not learned, but natural.15 And
while the monster claims that “the lessons of Felix, and the sanguinary laws of man” [F 97]
taught him how to frame Justine Moritz, the portrait of Frankenstein’s beautiful mother inside the
locket teaches us why he frames her. He is ugly; the smiles of beautiful women are not for him.
He is by nature cut off from human society.
Concluding his story, the monster thus demands of Frankenstein, “create a female for
me” [F 98]. He insists it is Frankenstein’s duty to comply, since a creator has a duty to make his
creation happy; if Frankenstein does not comply, he will slaughter the rest of his family, as well
as “thousands of others” [F 66].16 Frankenstein’s choice, he says, will determine whether he
7
�remains wicked, or returns to his original goodness [F 66]. He sees these possibilities in terms of
Paradise Lost: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from
joy for no misdeed” [F 66]. Despite his fall, he is silent again about the resemblance of his story
to Eve’s. He can be Adam or Satan; he sees no third possibility.17
Frankenstein agrees with the monster about his duty [F 67].18 But if he makes a female
monster, he worries, “their joint wickedness might desolate the world” [F 98]. To reassure him,
the monster promises he and his mate will quit human society. “It is true, we shall be monsters,
cut off from all the world,” he says, “but on that account we shall be more attached to one
another” [F 99].19 His words move Frankenstein to compassion, and he consents to make the
monster a companion. He believes the monster’s claim that his wickedness is due only to his
solitude [F 100].20 For his part, the monster does not touch Frankenstein’s family again until
Frankenstein changes his mind, and destroys his second creation [F 115-116].21 Then the
monster vows revenge, resumes killing, and drags Frankenstein to his death [F 152-154].
He kills because he is wicked, the monster claims; he is wicked because he is alone;22 and
he is alone because Frankenstein did not make him a companion. But he is also alone because he
is ugly. Can a companion be made for him? Human beings naturally find him ugly [F 98], he
thinks; he even finds himself ugly [F 76]. As Frankenstein realizes later, even a companion
created for the monster will likely find him ugly [F 114];23 and worse, soon we will see that such
a companion will likely also be ugly.24 The monster’s hope for a companion is due to seeing
himself as Adam in Paradise Lost, just as his later pursuit of revenge is due to seeing himself as
Satan.25 His reading has hidden other possibilities, and this will ruin his life. The monster is
alone, and must be alone, not by Frankenstein’s choice, but simply because he is ugly.26 But
why is he ugly?
8
�Part Two: The Enlightenment of Victor Frankenstein
Enlightenment also makes Frankenstein a monster. So he tells Walton aboard ship on the
sea of ice. “No youth could have passed more happily than mine” [F 20], he says. His parents
are tender, his father as indulgent and as little dictatorial as possible [F 19, 105]. Yet his family
is strangely constituted. Victor’s mother Caroline is the daughter of a friend of his father
Alphonse [F 19]. Caroline marries him after her father’s early death, so she is much younger
than her husband. Victor is the eldest of his brothers: he is an only child until age six [F 19],
when his brother Ernest is born. When Victor turns seventeen, his youngest brother William is
still an infant [F 24]. Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s cousin, is the only child close to his age. She
joined the family when Victor was four, because her mother – Alphonse’s sister – had died, and
her father had remarried. Victor and Elizabeth grow up together, first as playmates, then as
friends. His mother Caroline intends them to marry [F 19]. Victor’s practice of calling his
family his ‘friends’ perhaps results from the differences in age this accidental family embraces
[F 147].27
Alphonse Frankenstein is old, and has put politics before family [F 18]. But now that his
family is started, he has retired, to direct his children’s education [F 19, 24]. He is thus the cause
of the first accident to befall Victor. One rainy day, the thirteen year-old Victor finds a volume
of Cornelius Agrippa, a sixteenth-century writer on alchemy and other subjects.28 The theory of
chemistry and the other “wonderful facts” he finds in its pages dazzle him. But when tells his
father, Alphonse replies, “Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon
this; it is sad trash” [F 21]. Had his father instead explained patiently how Agrippa’s system had
been refuted and replaced by a more rational and powerful modern chemistry, Victor thinks, he
9
�would have thrown the book aside. Finding his father’s judgment to be ignorant, he instead
acquires and reads Agrippa’s complete works, followed by those of Paracelsus and Albertus
Magnus [F 22].29
As Victor tells it, his father’s carelessness gave his ideas “the fatal impulse that led to my
ruin” and made natural philosophy “the genius that has regulated my fate” [F 21]. The projects
of these authors – raising ghosts and devils, and finding the elixir of life [F 22] – become his
projects, and emulation combines with “bright visions of extensive usefulness” [F 21] to power
his studies. Books like Agrippa’s appeal to him not only because they teach that materials have
occult properties, but also because their teachings are esoteric, “treasures known to few besides
myself” [F 22]. Their projects are private, but Victor’s successes will be public: “what glory
would attend the discovery,” he fantasizes, “if I could banish disease from the human frame, and
render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!” [F 22].
Later events loosen Victor’s attachment to his alchemical writers. He studies distillation,
steam, the air-pump, and electricity, and his alchemical writers lose credit with him for their
ignorance of these phenomena [F 22-23]. His father sends him to lectures on natural philosophy
at the local school, but a second accident keeps Victor from all but the last few, and from
understanding even these [F 23]. Victor’s home schooling ends with him disgusted with natural
philosophy, and occupied instead with mathematics, German, and Greek [F 23].30 He does not
learn a modern chemical system to replace that of his alchemical writers. Then, when he is about
to leave for university at age seventeen, Victor’s mother Caroline dies from a scarlet fever
contracted from Elizabeth [F 24-25].31 Losing his mother to death, “that most irreparable evil”
[F 25], likely returned his thoughts to the alchemical pursuit of immortality.
10
�A final accident befalls Victor when he arrives at the University of Ingolstadt.32 Away
from his family, alone in a “solitary apartment,” unable to make new friends, he pursues his
ardent desire for knowledge [F 26]. He makes only two new acquaintances outside his
childhood circle: Professors Krempe and Waldman.33 When Victor meets Krempe, and
confesses his interest in alchemy, Krempe calls his reading “nonsense,” and says he must begin
his studies anew, since “these fancies… are a thousand years old” [F 26].34 He fails to interest
Victor in modern natural philosophy, however, because he says it means to annihilate the
alchemists’ visions of immortality and power – the very visions that interest Victor [F 27]. But
when Victor meets Waldman, he shows no contempt for Agrippa, and defends the alchemists as
the founders of modern philosophy. Charmed, Victor heeds Waldman’s argument that modern
science has traded the miraculous visions of alchemy for the “new and almost unlimited powers”
promised by scientists like Harvey and Boyle [F 27-28]. Waldman defeats Victor’s prejudice
against modern chemistry, and Victor decides to study under Waldman and Krempe [F 28], The
day he met these professors, Victor tells Walton, “decided my future destiny,” since “natural
philosophy, and particularly chemistry… became nearly my sole occupation” [F 29]. It did not
hurt, Victor adds, that Waldman had a benevolent aspect and sweet voice, since it was also
Krempe’s “repulsive countenance” that deterred Victor from taking his advice [F 29 and 27].
Victor’s sensitivity to beauty has terrible consequences when, at age nineteen [F 19] – nearly
Mary Shelley’s age when she begins to write Frankenstein35 – he begins to build his monster.
The desire to end disease interests Victor in the principle of life, and in physiology,
anatomy, and the causes of decay. An “almost supernatural enthusiasm” [F 30] drives his
solitary studies, which require dissections and vivisections [F 32]. His enthusiasm is almost
supernatural because his father was careful to keep supernatural horrors from entering the young
11
�Victor’s mind [F 30]. He is not averse to his work because he fears divine punishment. Instead,
his aversion is natural: he finds his continual occupation with dead things to be ugly. But at last,
after “examining and analyzing all the minutiæ of causation” involved in death and birth, he is
suddenly enlightened [F 30].36 He finds a secret reserved for him alone: “the cause of generation
and life,” which gives him the power of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” [F 30 and
32].37
Since his newfound power is general – he could animate a worm or a human being –
Victor must decide how to use it. He resolves to animate a being like himself. Even if the result
of his first try is not perfect, he reasons, like any other invention it could be the basis for future
improvements [F 31]. The only constraint on his choice is practical: since working on minute
parts will slow him down, he further resolves “to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to
say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large” [F 31 and 32; see also 13 and 65]. The
reasons for his haste are not clear. Perhaps he fears that another will animate a lifeless being
before he does – though the novel gives us no evidence that others are pursuing his project. To
gather materials, Victor frequents “charnel houses,” the “dissecting room,” and the “slaughterhouse” [F 32]. If he succeeds in animating his lifeless construct, he hopes that he might learn
how to reanimate the dead – something as yet he cannot do [F 32].
Despite later depictions, this construct cannot be an assembly of corpse parts animated by
electricity.38 No human corpse could furnish proper parts – hands, feet, heart – proportionate to
an eight-foot humanoid. If Victor cannot reanimate a dead human being, furthermore, he likely
also cannot reanimate their proper parts. It is more likely that the monster is built out of
homogeneous parts – bone, muscle, skin – harvested from human and animal corpses – hence the
need to visit the slaughter-house – and shaped into proper parts proportionate to the whole. The
12
�monster later tells Victor, “thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior
to thine; my joints more supple” [F 66]. When he compares himself to humans, the monster
judges, “I was more agile than they, and could subsist on coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat
and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded their’s” [F 80; see also 89]. So
Victor fails to make a being like himself; instead, he makes a being in many ways better than
himself. He also intends this being to reproduce. Anticipating the completion of his project, he
exults: “[a] new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent
natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so
completely as I should deserve their’s” [F 32].39 Either Victor already plans to make his being a
female companion, or he intends it to reproduce with human females. This mention of the
gratitude he expects from his creations is the only thought he reports about their mental lives.40
Victor’s concern with beauty extends to his creation. “His limbs were in proportion,” he
tells Walton, “and I had selected his features as beautiful” [F 34]. But as soon as he animates his
being, his enthusiasm for his project dissipates, and he sees the monster as horribly ugly. Victor
catalogs his “dull yellow eye,” “watery [and] clouded,” “his shriveled complexion, and straight
black lips,” and his “yellow skin [that] scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries
beneath” [F 34; see also 126].41 The problem is not just that Victor failed to harvest enough
skin. The monster is ugly especially because of the contrast his ugly parts make with others that
on their own are beautiful: his “hair… of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly
whiteness” [F 34]. He is so ugly that, “unable to endure [his] aspect” [F 34], Victor abandons
him almost at first sight. “I had gazed upon him while unfinished,” Victor tells Walton; “he was
ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing
such as even Dante could not have conceived” [F 35; see also 48]. Perhaps Victor hoped that
13
�motion would beautify his monster’s matter, making a ‘he’ out of an ‘it,’ rather than the reverse.
Only after seeing him move does Victor first call his work ‘monster’ [F 35].
The monster’s unintended ugliness is an image of Victor’s enlightenment. His
combination of marvelous alchemical projects and powerful modern techniques is stitched
together with the hope that form and matter can be separated from one another, and so too beauty
and life, and ugliness and death. He hopes to shape the ugly leavings of charnel houses,
dissecting rooms, and slaughter-houses into a beautiful living being. But this hope is suggested
by a truth of metabolism: by eating we make ourselves out of dead materials. Frankenstein’s
accidental reading makes for an accidental enlightenment, which makes an ugly monster, which
will ruin Frankenstein’s life.
Once the monster begins to move, Frankenstein begins to fall. He soon flees his
laboratory. When he collects himself enough to return, the monster is gone [F 35 and 37].42 He
does not see the monster again until he returns home after his brother William’s murder [F 48];
he does not speak with the monster until they are alone together later on the Alpine sea of ice [F
65]. Then, Frankenstein tries to kill his monster, presuming him guilty of William’s murder [F
65-66 and 60].43 But the monster persuades Frankenstein to hear his story, and to make him a
female companion.
This new project does not rekindle Frankenstein’s “almost supernatural enthusiasm” [F
30]. Instead, he is possessed by “a kind of insanity” that shows him “continually about me a
multitude of filthy animals inflicting on me incessant torture” [F 101], as if he were undergoing,
rather than conducting, his vivisections.44 Collecting his materials, he tells Walton, “was to me
like the torture of single drops of water continually falling on the head” [F 109]. Constructing
the female monster is a “horrible and irksome task,” a “filthy process.” “During my first
14
�experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment,” he
reports; “my mind was intently fixed on the sequel of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the
horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the
work of my hands” [F 113].45
Qualms about his promise accompany Frankenstein’s disgust. It is “probable,” he thinks,
that a female monster will think and reason; but what will be her character? If the male monster
became wicked, a female one “might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate,
and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness” [F 114] – something, he implies, the
male monster does not do. While the male monster swore to quit human society, a female one
might not keep a promise made before her creation [F 114].46 Even if she is good, a female
monster might not provide the male the companionship he seeks. Frankenstein assumes she will
turn out ugly; so the male monster might find his own ugliness more abhorrent in female form,
while the female might turn from him in disgust to the superior beauty of man.47 This fresh
insult to the male monster might return him to human society [F 114]. But if the monsters can
stand one another, their intercourse will quickly produce children; thus “a race of devils would
be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a
condition precarious and full of terror” [F 114]. Without knowing exactly how his monsters
reproduce,48 we cannot know whether Frankenstein imagines a species terrifying for its ugliness,
or its superiority, or both.
This last reflection shows Frankenstein the wickedness of his promise. Earlier he had
dreamed of the blessings of mankind and of a new species [F 32]; now, he tells Walton, “I
shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not
hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race” [F
15
�114-115 and 118]. Overcome by disgust and doubt, Frankenstein looks up from his gore-strewn
workbench to see the monster watching him. The monster grins. Frankenstein sees in this only
“malice and treachery,” and tears the female monster to pieces [F 115; compare 35].
Once his Eve is destroyed, for the monster only the path of Satan remains. “I shall be
with you on your wedding-night,” he swears [F 116], and departs. Hearing this, Frankenstein
also thinks of Adam and Eve: “the apple was already eaten, and the angel’s arm bared to drive
me from all hope” [F 131]. He expects to be banished from the paradise of marriage and family
on the eve of his wedding to Elizabeth Lavenza; he expects to die then by the monster’s hand.
Instead, the monster first kills his friend Henry Clerval, then, on the wedding-night in question,
Elizabeth herself. Soon after, Alphonse Frankenstein dies from sorrow [F 137]. Now
Frankenstein too compares himself to Satan, “the archangel who aspired to omnipotence” [F
147]. The monster’s reading has possessed Frankenstein as well. Revenge, he tells Walton,
became “the devouring and only passion of my soul” [F 139]. Urged on by the monster,
Frankenstein pursues him across Europe and north to the arctic sea of ice,49 where Robert Walton
first meets the monster and his shadow.
Part Three: The Enlightenment of Robert Walton
Enlightenment nearly makes Robert Walton a monster. After an accident kills his father
while Walton is still a child, his uncle raises him. By neglecting his education, this uncle leaves
Walton free for solitary readings of tales of discovery, the only books in his uncle’s library.
Young Walton loves above all tales of voyages to the Pacific over the North Pole. He reads
them day and night. Poetry distracts him briefly from his youthful dreams of discovery, but then
a second accident – inheriting a cousin’s fortune – returns him to his projects of exploration, and
16
�equips him to pursue them [F 8]. Walton does not say whether this second accident was his
cousin’s death. But death shapes his family and his education, as it did Frankenstein’s.
Walton writes all this in letters to his sister, where he calls his self-education an evil.
“Now I am twenty-eight, and in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen,” he
laments. “It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and
magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping,” or proportion [F 10]. Walton’s
circumstances, like Frankenstein’s, have made him an imaginative and extravagant projector.
But while Frankenstein had Clerval to regulate his mind, failed to confide in him, and lost him to
his monster, Walton lacks such a friend, and feels this lack acutely [F 10 and 16].50
To Walton, the North Pole is “the region of beauty and delight” where “the sun is forever
visible” [F 7] – a land of both literal and figurative enlightenment. “What may not be expected
in a country of eternal light?” [F 7], he wonders: certainly new discoveries in geography and
physics. “[Y]ou cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the
last generation,” he writes his sister, “by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries,
to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the
magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine” [F 8]. To
these philanthropic ambitions Walton adds a personal one: to be the first human to reach the
pole. “I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before
visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man” [F 7]. Walton’s public
and private motives recall the combination that moved Frankenstein to pursue the principle of
life.51
To pursue his project, Walton learns seamanship by day; by night, he studies
mathematics, medicine, and the physical sciences of naval use. He inures his body to hardship.52
17
�Then he travels to northern Russia, to a city named Archangel – he too is living in Paradise Lost
– where he hires a ship, assembles a crew, and sails north into the sea of ice [F 8]. He reassures
his sister by letter: “you know me sufficiently to confide in my prudence and considerateness
wherever the safety of others is committed to my care” [F 11]. “I will not rashly encounter
danger,” Walton promises; “I will be cool, persevering, and prudent” [F 12]. Despite his
promise, many of his men will die [F 149].
Walton is also ready to risk his own life. His sister will be happy, even if he dies in the
north, because she has a husband and “lovely children” [F 148]. Walton himself does not want a
family, but a friend. With no one to share his joy at success, to temper his dejection at failure, to
amend his faults, to supply proportion to his projects, when a third accident crosses his path with
the monster’s and Frankenstein’s, and he takes the latter aboard, he is eager to regard
Frankenstein as a friend. As Walton tells his sister, “I have found a man who, before his spirit
had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my
heart” [F 15].
Though Frankenstein approves of Walton’s desire, he declines to reciprocate, explaining,
“I have lost every thing, and cannot begin life anew” [F 16; see also 147]. Yet Frankenstein does
call Walton “my friend” [F 17], he helps him by suggesting useful improvements to his plan, and
he rallies his sailors when their fear of death makes them demand that Walton sail for home [F
149].53 But the chief help he gives Walton is to tell his story. “You seek for knowledge and
wisdom, as I once did,” he says, “and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may
not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been” [F 17]. His story will provide Walton “a view of
nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding,” concerning “powers and
occurrences, such as you have been accustomed to believe impossible” [F 17].54 When Walton
18
�presses Frankenstein to share the secret of the monster’s animation, Frankenstein rebuffs Walton
for his “senseless curiosity.”55 “[L]earn my miseries,” Frankenstein tells him, “and do not seek
to increase your own” [F 146]. His tale completed, Frankenstein corrects and augments
Walton’s notes, especially of his conversations with the monster, and shows him Felix and
Safie’s letters, received from the hand of the monster himself [F 146; see also 83].56
Perhaps Frankenstein’s final hope is to win glory and benefit mankind by making his
story public. But the meaning of his story is ambiguous. Walton, for example, does not learn
from him to give up on enlightenment, perhaps because of Frankenstein’s conclusion. “During
these last days,” he says, “I have been occupied in examining my past conduct; nor do I find it
blameable” [F 151]. He does implore Walton to “[s]eek happiness in tranquility, and avoid
ambition, even… the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and
discoveries” [F 152]. But then he recants: “[y]et why do I say this? I have myself been blasted
in these hopes, yet another may succeed” [F 151].
‘Succeed’ is Victor’s last word, one worthy of his name. His last request is that Walton
catch and kill the monster, though he does not insist that Walton do so at the cost of his ship and
crew. But Walton turns home. So did Victor succeed or fail? Even after hearing Frankenstein’s
story, Walton tells his sister, “I had rather die, than return shamefully, – my purpose unfulfilled”
[F 150]. Frankenstein’s last words do not change his mind. Instead, his crew compels Walton to
return.57 Nor does he fulfill Frankenstein’s last request, though he has his chance when the
monster boards his ship to see Frankenstein’s corpse. “Never did I behold a vision so horrible as
his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness” [F 152], Walton writes his sister; but
despite the monster’s ugliness Walton listens to him, and seems persuaded by his promise: “I
shall… seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and
19
�consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and
unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been” [F 155]. The monster means
to extinguish his light at the pole, by becoming a light at the pole. Not the monster’s ugliness but
Frankenstein’s corpse angers Walton [F 154]. He lets the monster escape without trying to kill
him [F 156]. Walton does not kill the monster, nor does he kill himself and his crew in his quest
for the pole. But only the rebellion of his crew spares him the latter.58 Maybe the monster finds
the pole in his place.
Part Four: The Enlightenment of Mary Shelley
Did enlightenment make Mary Shelley a monster? She pursued it with a vengeance. As
the daughter of two famous writers, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and the lover and
later wife of a third, Percy Shelley, she set herself an intense program of reading and writing,
beginning at age seventeen, if not earlier. Starting with biographies, novels, and her parents’
books, later adding history and philosophy, she recorded each book she and Percy read, day by
day and year by year, in her journal. Thirty-six books in the latter half of 1814, seventy-four in
1815, sixty-five in 1816, seventy-one in 1817 – all told she read well more than two hundred
books in her late teens and early twenties, in the four years preceding the publication of
Frankenstein.59 She read the Iliad, the Bible, the Aeneid, Plutarch’s Lives, Tacitus’ Annals, the
Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s plays, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost – twice – and Gulliver’s
Travels [J 48-49, 73, and 89-90]. Here is a typical journal entry, from Saturday, November 17,
1816: “Draw, write; read Locke and Curtius. [Percy] Shelley reads Plutarch and Locke; he reads
“Paradise Lost” aloud in the evening. I work” [J 68]. At this point Mary’s second child is
eleven months old [F 333].
20
�Shelley herself tells us that Frankenstein is a warning about the dangers posed by science
and technology, ambitious philanthropy, and especially ‘playing god.’ In her preface to the third,
1831 edition of the novel, she writes of Frankenstein’s success in animating his monster,
“supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous
mechanism of the Creator of the world” [F 172]. But in the first, 1818 edition, the supremely
frightful thing is the monster’s ugliness. Perhaps marking this shift in emphasis, the frontispiece
of the 1831 edition depicts a monster who, though goggling at his reflection in a mirror, looks
positively beautiful. No character in the novel means to ‘play god,’ nor displays a lasting
concern with doing so. Frankenstein and his monster mostly see themselves as Adam or as
Satan. Theological claims that god’s providence is better than man’s, or that imitating his
providence is hubris or sin, are notably absent.
Instead, Frankenstein is more secular, personal, even autobiographical than Shelley’s
1831 preface suggests. Its foreground concerns are with the monster’s ugliness, the perils of
solitary reading, the mundane risks of philanthropic ambition, the loss of the family, and the
meaning of nature. The novel is a Paradise Lost without God, a Prometheus Bound without
Zeus. The monster, Frankenstein, and Walton are all shadows of Shelley herself,60 and they
repeat the novel’s fundamental question: is enlightenment good, or does it make us ugly
monsters, cut off from family and nature?
We have plenty of evidence that Shelley finds enlightenment to be costly. Take the
monster: he is attracted to family life and sensitive to the beauties of nature, but his extreme
ugliness cuts him off from both [F 77]. Were it not for his enlightenment, especially by
Paradise Lost, he might have seen a possibility for his life other than retirement with a mate, or
war with his maker. Solitary contemplation, masked social activity in person or in writing,61 and
21
�scientific inquiry do not occur to him. He does not consider a life of exploration, though his
build would suit him, more than any other reasoning being, to such a life. Though he may be
smarter than his maker, he does not build a wife or a child for himself. Take Frankenstein: he is
also attracted to and suited to family and nature. But his enlightenment, at the hands of the
alchemists and the modern chemists, makes him an ugly monster, and cuts him off from family
and nature [F 43-44], before dragging him to death across the sea of ice. And take Walton: he
longs for and is suited to friendship, if not to family, but his enlightenment through books about
voyages of discovery has sent him and his crew to risk their lives at the edge of the world. These
three neglect the rule Frankenstein proposes to Walton: if your study “has the tendency to
weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy
can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human
mind” [F 33].62 Percy Shelley, writing as the anonymous author, endorses this rule in his
preface, claiming that the chief concern of the novel is “limited to the avoiding [sic] the
enervating effects of the novels of the present day,63 and to the exhibition of the amiableness of
domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue” [F 5-6]. At the book’s center is a
family of the good, the happy, and the wise – but the monster scares them away and burns down
their home.
Still, we have Frankenstein’s first name, Victor, and his last words, “another may
succeed” [F 152]; we have Walton, the audience of the story we are reading, who is deflected
from the pole not by Frankenstein’s tale, nor by Frankenstein’s death, nor by his own interview
with the monster, but by the near-mutiny of his sailors. Perhaps had he and his sailors all been
monsters, he would have succeeded. Perhaps these details indicate that Shelley herself doubted
“the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue.” Perhaps
22
�enlightenment shows us the truth about the family and nature, by showing us the extent to which
death and chance, not life and providence, makes our families, nature, and us. Perhaps
enlightenment reveals our world not as an amiable home, but as monstrous.64 When
Frankenstein, hiking alone in the Alps, considers the “awful majesty” of the mountains, the
“wonderful and stupendous scene” of the “sea, or rather the vast river of ice,” he calls out to the
“[w]andering spirits” of the place. The spirit that answers his call is the monster [F 65 and 77].
Another lie Percy Shelly tells in his preface is, “[t]he opinions which naturally spring
from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always
in my own conviction; nor is any inference to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing
any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind” [F 6]. He, and perhaps Shelley herself, could fear
a reader’s inference of prejudice against the theological doctrine of Milton, given the damage
Paradise Lost does to Frankenstein, and above all to his monster. But a philosophical doctrine is
also being judged throughout the novel, even though its author’s name is not mentioned.
Consider: Victor Frankenstein is a Genevan who makes a “man born big and strong” [CW 13:
162, see also 189-190], but fails to educate him adequately. This being is born into a state of
nature, and perfected by circumstances; he claims that he was naturally good, but society has
made him wicked; he begins life as a savage, is mistaken for a savage [F 13], and wishes to end
his life living as a savage with his mate in South America [F 99]. Consider further: in Shelley’s
time, the park outside Geneva where the monster murders William and frames Justine featured
an obelisk dedicated to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, before which the Genevans murdered their
magistrates during the Revolution.65 Rousseau depicts himself as a modern Prometheus in the
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, the first public writing of his philosophic career [CW 2:
2 and 179]. In Emile, his best and most important work [CW 5: 480], he mentions “another
23
�Prometheus” who had made a tiny man “by the science of alchemy” [CW 13: 436 note *].66
Rousseau claims in his Confessions to have abandoned five children to a foundling hospital [CW
5: 289, 299-301, 551-552], where they likely died. Later in life, when Shelley writes an
encyclopedia article on Rousseau, she returns repeatedly to the subject of these children [F
545].67 But the monster claims five victims before Frankenstein himself: William, Justine
Moritz, Henry Clerval, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Alphonse Frankenstein. The amiableness of
domestic affection, the excellence of universal virtue, and the beauty of nature are themes of
Rousseau’s novel Julie, or the New Héloïse. Lastly, among the more than two hundred books
that Mary Shelley read in the four years before Frankenstein was published are Rousseau’s
Confessions, Emile, Julie, and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker – and she read all but the last
of these twice [J 47-49, 55, 64, 72-73, 85-86, 89-90].68
Frankenstein is thus a meditation on the doctrine of the modern philosopher who
launched his career by questioning the goodness of enlightenment. Rousseau defended the
amiableness of domestic affection, but abandoned his children. He lauded the excellence of
universal virtue, but sparked the Revolution. “I have seen these contradictions,” Rousseau writes
about his claims in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, “and they have not rebuffed me”
[CW 2: 4]. Nor is Mary Shelley rebuffed. The ambiguities of her “hideous progeny” suggest she
is willing to pay the price of enlightenment. She pronounces her judgment in the voice of
Frankenstein’s creation: “[w]e shall be monsters.”
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
February 23, 2018
24
�Leftover Materials
This lecture is dedicated to my father, Paul David Black. It was delivered on his birthday, March 2, 2018, at St.
John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thanks to Michael W. Grenke for the invitation to give this lecture.
Thanks to the members of the 2016-2017 Mellon Study Group on Digital Technology for a galvanizing first
discussion of the themes of Frankenstein. Thanks to Lise van Boxel and Brian Wilson, founding members of the
Combat & Classics podcast team, for an animating discussion of the ideas in the lecture. Thanks to my sister,
Katherine Melissa Watson, for her helpful comments on an earlier draft.
The engraving on the lecture’s cover page is Theodore von Holst’s, and was the frontispiece to the 1831 edition of
Frankenstein. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frontispiece_to_Frankenstein_1831.jpg. Retrieved on
February 15, 2018.
1
Citations in the text of this lecture follow these conventions: CW refers to volume and page numbers in JeanJacques Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Edited by Christopher Kelly and Roger D. Masters.
Thirteen Volumes. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990-2010). F refers to page numbers in
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Edited by J. Paul Hunter. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), which
contains the 1818 text. FN refers to part and page numbers in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Frankenstein
Notebooks. Volume IX of Shelley’s Manuscripts, Two Parts. Edited by Charles E. Robinson. (New York: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1996). J refers to page numbers in Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley’s Journal. Edited by Frederick L.
Jones. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947). L refers to volume and page numbers in Mary Shelley,
The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Edited by Betty T. Bennett. Three Volumes. (Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). PL refers to book and line numbers of Paradise Lost, in the edition John
Milton, Paradise Lost. Second Edition. Edited by Scott Elledge. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993).
2
In calling Frankenstein’s product a ‘monster,’ I am following both Frankenstein’s practice and the monster’s own.
They each give reasons for using this term. They mean by it something so unprecedented in its deformity as to serve
as a warning.
3
He says, “it presented to me then as exquisite and divine a retreat as Pandæmonium appeared to the dæmons of hell
after their sufferings in the lake of fire” [F 70; see PL 1:710-730].
4
“At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became
fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence
and mortification” [F 76].
5
The monster does taste the offal left behind by the travelers who abandoned their fire, finding it “much more
savoury than the berries I gathered from the trees” [F 69]. But he apparently does not begin eating meat because of
this experience. In the only case where he kills for food, he does so to feed Frankenstein [F 142]. See also Marilyn
Butler, “Frankenstein and Radical Science” [F 311]. Since the monster was not born and did not grow, it is not
entirely clear why he needs to eat. But Rousseau would endorse his vegetarianism [CW 13: 184-186 and 297-299],
which might be obscurely connected with his construction: since he is made out of dead flesh, perhaps he does not
want to add to his substance by consuming dead flesh.
6
Constantin François Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, Les Ruines, ou Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires,
1791. Published in English as Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, Marquis de Volney, The Ruins: or a Survey of the
Revolutions of Empires. Third Edition. London: J. Johnson, 1796. It is available in the Liberty Fund’s Online
Library of Liberty at http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1706. Retrieved on February 2, 2018. There is no record in her
journal of Mary Shelley having read this work.
7
The connection between sex and a woman named Sophie is a theme of Book Five of Rousseau’s Emile.
25
�8
Prior to relating this accident, the monster tells Frankenstein the history of his cottagers, which “could not fail to
impress itself deeply” on his mind [F 81]. This is so much that case that the monster makes copies of letters Safie
exchanged with Felix, letters which testify to the truth of their story, in order to offer them to Frankenstein to “prove
the truth of my tale” [F 83]. Yet it is not clear what the monster learns from the history of the cottagers that is
different from what he learns from Safie and Felix’s readings and discussion of Volney. Perhaps the former history
teaches the same lessons as the latter, but is more striking because the monster can see the participants in the flesh.
9
When suicide later occurs to the monster as an alternative to demanding a mate from Frankenstein or taking
revenge on him, he rules it out, claiming that life is dear to him, despite his misery [F 66]. Yet once it is clear he
will not have a companion, and once Frankenstein is dead, the monster claims that he will commit suicide [F 155].
10
One new element appears in these reflections after reading Werther: the monster tries to infer his origin and
purpose from his physical constitution. “My person was hideous,” he reflects, “and my stature gigantic: what did
this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually
recurred, but I was unable to solve them” [F 86]. So far as I can tell, the monster makes no progress in this new line
of inquiry. It seems that his other readings closed off this line of thinking for him.
11
Here we see the damage done by Frankenstein’s abandonment of the monster. Had he overcome his disgust and
stayed to educate his product, Frankenstein might have imbued the monster with scientific and philanthropic
ambitions.
12
This contrast is the basis of the only joke I have found in Frankenstein. When the monster confronts Victor
Frankenstein to tell his story, he repeatedly demands that Frankenstein listen to him [F 66-67], likely because he
knows that his speech is more attractive than his looks. Frankenstein responds, “relieve me from the sight of your
detested form” [F 67]. “Thus I relieve thee, my creator,” the monster intones, while placing his massive hands in
front of Frankenstein’s eyes. Enraged, Frankenstein flings them away. This was not the time for a joke.
13
The monster’s halfheartedness in seeking revenge is suggested by several details. He tells Frankenstein he could
have torn Felix “limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope” [F 91], or destroyed the cottage and the cottagers,
glutting himself “with their shrieks and misery” [F 92] – but he does neither of these things, though he could have.
In addition, consider this episode that occurs on the road to Geneva. On an especially fine spring day, he sees a
young girl fall in a river, and leaps in to save her from drowning. He is trying to revive her when one of the locals
approaches him and snatches the child away. When the monster tries to follow, the man shoots him with his gun [F
95]. This bald ingratitude makes the monster renew his vow of “eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind” [F
96], but even this renewed vow does not prevent the monster from imagining that he might befriend William
Frankenstein when he first encounters him in Geneva.
14
The story of Justine Moritz’s fate includes an anticipation of the question the monster means his story to answer.
Ernest Frankenstein, the elder of Victor’s two younger brothers, asks “who would credit that Justine Moritz, who
was so amiable, and fond of all the family, could all at once become so extremely wicked?” [F 50; see also 54-55].
No one should credit such a miraculous change, though, since Justine is not guilty of the murder for which she is
accused. But Justine is beautiful [F 52]. The monster, who is ugly, is guilty of the murder; the question becomes
how he, being benevolent and fond of all his cottagers, could become so extremely wicked. Reflecting on Justine
Moritz’s execution, Elizabeth Lavenza says, “men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood” [F 61].
15
In the immediate sequel the monster asserts to Frankenstein that “the human senses are insurmountable barriers”
to any sort of union between the monster and a human being [F 98].
16
In the end Frankenstein does not comply, and the monster only kills members of his family. So it seems that his
threat to kill “thousands of others” was a bluff or an exaggeration.
17
“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous” [F 66].
18
Frankenstein asks, “did I not, as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to
bestow?” [F 99]. We might wonder, since some of us are makers of children, to what extent this rhetorical question
should be answered in the affirmative.
26
�19
“Our lives will not be happy,” the monster continues, “but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now
feel” [F 99]. If the monster is not content with harmlessness, and seeks happiness as well, then he will be drawn
back to human society.
20
Shelley would have been familiar with the argument that links solitude with wickedness through the dispute
between Rousseau and Diderot communicated by a footnote in Emile. Against this link, Rousseau writes,
The precept of never hurting another carries with it that of being attached to human society as little
as possible, for in the social state the good of one necessarily constitutes the harm of another. This
relation is in the essence of the thing, and nothing can change it. On the basis of this principle, let
one investigate who is the better: the social man or the solitary man. An illustrious author
[Diderot] says it is only the wicked man who is alone. I say that it is only the good man who is
alone. If this proposition is less sententious, it is truer and better reasoned than the former one. If
the wicked man were alone, what harm would he do? It is in society that he sets up his devices for
hurting others [CW 13:240 note *].
21
Seeing Frankenstein destroy the inanimate body of his companion, the monster says, “You can blast my other
passions; but revenge remains – revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food!” [F 116].
22
“My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in
communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of
existence and events, from which I am now excluded” [F 100].
23
The two monsters “might even hate each other,” Frankenstein muses; “the creature who already lived loathed his
own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female
form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again
alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species” [F 114].
24
Indeed, the monster demands that his mate be “as hideous as myself” because “once as deformed and horrible as
myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects” [F
99, 97]. He gives no other indication of why he thinks the effects of his own ugliness can be overcome. His thought
seems to be either that two solitary and isolated members of the same species will feel compelled to unite [F see 99],
despite their ugliness, or that because his mate will have been created particularly for him, they will be connected in
a way that overcomes the effects of their ugliness. The former thought seems naïve, while the latter thought depends
on the monster’s identification with Adam.
25
After the monster recounts his failed attempt to reveal himself to his cottagers, he says, “I, like the arch fiend, bore
a hell within me” [F 92]. See PL 4:73-75.
26
To be ugly is to have bad looks, to be dis-specied, without species. See Plato, Sophist, 228a.
27
One wonders whether it is the difference in age between Alphonse and Caroline Frankenstein, and the youthful
acquaintance of Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza, that explains how unerotic these relationships are – or
whether this simply should be attributed to authorial discretion. The lack of eros between these partners might also
contribute to Victor Frankenstein’s easy elision between his family and his friends. The reason for this elision is
that friends who are not family cannot be true friends. “Even where the affections are not moved by any superior
excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds, which hardly any later
friend can obtain,” Victor explains. “They know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards
modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more certain conclusions as to the integrity of
our motives. A sister or a brother can never, unless indeed such symptoms have been shown early, suspect the other
of fraud or false dealing, when another friend, however strongly he may be attached, may, in spite of himselF be
invaded with suspicion” [F 147]. Alphonse Frankenstein delicately mentions his romantic coolness to Victor when
the latter postpones his marriage to Elizabeth Lavenza: “You, perhaps, regard her as your sister, without any wish
that she might become your wife” [F 104]. Elizabeth sees no difficulty in this arrangement: “our union has been the
favorite plan of your parents ever since our infancy. We were told this while young, and taught to look forward to it
as an event that would certainly take place” [F 130]. The coolness of the connection between Victor and Elizabeth
might explain why Victor does not realize that the monster’s threat, “I shall be with you on your wedding-night,” is
27
�directed against Elizabeth, rather than against himself – as his reply, “before you sign my death-warrant, be sure you
are yourself safe” [F 116] indicates. Victor seems to lack self-knowledge when he later says, “if for one instant I
had thought what might be the hellish intention of my fiendish adversary, I would rather have banished myself for
ever from my native country, and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth, than have consented to this miserable
marriage. But, as if possessed of magic powers, the monster had blinded me to his real intentions” [F 133].
28
The editors of the Norton Critical Edition of Frankenstein supply here “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535),
German physician, author of De Occulta Philosophia (1531), and reputed magician” [F 21 note 6]. The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that Three Books on Occult Philosophy (1510 and, reworked and enlarged, 1533)
is “a comprehensive treatise on magic and occult arts,” and that Agrippa was also known for On the Uncertainty and
Vanity of the Arts and Sciences: An Invective Declamation, “a rigorous refutation of all products of human reason.”
See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agrippa-nettesheim. Retrieved on February 2, 2018. Is it a coincidence that
Agrippa’s other major work resembles, in its title at least, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts? Is Agrippa a
stand-in for Rousseau?
29
Paracelsus (1493-1541) was, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a German-Swiss physician and alchemist
who established the role of chemistry in medicine. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paracelsus.
Retrieved on February 4, 2018. Consider also CW 13: 436-437. According to the same source, Albertus Magnus
was a teacher of Thomas Aquinas and a proponent of Aristotle who established the legitimacy of the study of nature
for Christians. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Albertus-Magnus. Retrieved on February 4, 2018.
30
Though his disgust is not so great as to prevent him from studying Pliny and Buffon at this point [F 23]. Victor
also learned Latin and English when he was much younger [F 20].
31
Louis Pasteur did not succeed in spreading the germ theory of disease until the 1870’s. Frankenstein is set
sometime in the eighteenth century. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Pasteur/Vaccinedevelopment. Retrieved on February 16, 2018.
32
Shelley may have chosen Ingolstadt for Victor Frankenstein’s education because the secret society of the
Illuminati was founded at this university in 1776 [F 24 n 1].
33
This childhood circle includes Victor’s friend, Henry Clerval [F 21], who later studies with him at Ingolstadt [F
36], and ends by being murdered by the monster [F 122]. There is not enough time in this lecture to treat Clerval in
detail, let alone Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s other companion from childhood [F 26]. But it is worth nothing that,
even though Shelley presents Clerval’s favored subjects as a kind of antithesis and antidote to Victor’s reading [F
44] – Clerval recalls Victor to his friends, his family, and his love of nature [F 43-44] – Victor is quite familiar with
the kind of works Clerval reads [F 15-16, 31, 35-36, 101, 107-108, 143, 146-147], and this familiarity on its own is
not enough to deflect him from his path.
34
Krempe seems to be tracing the projects of the alchemists back to the eighth century, whereas the writings he is
criticizing date from the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It’s not clear to me why he does this.
35
Mary Shelley was born on 30 August 1797, and began writing Frankenstein sometime in June 1816 [FN lxxvi and
lxxviii].
36
Compare Rousseau’s account of his sudden illumination on the road to Vincennes in the second of his Letters to
Malesherbes [CW 5: 575-576].
37
Almost immediately, Frankenstein tells Walton, he forgot the steps that showed him the cause, but retained the
power [F 31]. It is puzzling that Frankenstein does not use this detail as an excuse when Walton asks him later for
the secret of the monster’s animation [F 146].
38
Shelley’s claim that Frankenstein uses his “instruments of life” to “infuse a spark of being” into the monster [F
34] may be metaphorical, since there is no other reference to electricity in the account of the monster’s animation.
39
The mention of the gratitude due to a father in this passage could give the impression that Victor intends to
supplant the role of the mother in generation, and to claim the gratitude that is her due. While there is something to
28
�this reading, I am more struck by the contrast between the mention of the father in this sentence and the mention of
the creator in the previous sentence. To say nothing about the pagan gods, the Hebrew one has already twice
supplanted the role of the mother in generation. Most striking, however, are the reflections Victor’s exultation
encourages about gratitude. Compare Rousseau’s reflections on gratitude in Book IV of Emile [CW 13: 387-388].
40
Victor later admits to himself that he “thoughtlessly” bestowed life on the monster [F 60].
41
The lack of skin also argues for the theory that the monster is not an assemblage of proper parts, taken from
corpses. Each of these parts would have had skin of its own, and more than enough, had they been harvested as
wholes.
42
As he sleeps after animating the monster, but before his flight, Victor has a horrible dream:
I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted
and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with
the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead
mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds
of the flannel [F 34].
Not only does this dream depict the thought that we are all made of dead materials, and so in a sense dead things, but
it connects this interpretation of metabolism and growth with sex and generation.
43
Frankenstein infers the monster’s guilt directly from his ugliness. Seeing a figure in the trees, he says, “its
gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that
it was the wretch, the filthy dæmon to whom I had given life. Could he be,” Frankenstein asks, “the murderer of my
brother? No sooner did that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth… […] Nothing in
human shape could have destroyed that fair child. […] The mere presence of the idea,” he concludes, “was an
irresistible proof of the fact” [F 48].
44
Frankenstein realizes that he cannot create a female monster without “again devoting several months to profound
study and laborious disquisition” [F 103]. In particular, “I had heard of some discoveries having been made by an
English philosopher, the knowledge of which was material to my success” [F 103]. Since it is hard to imagine that
Frankenstein needs additional anatomical information, which he acquires in any case through direct
experimentation, this comment might indicate that he has, reasonably, started to think about the moral formation of a
female monster. Perhaps the English philosopher Frankenstein has in mind is Mary Wollstonecraft, author of
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Mary Shelley’s mother.
This would also explain why he puts such weight on the uncertain character of a female monster in his ultimate
decision to destroy his second creation. However this may be, Frankenstein’s need for additional study is another
indication that he might not have planned from the beginning to make a female monster, perhaps because he
intended his monster to interbreed with human women.
45
Even cleaning up the aftermath of his interrupted work is sickening to Frankenstein. “The remains of the halffinished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living
flesh of a human being” [F 118].
46
Frankenstein thus anticipates a problem that arises in Paradise Lost: Adam is prohibited from eating from the tree
of knowledge before Eve is created. She does not hear the prohibition directly, but from Adam; this inclines her less
to obey it. See PL 8:323-333 and 9:758-760. We will soon see that Frankenstein too seems to have read Milton’s
epic poem [F 131 and 147]. He does not voice, but presumably could have anticipated, a similar but greater
problem regarding the monsters’ offspring, whom the monster has said nothing to bind.
47
Perhaps this also indicates that, if Frankenstein makes his monsters capable of reproduction with one another, he
also makes them capable of reproduction with human beings.
48
Frankenstein’s fears are another indication that he does not manufacture his monsters from the proper parts of
corpses. If they were assemblages of corpse parts, would not their offspring be human?
29
�49
The monster encourages Frankenstein to pursue him in order to draw out his revenge. As Frankenstein tells it,
“sometimes he himselF who feared that if I lost all trace I should despair and die, often left some mark to guide me”
[F 141]. Oddly, Victor adds, “yet still a spirit of good followed and directed my steps, and, when I most murmured,
would suddenly extricate me from seemingly insurmountable difficulties. Sometimes, when nature overcome by
hunger, sunk under exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert, that restored and inspirited me… I may
not doubt that it was set there by the spirits that I had invoked to aid me” [F 141]. Since the monster occasionally
leaves food for Frankenstein [F 142], it seems likely that he is also responsible for the activities of Frankenstein’s
‘spirits of good.’ Frankenstein’s meeting with the monster on the alpine glacier is preceded by his invocation of
“Wandering spirits” [F 65].
50
As Walton tells his sister, “I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic,
and affection enough for me to endeavor to regulate my mind” [F 10]. Later, he adds that his desire for friendship is
“one want I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe
evil” [F 10; see also 16],
51
Walton asks his sister: “do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose. My life might have been passed in
ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path” [F 9].
52
Frankenstein also claims to have superior physical endurance: “I had ever inured myself to rain, moisture, and
cold” [F 63]. But there is some reason to doubt this: he is forever swooning, for example, or struggling with
madness [F 37 and 122]. In his superior endurance Walton more resembles the monster; the same resemblance can
be found in their respective longings for a companion. Walton may be a chimera of Frankenstein and his monster.
53
“Are you then so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition?” Frankenstein asks
them. “You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your name adored, as belonging to brave
men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. […] Oh, be men, or be more than men” [F
149]. Frankenstein himself has encountered death for glory and the benefit of mankind; he has been a man and
made more than a man; and he has suffered greatly for it. It is striking that he is willing to repeat an appeal that has
cost him so much to heed.
54
If the monster is the gratification of Frankenstein’s wishes, then by calling him a “serpent” here Frankenstein
anticipates the later moment when, certain he will not receive a mate from Frankenstein, the monster compares
himself to a “snake” [F 116]. The image is Biblical, if it is not once again from Paradise Lost.
55
This is odd, since in his story Frankenstein claims to forget “all the steps” that “progressively led” to his
discovery, and to be left with “only the result” [F 31]. He clearly thinks he can continue to animate dead matter,
since otherwise he would have begged his incapacity in reply to the monster’s demand for a mate. But can he teach
this power to others?
56
Walton says, “the letters of Felix and Safie, which he shewed me, and the apparition of the monster, seen from our
ship, brought to me a greater conviction of the truth of his narrative than his asseverations, however earnest and
connected” [F 146].
57
Nor can we say he is secretly relieved by their compulsion. He writes to his sister, “The die is cast; I have
consented to return, if we are not destroyed. Thus are my hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision; I come back
ignorant and disappointed. It requires more philosophy than I possess, to bear this injustice with patience” [F 150].
58
In an early letter to his sister Walton considers the possibility that he might find a friend among his crew. “My
lieutenant,” he writes, “is a man of wonderful courage and enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory. He is an
Englishman, and in the midst of national and professional prejudices, unsoftened by cultivation, retains some of the
noblest endowments of humanity” [F 10]. Walton also tells his sister a lengthy story about the heroic generosity of
his master, but adds, “he has passed all his life on board a vessel, and has scarcely an idea beyond the rope and the
shroud” [F 11]. Walton concludes, “I shall certainly find no friend on the wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel,
among merchants and seamen” [F 10]. His crew is thus composed not of family nor of friends, but of associates
made necessary by Walton’s inability to reach the pole alone.
30
�59
Since Shelley read a few of these books twice during this period, and since she sometimes gives several works a
single entry in her journal – for example, “Shakespeare’s Plays” – this is only a rough count [J 32-33, 47-49, 71-73,
88-90].
60
The defect mentioned by at least one modern critic, that the novel’s three major characters all sound the same, is
thus not a bug but a feature, an indication that they are repetitions of the same person. See Germaine Greer, “Yes,
Frankenstein really was written by Mary Shelley. It’s obvious – because the book is so bad,” The Guardian. April
9, 2007. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/09/gender.books. Retrieved on February 4, 2018. Greer
complains, “There are three narrators: Thomas Walton, Victor Frankenstein and the monster himself. The three of
them, including the inarticulate monster, speak in paragraphs, with the same tendency to proliferating parallel
clauses and phrases and the occasional theatrical ejaculation.” It’s not clear why Greer thinks that the monster is, or
should be, inarticulate.
61
“It seems that all great things,” Nietzsche tells us in Beyond Good and Evil, “in order to inscribe themselves with
eternal demands upon the heart of humanity, must first stalk the earth as colossal and fear-inducing masks” [Preface,
see also Sections 25 and 40]. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil / On The Genealogy of Morality.
Translated, with an Afterword, by Adrian Del Caro. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). Even if the
fear and disgust the monster inspires are natural rather than learned, it does not follow that his ugliness expresses the
truth about his interior, nor that his ugliness is a disability. Since the monster’s vengeful path is ultimately due to his
accidental reading, since he was born good but was made wicked by society, Shelley can refer to Frankenstein in
one of her letters as “a book in favor defence of Polypheme” [L I: 91].
62
“If this rule were always observed,” Frankenstein continues, “if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to
interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his
country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been
destroyed” [F, 33].
63
Rousseau discusses the arguments for and against novels in the dialogue that serves as the Second Preface of Julie
[CW 6: 7-22].
64
In the Critique of Judgment, Kant asks us to
consider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling high up in the
sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their
destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean
heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on. Compared to the might of any of these,
our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more
attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects
sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to
discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the
courage [to believe] that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence [Ak. 261].
Note that the ability and the courage Kant mentions in this passage are not dependent on our safety from nature.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. Translated, with an Introduction, by Werner S. Pluhar. (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 120.
65
In a letter to Fanny Imlay, Mary Shelley describes the promenade of Plainpalais, outside of Geneva:
Here a small obelisk is erected to the glory of Rousseau, and here (such is the mutability of human
life) the magistrates, the successors of those who exiled him from his native country, were shot by
the populace during that revolution, which his writings mainly contributed to mature, and which,
notwithstanding the temporary bloodshed and injustice with which it was polluted, has produced
enduring benefits to mankind, which all the chicanery of statesmen, nor even the great conspiracy
of kings, can entirely render vain [F 174 or L I: 20].
66
“Would anyone believe, if he did not have the proof,” Rousseau writes in the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard
Vicar,
31
�that human foolishness could have been brought to this point? Amatus Lusitanus affirmed that he
had seen a little man an inch long, closed up in a bottle, whom Julius Camillus, like another
Prometheus, had made by the science of alchemy. Paracelsus, De natura rerum, teaches the way
to produce these little men and maintains that the pygmies, the fauns, the satyrs, and the nymphs
were engendered by chemistry, Indeed, I do not see anything that further remains to be done to
establish the possibility of these facts, other than to advance that organic matter resists the heat of
fire and that its molecules can be preserved alive in a reverberatory furnace “ [CW 13:436-437
note *].
What would Rousseau have his Vicar say if the alleged generation did not require the use of fire?
67
For more on Shelley’s concern with this matter, see James O’Rourke, “‘Nothing More Unnatural’: Mary Shelley’s
Revision of Rousseau,” in ELH. Volume 56, Number 3. (Autumn, 1989), reprinted in in F, 543-569. O’Rourke
quotes from Shelley’s 1838 encyclopedia essay on Rousseau:
Our first duty is to render those to whom we give birth, wise, virtuous, and happy, as far as in us
lies. Rousseau failed in this, – can we wonder that his after course was replete with sorrow? The
distortion of intellect that blinded him to the first duties of life, we are inclined to believe to be
allied to that vein of insanity, that made him an example among men for self-inflicted sufferings
[F, 547].
68
It is difficult to be sure exactly what Shelley read of Rousseau in the years before the publication of Frankenstein,
mostly because she does not name Rousseau’s works consistently in her journal. In 1815 she records reading
Rousseau’s Confessions, Emile, and Nouvelle Heloise [J, 47-49]. In 1816 she adds Rousseau’s Reveries, over four
days in late July and early August [J, 55]. She was writing Frankenstein at this point, having begun in June [F,
333]. She also reads something she calls the “Letters of Emile” over two days in September 1816 [J, 64]: could this
refer to Emile and Sophie? In the summary of her reading for that year, she repeats these titles, listing the Reveries
and the “Letters of Emile” [J, 72-73]. Shelley turned to correcting and transcribing Frankenstein in April, May, and
October 1817 [J, 78-79, 85]. Over six days in late June and early July 1817, she records re-reading Rousseau’s
Julie, having completed Frankenstein in May that year [F, 334]. She re-reads the Confessions over three days in
October 1817, followed by three days on something she calls “Rousseau’s Letters” – perhaps those referred to in the
Confessions, which would have included the April 20, 1751 letter to Mme. de Francueil where Rousseau discusses
his treatment of his children [CW 5: 551-552; J, 85-86]. She lists the Nouvelle Heloise and “Confessions et Lettres
de Rousseau” in her reading for 1817 [J, 89-90].
32
�
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"We shall be monsters" : Frankenstein and the ugliness of enlightenment
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Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein
Deans
Friday night lecture
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2015
What Is a Tutor?
(Or, On the Future of Our Educational Institution)
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community
of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to
pursuing answers to these questions. For the past eleven terms, in just as many convocation
addresses, I have tried to shed light on various aspects of the graduate program here at St. John’s.
But in this, my twelfth and final address as Associate Dean for the Graduate Program, I mean to
shine the light of inquiry closer to home – at the risk of doing what Coriolanus refused to do, and
displaying my wounds. I mean to ask: what is a tutor?
This question may seem perverse. How can someone who professes himself a tutor ask, in
public no less, what a tutor is? To this I reply: there is no guarantee that the names we use all the
time are the correct ones. In the Theaetetus, Plato’s Socrates claims that “those who spend their
lives in philosophy” are almost ignorant of whether their neighbors are human beings. This should
remind us that we too run the risk of using the wrong words for the things we encounter in the
world. Consider the word ‘tutor.’ While nowadays it takes some digging in the College’s website
to verify the fact, here at St. John’s, faculty members are indeed called ‘tutors,’ in order to
distinguish them from professors. On the Annapolis page for prospective faculty, we find this
claim: “We use the title ‘tutor’ to highlight that learning is an ongoing, cooperative enterprise in
which some are at different stages [from] others.” Professors, we are led to infer, downplay or even
deny – by their reliance on lectures – the ongoing, cooperative, and individual character of learning.
1
�We could be forgiven for further inferring that, by calling themselves ‘tutors,’ the faculty at St.
John’s means to indicate not just their difference from professors, but their superiority to them.
Any such pretensions are quickly punctured, however, by none other than the Oxford
English Dictionary. As it archly informs us, the particularly American meaning of ‘tutor’ is “a
teacher subordinate to a professor” [my emphasis]. But it also gives us the etymology of the word,
which gets us off to a helpful start. ‘Tutor’ comes from the Latin verb tueri, which means ‘to
watch’ – and so, derivatively, ‘to take care of,’ ‘guard,’ or ‘protect.’ A tutor in the original sense
protected a child and his estate in the absence of his father. But this purely defensive sense of the
word has become obsolete. In its modern meaning, the prophylactic sense is combined with a
pedagogical sense. Nowadays, a tutor is “one employed in the supervision and instruction of a
youth in a private household.”
Why this pedagogical addition to the work of a tutor? It must have come from the sense that
for the young, protection and supervision are not enough. No lesser a defender of the sufficiency of
human nature – or in his formula, “the natural goodness of man” – than Jean-Jacques Rousseau is
compelled to acknowledge, in his educational treatise Emile, that nature can at most be entrusted
with one-half, or perhaps only one-third, of the education of a human being who is meant to live in
society. Since even the best-guarded young can turn out badly, no one should employ a supervisor
who is not also an instructor, who in addition to protecting the young from malign external
influences, takes care to expose them to benign ones. To be employed, then, a tutor must also be an
instructor, which is to say, a teacher. Until so-called competency-based education rules the land, no
student will receive a college degree for having been left to herself for four years, provided only
that she has been adequately supervised and protected. Professing via lectures is not required, nor
perhaps even recommended, but teaching and learning are necessary. So to be a tutor in this
modern sense, one must teach.
2
�Here, then, is a first answer to our guiding question: a tutor is a teacher. How satisfying is
this answer? To test it, let’s turn to one of the books we read in the Philosophy & Theology tutorial:
Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the first section of the fourth part of that book, a
part titled “Epigrams and Interludes,” we find this warning: “Whoever is a teacher from the ground
up, takes all things in earnest only in relation to his students – even his own self.” To want to teach
is to want another human being to learn, which, absent an omnipotent speech, is to want to
accommodate oneself to the conditions of another human being’s learning. To want to
accommodate oneself wholly in this way, even in one’s own ground – to be willing to say anything,
so long as it produces a change in the listener – is to take one’s own self seriously only in relation to
one’s students. It is, in other words, to place a higher value on the one who does not know than on
the one who knows: to judge that the student’s unknown genius has a higher value than the
teacher’s known teaching. The limit of this willingness to bend oneself into whatever shape the
student needs, this faith that each student has an unknown, and perhaps unknowable genius, is an
education that stresses form rather than content, and that judges, not what a student has learned, but
only that she has learned – which is to say, changed. What is worse, this subordination involves the
thoroughgoing teacher in a contradiction, since one has a right to teach only if knowing is more
valuable than not knowing.
So Nietzsche hints that we cannot be wholly satisfied with the thought that a tutor is simply
a teacher. But he has much more to say on the question. While this playful epigram is his first
mention of teachers [Lehrer] in Beyond Good and Evil, and his only substantial one, he devotes the
whole of Part Six of the book to those who, literally, have been taught: “We Scholars [Wir
Gelehrten].” Though as a former philologist Nietzsche identifies himself as a scholar, experience
has given him access to a higher ideal than the scholarly, and to a ground from which to criticize
scholars, those who are wholly what they have been taught. Objectivity is the scholarly ideal,
3
�Nietzsche writes, and to the extent that a scholar achieves this ideal he becomes a precious
instrument, like a mirror:
he lives to submit before everything that wants to be known, without any other desire
than for that which knowing, “mirroring,” gives, – he waits, until something comes,
and then spreads himself delicately out, so that even light footsteps and the slipping
over of ghostly beings not be lost on his surface and skin.
In the light of his ideal the scholar squints at the subjective aspects of his person; he has time for the
objects of his study, but none for himself, and he demands of others the same submission. He is
industrious and patient, measured and even in his capacities and needs, dependent on the approval
of others, familiar, egalitarian, mediocre, and envious. As a thoroughgoing learner, he is the ideal
match for the thoroughgoing teacher. Like a mirror, his face remains empty until something like a
book – any book – is put in front of it.
Nietzsche grants that scholars have very serious reasons for pursuing this objective ideal.
The extent of human knowledge is vast and growing, all the more so now than in Nietzsche’s day.
To want to learn everything is to risk exhaustion; to want to learn only some things, before one
knows everything, is to risk either dilettantism or an arbitrary, ignorant choice. None of us wants to
be deceived in the things that are most important to us to know; and this intellectual conscience
demands that if we learn anything, we should learn it well. So we succumb to specialization, for the
sake of our self-respect, and the respect of others. The ideal of objectivity recasts this necessity as a
virtue, by dignifying our careful submission before anything that wants to be known, our careful
cultivation of our scholarly patch of grass. But the price of the objective ideal is high, for we
scholars become skeptical and envious of everything that is not objective: of everything that can
judge with a clear conscience for personal, subjective reasons. Indeed, we must be skeptical of
philosophy in particular, wherever we detect that it is not objective – that is, not scholarly. So
through a combination of intellectual conscience and exhaustion, we scholars end by putting
ourselves in the place of philosophers. Those who are skeptical about the possibility of judgment
4
�displace those responsible for making the most comprehensive judgments. This, in Nietzsche’s
account in Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil, is the consequence for students of learning from those
who are teachers from the ground up. Wholly selfless teachers produce students wholly lacking in
selves.
It’s time for a brief summary: a step backward for the sake of a leap forward. A tutor cannot
simply be a guardian, since this presumes that the young need nothing but protection to turn out
well. But a tutor cannot simply be a teacher, either, since wholehearted teachers educate young who
are nothing for themselves. What meaning of ‘tutor’ remains, on which we can wholeheartedly
pride ourselves? I once overheard a colleague of mine say something on this score that I find
helpful: “a tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical.” Lest I be suspected of just now having
taken my leap too far into the subjective and personal, let me explain what I take this colleague to
mean.
When times are good, and circumstances ordinary, each faculty member at St. John’s
College receives a sabbatical every seventh year of her tenure. We say that this respite from
teaching is for the sake of study, rest, and renewal of spirit, in anticipation of future teaching. But
we require from tutors neither a plan for a proposed sabbatical, detailing the studies to be pursued
and the rest to be taken, nor a report on a completed sabbatical. We do not test the spirits of our
returning tutors, to see whether they truly have been renewed. All that we require of a tutor
returning from sabbatical is that she resume teaching, for at least two more years. Now a practice
designed and described in this way, as a matter of instruction and not of compensation, rests on two
presuppositions. First, it presupposes that a tutor’s teaching will be benefited by study that is not
dictated by teaching. It acknowledges that, however much we may learn while we teach, the
learning that is incidental to teaching is not enough – even from the perspective of the demands of
teaching. Second, and more importantly in my view, by requiring neither a plan nor a report for a
5
�sabbatical, our practice acknowledges that the tutor, and not the College, is the best judge of what
counts as study, rest, and renewal of spirit – and that allowing tutors to exercise this judgment will
benefit their teaching. Our practice acknowledges that tutors are not teachers from the ground up;
we could say, with a wink at our modern arithmomania, that they are six parts teachers, and one part
something else. But this one part is the important part, for it is the ground of the rest. And here is
where the aptness of my colleague’s dictum becomes clear. A tutor is someone who deserves a
sabbatical, because a tutor, in the precise sense, is someone who can be trusted to make independent
judgments about the ground of her teaching. A tutor is someone whose own work is the work of the
College, not because she pursues it always with an eye to the needs of the College, but because she
knows that the activity of her own intellect and imagination is the source of the life in her teaching.
The College depends on such tutors to constitute its community of learning – to make it more than a
community of teaching. No array of scholarly specialists, however wisely selected, can take their
place.
To add some detail to this vision of what a tutor is, we can turn back to Part Six of Beyond
Good and Evil, to the ideal that Nietzsche opposes to the scholarly. “In the face of a world of
‘modern ideas,’ which would banish everybody into a nook and ‘specialty,’” Nietzsche writes – and
we should interject here that this is our world, to an even greater degree than it was Nietzsche’s –
a philosopher – supposing that today there could be philosophers – would be
compelled to place the greatness of the human being, the concept of ‘greatness,’
precisely in his comprehensiveness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in
manifoldness. He would even determine worth and rank from this, how much and
how many things one could bear and take upon oneself, how far one could stretch his
responsibility.
Let’s heed Nietzsche’s warning that what a philosopher is cannot be taught [nicht zu lehren],
and give the anti-scholarly ideal a more modest name, one more suited to saying what a tutor is.
Let’s call this the comprehensive ideal. Far from being scholarly mirrors who submit themselves
before every thought that comes along, who wish to do nothing more than understand each author as
6
�he understood himself, who are Platonists because it is Monday afternoon, and monotheists because
it is Monday night, devotees of the comprehensive ideal seek to place everything they comprehend
into an ordered whole in which they can live. They are skeptics, not in the sense that they try to
bend every exclamation point into a question mark, but in the sense that they test every thought to
see whether it is solid and shapely enough to be of use. They are courageous, deft, and methodical
critics, not in order to anatomize every idea they touch, but in order to be able, when called on, to
stand alone and give an account of themselves, and of the world they are trying to be. Seen in the
light of the comprehensive ideal, it is clear why a tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical. A
sabbatical is the appropriate conclusion to the creation of a world.
But what can a tutor striving for the comprehensive ideal be for her students? At the root of
the German word for teacher, Lehrer, is the word Lehre, or ‘instruction’ – a word closely related to
Lehr, or ‘model.’ We see something similar in the etymology of ‘to teach,’ which can be traced
back to the Greek word δείκνυµι, meaning ‘to show.’ We are accustomed to say here at the College
that tutors are model learners, but we should remember that they are also models of having learned,
of living with learning. Tutors who aspire to the comprehensive ideal model this ideal for their
students, and show them that it can be lived. They show them that their learning is neither for its
own sake, in that morally humble but metaphysically proud phrase, nor for the sake of some job,
family, institution, or community to which they must subordinate themselves, or into which they
must fit. Rather, their learning is for the sake of the wholeness in manifoldness of the being that
longs to comprehend a world – the wholeness in manifoldness that is the true end of liberal
education. It is by protecting this possibility, in tutors, staff, and students alike, that our remedial
community earns the right to be called a community of learning. It is through this wholeness in
manifoldness of the human being, in the highest sense of the term, that our two programs of
instruction, the graduate and the undergraduate, win the right to consider themselves wholes. And it
7
�is in pursuit of this wholeness in manifoldness that liberal education, our bookish, freeing, childlike
education, becomes what it is:
the consummation of practice and a courageous confrontation with what is most
real… the education of the free who know they are not free into a freedom that they
do not desire… an education that forgets and begins again, that plays at the most
serious things, and that thereby gives us a world in which to live.
There will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: one on Homer’s
Odyssey, one on Euclid’s Elements, one on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, one on Shakespeare’s
Henry plays, and one on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Schedules and meeting
places for these groups will be circulated by email soon. By way of conclusion, let me invite you
all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class.
The spring 2015 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
5 January 2015
Note
In my beginning, I have Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in mind, but also the beginning of section 204, in Part Six of Beyond
Good and Evil. Socrates’ remark can be found at Theaetetus, 174B. For “the natural goodness of man,” see Rousseau’s
note for philosophers in the Final Reply; the passage of Emile to which I refer is on page 38 of Bloom’s edition.
Nietzsche’s epigram about the teacher from the ground up is section 63 of Beyond Good and Evil; the translation is my
own. Part Six of that book had a strong influence on the whole argument of this address: I quote from sections 207 and
212, making my own translations there too; but the aspects of Nietzsche’s argument that I do not mention are more
interesting. The final quotation is from my Summer 2012 convocation address, “What Is Liberal Education? Part I.”
8
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2015
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2015 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Tutor? Or, On the Future of Our Educational Institution" in Annapolis, MD.
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Tutors
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2014
On the History Segment
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a
community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental
questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we
must from time to time inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining
the readings of the History segment.
The subject of this convocation address – the third of five, each treating one of the
segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address,
delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the
Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of
that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as
compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names
that determine the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each segment. Now I hope to
make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the
segment title ‘History’? Before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution you that
the threads I mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and
seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other
segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I only insist that these threads are
1
�present in the segment readings, and that they are truly worth following. So again, what are the
wonderful questions raised by ‘History’?
Those of you who recall my procedure in my last two convocation addresses will be
relieved to see that this time, our segment title contains no ampersand, and so makes no
questionable claim that two things are properly understood as one. But the required portion of
the history segment is still divided into a seminar and a tutorial; so we can wonder about the
principle of this division. In the History seminar, we read the Books of Samuel and Kings from
the Hebrew Scriptures, Herodotus’ Histories, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, several of
Plutarch’s Lives, Tacitus’ Annals, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; in the
tutorial we read parts of Augustine’s City of God, Vico’s New Science, Kant’s Idea for a
Universal History and Contest of Faculties, Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Marx’s German
Ideology, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life by Nietzsche, Husserl’s
Vienna Lecture, and Heidegger’s Age of the World Picture. Were it not for the puzzling
presence of the interloper Gibbon, who wrote in the eighteenth century CE, around the same time
as Kant, we could conclude that the division between the seminar and the tutorial, like the
organization of many classes in our graduate and undergraduate programs, is chronological by
author. But Gibbon’s membership among the History seminar authors suggests that the division
between seminar and tutorial is actually chronological by subject – by time period depicted
historically. In Samuel and Kings we read of events that are to have happened before the tenth
century BCE, and the seminar readings extend from there to the portions of Gibbon that we read,
which cover events in the first and second century CE. The tutorial readings pick up with
Augustine, who wrote in the fifth century CE, and run through to Heidegger’s attempt to
characterize the historical spirit of the twentieth century.
2
�There’s something to this interpretation of the division between seminar and tutorial, but
it doesn’t tell the whole story. For as soon as we turn to examine the subjects of the tutorial
authors, we discover that they don’t concern themselves with historical events later than those
treated by the seminar authors, but with all historical events, with history as a whole. To steal
some terms from the titles of their respective works, the seminar authors write Inquiries into
particular events – the Greek word ἱστορία, whence we get the word history, means inquiry –
whereas the tutorial authors write Universal Histories, or Philosophies of History. The
beginnings of the first readings in each class exemplify this difference. I Samuel begins simply,
artlessly, in the middle of things: “And there was a man…” [I Samuel 1:1]. The City of God, by
contrast, begins:
Most glorious is the City of God: whether in this passing age, where she dwells by
faith as a pilgrim among the ungodly, or in the security of that eternal home which
she now patiently awaits until ‘righteousness shall return unto judgment’, but
which she will then possess perfectly, in final victory and perfect peace [Book 1,
Preface].
The former work begins with a particular, a man; the latter by looking back to the whole passing
age and forward to the perfect end of eternity. Perhaps we have discovered an ampersand in our
segment title after all, and this difference between the seminar and tutorial readings ought to lead
us to call the segment ‘Inquiry & Universal History,’ or just ‘History & History.’
To get a better sense of the causes and extent of this difference, let’s let more of the
History segment authors speak for themselves. Here’s how Herodotus begins his book:
Here is the showing-forth of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that
neither what human beings have done might disappear in time, nor the deeds great
and admirable, partly shown forth by the Greeks and partly by the barbarians,
might be without fame: his inquiry shows forth both other things and through
what cause they warred against one another [Book I, 1].
Herodotus inquires into the deeds of human beings, and in particular into the great and admirable
deeds of Greeks and barbarians, for the sake of memory and fame, and for the sake of knowledge
3
�of causes. The deeds in question – which are chiefly deeds done in war – are worthy of memory
and fame, and knowledge of their causes is worth possessing, because they are great and
admirable, with a greatness not solely Greek, nor barbarian, but human. Likewise, Thucydides
begins thus:
Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the
Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and
believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that
had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both
the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he
could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who
delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed, this was the greatest
movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the
barbarian world – I had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote
antiquity, and even those that more immediately precede the war, could not from
lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as
far back as was practicable lead me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there
was nothing on a greater scale, either in war or in other matters [I.1.1-3].
Thucydides also justifies his inquiry by the human greatness to be discovered in the event,
another war, into which he inquires.
This view, that history means inquiry into particular events that disclose a lasting human
greatness, and so are worth remembering, runs through the readings of the History seminar.
Plutarch modifies it in his “Life of Alexander,” but only to insist that lasting human greatness is
not necessarily seen only in war: “For it is not histories that I am writing,” he says, “but lives;
and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a
slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where
thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities” [I.1]. And Tacitus modifies this
view in his Annals, but only to insist that partisan passions distort inquiries into lasting human
greatness, which must be dispassionate to be worthy of memory:
The Roman people of old, however, had their successes and adversities recalled
by brilliant writers; and to tell of Augustus’ times there was no dearth of
deserving talents, until they were deterred by swelling sycophancy. The affairs of
4
�Tiberius and Gaius, as of Claudius and Nero, were falsified through dread while
the men themselves flourished, and composed with hatred fresh after their fall.
Hence my plan is the transmission of a mere few things about Augustus and of his
final period, then of Tiberius’ principate and the remainder – without anger and
partiality, any reasons for which I keep at a distance [I.1.2].
In the History seminar it is only with Gibbon, writing sixteen hundred years after Tacitus,
but about the same events, that a deep challenge to this view of history first comes to light. In
Chapter XV of the first volume of Decline and Fall, our last seminar reading, Gibbon turns to “a
candid but rational inquiry into the progress of Christianity,” which he holds to be an essential
part of the history of the Roman Empire. But here Gibbon confronts a problem. The Tacitean
law of dispassion – what Gibbon calls “the great law of impartiality” – requires the historian to
confess the imperfections of the believers in the Christian revelation; but faith in its divine origin
requires the historian to profess the perfection of this revelation. “Our curiosity,” Gibbon writes,
is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so
remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. To this inquiry an
obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the
convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great
Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favorable a reception in the world,
and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of
the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to
execute its purpose, we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission,
to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the
rapid growth of the Christian church [487-488]?
According to Gibbon, then, the belief in divine providence poses a deep challenge to the view
that history is an inquiry into the natural causes of lasting human greatness. This challenge is so
deep that Gibbon is forced to invent a distinction between the first, divine causes of the growth
of Christianity, and the secondary, human causes of this growth. The historian, as distinguished
from the theologian, is restricted to the study of these secondary causes. But we might wonder,
given the extent of divine power, whether these secondary causes are in fact necessary, and
whether, if they are unnecessary, they are in fact causes.
5
�This view of history, as the record of divine providence, extends throughout the readings
of the History tutorial, and distinguishes these readings from those of the seminar. It is found in
explicitly religious form in Augustine, who writes,
the City of God of which we speak is that to which the Scriptures bear witness:
the Scriptures which, excelling all the writings of all the nations in their divine
authority, have brought under their sway every kind of human genius, not by a
chance motion of the soul, but clearly by the supreme disposition of providence
[XI.1];
and it is found in more secular forms in the works we read by Vico, Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
Vico envisions a “new Science [that] must therefore be a demonstration, so to speak, of what
providence has wrought in human history” [section 342], while Kant writes in his Idea for a
Universal History, “the history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realization of
a hidden plan of nature” to perfect the natural capacities of mankind [Eighth Proposition], so that
history thus understood is a “justification of nature – or rather perhaps of providence” [Ninth
Proposition]. For his part, Hegel grandly offers a Philosophy of History that is guided by “the
simple conception… that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world,
therefore, presents us with a rational process” [9] – a conception that consorts with the belief that
“a Providence (that of God) presides over the events of the World” [13]. And Marx sees history
as a necessary dialectic of material conditions, ending in a heaven on earth
where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production
and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to
hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after
dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd
or critic [53].
You may already have noticed, even from these brief indications, that a strange note has
crept in to these developments of the view that history is the record of divine providence. Since
this view of history is based on the Christian scriptures, and these scriptures give an account of
6
�the world from its beginning in God’s creation to its end in God’s kingdom, the histories
animated by this view are necessarily universal as well as providential. Accordingly, every
tutorial author that we have so far mentioned takes as his subject human history as a whole.
Moreover, since the Christian scriptures tell the story of the fall of man and promise his eventual
redemption from sin, these universal histories are necessarily progressive: each points to an
image of some perfect human end, whether in this world or in the next. But to the extent that
these universal providential histories are also held to be rational, strange conclusions result.
Vico, for example, struggles to preserve the eternal necessity of his science in the face of the
historical contingency of providence. “Since [human] institutions have been established by
divine providence,” he writes, “the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now
be, and will have to be such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from
time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case” [section 348]. In the Contest of
Faculties, Kant points to the French Revolution as evidence that the human race will enjoy
continual progress [section 7]. Hegel goes so far as to say that history teaches that “the real
world is as it ought to be” [36], while Marx makes human nature depend on the material
conditions that determine production [42]. In short, the attempt to transform the mysterious
operation of providence into a rational process, visible in history, compels the universal historian
to equate what is at each moment with what is best at that moment, and so to deny that there is
such a thing as lasting human greatness, into which we can inquire.
Of our tutorial authors, Friedrich Nietzsche is the first to call into question the aspirations
of universal history, by subordinating history and its scientific truths to the standard of life.
Husserl and Heidegger follow Nietzsche in this, each in his own way. But I shall pass over how
these thinkers accomplish this, so that my convocation address not be as long as human history
7
�itself. I will only say that, in subordinating history to another standard – whether it be life, or the
infinite task of philosophy, or the disclosure of being – it is by no means clear that these thinkers
return to the ancient view of history as an inquiry into natural events that disclose a lasting
human greatness. But from this conclusion to the tutorial readings, at least one of the wonderful
questions raised by the history segment should be clear. Is history an inquiry into lasting human
greatness, or is it the record of a necessary progress that denies the possibility of such greatness?
Since the second of these alternatives especially claims the name ‘History’ for itself, this
wonderful question could also be put thus: is there such a thing as ‘History’? Lastly, it should
also be clear, from everything that is at stake in this question, why, of all the segments in the
graduate program, Graduate Institute students are prohibited from taking the History segment
first. By basing our program almost entirely on the reading and discussion of great books, we
depend, perhaps more than members of any other community of learning, on the belief that there
is such a thing as lasting human greatness.
To conclude, let me announce that there will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study
groups this term: on Plato’s Republic, on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on Arabic poetry, on
Greek tragedy, and on Richard Feynman’s Quantum Electrodynamics. Schedules and meeting
places for all five of these groups will be circulated by email when they become available. Let
me also invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall,
before going to class.
The spring 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
14 December 2013
Delivered 6 January 2014
8
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2014 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the History Segment" in Annapolis, MD.
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2013
On Liberal Education as a Commodity
“Education is the only commodity that people are willing to pay for and not receive.”
I don’t know how this maxim strikes you, but I remember vividly how it struck me, as a
young undergraduate sitting in an introductory economics lecture: with the shocking
combination of strangeness and rightness that is the sign of a new truth. The circumstances
which led my professor to pronounce this maxim have faded from my memory: perhaps he was
peeved that his lecture was ill-attended, or perhaps he was dismayed at his students’ poor
performance on a recent exam. But the force of the maxim has not faded for me, over the
intervening quarter-century. It seemed then, and it still seems now, to capture almost perfectly
the puzzling combination on the part of most human beings of an eagerness to be educated, and
an unwillingness to do what is needed to become educated. Hence, “education is the only
commodity that people are willing to pay for and not receive.”
Reflecting on my professor’s maxim from the perspective of the graduate and
undergraduate Programs at St. John’s, it’s easy to say that things here are different. And justice
demands that we acknowledge that, with respect to this maxim, things indeed are different at the
College. We have no ‘ten-minute rule,’ for example – no mythical rule that claims to determine
how long students are obliged to wait after the beginning of a class for a late professor to arrive,
before they are within their rights to disperse. To the contrary, one of the most concrete
implications of our saying that the great books, not the tutors, are the teachers here at the College
is that our classes begin on time, whether the tutor is present or not. The tutors assist students
1
�with their learning, and they witness this learning; but their presence is neither necessary nor
sufficient for learning to take place. And this is as it should be: for ‘ten-minute rules’ and similar
legalistic evasions are fundamentally thoughtless. From the perspective of learning, either what
a professor has to say is likely to be helpful, or it is not. If the former, then one should be willing
to wait as long as is reasonable, and surely longer than ten minutes; if the latter, then why wait
that long – indeed, why come to class at all? So we should acknowledge that students at St.
John’s, and perhaps especially graduate students at the College, become members of this
community of learning because they are willing to do what is necessary to learn, and so to
receive the education that they have paid for.
But justice also demands that we press beyond this moment of self-congratulation, to see
as clearly as we can how we relate to our education, as graduate students and as tutors here at St.
John’s. Can we really say – speaking as students, for example – that we have never chosen to
cut a class, nor wished that we could do so, for the sake of some other activity that, if pressed, we
would acknowledge has less likelihood of educating us? Can we really say that we have never
forgone the opportunity to work on an essay for the sake of some apparently more pressing or
pleasant activity, in the vague hope that there will be time enough to write the essay later? Or,
speculating more cautiously, from the perspective of a tutor, isn’t learning at St. John’s
sometimes like being forced to consume a delicious meal at gunpoint? Sure, we all love to read
Plato, or Aristotle, or Rousseau, or Nietzsche – but must we do so right now? And must we rush
to be finished by 7:15, and ready with our opening question? Certainly some of the feeling of
constraint that comes with education is due to our membership in a community of learning, with
all the compromise and limitation that entails. But could there be something about learning
2
�itself, about education itself, that makes perhaps even the most willing and self-selecting among
us seek to evade its demands?
My professor’s maxim is helpful here, by framing its insight in the language of
economics. It begins, “Education is the only commodity…,” and it acquires its force with the
concluding image of a thoughtless consumer who pays for this commodity but neglects to
receive it. But is education a commodity? My economics textbook from that same introductory
class defines a commodity as “any item of use to a consumer or producer.” And though it is
fashionable, especially in our circles, to say that a liberal education above all is not useful in this
way – it is, rather, for its own sake – this seems to me to go too far. None of us would be here if
we suspected that becoming liberally educated would make no difference to our lives, or that it
would change them for the worse. Each of us hopes that education will change us for the better;
this is its use. For this reason, education is a commodity: it is an item that both producer and
consumer agree is of use, and that they try to price based on their mutual sense of its usefulness.
But education differs from other commodities in one crucial respect: it is the only
commodity about which its producer and its consumer necessarily disagree about what the
commodity itself is. The reason for this disagreement is straightforward. To desire education,
one must lack it, and know that one lacks it. But to lack education means to be ignorant to some
extent of what it means to be educated – which also means to have opinions about education that
are to some extent mistaken. Conversely, to provide education one must be educated, and know
what it means to be educated. Therefore there is a necessary misunderstanding between those
who would ‘produce’ education and those who would ‘consume’ it, as to exactly what is being
produced and consumed. Now economists are familiar with versions of this misunderstanding
that arise by accident with other commodities. Consumers might be unaware of the supply of a
3
�commodity, or of the demand for it in neighboring markets, and so they might end up paying a
price that is too high or too low. Such misunderstandings are inefficiencies in the operation of
the market that should be removed by better communication. But only in the case of education, I
would submit – and especially the most comprehensive kind of education, liberal education – is
it impossible to remove such misunderstandings in advance, because the understanding of the
commodity is the commodity. This is what makes it possible for the hapless student in my
professor’s maxim to pay for an education that he does not receive. The student pays for an
education that he wrongly understands in terms of grades and a degree, and he fails to receive the
education that his professor rightly understands in terms of the more comprehensive insight that
comes only with long labor.
I hope it is by now clear that the puzzle that I raised with my professor’s maxim, and
pursued using the language of economics, is really the same puzzle about learning that arises in
Plato’s dialogue Meno. In perhaps the most famous of his many attempts to evade the labors
Socrates is trying to impose on him, Meno – the ‘poster child’ for those who pay for their
education but fail to receive it – makes the following claim: it makes no sense to labor to learn
what one does not know. Either one knows a thing fully, Meno reasons, in which case there is
no need to learn it; or one does not know a thing at all, in which case there is no way to learn it.
For how would you begin to learn, let alone finish learning, something of which you are utterly
ignorant?
Socrates’ solution to Meno’s evasive puzzle is to insist that there is a condition other than
either knowing or not knowing: a mixed condition in which we have opinions about the things
that are, some of which are true, and some false. This mixed condition is the human condition,
according to Socrates: no human being ever finds himself on either horn of Meno’s dilemma,
4
�either knowing something fully, or being utterly ignorant of it. And as the dialogue continues,
Socrates is able to explain on the basis of this mixed condition how it is that human beings learn:
by juxtaposing our opinions with one another and with the things in the world, we first come to
know in a determinate way what it is that we do not know, and then – often with the help of a
teacher – we learn these things, to the extent that human beings can know them. Socrates’ name
for this human kind of learning is ‘recollection.’
What I have said so far about the Socratic doctrine of recollection in the Meno is
commonplace, and overlooks several interesting details. But there is a less commonplace
connection between the doctrine of recollection and another famous Socratic doctrine, advanced
in the Republic: the doctrine of the well-born falsehood, or the noble lie. Socrates introduces this
falsehood into his conversation about the best regime because he needs it, to give all the citizens
of the regime – or failing that, at all the citizens but the rulers – a natural attachment to their city
and to the land on which it is built, as well as a pious attachment to the city’s caste system. Now
the language of the falsehood is language that Socrates earlier calls tragic, and associates with
the style of Gorgias. (Interestingly, it is also language for which Socrates’ interlocutor at the
time, Glaucon, has no taste.) It replaces things that are simple and knowable with things that are
complex and mysterious: the rearing and education of the citizens, for example, become their
fashioning beneath the earth, and the discernment by the rulers of the virtues of the citizens
becomes their discernment of metals placed within the citizens by a god. These replacements
make the falsehood persuasive, and the attachment of the citizens to their regime more firm. But
in the Meno, Meno himself is said to be a lover of tragic language, which is associated there too
with Gorgias. Meno also prefers the complex and mysterious to the simple and knowable: a
definition of color, for example, as “an emanation of shapes commensurate with sight and hence
5
�subject to perception,” rather than a definition of shape as “that which alone of the beings
happens always to accompany color.” And in that dialogue, Socrates also comes up with a wellborn falsehood, one that makes use of Meno’s preferred, tragic language to describe our mixed
human condition, and to claim on the basis of this condition that learning is possible.
I take this connection between the falsehoods of the Republic and the Meno – their
common use of tragic language – to indicate the following. First, where important matters are
concerned, we are all to some degree resistant to learning. Our resistance comes from our
attachment to opinions that make us feel that we know more than we do. Learning always feels
to us at first like losing something; and losing something hurts. This pain marks the distance
between the learner and the teacher, and explains why they necessarily misunderstand one
another. But second, and more hopefully, wise teachers can use the very source of our resistance
to learning – our faith that we already know what is most important for us to know – to
encourage us to endure the pain of learning, and to face this pain again and again.
One consequence of these claims is that our teachers and administrators should not be
ashamed to speak of a liberal arts education as a commodity. Not only is this required in order to
be understood in our commercial society, in which as many things as possible have their price; it
is also recommended as a way of encouraging students to learn. There is something tragic in the
claims that a liberal arts education will produce skills in speaking, writing and thinking; or that it
will prepare students for the workplace of the future; or that it will guarantee a lucrative career;
or that it will produce better citizens of a democracy; or that it will make students happy –
something tragic, and so something false. But these are well-born falsehoods: they are false only
because they are partial, they resemble the truth, and they do more good than harm.
6
�Lastly, the members of our community should not be ashamed to speak in this way
because this is how the great books have always spoken to their readers: by knowing how to
speak and how to keep silent when they ought; by knowing just what to say. In his greatest
work, Emile, about the education of an imaginary child, Rousseau tells a beautiful story in this
vein about one such great book: Plutarch’s Lives. A young boy who has just read the “Life of
Alexander” is made by his foolish teacher to babble at a dinner party about the episode in which
Alexander dares to drink a potion given him by his friend Philip – despite having just received
intelligence that Philip means to poison him. This intelligence turns out to be false, and
Alexander lives; but the guests at the party disagree about whether Alexander’s action is
courageous, or foolhardy. “After the dinner,” Rousseau writes,
suspecting, on the basis of several bits of evidence, that my young doctor had
understood nothing at all of the story he had told so well, I took him by the hand
and went for a turn in the park with him. Having questioned him at my ease, I
found that more than anyone he admired Alexander’s much-vaunted courage. But
do you know in what he found this courage to consist? Solely in having
swallowed at a single gulp a bad-tasting potion, without hesitation, without the
least sign of repugnance. The poor child, who has been made to take medicine
not two weeks before, and who had taken it only after a mighty effort, still had its
aftertaste in his mouth. Death and poisoning stood in his mind only for
disagreeable sensations; and he did not conceive, for his part, of any other poison
than [medicine]. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the hero’s firmness had
made a great impression on the boy’s young heart, and that, at the next medicine
he would have to swallow, he had resolved to be an Alexander. Without going
into clarifications which were evidently out of his reach, I confirmed him in these
laudable dispositions.
I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be five Graduate Institute-hosted
study groups this term. Two will meet on Monday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00, beginning on
January 14th: one on Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and one on three of Shakespeare’s
plays: All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. A third group,
on the French language, will meet on Mondays from 3:30 to 5:00, but beginning on January 21st.
A group will meet on Thursday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00, beginning on January 10th, to read
7
�the last part of Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human, and the whole of Dawn. And a group will
meet on Friday afternoons from 4:00 to 6:00, beginning on January 18th, to read Heidegger’s
Nietzsche lectures. Schedules for these groups will be circulated by email. Also, I would like to
invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going
to tutorial.
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. The spring 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session.
Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
4 January 2013
Delivered 7 January 2013
Note
Those who would like to see just how many interesting details I have overlooked should consider Meno 75b-77b and
80d-81e in comparison with Republic 413a-415d. The story about Alexander taking his medicine can be found near
the middle of Book Two of Emile.
8
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On Liberal Education as a Commodity" in Annapolis, MD.
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2012
What Is a Segment?
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself
as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions,
and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from
time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by looking at
the graduate program, and asking ‘what is a segment?’
It is easy to be at a loss in the face of such a ‘what is?’ question, since it is not clear that a
segment is one of the beings. Rather, ‘segment’ is the conventional name we give to the parts of
the graduate program here at St. John’s, of which there are five: Philosophy & Theology, Politics
& Society, Mathematics & Natural Science, Literature, and History. These segments can be
taken in almost any order, though the History segment cannot be taken first; and completing four
of five segments entitles the student to a Master’s of Arts in Liberal Arts. Given that the name
‘segment’ is a convention, we might at first think that the question ‘what is a segment?’ is an
empty one: couldn’t these things just as well have been called parts of the graduate program?
But once we recognize that the undergraduate expression of the St. John’s Program does not
have segments – its parts are either the four years, freshman to senior, or the four classes,
seminar, tutorial, preceptorial, and laboratory – we see that the name ‘segment’ marks something
distinctive about the graduate expression of the Program.
1
�So the question ‘what is a segment?’ becomes something like ‘what were they thinking
when they called the parts of the graduate program – parts in some sense other than the sense in
which the different classes are parts – segments?’ And now we are not without resources, for we
can ask more generally, ‘what do people mean when they use the word segment?’ The word
means ‘part,’ certainly; but more strictly it means a part which has been, or can be, cut from a
whole. A segment, in other words, is not a natural part, the way a finger is part of a hand, or a
hand part of a human body. Rather, a segment is a part by violence: something that, were it not
for the cutting, we might not see as a part at all.
The particularly geometrical meaning of the term makes the need for cutting more clear.
In definition six of Book Three of his Elements, Euclid tells us that “a segment [τµῆµα: the word
means a part cut off] of a circle is the figure contained by a straight line and a circumference of a
circle.” From this we get our more modern geometrical uses of the term, such as in the phrase
‘line segment,’ which means a part cut off by two points from an infinite, or at least endless,
straight line. These particularly geometrical uses of the word ‘segment’ have two features in
common. First, the part is a segment because it must be cut off from the whole to be
distinguished as a part; and this is so because the whole is a homogeneous magnitude: a finite
area in the case of the circle, and an infinite length in the case of the straight line. The
homogeneity of the magnitude means that it has no natural parts, and that any part of it can be
distinguished as a part by cutting. Second, the segment so distinguished, because of the
homogeneity of its whole, can suffice as an indication of the whole. Given a straight line
segment, we can produce it in both directions, or remove its endpoints, to find the whole modern
straight line. And given any segment of a circle, no matter how small, we can find the whole
circle too.
2
�Could these two intimations of the geometrical meaning of ‘segment’ hold true for the
term as we use it in the graduate program? In calling its parts ‘segments,’ that is, could the
intention have been to intimate that the graduate program is a homogeneous whole, cut
arbitrarily into parts, each of which points back to the whole?
I think the answer to these questions is ‘yes.’ Despite appearances, the graduate program
here at St. John’s is a homogeneous whole – as is the undergraduate program, incidentally – and
its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. To be convinced of this view,
we need to look into, and try to see through, several other conventional terms that stand in our
way. Chief among these are the names we give to the segments and to our classes. The names
of our classes are easier to overcome, so let’s begin with them.
I hope it will surprise no one here to learn that our seminars are not restricted to
seminarians, nor are they literally seed-plots; nor do we bring in preceptors – that is,
commanders or instructors – to teach our preceptorials; nor are we called tutors – that is,
watchers or guardians – because our charges have not yet reached the age of legal majority.
Despite their evocative names, our classes differ mainly in size, in the number of tutors and
students in each. The activity of each, the pursuit through conversation of answers to
fundamental questions, is the same; and even though in some tutorials the demonstration of
mathematical propositions or the analysis of poetry is the chief technique, nothing in principle
prevents a preceptorial or even a seminar from reading a text closely, or attending to a
demonstration at the board. Even the composition of each segment out of a seminar, a tutorial,
and a preceptorial is not a matter of necessity – though it is, I hasten to add, a matter of strict
policy. While there are practical reasons to entrust a smaller class with the tasks of
demonstration in the Mathematics & Natural Science tutorial, and analysis in the Literature
3
�tutorial, it is not as clear that the readings of the Politics & Society, Philosophy & Theology, or
History tutorials could not be assigned to a seminar, nor that the seminar readings from these
segments would be ill-suited to a tutorial. There is nothing about Plato’s Republic, for example,
that suits it to be discussed by twenty people, nor about Hobbes’s Leviathan that suits it to
sixteen. We can even make much the same claim about preceptorials: that all of our seminar and
tutorial books are worthy of the intense scrutiny of a preceptorial, and that only practical
considerations should bar us from including our preceptorial books in the seminar and tutorial
reading lists.
The reason why our segments do in fact consist of a seminar, a tutorial, and a preceptorial
seems mostly to have to do with our judgment that each segment should consist of a required and
an elective component: the elective component is the preceptorial, while the required component
is shared between the seminar and the tutorial, in various ways, depending on the segment.
Sometimes the ampersand marks the division of labor: in the Philosophy & Theology segment
we have a largely-philosophy tutorial and a largely-theology seminar; in the Mathematics &
Natural Science segment it is the tutorial that takes mathematics, and the seminar natural science.
But sometimes this is not the case. If there really is such a thing as society, it is not clear
whether the Politics & Society seminar or tutorial treats it more fully. Where there is no
ampersand in the segment title, by contrast, the division of labor between the seminar and
tutorial is that the seminar in some fashion takes the ancients and the tutorial the moderns. The
Literature seminar is unapologetically Hellenic, while the tutorial handles the rest of literature.
The History seminar reaches as late as Gibbon among its authors, but as late as the fall of the
Roman Empire among its subjects; the tutorial picks up with Augustine and the rise of
Christianity.
4
�I hope this is enough to convince you that the different names we give to our classes –
seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial – are no barrier to understanding the graduate program as
homogeneous. The names we give to our segments, on the other hand, present more of a
challenge. Everywhere we look in higher education today, we see these names and similar ones
written above the majors and departments: Philosophy, Theology, Political Science, Sociology,
Mathematics, Physics, Literature, and History. But we should not infer from our adoption of
such titles for our segments that we agree with the thinking that leads to majors and departments.
Elsewhere, the title of a major often amounts to a compressed, predetermined answer to a series
of predetermined questions. It tells students what they will be studying, and sometimes even
what kind of profession they will have when they are done. It asserts the existence of the kinds
of beings that the discipline studies, that they are somehow knowable, and that they are worth
knowing. Perhaps most importantly, it reassures students about what they will be doing when
they study: physics majors can evade essays, and philosophy majors escape problem sets.
For us, by contrast, the titles of our segments should stand as compressed questions in
need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder that is the opposite of reassuring. Is there such
a thing as a life lived under the sole guidance of reason, or under the authority of revelation – and
ought we to think that one or the other of these lives can make us happy? Is there a distinct
realm of politics, or does it always reduce to philosophy or to theology? Are there beings that
are characteristically knowable, and if so, what sort of beings are they? Are the natural beings
among these beings, and so knowable as well? Is there a place for poetry or music in a happy
life, and do they provide something that reason and revelation cannot? Is there such a thing as
history, does it involve novelty or progress, and will it end? We must not take these titles that
we use merely to name the segments – numbering them would also have been confusing – as
5
�grounds for thinking that we know in advance what sort of questions and answers can be asked
and given in our classes, and hence that we know in advance the limits of what we might learn.
Now to say that each of our segment titles points to a fundamental question is not yet to
show that the graduate program is homogeneous, nor that it is a whole. Could there not be a
series of fundamental questions, perhaps even an infinite series, each of which has nothing to do
with the other, and so each of which indicates and demarcates its own field of inquiry? I can
almost imagine such a series; but as soon as I require that these questions have nothing to do
with one another, they cease to be meaningful to me as questions. Our experience in
preceptorial, the experience that some of you will soon have for the first time, gives good
guidance here. Most of the preceptorials offered this term count toward all three of the term’s
segments: Philosophy & Theology, Politics & Society, and History. And yet very few of the
fundamental and interesting questions asked in these preceptorials will present themselves
exclusively as philosophical, theological, political, or historical questions. It will occur neither
to students nor to tutors, while pursuing these questions, that there are certain directions the
conversation cannot take because a disciplinary boundary would be crossed. And it will not be
evident which segment each student is taking, from the tendency of his or her remarks to reside
in one discipline or another. To the contrary: while the interesting and fundamental questions we
pursue in our classes can originate in the concerns of many, perhaps infinitely many, disciplines,
as interesting they all indicate a relation between the thing asked about and us, the questioners
and answerers; and as fundamental they all point to the central questions of what we are as
questioning and answering beings, and how we should live. So it is precisely the interesting
character of the questions indicated by our segment titles, and pursued in our classes, that
indicates the wholeness of the Program in both its undergraduate and graduate expressions – and
6
�in doing so, indicates the problematic and aspirational wholeness of the human being. And
similarly it is precisely the fundamental character of these questions that indicates the problem
that we are, the human problem that constitutes the Program’s homogeneity.
What, then, is a segment? For us, here in the Graduate Institute, a segment is three
classes in which we read great books, gathered under a title which is meant to provoke
interesting and fundamental questions, all of which point back to the first and characteristic
question for a human being: ‘how should I live?’ I do not mean by this conclusion to deny that
certain questions are more likely to be pursued in the classes of one segment than in those of
another; in the Mathematics and Natural Science tutorial, for example, we would be remiss if we
did not discuss Euclid’s definition of a straight line, whereas this definition is not a frequent
topic of conversation in the Literature seminar. But I do mean to insist that our segment titles,
and the segments themselves, ought not to be taken as signs of deep differences, natural kinds,
among the books that we read and the questions that we ask. The St. John’s program is a whole,
not a heap.
But why this insistence? Why ask ‘what is a segment?’ Just as graduate students have a
special practical need for a segmented program, since the pace and order of their studies are not
as regular as those of undergraduates, they also run special risks once the segments have names,
as ours do. For some of you may already have studied, may have degrees in, may even have
advanced degrees in disciplines that share the names of our segments. I insist on the
questionableness of these names in part to point out that no matter your previous education, you
haven’t done this before. Our task in our classes is to make the most familiar books and authors
unfamiliar and newly challenging. I also insist on the questionableness of our segments’ names
to discourage the practice of worrying about which segments to take, and in which order. While
7
�it is respectable to have reasons to want to read particular books by particular authors, we should
keep in mind that what we find in the pages of every great book is human being, and human
being more wonderful, and less reassuring, than we can imagine.
I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on
Shakespeare’s Roman plays: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. We will
read Titus Andronicus during the summer term. This term, the group will meet on Thursday
afternoons, from 3:30 to 5:30, in the Hartle Room, beginning on January 19th. Watch your email
accounts for a schedule of readings. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the
refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial.
The spring 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
January 4, 2012
Delivered January 9, 2012
8
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2012
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2012-01-09
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Segment?"
Convocation
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Graduate Institute
Tutors
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2014
On the Politics & Society Segment
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a
community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental
questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we
must from time to time inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining
the readings of the Politics & Society segment.
The subject of this convocation address – the fourth of five, each treating one of the
segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address,
delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the
Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of
that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as
compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names
announcing that each segment treats a distinct subject matter. Now I hope to make good on these
claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title ‘Politics
& Society? Before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution you that the threads I
mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and seminar
readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other segments – are
by no means the only ones worth following. I only insist that these threads are present in the
1
�segment readings, and that they are truly worth following. So again, what are the wonderful
questions raised by ‘Politics & Society?’
I hope that you will humor me as I begin, one last time, with what at first looks like the
least meaningful element of our segment title: the twisted and enigmatic ampersand. For what
brand of ‘and’ does this old-fashioned symbol stand? Does it stand for the ‘and’ of a hendiadys,
making ‘Politics & Society’ like ‘might and main’ – a phrase composed of two elements that
mean one thing, a phrase that is therefore superfluous and redundant? Or does the ampersand
stand for a genuinely additive, and therefore divisive, conjunction – one that links two things
perhaps ordinarily found together, like ‘flotsam and jetsam’: the one present by nature, the other
by art? Are ‘politics’ and ‘society’ one thing or two?
Let’s try to say what each of these words means. ‘Politics’ comes first, and is perhaps the
easier of the two. The English word comes to us from the Greek politikē, meaning ‘the things of
the polis’: that is, the things of the city, understanding the city as the body of the citizens. One
form of this word appears as the title of one of the books that we read in the Politics & Society
seminar: Aristotle’s Politics. At the beginning of that book, Aristotle tells us that every city is
some sort of community, and every community aims at some apparent good. The community
that aims at the most authoritative and comprehensive good, he continues, is called “the city or
the political community” [1252a1-6]. In the next chapter, Aristotle clarifies his point. The city
is the complete or self-sufficient community, so to speak, such that while it comes into being “for
the sake of living,” out of need and fear, “it exists for the sake of living well,” without need and
without fear. If the other incomplete and insufficient communities are by nature, like the family,
the household, and the village, then this complete and self-sufficient community is also by
2
�nature, as the first to achieve their ends. Evidently, Aristotle concludes, the city exists by nature,
and man is by nature a political animal [1252b25-1253a5].
Aristotle picks up this thread at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, which we read
first in the Politics & Society tutorial. If politics concerns the partnership whose end is the most
comprehensive and authoritative good – presuming that there is such a good – then if there is a
science of politics, it will be a science of this most comprehensive and authoritative good
[1094a15-1094b]. Everyone agrees that this good is happiness, Aristotle continues [1095a1520], but not everyone agrees on what leads to happiness: some say pleasure, some say political
activity, some say contemplation [1095b15-20]. These claims launch him on the main project of
the Ethics: to examine pleasure, moral virtue, and intellectual virtue to see to what extent each of
these merits the title of comprehensive and authoritative good – and so to what extent each of
them is of concern to politics.
We find a similar pattern near the beginning of the other Politics & Society seminar text
that has a word related to politikē in its title: Plato’s Politeia, better known to us by its Latin title
as the Republic. In this book, Socrates’ long defense of the goodness of the virtue of justice
begins with the construction of a city in speech, within which he and his companions hope to see
both justice and the good that comes of it writ large [369a]. This city begins as a “city of utmost
necessity,” composed of four or five men [369e], but under pressure first of the principle of
specialization and then of the desire for luxuries, the “city of utmost necessity” balloons,
according to Socrates, first into a “healthy city” and then into a “feverish city” [372e]. In the
eyes of Glaucon, one of Socrates’ young companions, by contrast, the healthy city is a “city of
sows” [372d], and only the feverish city is fit for people “nowadays” [372e]. Socrates and his
companions end up seeking justice and its consequences in this feverish city. Once again we see
3
�an investigation of virtue, as a candidate for the comprehensive and authoritative good, against
the backdrop of a complete and self-sufficient association, as opposed to an incomplete and
insufficient one. (That Socrates and Glaucon seem to disagree about what constitutes sufficiency
is only one of the interesting details I’m passing over.) The more familiar Latin translation of
politeia, or ‘regime,’ as res publica, or ‘public things,’ helps by reminding us that the regime,
constituted by a claim about the authoritative and comprehensive good, is the animating principle
of all things public and political, as opposed to private and pre-political.
The political realm, we can conclude, is the public realm of authoritative claims about the
comprehensive human good. There are several such claims, and politics is their contest with one
another for the right to rule. But what, then, is society?
The English word ‘society’ comes from the Latin socius, meaning ‘companion.’ Any
group of companions, this etymology suggests, constitutes an association, and so a society.
Society seems, then, to be the genus of which politics is a species. But the first use of this Latin
term in the Politics & Society segment comes in one of the tutorial readings: Aquinas’ “Treatise
on Law,” questions 90 through 97 of the first part of the second part of the mammoth Summa
Theologica. One occurrence of the term is particularly striking for our purposes. In question 95
article 4, Aquinas asks “Is Isidore’s Division of Human Laws Appropriate?” In his answer he
remarks in passing that it is proved, in Book I Chapter 1 of the Politics, that “man is by nature a
social animal [animal sociale; emphasis added].” Lest we think that Aquinas takes the political
and the social to be synonymous, he continues: “But those things which are derived from the law
of nature by way of particular determination belong to the civil right [ius civile] according as
each political community [civitas] decides on what is best for itself.” Though Aquinas does not
use Latin terms etymologically related to politikē, other than to refer to Aristotle’s Politics, he
4
�does not lack a term to distinguish politics from society: politics is the realm of the civitas, and
of civil right. And for someone as familiar with Aristotle as Aquinas clearly was, it’s easy to
detect in Aquinas’ distinction between the social and the civil something like Aristotle’s famous
distinction in the Ethics between what is just by nature and what is just by convention [1134b171135a5]. By this distinction, Aquinas suggests that the social is the sphere of natural human
association, and is governed by natural law, which is the same everywhere. The civil or political,
by contrast, is the sphere of conventional associations, and is governed by civil right, which
differs from place to place.
Two other passages from the Treatise on Law support this interpretation of Aquinas’
meaning. In question 94 article 2, Aquinas asks “Does the Natural Law Contain Several
Precepts or One Only?” His answer is that it contains several, and because human beings have
“a natural inclination to know the truth about God and to live in society,” two of these precepts
are “to shun ignorance, [and] to avoid offending those among whom one has to live.” Later, in
question 96 article 2, he asks “Does It Belong to Human Law” – the source of civil right,
remember – “to Repress All Vices?” And he answers:
human laws do not forbid all vices from which the virtuous abstain but only the
more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain and
chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human
society could not be maintained; thus human law prohibits murder, theft, and
suchlike.
In introducing the idea of society into the Politics & Society readings, and distinguishing this
idea from the idea of politics, Aquinas thus redefines the political. It is no longer the public
realm of authoritative claims about the comprehensive human good. Rather, it is the realm of
conventional legal prohibitions against offense, also known as civil rights, which vary in their
particular character from place to place. Instead, society is the realm of authoritative claims
about the comprehensive good, based on the natural law. This law is comprehensive because it
5
�pertains to human beings as rational; it is good because all law aims at the common good of
those it rules; and it is authoritative because it comes from God.
By distinguishing society from politics in this way, Aquinas refounds, and so reorients,
the fundamental political question. No longer does the determination of the best regime depend
on the adjudication of claims about the best way of life, and so on the investigation of pleasure
and the moral and intellectual virtues. Now reason discovers the best way of life in the social
dictates of natural law, and politics need only determine which civil rights are required for us to
obey these dictates in each case. To a great extent, the political thinkers who come after Aquinas
accept this reorientation of the fundamental question. Among the readings in the Politics &
Society segment, for example, the first occurrence of the word ‘society’ in English comes,
unsurprisingly, in Hobbes’s Leviathan. But listen to how he uses it, in a famous passage that
demands to be read in full:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy
to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other
security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them
withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof
is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the Earth, no navigation, nor use of
the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no
instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no
knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no
society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and
the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short [XIII.9].
Hobbes lists society among those commodious things that only a commonwealth, with its
common power, can secure. As his argument develops in subsequent chapters of Leviathan, we
learn, as in Aquinas, that reason can discover the best way of life in the social dictates of natural
law – dictates such as “seek peace,” and “defend ourselves” [XIV.4] – and that politics need only
determine which civil rights are required for us to obey these dictates in each case. But notice
Hobbes’s striking innovation on Aquinas. The natural human state is the original human state,
6
�and the original human state is a state of war. Man is not naturally social according to Hobbes;
rather, society is always and everywhere the artificial product of the science of politics. The
tremendous gravity of the state of war requires a draconian allocation of rights to resist its
downward pull: all for the sovereign, and next to none for the subjects. And there is no ground
for disagreement with this allocation of rights, since there is no other comprehensive and
authoritative human good whose provision will guarantee peace [XI.1].
Though the political thinkers who follow Hobbes, like Locke, Rousseau, and the
American founders, disagree about the precise allocation of rights needed to constitute society,
they agree that this is the goal of politics: to make naturally asocial human beings social through
the political art. In the words of our Declaration of Independence, “We hold these Truths to be
self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to
secure these Rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the
Consent of the Governed.”
Time does not permit me to wonder whether one seminar author I have not yet
mentioned, Friedrich Nietzsche, also falls into this Thomistic-Hobbesian scheme. Instead, let me
close by pointing out some of the implications of the thread I have just followed. First, the
difference marked by the ampersand between ‘politics’ and ‘society’ does not correspond to the
difference between the readings in the segment’s seminar and tutorial. We do not have a
‘Politics seminar’ and a ‘Society tutorial,’ for example. Instead, the difference between ‘politics’
and ‘society’ in each class seems primarily chronological, corresponding roughly to the
difference between the ancient and the modern readings, or perhaps more accurately, to that
between the polytheistic and the monotheistic ones. Second, we can now see, I think, some of
7
�the wonderful, terrible questions the segment raises. Is the political realm comprehensive and
self-sufficient? If so, are the alternative claims whose contest constitutes that realm – claims on
behalf of pleasure, or moral virtue, or intellectual virtue – irreducible alternatives? Or is the
political partial and derivative, because it is dependent on some higher social principle, like the
natural law, or some more fundamental social principle, like the fear of death? If so, is there one
such principle, or many? Finally, if the political is comprehensive but plural, or if it is not
comprehensive but depends on plural extra-political principles, does this herald nothing for
humanity but ceaseless war? And if, on the other hand, the political is dependent on a single
social principle, does this dependence promise peace – and how can we distinguish it from
universal tyranny?
There will be not one but four Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: on
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, on Rousseau’s Social Contract, on the short plays of Samuel Beckett,
and on Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Schedules and meeting places for all four of
these groups will be circulated by email when they become available. Let me also invite you all
to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class.
And new students are reminded to visit the IT department in the basement of Randall Hall
between preceptorial and tutorial to set up their email accounts.
The summer 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
16 June 2014
Note
For my citations from Aristotle’s Politics, I have used the Second Edition of Carnes Lord’s translation. Citations
from his Nicomachean Ethics are from Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins’s translation. My citations from Plato’s
Republic are from Allan Bloom’s translation, also in its Second Edition. For Aquinas I used the translation found in
the Hackett collection titled On Law, Morality, and Politics. And for Hobbes’s Leviathan, I used the Curley edition,
also published by Hackett, which modernizes Hobbes’s spelling and punctuation.
8
�
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2012
What Is Liberal Education? Part I
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself
as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions,
and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from
time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by asking ‘what is
liberal education?’
Now let me reassure you that I don’t mean to try to answer this question in the next
fifteen minutes. My somewhat more modest goal is to divide the question into two parts, and
today to ask only ‘what is liberal?’ I mean to save the second part of the question, ‘what is
education?,’ for my next convocation address, in the fall 2012 term. Still, this modesty doesn’t
get me entirely out of difficulty. For now I find myself asking a ‘what is?’ question about an
adjective, ‘liberal’ – as if a quality of beings could itself be a being. Perhaps there is a noun that
gives meaning to this adjective? It turns out there could be as many as three.
There is a tradition here at St. John’s about this word, ‘liberal,’ that is a helpful place to
begin. It dates from the foundation of the New Program in 1937, when Scott Buchanan, the new
dean of the College, outlined its Program in a document titled “In Search of a Liberal College.”
To introduce his reader to the liberal arts, Buchanan begins with the etymology of ‘liberal,’
which he traces to three different Latin nouns: liber, or book; liberi, or free human beings;1 and
liberi, or children. Add a fourth Latin noun – libra, or balance – and a dash of alliterative
1
�whimsy, and you get the College’s motto: facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque, “I fashion free
human beings out of children by means of books and a balance.” Let’s leave aside libra, the
balance, which stands for laboratory science and which does not have a prominent place in the
graduate Program here at the College, and inquire instead into the meaning of ‘liberal’ through
the other three words.
First: liber, or book. If ‘liberal’ means ‘bookish,’ then the education we pursue here is
indeed liberal education, for perhaps even more than those who pursue the undergraduate version
of the Program – as I claimed in my convocation address last summer – we in the Graduate
Institute learn together chiefly by reading great books and discussing the questions that arise
from our reading. Before we congratulate ourselves on our bookish education, though, we
should acknowledge that the term ‘bookish’ is pejorative to some. You may have heard the
disapproving phrase ‘book smart,’ which is sometimes contrasted to a more approving phrase,
like ‘street smart.’ The thought behind these phrases and this contrast is that a bookish education
is concerned with things that are unreal, because abstract, or theoretical, or fictional. ‘Street
smarts,’ on the other hand, come from lived experience with things that are real, because
concrete or practical. The people who use these phrases and make this contrast are probably
thinking that only the ‘school of hard knocks’ can equip us for a life well-lived; a liberal, bookish
education only equips us for a life well-read. If ‘liberal’ means ‘bookish,’ then, we are
compelled by their disapproval to wonder whether a liberal education is what we want.
It is fitting to grant in reply that the content of the books we read is abstract, or
theoretical, or fictional. We might even be tempted to sharpen the criticism: since we read the
great books, what we read about is most abstract, most theoretical, the greatest of fictions. But
we should also ask these critics what they mean by ‘real.’ The concrete or practical content of
2
�the real experiences they advocate are deeds, rather than thoughts; ‘put down your books and live
a little’ could be their motto. But deeds are accompanied by thoughts, guided by thoughts, and
even magnified by thoughts. When we act we often begin by thinking; when we are kept from
acting we often argue; and when we are asked why we act, we often give reasons. When we
want to act with the assistance of others, we give them reasons. Moreover, every deed aims at a
state that is not yet achieved, which is to say, at a fiction. It turns out that the real, if it is
characterized by deeds, is shot through both with thought and with fiction. All ‘street smart’
human beings, we might say with a twinkle in our eyes, stretch out toward ‘book smarts.’ Their
stretching out is an inadvertent desire for liberal, bookish education.
Now we may have convinced our critics that deeds are embroiled with thoughts, and
reality with fiction. But isn’t it still the case that a bookish education is somehow more pallid
than real life experience? Don’t people read to escape the real world, to evade their
responsibilities? We can find a kind of reply to these questions near the end of Plato’s Phaedrus.
Having just invented a myth claiming that written speeches are good only as reminders to those
who already know – which is to say, that learning cannot come from books – Socrates imagines a
different kind of speech, one that is “written with knowledge in the soul of him who understands,
with power to defend itself, and knowing how to speak and to keep silent toward those it ought”
[276a-b]. He envisions, in other words, a writing that behaves like a living being, a writing the
reading of which is like interacting with a living being. The great books that are also our
teachers are such writings. Because they are written with knowledge, each time we turn to them
they speak to us in a way commensurate with our capacities. If conversation with a living being
is a real life experience – as our critics of bookish education would claim – then so too is reading
such a writing. Indeed, since they are purged of the mute, the everyday, and the accidental,
3
�reading the great books is more vivid than much of real life experience. Far from being an
evasion of the real world and its responsibilities, our liberal, bookish education confronts this
world directly and courageously.
Let’s turn to the second noun behind the adjective ‘liberal’: liberi, or free human beings.
It points to the meaning of liberal education that is perhaps most congenial to us, as participants
in a modern liberal democracy: liberal education as education of the free, as education to
freedom, as the education that most supports our political regime. But there are complications to
this meaning of ‘liberal’ that demand our attention; and it is a principle of education to be most
suspicious of what is congenial. First, is liberal education an education of the free, or an
education of the unfree to freedom? The great documents of our democracy tell us the former:
that we are endowed by our creator with an unalienable right to liberty, which government must
secure for us. But our motto tells us the latter: that the College, not the government, makes free
human beings – presumably out of those who are not free, despite being citizens of this great
republic. The government tells us that we are free to do what we want; but the College tells us
that we are not free until we know what we should want. Now St. John’s is supported in this
bold claim by one of the greatest of the great books that we read: the Republic of Plato. In that
dialogue Plato has his Socrates depict “our nature in its education and want of education”
through the image of a cave in which human beings are imprisoned “from childhood” [514a-b].
Human beings may be born free, Socrates’ image tells us, but most or perhaps all of us become
unfree as children, and we then need education if we are to become free again. If Socrates’
depiction is right, then a liberal education begins with the realization that we are not free; and the
belief that we are free is an obstacle to such an education.
4
�But this complication goes further. In Plato’s dialogue Meno, as we all know, Socrates
spends a lot of time trying to get a recalcitrant Meno to offer a satisfying definition of virtue. At
one point near the middle of the dialogue, after Meno has evaded Socrates’ demand in a variety
of ways, Socrates says that he will let himself be ruled by Meno, “since you don’t even attempt
to rule yourself – so that you can be free, I suppose” [86d-e]. By the end of the dialogue, the
freedom-loving Meno has learned nothing; the one who has learned the most from Socrates is
Meno’s obedient, nameless slave. If Socrates’ diagnosis is right, then liberal education not only
requires that we grant that we are not free; it also requires that we give up our desire for freedom.
We must become slaves of the speeches, following wherever they lead.
Can this be right, though? According to still another meaning of ‘liberal,’ liberal
education is education for free human beings, as distinguished from slaves, because it begins by
requiring that we have the leisure, the freedom from necessity, to pursue it. This freedom makes
liberal education an end in itself; to the extent that education is not an end in itself, to the extent
that it is not free from necessity, it is not liberal. This sense of ‘liberal’ reminds us that we
diminish liberal education when we talk only about the skills that accompany it, or the careers
for which it prepares us. But Socrates’ warning from the Meno about the desire to be free, and
about the need for us to rule ourselves, also reminds us that even activities for their own sake are
subject to rules, and not simply free from necessity. So how can it be that liberal education, the
education that is fitting for free human beings because it alone is for its own sake, nonetheless
requires that we acknowledge and accept that we are not free?
This brings me to the last of our Latin nouns: liberi, or children. According to our motto,
children are the raw material on which the College works, out of which to fashion free human
beings. This claim makes some sense for the undergraduate Program, but not for the Graduate
5
�Institute: since we require our students to have earned bachelor’s degrees, we cannot say that
they begin with us as children. But there is another respect in which the word liberi, or children,
could be applied to graduate students – and perhaps more so than to undergraduates. There is an
ancient accusation leveled against inquiry into fundamental questions, one that is at least as old
as Plato’s Gorgias: that such inquiry is childish. In that dialogue a young Athenian named
Callicles, angered by the claims Socrates makes about justice and punishment, bursts into the
conversation with a long speech, during which he tells Socrates that he feels about philosophy
the same way he feels about mumbling and playing around childishly:
For seeing philosophy in a young lad, I admire it, and it seems to me fitting, and I
consider this human being to be a free man, whereas the one who does not
philosophize I consider illiberal, someone who will never deem himself worthy of
any fine and noble affair. But whenever I see an older man still philosophizing
and not released from it, this man, Socrates, surely seems to me to need a beating
[485c-d].
We find an echo of the same view in Paul, who writes in his first Letter to the Corinthians,
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I
became a man, I put away childish things” [I Cor. 13:11]. Knowledge or faith about
fundamental matters is fitting for an adult; inquiry into fundamental matters is childish. So what
are we doing, inquiring at our age?
The best response to this accusation of childishness comes from a book by Friedrich
Nietzsche, titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It tells of a man named Zarathustra who wants to give
his happiness meaning by giving humankind a gift, and so descends from his mountain to the
valley and the town below. There he speaks to the townspeople, but he fails to convince them of
the value of his gift; so he begins to travel in search of companions, and while travelling he
makes a series of speeches. The first of these, spoken during his stay in a town called ‘The
Motley Cow,’ is titled “On the Three Metamorphoses.” In it Zarathustra describes three changes
6
�of shape in what he calls “the spirit”: “how the spirit becomes a camel, and the camel, a lion; and
the lion, finally, a child” [ASZ, 137]. The first metamorphosis, into a camel, occurs when the
spirit first wants to bear the most difficult burdens; the second, into a lion, occurs when these
burdens force the camel into the loneliest desert, and it must oppose the command ‘thou shalt’
with the demand ‘I will.’ If its opposition is successful, the lion wins freedom for itself, and it
can undergo the third metamorphosis, into a child. About this final form of the spirit Zarathustra
says: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a
first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’” [ASZ, 139].
With Nietzsche’s help, then, we can correct those who accuse liberal education of being
childish, by saying that in its highest form it is instead childlike. Continuing inquiry into
fundamental questions is innocent, because it asks ‘what is?’ without regard for the practical
consequences, and because it is deaf to the adult demand that its questions be settled for the sake
of action. It is forgetting because it sets aside the authoritative answers to its questions. It is a
new beginning because it seeks to ask about what is first for human beings, what is given. And
perhaps most importantly, childlike education is a game in the highest sense. It combines the
freedom from necessity that distinguishes play from work with the willing subjection to
necessity that distinguishes play from rest. It combines the camel’s readiness to shoulder the
greatest burdens with the lion’s fierce demand that the burdens be of his own choosing. The
result is a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’: something that is for its own
sake, but that can be yoked to other things, and so give rise to a world.
Let this be the conclusion, for now, of this inquiry into ‘what is liberal?’ Liberal
education is bookish education, freeing education, childlike education. As education through
conversation with the great books, it is the consummation of practice and a courageous
7
�confrontation with what is most real. It is the education of the free who know they are not free
into a freedom they do not desire. It is an education that forgets and begins again, that plays at
the most serious things, and that thereby gives us a world in which to live. This is liberal; so
what, then, is education?
I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which will meet on Tuesday afternoons, from 3:00 to 4:30, in
the Hartle Room, beginning on June 26th. We will read and discuss one act at each meeting.
Also, tomorrow at 2:00 there will be a writing workshop, also in the Hartle Room. Lastly, I
would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great
Hall, before going to preceptorial.
The summer 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
17 June 2012
Delivered 18 June 2012
Notes
1
Actually, Buchanan wrote liberus, free human being; but I can find no evidence of this substantive form of the
adjective liber, or free.
8
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Liberal Education? Part I" in Annapolis, MD.
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2011
What Is Graduate Liberal Education?
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself
as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions,
and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from
time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. So I mean to take this occasion to ask:
what is graduate liberal education? Now as citizens of, or visitors in, a democracy dedicated not
to the achievement of happiness but to its pursuit, everything around us commands us to
preoccupy ourselves with means, with procedures, and with methods. We feel a need to
apologize for any way in which we might depart from the common run in how we live our lives.
Our danger is that an excessive self-concern will place obstacles in our path – obstacles like
seminars on seminar, conversations about conversation, questions that ask ‘what is a question?’ –
and hide from us the things themselves that ought to be the subject of our studies. My apology,
then, is that I mean my remarks this afternoon to be a temporary inoculation against this danger:
a short bout of the disease that will leave us, perhaps after some discomfort, with a clear
conscience, and in energetic good health.
So what is graduate liberal education? It suits this occasion for me to begin with the
word ‘graduate.’ This word stands for what binds together all of us here today. Students come
to the Graduate Institute at different times in their lives, from different backgrounds, and with
different goals. Some mean simply to continue their education, others mean to become better
1
�teachers, and still others mean eventually to pursue more advanced degrees elsewhere. But all
come having completed some form of undergraduate education. (The same is true, incidentally,
of the tutors, not just in the Graduate Institute, but at St. John’s as a whole.) And yet,
notwithstanding this publicly-acknowledged completion, each student and each tutor is brought
to the Graduate Institute of St. John’s College by an opposite feeling, one of incompletion: a
feeling of need, for example, or a sense that one’s education is not finished, or an anticipation of
pleasure at the thought of learning more. To give this feeling of incompletion its due, think of
this: while in many quarters it has become a matter of routine expectation that young people will
complete an undergraduate degree, this expectation has not yet been extended to the graduate
level. The feeling that brings each graduate student to St. John’s, like the sense that brings each
tutor here, is not bolstered by routine. To the contrary: many of us pursue our educations here
just when the demands of career and family are at their height, and so very much against
common expectation.
This feeling of incompletion, whatever its form, has from time to time been taken, or
rather, mistaken, for a sign that the undergraduate education that precedes it has been a failure.
This false inference has in turn even led to the allegation that the program of the Graduate
Institute is really a ‘second chance’ at the St. John’s undergraduate program – the Program, as
we sometimes call it – and that, in view of its relative brevity, the graduate program is ‘St. John’s
lite.’ But this allegation is unjust. It makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St. John’s
undergraduate were to say on graduation day that she wished that she could have had a
preceptorial on Plato’s Republic, or another chance to work through Euclid’s Elements, then her
undergraduate education was a failure. Indeed, it makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St.
John’s tutor were to be eager to reread Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for his Politics and
2
�Society tutorial, because he hoped to learn something from his reading, then both his
undergraduate and his graduate educations were failures – to say nothing about the time he spent
as a tutor at the College. So in the question ‘what is graduate liberal education,’ the word
‘graduate’ does not mean ‘failed undergraduate.’ It means something more affirmative.
The best way to get at this more affirmative meaning is to infer what we at St. John’s
think ‘graduate’ means from a comparison of the graduate and undergraduate programs. The
first differences that come to sight in such a comparison are quantitative. Undergraduates attend
four classes a semester for eight semesters; graduates attend three classes a term for four terms.
The undergraduate classes are seminars, tutorials, laboratories, and preceptorials; the graduate
classes are seminars, tutorials, and preceptorials. Undergraduates have two tutorials a semester,
language and mathematics; graduates have one a term, and its content depends on the segment.
So with respect to quantity, it does appear that the graduate program is to the undergraduate as
shorter is to longer or less to more.
But here at St. John’s we know that quantitative measures are laconic, if not wholly mute,
unless they are informed by qualitative judgments. And it is the qualitative differences between
the graduate and undergraduate programs that begin to shed light on the affirmative meaning of
the word ‘graduate.’ Notice that while each of the undergraduate classes, and above all seminar,
proceeds roughly chronologically through its readings, over all four years of the program, each
of the graduate classes is roughly chronological only within its segment, and more strictly so
only within each class. Since the chronological order is the default order in the undergraduate
program, adopted when no other ordering theory is at work, the curtailed chronological order of
the graduate program is a sign that some other consideration intrudes. That consideration,
clearly, is choice. Within certain limits – not every segment is offered every term, and the
3
�History segment must not be taken first – graduate students are allowed to choose the order of
their studies. Perhaps more importantly, since the master’s degree is granted after four segments
have been completed, graduate students are allowed to choose which segment to omit from their
studies. The same consideration informs the place of the preceptorial in the undergraduate and
graduate programs. While students in both programs choose their preceptorials from a list of
offerings, undergraduates can choose two, and the choice is a privilege reserved for juniors and
seniors, whereas graduates can choose four, one for each segment. This qualitative difference,
that the graduate program affords more scope for choice, indicates that by ‘graduate’ the College
means, in part, someone who can be entrusted with more choices in her education.
But why can graduates be entrusted with more choices? And more importantly, to what
end is their greater scope for choice? Another qualitative difference between our two programs
is helpful here. Notice that, in the place of the undergraduates’ four mathematics tutorials and
three labs, the graduates have a mathematics and natural science segment, with a seminar,
tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial is the liberal art of mathematics cultivated through
regular demonstration; the preceptorials for this segment only occasionally involve
demonstration or practica. Instead, our graduate students study mathematics and natural science
chiefly by reading and discussing great books. Harvey, Newton, and Darwin are read in the
undergraduate tutorial or laboratory, but in the graduate seminar. Likewise, in the place of the
undergraduates’ four language tutorials and one music tutorial, the graduates have a literature
segment, with a seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial, again, are the liberal arts
of grammar, rhetoric, and logic cultivated through the study of poetry and prose. Instead, our
graduate students study literature chiefly by reading and discussing great books. More tellingly,
in the place of translation, which is the central activity of many semesters of the four language
4
�tutorials of the undergraduate program, our graduate students can choose to take a Greek
preceptorial that is ancillary to reading a great book in its original language.
More so than in the undergraduate program, in the graduate program most of the classes
are centered on the reading and discussion of great books, as distinguished from the cultivation
of the liberal arts. The tutorial schedules in each of the five segments show that only in the
literature tutorial is there latitude for variations in scheduling and content – variations associated
with the cultivation of the liberal arts in the undergraduate tutorials. The strict schedules and
settled content of the other four graduate tutorials make them resemble seminars and
preceptorials in the graduate, and undergraduate, programs. Indeed, only one of the five segment
titles even names a liberal art; the others name fields of study, such as are often used to order
books in a bookstore. (I will say something about the dangerousness of our segment titles in a
subsequent convocation address.)
This comparison of the two programs that express the Program, each of which combines
in its own way the study of the great books with the cultivation of the liberal arts, makes the
qualitative meaning of their quantitative differences clear. Graduate students at St. John’s
College cultivate the liberal arts less than do their undergraduate colleagues, but they can thereby
devote proportionately more of their time to a more focused study of the great books of the
western tradition. By ‘graduate’ the College means someone who can be entrusted with more
choices in his education, because he can be presumed to have cultivated the liberal arts enough in
his life to study at the graduate level, and to make good choices of subjects for his study. This,
then, is the end of the greater scope of choice afforded to graduate students by the Program: to
permit them to focus on a few great books of a few kinds, so as to study them in greater depth,
with greater intensity. It is no accident that, while the seminar, as the class in which the liberal
5
�arts are exercised on the great books, is the heart of the undergraduate program, the heart of the
graduate program is the preceptorial, as the class in which one or a few great books are read with
the greatest focus.
So the conclusion, for the moment, of my inquiry – the answer I suggest to my question
‘what is graduate liberal education?’ – is the following: graduate liberal education is not so much
the continued cultivation of the liberal arts, as the more focused study of the great books of the
western tradition. Of course, like so many other answers to ‘what is?’ questions, this answer is
itself a riddle that poses another question: ‘what does it mean to study a great book?’ Common
sense tells us, after all, that we study not the books themselves but the things that the books are
about, human being and the world. Perhaps it would be better if we could get the books out of
our way, and go straight to the things themselves. As an epilogue to my inquiry today, I would
like to suggest a solution to this riddle – one that takes seriously the thought that the great books
are the things themselves.
When we at St. John’s College say that we study books, we mean that we study what is
essential about them, rather than what is accidental. In part, this means that we are not primarily
concerned with accidents of translation, or edition, or substantiation. The ways in which two
translations of the Republic or two editions of the Federalist Papers might differ are only
interesting to us insofar as they illuminate what is essential about these books. And it makes no
difference to us whether the books are written on parchment, printed on paper, or displayed on an
iPad, provided that what is essential shines through. But we are concerned to spend our limited
time on certain books, those whose essential content is great. What, then, do we mean by ‘great,’
with respect to books?
6
�At first it might seem that by ‘great’ we mean ‘the cause of great effects.’ This is not a
bad way to begin. For how else would we first suspect that a book is great, if not by hearing,
among everyone or among all those whom we admire, the opinion ‘this book is great’? And to
produce such an opinion among so many or such admirable people is surely to cause a great
effect. But it doesn’t take much reflection to see the problem with this view. How do we know
that the book in question is really the cause of, that is, really responsible for, this great effect?
The difference between the accidental and the essential is helpful here too. We are not interested
in books that have great effects by accident – for example, by being misunderstood. Such things
are in the territory of the intellectual historian. Rather, we are interested in books that essentially
cause great effects. For the same reason, we are not interested in books that fail to have great
effects by accident – again, for example, by being misunderstood. Rather, we are interested in
books that essentially intend to cause great effects.
The objection that books do not strictly speaking have intentions should not confute us.
Like every product of human art, a book has an intention only to the extent that the human being
who authored it had an intention: the rest is accident. (If your thoughts have just strayed to
numberless monkeys and the works of Shakespeare, I encourage you to try the experiment.) If
we are interested in books that essentially intend great effects, we are necessarily interested in
books whose authors also intended such effects. What we encounter in these great books is their
authors preserved and perfected, made young and beautiful.
But what is the greatest effect an author can intend? For surely there are effects greater
than merely spreading the opinion ‘this book is great.’ Here we are at the heart of the matter. To
foster and educate human beings, to help a human type become actual from among those
potentials that compose human nature; and, concomitantly, to take what is given to us in some
7
�disorder and illuminate a world, ordered in terms of first and last, foreground and background –
this is the greatest effect an author can intend. This, too, is what it means for the great books to
be the things themselves: that in the light of the human types they foster and the worlds they
illuminate, the things themselves also emerge. The traditional subjects of the liberal arts – the
words that are the fundamental beings in grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the magnitudes and
multitudes that are the fundamental beings in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy – are
first illuminated by the more comprehensive relation of human being and world articulated in a
great book. Such books furnish the minds of whole epochs of humankind. Such books,
regardless of the genre in which history has shelved them, are all products of their author’s love
of wisdom. And so they are worthy of our focused study, here in the Graduate Institute at St.
John’s College.
I would like to conclude this epilogue by announcing that there will be a study group this
term on Machiavelli’s Prince, held on Tuesday afternoons at 2:30 in the Hartle Room, beginning
on July 5th. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the
back of the Great Hall, before going to class.
The summer 2011 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff Black
Annapolis, Maryland
June 20, 2011
8
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2011
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2011-06-20
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Graduate Liberal Education?"
Convocation
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2014
On the Literature Segment
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a
community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental
questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we
must from time to time inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining
the Literature segment.
The subject of this convocation address – the last of five, each treating one of the
segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address,
delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the
Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of
that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as
compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names
announcing that each segment treats a distinct subject matter. Now I hope to make good on these
claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title
‘Literature’?
I pondered this question for a long time, in the dim cave of my office in the BBC, during
the hot and muggy summer of 2014. And those of you who know me will understand the despair
I was reduced to, because I could see no way forward. There is no ampersand in the segment
title ‘Literature’ – so how was I to begin? My mind twisted and turned, trying to answer this
1
�question, and my body twisted and turned too as a result: now sitting in my office chair, now
standing to think, now throwing myself into one of my soft and easy chairs, fit only for soft and
easy people. And then, late one Friday afternoon, while trying to figure out how to put my feet
up on my desk without kicking my laptop, I kicked instead an open drawer of my desk. In a puff
of dust, several folded sheets of paper fell loose from where they had been Scotch taped to the
underside of the desk drawer. I took up these pages, and began to read.
“Fall 1985 Graduate Institute Convocation Address. On the Literature Segment.
“I went down from the dim cave of my office into the hot summer sun, to the new coffee
shop on Maryland Avenue, alone with my thoughts, to purchase a cappuccino – because I needed
some coffee, and because I heard they were making this new drink there for the first time. The
coffee shop was crowded and noisy, and there was a line, so I purchased my cappuccino to go in
a Styrofoam cup, and began to make for the door, the sun, and my office. But just then, someone
took hold of my seersucker sleeve from behind and said, ‘Hey, you’re the Director of the
Graduate Institute, right?’
“I turned to see a student seated at a table, hunched over a much-annotated copy of what
looked like the Iliad while fixing me with an angry glare. ‘I am,’ I said, hesitating. ‘Mr…?’
“‘Ms.,’ she corrected, rolling her eyes. Then she pushed what was indeed the Iliad across
the table, toward me, with both hands. ‘Why do we read this stuff?’
“I sat down in the vacant chair, setting my cappuccino on the table. ‘You mean the
Iliad?’ I asked.
“All of it: Homer, the Greek tragedies and comedies, the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare,
poetry. Literature,’ she intoned, in a plummy Masterpiece Theatre accent. ‘I came here, to St.
John’s, to study the greatest ideas in philosophy, in math and science, in politics. I came here to
2
�study what’s most true – not some stories made up by some dead Greek whose name may or may
not have been Homer.’
“I glanced at the doorway, and the bright world beyond it. ‘Aristotle says in the Poetics
that poetry is more philosophic than history,’ I ventured weakly, ‘because it speaks about general
rather than particular things, about what is likely or necessary rather than just about what
happened. And by poetry he means making, in the sense of making things up. He’s talking
about everything we read in the Literature segment, in a book that we read in the Literature
segment.’
“This earned me a derisive snort. ‘Did Mr. Aristotle write the Graduate Institute
curriculum? Is he available to answer my questions? And in any case, Mr. Director, you’ve
missed my point. Let’s grant that poetry is more philosophic than history. Are you or Mr.
Aristotle able to say that it’s more philosophic than philosophy? Besides, everybody knows that
what we call history here in the Graduate Institute is really philosophy. And it’s not even true
that poetry speaks of general rather than particular things. Open Thucydides, and read that in
such-and-such a year, Alcibiades got on a trireme and sailed to Sicily. Now open Chaucer, and
read in the Franklin’s Tale that Arveragus got on a boat and sailed to Brittany. The only thing
missing is the date! Both history and literature are full of pointless details that only obscure the
philosophic truth. At least the pointless details of history actually happened. Who cares that
Niraeus, the second most beautiful Greek after Achilles, only brought three ships to Troy?’
“I thought about the slow cooling of my coffee, despite the Styrofoam. ‘Maybe these
details are useful ways of clothing philosophic truth,’ I responded. ‘Doesn’t Lucretius say
something in De Rerum Natura about doctors putting honey on cups of bitter wormwood, and
about their patients being tricked but not betrayed? Maybe a beautiful story, full of imagined
3
�details, makes it more pleasant to read about painful philosophic truths. For example, take that
detail about Niraeus. Isn’t that Homer’s way of saying that beauty doesn’t bring military might,
and that Achilles doesn’t have his fifty ships at Troy because he’s the most beautiful? A literary
form could also make it more pleasant for authors to write painful truths,’ I added. ‘In a
philosophic treatise, everything an author writes is in his own name. In a literary work, he can
put a painful truth in the mouth of one of his characters, and blame it on the character if he needs
to.’
“The coffee shop had been noisy, but it suddenly went silent, and I felt a moment’s
shame for what I had just said – straining to make myself heard – too loudly. The student stared
levelly at me for a moment. ‘Lucretius is cool,’ she said at last, ‘and you get brownie points for
using Latin. But don’t you see that your esoteric argument is totally lame? First, if you can see
through it, and I can see through it, then everyone can see through it. Lucretius even tells you
that he’s doing it – and he tells you twice, three books apart, like he thinks you’ll forget. Second,
if everybody sees through the beautiful clothing, then no one’s going to buy it when an author
blames something on one of his characters. You’ll have to do a lot better than that, Mr. Director,
to convince me that there’s something to esotericism. Everybody knows that literature is
seductive. Read the second preface to Julie – you know,’ she responded to my raised eyebrow,
‘by Rousseau. They knew it in the eighteenth century. There was a whole debate about whether
too many people were reading novels, and about whether novels drive people mad. Novels were,
like, the Walkmans of the eighteenth century. And no one was letting their authors off the hook.’
“I started to say something to this, but the student was on a roll, and interrupted me.
‘And third, what’s wrong with you? Every time you say something to me, you repeat something
that you read in some book. You’re like that guy Montaigne writes about, in “Of pedantry,” who
4
�won’t say that he has an itchy backside until he looks up what itchy means and what a backside
is. I ask you a question, and you give me great books. Well, I want great ideas. So tell me
straight up, Mr. Director, because life is short. Why should I waste my time on literature?’
“The student had been speaking more and more angrily, and as she posed this last
question she slammed her Iliad shut. The coffee shop fell silent again. I reached for my drink,
snapped open the plastic lid, and drank deeply of cold foam and lukewarm, bitter coffee. Clearly
this cappuccino fad was going nowhere. But as the stimulant raced through my veins and the fog
cleared from my vision, I looked the student in the eye and asked, ‘you’ve read Julie? That’s not
on the Graduate Institute reading list.’
“And then I saw what I did not expect to see: the student blushed. I glanced away,
reflected for a moment, and then began again to speak.
“‘So you want a philosophic argument for why literature is as philosophically serious as
philosophy?’ I asked.
“The student nodded.
“‘Okay. Remember how in Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes
between five intellectual virtues: art, science, prudence, wisdom, and intellect?
“‘Kind of,’ she replied. ‘What I remember is that art has to do with making things,
science with knowing things that can’t be otherwise, and prudence with acting in matters that can
be otherwise. But I don’t remember so much about wisdom or intellect.’
“‘You’re on the right track,’ I said. ‘Wisdom has to do with knowing first principles, and
Aristotle confusingly calls it a combination of science and intellect. This makes more sense
when he says later that intellect is concerned with the ultimates in both directions: ultimate
general principles, and ultimate particulars. It’s a kind of perception.’
5
�“‘Let’s see if I’m following you,’ the student ventured. “An example of art is writing, an
example of science is physics, an example of prudence is tactics, and an example of both wisdom
and intellect is… philosophy?’
“I reflected again, and then said, ‘Let’s leave wisdom out of it for now. I find it easier to
think about single judgments, rather than bodies of knowledge. If we were to say that “avoid
comma splices” is part of the art of writing, Newton’s second law part of the science of physics,
and “Athens should not invade Sicily” is a judgment of prudence, then what would be a
judgment of the intellect?’
“‘Well,’ the student replied, ‘if Aristotle is right that the intellect concerns the ultimates,
both principles and particulars, then the principle of non-contradiction would have to be one of
its judgments, and others ought to have the form “this is a comma,” or “this is force, this mass,
and this acceleration,” or “this is Athens, and this Sicily.” These judgments would be a little like
definitions, but also different: they wouldn’t say “a comma is a punctuation mark indicating a
brief phrase,” or something like that, because that kind of definition is part of the art of writing.
Instead, they would be like a cross between definitions and perceptions. The “this” part of “this
is a comma” would indicate a sense perception, but the “is a comma” part would be a perception
of the intellect.’
“‘Great,’ I said, starting to enjoy myself. Even my cappuccino was tasting better. ‘So
let’s agree that we’ve got Aristotle’s meaning right, for the sake of argument. We might think
differently if we were to look at the text, but we don’t want to fetch a book and run the risk of
being called pedants, do we?’
“This earned me another eye roll.
6
�“‘So now consider this,’ I continued. ‘Aristotle also tells us in the Ethics that the moral
virtues come to us through habituation, but the intellectual virtues through teaching. This seems
straightforward in the cases of art and science. If you want to learn the art of writing, you visit
the writing assistant, or read a style manual, or best of all, read and emulate an excellent writer.
If you want to learn the science of physics, then you take a physics class, or do experiments on
your own, or read a textbook.’
“‘I can do the next one,’ my student broke in excitedly. ‘If you want to learn prudence,
then you hang out with prudent people, or read histories about prudent people, if you can’t find
any of them around.’
“‘Aristotle says as much in the Ethics,’ I agreed, after swallowing the last of my coffee.
‘But tell me this. How do we learn intellect? And I’m not thinking now of the ultimates in the
sense of first principles, like the principle of non-contradiction – which is discussed in the
Metaphysics. How do we learn the ultimate particulars, and get better at knowing them, so as to
know better that we’re using them correctly in the judgments made by art, science, and
prudence?’
“The student’s expression, which had been open and hopeful since we began talking
about Aristotle, began to cloud over. After a pause, she said quietly, ‘I bet you’re going to tell
me that the answer is’ – and she said the last word with the same accent – ‘Literature.’
“‘Why not?’ I pressed on. ‘We all probably get our first instruction in the ultimate
particulars from the opinions of the people around us – this is a human being, that one is a hero,
this one is a valet – but the particulars that we learn this way must be pretty narrow. And we can
broaden them by reading history, sure, but the historian is expected to keep to what did happen.
Only the poet in Aristotle’s sense can instead write about what could happen, or must have
7
�happened. The poet can purify events so that every detail reflects the philosophic truth; he can
write about the rare, extreme cases; and he can supply the internal details that no one has access
to, but that must have happened – like the speeches in Thucydides. And by doing all this he can
improve our intellects by enriching our sense of the ultimate particulars, to the benefit of all the
other intellectual virtues. Maybe this is what people mean when they say – I mean no one says it
now, but they’ll probably say it someday – that reading novels makes us more empathetic. Not
just that novels make us better disposed toward others, though they can do that, but that they give
us a richer sense of others’ inner lives, and make us more nuanced in our judgments about them.
And maybe this is why Aristotle says that wisdom is a combination of science and intellect. It’s
a combination of philosophy proper and literature.’
“I trailed off, and the student rewarded me with some brief, sardonic applause. ‘Not bad,
Mr. Director. I won’t even hold it against you that you mostly talked about what Aristotle
thinks. That’s the more dialectical way, isn’t it – to make use of what your opponent
acknowledges? But there’s one problem you haven’t addressed, one question that you won’t be
able to answer.’
This was the last line on the last page, and there were no more pages to be found. I
kicked every other drawer in my desk, to no avail. Then, noting the lateness of the hour, I
snatched up the pages that I did have, and went down, out of the cool dark cave of my office,
into the hot Maryland sun.
There will be three Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: one on Homer’s
Iliad, one on Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and The
World as Will and Representation, and one on Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Schedules and
meeting places for these groups will be circulated by email soon. Let me encourage you all to
8
�attend the Dean’s Lecture tomorrow night, on another work of literature, titled “Moments in
Time: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1,” at 8:00 in the FSK Auditorium. And let
me also invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall,
before going to class.
The fall 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
2 August 2014
Delivered on 21 August 2014
Note
For those philosophic souls who want to investigate what itchy means, and need to look up what a backside is, I
offer the following guidance. For the meaning of going down and blushing, see Books 1 and 7 of Plato’s Republic.
Aristotle makes his claims about poetry and history at the beginning of Chapter 9 of his Poetics. For beautiful
Niraeus, see Iliad Book 2, lines 671-675. The honey and wormwood image is found in On the Nature of Things,
Book 1, lines 934-948, and Book 4, lines 10-25. The full title of Rousseau’s Julie is Julie, or the New Héloïse,
Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps. “Of pedantry” is the twenty-fifth essay in
Book 1 of Montaigne’s Essays. The discussion of art, science, prudence, wisdom and intellect may be found chiefly
in Chapters 3 through 8 of Book 6 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle discusses the principle of noncontradiction in his Metaphysics, in Book 4, Chapters 3 through 8, and Book 11, Chapters 5 and 6. Finally, there is
a coffee shop on Maryland Avenue. I first met my future wife there, and later her son, to both of whom I dedicate
this address.
9
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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convocation
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9 pages
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2014
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2014-08-21
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Annapolis_GI_Fall_2014_Convocation
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2013
On the Mathematics & Natural Science Segment
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a
community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental
questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we
must from time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so
by examining the readings of the Mathematics & Natural Science segment.
The subject of this convocation address – the second of five, each treating one of the
segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address,
delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the
Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of
that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as
compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names
that determine the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each segment. Now I hope to
make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the
segment title ‘Mathematics & Natural Science’? And before I proceed to answer my own
question, I should caution that the threads that I mean to follow for the next few minutes –
threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected
to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I
only insist that these threads are present in the segment readings, and that they are truly worth
1
�following. So again, what are the wonderful questions raised by ‘Mathematics & Natural
Science’?
At the risk of becoming predictable, let’s begin once again with the least promising word
in the segment title: the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ – or, more precisely, the ampersand. As
it did in the Philosophy & Theology segment title, the ampersand implies that there is something
double about the subject matter of the Mathematics & Natural Science segment. And once
again, this implication is borne out by a cursory glance at the reading lists of the segment’s
seminar and tutorial. In seminar, we begin with Lucretius’ bittersweet poem about atoms, On the
Nature of Things; then we turn to Plato’s dialogue about the musical making of the world, the
Timaeus, followed by Aristotle’s discussion of the four causes of natural things – things that
have a principle of rest and motion in themselves – in the Physics. In tutorial, by contrast, we
begin with the definitions, postulates and common notions found in Book I of Euclid’s Elements;
and we continue by demonstrating and discussing each of the forty-eight propositions in Book I.
So in what we might mischievously call the ‘Natural Science’ seminar, we begin by considering
the principles – which is to say, the causes – of natural things: whether they be atoms, the Same
and the Other, or form and matter. In what we might call the ‘Mathematics’ tutorial, by contrast,
we begin by considering points, lines, and figures – magnitudes and their parts – and by
convincing ourselves that if some truths be given, other truths must follow by necessity. What,
then, is the meaning of the ampersand that joins these two inquiries, into causes and into
magnitudes, in our segment title?
It will help to consider here the meaning of the two parts of the title ‘Mathematics &
Natural Science.’ ‘Natural Science’ seems easy enough: ‘science’ is another word for
‘knowledge’ – it consists of the things we know – and as for ‘nature,’ well, let’s leap over an
2
�abyss and just agree with Aristotle that it consists of the things that have a principle of rest and
motion in themselves, and so come to be and pass away. ‘Natural Science,’ then, amounts to
what we know of such things, especially concerning their causes. ‘Mathematics,’ on the other
hand, is a little trickier. Our English word is related to the ancient Greek noun ta mathēmata,
which in turn is related to the ancient Greek verb manthanō, meaning ‘I learn,’ ‘I perceive,’ or ‘I
understand.’ So ta mathēmata are the characteristically learnable, perceptible, understandable
things. We can see the bearing of this etymology if we consider the chief content of
mathematics, according to our ordinary understanding: namely, proofs about magnitudes and
multitudes, figures and numbers. Such proofs are characteristically learnable because they bring
with them the certainty of logical necessity, and because they hold for all time and place. For
example, once we have learned how to demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem – proposition 47
from Book I of the Elements – we know that it will prove true on Earth and on Mars and in the
Andromeda galaxy, and that it will hold true for all future time as it did for all past. This
characteristically knowable quality leads some to translate the ancient Greek word for the
knowable things, ta mathēmata, with the English word ‘science.’
Now before we rush to conclude that our segment title, ‘Mathematics & Natural Science,’
really just means ‘Science & More Science,’ let’s recall that abysmal word ‘natural.’ We said,
following Aristotle, that natural science in particular consists of knowledge about the causes of
things that change in time and place. But mathematics, by contrast, consists of characteristically
knowable things that do not change in time and place. And with this contrast, a wonderful
question hidden inside the ampersand of our segment title comes to light. Is it possible that the
characteristically knowable things, namely magnitude and number, are the causes of the natural
things? Is it possible that the things that do not change in time and place are the causes of the
3
�things that do? Let’s pause for a moment to savor and shudder at the magnitude of this question.
If the answer is yes, then natural science deserves the name ‘science,’ because the causes of
natural things are fully knowable. If the answer is no, on the other hand – if we mean by ‘cause’
something other than magnitude or multitude – then either this thing must prove as knowable as
the objects of mathematics, or we must resign ourselves to a nature that is to some degree
unknown and unknowable.
Some of you might have noticed that, in describing the readings of the Mathematics &
Natural Science seminar and tutorial, in each case I stopped after the first few readings. It turns
out that our first wonderful question in the segment readings – the question of whether the
mathematical things are the natural causes – equips us to understand a change that happens in the
middle of each reading list. In the seminar, this change is marked by the triumphant title of
Francis Bacon’s New Organon. The newness of Bacon’s organon comes from his sense that
neither the natural causes nor the natural things themselves are what ancient philosophers – like
Aristotle, author of the old organon – thought they were. It is a mistake, Bacon argues, to try to
deduce the causes from the things themselves, because nature loves to hide: neither the causes
nor the things themselves are apparent. The organic – which is to say instrumental or methodical
– character of the New Organon follows from this claim: if there are natures and natural causes,
but they are hidden, what is needed is a reliable way to force them into the open. This forceful
way is the method of experiment. After Bacon’s New Organon, we turn in seminar to a work by
René Descartes with the deceptively sober and technical title of Discourse on Method. Among
many other interesting things, Descartes suggests in that work a standard by which to measure
the certainty of knowledge, such as the knowledge gained from scientific experiment. This
4
�standard is clarity and distinctness; and it is brought over to natural science from – you guessed it
– mathematics.
So if we take the New Organon and the Discourse on Method together, they seem to
announce not just a break with the ancient study of natural science, in their self-consciously new
focus on method, but an answer to our question about whether the mathematical things are the
natural causes. Yes, Bacon and Descartes say, the natural causes can be known; and yes, they
can be known with the clarity and distinctness of mathematics; which is almost the same thing as
saying that yes, the mathematical things – and especially number – are the causes. The color red,
we might explain in this Baconian-Cartesian spirit, is nothing more than light with a wavelength
of 700 nanometers, while violet is nothing more than the same with a wavelength of 400. To
make red violet, indeed to make any color into any other, is merely a matter of changing a
number – proof that in this case, as in every case, number is the cause. Whatever ancient
philosophers like Lucretius might have known about the causes of natural things, the proof of the
superior knowledge available through the modern experimental, methodical, mathematical
natural science is the superior power of that science – power exercised, unlike the paltry power
of ancient natural science, for “the relief of man’s estate.” Isaac Newton’s Principia makes its
own new beginning to display what can be achieved in the field of mechanics by this modern
natural science, and in so doing argues that the natural world extends infinitely further than
Aristotle admits – that the natural world is in fact the world simply, and natural science, science
simply. Darwin and Jung follow the Baconian-Cartesian path, each in his own, sometimes
questionable way, extending modern science from what we now call physics to the fields of
biology and psychology. And with each new advance in knowledge comes an increase in power:
5
�modern physics can put human beings on the Moon; modern biology can shape living things to
our needs; and modern psychology can make human beings more useful.
Let’s turn away from this vision of a secular heaven on earth to look at the readings of the
‘Mathematics’ tutorial, and the change that happens from Euclid’s geometry to that of
Lobachevski. It does not diminish the signal knowability of mathematics, nor that of Euclid’s
geometry in particular, to notice that it is founded on a handful of postulates; but this does raise
some questions. While definitions isolate and name certain geometrical possibilities – or even, if
you wish, certain geometrical impossibilities – and common notions spell out the necessary logic
of mathematical proof, postulates set the limits of geometrical possibility itself. But the word
‘postulate’ comes from the Latin verb postulare, which means ‘to demand’; and the
corresponding word in Euclid’s Greek, aitēmaton, means much the same: a thing asked for,
begged, or demanded. A postulate, then, is precisely not a name, nor something that must be
granted for logical proof to be possible; rather, it is something would not jeopardize the
possibility of logical proof if it were otherwise.
But if mathematical proofs would be possible even if one of the postulates were not
granted, or if a different postulate were granted in its place, then mustn’t ta mathēmata, the
mathematical or characteristically knowable things, include the conclusions demonstrated by
such proofs? This question puts us on the road to different, non-Euclidean geometries, including
the geometry of Lobachevsky – not to mention different arithmetics, such as the arithmetic of
imaginary numbers. And this road leads to a mathematics that consists of a set, perhaps a
limitless set, of alternative geometries and arithmetics, each corresponding to postulates that
there might be good reason to grant. Moreover, if the knowable things consist of sets of such
geometries and arithmetics, and the knowable things are the causes of the natural things, then
6
�mustn’t these alternative geometries also be causes? This question puts us on the road to
discovering the use of non-Euclidean geometry in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the
use of imaginary numbers in Feynman’s account of quantum electrodynamics.
Now the discovery of such correspondences should not make us Pollyannaish. It would
be terribly useful, and a great boon for the prospect of knowledge in the fullest sense, if it should
turn out that the things we are most suited to know are also the things themselves. But the very
utility and appeal of this situation should make us suspicious. Could the correspondences we
have discovered, between the knowable things and the causes of the natural things, instead be
due to the form our mind necessarily gives to everything it perceives and knows? Have we
merely discovered a gift that we have made for ourselves, and hidden from ourselves, without
knowing it? If so, perhaps we should expect a correspondence between every possible arithmetic
or geometry and some possible being, but at the cost of suspecting that behind every being for us
could lie a being in itself, to which we have no access. The very perfection of our knowledge of
the beings for us would rule out our knowing the beings in themselves – presuming that the
beings in themselves are any concern of ours.
It could also be the case that the Baconian-Cartesian equation of knowledge with power
is incorrect, and that in fact we only know things to the extent we do not have power over them.
Take the limit case of the modern scientific project, in which human beings acquire the power to
turn anything into anything else. What would remain of knowledge about the objects of these
transformations, if nothing about them were durable, let alone unchanging in time and place? If
the miraculous power of a god, which must be ruled out for both mathematics and natural
science to be possible, reappears as the goal of the modern scientific project to relieve man’s
estate, then this project seems to aim at its own self-destruction. Here we see the questions we
7
�have been following through the Mathematics & Natural Science segment touch on the themes of
Philosophy & Theology.
Finally, there is the more present and clear danger of treating the mathematical things,
and especially numbers, as the only knowable things just because they are the easiest things to
know. For the same reason that 700 nanometers is not equivalent to the color red, and eightyfive percent is not equivalent to learning, knowing the magnitude and multitude of a thing might
not be enough to know it, or even its causes, fully. Every science requires that one be able to
count its objects, but to determine the unit in each case needs more than skill at counting. This
danger should especially be heeded in an egalitarian democracy: the regime that most of all seeks
to reduce questions of justice to problems of arithmetic. Here we see the questions that we have
been following through the Mathematics & Natural Science segment touch on the themes of
Politics & Society.
In conclusion, I would like to announce that there will be three Graduate Institute-hosted
study groups this term. One group will study Plato’s Laws, while another will study T.S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets. Both of these groups will meet on Thursday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00,
beginning on August 29. A third group will meet to learn Italian, and to read Machiavelli’s
Prince. Schedules and meeting places for all three of these groups will be circulated by email.
Lastly, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the
Great Hall, before going to tutorial.
The fall 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
20 August 2013
Delivered 22 August 2013
8
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Mathematics & Natural Sciences Segment" in Annapolis, MD.
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2012
What Is Liberal Education? Part II
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself
as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions,
and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from
time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by asking ‘what is
liberal education?’
As I reassured the audience of my summer convocation address, let me reassure you too:
I don’t mean to try to answer this question in the next fifteen minutes. My only somewhat more
modest goal involves dividing the question into two parts. Last term, I asked the question ‘what
is liberal?’, and with the assistance of the College’s motto, offered the following answer in the
case of education:
Liberal education is bookish education, freeing education, childlike education. As
education through conversation with the great books, it is the consummation of
practice and a courageous confrontation with what is most real. It is the education
of the free who know they are not free into a freedom they do not desire. It is an
education that forgets and begins again, that plays at the most serious things, and
that thereby gives us a world in which to live.
But this answer is obviously preliminary, because it depends in turn on the answer to a deeper
question. ‘That’s all very well, Mr. Black,” someone might say, “but what is education?” To
begin to answer this question, I propose to pose it to three great books, two of which are on the
reading list of our graduate Program. These books are Rousseau’s Emile, whose subtitle is On
1
�Education; Plato’s Republic, whose subtitle is On the Just; and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and
Evil, whose subtitle is Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.
If we understand what is asked in the question ‘what is education?’ it must be because we
think that there is such a thing. So why do we think this? Let’s confine ourselves to human
beings: the beings whose education is most interesting to us. When we observe the human
beings around us, we cannot help but be struck by the differences between them in their activities
and capacities. Some of them are capable of much, some of little; some need much, some need
little. Perhaps most strikingly, some human beings are largely capable of providing for their own
needs, and some are not. Once we are able to judge the ages of human beings, we might make
the following generalization: that human beings are born weak, because unable to care for
themselves; that as they age they sometimes flourish and become strong; and that if they live
long enough, the strong eventually decline and become weak again. These changes, these
differences between human beings at different ages, might even be more striking to us than those
underlying qualities that all human beings share. And the cause of these changes, Rousseau tells
us near the beginning of Emile, the cause that shapes human beings over the course of their lives,
is education.1 Education is the answer to the question of why human beings differ so much, not
just from one another, but each of them from one time to another.
But there is something puzzling about this first attempt at a definition of education, which
takes education as the cause in general of change in human beings. For we tend to want to think
of education as the cause, and so by extension as the process, of good change in human beings:
education, we think, changes us for the better. Rousseau acknowledges as much when he writes,
“[e]verything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by
education.” Education, we are likely to insist, is change in human beings in a certain direction:
2
�toward some completion, toward being grown, toward some good. It is odd to think of the
changes that, even in the best case, follow the completion of growth – that is, our inevitable
decline – as part of our education.
Rousseau takes this difficulty into account as he develops his argument in Emile. This
education, the one that gives us what we lack at birth but need when grown, comes from three
sources: nature, men, and things. “The internal development of our faculties and our organs,” he
explains, “is the education of nature. The use that we are taught to make of this development is
the education of men. And what we acquire from our own experience about the objects which
affect us is the education of things.” What we ordinarily think of as the content of our education
– the opinions we are taught about how things are and what we ought to do – is really only part
of our education, according to this account. And the expansion of the definition of education to
include internal developments and experiences, as well as opinions, makes it possible to
distinguish growth from decline, and good education both from bad and from no education at all.
Since each of the three educations must tend to the same end, Rousseau tells us, and the
education of nature “is in no way in our control,” a good education, an education properly
speaking, is one in which the educations of things and of men are directed to the end imposed by
the education of nature. And since we could not bring ourselves knowingly to pursue a
consistently harmful education – even if such an education is better than a contradictory one –
our supposition must be that the end imposed by the education of nature is good. Here, then, is a
second definition of education, one that seems closer to what we mean by the word: education is
the cause of good changes in human beings, because it is oriented by nature. Or, to put the same
point differently, for education to be the cause of good changes in human beings, there must be
such a thing as nature.
3
�This definition, which we arrived at with the assistance of Rousseau’s Emile, is shared by
a second great book, Plato’s Republic. At the beginning of Book Seven of that work, Plato has
his Socrates present an image of “our nature in its education and want of education.” Picture
human beings as if they were bound head and foot in a cave underground, such that they are all
forced to face a wall. Far above and behind them, a fire burns. Nearer, but still above and
behind them, other human beings stand along a road behind a partition, and carry artifacts that
they raise up above the partition, into the light of the fire, such that the artifacts cast shadows on
the wall that the prisoners face. While they do this, some of the puppeteers make sounds that
bounce off the wall, and so seem to come from the shadows. Socrates asks whether such human
beings, bound as they are, can see anything other than the shadows cast by themselves and by the
artifacts raised above the partition. His young interlocutor, Glaucon, says that they cannot. And
so Socrates concludes, with Glaucon’s agreement, that these human beings will take the shadows
of artificial things for the truth – when in fact the truth is only fully available to those who free
themselves or are freed from their bonds, who make the painful climb toward the dazzling light
at the mouth of the cave, and who emerge to look at and eventually to see the things themselves,
which are not artifacts, in the light of the sun.
The horror and the beauty of this image, the horror of our imprisonment and the beauty of
the promise of our liberation, are so striking that it is easy to pass over Socrates’ remark that this
is an image of our nature “in its education and want of education.” Is it clear which part of the
image represents which condition of our nature? Socrates tells us that we are in the cave “from
childhood,” not from birth: so there must be a point early in our lives when each of us, in the
language of the image, is brought down into the cave – by someone who is able to exit it, of
course – and placed in our bonds, facing the wall with its shadows. Could this point be when we
4
�are first able to understand and articulate speech: that is, at the beginning of what we ordinarily
call our education? Later in his conversation with Glaucon, Socrates does call the condition in
the cave one of “greater lack of learning,” but this hardly settles the question, since he also notes
that “education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be”: it is not the art of
putting knowledge into a soul that lacks it, but the art of turning the whole soul from that which
is coming into being to that which is, and finally to the brightest part of that which is, the good.
Socrates’ image teaches us that it is a question of education against education, then: there are
those who claim that education happens only inside the cave, and those who claim that education
happens only outside, in the light of the sun. And the difference between these two views,
certainly within the cave but perhaps also outside it, is a matter of life or death.
It is tempting, and perhaps also easy, to accept Socrates’ encouragement and side with
Glaucon in the view that education is the noble and painful struggle against artifice on behalf of
nature, against appearance on behalf of the truth, against becoming on behalf of being, and
against evil on behalf of the good itself. It is very tempting to believe that the peak of education
is a kind of emigration to the Isles of the Blessed: the achievement of heaven on earth. But this
would be to ignore Socrates’ remark that education is the art of turning the whole soul from
becoming to being. This remark implies that education, even as Socrates understands it, takes
place chiefly, and perhaps even entirely, within the cave. According to Socrates’ image, the
need for compulsion – another term for this art of turning – ceases once the soul has been forced
to stand up, to turn around, to walk, to look at the light, to climb the rough, steep, upward way,
and at last to emerge from the cave. Once outside of the cave, the soul only needs to become
accustomed to the light, in order to see everything that can be seen.
5
�Let’s turn to the last of our three great books, Beyond Good and Evil, for help in thinking
through some further implications of Socrates’ definition of education as an art of turning. In the
Preface to that work, Nietzsche claims that the good itself – the pole star of the Socratic art of
turning, by whose light education is to be distinguished from indoctrination – is an invention, an
error, and a piece of philosophic dogma. And throughout the work he opposes to this Platonic
dogma a series of painful questions. If there is such a thing as nature, is it good for human
beings? To the extent that we have access to the truth, it is good for us, and is it better for us
than appearance? Is there such a thing as being, and can it concern us more, or be worth more to
us, than becoming? And is there such a thing as evil, or is it really a distorted view of something
that is properly called good?
If education as Socrates understands it takes place entirely within the cave, then it seems
better to understand education in terms of fundamental questions like these than in terms of
philosophers’ predetermined, dogmatic answers to such questions. This does not mean,
however, that these questions lack answers. Roughly speaking, for example, Nietzsche seems to
think that the answer to each of these fundamental questions is ‘no.’ But it is in asking these
painful questions, in discovering how matters stand for oneself with regard to these questions,
that education understood as the art of turning primarily consists. What follows from these
questions – insight into which answers are given to us as predetermined, and which answers can
be changed – teaches us about the limits to our learning, and so educates us about what education
can be for us. In other words, despite the great foreground differences between Nietzsche and
Plato’s Socrates, they agree that education understood as the cause of good changes in human
beings now must mean the pursuit of self-knowledge: obedience to the Delphic command, ‘know
thyself.’ They agree that obedience to this command is painful, though they both hint that it is
6
�not only painful. And they agree that obedience to this command is not the matter of a moment,
nor of a few months or years, but of a lifetime. As Socrates’ image implies, each human being
who succeeds in escaping the cave also gains the power to be a puppeteer, or worse, one who
draws down the young and binds them in a cave of his own making.
On the basis of these brief reflections on three great books, I can now hazard an answer to
my opening question. What is liberal education? For education to be possible, for there to be a
cause of good changes in human beings, there must be a nature of human beings that can be
known, and a good of this nature in each case. If there is such a nature and such a good, then
education requires the pursuit of self-knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge of this nature and this
good. So education in the true sense must therefore above all be the repeated reopening of the
question of whether there is such a nature, one that can be known, and that has its corresponding
good. Education in this sense is intrinsically liberal: for it is with the assistance of great books
that we best seek to know ourselves, it is through self-knowledge that we find the freedom that
suits us, and it is in this freedom that we become childlike, ready to begin again asking with
playful seriousness our fundamental questions about nature, truth, being, and the good.
I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be two study groups this term, one
on the French language, meeting on Monday afternoons, from 3:30 to 5:00, in the Hartle Room,
beginning on September 10th, and the other on Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human, meeting on
Thursday afternoons, also from 3:30 to 5:00 in the Hartle Room, beginning on August 30th.
Schedules will be circulated by email. Also, I would like to invite you all to take part in the
refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial.
The fall 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
7
�Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
22 August 2012
Delivered 23 August 2012
Notes
1
In this address, I draw chiefly on the beginning of Book One of Emile, page 38 in the Bloom translation; on
Republic 514a-518c; and on Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, and sections 9, 230, and 231.
8
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Liberal Education? Part II" in Annapolis, MD.
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2011
What Is a Community of Learning?
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself
as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions,
and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from
time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. So I mean to take this occasion to ask:
what is a community of learning? My suspicion is that the phrase involves a latent but
fundamental tension between its component terms, ‘community’ and ‘learning.’ To expose this
tension, I propose to begin by investigating the meaning of each term in turn, under the guidance
of Plato’s Socrates.
Let us put learning first, as we ought to do here at St. John’s. What, then, is learning?
One answer, and I think a true and beautiful answer, is found in the Meno, part of which every
incoming Graduate Institute student reads in the course of our new student orientation.
Responding to Meno’s paralyzing claim that it is impossible to seek anything – because either
one knows what one is seeking, and so has no need to seek it, or one does not know what one is
seeking, and so does not know how to seek it – Socrates raises a third possibility: we know what
we are seeking, but we have forgotten it. Learning, therefore, is recollection, remembering what
we once knew but have forgotten. The human soul, Socrates explains to the enthralled Meno, is
immortal, and death and birth are only apparent changes that do not entail the soul’s destruction.
Since the immortal soul has therefore seen all things, both on the earth and in the underworld,
1
�there is nothing that it has not learned. And since the whole of nature is akin, it suffices for a
human being to recollect one thing, in order for him to be able to recall everything else for
himself.
It is not hard to see that Socrates’ story does not in fact allege that learning is
recollection, as Socrates claims, and Meno concludes it does. If what we call learning is
recollection, and we recollect what we once knew but have forgotten, then recollection
presupposes knowledge. So where did this knowledge come from? The answer, according to
Socrates’ story, is that it came from seeing: knowing is primarily having seen, and so learning is
primarily seeing. And indeed, this is what we see in the subsequent geometry lesson with
Meno’s slave. All Socrates needs to do, for the slave to learn to find the side of the double
square, is to make the slave see that the square drawn on the so-called diagonal is in fact twice as
big as the square drawn on the original side. The slave’s opinions about the name of the side of
the double square – for example, that this name must, in order to be speakable, contain some
mention of a numerical ratio with the original side – are reasonable, but they are obstacles to his
seeing what Socrates wants him to see, obstacles that Socrates must clear away by refutation if
the slave is to see clearly. If the slave were to go through the same lesson repeatedly and in
various ways, Socrates concludes, he would end up having knowledge about such things no less
precisely than anyone. That is, he would know such things as well as it is possible for a human
being to know them.
Now if learning is primarily nothing other than seeing, it seems to me to follow that it is
an essentially private activity, one that takes place entirely in the one who sees. This is not to
deny that it can be pursued in a community, with friends or colleagues; it is only to deny that it
must be pursued in common. The same thing follows, I think, even when the seeing involved is
2
�metaphorical, and the thing seen is seen in the speeches uttered in our common life. Even when
the thing learned is common, the learning is not essentially in common. Now it is true that the
slave boy needs Socrates to help him to clear away the incorrect opinions he has about the side of
the double square. But if these obstacles to seeing are due, not to what the slave has seen, but to
what he has heard from his community – as the Meno implies, and the Republic’s cave story
states outright – then it follows nonetheless that learning requires community only as a source of
things to see, and not as a means to seeing.
But I have gotten ahead of myself. For what is a community? Once again, a Platonic
dialogue is helpful. For human beings to be in a community, they must hold things in common.
As Socrates and Glaucon agree in the Republic, the greatest good in the organization of a city,
the common good at which the legislator aims, is what binds it together and makes it one: the
community of pleasure and pain, which leads the citizens to say ‘my own’ and ‘not my own’
about the same things, and in the same way. More generally, we can say that any community
extends just as far as does this sense of a common good, marked by these opinions about what is
and is not its own. But much earlier in their long conversation, Socrates and Glaucon also agree
that, at least in the case of the citizens of the city in speech, these opinions about ‘my own’ and
‘not my own,’ about who is a citizen and who a stranger, are founded on a lie: namely, a story
that all the citizens are brothers, born of and nursed by the land that they inhabit. More
generally, we can say that the sense of the common good in every community is marked by
correct opinions that are, if not lies, at least not held because they have been seen to be true.
Since each community is founded and maintained by the promulgation of such correct opinions,
it is absolutely forbidden to call these opinions into question, whether by laughing at them, or by
inquiring into their truth. To do so is to call the community itself into question.
3
�By now it should be clear what I have in mind by the latent but fundamental tension that I
suspect in the phrase ‘community of learning.’ Learning, according to the Meno and the
Republic, is an essentially private activity that does not require a community for its completion.
And every community, according to the Republic and the Meno, is founded on correct opinions
that are resistant to inquiry, and that therefore pose particularly recalcitrant obstacles to
community members seeing what is – that is, to their learning. This latent but fundamental
tension between community and learning is made vivid by Socrates’ image of the cave in the
Republic. We are like prisoners confined to a deep cave, Socrates says, whose necks and legs are
bound so that what we can see is limited to what is right before us. Above and behind us, where
we cannot look, unbound denizens of the cave carry artifacts back and forth in front of a fire, so
that shadows are cast by these artifacts on the cave wall that we face. The cave wall also reflects
sounds made by some of these puppeteers, so that we take them for sounds made by the
shadows. We take the shadows themselves for real beings, and the ones that seem to speak for
real human beings.
Socrates makes it clear that the cave is an image of the community by remarking that,
while it is an image of our nature in its education and want of education, we find ourselves in it
not from birth but from childhood. Our first education must have amounted to an induction into
the cave; a second, deeper education is needed for us to escape it. Moreover, the image suggests
that while a kind of learning is possible within the cave – some of the prisoners get very good at
discerning, naming, and predicting the shadows – this so-called learning is based on a
fundamental falsehood: never having seen either the source of the shadows or any other kind of
being, the prisoners take the effects for causes, and artifacts for natures. (We should note that
4
�this would be the case even if there were no world beyond the cave.) What is learned in the cave
is correct opinion rather than truth, though it bears some intelligible relationship to truth.
It is conventional, in edifying addresses of this kind, that the speaker, having identified
some apparently intractable problem, go on to offer a surprising solution. I am sorry to say that I
have no such solution to offer with respect to the phrase ‘community of learning.’ To repeat:
learning, understood as seeing, does not require a community for its completion; and every
community poses barriers, in the form of correct opinions, to learning. Unless learning is
something other than literal or metaphorical seeing, or unless there are communities that do not
depend on correct opinion for their sense of the common good, it seems that the phrase
‘community of learning’ must involve a contradiction: in the respect that there is learning, there
is no community, and in the respect that there is a community, there is no learning. But both the
image of the cave in the Republic and the scene with the slave in the Meno do suggest one way in
which the consistency of the phrase might be saved. According to Socrates, while the release
and healing of the prisoners in the cave can happen by nature, it helps to have a free human being
in the cave, one who can release the prisoners, compel them to stand up, walk, and turn toward
the light, and even drag them by force out of the cave. This releasing, compelling, and dragging
is the closest one can come to helping to see, and so the one who does this is the closest thing to
a teacher. Similarly, while Socrates quite reasonably claims that he is not teaching Meno’s slave
when he sets the latter’s opinions against one another – after all, he does not tell the slave the
correct opinion – he does help him to see that he does not know the side of the double square.
This compulsion, this setting of opinion against opinion, has more in common with the means
used by the community than it does with seeing, but it can lead to seeing.
5
�This conclusion points to a more consistent meaning for the phrase ‘community of
learning.’ Since we all always already find ourselves in a community, with our necks and legs
bound, and our heads pointed in a fixed direction, it would be very helpful to us if we could find
and join another community, one whose correct opinions oppose and counteract those that
constitute and maintain the broader community in which we find ourselves. Such a ‘remedial
community’ would have orthodoxies of its own, of course, and these would necessarily stand as
obstacles to learning. But if these orthodoxies were well-chosen, they could also contradict the
orthodoxies of the broader community, call them into question, and help us to loosen the bonds
that limit our field of view. Such a remedial community, though an obstacle to learning when
seen from the highest perspective, when seen from our perspective could help us to learn.
This, I submit, is the best true answer to the question ‘what is a community of learning’;
and it is by being such a remedial community that St John’s College earns the right to call itself a
community of learning. More particularly, it is by means of this notion that the several practices
of the College that seem unnecessary to learning when seen from the highest perspective –
practices like our largely-required graduate program, our requirement of attendance and
participation in the conversation, our imposition of due dates for essays, and our determination of
class lists and teaching assignments – are justified. The notion of a remedial community helps us
to see, for example, that it is a lie in the soul to justify turning in a late paper on grounds of
learning. It is true that the thought comes when it wants to, and not when we want it to; so it is
true that due dates make no sense from the highest perspective. But we have no right to this
highest perspective. We are prisoners in a cave. The due date of an essay protects learning by
giving it a standing in the world of the cave equal to the standing of the important shadows that
6
�parade before our eyes. It protects learning by opposing compulsion to compulsion, correct
opinion to correct opinion.
Similarly, it is a lie in the soul to justify skipping a class, or sitting silently in one, on
grounds of learning. It is true that we might learn more reading by ourselves in our rooms, or by
coming to class just to listen, than by coming to class and saying what we think; so it is true that
the requirements of attendance and participation make no sense from the highest perspective.
But we are prisoners in a cave. We have no right to this highest perspective. These requirements
protect learning by giving it a standing in the world of the cave equal to that of flat tires and
doctor’s appointments.
It should not escape our notice that this notion of a community of learning as a remedial
community also supplies us with a helpful standard to judge the College. If the orthodoxies of
St. John’s do not oppose and counteract those of the broader community, if they instead echo and
magnify the latter, then the College is a community of learning in name only. St. John’s and its
Graduate Institute ought to be a shelter from the ever-increasing busyness and prevailing shortterm fearfulness that characterize the current mood of the surrounding community. This does not
mean that we should expect serenity within these walls; the image of the cave suggests that if we
are not kicking and screaming, if we do not feel ourselves to be under compulsion, if we are not
temporarily blinded, we are not being prepared for learning. But we should expect that the mood
of our studies here will not be the mood of the surrounding community. If it is, we can only
struggle by ourselves, or hope for the assistance of a wise, and free, friend.
So come to class, and speak in class, and turn your essays in on time, even if, or
especially if, you must struggle to do so. Your struggles are not a sufficient sign of learning, but
if it is true that we all find ourselves prisoners in a cave, they are a necessary sign.
7
�I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on
Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Please watch your email for an announcement of the place
and time. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back
of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial.
The summer 2011 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
August 25, 2011
8
�
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2011
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Community of Learning?"
Convocation
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Tutors
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The Very Pictures of Education: On Rousseau’s Illustrations in Emile
Do great books need pictures?
This question arises once we notice that some great books have pictures, while others do
not. Once printing began to spread through Europe, in the sixteenth century, great books began
to appear with engravings, called frontispieces, placed at their beginnings. Francis Bacon’s
Great Instauration (1620) [Slide 1],1 whose frontispiece depicts two ships passing beyond the
Pillars of Hercules – that is, the Strait of Gibraltar – in search of a new world; Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan (1651) [Slide 2], whose frontispiece depicts the incorporation of the body politic, the
sovereign, from the bodies of its subjects; and Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725) [Slide 3],
whose frontispiece depicts a collection of objects of allegorical significance, meant to help the
reader’s memory of the idea of the work [NS 1]2 are three famous seventeenth and eighteenthcentury examples. But by the nineteenth century, the use of frontispieces seems to have ended,
although the technology needed to include them remained available. Some authors of great
books seem to have chosen not to include pictures, then, though it was possible for them to do
so.
This historical record tempts us to dismiss the use of pictures as a fashion in printing.
But our question – do great books need pictures? – recurs from another, more serious,
perspective. Ever since Plato’s Socrates raised, in the Phaedrus, the possibility that a piece of
writing could be composed according to “some necessity” that dictates the order of its parts and
their suitability “to each other and to the whole” [264b-c],3 we have been reminded to ask
whether the author of a great book can give an account of the reason for its parts, according to
this principle of logographic necessity. From the perspective of this principle, then, the
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 2
difference between those authors who could have added pictures to their great books and did, and
those authors who could have but did not, looks like evidence not of a historical fad, but of a
disagreement over whether great books need pictures. This disagreement concerns us, as readers
of great books, not least because their contemporary publishers sometimes disagree with their
authors about the need for their pictures, and omit them from their editions, without notice.
Tonight I mean to consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s answer to this question – ‘do great
books need pictures?’ – by examining some of the pictures Rousseau provided for his great
books. Each of the three books that Rousseau says make up his “system,” the Discourse on the
Sciences and the Arts (1750), the Discourse on Inequality (1754), and Emile (1762) [CW 5:575]4
has a frontispiece; Emile also has four additional illustrations, so that it has five in total: as many
pictures as books. Rousseau also commissioned twelve illustrations for Julie, his epistolary
novel.5 In each case, moreover, there is evidence that the pictures are, in an important sense,
Rousseau’s. Apprenticed unhappily as an engraver in his youth [CW 5:26-37], Rousseau
corresponded extensively with the artists who worked on his illustrations; and while these letters
have been lost, we do have letters to others in which Rousseau indicates the attention he devoted
to the pictures for his books. Lamenting his publisher’s difficulties with the engravings for Julie,
for example, Rousseau writes,
the details into which I entered were not the sort to be carried out to the letter. It
is not what the designer must draw, but what he must know so as to make his
work conform to them as much as possible. Everything that I have described
must be in his head in order to put in his engraving everything that can be
admitted there and to put nothing contrary [CC 4:408; translation mine].6
Despite this evidence of Rousseau’s care in instructing his artists, publishers of his works have
not scrupled to omit his illustrations from their editions – sometimes even along with passages
that mention them – presumably because they consider them unnecessary adornments of
Rousseau’s books.
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 3
This lecture will have eight parts. In the first two, I will briefly examine the frontispieces
to the First and Second Discourses, considering them as preparations for Rousseau’s illustrations
in Emile. In the next five sections, I will briefly consider in turn each of these illustrations,
reading them first in themselves, then in the light of his explication of each, then in the light of
their mythological sources, and lastly in the light of their relation to the argument of Emile.
Finally, in the eighth and longest part, I will sketch what I take to be Rousseau’s answer to our
question – do great books need pictures? – with reference to his brief discussion in Emile of what
he calls the language of signs, and his fuller explanation of this language in the Essay on the
Origin of Languages.
Part One: Prometheus, or the Failed Frontispiece?
Rousseau’s literary fame dates from the publication of his First Discourse, his anonymous entry
into the Academy of Dijon’s prize competition, in which the academy asked whether the
restoration of the sciences and the arts has contributed to the purification of morals [FD 3;
compare 5]. In the Discourse Rousseau argues that, to the contrary, scientific and artistic
progress causes moral corruption [FD 9]. Rousseau’s use of illustrations in his works also dates
from the publication of the First Discourse, whose printed version was accompanied by a
frontispiece. Across from the work’s title page is an engraving of three figures in an outdoor
setting, with some vegetation in the foreground, and perhaps a mountain in the background
[Slide 4]. The leftmost figure is a muscular, bearded male, naked except for a cloak draped over
his shoulder. He holds a torch in his right hand, the flame of which strangely seems to burn
horizontally, rather than vertically. His left hand rests on the central figure’s shoulder;
otherwise, the leftmost figure seems to hover in midair, straddling a billowing cloud. He gazes
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 4
intently at the other figures in the scene. The central figure is another male, more slightly built
than the first, and wholly naked. He stands on a block, in a statuesque pose, with both hands
open, their palms visible. He could be looking rapturously at the face of the leftmost figure, or at
the torch that he holds. Lastly, though he is partly obscured by shadow, we see enough of the
rightmost figure to conclude that he is not fully human: he has horns and cloven hooves. A cloak
worn over his right shoulder partly covers his nakedness, and we can make out pan pipes slung
over the same shoulder. Of the three figures in the scene, the rightmost is the only one to have at
least one limb on the ground. His left hand is raised, palm upward, in an expressive gesture,
while his right hand is concealed behind the central figure, into whom he leans. He gazes avidly
at one or both of his companions, or perhaps at the torch in the leftmost figure’s hand.
This frontispiece also features a caption: “Satyr, you do not know it. See note page 31”
[FD 2]. It directs us to the center of the First Discourse, to the beginning of Part Two of the
work, to a footnote to Rousseau’s claim that, according to an ancient Egyptian tradition, the
sciences were invented by “a god inimical to men’s repose” [FD 16]. The footnote compares
this Egyptian myth about the god Theuth to the Greek myth about Prometheus, and points out
that both peoples regarded their divine benefactors with disfavor. “‘The satyr,’” Rousseau
quotes from an ancient fable, “‘wanted to kiss and embrace fire the first time he saw it but
Prometheus cried out to him: “Satyr, you will weep the loss of the beard on your chin, for it
burns when you touch it.”’ This is the subject of the frontispiece” [FD 16 n *]. It is not hard to
find the satyr among the figures in the illustration. But which is Prometheus? He could be the
leftmost figure, who bears a lit torch and hovers in the air like a god. But then who is the third
man?
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 5
Six years after the publication of the Discourse, Rousseau judged its frontispiece to be
“very bad” [CC 4:408]. It was certainly not understood by all of the Discourse’s readers. One of
them, Claude-Nicolas Lecat, wrote an anonymous Refutation of the work, in which he claims
that the central figure in the illustration is man, “naked and leaving the hands of Prometheus, of
nature.” The satyr, he maliciously continued, is Rousseau himself, ignorantly admiring the
image of natural man, which image is about to be burnt to ash by Prometheus’ fire [CW 2:156].
This tendentious interpretation provoked Rousseau’s retort that he would treat his readers “like
children,” and interpret for them the “clear allegory” of the illustration. “Prometheus’ torch,” he
says in the Letter to Lecat, “is that of the sciences, created to inspire great geniuses.” “[T]he
Satyr who, seeing fire for the first time, runs to it and wants to embrace it, represents common
men, seduced by the brilliance of letters, who surrender indiscreetly to study.”7 And
“Prometheus who cries out and warns them of the danger is the Citizen of Geneva” – that is,
Rousseau himself [CW 2:179].
Rousseau’s insistence on the clarity of his allegory should not make us forget that he still
only identifies two of the three figures in the frontispiece: Prometheus-Rousseau, the leftmost
figure, is known by his torch, while the satyr-common man, the rightmost figure who reaches for
Prometheus’ torch, is known by his shape. Again, who is the third man? We can make an
educated guess with the assistance of the illustration’s caption. The phrase “fire burns when one
touches it” [CW 2:12 n *] comes from Plutarch’s essay “How to profit by one’s enemies,” where
it is followed immediately by this qualification: “yet it furnishes light and heat, and is an
instrument of every craft for those who have learned to use it” [II.9].8 If Rousseau’s studied
omission of this sequel has the same cause as his studied silence about the identity of the third
man in the illustration, then it seems likely that this third man must be a “great genius,” whom
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 6
Prometheus’ torch was made to enlighten. In particular, it seems likely that this man must be the
great genius whose enlightenment leads him to keep enlightenment from the common people,
lest scientific and artistic progress corrupt their morals – namely, Rousseau himself. In the
frontispiece to the First Discourse, then, we see the first example of Rousseau doubling himself
in an image. Soon we will see another example of this practice in one of the illustrations in
Emile.
Years after the publication of the First Discourse, Rousseau complained in the Letter to
Beaumont that none of his adversaries had been able to understand his distinction between the
suitability of enlightenment for individuals, and its dangerousness for peoples – though he
always drew this distinction with care [OC 4:967]. We might blame precisely Rousseau’s care in
drawing this distinction for his adversaries’ failure to notice it. As we saw, Rousseau compares
Prometheus with the Egyptian god Theuth, who is mentioned in the discussion of the
“seemliness and unseemliness of writing” in Plato’s Phaedrus as the inventor of written letters,
among other sciences [275c-276c]. In this discussion, the question arises whether a piece of
writing can have the power to defend itself, by knowing how “to speak and keep silence toward
those it ought” [276a]. By trying, with the frontispiece to the First Discourse, to speak
differently to different readers, Rousseau seems to have spoken unclearly. But he would soon
have a second chance.
Part Two: The Hottentot, or the Literal Frontispiece
Four years later, Rousseau published his Second Discourse, a work that seeks to uncover man’s
original condition, and to describe the history of his development from this original condition to
his present state. Once again, Rousseau furnished this writing with a captioned frontispiece,
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 7
located across from its title page [Slide 5]. Again, the setting is outdoors, with vegetation in the
foreground and, this time, the ocean in the distance. But this frontispiece features a stark visual
and thematic division, cutting down the middle and through its principal figure. To his left we
see a group of five adult males, wearing broad-brimmed, feathered hats, with elegant clothes and
tasseled shoes. Four of them are standing, apparently disputing with one another: two have their
hands raised in animated gestures. The fifth man, perhaps their leader, sits on an ornate box.
One of his hands is raised to his face is a gesture familiar from our classes: the gesture of
pondering, or perhaps of duplicity. Behind this group, a crenellated keep rises, with two
machicolated bartizans. Over this left side of the image hang dark clouds, casting their shadows
on the keep and the ground below. To the right of the principal figure, by contrast, we see two
rows of low huts, set on a beach that slopes gently to the water. In front of the closer row of
huts, we can just make out five or six dark-skinned figures. Behind these huts, on the water, five
or six ships are moving under sail, their pennants streaming in the wind. Over this right side of
the image, the clouds are lighter, the sky brighter, and birds fly in the distance.
The principal figure stands between the two halves of this scene. He is a dark-skinned
male, wearing fur breeches, a necklace, and a sword at his hip. A bundle of fabric lies in the
foreground; peeking out from it is a broad-brimmed feathered hat like those worn by the other
men. While looking down at the leader of the group to his right, the central figure gestures with
his left hand at the huts on the beach or the ships on the water, and with his right at the bundle at
his feet. While his left foot is planted on the ground, his right heel is lifted, as if he were about to
take a step.
The caption to this illustration reads, “[h]e returns among [chez] his equals. See Note 13,
page 259” [SD 112; I have altered the translation]. Turning there, we find Rousseau observing
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that despite every effort by Europeans, no savage has ever been won over to the European
religion and way of life. Anticipating the objection that this is due not to the superiority of the
savage life, but to their habitual attachment to it, which makes them insensible to the advantages
of the European way, he quotes at length from a traveler’s tale by Peter Kolben. The Dutch
governor of the Cape of Good Hope took an infant Hottentot, and had him raised in the European
religion and way of life. After he had been educated and had traveled, this Hottentot returned to
the Cape, and soon decided to visit his relatives. During this visit, he discarded his European
clothes and dressed himself in a sheepskin; he then returned to the Dutch fort, carrying his
former outfit, and told the Governor the following (and here Rousseau tells us to see the
frontispiece):
[b]e so good, Sir, as to note that I forever renounce these trappings. I also
renounce the Christian Religion for the rest of my life; my resolution is to live and
die in the Religion, the ways, and the customs of my Ancestors. The one favor I
ask of you is to leave me the Necklace and the Cutlass I am wearing. I shall keep
them for love of you [SD 220-221].
Then, without waiting for a reply, the Hottentot ran off, never to be seen in the Cape again.
The footnote containing this story is connected to a passage in the main text of the
Discourse, where Rousseau asserts that the savage state, “occupying a just mean between the
indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our amour-propre, must have been the
happiest and the most lasting epoch… the least subject to revolutions, the best for man” [SD
167]. So at first it looks like the note and the frontispiece are meant to support these assertions.
The stability and superiority of the savage state are proven by the story of the Hottentot who –
although wholly familiar with the European religion and way of life, and wholly unfamiliar with
the savage alternative – prefers the savage way as soon as he learns of it. But Rousseau cautions
his reader that his notes “sometimes [stray] so wide of the subject that they are not good to read
together with the text” [SD 129]. And indeed, some of the details of the Hottentot’s speech are
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puzzling. It is unreasonable to believe, for example, that he keeps the necklace and the sword for
love of the Governor of the Cape – the man who kidnapped him and deprived him of a childhood
and youth lived in the best and happiest way for a human being. Why then does the Hottentot
take these items, and run away without waiting for a reply?
Rousseau’s illustration helps us to answer this question, by showing us that in keeping
the necklace and sword, and indeed in wearing the sheepskin, the Hottentot is not returning to his
equals. These have neither swords nor necklaces; they do not even wear pants [Slide 6]. The
illustration also shows us that, while saying what he says, the Hottentot gestures not only at the
beach huts of his native people, but also at the ships of his adoptive people. These ships mean
that there will always be more Dutch, more Europeans, more civilized and enlightened human
beings arriving at the Cape of Good Hope, in a flood that the religion, ways, and customs of the
Hottentot’s ancestors cannot hope to survive – unless they can take advantage of European
military technology and luxury economics. The frontispiece to the Second Discourse thus shows
us that the Hottentot chooses not to return to the savage state, the mean between our primitive
and civilized states, but rather to combine the best of the savage state with what is necessary
from civilization. He means to try to be a natural man in civilized society. He means to try to be
an Emile.
Part Three: Thetis, or the Mother9
Emile, which Rousseau thought of as his best work [CW 5:473], depicts the education of an
imaginary child, named Emile, from birth or even before birth, until his marriage to a woman
named Sophie and the announcement of her pregnancy. Its first book lays out the reasons for
Rousseau’s educational project, and follows the child during his infancy. As a whole, Emile
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consists of five books, each with an illustration commissioned by Rousseau.10 The first of these,
titled “Thetis,” is said, in Rousseau’s “Explication of the Illustrations,” to relate to the first book
and serve as the frontispiece to the work [E 36; I have altered the translation].11 As befits a
frontispiece, it appears across from Emile’s title page.12
Turning there, we find that we begin in the cave [Slide 7]. Five women are gathered
underground, on the bank of a river. Behind them, up and to the left, a twisting path rises to
daylight. One of the women, adorned with a necklace and bracelets, with jewelry in her hair and
wearing a fancy dress, kneels at the water’s edge, holding her skirts back with her left hand,
while with her right she dips a naked infant headfirst into the water. Behind her, and more
plainly dressed, the other four women are caught in animated poses. One holds a hand up in the
air, in a gesture that perhaps indicates astonishment; a second has her arms around the shoulders
of the first; a third holds the well-dressed woman’s cloak in one hand, while her other hand rests
on the woman’s arm – perhaps to comfort her, perhaps to keep her from falling into the river; a
fourth woman crouches at the water’s edge, her dress hitched up in her left hand. At least two of
these women have their blouses open and their breasts bared, as though they have just been
nursing. And finally, lurking in the darkest part of the scene and barely discernible, we can see a
muscular but hunched figure in a raft on the river, bearing a pole or an oar, and accompanied by
a shrouded companion [Slide 8].
Rousseau’s explication says that the illustration “represents Thetis plunging her son in the
Styx to make him invulnerable” [E 36]. The well-dressed woman, then, is Thetis; and the naked
infant is her son, whom readers of the Iliad will know as Achilles. If the river is the Styx, then
the figure in the raft must be Charon, ferrying a shade to the underworld. Rousseau’s use of this
image as a frontispiece to the whole work leads us to infer that the education described in Emile
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is to be a type of ‘invulnerability treatment,’ and Emile a type of Achilles. But why include
Charon in the image, then – especially since Rousseau tells us outright that the river depicted is
the Styx? And why title the engraving “Thetis,” rather than “Achilles”?
Rousseau’s explication ends by directing the reader deep into the text of Book I.13
Following his direction, we find a paragraph about the two ways that mothers can depart from
nature: by neglecting their children – for example, by failing to breastfeed them – or by caring
excessively for them. In this context Rousseau mentions the fable of Thetis plunging Achilles in
the Styx, which he say contains a “lovely” and “clear” allegory.14 “The cruel mothers of whom I
speak do otherwise,” Rousseau concludes: “by dint of plunging their children in softness, they
prepare them for suffering; they open their pores to ills of every sort to which they will not fail to
be prey when grown” [E 47]. The example of Thetis thus seems like an instance of natural
mothering – her ‘invulnerability treatment’ for Achilles is neither too harsh, nor too soft, but just
right. And yet the engraving of Thetis suggests that she is not breastfeeding her son, but
confiding this task to wet nurses.
What is worse, a scant few pages later, in the context of a discussion of how doctors
cause their patients to fear death, Rousseau has the following to say about Achilles: “[i]t is the
knowledge of dangers that makes us fear them; he who believed himself invulnerable would fear
nothing. By dint of arming Achilles against peril, the poet takes from him the merit of valor;
every other man in his place would have been an Achilles at the same price” [E 55]. Had Thetis’
‘invulnerability treatment’ for Achilles succeeded, it would have protected him from death,
though at the cost of depriving him of the opportunity for virtue. But it did not succeed: Achilles
remained vulnerable in one place, and was therefore given the opportunity for virtue, but at the
cost of increasing his fear of death. The ‘Thetis’ engraving completes the argument of the text,
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first by showing that Thetis was at once too hard and too soft – she neglected to breastfeed her
son, and she tried to make him invulnerable – and second by showing that the fear of death is
both the cause and the effect of both kinds of excess:15 the cause in the case of Thetis, the
mother, and the effect in the case of her son. Hence Charon, barely visible in the gloom, is the
most important figure in this illustration.
Part Four: Chiron, or the Tutor
While it seems reasonable to attribute Achilles’ wrath to his fear of death, it might occur to those
of us who know Homer well that in the Iliad there is no mention of Thetis dipping the infant
Achilles in the Styx to make him invulnerable. So the Iliad cannot be the text to which the first
illustration in Emile refers. Rather, the story comes from a later, and to us less-known epic: the
Achilleid, by Statius [I.133-134].16 As it happens, this epic is also the likely source of the fable
behind the second illustration in Emile – suggesting that these two illustrations are best
interpreted together.
Book Two of Emile describes Emile’s childhood: the conditions of his happiness, his first
experience with property, his learning to speak, and the training of his senses. Turning to the
illustration found at the head of this book [Slide 9], we see two figures meeting on a
mountainside. To their right, from our perspective, the ground slopes downward to some trees;
to the left it slopes steeply upward to some tree-studded crags. In the distance we see some
clouds in the sky. The figure on our right is a young child, dressed in a tunic. In his right hand
the child holds a rabbit by the ears; it is not evident whether the rabbit is alive or dead. The
child’s streaming hair and posture, with one leg flexed but planted on the ground, and the other
in the air, suggest that he has arrived running. With his left hand the child reaches out for an
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apple proffered by the figure on our left, as he gazes into his face. This figure is clearly a
centaur. His human upper body is clothed by some sort of cape, and his face is bearded. The
posture of his equine lower body is strange: with one foreleg straightened and planted on the
ground, and his one visible hind leg flexed, he could be rising from a crouching position. The
centaur gazes into the child’s face, extending the apple with his right hand, and reaching with his
left, not for the limp rabbit, but past it to caress the child’s cheek. At the centaur’s feet we can
barely make out a basket of apples to his left, and a heap of items to his right, including what
look like a crested helmet, a shield, a scroll, perhaps a lyre, a pad of paper, and perhaps even a
potted plant.
According to its title, the subject of this engraving is Chiron, the centaur; and the action
depicted, according to Rousseau’s explication, is “Chiron training the little Achilles in running”
[E 36]. The citation accompanying this explication directs us to “Page 382” of Emile’s first
volume, where we read the story of “an indolent and lazy child who was to be trained in
running” – a child who, like Achilles, “was intended for a military career.” This child prided
himself to such an extent on his noble birth that he persuaded himself that rank can take the place
of ability. “To make of such a gentleman a light-footed Achilles,” Rousseau tells us, “the skill of
Chiron himself would hardly have sufficed” [E 141]. To make a long story short, the tutor in this
example goads his pupil into competing with other children in running, using cakes as a prize.17
By secretly manipulating the conditions of each race, the tutor is able to arrange an initial victory
for his vain and lazy charge, and to ensure subsequent victories at his, the tutor’s, will. Not only
does this child become accomplished at running. “This accomplishment produced another of
which I had not dreamed,” writes Rousseau. “When he had rarely carried off the prize, he almost
always ate it alone, as did his competitors. But, in accustoming himself to victory, he became
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generous and often shared with the vanquished. […] I learned thereby what the true principle of
generosity is” [E 142].
Leaving aside for the moment this puzzling conclusion, we might also be puzzled by
Rousseau’s choice of an illustration for this text. The engraving depicts a race run for an apple,
not for a cake; and the competition in the race seems to be a hare, rather than another child.
Moreover, why say that the illustration depicts Achilles, and not just a lazy child; and why depict
the centaur Chiron rather than a human tutor? It turns out that the fable about Chiron’s education
of Achilles comes not from the Iliad18 but from the Achilleid, so that there is a close thematic
connection between the first two illustrations to Emile. Now the Achilleid begins with Thetis
witnessing the abduction of Helen by Paris, and realizing that the Trojan war will result. Fearing
that Achilles will be sought for, will want to fight, and will die [I.37-38, 74-76], she first tries
and fails to persuade Neptune to sink Paris’ ships [I.80-81], then seeks out Chiron [I.104-106], to
whom she had sent Achilles for his education. “High up his lofty dwelling bores through the
mountain” [I.106-107], Statius writes,
[h]ere are no darts that have tasted human blood, no ash trees fractured in festive
combats, nor mixing bowls shattered upon kindred foes, but innocent quivers and
empty hides of wild beasts… [f]or at this time unarmed his only labour was to
know herbs that bring health to living things in doubtful case or to limn with his
lyre the heroes of old for his pupil [I.112-118].
Thetis finds Chiron awaiting Achilles’ return from the hunt, and persuades him to release
Achilles to her – citing, among other things, her frequent nightmares about dipping Achilles in
the Styx [I.133-134]. Chiron assents, because Achilles has become unmanageable [I.149-155],
though Statius tells us that Chiron never would have done so had he known of Thetis’ plan to
disguise Achilles as a woman, in the hopes of avoiding his recruitment to fight at Troy [I.141143]. When Achilles finally appears, he is armed, accompanied by Patroclus, and bearing lion
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cubs that he has abducted after killing their mother [I.158-177]. Achilles and Thetis depart the
next day.
By alluding in this way to the Achilleid, the ‘Chiron’ illustration helps us to interpret its
details. Now we see why the scene is set on a mountainside, why Chiron is clothed in animal
skins, and why a helmet, a shield, a lyre, and a potted medicinal plant lie in the foreground. But
more importantly, the illustration deepens the story in the text to which it refers, both through its
allusion to the Achilleid and through its departures from that work. First, when compared with
the ‘Thetis’ illustration and interpreted in light of the Achilleid, the ‘Chiron’ illustration teaches
us that the mother and the tutor are antagonists in the education of the child. The mother, moved
by the fear of death, seeks to preserve her child from harm, while the tutor, whose motives are
unknown, seeks to prepare him to face it. This antagonism is touchingly depicted in the
Achilleid, when Achilles, Patroclus, Chiron and Thetis spend the night together in Chiron’s cave.
Statius writes, “[t]he huge Centaur collapses on stone and Achilles fondly twines himself about
his shoulders, though his faithful mother is there, preferring the familiar bosom” [I.195-197].
Tutor and mother both have a medicine for the human condition, but the mother’s medicine is
harmful – it culminates in proud wrath – while the tutor’s medicine is beneficial: it turns pride
into generosity, whose principle, the text implies, is confidence that there will always be more
cake – or in other words, ignorance of death.19 Second, in its departures from the Achilleid, the
‘Chiron’ engraving implies that Rousseau’s Achilles has been training in running, rather than
hunting; that his skill is with defensive weapons; and that he is a vegetarian, and so more capable
of pity.20 Rousseau’s Chiron, by contrast, may still be a carnivore; the fate of the hare is
unknown.
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Part Five: Hermes, or the God
Book Three of Emile spans the years between childhood and puberty, and covers Emile’s
introduction to the elements of the natural sciences and the trade of carpentry, as well as the
completion of the training of his senses. The third illustration in Emile appears at the beginning
of this book, which in the first edition falls at the beginning of its second volume. Appropriately
enough, this illustration also makes a new thematic beginning. Turning there we discover
another outdoor scene, populated by three figures [Slide 10]. The chief figure stands on a step in
the foreground, with one foot on the earth. He is nearly naked, clad only in a cloak draped over
his left shoulder, and a winged, soft-brimmed cap. His ankles also seem to be winged. In his left
arm he cradles a slim wand entwined by two serpents. With his right hand he uses a stylus to
draw what look like geometrical figures on one of the two broad columns that stand in the center
of the scene. And at his feet, in the foreground, are piled mathematical instruments: an armillary
sphere, a protractor, and a sundial are easily discerned, while the other objects may include a
writing desk with geometrical proofs, a book, a model star, and a carpenter’s square. In the
bottom right of the illustration, far from the mathematical instruments, a plant grows. The other
two figures in the scene seem to be an older, bearded male and his younger, beardless
companion. Both are dressed simply: the former in a cloak, the latter in an open-necked shirt.
Both are also gesturing expressively: the elder points discreetly with his right hand to the chief
figure’s activity, while perhaps restraining his companion with his left arm; the younger of the
men has his left hand raised in a gesture of wonder. The statue of what may be a sphinx beside
them, and the elongated pyramid or obelisk behind them, suggest an Egyptian setting – though
the tree on the left margin of the image, and the gently rising hill in the right background, are not
reminiscent of Egypt.
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Rousseau gives ‘Hermes’ as the subject of this engraving, and writes in his explications
that it depicts “Hermes engraving the elements of the sciences on columns” [E 36]. The
accompanying reference to the text is to “Page 76.” Turning there, we find Rousseau
proclaiming
I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know. It is
said that Hermes engraved the elements of the sciences on columns in order to
shelter his discoveries from a flood. If he had left a good imprint of them in
man’s head, they would have been preserved by tradition. Well-prepared minds
are the surest monuments on which to engrave human knowledge [E 184].
So the ‘Hermes’ engraving, like the ‘Thetis’ engraving, depicts a misguided action. Just as
Thetis should have trained her son in running, rather than trying to make him invulnerable, so
Hermes should have engraved the principles of the sciences in the minds of men, rather than on
columns. But how does one do this? Rousseau gives a clear answer in the immediate sequel:
with a book, indeed with one book in particular – Robinson Crusoe. While the general danger of
books is that they give their readers words that do not correspond to things, and so the opinion of
knowledge without the reality, books like Robinson Crusoe escape this danger by putting their
readers in imaginary situations that force them to attend to things, and in particular to their real
utility, apart from opinion [E 185]. This interested attention to utility is the only lasting
foundation of the sciences.
Rousseau’s example of a book that escapes the dangers of books helps us better to
interpret the ‘Hermes’ illustration. In our treatment of the frontispiece of the First Discourse, we
mentioned the possibility raised in Plato’s Phaedrus: that a piece of writing can overcome the
defects of writing, by knowing how “to speak and to keep silence toward those it ought” [276a].
A suitably edited Robinson Crusoe,21 it seems, is such a piece of writing: it keeps silent to those
interested in words, for whom it is only a quaint story, but it speaks volumes to those interested
in judging the true utility of things. But Rousseau also says that the frontispiece to the Discourse
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depicts a fable found allegorically in the “ancient tradition passed on from Egypt to Greece” [G,
16] about the Egyptian god Theuth, known to the Greeks as Hermes. Now we see the reason for
the Egyptian objects – the sphinx and the pyramid or obelisk – in the otherwise Greek scene of
the ‘Hermes’ illustration. Rousseau takes the fables of Prometheus, Theuth, and Hermes to have
the same meaning.22 They raise the question of how the sciences and the arts can be cultivated
without causing moral corruption.
Putting the ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Hermes’ illustrations side by side, we see that they have
similar structures [Slide 11]. There are three figures in each: a divinity who possesses the
sciences and the arts, a figure who is kept from them, and an intermediary between the two. But
the satyr who is kept away in the ‘Prometheus’ illustration, and who represents “common men”
[CW 2:179], is replaced in the ‘Hermes’ illustration by a young man who is kept from Hermes’
engravings, and yet shown them at a distance. The naked man, whom we guessed to represent
great geniuses who are suited to the sciences, is replaced by an older, bearded man, who at once
restrains his charge and points out Hermes’ work. Lastly, Prometheus himself is replaced by
Hermes. If it follows that Hermes also represents Rousseau,23 then the move from the First
Discourse to Emile involves a move from a project to keep the sciences and the arts away from
the common man, and in the hands of great geniuses, to a project to preserve the useful elements
of the sciences and the arts, by teaching them to ordinary intellects [compare E 52]. Far from
being uselessly employed in engraving these elements on columns, Hermes is usefully employed
in engraving them on the minds of men, using the writing that overcomes the defects of writing.
It is more than a joke that Emile’s central engraving is an engraving of Rousseau engraving.
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Part Six: Orpheus, or the Priest
Book Four of Emile is long, and treats the social but not fully sexual consequences of Emile’s
emerging erotic desires: his education in compassion, his study of history, and the education of
his taste. The book is made longer, though, by Rousseau’s exceptional inclusion of a distinct
writing in its midst, called “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” [E 266-313]. The
illustration to Book Four is also exceptional, because it is found not at the beginning of the book,
as the second and third illustrations were found at the beginnings of their respective books, but in
the middle of the fourth book – which in the first edition falls at the beginning of the third
volume.24 In effect, this makes the illustration into a frontispiece for “The Profession of Faith,”25
whose preamble begins right after the engraving, where Rousseau writes, in reference to
religious matters, “[i]nstead of telling you here on my own what I think, I shall tell you what a
man more worthy than I thought” [E 260].
Turning to the illustration, we find another outdoor scene, set in the wooded foothills of a
mountain [Slide 12]. The center of the engraving is dominated by a man standing on a raised
patch of earth, and dressed in sandals, a tunic and a cloak. His left hand holds a fold of his cloak,
or perhaps a sheaf of paper, while his left arm cradles a lyre.26 His right hand is raised palm
upward in a gesture to the sky. By contrast, his serene gaze is directed downward, to the crowd
gathered around him. This crowd is chiefly composed of bare-chested men, old and young – or
at least bearded and beardless. Unlike the central figure, they are dressed only in animal skins
wrapped around their waists, and they are barefoot. One of these men cowers, one kneels, two
crouch; but all of them, except the cowering man, look up at the sky with expressions of awe.
The remainder of the crowd, to the central figure’s right from our perspective, consists of
animals. We can make out a small rodent, a sheep, an ox, a horse, and several birds, including a
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bird of prey that seems far too large for the branch it perches on. As far as we can tell, there are
no women present.
Rousseau titles this illustration “Orpheus,” and writes that the engraving “represents
Orpheus teaching men the worship of the gods” [E 36]. The illustration itself refers to “Page
128” of Volume Three. Turning there, we find an intermission in the “Profession of Faith,”
during which Rousseau remarks, “[t]he good priest had spoken with vehemence. He was moved,
and so was I. I believed I was hearing the divine Orpheus sing the first hymns and teaching men
the worship of the gods. Nevertheless I saw a multitude of objections to make to him” [E 294].
Rousseau thus likens the Savoyard Vicar, whose views on religion are given instead of
Rousseau’s own, and with whose views Rousseau does not agree,27 to Orpheus.
It will help here to review some of the details of the Orpheus myth. In Ovid’s version in
the Metamorphoses, Orpheus loses his bride Eurydice to death, and is so overcome with love for
her that he decides he cannot live without her [X.26].28 He pursues her into the underworld,
where his music charms everyone, and secures Eurydice’s release – on the condition that, as he
leads her to the surface, he not look back at her. We should understand this otherwise arbitrary
condition as a test of Orpheus’ trust in Eurydice: a test of his confidence that she would rather
accompany him than stay in the underworld. But when “they were nearing the margin of the
upper earth,” Ovid writes, “he, afraid that she might fail him, eager for the sight of her, turned
back his longing eyes; and instantly she slipped into the depths” [X.55-57]. Orpheus is stunned
by her second death; he tries to pursue her, but his descent is barred.
Orpheus mourns Eurydice for three years, spurning the other women who try to console
him.29 His lack of confidence in Eurydice becomes a mistrust of all women. He sings in
mourning, and Ovid reports that his songs draw to him “multitudinous birds,” “snakes,” a “train
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of beasts,” “oxen,” and some “stout peasants” [XI.20-21, 31, 33] – suggesting that Ovid’s
description provides some of the details of Rousseau’s illustration. Even the trees and the stones
are moved. But Orpheus’ song also attracts the local women who, offended by his contempt for
them, drown out his song and finally tear him to pieces. A nearby river carries off his head, still
singing, and his lyre, still sounding, while his shade is reunited at last with Eurydice’s in the
underworld.30
So Rousseau’s illustration compares the Savoyard Vicar to Orpheus, and Ovid’s telling of
the Orpheus myth suggests that the singer was destroyed by his soured love for a woman. Does
Rousseau mean thus to suggest that the “Profession of Faith” – the Vicar’s teaching concerning
the gods, his song – is also based on erotic love gone wrong? If we look at the details of what
the Vicar says, this is exactly what we learn. In his preamble we learn that the Vicar is miserable
because of a scandal caused by a conflict between his erotic desires and his respect for marriage.
The Vicar cannot be chaste, but he cannot marry; nor can he bring himself to commit adultery.
So he sleeps with an unmarried woman, and she becomes pregnant, without a husband on whom
to blame the pregnancy. The lovers are discovered and torn from one another’s arms [E 267].31
“A few such experiences lead a reflective mind a long way,” the Vicar confesses to JeanJacques. We see how far the Vicar was led when we read his “Profession of Faith.” There he
outlines a metaphysics in which the soul is enslaved to, and yet feels contempt for, the body: the
soul is “subjected to the senses and chained to [the] body which enslaves it and interferes with
it,” but “care for [the] body’s preservation incites the soul to relate everything to the body and
gives it an interest contrary to the general order, which the soul is nevertheless capable of seeing
and loving” [E 292]. Having been torn, like Orpheus, from his love, the Vicar is now
figuratively torn apart, like Orpheus was literally, by contempt for his own erotic desires.32
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Now Rousseau does not wholly agree with the Vicar’s “Profession of Faith,” and Emile
will hear nothing like it from Jean-Jacques.33 Rousseau’s own view seems to be that the conflict
erotic desire can foment between the soul and the body is not necessary: it can be forestalled by
correct education. To the extent that otherworldly metaphysical teachings arise from thisworldly
sexual conflict, then, they too are not necessary – and they too can be avoided by correct
education. This conclusion reminds us of another, less-known thread of the Orpheus myth. In
the Argonautica Apollonius mentions Orpheus first among the Argonauts [I.23],34 and depicts
him saving his crewmates on two occasions: once when he sings of the origin of the cosmos and
of the gods, to stop the Argonauts from quarreling [I.492-511]; and once when he sings to drown
out the voices of the Sirens [IV.903-909].35 Apollonius’ version of the Orpheus myth suggests
the possibility of another, more successful Orpheus who can protect his comrades against the
dangers of erotic desire, and reminds us of another hero, more successful than Achilles, who
resisted the Sirens’ song, who did not lose but regained a wife, and whose image governs the last
two books of Emile, as Achilles’ image does the first two.
Part Seven: Circe, or the Woman
The fifth and final book of Emile begins with a discussion of the natural differences between
men and women; it goes on to describe the education of Emile’s intended wife, Sophie, their
courtship, Emile’s travels, and their marriage. Rousseau places the illustration for this book at its
beginning, which falls at the beginning of the first edition’s fourth volume. The engraving
depicts our first indoor scene, with two figures in the foreground [Slide 13]. On our left is a
young woman, richly clad in a patterned dress and a cloak, and adorned with a ribbon in her hair
and bracelets on her wrist. Her head is tilted to her left, and she wears a serene, welcoming
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expression; her arms are extended, palms open and fingers splayed, as if to invite an embrace.
At her sandaled feet lie a long stick and a shallow-bowled, broad-based cup. Behind her are a
striking table with a claw-footed leg, and the edge of a sumptuous, canopied bed [Slide 14]. On
our right is a bearded man, wearing a plumed helmet, a cloak, short breeches, and sandals. In his
right hand he holds a sword, but since his finger is across the hilt and stretched in the direction of
the blade, and since the sword point is on the ground, he seems about to lay it down. In his left,
he holds what looks like a sprig of vegetation, with his arm stretched out away from the woman.
The man’s left leg is extended, his knee unbent, and he gazes directly into the woman’s eyes, his
expression made unreadable by the shadow cast by his helmet. He looks like he is trying to step
into the woman’s embrace while setting down his sword, without bending his knee or looking
away from her gaze. Behind the man we see the snouts and bodies of four or five pigs; behind
them, columns reminiscent of the ‘Hermes’ illustration; and behind these a neoclassical temple,
its dome faintly visible, decorated with one figure in an alcove, and two more lounging to either
side of the pediment.
Rousseau titles this engraving ‘Circe,’ and says in his explications that it depicts her
“giving herself to Ulysses, whom she was not able to transform” [E 36]. We are referred to
“Page 304” of Emile’s fourth volume, where we find the conclusion to the following story.
During his courtship of Sophie, Emile and Jean-Jacques live nearby. Sophie only permits Emile
occasional visits: one or two a week, for a day or two at most. When Emile first met Sophie,
heard her name and heard her speak, he began “to swallow with deep draughts the poison with
which she intoxicates him” [E 415]; but now, when he is apart from Sophie, he “is Emile again.
He has not been transformed at all” [E 435]. Emile studies the neighborhood and works to
improve it, and at least once a week, or in bad weather, he and Jean-Jacques labor in a
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carpenter’s shop in the city [E 437]. Alerted to this practice by Sophie’s father, one day Sophie
and her mother visit the workshop. They admire the respectability and the cleanliness of the
carpenter’s trade, and they are moved by how seriously Emile takes his low-paying job. Then
they prepare to leave, and Sophie’s mother invites Emile to leave with them. Emile sadly replies
that he cannot: he and Jean-Jacques are needed, and they have promised to work. So Sophie and
her mother leave, the mother in a fit of pique. Why didn’t Emile, who is rich, pay off his
obligation, and leave with them? But Sophie is happy with Emile’s choice. Had he paid off his
obligation, this would have meant “putting his riches in place of his duties” [E 438]. “It is for
me that he stays,” she tells her mother; “I saw it in his eyes” [E 439]. Here Rousseau interrupts
to explain that Sophie wants to be loved for her virtues, more than for her charms; so she wants
Emile to prefer his own duty to her, and her to all else. “She wants to reign over a man whom
she has not disfigured,” Rousseau concludes. “It is thus that Circe, having debased Ulysses’
companions, disdains them and gives herself only to him whom she was unable to change” [E
439].
Though Rousseau follows Horace in using the hero’s Roman name, Ulysses,36 the most
likely source for the myth behind this illustration is Homer’s Odyssey. In Book Ten, Odysseus
tells of how he came to Circe’s island after the loss of all but one of his ships [X.130-132].37
Spying her house from afar, he sends half his remaining men to scout. Circe invites them in,
gives them a potion to make them forget their country, and strikes them with her wand, turning
their bodies, though not their minds, into those of pigs [X.236-241]. Only one man, who
suspected treachery, escapes. When Odysseus learns of the fate of his comrades, he resolves to
go to Circe’s house alone. But on his way there, he meets Hermes, disguised as a youth. The
god tells Odysseus what to expect: Circe “will make you a potion, and put drugs in the food, but
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she will not even so be able to enchant you, for this good medicine which I give you now will
prevent her” [X.290-292]. He tells Odysseus what to do –
as soon as Circe with her long wand strikes you, then drawing from beside your
thigh your sharp sword, rush forward against Circe, as if you were raging to kill
her, and she will be afraid, and invite you to go to bed with her. Do not then resist
and refuse the bed of the goddess, for so she will set free your companions, and
care for you also; but bid her swear the great oath of the blessed gods, that she has
no other evil hurt that she is devising against you, so she will not make you weak
and unmanned, once you are naked [X. 290-301] –
and he gives Odysseus a black root with a milky flower, whose nature he explains, called moly
by the gods.
Events unfold as Hermes predicts. Circe offers Odysseus the potion; he drinks and is not
enchanted. She strikes him with her wand; he rushes her with drawn sword. “[S]he screamed
and ran under my guard,” Odysseus narrates, “and clasping both knees in loud lamentation spoke
to me” [X.323-324]. Circe wonders at Odysseus’ immunity to her drugs; she says, “[t]here is a
mind in you no magic will work on” [X.329]. She recognizes him as Odysseus, whose arrival
was foretold to her many times by Hermes. She invites Odysseus to bed, and he complies – but
only after securing her oath, as Hermes recommended. Later, he will require her to restore his
men to human form.
With Homer’s assistance, we can now recognize Circe’s “long staff,” and the potion
goblet at her feet. The plant in Ulysses’ left hand is no doubt the moly, and the pigs in the
background are Ulysses’ unfortunate companions – moved from the pens Homer mentions [X.
238] to Circe’s bedroom for visual effect. The meaning of the bed behind Circe, of her
expression and gesture, is unmistakable. But what of Odysseus’ claim in Homer that Circe ran
under his guard and clasped his knees? Here both parties are standing. And what of Rousseau’s
offhand comment that Emile has already drunk of Sophie’s poison, and been transformed [E 415,
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435]? Lastly, what of the implication of Rousseau’s carpentry story: that it was Sophie’s mother
who tried to make Emile into a rich pig, whereas Sophie herself had no intention of doing so?
By juxtaposing illustration, myth, and text in this way, we see that Rousseau has tinkered
meaningfully with his Homeric precedent. Whereas the Homeric Circe tries both her potion and
her wand on Odysseus, and only submits out of apparent fear when both fail,38 the Rousseauean
Circe-Sophie tries her potion, succeeds in making Ulysses-Emile forget his country, and then
drops her wand, preferring to offer herself willingly to the man who, despite being enchanted by
her, nonetheless still prefers his duty. Accordingly, Ulysses-Emile holds the moly off to one
side; it is not needed in this encounter. Instead, it will be needed later in Book Five. There, in a
final reference to the ‘Thetis’ illustration, which Rousseau has called a “frontispiece to the
[whole] work” [E 36], Rousseau recounts how Jean-Jacques must use the authority granted to
him by Emile to compel Emile to leave Sophie and travel for a year. The stated purpose of these
travels is for Emile to study the principles and practice of government [E 455] – that is, to
remind Emile about his country – but they have an additional purpose: to satisfy Jean-Jacques, as
Sophie is satisfied, that Emile loves his duty more than he loves her [E 443]. So after gaining
Emile’s attention, and stunning his reason, by making him envision Sophie’s death, Jean-Jacques
speaks at length about how Emile’s love for Sophie exposes Emile to hurt. “[I]t is in vain,” JeanJacques tells him, “that I have dipped your soul in the Styx; I was not able to make in
everywhere invulnerable. A new enemy is arising which you have not learned to conquer, and
from which I can no longer save you. That enemy is yourself” [E 443]. That it is not Thetis but
Chiron-Hermes-Jean-Jacques who does the dipping, and not Emile-Achilles’ body but his soul
that is dipped, shows us how far we have come from the mistaken motherly care of the beginning
of the book. Sophie is both a necessary condition for the man raised uniquely for himself to be
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good for others [E 41], and Emile’s Achilles heel. The gravity of this vulnerability is hinted at
by Rousseau’s title for the unfinished and unpublished sequel to Emile: Emile and Sophie, Or the
Solitaries [CW 13:685].39
Part Eight: The Very Pictures of Education?
Now that we have surveyed each of the illustrations in Emile, let’s return to our opening
question: do great books need pictures? Is there “some necessity” in writing that dictates that a
great book should have illustrations as well as text? In our survey we have given Rousseau’s
illustrations four cumulative readings: first as pictures, then as pictures informed by Rousseau’s
explications, then as pictures informed by ancient myths, and lastly as pictures informed by the
text of Emile. To understand Rousseau’s answer to our opening question, then, we should ask
him why each of these readings is necessary. He gives us an answer in a passage from Book
Four of Emile, and additional assistance in passages from the Essay on the Origin of Languages
and the Second Discourse.
First, why are the illustrations themselves necessary? At a climactic moment in Book
Four of Emile – Jean-Jacques is about to give his ‘Savoyard Vicar’ speech to Emile, wherein he
will reveal all he has done for Emile’s education, warn him of the dangers of sex, and extract
from him an unconditional promise of future obedience; that is, Hermes is about to give Ulysses
the moly to protect him from Circe – Rousseau pauses the action to discuss how to prepare Emile
for this speech. Since his lesson about sex should influence Emile “for the rest of his days,” the
instruction it contains ought “never to be forgotten.” “Let us try therefore,” Rousseau proposes,
“to engrave [graver: OC 4:645] it in his memory in such a way that it will never be effaced” [E
321]. The verb he uses here, graver, is related to one of the nouns for engraving, gravure, which
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suggests a connection between Jean-Jacques’s goal in setting the scene for his speech to Emile,
and Rousseau’s goal in providing illustrations in his book.40 The way to achieve this goal,
Rousseau continues, is to use “the most energetic of languages”: “the language of signs that
speak to the imagination” [E 321], a language that consists of actions.
While this goal of making a teaching more memorable reminds us of the illustration of
Hermes engraving the elements of the sciences on columns, and responds to the concern raised in
the Phaedrus that writing causes “forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through
neglect of memory” [275a], it is not the chief reason for Rousseau’s interest in the language of
signs. In the discussion in Emile he turns quickly from the mnemonic use of this language to its
persuasive use: to make human beings act. Unadorned reason, Rousseau pronounces,
“sometimes restrains, it arouses rarely, and it has never done anything great” [E 321]. If you
want great actions from human beings, you need reason adorned with images of action, whose
energy makes a stronger impression than unadorned reason does, by speaking to the heart.
Rousseau does not say why this is so in Emile, but passages from the Second Discourse and the
Essay on the Origin of Languages explain that the energy of the language of signs is due to the
particularity, the variety, the expression, and the compression of the images that make up its
vocabulary.41 So Rousseau’s answer to the question ‘why are the illustrations in Emile
necessary?’ is that he hopes that they will persuade human beings to act.
Why, then, must the illustrations be explicated? Rousseau’s next move in Book Four of
Emile is to launch into a four-paragraph “digression” [E 323] that purports to show, through
historical examples, that the ancients knew how to persuade men to act through the language of
signs, whereas the moderns, through neglect of this language, can move men only by self-interest
or force. The ancients had such a command of this language, Rousseau asserts, that “often” [E
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322] – though pointedly not always – an object they exhibited to the eyes of their audience was
able to say everything. Rousseau’s favorite example of this, which he uses both in Emile and in
the Essay, is the gift given by the king of the Scythians to Darius, the king of the Persians, when
the latter were invading Scythia: a bird, a frog, a mouse, and five arrows. “This terrifying
harangue made its point,” Rousseau writes, “and Darius hurried to get back to his country in
whatever way he could” [E 322] – whereas a threatening letter in place of these signs would only
have been laughable.
But if we look up the source of this story, in Book Four of Herodotus, we learn that the
Scythians gave the Persians the gift as a puzzle42 – likely hoping to detain them in Scythia – and
that the Persians gave the gift two opposite interpretations: as a surrender, and as a threat.
Herodotus does not tell us which interpretation was correct, and it’s not even clear from his
account that the Scythians knew what they meant to say. He merely recounts that an accidental
defeat led Darius to conclude that the Scythians despised the Persians, and to prefer the
interpretation that their gift was a threat. If we give the same treatment to the rest of Rousseau’s
historical examples from this passage in Emile, and the corresponding passage in the Essay, we
find that in several of them he suppresses a detail that is mentioned by his source: that the signs
in question did not say everything, because they were accompanied by a speech.43
Once again, we find a helpful explanation in the Essay on the Origin of Languages.
There Rousseau concludes from his historical examples that “one speaks much better to the eyes
than to the ears,” and that “[t]he most eloquent discourses are even seen to be those with the
most images embedded in them” [EOL 250].44 But then he admits that
when it is a question of moving the heart and inflaming the passions, it is an
entirely different matter. The successive impression made by discourse, striking
with cumulative impact, succeeds in arousing in you a different emotion than does
the presence of the object itself which you take in all at once glance [EOL 250].
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Rousseau distinguishes between the power of images and the power of sounds by stating that
“visible signs make for more accurate imitation, but… interest is more effectively aroused by
sounds” [EOL 251]. It follows from this distinction that while images can concentrate the
interest of their viewers, they cannot generate this interest, nor ensure that it is directed rightly.45
This account explains why the language of signs needs the assistance of discourse, as we
see from many of Rousseau’s historical examples; but it does not explain what can be done for
illustrations in a written work – which, unless it is read dramatically aloud, cannot rely on sounds
to generate interest. If we read further in the Essay, though, we find another helpful section,
where Rousseau writes, “we do not realize that often [sensations] affect us not only as sensations
but as signs or images, and that their moral effects also have moral causes” [EOL 284].
Sensations of beautiful colors, for example, are given life by drawing, by imitation, so that “it is
the passions which they express that succeed in arousing our own, the objects which they
represent that succeed in affecting us” [EOL 284]. This is why colors can be removed from a
painting – it can be turned into a drawing – without it moving us less. When illustrations are
used to depict an action, then, the passions that motivate action are concentrated by the
simultaneity of the drawing, but generated – in the absence of sounds – by the meaning of the
things drawn. So if the viewer knows what the images mean, either because he recognizes them,
or because he can read an explication of what they represent, they will generate and concentrate
his interest. This is Rousseau’s answer to why the illustrations must be explicated: so that the
energy of the language of signs will be properly directed, and the right action will be more likely
to ensue.
But why, third, must the images and their explications refer to ancient myths? After all,
the frontispiece to the Second Discourse makes no such reference, and yet there is no sign that
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Rousseau considered it a failure. We can infer Rousseau’s answer to this question once we
notice another implication of his historical examples: that the language of signs is more
successful the more the communicating parties have something in common. We can treat the
example of the Scythian gift as one in which the parties had little in common, and in which the
language of signs failed – presuming that communication was ever intended in the first place.
By contrast, in Book Four of Emile Rousseau offers several examples46 of the successful use of
the language of signs, in which the sign alone did say everything. The first of these,
“Thrasybulus and Tarquin cutting off the tops of the poppies” [E 322], partly refers to another
story in Herodotus, one that is substantially repeated with different characters by Livy. When
Periander came to power in Corinth, he sent to Thrasybulus, tyrant of neighboring Miletus,
asking about the “safest political establishment for administering the city best” [V.92].
Thrasybulus led Periander’s messenger outside the city, and, speaking with him about unrelated
matters, cut down each stalk of corn that had grown higher than the rest. He then sent the
messenger back to Periander. Now according to the messenger, Thrasybulus made no reply to
Periander’s query. But once he heard what Thrasybulus had done, Periander understood that the
safest political course was to “murder the most eminent of his citizens” [V.92].
In this example, communication by the language of signs succeeded between the two
tyrants because of their similar situations and inclinations; but it was accomplished by a
messenger who was unaware of the message he carried, because of the difference between his
situation and inclination and those of the tyrants.47 We see that the same sign can have meaning
among those who have something in common, while being meaningless to those who do not.
And this helps us to see how allegorical illustrations can be suited to audiences composed of
those with various levels of education. To readers who know the Achilleid, the Phaedrus, the
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Metamorphoses, the Argonautica, and the Odyssey, at one extreme, Rousseau’s illustrations will
be full of detailed meaning; those who do not even know the names Thetis, Chiron, Hermes,
Orpheus and Circe, at the other, will only find as much meaning as one sees in a picture of a
woman dipping a baby in a river.48 So we have Rousseau’s answer to the question of why his
illustrations must refer to ancient myths: to single out his educated readers, and in particular
those who pride themselves on their devotion to the highly questionable modern project of
enlightenment.
Lastly, why then must the images in Emile refer also to passages in Rousseau’s text – and
do so, as I have suggested, in a way that complicates and corrects their corresponding ancient
myths? One final observation will be helpful here about the examples in Rousseau’s
“digression”: they quietly point out that the chief users of the language of signs are tyrants.
Rousseau begins his digression by listing four ancient examples of Biblical covenants based on
threats of divine force;49 then he refers in a footnote to the modern example of the signs used by
the Roman clergy and the “tyrannical government” of Venice [E 322 n *]. After the examples of
Thrasybulus and Periander, of Tarquin and his son, already mentioned, who communicate their
tyrannical designs by signs, he concludes with the example of Mark Antony, who failed to save
the Roman republic because, according to Plutarch, he was “swept away by the tide of popular
applause,” and by “the prospect, if Brutus were overthrown, of being without doubt the ruler-inchief” [II, 489].50 Now if the language of signs is meant to give its users a hold on human beings
other than “by force or by self-interest” [E 321], it must be appealing to those who are unable or
unwilling to use force, but also unable to appeal to self-interest, in either its uneducated or its
educated form. And since human beings act either willingly or unwillingly, persuasion does not
amount to a third option – rather, it amounts to a combination of the two: human beings thinking
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that they act willingly, while in fact they are acting unwillingly. But this requires that the
interests that cause actions in human beings be connected with actions that are not ordinarily
their result: that the Achilles or the Odysseus that causes admiration, for example, be
surreptitiously replaced by the Emile who is both and better than both. This, then, is Rousseau’s
answer to the question why his illustrations must refer to passages in his text: that only by so
doing can he persuade his educated and enlightened readers to turn their attachment to ancient,
mythical heroes into an attachment to Emile.
So Rousseau’s answer to our opening question – do great books need pictures? – is a
resounding yes. They need pictures, he says, as long as their readers have hearts as well as
heads, and as long as their authors mean to make their readers act. They need pictures of
mythological figures as long as their authors want especially to reach and move their educated
readers. And they need to juxtapose these figures with arguments in their pages as long as they
want to persuade their educated readers to act in new ways. As the ancients knew, and Rousseau
himself knows, persuasion, which does not attempt to enlighten self-interest, but does not crush
with force, is the very picture of education.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
June 18, 2013
Delivered June 19, 2013
Explication of the Slides
Slide 1 represents the frontispiece of Bacon’s Great Instauration, which may be found in Francis Bacon, Novum
Organum. Translated and Edited by Peter Urbach and John Gibson. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), ii.
Slide 2 represents the title page of the Head Edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, which may be found in Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Edited, with Introduction, by Edwin Curley.
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), lxxviii.
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 34
Slide 3 represents the frontispiece of Vico’s New Science, which may be found in Giambattista Vico, The New
Science of Giambattista Vico. Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of “Practic of
the New Science.” Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Frisch. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1984), 2.
Slide 4 represents the frontispiece of Rousseau’s First Discourse, which may be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Discourses and other early political writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.
Slide 5 represents the frontispiece of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, which may be found in Rousseau, The
Discourses and other early political writings, 112.
Slide 6 represents and magnifies the detail from the bottom right-hand corner of the frontispiece of the Second
Discourse, wherein the huts of the Hottentots are depicted.
Slide 7 represents the ‘Thetis’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On
Education. Translation and Introduction by Allan Bloom. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), ii. A portion of the
illustration on the middle left margin has been boxed in red.
Slide 8 represents and magnifies the detail from the middle left margin of the ‘Thetis’ illustration, wherein the figure
of Charon can barely be discerned.
Slide 9 represents the ‘Chiron’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 76.
Slide 10 represents the ‘Hermes’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 164.
Slide 11 juxtaposes the frontispiece of the First Discourse from Slide 4 with the ‘Hermes’ illustration from Slide 10.
Slide 12 represents the ‘Orpheus’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 261.
Slide 13 represents the ‘Circe’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 76.
Slide 14 represents and magnifies the detail from the top left margin of the ‘Circe’ illustration, wherein a bed canopy
is depicted.
Notes
1
Readers of this lecture, who cannot benefit from the slideshow that accompanied it, should consult the
“Explication of the Slides,” above.
2
Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744)
with the addition of “Practic of the New Science.” Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). Citations to this edition are given in the form [NS page].
3
Plato, Phaedrus. Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Interpretive Essay by James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998).
4
Quotations from Rousseau’s writings are taken from the best editions that are widely available. Quotations from
the First and Second Discourses and the Essay on the Origin of Languages are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The
Discourses and other early political writings. Edited and Translated by Victor Gourevitch. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), and are given in the forms [FD, SD, or EOL page]. Quotations from Emile are from JeanJacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education. Translation and Introduction by Allan Bloom. (New York: Basic
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 35
Books, 1979), and are given in the form [E page]. I also refer in the text to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Correspondance
complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau. Édition critique établie et annotée par R.A. Leigh. Fifty-Two Volumes.
(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1965-1998), in the form [CC Volume:page]; to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected
Writings. Thirteen Volumes. Series Editors Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly. (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England, 1992-2010), in the form [CW Volume:page]; and to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres
complètes. Five Volumes. Series Editors Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1964-95), in the form [OC Volume:page]. Translations from CC and OC are my own.
5
These engravings were not ready for the first edition of the novel, and so were at first published separately,
accompanied by narrative descriptions of the “Subjects of the Engravings” [CW 6:621-628] that indicate the high
level of detail Rousseau meant his illustrations to communicate. As he writes at the beginning of his discussion of
these illustrations,
Most of these Subjects are detailed so as to make them understood, much more so than they can be
in the execution: for in order to realize a drawing felicitously, the Artist must see it not as it will be
on his paper, but as it is in nature. The pencil does not distinguish a blonde from a brunette, but
the imagination that guides it must distinguish them. The burin cannot render highlights and
shadows well unless the Engraver also imagines the colors. In the same way, with figures in
motion, he needs to see what precedes and what follows, and accord a certain latitude to the time
of the action; otherwise one will never capture well the unity of the moment to be expressed. The
Artist’s skill consists in making the Viewer imagine many things that do not appear on the plate;
and that depends on a felicitous choice of circumstances, of which the ones he renders lead us to
presuppose the ones he does not. Therefore one can never enter into too much detail when one
wants to present Subjects for Engraving, and is absolutely ignorant of the art [CW 6:621].
6
For an example of Rousseau’s care with the details of his illustrations, consider this passage from a letter to his
publisher, Duchesne, written on March 7, 1762:
The change that was made to the flames [in the Thetis engraving] on my advice is very bad, and
spoils the effect of the engraving which the lit portion brought out a great deal; I would wish that
my stupidity in this respect be fixable. I will be more hesitant the next time to give my advice, for
fear of committing another. And yet to this point I have not been mistaken in matters of effect [CC
10:142-143].
7
Why is a satyr an appropriate allegorical representation of common men? Rousseau writes at some length about
the mixed or monstrous character of modern human beings in Book One of Emile [E 37-41]. He attributes this
mixture to contradictions between the education we are given by nature, and the one we are given by men. The
satyr, half beast and half man, is a good image for the kind of monsters that we are, according to Rousseau. It
follows that if the education of nature were to have its way with us, we would be nothing other than beasts.
8
See Plutarch, Moralia. Volume Two. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1962). Citations from this work are given in the text in the form [Volume.section].
9
My discussion of Rousseau’s illustrations in the next five sections of this lecture has benefited considerably from
John T. Scott’s unpublished paper “The Illustrative Education of Rousseau’s Emile,” which he was kind enough to
share with me.
10
Charles Eisen, who designed the engraving for the Second Discourse, also designed the engravings for Emile
[Scott, 6].
11
Rousseau rejected the idea that the engravings should be identified by inscriptions explicating the action depicted
in each. In one letter to his publisher he writes,
I do not believe that inscriptions at the bottom of the engravings are needed: one ought not to
explain at all what is clear: we could just number the page and the volume there, to which each
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 36
engraving is related; but I fear that the binder will move it [each engraving] to that page, whereas
each engraving ought to be at the head of a book” [CC 10:143].
In a later letter, Rousseau continues,
[i]t is not possible, Sir, that the inscription of the engraving remain as it is; the way in which it has
been cut into two lines forming two sort of little rhyming verses, [is] very ridiculous, and I must
warn you that anyway we will redo the inscriptions; since there are changes to be made to those
that I have sent you, one ought not to have them engraved without alerting me. I would be of the
opinion, then, that we erase the inscription completely, if it’s possible to do so without much
trouble. If you would rather leave it in, and consequently put one on all the others (and I consent
to it if you judge it appropriate) in this case this one absolutely must be rewritten in the following
way, since once again it cannot remain as it is. Thetis dips Her son / in the Styx. See p. 37 [CC
10:150].
12
Rousseau instructed his publisher that, with the exception of “Orpheus,” each engraving was to be placed
opposite the first page of each book:
The citations of pages that you had engraved at the top of each engraving will certainly lead the
binders and signature-sewers to commit an error. They will place the engraving facing the cited
page, instead of putting it at the beginning of the book or volume, as is said in the explication.
You must attempt to prevent this. There should be an engraving as frontispiece for each volume
and another in the first volume at the head of the second book [CC 10:222-223].
13
As Scott rightly notes, Bloom mistakenly has the explications point to the pages on which the engravings are
found, rather than the pages of the text to which the engravings refer [Scott, 9-10].
14
Rousseau also uses the terms “fable” and “allegory” in his description of the frontispiece to the First Discourse.
See the discussion of the Prometheus illustration, above, the Discourse itself, [G, 16 n *], and the Letter to Lecat
[CW 2:179].
15
How does the fear of death cause Thetis to neglect to breastfeed her son? Breastfeeding might entail implicit
acknowledgement of one’s mortality, because it involves explicit acknowledgement of one’s subordination to one’s
offspring. Rousseau advocates familiarizing young girls with the fear of death early in their educations, whereas he
recommends keeping this fear from young boys. See Book Five of Emile [E 379-380].
16
References to this work are to Statius, Achilleid. Edited and Translated by D.R. Shackleton Bailey. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and are given in the text in the form [Book.line numbers].
17
Scott points out that Rousseau is “coy” about whether the tutor and the pupil in this example are Jean-Jacques and
Emile. In the example itself he distinguishes himself from “the man who speaks in this example” [E 141], and
presumably thereby distinguishes the pupil from Emile. But in one place later in the text he refers to Emile as the
pupil in the example [E 153], and in another to Emile’s “former races” [E 436]. Earlier, Rousseau had written that
he “will not be distressed if Emile is of noble birth” [E 52]. See Scott, 18.
18
Scott notes that the only reference in Homer to the “most righteous of the centaurs” is to his medicinal skill,
which he taught to Asclepius and to Achilles. See Iliad IV.219 and XI.832. It may be significant that Asclepius
tried to use these skills to overcome death. Scott also helpfully directs us to the first chapter of Xenophon’s
Cynegeticus, where Chiron is mentioned as a master of hunting, and to the eighteenth chapter of Machiavelli’s
Prince, where he is a metaphor for knowing “how to use the beast and the man.” See Scott, 15-16.
19
Another difference between Thetis’ and Chiron’s treatments is that Thetis’ are physical, whereas Chiron’s are
psychic. Chiron is a singer, and he teaches Achilles to sing as well. This points to a connection between the
‘Chiron’ illustration and the ‘Orpheus’ illustration.
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20
Rousseau devotes a few pages of Book Two of Emile to a discussion of carnivorousness. Human beings are
naturally vegetarians, he argues, and it is “above all… important not to denature this primitive taste,” not for the
sake of health, but for the sake of character: “it is certain that great eaters of meat are in general more cruel and
ferocious than other men” [E 153]. He follows these claims with a lengthy quotation from Plutarch, of a lurid
passage that argues that while the first carnivorous human beings must have overcome a deep repugnance to eat
animal corpses, they were compelled to do so by natural scarcity [!], whereas modern human beings have no such
excuse [E 154-155]. It may be relevant to note that Statius’ carnivorous Achilles does indeed seem to be cruel and
ferocious. Thetis wants to keep him from the Trojan war by disguising him as a girl and hiding him among the girls
of Scyros. Ashamed to comply, especially by the thought of what Chiron might say, Achilles only goes along with
her plan after he is seized by lust for one of the girls, Deidamia [I.301-303]. Soon afterward, he rapes and
impregnates her [I.640-643]. In some respect, the rest of the story of Emile could be understood as Rousseau’s
attempt to avoid this outcome for his Achilles. Compare the interpretation of the Circe engraving, below.
The vegetarianism of the Achilles depicted in the Chiron illustration could just as well have been indicated
by the depiction of a cake as by the depiction of an apple. Perhaps Rousseau chose the latter to allude to the story of
Adam and Eve, or to the story of the beauty contest that was the first cause of the Trojan War. Or perhaps an apple
is easier to identify in an engraving than a cake.
21
“This novel,” Rousseau writes,
disencumbered of all its rigmarole, beginning with Robinson’s shipwreck near his island and
ending with the arrival of the ship which comes to take him from it, will be both Emile’s
entertainment and instruction throughout the period which is dealt with here [E 185].
It is instructive to see which parts of the novel, falling before Robinson’s shipwreck and after the arrival of his
rescuers, Rousseau considers to be “rigmarole.”
22
Scott points out that the identification of the Egyptian god Thoth or Theuth with the Greek god Hermes only came
after the age of classical Greek literature, in the person of Hermes Trismegistus of the hermetic tradition [Scott, 20].
23
It also makes sense to interpret the beardless youth as Emile, and the older, bearded man as his tutor, JeanJacques – though Rousseau has argued earlier in Emile that a tutor should be as near in age to his pupil as possible:
“a child’s governor ought to be young and even as young as a wise man can be” [E 51]. This interpretation has the
advantage of agreeing with the story of Book Three, wherein Jean-Jacques shows Emile the elements of the
sciences, without allowing him to approach any of the sciences very closely. “The issue is not to teach him the
sciences,” Rousseau writes, “but to give him the taste for loving them and the methods for learning them when this
taste is better developed” [E 172]. It also has the advantage of repeating the strange doubling of Rousseau that we
saw in the ‘Prometheus’ illustration. There Rousseau was at once Prometheus the titan (or Rousseau the author) and
the Citizen of Geneva; here he is at once Hermes the god (or Rousseau the author) and Jean-Jacques the tutor.
24
Another indication of the exceptional character of the ‘Orpheus’ illustration is that in his “Explications” Rousseau
tells us that it “belongs” to the fourth book – again, unlike the illustrations to Books Two and Three, each of which
was said to be “at the beginning” of its book, or the illustration to Book One, which was said to “relate” to that book
[E 36; I have altered the translation]. John Scott details the convincing circumstantial evidence that this engraving is
a late addition: Rousseau’s
instructions for the division of [the] published work come in November 1761, just six months
before it appeared, and include his specification that the third volume should open with the
dramatic introduction to the “Profession.” At this same time, Rousseau also sends his ideas to
Eisen for the engravings for the last two books, and thus his instruction for the engraving of
Orpheus. Finally, the textual reference in Book IV to Orpheus was added only during production.
See Scott, 25 and OC 4:1569.
25
Recall that Rousseau instructed Duchesne to place the ‘Orpheus’ engraving at the beginning of the Profession of
Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. See note 12, above.
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26
There is also a lyre in the ‘Chiron’ illustration.
27
We can detect this disagreement at the end of the Vicar’s speech, where he advises the young Rousseau:
[i]f my reflections lead you to think as I do, if my sentiments are also yours and we have the same
profession of faith... [g]o back to your own country, return to the religion of your father, follow it
in the sincerity of your heart, and never leave it again [E 311].
Since the young Rousseau did not take this advice, we ought to infer that he did not share the Vicar’s sentiment. An
indication of the ground of their disagreement may be seen earlier in the Profession of Faith, where the Vicar claims
that conscience is to the soul what instinct and the passions are to the body. He makes this claim in the context of an
argument that conscience and instinct or the passions are always at odds with one another, and that of these, it is
conscience that speaks with the voice of nature. The young Rousseau tries to interrupt the Vicar at this point, but the
Vicar will not let him speak [E 286-7]. To put the comparison crudely for the sake of brevity, Rousseau and the
Savoyard Vicar seem to agree that conscience is an innate principle of justice and virtue [E 289]; that it speaks in
sentiments rather than in judgments [E 290]; that it therefore differs from reason or the natural intellect, since reason
leads to knowledge of the good and conscience to our love of the good [E 286]; that both reason and conscience are
required for moral action [E 294]; and that the voice of conscience can be stifled but not eradicated [E 291]. But
Rousseau disagrees with the Vicar’s inferences from the contradictory demands of instinct or the passions and
conscience. The Vicar takes these demands to indicate that human beings are composed of body and soul [E 279].
This fundamental dualism leads him to a belief in human freedom [E 281], in the existence of God [E 275; cf. 290
and 295], in the natural sociability of human beings [E 290], and in an afterlife—understood as the place where the
soul, freed from the body, can finally pursue wholeheartedly the demands of conscience [E 282-5]. It also follows
from the Vicar’s hatred of the body and his reliance on the afterlife that, as he sees it, the demands of conscience are
not compatible with patriotism [E 295]. The importance of the Vicar’s dualism becomes clear in his comment that
[i]f conscience is the work of the prejudices, I am doubtless wrong, and there is no demonstrable
morality. But if to prefer oneself to everything is an inclination natural to man, and if nevertheless
the first sentiment of justice is innate in the human heart, let him who regards man as a simple
being overcome these contradictions, and I shall no longer acknowledge more than one substance
[E 279].
By claiming, in his own name, that conscience develops from the selfish human passions [E 235], Rousseau has
already suggested, earlier in Emile, how these contradictions may be overcome. According to his own argument,
then, the Vicar ought to abandon his dualism, and everything that follows from it.
28
References here are to Ovid, Metamorphoses. With an English Translation by Frank Justus Miller. In Two
Volumes. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), and are given in the text in the form [Book.lines].
29
Ovid adds here that Orpheus turns his sexual attentions to young boys, heightening the impression of Orpheus’
burgeoning dislike for women.
30
We find many of the same details in Virgil’s telling of the story in Book IV of his Georgics, though his imagery
does not correspond as closely with Rousseau’s engraving as Ovid’s does. Virgil attributes the fateful backward
glance to “a sudden frenzy [that] seized Orpheus, unwary in his love” [IV.488-489], rather than to any fear of
weakness in Eurydice. And he does not suggest that it was homosexual practices that turned the local women
against the singer. See Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. With an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough.
In Two Volumes. (London: William Heinemann, 1916). The citation above from the Georgics is given in the form
[Book.lines].
31
The Vicar says that his resolve not to profane the institution of marriage
was precisely what destroyed me. My respect for the bed of others left my faults exposed. The
scandal had to be expiated. Arrested, interdicted, driven out, I was far more the victim of my
scruples than of my incontinence; and I had occasion to understand, from the reproaches with
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 39
which my disgrace was accompanied, that often one need only aggravate the fault to escape the
punishment [E 267].
32
As Rousseau later writes in reference to Emile’s first sexual experience, “I have reflected on men’s morals too
much not to see the invincible influence of this moment on the rest of his life” [E 318]. Compare his later
chastisement of readers who “do not sufficiently consider the influence which a man’s first liaison with a woman
ought of have on the course of both of their lives” [E 415].
33
Instead of receiving an otherworldly metaphysical teaching, Emile receives a thisworldly revelation in which
Jean-Jacques explains what he has done for his education [E 323], and then, having thus secured his attention,
initiates him into the mysteries and dangers of sex [E 324]. In reply, Emile asks Jean-Jacques to retain his authority
over him, in order to protect Emile from his own passions [E 325].
34
References here are to Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica. With an English Translation by R.C. Seaton. (London:
William Heinemann, 1912], and are given in the form [Book.lines].
35
Jean-Jacques uses the Sirens as an image of the dangers of sex in his revelatory conversation with Emile, as a way
of impressing on Emile how difficult it will be to heed Jean-Jacques’s authority. “Just as Ulysses, moved by the
Sirens’ song and seduced by the lure of the pleasures, cried out to his crew to unchain him, so you will want to break
the bonds which hinder you” [E 316]. This passage, together with a reference to Ulysses at the beginning of Book
IV of Emile [E 212], leads John Scott to the thoughtful, and to my mind correct, hypothesis that, had Rousseau not
been required by the division of the work into volumes to place an engraving in the middle of Book Four, he would
have placed an engraving of Odysseus at the beginning of this book. “The engraving to Book V of Emile also
depicts Odysseus,” Scott writes,
and choosing the same figure to illustrate Book IV would have given the work as a whole a
symmetry with the first two books relating the story of Achilles and the last two the story of
Odysseus. […] The choice of Odysseus as the subject for an engraving for Book IV would be
appropriate for novelistic reasons, since the story of Emile’s wandering begins there and continues
into Book V. It would also be appropriate for theoretical reasons, for the taming of Odysseus’
wily pride and his return to domesticity would accord with Rousseau’s reinterpretation of the story
of Achilles in the first two engravings for the work and the philosophical thrust of the work.
See Scott, 25-26. It poses no difficulty for this hypothesis that Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens happens after
his encounter with Circe, according to the Odyssey. Homer writes that Circe warns Odysseus of the danger of the
Sirens, and tells him how escape despite listening to their song [XII.39-54]. In his Epistles, in a passage which
Rousseau knew well, Horace mentions the Sirens and Circe in this order. See note 36.
36
“You know the Sirens' songs and Circe's cups,” Horace writes in the Epistles; “if, along with his comrades,
[Ulysses] had drunk of these in folly and greed, he would have become the shapeless and witless vassal of a harlot
mistress – would have lived as an unclean dog or a sow that loves the mire” [I.ii.23-26]. See Horace, Satires,
Epistles, and Ars Poetica. With an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1942). The reference is in the form [Book.epistle.lines]. It’s likely that Rousseau was familiar
with this source, the next line of which contains the line nos numerus sumus, et fruges consumere nati, which Lecat
cites in his Refutation of the First Discourse [CW 2:133], and which Rousseau later quotes in Book Two of Emile
[CW 13:296].
37
References to the Odyssey are to Homer, The Odyssey of Homer. Translated with an Introduction by Richmond
Lattimore. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), and are given in the text in the form [Book.lines].
38
Those who would argue that Circe offers herself to Odysseus because she recognizes who he is need to find a way
to explain the details of Hermes’ advice. He does not advise Odysseus simply to identify himself to Circe.
39
This work, which seems unfinished, and was not published during Rousseau’s lifetime, consists of two letters
written by Emile to his tutor Jean-Jacques. In the first, Emile describes how, after Sophie bears him a son and a
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 40
daughter, Jean-Jacques leaves, and Emile and Sophie’s misfortunes begin. Sophie’s parents soon die, then her
daughter by Emile. Consumed with grief, she is taken by Emile to the capital city for distraction, accompanied by a
friendly couple. They spend two years in the capital, during which time Emile and Sophie are both corrupted. Their
friends turn out to be libertines, and the female friend apparently ends by persuading Sophie to engage in an
adulterous affair with the friend’s husband. Sophie then reveals this affair to Emile, and the resulting pregnancy.
He is thunderstruck; he roams the capital in a passionate fury. But once he calms down, Emile leaves the capital and
takes work as a carpenter, while he deliberates about what to do. He decides to leave Sophie and to take his son
with him; but he is dissuaded from the latter on learning of a secret visit by Sophie, who fears precisely this.
Instead, Emile flees Sophie and the capital, heading south.
In the second letter we read that Emile, arriving eventually in Marseilles, embarks for Naples as a common
sailor. Unfortunately, the captain of his ship is in cahoots with the Barbary pirates. When the captain’s treachery
becomes clear, Emile kills him, but is taken by the pirates and – as soon as they see he will not be ransomed – sold
into slavery. As a slave Emile is put to use, first as a craftsman and then as a laborer on public works. When the
latter situation becomes dangerously onerous, Emile plots with his fellow slaves to go on strike: an action which
ends with Emile being made the overseer of the other slaves. He performs so well in this position that he attracts the
attention of, and is eventually sold to, the Dey of Algiers – at which point the primary manuscript breaks off. Two
passages in the first letter suggest that, had the work been completed, we would have read of the deaths of Sophie
and of Emile’s son as well [CW 13:685-721].
40
It would have occurred to Rousseau that illustrations could be used to this end if he was familiar, as seems likely,
with Vico’s New Science, whose allegorical frontispiece is composed of what Vico calls “hieroglyphs,” to which he
devotes thirty paragraphs of explanation, and which he says are intended “to give the reader some conception of the
work before he reads it, and, with such an aid as imagination may afford, to call it back to mind after he has read it”
[NS, 3]. There is no conclusive evidence, as far as I can tell, that Rousseau read Vico, but there are suggestive
similarities between their thoughts. The editors of the Pléiade edition remark that the Essay on the Origin of
Languages especially raises the question of whether Rousseau read Vico while he was in Venice, but that decisive
proof is lacking [OC 1:1548; 5:1545].
41
“Every general idea is purely intellectual,” Rousseau writes in the discussion of language in the Second
Discourse; but
if the imagination is at all involved, the idea immediately becomes particular. Try to outline the
image of a tree in general to yourself, you will never succeed; in spite of yourself it will have to be
seen as small or large, bare or leafy, light or dark, and if you could see in it only what there is in
every tree, the image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely abstract beings are either seen in
this same way, or conceived of only be means of discourse. Only the definition of a Triangle
gives you the genuine idea of it: As soon as you figure one in your mind, it is a given Triangle and
not another, and you cannot help making its lines perceptible or its surface colored. Hence once
has to state propositions, hence one has to speak in order to have general ideas: for as soon as the
imagination stops, the mind can proceed only by means of discourse [SD 148].
In the first chapter of the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau adds that the language of gesture, which
when frozen in time becomes drawing, is just as natural as spoken language, but easier and less dependent on
conventions: “for more objects strike our eyes than our ears, and shapes exhibit greater variety than do sounds; they
are also more expressive and say more in less time” [EOL 248].
42
While Rousseau claims that “[t]he ambassador [left] his present and [departed] without saying anything” [E 322],
Herodotus writes that the messenger said, “let the Persians… if they were clever [sophoi] enough, discover the
signification of the presents” [IV.131]. See Herodotus, The History. Translated by David Grene. (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
43
One of Rousseau’s examples in the Essay is of the Levite of Ephraim, who cut the body of his wife into twelve
pieces to rouse the tribes of Israel against the tribe of Benjamin. About this sign, Rousseau writes, “[a]t this ghastly
sight they rushed to arms… [a]nd the Tribe of Benjamin was exterminated” [EOL 249-250]. But in Judges, the
source of the story, we read that while the Israelites were outraged at the sight of the woman’s dismembered corpse
[19:30], they needed a speech to determine them to attack those responsible in Gibeah [20:4-9]. Another of the
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 41
examples in the Essay is of King Saul, who dismembered his plow oxen to being Israel to the assistance of the tribe
of Jabesh. But in I Samuel we read that Saul accompanied the parts of his dismembered oxen with a threat.
“‘Whoever does not come out after Saul and after Samuel, thus will be done to his oxen!’ And the fear of the Lord
fell on the people,” the scripture writer concludes, “and they came out as one man” [11:7]. Again, while Rousseau
claims in the Essay that the orator Hyperides got the courtesan Phryne acquitted “without urging a single word in her
defense” [EOL 250], we read the following in Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, XIII:
Hyperides spoke in support of Phryne, and when his speech accomplished nothing, and the jurors
seemed likely to convict her, he brought her out in public, ripped her dress to shreds, exposed her
chest, and at the conclusion of his speech produced cries of lament as he gazed at her, causing the
jurors to feel a superstitious fear of this priestess and temple-attendant of Aphrodite, and to give in
to pity rather than put her to death. Afterward, then she had been acquitted, a decree was passed to
the effect that no speaker was to lament on another person’s behalf, and that no accused man or
[woman] was to be put on display while their case was being decided [590e-f].
See Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters. Edited and Translated by S. Douglas Olson. Volume VI. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 411-413. Finally, the same criticism could be made of Rousseau’s use of the
example of Antony, at the end of his digression in Emile. “On the death of Caesar,” he writes, “I imagine one of our
orators wishing to move the people; he exhausts all the commonplaces of his art to present a pathetic description of
Caesar’s wounds, his blood, his corpse. Antony, although eloquent, does not say all that. He has the body brought
in. What rhetoric!” [E 322-323]. According to Plutarch’s “Life of Antony,’ though, Rousseau’s likely source,
Antony behaved differently:
[a]s Caesar’s body was conveying to the tomb, Antony, according to the custom, was making his
funeral oration in the market-place, and perceiving the people to be infinitely affected with what
he had said, he began to mingle with his praises language of commiseration, and horror at what
had happened, and, as he was ending his speech, he took the under-clothes of the dead, and held
them up, showing them stains of blood and the holes of the many stabs, calling those that had done
this act villains and bloody murderers. All which excited the people to such indignation, that they
would not defer the funeral, but, making a pile of tables and forms in the very market-place, set
fire to it; and every one, taking a brand, ran to the conspirators’ houses, to attack them [II, 489490].
Antony uses the language of signs to concentrate the passions generated by his spoken words.
44
Rousseau claims to be following Horace in drawing this conclusion. And indeed, we read in On the Art of Poetry,
“[l]ess vividly is the mind stirred by what finds entrance through the ears than by what is brought before the trusty
eyes, and what the spectator can see for himself.” Yet Horace follows up with this qualification: “you will not bring
upon the stage what should be performed behind the scenes, and you will keep much from our eyes, which an actor's
ready tongue will narrate anon in our presence [180-184].” The examples he gives of such things are of atrocities
and miraculous transformations. If these things are more striking when imagined than when feigned on the stage,
they may indicate a limit to the energy of the language of signs.
45
“The object that is exhibited to the eyes shakes the imagination, arouses curiosity, keeps the mind attentive to
what is going to be said” [E 322], Rousseau explains in Book Four of Emile.
46
The other examples are, first, “Alexander placing his seal on his favorite’s mouth,” and second, “Diogenes
walking before Zeno.” The first is a reference to Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander,” paragraph 39 [E 491 n 68]. The
story told there involves a friend of Alexander who had read a letter from Alexander’s mother, advising Alexander
to desist from giving magnificent gifts, because this made their recipients equal to kings and made them many
friends, while stripping Alexander bare. The gesture was meant to tell the friend to keep silent about the advice,
which Alexander had been keeping secret. The second phrase is a reference to Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the
Philosophers, VI.39 [E 491 n 69]. The text only says that when “someone” told Diogenes there is no such thing as
motion, he got up and walked around. In both examples, though, the significance of the action depends on the
communicating parties having a considerable amount of experience in common: the content of Alexander’s mother’s
letter, in the first case, and the claims of Zeno’s paradoxes in the second.
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47
According to Herodotus, the messenger reported “that Thrasybulus had made no suggestion at all, and indeed he
wondered what sort of a man this was he had been sent to, a madman and a destroyer of his own property” [V.92].
Despite his ignorance of the message, the messenger’s judgment of Thrasybulus was good.
48
In the Letter to Raynal, an early reply to criticisms made of the First Discourse, Rousseau answers the claim that
“[i]t is impossible to be too emphatic about truths that clash so head-on with the general taste, and it is important to
deny chicanery every possible hold” by saying that “I am not altogether of the same opinion, and I believe that
children should be left some baubles” [G, 31; italics in the original]. Compare what Rousseau says about the
illustrations in Emile in a letter to his publisher: “I am very happy with the illustrator, and even with the engraver,
and I am, like children, quite taken with beautiful images” [CC 10:151].
49
Rousseau’s first examples showing the superiority of the ancients have to do with covenants. When the gods
ruled instead of force, he tells us, covenants were solemnly made in their presence, and these covenants were
recorded in the “book” of the earth: in stones, trees, and heaps of rocks. “[T]he faith of men was more assured by
the guarantee of these mute witnesses than it is today by all the vain rigor of the laws” [E 321]. He implies that by
swearing in the presence of these objects, the ancient Israelites made it more likely that their covenants be kept –
that is, that the language of signs persuaded men to act faithfully. What, then, was the basis of this persuasion?
Rousseau gives four examples of ancient covenants – all taken from Genesis. The first is to “the well of the
oath” [Genesis 26:32-33; Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this example, a pact is struck between Isaac and Abimelech in which
the latter pledges not to attack the former, because “[w]e have clearly seen that the Lord is with you” [Genesis
26:28], and a well is dug called the well of the oath. The evidence that the Lord is with Isaac seems chiefly to have
been the flourishing of the Israelites that followed once Abimelech realized that Isaac was Rebekah’s husband, and
put him under his protection. Second, Rousseau mentions “the well of the living and seeing” [Genesis 16:14;
Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this case Hagar encounters a messenger of the Lord, who promises her that she will bear a son
named Ishmael, “a wild ass of a man – / his hand against all, the hand of all against him, / he will encamp in despite
of all his kin” [16:12]. This covenant leads Hagar to return to Sarai and to endure her abuse, but it also promises
centuries of conflict. Third, Rousseau cites “the old oak of Mamre” [Genesis 18:1; Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this
passage, the Lord appeared to Abraham in the form of three men, and they promised Sarai that she would have a
child. The same three men went on to visit, and destroy, Sodom and Gomorrah. And finally, Rousseau mentions
“the mound of the witness” [Genesis 31:46-48; compare Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this last example we read about how
Jacob, having taken flocks and daughters from Laban, made a pact with the latter to draw a boundary between them
[31:52]. Jacob is able to make this pact because, he claims, God was with him [31:42] in his theft – that is, the theft
succeeded.
What these examples seem to have in common is that in each case the covenant symbolized by a natural
object was concluded against the backdrop of an indirect or direct demonstration of the power of God. We are led to
conclude that while the signs concentrated the memory of these demonstrations of power, it was the demonstrations
themselves – in other words, an experience of force – that aroused the interest of the contracting parties, and
persuaded them to be faithful. The examples thus illustrate how persuasion is based on the tyrannical exercise of
force.
50
The only exception, if that is what it is, to the rule that Rousseau’s historical examples of the language of signs
involve tyrants, is the example of Diogenes and Zeno [E 322].
�
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The very pictures of education: on Rousseau's illustrations in Emile
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Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 1
“Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are”:
Machiavelli on Human Nature
How do the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli appear to us today? There is no small risk
that, whenever we crack the spines of The Prince or the Discourses on Livy, we will find these
books to be boring. Full of historical details, full of admittedly colorful and even shocking
anecdotes, they nonetheless appear to teach us only what we already know: the maxims of
amoral, or immoral, prudence, that ‘the end justifies the means,’ or that ‘might makes right.’ To
say that we already know such things does not mean that we believe them, of course. Perhaps in
extreme circumstances, with lives at stake, we might grant that it is necessary to be
Machiavellian; but who really expects to find himself in extreme circumstances? Most of the
time, among family, friends, and fellow citizens, we try to be good, to do what is right. We
might grant, while smothering a yawn, that we sometimes need to be Machiavellians. But we
would not say that we are Machiavellians.
And yet Machiavelli’s books are not just full of striking maxims about how we should
live, like “men should either be caressed or eliminated” [P 3:10].1 They are also full of striking
claims about how we do live, claims that Machiavelli offers in support of these maxims. “[M]en
should either be caressed or eliminated, because they avenge themselves for slight offenses but
cannot do so for grave ones” [P 3:10] – because, that is, only death can stop a human being from
seeking revenge, even for a slight injury. Behind or beneath the Machiavellian maxims about
how we should live, there appears to be a Machiavellian account of how we do live – an account
of what human beings are, an account of human nature. Could this account be true? And if we
find it to be so, are we compelled to be, not just rainy day Machiavellians, but Machiavellians
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 2
through and through? These questions, it seems to me, run a lesser risk of being boring.
Tonight I will sketch this Machiavellian account of human nature, chiefly as it is found in
The Prince, but with some reference to the Discourses on Livy. In concentrating on these two
books, I will be following Machiavelli’s advice, at least to some extent. In the Dedicatory Letter
of The Prince, he suggests that it contains all that he has learned and understood; while in the
Dedicatory Letter of the Discourses he writes that it contains as much as he knows and has
learned [P DL:3-4; D DL:3; compare TM, 17]. Either book on its own would presumably suffice
for the experienced student of Machiavelli. But for relative beginners like ourselves, it is helpful
to have the same matter given two different forms. What I hope to show by this sketch is that we
underestimate Machiavelli if we consider him simply as a teacher of amoral or immoral practices
that we can take or leave as we conduct our lives. To the extent that Machiavelli’s account of
human nature is shared by his successors, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau – to
whose thought we trace our political institutions and our understanding of ourselves – we may be
forced to acknowledge his account of human nature as our own. It may turn out that deep down,
where it counts, we are Machiavellians, even though we do not appear to be so, even to
ourselves.
This lecture will have three parts. In the first, I will offer the desire to acquire as the
main element of human nature as Machiavelli depicts it, and show how in a political setting this
desire ramifies into two humors, that of the great and that of the people. In the second I will
sketch goodness as the excellence of the popular humor and virtue as the excellence of the humor
of the great, and I will connect Machiavelli’s distinction between goodness and virtue to the
famous ‘turn’ in Chapter Fifteen of The Prince from the imagination of a thing to its effectual
truth [P 15:51]. In the final part I will suggest that Machiavelli’s view of human nature points to
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 3
a science of human nature without a distinctively human element – what Machiavelli calls a
“science of sites” – and I will raise some difficulties with this science, difficulties that originate
in Machiavelli’s own writings.
I
Readers who leaf through the pages of The Prince or the Discourses in search of the
phrase ‘human nature’ are bound, at first, to be disappointed. As far as I can tell, Machiavelli
never uses the phrase in either work. Mentions of nature, by contrast, are easy to find. In The
Prince, for example, Machiavelli writes of the natures of nonliving things, like sites, mountains,
low places, rivers, and marshes [P DL:4, 14:59]. He writes of the natures of living things, like
beasts, foxes, and lions [P 18:69, 70; 19:78]. He writes of the natures of particular human
beings, alone or in groups, like peoples, governments, ministers, emperors, princes, and cautious
men [P DL:4; 6:24; 4:18; 7:30; 17:68; 19:76; 23:95; 25:99, 100]. He even writes of nature in
general as something that contains things [P 7:26], and that causes particular men to incline in a
certain way [P 25:100].2 But each time he writes about nature, Machiavelli sidesteps the phrase
‘human nature.’ He is willing to write as if particular beings have natures, he is willing to
include particular human beings among these beings, and he is willing to imply that all beings
fall within nature in some general sense; but nature in each of these cases is subhuman or
superhuman – that is, not specifically human. The closest Machiavelli comes to writing about
human nature in The Prince is a single claim he makes about the “nature of men” – that they are
“obligated as much by benefits they give as by benefits they receive” [P 10:44]. Even there, he
does not dignify the nature of men with the specific adjective ‘human.’
Nonetheless, there are plenty of hints in The Prince that Machiavelli thinks that human
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 4
beings do have a nature, if only in the sense of an abiding character. Early in the work, for
example, he considers “a natural difficulty” and “another natural and ordinary necessity” that
confront a new prince: that “men willingly change their masters in the belief that they will fare
better,” but that “one must always offend those over whom he becomes a new prince” [P 3:8].3
In the immediate sequel Machiavelli treats these natural necessities that follow from the
character of men as “universal causes” [P 3:9],4 and suggests that they contribute to an
apparently permanent “order of things” [P 3:11] that endures despite the changes brought by
time [P 3:13; 10:44].5 Later in The Prince he invokes “human conditions” in much the same
way, to explain why a prince cannot have, nor wholly observe, all of the qualities that are held
good [P 15:62]. The conditions in question can be summarized in a single phrase: men are
wicked unless necessity makes them good.6 As with the other natural necessities felt by a new
prince, Machiavelli implies that these conditions will never change, as long as there are human
beings. If they did change, his description of the situation of the new prince, and of the political
situation more generally, would cease to be true.
Similar claims about the abiding character of human beings can be found in the
Discourses, in a somewhat more explicit form. In that work Machiavelli warns early on against
the error of thinking that men, among other things, have “varied in motion, order, and power
from what they were in antiquity” [D I.P.2:6]. To the contrary, “[w]hoever considers present and
ancient things easily knows that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the
same humors, and there always have been” [D I.39.1:83].7 Not just human beings but human
things have a permanent character: they “are always in motion, either they ascend or they
descend” [D II.P.2:123]. Perhaps as a result, the world has a permanent character too: “I judge
the world always to have been in the same mode,” Machiavelli writes, “and there to have been as
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 5
much good as wicked in it” [D II.P.2:124]. He even flirts, indirectly, with the idea that the world
is eternal. “To those philosophers who would have it that the world is eternal,” he writes, “I
believe that one could reply that if so much antiquity were true it would be reasonable that there
be memory of more than five thousand years – if it were not seen how the memories of times are
eliminated by diverse causes, of which part come from men, part from heaven” [D II.5.1:138139]. It is reasonable, then, that there be no memory of more than five thousand years, even if
the world is eternal. So is the world eternal? However this may be, Machiavelli regards the
world as lasting enough that he can claim that human things have an abiding character. “It has
always been, and will always be,” he announces, “that great and rare men are neglected in a
republic in peaceful times” [D III.16.1:254]. Men “have and always had the same passions, and
they must of necessity result in the same effect” [D III.43.1:302]. If it were to turn out that the
abiding character of human beings included an element specific to human beings, an element that
was a cause or principle of human motion and rest, then despite his avoidance of the term,
Machiavelli could be said to have an account of a specifically human nature.
The best candidate for such an element, in The Prince and the Discourses, is the desire to
acquire. In The Prince this desire sets the tone for the whole book. Machiavelli mentions it in
the first sentence of the Dedicatory Letter, writing “[i]t is customary most of the time for those
who desire to acquire favor with a Prince to come to meet him with things that they care most for
among their own or with things that they see please him most” [P DL:3]. In the particular form
of the desire to acquire a principality, this desire dictates the concerns of the first half of the
work, and is mentioned in three of the first fourteen chapter titles;8 while the second half, which
examines “what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends”
[P 15:61], can be understood as containing advice about how to keep an acquisition. But when
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 6
Machiavelli formulates this desire as a principle, he writes, “truly it is a very natural and ordinary
thing to desire to acquire” [P 3:14], without saying for whom, or for what, this is very natural
and ordinary. He does continue, in the immediate sequel, “and when men do it who can, they
will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the error
and the blame” [P 3:14-15], but this amounts to saying that praise and blame are specifically
human, not that the desire to acquire is.9 In the Discourses Machiavelli elaborates: “nature has
created men so that they are able to desire everything and are unable to attain everything” [D
I.37.1:78]. As a result, “human appetites are insatiable, for since from nature they have the
ability and the wish to desire all things and from fortune the ability to achieve few of them, there
continually results from this a discontent in human minds and a disgust with the things they
possess” [D II.P.3:125]. While Machiavelli says that the insatiable appetites and the discontent
and disgust that they produce are specifically human, they are also effects of a cause that is not
specifically human: nature in general.
Not only does Machiavelli fail to insist that the desire to acquire is specifically human; he
also fails to assign the desire a specific end. In The Prince and the Discourses he depicts human
beings who desire to acquire material things like cities and provinces, states and kingdoms,
friends and partisans, and spiritual things like reputation, glory, and knowledge. But he never
argues that these are the proper objects of the desire to acquire. Instead, he asserts in the
Discourses, “each willingly multiplies that thing and seeks to acquire those goods he believes he
can enjoy once acquired” [D II.2.3:132; compare II.4.2:137]. The desire to acquire can have
anything as its object, then, so long as the one who acquires it believes he will enjoy it. But the
omnivorousness of the desire points again to its insatiability. Since the object of the desire is
nothing in particular, but rather acquisition for the sake of enjoying possession, and since
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 7
possession inspires only disgust and discontentment, the acquiring being goes from expecting
future enjoyment to feeling present dissatisfaction, and the desire to acquire must seek a new
object. Machiavelli is right, then, to call this desire a desire to acquire, since it aims at no object
in particular, but rather at acquisition, which is to say the feeling of acquisition, in general.
Human beings feel discontent and disgust with what they have; they enjoy only when they feel
that what they have is increasing.10 The desire to acquire thus resembles a drive to grow, since
its end is an increase in one’s own, without any intrinsic concern about whether one’s own is also
good.11
Understood in this way, the desire to acquire has both external and internal consequences.
Externally, this desire drives isolated human beings to acquire without limit and without
exclusion – in the Discourses Machiavelli mentions that it is even possible to “acquire the
world” [D I.20.1:54]. It follows from this that isolated human beings are almost entirely
formless.12 Perhaps this is one reason for Machiavelli’s practice of using “matter” as a term for
the human beings who are potential subjects of a prince [P 6:23; 26:102, 104]. But in a political
setting, when human beings live together, their desires to acquire interfere with one another, and
form arises. In The Prince, Machiavelli proclaims that in every city and every principality, “two
diverse humors are found” [P 9:39; compare 19:7613]: the people and the great. These humors
are defined by their characteristic appetites: “the people desire neither to be commanded nor
oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people” [P 9:39].14 In
the Discourses, Machiavelli calls these humors the nobles and the ignobles, and writes,
“[w]ithout doubt, if one considers the end of the nobles and of the ignobles, one will see great
desire to dominate in the former, and in the latter only desire not to be dominated; and in
consequence, a greater will to live free, being less able to hope to usurp it” – that is, to usurp
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 8
freedom – “than are the great” [D I.5.2:18].15
Lest we think that Machiavelli means that the people or the ignobles do not desire to
acquire, and that his two humors are therefore different natures,16 rather than ramifications of the
desire to acquire, Machiavelli points in the Discourses to their common source. Having just
characterized the difference between the nobles and the ignobles, he restates it paragraphs later
as the difference between “those who desire to acquire” and “those who fear to lose what they
have acquired,” and then explains that tumults are most frequently generated by those who
possess, because “the fear of losing generates in [them] the same wishes that are in those who
desire to acquire; for it does not appear to men that they possess securely what a man has unless
he acquires something else new” [D I.5.4:19].17 Machiavelli thereby blurs the difference
between the people and the great: fearing to lose has the same effects as desiring to acquire.
Later in the Discourses he makes much the same point, insisting that the difference between a
prince’s and a people’s way of proceeding “arises not from a diverse nature – because it is in one
mode in all” [D I.58.3:117], and that the popular desire for freedom is an effect of the desire to
acquire [D II.2.1:129].18 If these assertions are not enough, Machiavelli also tells a characteristic
story in the Discourses about Clearchus, the tyrant of Heraclea, who, finding himself caught
“between the insolence of the aristocrats… and the rage of the people,” “decided to free himself
at one stroke from the vexation of the great and to win over the people to himself.” By having
all the aristocrats cut to pieces, “he satisfied one of the wishes that peoples have – that is, to be
avenged. But as to the other popular desire,” Machiavelli continues, “to recover freedom, since
the prince cannot satisfy it, he should examine what causes are those that make [peoples] desire
to be free. He will find that a small part of them desires to be free so as to command, but all the
others, who are infinite, desire freedom so as to live secure” [D I.16.5:46]. Even if the humor of
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 9
the great is eliminated from a city or a principality, the remaining popular humor reforms itself
into two humors: the people, and the great.
These Machiavellian indications that the humors of the people and the great are
ramifications of the more fundamental desire to acquire also indicate that it is political life that
chiefly causes these ramifications. In isolation the desire to acquire knows only the feelings of
pleasurable increase or disgusting stasis; the desire to oppress, on the one hand, and the fear of
oppression on the other arise only in the political encounter with other more or less powerful
desires to acquire. Machiavelli acknowledges this in his brief account of the origins of political
life in the Discourses. “[S]ince the inhabitants were sparse in the beginning of the world,” he
writes, “they lived dispersed for a time like beasts; then, as generations multiplied, they gathered
together, and to be able to defend themselves better, they began to look to whoever among them
was more robust and of greater heart, and they made him a head, as it were, and obeyed him” [D
I.2.3:11].19 Thus arose the universal political struggle between the two humors, in which the
great give reputation to one of their number “so that they can satisfy their appetite under his
shadow,” while the people give reputation to one of the great “so as to be defended with his
authority” [P 9:39].20
The desire to acquire also has internal consequences: namely, the ramification of the
present into the past and the future. Like any desire, the desire to acquire involves opposing a
painful, factual present to a pleasant, counterfactual future. A being animated by such a desire
must be able to distinguish what it actually possesses from what it might possess, in order to
direct itself away from the former and toward the latter. So a being who desires to acquire, in
particular, must have memory, a continuing sense of its possessions, and foresight, a sense of
what its possessions might become. In the healthy case, its memory will be the basis of its
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 10
dissatisfaction with the present, and its foresight, the basis of its hope for the future. As
Machiavelli puts it in the Discourses, the insatiability of human appetites makes men “blame the
present times, praise the past, and desire the future, even if they are not moved to do this by any
reasonable cause” [D II.P.3:125].
It is the people or the ignobles in particular who blame the present and praise the past,
since their knowledge of the past is less accurate than their knowledge of the present, and past
things in general are neither feared nor envied [D II.P.1:123]. Moreover, memory supports the
popular form of the desire to acquire – the fear of loss – by preserving an inaccurate but
venerable past, and arguing that excellence consists in this preservation [D I.10.2:31]. Memory
encourages men to honor the past and obey the present, and thereby discourages conspiracies [D
III.6.1:218]. And when it involves fearsome events, memory can bring a state back to its
beginnings, and so preserve it [D III.1.3:211]. Perhaps unsurprisingly, memory is therefore also
an obstacle to the great or the nobles’ desire to acquire, especially when acquisition brings
innovation [P 2:7, 4:19, 5:21]. It is the first concern of new sects to eliminate the memory of
their predecessors, for example [D II.5.1:139]. But memory can also serve the foresight of the
great: if it helps to maintain a nation in the same customs for a long time, it makes it easy for
human beings to know future things by past ones [D III.43.1:302; compare I.39.1:83-84].21
Since the future is on this account the realm of hoped-for acquisition by the great, or
feared loss by the people, while the present is the realm of real possession, whether unsatisfying
to the great or satisfying to the people, the ramification of the present into the past and the future
is also a differentiation between the factual and counterfactual worlds, or between the real and
the imaginary. Taken together, the humors of the people and the great and the ramification of
the present into the past and the future explain the typical progressivism of the great, who want
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 11
to live in the future that their desire to acquire foresees, and the typical conservatism of the
people, who want to remain free of this future.22 Taken together, these forms of the desire to
acquire explain why each of Machiavelli’s humors has its corresponding understanding of human
excellence.
II
So far we have considered the desire to acquire as the core of human nature, according to
Machiavelli. We have also sketched the chief implications of this desire, showing how in
political settings it issues in a progressive great and a conservative people. Each of these
humors, it turns out, also has a characteristic understanding of human excellence: for the people
excellence is goodness, and for the great, excellence is virtue [D I.17.1-3:47-48; compare MV,
24-25]. We will discover, as we try next to fill in the content of goodness and virtue according
to Machiavelli, that the difference between goodness and virtue is also connected to his famous
distinction, made in The Prince, between the “effectual truth” and “imagined republics and
principalities” [P 15:61].
Perhaps because of its focus on the perspective of the great, goodness is only mentioned
twice in The Prince, both times in an ironic and disparaging way. Having begun his
consideration of ecclesiastical principalities with the claim that they are maintained without
virtue or fortune, Machiavelli concludes with the pious hope that “with his goodness and infinite
other virtues” Pope Leo X will make the pontificate “very great and venerable” [P 11:47]. In a
likeminded remark later in the book, during his survey of the fates of the Roman emperors,
Machiavelli notes that Emperor Alexander was of such goodness that he never made use of
summary execution. But he was also held to be effeminate, for which he was despised,
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 12
conspired against, and assassinated [P 19:77]. These examples distinguish goodness from virtue,
and can hardly be said to recommend goodness to a prince. In the Discourses, by contrast, there
is a fuller and less dismissive discussion of goodness. Machiavelli claims that it is the
characteristic excellence of peoples, as opposed to princes, writing that if the glories and the
disorders of princes be reviewed, “the people will be seen to be by far superior in goodness and
glory.” Princes, he explains, are superior to peoples in ordering, but peoples are superior to
princes in maintaining the things ordered – which is why they attain the glory of those who order
[D I.58.3:118]. Despite having characteristically retracted half of his praise of peoples,
Machiavelli leaves them with their superiority in goodness.
This excellence consists, then, in maintaining what is ordered at the founding of a sect, a
republic, or a kingdom, and promulgated by education [D III.1.2:209; III.30.1:280]: namely, the
laws, which are maintained by being obeyed by the people. Both peoples and princes show
goodness when they obey, and so are restrained by, the laws [D I.58.2:116; compare
III.24.1:270, III.46.1:307]. Indeed, early in the Discourses Machiavelli asserts, “the knowledge
of things honest and good” first arose out of the people’s obedience to the great. “[S]eeing that if
one individual hurt his benefactor,” he explains,
hatred and compassion among men came from it, and as they blamed the
ungrateful and honored those who were grateful, and thought too that those same
injuries could be done to them, to escape like evil they were reduced to making
laws and ordering punishments for whoever acted against them: hence came the
knowledge of justice [D I.2.3:11-12].
Now because goodness consists chiefly in obedience to the laws, it is closely connected
to religion as the basis of the laws [D I.11.3:35; I.55.2:110, 111], and to conscience as their
internal enforcement [D I.27.1:62; I.55.2:110]. Through obedience to the laws, goodness
procures and defends freedom [D I.17.1:47], which as we have seen is the goal of the people’s
modified desire to acquire. Lest we think that goodness consists solely in obedience to the laws,
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 13
Machiavelli mentions one example that “shows how much goodness and how much religion”
were in the Roman people. When the Senate issued an unpopular edict that required the plebs to
sacrifice to Apollo a tenth of the booty taken in a recent victory, “the plebs thought not of
defrauding the edict in any part by giving less than it owed, but of freeing itself from it by
showing open indignation” [D I.55.1:110]. Goodness consists chiefly in obedience to the laws,
but perhaps more importantly, in the refusal to use fraud even when one disobeys. It is almost
the same thing as honesty.
Machiavelli signals, in several places, that the opposite of goodness is corruption [D
I.17.1:47; I.55.1:110; III.1.2:209; III.30.1:280]. But there is reason to think that a more
thoroughgoing opposite to this excellence of the people is the excellence of the great, virtue.
This is not just because, as we have seen, Machiavelli is contemptuous of goodness in his book
on princes, nor just because the superiority of princes to peoples in ordering means that they
must destroy a prior order that others are trying to maintain. It is not just because virtue is
inimical to goodness. Rather, it is because goodness can also be inimical to virtue. We see how
so in one of the examples Machiavelli gives to illustrate the goodness of the matter and the
orders of Rome: that of Manlius Capitolinus, who found no one to support his rebellion against
the Senate and laws, and was condemned by the Roman people to death. “I do not believe that
there is an example in this history more apt to show the goodness of all the orders of that
republic than this,” Machiavelli concludes, “seeing that no one in that city moved to defend a
citizen full of every virtue, who publicly and privately had performed very many praiseworthy
works” [D III.8.1:238].23
In contrast to his account of goodness, Machiavelli’s account of virtue is developed more
fully in The Prince, and in particular in the book’s second half, Chapters Fifteen and following,
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 14
where he turns to consider “what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects
and with friends” [P 15:61]. This statement of what remains of his project implies that the first
half of the book considered what the modes and government of a prince should be with
foreigners and with enemies; and when we see that the explicit subject of the first half of The
Prince is “How Many Are the Kinds of Principalities and in What Modes They Are Acquired”
[P 1.T:5] – that is acquisition – this implication is confirmed. We seem to be on a firm
Machiavellian footing: with foreigners and enemies the prince follows the desire to acquire,
while with subjects and friends he practices virtue. The generality of Machiavelli’s opening
statement on virtue might therefore come as a surprise. “A man who wants to make a profession
of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good,” he writes. “Hence it
is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to
use this and not use it according to necessity” [P 15:61]. Necessity, and not the difference
between friend and enemy, or subject and foreigner, determines whether the prince should be
good or wicked. The “so many who are not good” include friend and foe alike. To be able to act
as necessity demands, we will learn, is virtue.
Machiavelli connects his new account of virtue to his famous move from the imagination
of a thing to its effectual truth, or from how one should live to how one lives [P 15:61]. Before
considering this connection, though, let’s follow his development of this account of virtue in the
chapter of The Prince devoted to whether a prince should be honest. Since combat with laws –
what we might call the combat of the good – is often not enough, one must have recourse to
combat with arms: so “it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the
man” [P 18:69]. The ancients understood this necessity, and communicated it by depicting the
centaur Chiron as the teacher of Achilles. “To have as a teacher a half-beast, half-man,”
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Machiavelli writes, “means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both
natures” [P 18.69]. We have mentioned that Machiavelli is willing to say that there is a nature of
princes [P ED:4]: this nature now seems to be something more comprehensive than the nature of
a man or the nature of a beast, if it is capable of using, or imitating [P 19:78], both of these
natures. “Thus, since a prince is compelled of necessity to know well how to use the beast,”
Machiavelli continues, “he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend
itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves. So one needs to be a fox to
recognize snares and a lion to frighten the wolves” [P 18:69]. Each animal, then, has a single
defect that is remedied by the other: the fox’s astuteness remedies the lion’s gullibility, while the
lion’s fierceness remedies the fox’s contemptibility [compare P 19:79].
But if each of the two bestial natures that the prince should use has a single defect that is
remedied by the other, what use does the prince have for the other component of the centaur: the
nature of a man? Machiavelli has implied that this nature is needed for combat with laws, since
this is “proper to man” [P 18:69]; but we would be forgiven for doubting him, since he has also
claimed, six chapters earlier, that good arms are the necessary and sufficient condition of good
laws [P 12:48]. We might begin to suspect that combat with arms is also sufficient, and that the
prince who knows well how to use the nature of the fox and the lion has no need of the nature of
man in addition – that he could be entirely inhuman, all beast. But Machiavelli has more to say.
“[I]f all men were good, this teaching would not be good,” – if all men were honest, that is, there
would be no snares, and it would suffice for a prince to be a lion – “but because they are wicked
and do not observe faith with you, you also do not have to observe it with them” [P 18:69].
There are infinite modern examples, he claims, in which “the one who has known best how to
use the fox has come out best,” because a faithless prince has ensnared the gullible. “But it is
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 16
necessary,” Machiavelli continues, “to know well how to color this nature, and to be a great
pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple and so obedient to present necessities that he
who deceives will always find someone who will let himself be deceived” [P 18:70]. The nature
of the fox needs to be colored because its astuteness is limited to recognizing snares, as opposed
to setting them. There is a use for the nature of man after all: it equips an otherwise brutish
virtue with the specifically human ability to lie.
In restating his conclusion, Machiavelli makes it clear that his discussion of “In What
Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes” [P 18.T:68] is really a discussion of his account of all
virtue, which is to say a discussion “Of Those Things for Which Men And Especially Princes
Are Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61], or a discussion of human excellence in general. “[I]t is not
necessary,” he writes, “for a prince to have all the above-mentioned qualities [the traditional
virtues and vices] in fact, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them” [P 18:70; compare
15:62]. Lest we infer that it is necessary to have some of these qualities, he then sharpens his
restatement: since “by having them and always observing them, they are harmful; and by
appearing to have them, they are useful,” it is necessary to “remain with a spirit built [edificato]
so that, if you need not to be those things, you are able and know how to change to the contrary”
[P 18:70]. To use a nature, or to imitate a nature, turns out to mean not to have but to appear to
have that nature. But to appear to have a nature one does not have is to lie. So the specifically
human ability to lie seems sufficient to generate the appearance of, and therefore sufficient to
make use of, all the other natures a virtuous prince might need.
This reading is supported by the discussion of Severus in the next chapter of The Prince.
Since Severus was a new prince whose actions were great and notable, Machiavelli wants “to
show briefly how well he knew to use the persons of the fox and the lion, whose natures I say
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 17
above are necessary for a prince to imitate” [P 19:78]. These natures are now persons, things
that can be impersonated. “[W]hoever examines minutely the actions of this man will find him a
very fierce lion and a very astute fox” [P 19:79], Machiavelli continues, again omitting to
mention the person or nature of a man. But it turns out that being like Severus is not sufficient
for the best kind of prince: “a new prince in a new principality… should take from Severus those
parts which are necessary to found his state and from Marcus [Aurelius] those which are fitting
and glorious to conserve a state that is already established and firm” [P 19:82]. Since we know
from the Discourses that those parts are called goodness, we might conclude that this is the use
of the nature of a man. But Marcus was an enemy of cruelty [P 19:76], whereas Severus was
very cruel [P 19:78], so the new prince who combines their parts will be neither, though he will
know how to appear to be both. In other words, the virtuous desire to acquire uses the
specifically human ability to lie to impersonate a man, just as much as to impersonate a lion or a
fox.
Understood in this way, the nature of the prince is something built, rather than something
grown. But this is also true of the nature of peoples. Recall Machiavelli’s practice of referring
to the people as “matter” to be formed by the prince [P 6:23; 26:102, 104], and his claims that
knowledge of goodness arises from obedient gratitude to the great, and knowledge of justice
from laws to protect against ingratitude [D I.2.3:11-12]. If the excellence of the people is
goodness, the maintenance of orders founded by the great, then the nature of peoples is
something built by the great, just as the nature of the great is something built by the great
themselves. The great, we might say, and especially the prince, give form both to their own
formless desire to acquire, and to that of the human beings around them. And they are guided in
this formation by necessity.
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Machiavelli means this foundation on necessity to justify his claim in The Prince that by
departing from the orders of others in his discussion of virtue and goodness, and focusing on “the
effectual truth of the thing” rather than on the imagination of it, he is writing something “useful
to whoever understands it” [P 15:61]. Imaginary republics like Plato’s and imaginary
principalities like Christ’s, which “have never been seen or known to exist in truth,” are used to
illustrate how one should live – that is, they are used to support goodness. Real republics and
principalities, by contrast, are used by Machiavelli to illustrate how one does live. That there is a
difference between how one should live and how one does live is a sign of the failure of the
imaginary realm to make human beings completely good, and a sign of the need to turn to the
real. “Hence it is necessary for a prince,” Machiavelli concludes, “if he wants to maintain
himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity”
[P 15:61].
So the virtuous live in the realm of the real, according to Machiavelli, while the good live
for the most part in the realm of the imaginary, or the counterfactual. The virtuous live in the
present, which exists, while the good live mostly in the future, which does not. What is
surprising about this conclusion is that it exactly contraries the conclusion we came to in our
analysis of the desire to acquire, which had the humor of the people seeking to maintain present
possessions, and the humor of the great hoping for future acquisitions. In other words, each
humor of human nature, each way that the desire to acquire expresses itself in a political setting,
must need the native realm of the other. The good people need an imaginary future because their
desire to acquire, frustrated by the competing desires of the great, is limited in the real world to a
hope for maintenance; only in another world, or in a city in speech, can they hope to avenge their
subordination and become great. The virtuous great, by contrast, need the present because their
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 19
practice of lying – that is, their construction of imaginary worlds – for the sake of future
acquisition needs to be informed by present necessities imposed by the people they are lying to;
in other words, they require goodness for their virtue to be effectual. The difference between
goodness and virtue, we could say, is the difference between an ignorant self-deception and a
knowing deception of others.
III
Having concluded our sketch of Machiavelli’s view of human nature, understood as the
desire to acquire, with its two humors and their corresponding excellences, we might begin to
wonder whether this view is true. This is too big a question to explore in the final part of this
lecture, though Machiavelli’s view does have the merit of explaining a common moral
phenomenon: the concern of those who are trying to be good, that they might be the dupes of
those who are not. Instead, this final part is devoted to a narrower, though related, question: does
Machiavelli think that his account of human nature is true?
Recall that in the fifteenth chapter of The Prince Machiavelli claims to turn from the
imagination of a thing to its effectual truth, and from how one should live to how one lives [P
15:61]. He makes these claims right after announcing his turn to “what the modes and
government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends” [P 15:61], and presumably
away from what his modes and government should be with foreigners and with enemies. The
first chapter of The Prince, by contrast, refers in its title to the modes in which principalities are
acquired [P I.T:5], and so announces the subject of the first part of the work. The suggestion in
both parts of The Prince, then, is that what human beings should do follows directly from what
they in fact do. What human beings in fact do provides the content of necessity, on the basis of
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 20
which virtue acts. Moreover, Machiavelli’s distinctions between foreigners and subjects, or
between foes and friends, vanish from the perspective of necessity. The first part of The Prince
focuses on acquisition, and so on foreigners and foes, but it treats in the same spirit how
acquisitions are maintained, and so mentions subjects and friends [for example, P 7:29-30].
Similarly, the second part focuses on how the prince should treat subjects and friends, but the
virtues that Machiavelli discusses in this part are needed also for dealing with foreigners and foes
[for example, P 17:67-68]. Perhaps the clearest indication that these divisions vanish from the
perspective of necessity is the title of the fifteenth chapter of The Prince, “Of Those Things for
Which Men and Especially Princes Are Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61]. Attentive readers will
remember that Machiavelli has already, much earlier in the work, said what these things are:
“truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and when men do it who can,
they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the
error and the blame” [P 3:14-15]. The difference between the first and the second parts of The
Prince is the difference between what human beings do to acquire, and what they ought to do.
The first part of the work is chiefly descriptive, the second chiefly hortatory; and Machiavelli’s
exhortation is based on his description: men should learn not to be good – that is, to be virtuous –
because men are not good – that is, they are corrupt. In other words, Machiavelli’s exhortation
to virtue requires two things to be true: that men are corrupt, and that there is a difference
between corruption and virtue. Let’s look at each of these criteria in turn.
One objection to Machiavelli’s claim that men are corrupt is that this may accidentally be
so, but it is not so necessarily. As we have seen, human nature, according to Machiavelli,
consists of a matter that is not specifically human, the desire to acquire, that can be formed to
have specifically human excellences, goodness and virtue. In other words, human nature is
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 21
malleable. (Moreover, Machiavelli is evasive about what is specifically human in goodness and
virtue: in The Prince, as we have seen, he guardedly identifies fraud, which uses or imitates
brutish natures, as specifically human; but since fraud merely serves the desire to acquire, it does
not serve a specifically human end.) In the Discourses Machiavelli makes this malleability more
explicit when commenting on Livy’s disparaging claim that the French begin battles as more
than men, but end them as less than women. “Thinking over whence this arises,” he writes, “it is
believed by many that their nature is made so, which I believe is true; but because of this it is not
that their nature, which makes them ferocious at the beginning, cannot be ordered with art, so
that it maintains them ferocious to the last” [D III.36.1:292]. To be precise, the nature of the
French makes them ferocious at the beginning of battles; it is the failure of this nature that makes
their ferocity lapse. This failure can be avoided, and their nature maintained, by the order
imparted by art. The Roman army, Machiavelli indicates later in the same chapter, exemplifies
such ordering. Nothing its soldiers did was not regulated: “they did not eat, they did not sleep,
they did not go whoring, they did not perform any action either military or domestic without the
order of the consul” [D III.36.2:292]. Not only can the difference between male and female be
maintained by art; art can also constrain the natural movements of growth and reproduction.
This artful ordering of nature produces the excellences that Machiavelli names goodness and
virtue.
But Machiavelli also admits in the Discourses that there are limits to what art can achieve
with its human material. He mentions two reasons why we are unable to change our natures as
necessity demands: “one, that we are unable to oppose that to which nature inclines us; the other,
that when one individual has prospered very much with one mode of proceeding, it is not
possible to persuade him that he can do well to proceed otherwise” [D III.9.3:240]. These
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reasons, which correspond to Machiavelli’s injunction in The Prince that one must both be able
to change one’s nature, and know how to do so [P 18:70], suggest that the limits to malleability
are imposed by the energy and the opinions of each human being.24 Since there will not always
be a human being available with the needed energy and opinions to do what necessity demands
in each case – and this is especially so if, as Machiavelli implies, success renders one’s opinions
inflexible – art will eventually fail to order nature, with a consequent failure of virtue and of the
goodness it orders. A permanently good human order, then, is not to be hoped for, despite the
malleability of human nature. Corruption is necessary, and so virtue is needed.
The requirement that virtue be different from corruption is trickier to establish. We have
seen that both of these forms of human nature are opposed to goodness; they differ because
virtue in departing from goodness looks to a different standard, necessity, whereas corruption in
departing from goodness does not. The difference between virtue and corruption depends, then,
on the existence of knowable necessities in human life. Now we have seen Machiavelli write as
though necessities are knowable by human beings; this is what he seems to mean when he urges
princes to “learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity”
[P 15:61].25 In other words, Machiavelli seems to think that there is a science of necessities. But
in The Prince and the Discourses taken together, Machiavelli mentions science only twice: both
times in a chapter late in the Discourses that asserts that a captain must be a knower of sites, or
of “the nature of countries” [D III.39.T:297; III.39.2:299]. The argument of this chapter closely
parallels that of a similar chapter in The Prince, titled “What a Prince Should Do Regarding the
Military” [P 14.T:58] – a chapter where, admittedly, science is not mentioned. In these two
places, Machiavelli advises that princes, captains, and the great should train in hunting, part of
the practical mode of the peaceful exercise of the art of war [P 14:59].26 Hunting yields
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 23
particular knowledge of the country in which one trains. “First,” Machiavelli writes in The
Prince, “one learns to know one’s own country, and one can better understand its defense; then,
through the knowledge of and experience with those sites, one can comprehend with ease every
other site that it may be necessary to explore as new” [P 14:59]. Particular knowledge becomes
general knowledge, and defensive ability becomes offensive ability, because of a “certain
similarity” between the corresponding features in every country, “so that from the knowledge of
a site in one province one can easily come to the knowledge of others” [P 14:59].27 Machiavelli
makes sweeping claims for his science of sites. Not only is it necessary for a captain to have this
“general and particular knowledge” of “sites and countries” if he wants to work anything well [D
III.39.1:297-298], but it will allow a prince to know “all the chances that can occur to an army”
[P 14:60]. While Philopoemen, Machiavelli’s example of a possessor of this science, led his
army, “there could never arise any unforeseen event for which he did not have the remedy” [P
14:60]. As long as we have the energy to be able to act as necessity demands, the science of sites
guarantees that we will know how to do so.
We might grant Machiavelli’s claim that there are no supernatural kingdoms: that
because all countries are alike in nature, knowledge of one leads to knowledge of all. But why
does he think that a perfected science of sites allows a prince to overcome fortune? A sentence
from the Discourses is helpful here. “Whoever has this practice,” Machiavelli writes, “knows
with one glance of his eye how that plain lies, how that mountain rises, where this valley reaches,
and all other things of which he has in the past made a firm science” [D III.39.2.298]. This talk
of plains, mountains, and valleys should remind us of the comparison in the Dedicatory Letter of
The Prince, between the natures of peoples and of princes, on the one hand, and the natures of
mountains or high places and of low places, on the other [P DL:4]. By limiting his use of the
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 24
word “science” in The Prince and the Discourses to the science of sites, Machiavelli indicates
that there is no science specific to human beings, nor even one specific to living beings. Human
nature and living nature are continuous with nonliving nature, and psychology is continuous with
geography – or better, with physics. The malleability of human nature, then, is great enough that
nonhuman and nonliving phenomena are imitable by human beings, but not so great that human
beings become incalculable as a result.28 Just as there are no superhuman kingdoms, there are no
supermen – though as we have seen there are centaurs.
This understanding of Machiavelli’s science of sites is puzzling, though, because it seems
to require a descriptive treatment of virtue, rather than the hortatory one that we find in the
second part of The Prince. If human beings are as determined and predictable as nonhuman
bodies, why not describe what they do, rather than fruitlessly exhorting them to behave otherwise
than they do? In particular, we would expect Machiavelli to insist that princes do learn to be
able not to be good, and to use it according to necessity, to the extent that they have the most
excellent form of the desire to acquire. Instead, as we have seen, he insists, “it is necessary for a
prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not
use it according to necessity” [P 15:61; emphasis added]. Now what sense does this condition,
“if he wants to maintain himself,” make in the light of Machiavelli’s claim that all human beings,
and the great above all, are driven by the desire to acquire? Since acquisition presupposes the
persistence of the acquiring being, how could a prince not want to maintain himself?29
In the chapter of The Prince devoted to conspiracies, Machiavelli admits that there exist
very rare human beings with “an obstinate spirit,” who do not care about death. A prince cannot
avoid death at the hands of such a conspirator, because “anyone who does not care about death
can harm him” [P 19:79]. Since the threat of death and the consequent loss of all one’s
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 25
acquisitions – the threat of ruin, as Machiavelli puts it – is the paramount necessity faced by
human beings [for example, P 15:61], these very rare human beings apparently fall outside the
scope of this necessity, and therefore outside the scope of the science of sites.30 There is no
remedy available to princes for such unforeseen events. We might expect Machiavelli to try to
account for the existence of such human beings by tracing their obstinacy back to the desire to
acquire, saying, for example, that they do not care about death because they hope for an afterlife
in which they will be rewarded. But he does not do so; instead, he says only that they are
motivated by the desire to avenge a “grave injury” [P 19:79-80; see also D III.6.11:227] – a
desire that can be satisfied in this life, even if one does not long survive its satisfaction.
In the Discourses Machiavelli claims, “private men enter upon no enterprise more
dangerous or more bold” than a conspiracy against a prince [D III.6.1:218; see also III.6.4:223].
In The Prince, by contrast, he writes, “nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of
success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of new orders” [P 6:23].
The obstinate spirit one needs to brave the greatest danger in a conspiracy is presumably also
needed to brave the greatest danger in founding something entirely new, for every new
foundation begins as a conspiracy against the old. We might wonder, then, whether this account
of human nature is adequate to explain the activity of the new prince, or even Machiavelli’s own
activity. Is Machiavelli himself motivated by the desire to acquire? We cannot seriously believe
that a virtuous possessor of the science of sites, for whom, as long as he is armed, no accident
can arise for which he does not have the remedy [P 14:60], could be compelled to endure a
“great and continuous malignity of fortune” [P DL:4]. Machiavelli does make it seem, at the
beginning of the Dedicatory Letter of The Prince, that he desires “to acquire favor with a Prince”
[P DL:3]; but in the Preface to the first book of the Discourses he claims instead that he has
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 26
always had a “natural desire… to work, without any respect, for those things I believe will bring
common benefit to everyone” [D I.P.1:5].
These doubts about Machiavelli’s science of sites – that it ought to preclude the hortatory
character of the second part of The Prince, and that it cannot account for human beings who are
contemptuous of death – suggest that the account of human nature in The Prince and the
Discourses is partial, and that Machiavelli knows it.31 Through these works he means to shape
human nature, to the extent that it can be shaped, by an education that claims that human nature
is more malleable and more predictable than Machiavelli really thinks it is. For the sake of the
common benefit, he means to persuade the great to act as if they are acting only according to
necessity. This project would amount to nothing more than a curiosity in the history of political
thought were it not for its remarkable success. We are the indirect beneficiaries of Machiavelli’s
questionable attempt: we who believe that our natures are malleable, especially by technology;
we who believe in rights founded only on necessities; we who believe ourselves great because of
the dream of acquisition without limit; we who believe in progress, and in the necessity of a
better future; and we who believe ourselves to be the people whose acquisitions the laws of
nature and of nature’s God secure. Without attention to Machiavelli’s account of human nature
we run the risk of remaining the unconscious inheritors at third hand of a partial account, of a
project, posing as a science, to narrow human possibilities through education. We risk being
Machiavellians without knowing it. How is this to the common benefit of everyone?
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
20 June 2012
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 27
Notes
1
References to The Prince and to the Discourses will be given in the text, in the forms [P Chapter:page] and [D
Book.chapter.paragraph:page], respectively. In these references, DL stands for dedicatory letter, P for preface, and
T for title. The editions used are Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince. A New Translation with an Introduction, by
Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), and Niccolò Machiavelli,
Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1996). I also refer to Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders: A Study of the
Discourses on Livy. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001) in the form [MNMO, page]; to
Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) in the
form [MV, page]; and to Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1958) in the form [TM, page].
2
In the former passage, Machiavelli writes, “states that come to be suddenly, like all other things in nature that are
born and grow quickly, cannot have roots and branches” [P 7:26], while in the latter he writes that a man cannot be
found who is so prudent to accommodate himself to changes in fortune, in part “because he cannot deviate from
what nature inclines him to” [P 25:100]. In two passages in the Discourses analogous to the latter passage in The
Prince, Machiavelli writes that we are unable to change in part because “we are unable to oppose that to which
nature inclines us” [D III.9.3:240], and “it is given by nature to men to take sides in any divided thing whatever, and
for this to please them more than that” [D III.27.3:275]. In these last three passages we might expect Machiavelli to
write “his nature” or “our nature,” but he does not. There is one passage in the Discourses where he refers to “the
wicked nature of men” [D III.29.1:277], but he makes the reference while quoting a view with which he does not
agree.
3
In nearby chapters at the beginning of The Prince, Machiavelli uses the phrases “natural prince” [P 2:7] and
“natural affection” [P 4:17] to refer to the prince who inherits a principality and the affection felt for him. The
natural and the ordinary are closely connected at this point in the work, and they both refer primarily to the sequence
of human generation. The new prince is opposed to the natural or ordinary prince in Machiavelli’s argument, and
the natural and ordinary is both an obstacle and an opportunity for him.
4
Machiavelli may mean to contrast these “universal causes” with the “superior causes” that he mentions in his
discussion of ecclesiastical principalities [P 11:45].
5
“[T]ime sweeps everything before it and can bring with it good as well as evil and evil as well as good” [P 3:13],
according to Machiavelli, and “worldly things are so variable that it is next to impossible for one to stand with his
armies idle in a siege for a year” [P 10:44]. There is another reference to an “order of things” much later in The
Prince: “in the order of things it is found that one never seeks to avoid one inconvenience without running into
another; but prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the qualities of inconveniences, and in picking the less
bad as good” [P 21:91].
6
“[O]ne can say this generally of men,” Machiavelli writes, “that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and
dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours, offering you their blood,
property, lives, and children… when the need for them is far away; but, when it is close to you, they revolt” [P
17:66]. Having taught his reader later in The Prince that a prudent lord cannot observe faith, he continues, “if all
men were good, this teaching would not be good; but because they are wicked and do not observe faith with you,
you also do not have to observe it with them” [P 18:69]. Indeed, “men will always turn out bad for you unless they
have been made good by a necessity” [P 23:95]. Machiavelli’s other claims about the apparently abiding character
of men include, “men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone,
touching to a few” [P 18:71], and, “men are much more taken by present things than by past ones, and when they
find good in the present, they enjoy it and do not seek elsewhere” [P 24:96].
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 28
7
Machiavelli repeats this claim much later in the Discourses, in a way that suggests an amendment. “Prudent men
are accustomed to say,” he writes, “and not by chance or without merit, that whoever wishes to see what has to be
considers what has been; for all worldly things in every time have their own counterpart in ancient times. That
arises because these are the work of men, who have and always had the same passions, and they must of necessity
result in the same effect” [D III.43.1:302]. What prudent men say by custom rather than by chance, and not without
merit, is then corrected by what Machiavelli says in the immediate sequel: that it is true that the works of men “are
more virtuous now in this province than in that, and in that more than in this, according to the form of education in
which those people have taken their mode of life” [D III.43.1:302]. Education can shape nature, such that “Men
Who Are Born in One Province Observe Almost the Same Nature for All Times” [D III.43.T:302; emphasis added].
Similarly, when investigating “Whence It Arises That One Family in One City Keeps the Same Customs for a Time”
[D III.46.T:306], Machiavelli argues that this “cannot arise solely from the bloodline, because that must vary
through the diversity of marriages, but it necessarily comes from the diverse education of one family from another”
[D III.46.1:306].
8
“How Many Are the Kinds of Principalities and in What Modes They Are Acquired” [P 1.T:5]; “Of New
Principalities That Are Acquired through One’s Own Arms and Virtue” [P 6.T:21]; “Of New Principalities That are
Acquired by Others’ Arms and Fortune” [P 7.T:25].
9
This suggests another reason why Chapter XV, titled “Of Those Things for Which Men And Especially Princes are
Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61] is also about acquisition.
10
The desire to acquire thus amounts to a desire for novelty. Later in the Discourses Machiavelli writes “men are
desirous of new things, so much that most often those who are well off desire newness as much as those who are
badly off. For, as was said another time [at D I.37.1:78], and it is true, men get bored with the good and grieve in
the ill” [D III.21.2:263].
11
And just as reproduction is growth by other means, so are one’s offspring and their acquisitions one’s own
acquisitions, by other means. Consider Machiavelli’s hints about how Alexander VI used Cesare Borgia [P 11:46].
Death is not simply a limit of the desire to acquire. But compare note 27, below.
Machiavelli does occasionally refer to a good that is the goal of acquisition. For example, in the
Discourses he writes,
[i]t appears that in the actions of men, as we have discoursed of another time [D I.6.3:21-22,
where he wrote of “inconveniences”], besides the other difficulties in wishing to bring a thing to
its perfection, one finds that close to the good there is always some evil that arises with that good
so easily that it appears impossible to be able to miss the one if one wishes for the other. One sees
this in all the things that men work on. So the good is acquired only with difficulty unless you are
aided by fortune, so that with its force it conquers this ordinary and natural inconvenience” [D
III.37.1:294].
But it is not clear that by “the good” here Machiavelli means anything other than any acquisition that can be felt and
so enjoyed.
Also, there are occasional hints in The Prince and the Discourses that some acquisitions can be harmful to
the body that acquires them. In The Prince Machiavelli first raises the possibility of such acquisitions when he tells
his reader that to keep an acquisition the prince must ensure that the acquired body becomes “one whole body” with
the acquiring body [P 3:9]. If the new acquisition instead remains disparate with respect to the prince’s other
possessions, then he runs the risk of losing it. A powerful foreigner can easily gain the lesser powers in a disparate
province, since the lesser powers, moved by their envy of their rulers, quickly and willingly make “one mass” with
the foreign invader [P 3:11]. A prince who rules a disparate state, and who fails to prevent powerful foreigners from
taking advantage of this disparity, will soon lose his new acquisition, and “while he holds it, [he] will have infinite
difficulties and vexations within it” [P 3:11]. So acquisitions can be harmful to the prince and his state as long as
they remain disparate with his other possessions; in general, Machiavelli claims, “the disparity in the subject”
explains why some conquerors hold their acquisitions while others lose them [P 4:19]. This disparity can be
eliminated, and the new acquisition made into one whole body with the acquiring state, by eliminating the new
acquisition’s memory of its previous way of life [P 4:19] – that is, by making the acquisition more complete.
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 29
Acquisition in Machiavelli’s account thus resembles nutrition, in that the acquired body must become like
the acquiring body before it can be good for the acquiring body. As long as an acquisition remains disparate, it
remains undigested, and a cause of “difficulties and vexations.” But it is not until he considers cities and
principalities that live under their own laws before they are acquired that Machiavelli suggests that some
acquisitions are by their nature indigestible. Considering the case of a city, he claims at first that “a city used to
living free may be held more easily by means of its own citizens than in any other mode, if one wants to preserve it
[P 5:20]. But Machiavelli soon admits that this is impossible: “in truth there is no secure mode to possess them
other than to ruin them” [P 5:20]. The acquisition of a free city is necessarily harmful: “whoever becomes patron of
a city accustomed to living free and does not destroy it, should expect to be destroyed by it” [P 5:20-21]. The
indigestibility of such a city results, as we might expect, from the persistence of the memory of its way of life,
despite length of time, benefits received, and anything short of destruction [P 5:21]. So the only secure way for a
prince to keep such an acquisition is to eliminate it, or to live in it – that is, rather than digesting it, to be digested by
it [P 5:21].
This marks the extent of Machiavelli’s admission in The Prince that some acquisitions are not good for the
acquiring body. In the Discourses he writes that “[t]he intention of whoever makes war through choice – or, in
truth, ambition – is to acquire and maintain the acquisition, and to proceed with it so that it enriches and does not
impoverish the country and his fatherland” [D II.6.1:140]. Machiavelli thereby admits that there can be acquisitions
that are not good. A later chapter title, “That Acquisition by Republics That Are Not Well Ordered and That Do Not
Proceed According to Roman Virtue Are for Their Ruin, Not Their Exaltation” [D II.19.T:172], suggests that virtue
might be the necessary and sufficient condition that makes acquisitions good, though Machiavelli ends the chapter
by suggesting that “acquiring was about to be pernicious for the Romans in the times when they proceeded with so
much prudence and so much virtue” [D II.19.2:175]. His most general remark about the goodness of acquisition in
the Discourses comes in a chapter whose title proclaims its concern in part with the causes that eliminate the
memories of things, where Machiavelli asserts in passing that “in simple bodies, when very much superfluous matter
has gathered together there, nature many times moves by itself and produces a purge that is the health of that body”
[D II.5.2:140]. But this remark about the goodness of acquisition, like the analogous discussion in The Prince,
reduces goodness to similarity to the acquiring body: that is, it reduces the good to what is one’s own. It does not
point to the an account in terms of a good that is independent of one’s own.
12
Almost, because the presence of other competing desires to acquire is likely not the only source of formative
effects on the desire to acquire. To the extent that circumstances resist acquisition – one is not strong enough, for
example, to climb the tree to reach the desired apple – the desire to acquire is also given form. But these formative
effects are presumably not as lasting as political ones. If they were, then our common experience of infantile
weakness would yield in everyone the humor of the people.
13
Here Machiavelli writes, “in other principalities” than the Roman empire, “one has to contend only with the
ambition of the great and the insolence of the people” [P 19:76]. In the Roman empire one had to contend as well
with the cruelty and avarice of the soldiers.
14
Later in the same chapter Machiavelli will reformulate this distinction, writing, “the great want to oppress and the
people want not to be oppressed” [P 9:39]. The disappearance of command from his formulation calls for an
explanation, and Machiavelli provides one in the sequel when he claims, “when a prince who founds on the people
knows how to command,” among other things, “he will see he has laid his foundations well” [P 9:41], since
“citizens and subjects” can become “accustomed to receive commands” [P 9:42]. Where oppression is concerned,
the great and the people have nothing in common; but they do have something in common where command that is
not oppressive is concerned. Command is thus the closest thing to a political solution to the existence of two
humors.
15
One difference between the perspectives of The Prince and the Discourses is signaled by Machiavelli’s different
description of the desires of the two humors in the two works. ‘Command and oppress’ in The Prince becomes
‘dominate’ in the Discourses. In the former work Machiavelli distinguishes between kinds of domination; in the
latter he does not.
16
Mansfield writes that according to Machiavelli, morality
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 30
is controlled by natural temperament, by the two humors that divide all mankind and underlie all
moral behavior and opinion. By speaking of humors Machiavelli indicates that they are not habits
of the mind nor mental in origin but prerational dispositions. Not being rational in nature, they
cannot be reconciled by speech or argument. These are two human types who do not understand
each other – the one preferring security and comfort, suspicious of anyone who desires more, the
other seeking risk and demanding honor, unbelieving that anyone could be satisfied with less [MV,
24].
17
Machiavelli’s sudden shift from the plural to the singular in the course of this passage is both striking and
puzzling. Could he mean to imply that men can be made to feel secure in their possession if only one man among
them – their prince, for example, who in a sense has what they have – acquires something new?
18
“It is an easy thing to know whence arises among peoples this affection for a free way of life for it is seen through
experience that cities have never expanded either in dominion or in riches if they have not been in freedom” [D
II.2.1:129]. Moreover, if a republic “will not molest others, it will be molested, and from being molested will arise
the wish and the necessity to acquire” [D II.19.1:173]. The desire to acquire is also an effect of the desire for
freedom.
19
There is a similar but less detailed account in the previous and first chapter of the Discourses. Since all cities are
either founded by natives or by foreigners, and all foreigners were natives elsewhere, then the original foundation of
cities
occurs when it does not appear, to inhabitants dispersed in many small parts, that they live
securely, since each part by itself, both because of the site and because of the small number,
cannot resist the thrust of whoever assaults it; and when the enemy comes, they do not have time
to unite for their defense. Or if they did, they would be required to leave many of their
strongholds abandoned; and so they would come at once to be the prey of their enemies. So to
flee these dangers, moved either by themselves or by someone among them of greater authority,
they are restrained to inhabit together a place elected by them, more advantageous to live in and
easier to defend [D I.1.1:7].
20
That the command of one of the great produces a political struggle between the two humors indicates that this
command is not a perfect solution to the existence of the two humors. This is partly because the great continue to
desire to acquire by oppressing the people. But it is also because the satisfaction of the people’s desire to be free of
oppression cannot amount to a satisfaction of their more fundamental desire to acquire. Even a free people is
compelled to recognize the superiority of the great, whose fundamental desire they share, and to see this superiority
as an obstacle to the satisfaction of their desire to acquire. The result is envy: the desire that the great be deprived of
their superiority. Machiavelli acknowledges this difficulty early in The Prince, when he considers the challenges a
prince faces in holding a recently-acquired province that is disparate from those he already holds. “[T]he order of
things is such that as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a province, all those in it who are less powerful adhere to
him, moved by the envy they have against whoever has held power over them” [P 3:11]. Even or especially
founders face envy [P 6:25], though Machiavelli conceals this difficulty in his concluding exhortation of a prince to
seize Italy and free her from the barbarians [P 26:105]. Since envy persists among the people even when they are
free from oppression by the great, and arises among the great when they elevate one of their number to command the
people, Machiavelli distinguishes envy from fear [P 7:31; D II.P.1:123] and elevates it to a characteristic of human
beings in the Discourses. “[T]he envious nature of men,” he writes there, “has always made it no less dangerous to
find new modes and orders than to seek unknown waters and lands, because men are more ready to blame than to
praise the actions of others” [D I.P.1:15]. The political solution to the existence of the two humors is not just
command, but hidden command.
21
According to Machiavelli, there may be airborne intelligences, by contrast, who foresee future things by “natural
virtue” [D I.56.1:114].
22
This is not to deny that the people, and especially an oppressed people, might long for a future in which they are
free from oppression. But such a future would require that the great be deprived of their superiority. The people are
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 31
typically conservative as long as they cannot imagine a satisfaction for their envy. In a chapter titled “The Multitude
is Wiser and More Constant than a Prince,” Machiavelli admits that under a corrupt prince the people fear the
present more than the future, while under a corrupt people they fear the future more than the present, because in the
future a tyrant might emerge [D I.58.4:119]. But the corrupt case is not the typical one. Similarly, circumstances
might require the great to fear the loss of their acquisitions, rather than to desire further acquisitions – for example,
when threatened by a superior desire to acquire. But this is also an atypical case for the great.
23
Manlius’ fate points to another of Machiavelli’s remarks about goodness. Later in the Discourses, in a chapter
partly titled “For One Citizen Who Wishes to Do Any Good Work in His Republic by His Authority, It Is Necessary
First to Eliminate Envy” [D III.30.T:278], Machiavelli suggests first that “virtue and goodness” can eliminate envy,
and then characteristically revises his claim by adding that “goodness is not enough” [D III.30.1:279, 280] –
implying that virtue, if not sufficient, is at least necessary.
24
Extraordinary energy is needed for a prince to avoid the dangers of either being loved or being feared, according
to the Discourses. “One cannot hold exactly to the middle way,” Machiavelli writes, for our nature does not consent
to it, but it is necessary to mitigate those things that exceed with an excessive virtue” [D III.21.3:263; compare
22.3:266]. Perhaps most difficult is the apparently miraculous feat of ordering virtue and goodness in the same
human being. In the same work Machiavelli praises
the generosity of spirit of those [Roman] citizens whom, when put in charge of an army, the
greatness of their spirit lifted above every prince. They did not esteem kings, or republics; nothing
terrified or frightened them. When they later returned to private status, they became frugal,
humble, careful of their small competencies, obedient to the magistrates, reverent to their
superiors, so that it appears impossible that one and the same spirit underwent such change [D
III.25.1:272].
25
In a later formulation, Machiavelli writes that the prince “needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of
fortune and variations of things command him” [P 18:70].
26
The theoretical mode of the peaceful exercise of the art of war involves reading histories and imitating some
excellent man in the past [P 14:60]. The practical and theoretical modes of the peaceful exercise of the art of war,
added to the wartime exercise of this art, make up the whole art of war, which Machiavelli says should be the only
art of the prince, because many times it enables men to acquire states, and it helps them to maintain them [P 14:58].
Machiavelli wrote a book called The Art of War.
27
Machiavelli repeats this reasoning in the Discourses. “Once one individual has made himself very familiar with a
region, he then understands with ease all new countries; for every country and every member of the latter have some
conformity together, so that one passes easily from the knowledge of one to the knowledge of the other” [D
III.39.2:298]. Without this familiarization with one’s own country, one comes to know new countries either never,
or only after a long time and with difficulty.
28
As Mansfield puts it,
Machiavelli adumbrates the modern scientific understanding of nature that, with Bacon, abandons
natural beings and begins the search for natural laws, but he does no more than adumbrate. Since
he approaches the question of the nature of nature from the standpoint of what is good for human
beings, he remains faithful to the fact that in morals and politics, different natures appear distinct
to us, above all the difference between good and evil [MV, 21].
I mean here to fill out the content of Machiavelli’s adumbration with respect to human nature, and to point out the
resulting tension between his abandonment of natural beings and his fidelity to the natural difference between good
and evil. One sign of this tension is that while the science of sites seems to entail a mechanical or hydrodynamic
account in which lifeless nature is primary [see, for example, P 25:98-99], the examples that Machiavelli offers for
the excellent human being to imitate are chiefly living beings [compare P 25:100-101]. It is not clear whether the
living or the nonliving is the primary category for Machiavelli’s comprehensive science.
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 32
29
A reader who remembers the example of Pope Alexander VI from The Prince might object at this point that
Alexander hoped to continue acquiring after his death, using his son Cesare Borgia as “his instrument” [P 11:46].
But acquisitions made through one’s offspring can be lost to death just as well as one’s own acquisitions, as long as
one’s offspring are also mortal [P 7:31-32]. Also, it may necessarily be the case that a prince’s instruments are
always inferior to him; had he lived, Alexander VI might not have made the errors that Cesare Borgia made
[compare P 7:32-33 with 18:70]. Lastly, the pleasure of an predicted acquisition might necessarily be poorer than
the pleasure of a real acquisition, if one has doubts about the possibility of enjoying it.
30
We learn by Machiavelli’s treatment of the same episode in the Discourses that the centurion with the “obstinate
spirit” was not in fact the initiator of the successful conspiracy. Rather, he was the instrument of a prefect, who was
himself driven to conspire against his emperor by the necessity imposed by the prefect’s fear of death [D
III.6.11:227]. This elaboration does not detract from Machiavelli’s admission that some human beings cannot be
compelled by the threat of death, and so his admission that his science of sites is not comprehensive.
31
There are other details in The Prince that raise similar doubts about the science of sites. For example, Machiavelli
suggests that “obedience to present necessities” is what makes human beings vulnerable to being deceived [P
18:70]. He seems to mean not just that necessities can be manipulated [compare D III.12.1:247], since a human
being would be no less excellent were he to be responsive to artificial necessities as well as to natural ones, nor just
that necessities can be apparent rather than real, since a science of sites would distinguish only real necessities.
Instead, he seems to mean to qualify his claim that it is sufficient for virtue to orient itself by necessity. In the same
chapter Machiavelli also warns that “the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing”; and
there is a similar passage in the Discourses where he writes, “all men are blind in this, in judging good or bad
counsel by the end” [D III.35.2:291]. Again, if necessity were as knowable as Machiavelli elsewhere claims that it
is, judging by the end would not be an instance of blindness or gullibility.
�
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"Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are": Machiavelli on Human Nature
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Black, Jeff J. S., 1970-
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St. John's College
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2012-06-20
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Annapolis, MD
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Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527
Philosophy, Renaissance
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English
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Bib # 80134
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on June 20, 2012 by Jeff Black as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Mr. Black is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is on exactly what constitutes human nature in the work of Machiavelli. In particular, he considers how this view has affected the way we see Machiavelli's works and what it has to teach us about his writings.
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