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The St. John’s Review
Volume 62.1-2 (Fall 2020-Spring 2021)
Double Issue
Editor
William Pastille
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Panayiotis Kanelos, President;
Joseph Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind
review. Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St.
John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or
to Review@sjc.edu.
© 2020 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Arbores Vitae
William Darkey
The “Mysteries of Moderation”
and the Education of Socrates
Janet Dougherty
On Dante’s Commedia:
The Fact of the Fiction and the Truth of the Poem
Jason Menzin
Please Note:
This is a double issue containing both
numbers 1 and 2 of volume 62.
A separate number will not be published
in the spring of 2021.
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��Arbores Vitae
William Darkey
When I was a child I think I knew that the trees played a very
great role in my life, though I could not have reflected much
about it. It was simply a fact of my existence among many others. Now, in recollection, I can see it in a different way, can separate out this aspect of my life for examination, can collect my
separate memories of the trees and try to compose them as a
theme.
As a child I lived among the trees. My earliest memory—of
the bedroom in which I was born—contains a tree—a great
maple tree just outside the window. It whispered to itself, and I
remember the sound. It tossed its branches in the storms. A pair
of orioles hung their nest there every spring. The milkman
stopped his big bay horse under it in the morning. Its great roots,
mysteriously underground, heaved the brick sidewalk where I
rode my wagon, and my father, looking at the swell, would say,
“I guess that tree’ll have to come down some day. I’ll hate to see
it go.” I didn’t quite know what he meant, but it seemed a dreadful prospect. I think that tree must have been my symbolic exit
from the house to the world of nature, as it plunged its roots deep
into the earth and tossed its head into the sky. And, truly, it did
seem to lift itself into the blueness.
I can see in my mind’s eye the rough, giant shagginess of its
trunk. And I can still feel that roughness in the palm of my hand,
and feel the life of the great trunk, feel the dynamic tension of
holding the head up by the grip of the roots. Oh, I knew it was
alive, all right. Alive, and other. Not smooth like my skin, not
smooth like the walls and floors of the house or the wooden
posts of the front porch.
Stronger than anyone I knew. I recognized it as a kind of tutelary
presence, living, mighty, sheltering, benign, yet awesomely other. It
William Darkey (1921-2009) was a tutor at St. John’s College for over
six decades. He was a founding member of the Santa Fe campus and
also served as its Dean. This reminiscence was discovered among his
papers by his stepson, Peter Nabokov, who is a professor in the
Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA.
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was the first tree I ever knew, a kind of patriarch. For me, an incarnation, I suspect, of Ygdrasil. It is so deeply rooted in my memory,
indeed in my life, that I would not be who I am if it were not there.
This is so true that although I know the fancy is false, I cannot help
imagining that everyone has some kind of first tree inside him, a
personal axis that centers him between earth and sky, and that fixes
him all his life for better or for worse to some inner native landscape, consummating a union of person and place.
For me, that tree has no name, no private designation. It has no
symbol. It is simply itself. It is possible that that same tree could
fulfill the same role for another person, but it seems altogether
unlikely that it should be so. It (and the pronoun is wrong, because there are no proper pronouns for trees) and I are a unique
pair, or so it seems to me.
Fifteen years ago, returning to Cumberland, I passed that
house on Patterson Avenue. The tree had been cut down. I suppose that, as my father had long ago predicted, the roots bad
heaved too much of the paving. The house looked shorn, unsheltered and unsheltering, naked to the street, unrelated either to the
earth or to the sky. Unrelated to people. It didn’t look like a good
place to be born.
I can imagine a sort of fairy tale in which a man is born in relation to a tree, and that when the tree is cut down, the man suffers a kind of death.
Now if all of this seems fanciful or, worse, precious or sentimental, what on earth do we mean by our metaphor when we
speak of “roots”?
When I was five years old, we moved to another bouse, not far
away from the one I was born in, but at the end of a street on the
edge of town and on the edge of a wood. The land there until the
turn of the century had been part of a large estate. The section
where our house stood had been the middle of an apple orchard.
Most of the apple trees bad been cut down or had died, and the
land had gone back into second-growth woodland wild cherry,
thorn, locust, and ash, with generous quantities of wild honeysuckle vines and poison ivy. Scattered here and there were a few
ancient apple stumps and a number of second-growth apple trees
mostly untended and wild, though some half dozen in the lot
next to our house had been pruned and trained and, along with
one lone pear tree, still bore a quantity of reliable fruit for whoever might want it—usually small boys perched aloft who ate the
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3
apples green with salt on them, and later with the air of successful primitive gatherers took home bagsful of apples to be made
into applesauce.
These apple trees were heavily leaved and well-domed, with
branches low to the ground, very convenient for climbing. They
taught me that trees are for climbing. At a certain stage of life,
climbing is what you do about a tree. And not just to get its fruit.
The tree lifts you up into another world, a swaying, creaking,
rustling world between earth and sky; a world perfumed by the
dry smell of the bark, the green smell of the leaves, and in the
spring by the smell of the blossoms; a world shared cautiously
with wasps and bees and occasionally, if you are very still, with
the robins and catbirds who are the natural denizens of that
world.
The tree world is very quiet and private. Generally, other people don’t know you are there, and unless you tell them, they
don’t often think of looking for you up there. Such presence with
invisibility is an altogether godlike feeling. And like some other
kinds of pretensions to divinity, it can get you into trouble when
you are found out, by parents who want you for dinner.
Up in a tree is the ideal place in all the world for thinking
whatever it is that children think about. Not, it seems to me, as a
retreat from the world, or as a refuge, at least in a negative sense.
Being in a tree is like paying a call on a wise friend, like conversing, or perhaps sometimes like playing a kind of grave game
with the tree. It is quite simply what you do with a tree. And, of
course, reciprocally, it is what a tree does with you.
The wild cherry trees always seemed to me to be like girls,
small among the other trees, slender, swaying, and in the springtime decked out in lacey tassels. The bark of the young trees is
smooth and red. The branches you climb on often become quite
polished. One such small tree was a favorite refuge of mine. I
recall quite vividly how, when I was told of the death of a favorite cousin, I left the house and climbed up into that tree. I do
not yet know why I did that, and I recall that even at the time the
impulse seemed to come from outside me; but it seemed clearly
the thing to do. After a while my father came and got me. I didn’t
know how he knew where I was; maybe he watched me go. I
think he understood a child’s grief. Maybe he even understood
what the tree had to do with it.
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The woods extended along a ridge into the town in a narrow
peninsula whose tip was just across the street from our house.
After about fifty yards the land fell away very steeply towards
the Potomac River. That slope no doubt had been timbered and
burned over, but to judge from the growth of the trees on it, it
must have been untouched for seventy-five or a hundred years.
There were a few large ash trees, but most were tall, spreading
white oaks, quite unclimbable by small boys, and therefore
rather fierce and forbidding. It was a mysterious region, and I
didn’t often venture far down into it.
Several things of great interest, however, were to be found
near its border. The first of these were some flowering Judas
trees (we called them redbuds), and we took branches of it home
to our mothers in the spring. Bloodroot also grew there, and we
would dig the roots and paint ourselves with the vermillion juice.
And there was sweet anise; we dug the roots and chewed them
for “lickerish.” Violets grew there in profusion, and spring beauties. Once on a solitary quest for one or another of these plants, I
went a little farther down the slope than usual and saw in the
middle distance the trunk of a tree I could not recognize. When I
reached it, I found it was well over a foot in diameter, very
straight and vertical, and its top had somehow broken off long
before about twenty feet above the ground, so that it stood like
what seemed to me a mysterious pillar or monument alone in the
mysterious oakwood. I thought it a very important thing to have
discovered, so I told no one about it for a long time. One day I
pulled off some bark and recognized it as a cedar, since it
smelled like our cedar chest. After a while, I took my father to
see it, and he told me the tree had been struck by lightning. This
confirmed my conviction of the tree’s importance; and I tried to
imagine the awesomeness of the thunder-stroke. I didn’t entirely
know what I meant by my thought, but it seemed mysteriously
wonderful and frightening and thrilling to lay my hands on that
being that once long ago the lightning had selected.
It is not easy to understand how we come to our understanding
of time, of what it means to be very old, older than, for instance,
one’s grandmother, who has white hair. That isn’t quite what one
means by very old. For me, at least, I think it was the trees that
helped me to approach that mystery. Only three trees of my acquaintance ever had proper names. They were, respectively, the
Old Apple Tree, the Old Willow, and the Old Oak. The Old
�ESSAYS | DARKEY
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Apple Tree grew on our own land and was one of the trees of the
original orchard. It was the snag of a stump, good-sized for an
apple tree, coming out of the ground at a slant and rising in a flat
S-curve until its upper third was almost horizontal. None of its
original branches remained at all—I suspect that the storm
which blew the top out of the tree broke the trunk off below the
branches—but the old tree had put out new stems, one horizontal and one vertical. The latter, as if ignorant of its lower parts,
was simply an ordinary ten-foot tree which blossomed and bore
fruit, unmindful of its age. But anyone could see that the supporting trunk was not only of another generation but even of another age, so gnarled and twisted was it, so much larger and
more powerful, that it had endured. It wasn’t that anyone explained to me what was meant by “old,” but when they called
this tree “the Old Apple Tree,” I could see what they meant. I felt
something like respect for the tree, and I never walked under the
slant of the trunk on the downhill side.
The Old Willow was a similar case. It had been an unusually
large weeping willow that had been topped perhaps first by a
storm and later by pollarding, since it grew on a street corner.
Now I knew weeping willows—we had one in the yard, and it
tossed its hair in the wind and dropped its leaves in the fall and
put forth its little greengold leaflets which in the spring smell
like nothing else in the world. This tree was an altogether charming girl. But the Old Willow on the street corner was a frightening travesty of her, with a huge stumpy trunk surmounted by
short, thick branches raised at right angles like threatening arms.
Grotesquely in the springtime it put forth the same little greengold leaves, shed the same pungent odor, tossed the same tresses.
I had the feeling that something lived inside the trunk of that
tree, and at night I would pass it on the other side of the street.
The Old Oak was my great friend. He—for he was without any
doubt masculine or the equivalent of it in the world of trees—
stood on the top of the ridge and on the edge of the slope down
to the river. He was taller by far than any other tree around and
of greater girth. Anyone could plainly see that he was the king of
the woods. Everyone I knew called him The Old Oak, so in a
sense that was his proper name; but in another sense, it wasn’t a
name at all, and my great friend was as anonymously individual
as his whole race and was designated only as the Old one of that
race. That was not his real name, but only our name for him. And
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so we’d say to one another, “I’ll meet you at the Old Oak.” or
“Let’s have the Fourth of July picnic under the Old Oak.”
Long before I knew him, someone had built a fire against the
base of his trunk, so that there a charred hollow curved into the
base of his trunk just above ground level; and the great tree had
compensated as it could by putting out a compensatory curve of
growth on the opposite side. When I first walked into his shade I
was a very small child, and I suspect that I was not aware at all
of the oak’s vast upwardness, but saw only the elephantine great
gray bole and the first spread of branches. Later, even though I
was learning to climb into the kingdom of the trees by way of the
lesser and more domesticable apple and cherry, it did not occur
to me that one could climb into the Old Oak. From a practical
point of view, the trunk was too huge to get any purchase on, and
the limbs, even at the first crotch, were far beyond my reach.
More importantly, there was a presence about this great being
that forbade intrusion into his domain. In due course, however,
as we both grew, and I much faster, I discovered certain knots
and knobs and stubs that were within my extremest reach, so that
with a certain amount of scrambling and what seemed to me
death-defying lurches into nothing I managed to attain the first
crotch. To get back down from there by the way I had come up
was out of the question, and I solved the difficulty by dropping
from the lowest branch into a pile of oak leaves. (It may be said
in passing that the kingdom of the trees is like fairy land in many
ways, and not the least in that it is a realm which, as a rule, one
may enter more easily than he can depart, and rash intruders
have been known to return crippled or worse.)
For quite a long while, I think, I was content to climb to the
first stage and never thought seriously of going higher. Naturally,
however, that thought eventually did come. I wondered what it
would be like to be in the very top of the tree. How far would I
be able to see? I had already known the delight of being in a tree
top in a strong wind, and it seemed to me that the Old Oak might
sway more widely than any of the dwarfs at his feet.
One evening I had been called in from play, and had washed
and changed into clean clothes for supper with unaccustomed
dispatch. I found myself with nothing to do and half an hour left
till suppertime. I knew at once that this was the time to climb to
the top of the Old Oak. The tree was less than a hundred yards
from the house, and I was there in a moment. Up into the first
�ESSAYS | DARKEY
7
crotch. Then a long upward look. The tree forked, and the twin
trunks soared upwards almost parallel to one another. The righthand fork looked more promising, and up I went by that way,
shinneying, holding on to small shooting branches and then, having accepted their help, I had to overcome the hindrance they
presented as I tried to get around them. After some initial success
and considerable elation at being already above the common level of the woods and looking down on the other treetops, I found
my way blocked by a growth of shoots that I could only have
passed by cutting them off.
The other fork was behind me, perhaps three feet away. Manoeuvering desperately and summoning all my courage, I made
the leap, clutching the trunk with arms and legs. Safe. I hung on
for a while until I recovered my nerve and started up again. And
I made it to the very top. The breeze blew; the tree swayed, and I
swayed blissfully. I had done it. No other boy I knew had ever
done it, not even my cousin George who was three years older
and could do everything. Speaking of George, as I looked at his
house I could see that I was significantly higher than the attic
windows and that I was actually looking down on the slate roof.
The thought made a flutter in my stomach, and I gripped the tree
more tightly.
Then I heard my mother’s voice calling me for supper. I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought about getting down, and I’d done
enough tree-climbing to know instinctively that it was likely to
be a problem. I felt foolish. And increasingly scared. So I didn’t
answer.
Mother knew I wasn’t far away, so she walked across the
street and up the path to the clearing where the oak tree stood,
and called again. She looked very small to me down there. I
knew she’d be frightened, and I hated to do that to her. She
called again, and I knew I had to say something.
“I’m up here,” I said in what must have been a small and
sheepish voice.
She looked up, but couldn’t see me in the foliage. “Where?”
she said.
“Up here in the Old Oak,” I said.
She moved about until she located me. I saw her turn pale.
“How ever did you get up there?” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Controlling herself, she said, “Well, you’d better come down
right away. Dinner’s ready.”
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“I don’t think I can,” I said. “I’ve never done it before.”
“Well, you’ll just have to,” she said. Then, seeing that my fear
was increasing, she said, “Come on. You can do it. I know you
can. After all, you got up there.”
“It’s a lot harder getting down,” I said.
“Well, you can’t stay there all night,” she said. “Listen. I’ll
help you. Tell me just exactly what you did to get up, and then
we’ll just do it backwards.”
And it worked. She talked me backwards down out of that
tree. Even across from the one fork to the other. She was surely
more frightened than I was, but she didn’t let it show in her
voice. When I hit the ground she said, “You pick the darnedest
times to do things. Look at you. You’re a sight. Go get washed
for supper.”
“Gee, thanks, Mother,” I said. “I couldn’t ever have gotten
down without you.”
“Sure you could,” she said. “But I’m glad I was here.” Even
then I knew what I’d said was pretty inadequate, but I knew she
knew I knew, so it didn’t matter too much.
In 1936 we got the edge of an Atlantic hurricane, and the Old
Oak went down. In the morning we found it lying headlong
down the hill towards the river. It had never occurred to me that
a god was mortal. I’ve never forgotten.
�The “Mysteries of Moderation” and
the Education of Socrates
Janet Dougherty
Xenophon celebrates the gentlemanliness of Socrates in the Memorabilia. In that work he demonstrates Socrates’s virtue, in particular his justice and beneficence, and shows that he in no way deserved his fate. Xenophon does this by recollecting what he knew
and had heard of Socrates, who spoke “always” about the human
things and, while he persisted in examining “what each of the beings is” (Memorabilia 4.6.1),1 knew in particular the things a gentleman must know (1.1.16; 4.7.1). Others came to him for guidance in how to be gentlemanly (1.2.48). In the Oeconomicus
Xenophon addresses Socrates’s education in gentlemanliness.
Most of the Oeconomicus is devoted to Socrates’s recounting of an
earlier conversation he had with Ischomachus, a man reputed to be
a gentleman truly deserving of the epithet. Literally the Greek term
for gentleman means: “noble (or fine or beautiful) and good” (kalos k’agathos). The gentleman must be a good citizen and he must
manage well his household, including his family, servants and
slaves. Ischomachus thinks of gentlemanliness primarily as a form
of mastery. At the end of the dialogue Ischomachus sums up his
standard for judging any master, including the manager of an estate, praising most highly he who rules over willing subjects.
[I]f . . . he filled each of the workers with spirit, a love of
victory vis-à-vis one another, and each with the ambition
to be most excellent, then I would assert he has something
of a kingly character. And this is the greatest thing . . . in
any work where something is achieved by human beings,
in farming as in any other. Yet I do not say, by Zeus, that
it’s possible to learn by seeing it or hearing of it once, but
I assert that the one who is going to be capable of it
needs education, a good nature, and most of all, to become divine. For it seems to me that this good—to rule
over willing subjects is not altogether a human thing, but,
Janet Dougherty is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
1. References to the Memorabilia may be found in Xenophon, Memorabilia, tr. Amy L. Bonnette (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
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rather, divine; it is clearly given only to those who have
been genuinely initiated into the mysteries of moderation
(τοῖς ἀληθινῶς σωφροσύνῃ τετελεσμένοις); but tyrannical
rule over unwilling subjects, it seems to me, they give to
those whom they believe worthy of living like Tantalus
in Hades, who is said to spend unending time in fear of a
second death (Oeconomicus 21.12).2
Ischomachus is proud of his effective governance over other
members of his estate: he is quite prosperous and has a largely
favorable reputation. But he cannot be confident he has attained
the divine status he describes here. Neither he nor Xenophon’s
readers can affirm the willingness of Ischomachus’s subjects to
submit to his rule, for most of his servants are slaves. The standard he sets for ruling is inspiring; the likelihood that it describes
any gentleman’s household management is small. The pretense,
however, is salutary: Ischomachus aims at a benign form of mastery, if only to avoid the fate of Tantalus. He may be able to convince his servants that he deserves his role. Ischomachus is neither an overt tyrant nor divine.3 But what of Socrates?
The mature Socrates did not rule others, but he set a standard
for those who attended to him (Memorabilia 1.2.18). He willingly offered counsel. A few of his followers—Critias and Alcibiades are named—turned dramatically away from him and became arrogant, but when they were associating with Socrates
they were better behaved—more moderate, Xenophon says
(1.2.25-26). He records a wide array of examples from Socrates’s
life of his beneficial guidance of many and various human beings, including those who sought high political positions. His
continence with respect to physical pleasures was legendary,4
and he encouraged it in others. Continence is not yet virtue, although Xenophon’s Socrates insists that it is a necessary condition. It seems closest to the virtue of moderation. Xenophon’s
praise for Socrates implies that if anyone is moderate, it is he.
Moderation, like all virtue, for Socrates, is wisdom (3.9.4-5). He
seems never to have misjudged an individual, or to have pursued
any good to the neglect of another of higher rank (4.8.11). Is this
2. Carnes Lord’s translation in Robert Bartlett, Xenophon: The Shorter
Socratic Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
3. See Xenophon’s Hiero on the possibility of benign tyranny.
4. Plato, Symposium 216 d-219d and Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.3.5-15.
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the height of moderation that Ischomachus refers to in his final
speech?
Socrates reports the conversation with Ischomachus, which
occurred at an unspecified time in the past, to Crito’s son Critobolus who urgently needs instruction in the art of managing a
household. He seems to have come to Socrates, thinking that he
might have the necessary understanding, maybe even the skill,
though he has no estate. The recounted conversation serves as a
substitute for instruction in the art that Socrates has never practiced. Just before he relates the conversation to Critobolus,
Xenophon has Socrates refer briefly to an important transition in
his life—indeed, the inception of political philosophy. He sought
to understand gentlemanliness, the ‘noble-and-good’ and looked
first toward the most handsome (kalos) men he encountered. Presumably he considered the kalos part of the compound ‘beautyand-goodness’ to be visible to the eye. That effort proved disastrous, for he found that these men had depraved (mochtherous)
souls (Oeconomicus 6.16). No longer trusting in his ability to see
the thing itself he turned to the use of the term in speech. Everyone, he seems to say, referred to Ischomachus as a gentleman.
Socrates not only attended to what he heard from others about
this reputedly most gentlemanly man; he also conversed as soon
as he was able with the man himself.5 He presented himself to
Ischomachus as an aspirant to gentlemanly virtue in need of instruction.
By chance, presumably, Socrates came across Ischomachus in
the marketplace, waiting for foreigners who never turned up. Already frustrated in his effort to understand gentlemanliness,
Socrates engaged the gentleman in a lengthy conversation.
Ischomachus willingly reported on the art of household management as he practiced it and, when Socrates pressed him, on
the details both of how he governed servants and of the art of
farming. Despite his own reputation as an idle chatterer, Socrates
knew that he was capable of learning and said so to his instructor. But he was an odd sort of pupil: he owned no land or slaves
over whom he could exercise the proper sort of mastery, nor did
he have any prospect of acquiring these things. In Xenophon’s
dialogue Socrates does not say whether he was convinced that
5. Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 147-150.
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Ischomachus deserved his reputation, and he does not claim to
have developed all the same virtues. What could he have hoped
to learn from Ischomachus? What did he learn?
Plato’s depiction of Socrates in the Phaedo and Socrates’s account of his “turn” in that work (99e-100a) is rather different
from Xenophon’s, but the two are compatible, just as Socrates’s
beneficence toward others is compatible with the generosity he
shows his followers in Plato’s account of his last day alive. In the
Phaedo Socrates acknowledges that in his earlier days he sought
direct knowledge of the beings. He thought at first he would find
support in his quest for such knowledge from authors such as
Anaxagoras, but he was sorely disappointed. His response was to
turn away from the study of the beings themselves for fear that
his studies would, as it were, lead him to blind himself as men do
who look directly at the sun during an eclipse.6 He maintained
the hope of understanding the beings in general but he redirected
his inquiry, taking as hypotheses what seemed to be “most compelling” (ἐρρωμενέστατον). He devoted his attention primarily to
the speeches of human beings. Their speeches, he notes, include
words like ‘justice’ and ‘good’ and acknowledge that these things
motivate actions. His own account of his unwillingness to escape
Athenian justice exemplifies the tendency. To explain his mature
approach more fully to his companions he announces that he assumes there is something good or beautiful simply and reasons
from these beings to prove the immortality of the soul.
Xenophon discusses neither the young Socrates’s efforts nor
his dying days, and he says nothing about immortality, but the
conversation with Ischomachus that he has Socrates recount in
the Oeconomicus illuminates the same change in Socrates’s
habits. The Clouds is part of the almost explicit background of
Socrates’s conversation with Ischomachus, who complains to
him that he does not know how to “make the weaker argument
the stronger.”7 Aristophanes depicts Socrates in The Clouds as
continent, indeed ascetic, with respect to physical pleasures,
but immoderate in his offer of education to those least suited to
benefit from it, and indifferent to justice. His effect on his
pupils, Strepsiades and Pheidippides, is to erode their self-restraint. In the conversation with Ischomachus Socrates refers to
6. Plato, Phaedo, 99d-e.
7. Aristophanes, Clouds, 888-1104.
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his own bad reputation, an effect of Aristophanes's play;8 he
doubts that he can advise Ischomachus given his infamy (Oeconomicus11.3). But Xenophon’s Socrates shows that he has
already learned the error of the ways Aristophanes attributes to
him: he does not offer to teach Ischomachus, responding instead that maybe he is unable “to make the untrue true.” On
this occasion, Socrates is not only more cautious than in The
Clouds. He is also inclined to defend himself from thoughtless
criticism: his nature is good, he asserts, and his poverty does
not detract from his ability to pursue virtue (11.4-5). He repudiates the attack on his reputation while acknowledging his
lack of the virtue Ischomachus displays. He seeks to acquire it,
starting “tomorrow,” he says (11. 5).
The Memorabilia presents us with a pious, law-abiding
Socrates whose life was wholly respectful of the ways of the
city. His indictment and execution appear simply unjust; his
thought is unwaveringly benign towards the city and its citizens. Since this was not always Socrates’s reputation either
earlier reports were false or they were reports of the immature
character of the thinker. If Socrates’s encounter with
Ischomachus was the turning point in his development of gentlemanliness, the Oeconomicus must be examined with care.
While addressing the question what Socrates learned from
Ischomachus we must consider others: Does Socrates learn by
imitating Ischomachus, or in some other way? What part does
moderation play in Socratic gentlemanliness? I will conclude
by considering how Socrates’s report of his conversation with
Ischomachus may facilitate the education of Critobolus.
*****
There are three parts to Ischomachus’s account of his way of life.
The first focuses on his education of his wife; the second on his
manner of ruling subordinates; and the third on the details of
farming. Each points to a striking contrast between Socrates and
his instructor: Socrates clearly does not educate Xanthippe as
Ischomachus does his (nameless) wife; he is master of no one;
and he never owns land enough to farm. If learning requires
8. Plato, Apology, 19c-d.
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practice,9 Socrates cannot learn the arts of the gentleman, for he
apparently has no occasion to practice those arts. In the conversation with Critobolus that occupies the first six chapters of the
book Socrates acknowledges both that he knows something of
the art of household management and that because of his lack of
experience he could easily destroy rather than enhance Critobolus’s wealth should he take charge. He compares household
management to flute playing: it is not enough to learn about it;
one must possess a flute and play.10 The implication is that if
there are some arts that are exhausted by knowing, and whose
practice requires no prior acquisitions—mathematics is an obvious example11—managing is not among them. No instruments
other than natural possessions are needed for one to practice the
arts of rhetoric and dialectic. The corresponding virtues do not
require wealth in the ordinary sense, nor do they produce marketable goods. These are the sort of virtues Socrates exhibits in
his interactions with others. But wealth, as Critobolus and
Socrates agree, lies not merely in material possessions. It may
include friends and even enemies, anything and anyone which
one can use to one’s benefit (1.5-7). The mature Socrates not
only finds ways to live comfortably but shares good things with
others, according to Xenophon.12 He practices a kind of economic art and manages his companions.13 Still, he will not manage
Critobolus’s estate.
The household, as Ischomachus presents it, aims at maintaining and producing material possessions, things that satisfy needs
and produce a surplus as well. He describes the household itself
as a harmonious blend of nature and convention. The gentleman’s wife, according to Ischomachus, is by nature suited to pre9. See Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.19 on the need for practice to develop virtues.
10. Although Ischomachus convinces Socrates through questioning that
he knows the art of farming, he denies that Socrates can learn the art of
flute-playing through questioning. The less “philanthropic” arts conceal
themselves. But farming, too requires practice. (Compare 2.12-13 and
19.14-19).
11. Plato, Meno, 82b and 85e.
12. Memorabilia, 1.6.14.
13. See Thomas Pangle, “The Socratic Founding of Economic Science,”
Interpretation 45:3 (2020).
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side over the activities that occur within the house just as the
man is by nature suited to outside activities. If her education is
successful, she will accept her permanent confinement to an inside life and commit herself entirely to the prosperity of the
household. Her lack of individuality is so complete that
Ischomachus never mentions her name. Lacking earlier education—her mother apparently told her only to be moderate—
Ischomachus’s wife is dependent on her husband for guidance in
all her daily tasks. She must first learn to put all their possessions
in order according to the frequency and kind of their use. This
requires that she recognize both the character of each object and
the customs and conventions as well as the natural needs it
serves. Ischomachus, confident in his knowledge of all these
things, instructs her. The wife must rule over a hierarchy of subordinates, including those who have authority over the lowliest
inside workers. She must know each of their tasks and how to
accomplish it. She is, according to her husband, like a queen bee,
but he also compares her to a general. If the latter comparison is
meant as flattery, it suggests that she would prefer to be recognized for manly virtues than for simply natural ones. The queen
bee is a natural ruler; she needs no education. The general, by
contrast, is elected to his office and must please the populace,
just as Ischomachus’s wife is obliged to please him. He must
impose order on his soldiers to make them parts of an unnatural
but effective whole that can be victorious in conflicts. The use of
the general as an analogy with the woman of the house implies
that she is responsible for the defense of the wealth of the household against its potential destroyers. It also implies that she must
rule as human beings rule over others. Her role may be in accord
with nature but it requires a good deal of conventional support.
Ischomachus doesn’t insist that all the members of the household are by nature suited to their positions, although he does distinguish among them. He works with his wife, for example, to
select an appropriate housekeeper, someone who is continent,
uses forethought and desires to please (9.11). In the larger world,
Ischomachus acknowledges to Socrates, human beings cannot
always be found in their places: the foreigners whom
Ischomachus intended to meet never arrived. It is this accident of
misplacement that enables Socrates to converse with him at such
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length.14 But the proper places for individuals even within the
household may not be obvious, and therefore it requires significant exertion for the mistress to maintain order. For example,
barriers must be placed between the men’s and the women’s
quarters so that the slaves will not produce children unwanted by
the mistress and master. The workers, mostly if not exclusively
slaves, must be kept at work. It would be very difficult to maintain that this is ruling over willing subjects, and it is certainly not
rule for the sake of the ruled. At best, the members of the household accept that they can do no better than to work well and win
the rewards with which they are encouraged, even if these are
meagre—better clothing and shoes. But Ischomachus’s wife is
quite willing to tend the sick among them for she hopes thereby
to win their affection. She understands at least that they are beings capable of love and hate, loyalty and the opposite, and that
she must strive to win the responses she prefers (7. 37-38).
Socrates raises no objections to Ischomachus’s account of his
education of his wife, and he may hope that Critobolus will attend to its details. Critobolus clearly has done nothing to educate
his own wife and is nonetheless inclined to blame her for bad
management (3. 10-15). Socrates's relationship with Xanthippe,
we learn from Xenophon’s Symposium, is utterly different from
Ischomachus’s with his wife. Whatever the truth about Socrates’s
marriage, it seems true that Socrates wanted to be able to deal
with human beings as they are.15 If he learned from
Ischomachus’s account that he must attend to human needs and
differences, he surely noticed that the order of the gentleman’s
household conceals as well as reflects natural aspects of human
beings. The Socrates of The Clouds made a consistent effort to
understand the objects of his studies on their own terms. In
Aristophanes's play he seems to break from the human scale to
understand nature and not to return to it. Fleas, for example,
jump some number of flea feet, but Socrates’s companions are
pale and emaciated. He accepts as students those who have no
commitment to truth, and he teaches them to disdain the custom14. It is an accident from Socrates’s point of view.
15. See Xenophon’s Symposium 2.10 on the benefit to Socrates from
Xanthippe’s unruliness, in Robert C. Bartlett, ed. and tr., Xenophon:
The Shorter Socratic Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1996).
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ary understanding of what is good and bad, beautiful and repulsive, without concern for practical consequences. Socrates must
learn to see and accept human beings as they are.
Human beings “as they are,” with rare exceptions, are not independent of groupings that incorporate conventional
standards.16 Aristophanes's Socrates’s failing is that he gives no
thought to what enables citizens to thrive together in a family or
a city. When Strepsiades takes revenge on Socrates for his son’s
corruption, he displays his intolerance for the destruction of the
family, which concerns him even more than his debts. The
Socrates of The Clouds attends to the needs of human beings so
little that he causes if not his own demise, the destruction of his
school, his followers, and his place in the city. The Socrates of
the Memorabilia is different, and it seems likely that
Ischomachus’s instruction has helped to alert him to the surface
of human life. He has moderated his drive to unearth truths that
are hidden with the understanding that humans seek, as individuals and in common, both what is good and the beautiful.
Ischomachus believes the inside space of his home reflects the
cosmic order that accommodates human needs and provides advantages for human life. It is orderly and functional, and it supports the variety of human activities, both essential and choice
worthy.17 The gentlemanly Socrates respects the assurance of
Ischomachus that the gentlemen’s rule gracefully blends convention with nature. As Xenophon presents him in the Memorabilia,
Socrates obeys the Athenian laws and upholds the standards of
justice and piety they embody. He examines without violating
the things gentlemen like Ischomachus believe they know: piety,
nobility, justice moderation and courage, and more (Memorabilia
1.1.16). Like the people with whom he converses, Socrates
strives to live well within the larger whole of the city. Like the
household manager, he is thoroughly devoted to the human good;
in his case, his interlocutors’ good as well as his own. To reconcile the goods of individual and community is a noble as well as
16. Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.12-14.
17. Thomas L. Pangle, Socrates Founding Political Philosophy in Xenophon’s Economist, Symposium and Apology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2020), 95-96. Ischomachus improves upon the conventions; his regime might even accommodate the philosopher.
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a moderate goal. Socrates combines this goal with thoroughgoing awareness of discord.
The household order is impermanent and must be maintained
with continuous labor. Ischomachus and his wife know this but
reflect little on the limits to their ability to reform natural beings
they possess. In general, Ischomachus lacks Socrates’s distinguishing characteristic: the awareness of his limitations. Socrates
sends his companions to learn from others when he cannot instruct them (Memorabilia, 4.7.1); there is no evidence that
Ischomachus seeks another’s aid except when he hints Socrates
might help him to defeat his accusers (Oeconomicus, 11.25). He
acknowledges no faults, nor any uncertainties. He appears to understand everything he knows exclusively in relation to its utility
for satisfying needs or procuring wealth. If he misses essential
characteristics, he will not notice, unless they impact the usefulness of an object. Ischomachus’s belief that the order he imposes
reflects the larger order of the cosmos seems willfully naïve (7.
16-34). Yet if there is no such order, if things are not organized
according to kinds that have definite relations to one another in a
larger whole, they may not be knowable at all. Ischomachus’s
well-ordered household provides an image of order that contrasts
with Aristophanes's Socrates’s badly managed household, the
Thinkery, where beings must be encountered one at a time. The
permutations of language alert him to the suspect character of the
distinctions by kinds in speech just as the clouds reflect not the
truth but the characters and imaginings of those who perceive
them. But Socrates’s clever insights preoccupy and distract him
from both the good and the noble.18 The gentlemanly method of
ordering household possessions requires that their uses and their
beauty be taken into account. Socrates learns to take seriously
these criteria, and to consider to what extent knowledge of any
being requires understanding its place in relation to others.19
18. The Socrates of Aristophanes's Clouds treats matters of human concern like justice and injustice as matters of indifference: the unjust
speech wins simply because most people are already corrupt. See lines
1088-1104.
19. Ischomachus’s education of his wife is also an education of
Socrates, who was concerned not only with the order of things that pertain to gentlemanly life, but also with the cosmic order. See Strauss,
Discourse, 147-150.
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Xenophon recollects Socrates as an exemplar of self-knowledge
who sees other humans truly, as they are immersed in the life
they share within the city. His self-knowledge includes knowledge of needs, desires and aspirations, some of which he shares
with other human beings and some of which distinguish him. He
avoids the danger that one who lacks such knowledge imposes
one’s wishes and fears on other beings or fails to recognize
theirs. Socrates learns better how to investigate the beings from
attending to Ischomachus’s account of the flawed education of
his wife.20
*****
After recounting his education of his wife, Ischomachus goes on,
with a bit of prodding from Socrates, to talk about his day to day
outside activities. He gives Socrates a list of what he prays for as
well as a description of the way he spends most of his days
(11.8-18). Much of his activity is devoted to preparing his skills
and his body for war, should he ever have to defend his land and
his city. He must leave his estate fairly frequently and go into
town to attend to his citizen duties. The labor that makes the
farm productive is done by subordinates, mostly slaves. Just as
Ischomachus is confident that he can leave the inside tasks entirely to his now educated wife, he is equally confident that his
stewards and other servants will in his absence manage his affairs just as he would himself. He is so certain of this that when
he talks with Socrates he is in no rush at all to get home.
Socrates presses him for an account of how he makes his subordinates both diligent and loyal. Both parts of this task are difficult. But Ischomachus makes an even greater claim: he makes
some of his servants gentleman, he says, and he treats them as
such (14.9). He fails to mention whether he arms them.
Ischomachus admits that not all his servants can be made diligent. He supplements nature by punishing those who do not follow orders and rewarding those who do. He imitates, he says,
both Athenian and Persian law: he doles out both punishments
and rewards. The method of reward works with those who love
gain and have the foresight to work for their advantage. He distinguishes those “who are induced to be just, not only through
20. See Strauss, Discourse, 157-158 for speculation on Ischomachus’s
wife’s later activities.
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having more than others as a result of their justice, but also
through desiring my praise” (14.9). The only praise they are likely to earn is his, so they strive to demonstrate what he perceives
as loyalty. Ischomachus claims that he educates his stewards to
rule (13.4), and that he treats some of them “as free men, not
only enriching them but honoring them as gentlemen” (14.9).
But especially if they are slaves, even the “gentlemanly” servants, are compelled to accept Ischomachus’s authority because
it has the backing of the laws of the city. Still, he is no doubt correct in noting that some men are motivated only by the satisfactions of needs and gain in general, while others crave honor too.
In the Memorabilia Socrates converses with and benefits both
types. Those who desire honor, the lovers of nobility, believe that
holding high public office establishes their worth. In pursuit of
noble ends even the best of these at times forget to secure their
own good. Socrates educates them in the political things, things
they need to know in order to manage whoever they aspire to
govern, whether it be the cavalry, the entire army, or the city as a
whole (Memorabilia, 3.1-7). He helps them to know better both
the demands of the office and their own natures. Socrates evidently learns not from Ischomachus’s virtues alone but also from
his defects. While Ischomachus exploits his servants’ dependence, Socrates helps some of his interlocutors to see the tension
between what benefits them and what is honored in the city
(3.5.28; 3.7.9). Since he is not moved to seek honor for himself,
he does not rule them but rather gives them the means to rule
themselves. The well managed household helps to illuminate the
problematic character of the pursuit of nobility generally: in the
household one man determines who is honored; in the city presumably all citizens must share in the appreciation of noble acts,
which aim to secure the safety and well-being of the city as a
whole. When the gentleman prospers, he has the wherewithal to
reward his servants; when the city prospers its defenders flourish
and their reputations soar. In both cases, the individuals who win
their master’s praise may sacrifice much for little prosperity of
their own. Still, the standard for success in ruling the city seems
less arbitrary. The difference is not insignificant;21 the similari21. Socrates obscures the difference between household and city especially in Mem.3.4.12. But see Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1972), 63.
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ties point to the fact that the city may require its most distinguished citizens to sacrifice their own good for the questionable
good of the whole.22
In the Memorabilia, Socrates obscures the differences between
the household and the city. For example, in his conversation with
Nicomachides, a soldier who hoped to be elected general, he
praises the virtues of the householder as preparation for rule in
the city. He goes so far as to claim that the wealthy man with no
experience of war who has been elected general is a good choice.
Nicomachides is, not surprisingly, astonished. Although his indignation is probably justified,23 his claim to the office he coveted is not. His experience in facing danger is insufficient to prepare him to lead others. The elected general, Antisthenes, has
been successful in other endeavors—he has, for example, led a
chorus - and has shown his ability to delegate authority to men
who have the necessary understanding and skill. What he supplies is money and the determination to win. Antisthenes is more
of a businessman than a genuinely noble man of distinction. He
wishes to be superior to other men but he does not care to cultivate the virtues for which men are justly praised. That the citizens have elected him is likely a sign that they are less impressed
by individual virtue than by success. Socrates’s defense of the
choice seems to have similar grounds: the virtues of the household or business manager develop out of a straightforward pursuit of goods humans seek. In this case neither candidate for
general seems to consider the good of the city his own good.
Young Pericles, a general and the son of the renowned leader of
Athens, provides a different example. Socrates encourages and
instructs him, for his devotion to the city is genuine and his understanding is strong. Socrates also warns Pericles that his efforts
may fail to secure the good of the city; even so he will be noble
(kalos). Pericles died unjustly at the hands of the city’s leaders
after the successful battle at Arginusae.24
22. In Memorabilia, the most prominent example is young Pericles. See
especially 3.5.28.
23. Thomas Pangle, The Socratic Way of Life (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2018), 125.
24. Debra Nails, The People of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company, 2002), 228; Xenophon, Hellenica 1.6-7.
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Aware of its dangers, Socrates takes nobility seriously. The
aspiration to the most splendid (kalos) deeds, including those
deeds possible only for those who hold high public office, indicates nobility of character. As they protect the city men like
young Pericles exhibit the ability to devote themselves to a good
greater than their own. Socrates teaches thoughtless and ambitious men what noble action would require (3.3 and 3.6). Good
and noble things become visible in the shared life of members of
the household and the city, but they are not exhausted in these
environments. Perhaps because he sees the disparity between
worth and honor, Socrates does not share the aspiration to do
great deeds. Perhaps too he lacks means. It seems most likely,
however, that the pursuit of friendship with the best men he can
find to associate with supplants public recognition. Socrates encourages friendship both with and among his companions. Those
who aspire to be the best men they can be are most attractive as
friends (2.6.28).
The friendship between carefully selected friends is more
moderate and no less admirable than public service: it is directed
to the common good of the friends and less subject to the whims
of public caprice. Socrates shared with his friends the good
things they found in books and in conversation. Xenophon
quotes Socrates’s description:
[R]eading collectively with my friends, I go through the
treasures of the wise men of old which they wrote and
left behind in their books; and if we see something good,
we pick it out; and we hold that it is a great gain if we
become friends with one another.” (1.6.14)
Such good things are of a more reliable and enduring sort.
*****
Ischomachus’s household, in contrast with Socrates’s companions, enjoy in common many goods that satisfy human needs
and provide comfort. The prosperity of Ischomachus’s household benefits the owner most, but especially if Ischomachus
rewards his servants as generously as he indicates, it benefits
all its members. But he aims at creating a surplus.
Ischomachus’s praise is manipulative: he gives it, no doubt, to
those who best serve his interests, not out of love of nobility.
The steward’s love of praise enables the master to train him;
the steward in turn must recognize and exploit the differences
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among lower servants, mostly laborers, with respect to the
power of gain and of praise. He must be sure to benefit and to
praise those who serve the advantage of the master. No doubt a
steward intelligent enough to apply these lessons would be intelligent enough to see that the master is applying the same understanding to himself. The skills Ischomachus’s stewards exercise in directing the laborers who improve the land and make
the farm productive are useful. Within their smaller domain
under Ischomachus’s rule, they rule also, and all prosper if they
rule well. Socrates focuses Ischomachus’s attention on the difficulty that a capable steward would want to serve primarily (if
not exclusively) himself. Even if Ischomachus treats some of
his subordinates as gentlemen, he cannot treat them as equals.
And even if they are his superiors in merit and ability,
Ischomachus must treat them as inferiors who ought to be satisfied with his praise. The city resembles the household in that its
members strive to please those who wield power: the powerful
in turn sometimes strive to serve the city. Convention obscures
as well as reveals what is best in human beings.
In practice the art of household management cannot avoid
imposing conventional distinctions and thereby obscuring natural similarities and differences among men. If justice requires
that each individual be given a place in the whole that corresponds to his abilities and merit, the household, like the city, is
never perfectly just. If moderation implies ruling without exploitation, Ischomachus is not altogether moderate. The
renowned gentleman doesn’t seem to notice the difficulty, and
it would be unhelpful if he did. He is very fortunate if his stewards and ambitious servants are similarly obtuse. Ischomachus
instructs Socrates in moderation, in part by falling short of his
own articulated standard. Socrates voices no objections, but he
displays greater virtues: He always had advice to offer those
who sought it, Xenophon reports, and he never misled anyone.
He encouraged those who came to him to govern themselves.
He had over others a natural superiority that was evident to
most. They offered their gratitude and companionship. Socrates
and his companions as Xenophon represents them in the Memorabilia could be likened to a household—some followed
Socrates assiduously over a long time—but their relations are
based almost entirely on their natural characteristics, and no
competition arises over the goods they share. Only a few could
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have been fellow inquirers into the natures of the beings; many
more must have appreciated the “good things” Socrates delighted in sharing with them. Socrates’s friendships were gentlemanly associations; his guidance was truly moderate rule.
Xenophon calls him “blessed” (makarios) (1.6.14).
The common good Socrates shared with the men who sought
him out was not wealth but friendship, or something akin to it.
Socrates humbled those who pretended to know more than they
did and then guided them toward what he thought best for each.25
Since he did not always know the things he thought each one must
learn, he directed some of his followers to appropriate teachers.
But it was Socrates to whom men came for counsel in gentlemanliness when their fellow citizens and the laws were inadequate
teachers. He knew the things a gentleman must know, and his
knowledge went beyond the conventional understanding. Socrates’s manner of instructing Critobolus in the Oeconomicus is an
example of his disinterested and generous pedagogy. It is up to the
young man to choose how much he will follow Ischomachus’s
example in order to maintain and even increase the worth of his
estate. Socrates gives him an opportunity to compare the way of
life of the successful gentleman with Socrates’s truth-loving pursuit of the good life. The contrast Xenophon draws between the
philosopher and Ischomachus is unmistakable. Ischomachus relies
on observation: he expects the truth about the beings to be visible
to the eye. If his slaves are docile, their docility is treated as willingness to serve. Socrates’s discussion with Critobolus of what
constitutes wealth demonstrates that while he attends to appearances, he does not limit his examinations of the beings, or their
uses, to their visible surfaces.
In the earlier conversation with Socrates Ischomachus distinguished farming from other arts as the most generous and open
to observers. It has no secrets; its well-bred practitioners do all
that they do unconcealed from others and happy to share what
they know. When a farmer is unsure what to plant, he observes
his neighbors’ crops and even nearby uncultivated lands. Farming requires careful observation: plants show what is best for
their growth in their natural tendencies, and the farmer must imitate these. Still, Ischomachus insists, because nature shows itself
25. See Socrates’s treatment of Euthydemus in Memorabilia, 4.2.40;
also 4.7.1.
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to the careful observer no particular virtues apart from diligence
are necessary to farm successfully. According to him his father’s
(and implicitly his own) love of labor explain his success. But
Ischomachus cannot deny that to practice the art of farming one
needs land. He fails to mention the good fortune of his inheritance of substantial landed wealth. Ischomachus’s insistence on
the democratic character of farming has the rhetorical advantage
of deflecting envy, but he surely exaggerates. He persuades
Socrates that he, the philosopher, possesses the art of farming
because he can answer questions like how deep to plant seed,
how many crops to plant in a season and when, and his answers
accord with Ischomachus’s views. He denies that Socrates could
similarly be persuaded that he knows, for example, flute playing,
the art to which Socrates compares household management when
he converses with Critobolus (Oeconomicus 1.12).
Socrates does not quarrel with his instructor about the accessibility of the art of farming—after all, he has indeed observed a
great deal without making a formal study of local crops, and he
may wish to encourage Critobolus to make similar progress. He
does challenge Ischomachus’s claim that his father was a lover of
labor and of farming. Since Ischomachus’s father repeatedly
bought uncultivated land and sold it for a profit once it was cultivated, Socrates compares him with a merchant: he was less a
lover of art or of labor, Socrates avers, than a lover of gain.
Socrates generalizes: men often claim that they love things that
they believe benefit them. The true good for human beings is not
always evident. For anyone who is listening with care Socrates
clearly points to the question, what is truly good. Socrates observes other beings just as he observes humans, with no inclination to exploit or manipulate them. The good and the noble, and
much else that matters to human beings, are not immediately
apparent to the observer. Socrates does not merely observe: he
inquires into what each of the beings is.
Socrates shows great respect for the renowned gentleman
throughout their conversation but he has no intention of emulating his way of living. The art of economics as Ischomachus practices it is finally devoted to acquiring means without any limit or
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end.26 Still, Ischomachus’s household is ordered in a way that
reflects natural as well as conventional differences. The master
of the household knows that it is best to rule over willing subordinates who each pursue their own good, understood as gain and
in some cases honor. The highest honor belongs to the one who
rules them successfully and in doing so, increases his wealth. In
his closing speech Ischomachus affirms that the art of ruling is
unlike the art of farming: it requires “education, a good nature,
and most of all, to become divine” (21.12). Ischomachus’s rule
depends upon the laws and conventions of the city; his household reflects the order of the city and helps support it. It indicates
to Socrates and any serious observer the needs that compel human beings to order themselves into some kind of whole. All this
testifies to Ischomachus’s and in general to gentlemanly moderation. At the same time it points to the question whether the fulfillment of the needs the household addresses adequately represents the good of the human beings so ordered. The household
and the city that provides for its stability provide a context for
Socrates’s friendships and his inquiries, including the inquiry
into what is truly good. Socrates’s appreciation of that context
links him to the conventional gentleman and is at the heart of his
moderation. He does not claim to possess the ruling art but his
nature, and his education, are exemplary.
The mature Socrates Xenophon presents to us in the Memorabilia neither seeks office nor governs the members of a household.
He responds to the requests made of him by a wide array of interlocutors and seeks out some to educate. Those who follow him
willingly and become continuous companions27 may be said to be
willingly governed. Even so, Socrates tries to educate them for
their own good alone. To that end, he promotes first of all continence, and then self-knowledge, the knowledge in particular of
what sort of pursuits are appropriate for each individual. Only
26. See Wayne Ambler, “On the Oeconomicus” in Xenophon: The Shorter Socratic Writings, ed. Robert C. Bartlett (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1996), 106 and 109. In the conversation with Critobolus, Socrates
emphasizes benefit over acquisition. Socratic economics differ from
Ischomachus’s understanding both in emphasizing the goodness of the
soul and in eschewing the restrictions imposed by justice and nobility.
The latter point is elaborated in Pangle, “Economic Science,” 392-3.
27. Memorabilia, 1.2.48; 4.2.40.
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27
some are suited to the pursuit of high office; more are suited to the
gentlemanly management of their households. Very few are suited
to the deepest sort of inquiry into “what each of the beings is.”
Socrates does not try to make them into what they are not.
The Socrates of the Memorabilia is unambiguously a citizen, a
member of the largely conventional ordered whole that is the polis.
He is not just an observer of the cosmos set by accident into the
city and looking down on human beings from on high. If Aristophanes's Socrates is not a simple fabrication, the excesses of
Aristophanes's character must reflect Socrates’s youthful, immoderate pursuit of truth at the expense of the human good. His education in gentlemanliness is the source of his moderation; it explains
the transformation from his depiction in The Clouds to the Memorabilia. Socrates’s first serious interest in gentlemanliness, as Xenophon presents it, parallels his turn to focus on the speeches of
human beings as Plato’s Socrates represents it in the Phaedo. As in
the Phaedo, Xenophon’s Socrates’s turn enables him to examine
nobility and goodness without undermining their pursuit. The conversation with Ischomachus gives Socrates an understanding of the
life of the Athenian gentleman and the good that such a life serves,
as well as its defects. Ischomachus’s instruction helps Socrates to
find his place in the polis, and to reconcile his unwavering pursuit
of the truth with the necessarily conventional character of the city
and in general of human life. For the truth is consistently the goal
of Socrates’s inquiries, whether in Aristophanes's presentation or
in Plato’s or Xenophon’s. Ischomachus does not know the difference between making the untrue true and making the weaker argument prevail.
The good and the noble, and the pursuit of both together, manifest themselves in the city, and are hard if not impossible to discern apart from it. Friendship too thrives within the city where
there is a common understanding of good and noble pursuits.
Nonetheless the city has a limited horizon: what is sought and
honored is not necessarily truly noble or good. Socrates’s place in
the city is that of the gentlemanly philosopher, who discerns shortcomings as he seeks to understand what the city points to but no
set of citizens grasps.
Xenophon celebrates the reconciliation, however tense and impermanent, between Socratic inquiry and the city, and downplays
Socrates’s role as a critic. In the Memorabilia Xenophon calls him
not only good or beneficent but also noble, kalos k’agathos, for
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neither relying on the conventions for instruction nor disdaining
them, he knows the things a gentleman must know. Socrates displays the gentlemanly virtues, but without the usual apparatus. He
consistently practices justice, understood primarily as obedience to
the laws of the city, and he is as thoroughly moderate as any human can be. Insofar as it is possible, he cultivates the human good.
Xenophon’s overriding goal seems to be not merely to defend
Socrates but to establish the recollection of his way of life as the
foundation of a tradition. That tradition entails the pursuit of the
good and the noble independent of opinion and convention, for
these things are central to understanding the peculiar beings
known as humans. More generally, it is a tradition of philosophic
inquiry moderated by understanding of the political things.28
Where does this leave Critobolus, who loves comedies more than
labor and who will no doubt suffer if he loses his material wealth?
Socrates cannot decide for him how he is to proceed. He is not
likely to abandon his land to imitate fully Socrates’s way of life.
Will he give up his passion for comedies? Socrates, it would seem,
does not object to Critobolus’s laughing at Aristophanes’s Socrates
or at the pretenses of other gentlemen, but he must begin to take
responsibility for the pursuit of his good. Critobolus must learn to
practice moderation or suffer the loss of his wealth. He may be
inspired by Ischomachus’s praise of moderate, gentlemanly, rule.
He would improve his holdings in the city if he imitated the sober
gentleman. Farming would serve Crito’s son well, for it provides
goods without which life is impossible, while it never loses touch
with living beings as they are. An exemplary managed household
provides a context in which the human good and the passion for
distinction become visible. Gentlemanliness requires that Critobolus not devote himself exclusively to the most noble pursuits.29
Socrates’s instruction is not as transparent as the art of farming
(see 21.12). Socrates learned moderation from Ischomachus, but
he practices it differently, by eschewing mastery for the sake of an
understanding of the good. Socratic moderation is more perfect.
His gentlemanliness is the foundation of political philosophy.
28. Pierre Manent, The Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic, tr. Marc LePain, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013),
18: “We could say that the things in themselves are the political things.”
29. See Strauss, Discourse, 129.
�On Dante’s Commedia:
The Fact of the Fiction
and the Truth of the Poem
Jason Menzin
The infernal poetics of the first canticle of Dante’s Commedia
center on Geryon, the monster of fraud at the middle of Inferno.
Through Geryon, an imagine of unnatural poetry, Dante prompts
the reader to consider the damning potential of human poeisis,
calling into question the truth of his own poetic endeavor. Over
the course of the Commedia, however, Dante purges and finally
spiritualizes his self-conscious act of world-making. He recasts
the character of his poem and the sense of a center.
Geryon, a multi-formed figure of fraud, appears to Virgil and
the pilgrim Dante at the structural mid-point of Inferno:1
[H]e came on, that filthy effigy [imagine]
of fraud, and landed with his head and torso
but did not draw his tail onto the bank.
The face he wore was that of a just man,
so gracious was his features’ outer semblance;
and all his trunk, the body of a serpent. (Inf. 17.7-12)
Jason Menzin has a BA from Columbia University, an MA from St.
John's College (Annapolis), taught philosophy at Boston College, and
is completing a PhD in English at University College London.
1. Note the difference between the world imagined and the poem of that
imagining—that is, the difference between the spatial midpoint of hell
(at the fifth of nine circles, demarcated ultimately by the gate of Dis in
Cantos 8 and 9) and the structural midpoint of the Inferno canticle
(Canto 17, if Canto 1 is treated as a proem to the entire Comedy). Note
too that Dante devotes one half of the material text of Inferno to various
formulations of fraud (in Cantos 17 through 34), filling circles eight
and nine of hell. Translations are by Allan Mandelbaum from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso (New
York: Bantam Books, 1980, 1982, and 1984).
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This composite creature bears the face of “a just man,” as if
wearing a piece of woven cloth that belies the monster beneath.2
He is a fusion of characters from Genesis, of Adam and the serpent—part rational, part bestial—and so a figure for the Fall. He
is the deception that works against the goodness and truth of the
Creator and creation.3 Geryon is the lie that looks like the truth—
dangerous, unconstrained, destructive, repulsive—as Virgil declares in the opening lines of Canto 17:
Behold the beast who bears the pointed tail,
who crosses mountains, shatters weapons, walls!
Behold the one whose stench fills all the world! (Inf. 17.1-3)
Like an infernal parody of the God-man who saves the world,
Geryon, dwelling in the middle of Inferno, is the man-beast
whose rot fills the earth.4
But in Dante’s telling, Geryon is also much more than that.
The figure of fraud bears a striking resemblance to the artifice of
poetry, to the product of the act of poeisis:
he had two paws, with hair up to the armpits;
his back and chest as well as both his flanks
had been adorned with twining knots and circlets.
No Turks or Tartars ever fashioned fabrics
more colorful in background and relief,
nor had Arachne ever loomed such webs. (Inf. 17.13-18)
Geryon is “adorned,” and not merely with the face of a just man.
The monster has been made beautiful to our material eyes, bearing “twining knots and circlets,” more “colorful” that any Turkish fabric “ever fashioned,” more well “loomed” than any web of
Arachne. In other words, the monster at the middle of Inferno is
a poem, an infernal poem, compelling and treacherous. Geryon is
woven, even as Dante’s poem is woven, even as the world of
2. Cf. other double-sided figures in Inferno: the Minotaur of Canto 12,
the Ovidian moments of human-serpent and serpent-human transmutation in Cantos 25 and 26. Contrast the divine nobility of the Griffin in
Canto 31 of Purgatorio.
3. Cf. Genesis 1:4: “it was good,” and 1:31: “it was very good.” And
John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
4. Cf. Lucifer with his three faces woven into a single head, an infernal
parody of the Holy Trinity at the spiritual center of Inferno in Canto 34,
the bottom of the pit and the material center of creation.
�ESSAYS | MENZIN
31
Dante’s poem is woven. Knots and circlets; canticles and cantos
and terza rima; realms and circles and rings.
Having just encountered the sinful poesis of the sodomite-poets in
the second ring of the seventh circle, how ought the reader understand the poet Dante’s emphatic placement of this well-woven fraud
in the eighth, at the midpoint of his text? If Geryon stands as a figure
for both poetry and human deceit, how ought the reader weigh the
truth or fraudulence of Dante’s own poetic world-making?
Just before the encounter with Geryon, who ultimately conveys pilgrim and teacher into the sphere of liars and lies, Dante
the poet-narrator prompts the reader to question the veracity of
his own poem:
Faced with that truth which seems a lie, a man
should always close his lips as long as he can—
to tell it shames him, even though he’s blameless;
but here I can’t be still; and by the lines
of this my Comedy, reader, I swear—
and may my verse find favor for long years—
that through the dense and darkened air I saw
a figure swimming, rising up. (Inf. 16.124-31)
Dante acknowledges that his account of Geryon seems beyond
belief, but then at once swears to its truth, swearing (perhaps
ironically, certainly self-referentially) to the truth of his poetic
account by swearing upon “the lines / of this my Comedy” and
upon any future “favor” they may find. Assuming the posture of
a worldly and rational sophisticate, the poet suggests that a wise
man ought to keep his mouth closed about something that seems
false. He says not to speak the truth that seems a lie, but then
proceeds to speak it. And that truth? A lie that seems like truth.
But why? Why does Dante-poet make so acute the question of
the truth of his journey and of his poem? Why place a woven
monster at the middle of a woven poem about a woven cosmos
and, by swearing to the truth of his account, call that very account into question? It is possible that the reappearance of Geryon later in the Commedia suggests a path to respond to these
questions.
Geryon—effigy of the sickness of the world and figure for the
dangers of fallen poesis—returns to the Commedia in Purgatorio,
not in body, as in Inferno, but upon the lips of Virgil moments
before Dante enters the refining fires:
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My son, though there may be
suffering here, there is no death. Remember,
remember! If I guided you to safety
even upon the back of Geryon,
then now, closer to God, what shall I do? (Purg. 27.20-24)
Of the many terrifying figures of Inferno—Cerberus, the fallen
angels, the Malebranche, Lucifer himself—why should the poet
of Purgatorio bring back this monster at the critical moment of
Dante-pilgrim’s purification? Perhaps because Geryon—the possibility of infernal poetry, the seeming fraud at the middle of the
first canticle, the false face of fallen poetics—perhaps because
that monster must be purged from Dante’s own art in order for
his poem to ascend higher. Perhaps this is how Dante-poet enacts
in his poem the spiritual transformation from “worm” to the possibility of “angelic butterfly”—by letting go of poetry as fraud,
as unnatural creation, artful, seductive, destructive, dangerous
(Purg. 10.124-125). In the mere span of eight lines, Dante-pilgrim endures excruciating pain in the mountain’s fire and
emerges to a new life even as the sun sets, feeling “the force /
within” his “wings . . . growing for the flight” (Purg. 27.49-57,
27.122-123). And just so, one form of poetry falls away, as a new
form readies itself to soar.
Purgatorio is rich in inversions and images of transformation.
Early in the journey through Purgatory and only moments after
Virgil laments the limits of his human reason, Dante comes to
tell the older poet what to do:
While he, his eyes upon the ground, consulted
his mind, considering what road to take,
and I looked up around the wall of rock,
along the left a band of souls appeared
to me to be approaching us—but so
unhurriedly, their movements did not show.
“Lift up your eyes,” I told my master. (Purg. 3.55-61)
Virgil, “eyes upon the ground,” works alone within “his mind,”
whereas Dante, in a gesture of faith and spiritual curiosity, looks
beyond himself, “up around the wall of rock.” The gazes of the
two poets literally and figuratively form together a coupled-contrary: downward and inward, upward and out. In Dante-poet’s
remembering, this moment subordinates earth-bound, rational
mediations to the possibility of something more; it prefigures in
�ESSAYS | MENZIN
33
small the conclusions of Purgatorio and the trajectory of Paradiso. And in an instance of inversion here before the mount of
purgation, the place of hope, student temporarily becomes teacher,
guided becomes guide, when Dante instructs Virgil to “Lift up
your eyes.”
Just so, Dante recognizes the mount as a place of celestial inversions, when he again looks upward:
My eyes were first set on the shores below,
and then I raised them toward the sun; I was
amazed to find it fall upon our left. (Purg. 4.55-57)
To Dante’s amazement, here sunlight falls upon the land from
another part of the sky. In Purgatory, souls purge themselves of
sin and learn to let go; the habits of mortal life are loosened and
then left behind, ushering in a better kind of experience. And as
Virgil explains, the mount itself reveals the shape of that better
possibility, in another inversion of what Dante (and we) have so
far known:
This mountain’s of such sort
that climbing it is hardest at the start;
but as we rise, the slope grows less unkind. (Purg. 4.88-90)
Eventually, “this slope” will seem
so gentle
that climbing farther up will be as restful
as traveling downstream by boat. (Purg. 4.91-93)
In a reversal of earthly experience, an ascent of this mount
moves toward sabbatical “rest,” the “climbing” a figure of spiritual growth. And whereas late in Canto 20 Dante “feel[s] the
mountain tremble like / a falling thing,” he comes to learn from
Statius in Canto 21 that “it only trembles […] / when some soul
feels it’s cleansed, so that it rises / or stirs to climb on
high” (Purg. 20.127-128; 21.58-60). What feels, in other words,
like “a falling thing”—a reminder of the Fall and of the fact of
death—reveals itself to be a soul as it rises, an inversion that
points to the central Christian paradox (Purg. 21.59-60). We must
lose our life in order to gain it, must seem to fall in order actually
to rise. We are doubtless “worms,” but we are also “born / to form
the angelic butterfly that soars” (Purg. 10.124-5). Through the
second canticle, Christians (including Christian poets and their
poems) who are “arrogant, exhausted, wretched,” with “intel-
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lects” that are “sick and cannot see,” may learn to fly (Purg.
10.121-123).
In Purgatorio, Dante moves to purge the infernal poetics of
Inferno, hopes to make his “poem”—this poem and the poem to
follow—“rise again from Hell’s dead realm” (Purg. 1.8). He is,
in other words, attempting to enact an artistic resurrection. For
example, where Dante, poet of Inferno, characterizes Geryon as
the “gross effigy of fraud” (sozza imagine di froda), Dante poet
of Purgatorio re-imagines the imagine, recasts the word in order
to save it and the poem. Near the “bordering bank” of the First
Terrace in Purgatory, Dante-pilgrim experiences God’s art in the
image of Gabriel announcing the moment of divine condescension, the pattern of all humility.
The angel . . . after long interdict, appeared before us,
his gracious action carved with such precision—
he did not seem to be a silent image [imagine].
(Purg. 10.34-39)
Dante sees in Gabriel “the effigy [imaginata] / of one who turned
the key that had unlocked / the highest love” (Purg. 10.34-43). In
God’s better art, marble images seem to speak and move. What
feels impossible becomes wondrously possible. The monstrous
imagine of Inferno yields to the better imagine and imaginata of
Purgatorio. Here silence speaks, and it says neither “death” nor
“pride” nor “fraud,” but “peace,” “new life,” and “love” (Purg.
10.34-43). The “effigy” of Gabriel’s Ave to the Virgin supplants
in the reader’s experience the destructive “effigy” of Geryon’s
wholly earthly, fallen, and unnatural art. Acts of artistry in the
new poem purge the old, enabling the poetic resurrection. Other
“effigies of true humility” (l’imagini di tante umilitadi)—including David and Trajan—appear too, offering better art, “because
He was their maker” (Purg. 10.98-99). No unnatural poeisis, no
usury, no alchemy, only God’s art, where there is no fraudulence,
no deception, no false faces, only things as they are and should
be: “The dead seemed dead and the alive, alive” (Purg. 12.67).
Near the end of Purgatorio, Dante enables his reader to sense
the shift into paradisal poetics, to feel the purged poem in a place
where sin is impossible. He enters a garden where the wind gently blows life into the trees, stimulating
the little birds upon
the branches in the practice of their arts;
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35
for to the leaves, with song, birds welcomed those
first hours of the morning joyously,
and leaves supplied the burden to their rhymes.
(Purg. 28.14-18)
This is poetry in the region that never fell, where morning birdsong “rhymes” and the natural singers’ art receives its musical
“burden” in the repeating sounds of leaves on wind-moved
“trembling boughs” (Purg. 28.10).5 Like Dante-pilgrim’s rectified will—“free, erect, and whole”—the birds of the earthly paradise sing the poem of nature healed in a place of purity and
claritas (Purg. 27.140, 28.28-30).
The force of God’s better art, as of the unfallen creation, recurs in Purgatorio during a moment of poetic elevation in Canto
28, when Dante-poet translates an instance (and perhaps too the
entire genre) of bawdy pastoral into paradisal terms. The transformation begins as Dante-pilgrim meets Matilda, the “solitary
woman moving, / singing, . . . gathering up flower on flower”
within the earthly paradise (Purg. 28.40-41). In the passage’s
brief colloquy, the tantalizing motions and sounds, the glances,
the garden—in all of it, Dante’s contemporary readers would
hear echoes of Cavalcanti and poets like him. The reader would
expect to find a “little shepherdess” with “light-blond, curly
hair / And eyes full of love,” ready to consummate the amorosa
voglia at the heart of “In un boschetto trova pasturella.”6 Having
established those connections in the first moments of the pilgrim’s encounter with Matilda, Dante-poet exploits them to profound spiritual effect. Over the course of the Canto, he refines
the motifs and figures of the pastoral love song into something
holy. In purgatorial translation, the Cavalcanti-esque scene becomes a moment of chastity, of “chaste eyes,” “intelligible”
sounds, and “light” (Purg. 28.57-60, 28.80). The maiden’s song
5. As Matilda comes to explain, the “wind” in this place is not what
we understand as wind, not the result of weather, certainly not the
result of Lucifer’s freezing wingbeats, but an echoing effect of celestial mechanics. What moves the boughs moving the leaves accompanying the rhyming birds is better weather, sublime wind (Purg. 28.97108).
6. Guido Cavalcanti. “In un boschetto trova pasturella” in Introduction
to Italian Poetry. Edited by Luciano Rebay. (New York: Dover Publications, 1991) 18-19.
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proves not lustful but psalmic. The pilgrim finds satisfaction
with hearing and seeing and with questions answered. In this
place of virgin-flowering, of a seedless “engender[ing]” that is
more than natural poeisis, Matilda—la “donna innamorata”—
does not sing the sexual line from Cavalcanti, but “Delectasti”
and “Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata” (Purg. 28.67-69, 28.81,
29.1-3). She sings thanksgiving to God and for the blessings of
sin forgiven. Poem and poetess are startlingly pure. Purged. They
signal Dante’s new poetics, spiritual poetry elevated through the
mountain’s fire.
In Paradiso Dante approaches the point beyond space and
time—“there / where in one point, all whens and ubis end”—recentering the center of all things and recasting the character of
his poem (Par. 29.11-12). Beatrice provides the terms for this
better understanding, extending the proleptic inversions of Purgatorio to their more than natural conclusions. Through a vision
of the cosmos and divinity, Dante’s paradisal guide clarifies the
final sense of material distance and structure through their subordination to the higher claims of spiritual insight. It is an ultimate inversion, foreshadowed not only through the translations
and elevations of Purgatorio, but also perhaps by the literal
peripeteia of the pilgrim and Virgil at the dead middle of the
cosmos, upon the body of Lucifer at the bottom of Hell (Inf.
34.76-81).
Late in Paradiso (and appearing in her own beauty beyond
all “nature or art”), Beatrice observes the supernatural sense
of heaven, of the whole creation’s dependence on a more than
material, more than rational foundation (Par. 27.91). She describes a divinely intellectual reality beyond the here and
now, the “heaven” that “has no other where than this: / the
mind of God” (Par. 27.109-110). It is, as Dante-poet comes to
reflect, a “truth that is unlike / [our] present life” (Par.
28.2-3). Ready to see more, in Canto 28 Dante has a vision of
“a point” of blazing light, surrounded by nine concentric rings
of fire, each rotating around the center (Par. 28.16-34). The
rings circle in descending order of speed and in a descending
sequence of purity from the center, from smallest to largest
(Par. 28.34-39). The fastest, most ardent, most pure, is nearest the central point of light (Par. 28.41-45). And as Beatrice
begins to teach Dante the mystery, to characterize the non-
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material shape of spiritual reality, she frames the impetus behind the moving world:
On that Point
depend the heavens and the whole of nature.
Look at the circle that is nearest It,
and know: its revolutions are so swift
because of burning love that urges it. (Par. 28.41-45)
Dante-pilgrim is coming to see, with better eyes, the basis of the
world. He “look[s]” in order to “know” the burning love behind
“the heavens and the whole of nature.” He now sees in order to
understand. But as Dante observes, the common sense, sensible
framework of the cosmos (and the path too of his journey in Paradise, of the ordering in Paradiso from the moon to the stars)
fails to correspond to Beatrice’s descriptions. The material
world, in fact, is a complete inversion of what he now hears:
in the world of sense, what one can see
are spheres becoming ever more divine
as they are set more distant from the center. (Par. 28.49-51)
Beatrice’s spiritual sense of things turns the world inside out.
The sizes of the material spheres in the sky prove merely signs of
their spiritual significance:
The size of spheres of matter—large or small—
depends upon the power—more and less—
that spreads throughout their parts. More excellence
yields greater blessedness; more blessedness
must comprehend a greater body when
that body’s parts are equally complete. (Par. 28.64-69)
In Beatrice’s spiritual decoding of cosmic structure, the most
distant sphere from the material center of things is the actual
center of reality, the innermost material point, the most distant
spiritual sphere.7
Reading these ideas backwards into Inferno suggests that although Geryon swims at the material center of the first canticle
and Lucifer freezes at the material center of the earth and Dante’s
cosmos, it is the Trinity that dwells, despite appearances, at the
spiritual center of the poem and creation. In other words, seen
7. Clive Stapleton Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 58, 116.
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through spiritual eyes, the material center is merely the periphery
(the most distant point from God), while the most remote sphere
of Paradiso is the eternal center, “no other where than . . . / the
mind of God” (Par. 27.109-10). The end of the poem is the heart
of the whole. If so, then perhaps an act of spiritual poeisis (such
as “this sacred poem”) may seem like fraud to those who read
with wholly material eyes, may feel like complete fiction to
those who have “lost,” as Virgil suggests of the shades in Inferno, “the good of the intellect” (Par. 25.1; Inf. 3.18). And if this is
so, then (despite his infernal playfulness) perhaps Dante does
“swear” genuinely upon the truth of his poetic account, affirming
finally not the material and literal meaning of his journey and retelling, but its imaginative and spiritual sense.
In this context at the close of Paradiso, the monster Geryon
returns for a third and final time in the Commedia, not in body
(as in Inferno), nor in speech (as in Purgatorio), but in artistic
form, in the elevation of spiritual word-play. Geryon, infernal
poem in the midst of Inferno, returns at the conclusion of Paradiso, in the midst of spiritual truth, as “one single volume,” the
spiritual book of making in which is “ingathered / and bound by
love . . . what, in the universe, seems separate” (Par. 33.85-87).
The artful “twining knots” adorning the monster in Inferno (le
coste / dipinti avea di nodi) return in Paradiso as the knot of
eternity (La forma universal di questo nodo), “the universal
shape / which that knot takes” (Inf. 17.14-15; Par. 33.91-92).
The gross effigy of fraud (sozza imagine di froda) returns as our
image (nostra effige), the more than human mystery of how “our
human effigy / suited the circle” (l’imago al cerchio) of the second person of the Trinity (Par. 33.137-138). The monstrous
poem is replaced imaginatively, spiritually, with the eternal book,
the knots (nodi) of fallen artistry with the knot (nodo) of all reality, the image (imagine) of fraud with the image (imago) of
Christ.8 Fraud yields to the absence of sin, and the absence of sin
8. What is more, the “circlets” (rotelle) of Geryon at Inf. 17.15 return
elevated through paradisal word-play in the divine “circles” and “circle” (cerchio) of Par. 33.115, 138. The adornment of the monster (with
flanks dipinti) at Inf. 17.15 appears revivified in the final adornment of
the begotten circle, “painted with our effigy” (pinta de la nostra effige)
in Par. 33.131.
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yields to a final, affirmative, and mystical goodness. Worm to
butterfly.
Perhaps all of this points to the final recognitions, the final
inversions of our habitual human responses in the here and now.
If God is no “where,” then the center of Inferno, the center of
Hell, the center of the physical cosmos, all of it must give way
before the heart that is not in any place or moment, the spiritual
center that is everywhere and always. The risk of unnatural poeisis must yield before the activity of the supernatural Maker. If so,
then our journey, the reader’s journey, like Dante’s own, occurs
not finally in space and time, but in and through the poet’s imagination, enacting in imitation the creative act of divinity from
eternity. No material poem in the end then, only spiritual, or only
a material poem spiritualized, raised: when la scritta morta (dead
writing) ascends to become lo sacrato poema (the sacred poem),
itself ultimately only a shadow of God’s greater Commedia (Inf.
8.127; Par. 23.62).
�
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St. John’s College
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The St. John’s Review
THE
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 61.1-2 DOUBLE ISSUE (FALL 2019-SPRING 2020)
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St. John’s Review
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See the Editor’s Note for instructions to subscribers.
Volume 61, Numbers 1 and 2
Double Issue (Fall 2019-Spring 2020)
�The St. John’s Review
Volume 61.1-2 (Fall 2019-Spring 2020)
Double Issue
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
Robert B. Williamson
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Panayiotis Kanelos, President; Joseph
Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or to Review@sjc.edu.
© 2019 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Editor’s Note
The Future of The St. John’s Review
with Instructions for Current Subscribers...........................................v
Essays
Charlotte’s Web for Grownups..................................................1
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
More than Human: On Human Divinity in
Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics .................................................34
Jason Menzin
Constructing the World: The Kantian Origin of the Very Idea .........49
Raoni Padui
Please Note:
This is a special double issue containing both
numbers 1 and 2 of volume 61.
A separate number will not be published
in the spring of 2020.
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The St. John's Review, Fall 2019-Spring 2020
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Hunt, Frank
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's Review
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 59.1-2 (Fall 2017-Spring 2018)
Double Issue
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Panayiotis Kanelos, President; Joseph
Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or to Review@sjc.edu.
© 2017 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
We Are, Nonetheless, Cartesians:
A Prodigal Johnnie Reports Back ..........................................1
Antón Barba-Kay
Jacob Klein: European Scholar and American Teacher....................22
Eva Brann
On Negation: Other Possibilities in
Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World .............................................35
Jason Menzin
“The Student,” by Anton Chekhov:
A Story Told and Glanced At .......................................................55
Louis Petrich
Poetry
Tetrastichs .........................................................................................79
Elliott Zuckerman
Please Note:
This is a special double issue containing both
numbers 1 and 2 of volume 59.
A separate number will not be published
in the spring of 2018.
��We Are, Nonetheless, Cartesians:
A Prodigal Johnnie Reports Back
Antón Barba-Kay
I fancy that every speculative thinker, however solid he may believe the grounds of his
thinking to be, does harbor, somewhere
deep down in him, a skeptic—a skeptic to
whom the history of philosophy looks
rather like the solemn setting up of rows of
ninepins, so that they may be neatly
knocked down! That way of looking at
things is tempting, no more; it is tempting,
and for philosophy it is in a sense the temptation—just as for man in general suicide
is that. It is a kind of suicide, too.
—Gabriel Marcel
It is said that philosophy makes no progress—that its history is a
series of footnotes to Plato, say, or that it is an ever-renewed attempt to find a beginning that cannot be known by being taken
for granted. The remark is sometimes made to rouge over our
blushes at the fact—striking to newcomers—that philosophers
have not been known to settle any fundamental questions once
and for all to everyone’s satisfaction. And yet there is at least one
point to which just about every modern thinker subscribes predictably and monotonously: I mean that Cartesian philosophy has
got it all very wrong.
Descartes was wrong that philosophy should be founded on
a closed set of first principles, wrong to think he could subtract
himself from the world, wrong to imagine himself as a pure
Antón Barba-Kay teaches philosophy at The Catholic University of
America in Washington, DC. This lecture was first delivered St, John’s
College in Annapolis on Wednesday, July 6, 2016.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
monadic subject, wrong to conceive of his consciousness as an
impartial spectator, wrong that we have privileged access to immediate self-knowledge, wrong about qualia making up the stuff
of perception, wrong to try to demonstrate God’s existence on
purely rational grounds, wrong about the separability of mind
from body, wrong in reducing organisms to mechanisms, and
wrong to think that mastery and possession should be our proper
disposition toward nature. There would seem to be a whole buffet
of wrongheadedness on offer here, such that any observer surveying the past three hundred years of philosophical writing at a
glance would be forced to conclude that Descartes was so wrong
about so many things that there could be nothing worth talking
about anymore—at least insofar as it isn’t clear whether there is
anyone still standing who is in need of being disabused.
The reductio ad Cartesium is as characteristic of twentiethcentury phenomenology (which acknowledges Descartes as its
awkward stepfather), as it is of Frankfurt School and post-Heideggerian thinkers who have taken special issue with Descartes’s
Enlightenment view of the unadulterated, monological cogito.
But this anti-Cartesian impulse has been even more evident in
Anglophone philosophy, taking its cues as it does from late
Wittgenstein, who directs so much of his laconic ingenuity
against what is usually identified as the Cartesian view of consciousness. There is virtually no one writing about philosophy of
language or philosophy of mind who disagrees with the substance
of Wittgenstein’s criticisms. And yet one opens up just about any
subsequent book in this vein—by Sellars, or Rorty, or Dennett,
or Ryle, or Nagel, or Searle, or McDowell—and sure enough the
doornail has been resurrected, the dead horse is propped up and
flogged with relish as if for the very first time. Attend almost any
academic conference on an epistemological theme, and you will
hear Descartes mentioned as a foil to the true view being advanced with a frequency that would make for a decent game of
bingo, if it did not partake of the regularity of law. I add to this,
finally, that I have been surprised by the animus with which most
of my students treat Descartes. They tend to find him smug, glib,
and bratty, almost always returning the favor by letting him have
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
3
it in the most peevish and conceited manner. Or rather, I would
be surprised if I did not take care to remember the hysteric
falsetto that I felt myself adopting toward him when I first read
him at St. John’s. Bacon was a magnanimous humanitarian,
Machiavelli inspired giddy admiration, Montaigne had his salty
candor, but Descartes I held responsible for every modern perversion. My question, then, is why this is so, what is it about
Descartes that gets our goat? Why can’t we get over him?
Now, there are of course many ways of being wrong. There
are authors whom we honor with perennial disagreement; we remain interested in their mistakes because we acknowledge that
being dead wrong is harder than being half right. And so,
Anaxagoras or Lucretius or Spinoza will continue to have a home
among our philosophical counterfactuals, as thinkers who have
staked out a wrong—but nonetheless basically and fundamentally
wrong—position, a fixed Charybdis with respect to which all
other positions must navigate. Philosophers are, on the whole,
trying to stake out the middle ground of justice between extreme
positions, and so those who have argued that there is no such
thing as middle ground (between the mind and the body, say)
cannot but continue to figure in such discussions. Our disagreement with Descartes has something to do with this, but I don’t
think it’s enough to account for the allergic obsession with which
we seem to return to him. I have known no one to get his or her
dander up on account of Anaxagoras.
Descartes also figures disproportionately in our imagination
because we understand him to be one of the fathers of the modern
scientific method. Any throat-clearing prefatory to discussing the
history of science and technology therefore feels compelled to
take its bearings by him—just as any book on the history of painting starts flexing its erudition with those obligatory couple of
paragraphs about the caves at Lascaux. What’s more, by routinely
taking Descartes to be such a father figure, we acknowledge how
much of his practical project has gone exactly according to plan.
No one disputes the fact that he was a gobsmackingly gifted
mathematician, for instance, or that his mechanical, anti-teleological interpretation of nature proved a necessary condition of
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
modern industrialization. We only worry about the scientific mastery and possession of nature because it is a fait accompli and it
is no great strain to see the trade-offs. All the same, it is both as
scientists and as philosophers that we continue to try to worry his
views out of ours; and if this is so, then I want to say that it is for
parallel reasons—that despite our best efforts to refute his philosophical views, we remain, nonetheless, and in decisive respects,
Cartesians. As Wittgenstein says: it is as if a certain picture of
the world holds us captive.
But before saying what I take to be the most distinctive aspects of this picture and why we can’t seem to exorcise it from
consideration, here is my (very un-Johnnie-like) disclaimer: I will
be more concerned in what follows with relatively conventional
Cartesian views—views routinely ascribed to Descartes—than
with scrupulous attribution to his work, because part of what I
take to be most remarkable about our widespread view of Cartesianism is how impervious it is to questions about what the historical Descartes might have actually thought. It seems at least
likely, to take one example, that Descartes was not the grossest
kind of mind/body substance dualist—I have seen many diligent,
knowledgeable scholars at pains to argue so. And yet this is
treated as irrelevant outside such localized discussions: as soon
as anyone brings up dualism, you can brace yourself for the requisite, tendentious summary of Descartes’ views. This will annoy
anyone who has taken some trouble over his words, of course,
but it should also alert us to the fact that Cartesianism has a sort
of life of its own. I do not say that Cartesianism has nothing to
do with the texts of Descartes. But we should be interested in the
fact that its mistakes have not been straightforwardly rectified by
quoting chapter and verse. It is because Cartesianism does not
(exactly) exist, that, for some reason, we have had to invent it.
In what respects, then, is Cartesianism still intimately ours?
The clearest way in which Descartes continues to have a hold on
our thinking is that he is the first philosopher to insist on reasoning as an individual dislocated from a tradition of thought. He is
the first to make the claim that everything worth knowing can be
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
5
worked out methodically and self-evidently by the projected light
of one’s own analysis. Any thinker amounting to anything has of
course found him or herself somehow at odds with tradition. But
Descartes’s discussion in the Discourse of his teachers and the
academic curriculum at La Flèche is not so much an argument
with tradition, or a criticism or purification of standing opinions,
as an out of hand dismissal of the possibility that convention
could have any bearing on the task of knowing the truth. Poetic
fables, he says, are full of exaggerations, oratory is nothing but
the prettification of rigorous thought, the moral writings of the
ancient pagans are “magnificent palaces that were built on nothing but sand and mud” (5),1 and theology is pointless because
salvation is either available to all without study or beyond anything that any amount of study could hope to establish. All of this
is striking less for what Descartes says than for what he thinks
goes without saying. When he then says of philosophy that “there
is still nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and
consequently nothing that is not doubtful;” he does not even feel
the need to defend the glorious havoc contained in that single
consequently. The same goes for the habits and customs which
he purposes to extirpate from his mind: “the mere fact of the diversity that exists among them suffices to assure one that many
do have imperfections” (8), there being “one truth with respect
to each thing” (12). That these are breathtaking non-sequiturs
should not obscure the fact that they are hugely attractive ones,
and that we risk misunderstanding both Descartes and ourselves
so long as we do not acknowledge the full strength of that attraction, and continue to look for its sources.
Surely what is most attractive about his position is its promise of original and pristine certainty, his adoption of a stance anterior to and abstracted from any particular context of experience
from which to judge truth or falsity. Let me begin by saying what
I take to be insightful about this direction of approach. The main
1. Page numbers are keyed to Discourse on Method and Meditations
on First Philosophy, translated by Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
questions of the Meditations are the programmatic questions of
modern philosophy. What can I know, and how can I be sure of
it? What difference do I make to the objects of my experience
and thought? I open my eyes and the world seems to show up effortlessly, a spectacle articulate and whole. Descartes’s experiment in doubt is meant, on the contrary, to call attention to the
sense in which what I witness is not simply self-standing, but
something that can only take place where I freely work to sustain
it. I must be party to my experience in order for it to be constituted as experience at all. Everything that lies in my thinking
must be doubtful—subject to the possibility of being doubted—
because it is a condition of its being thought that I own and affirm
it. Experiencing something thus means that I am in some sense
at work at implicating things in, and explicating them according
to, a woven whole of conscious expectation. Descartes goes so
far as to doubt the most basic truths of mathematics, not because
there is any real likelihood that they are false in themselves, but
because it is not inconceivable that I may slip up every time I add
two to three (61), which is meant to emphasize that even the most
basic arithmetical operations work out by being kept in mind. To
the extent that I can then imagine willfully abstaining from the
activity of discriminating and articulating the world as mine, to
the extent that I can hold all of my experience in abeyance, the
world collapses in on itself, an abyss opens up beneath my feet.
The malevolent genie personifies this possibility of existential
vertigo, in which doubt unfixes all things because there is nothing
not affirmed by me that could steady them. The one intact, unshakable point that cannot even be subject to doubt is therefore
that very activity of my conscious intending. I am a thing unlike
any other because in some sense I carry the very weight on which
I stand, I bear the full weight of the world—even if I can only be
sure of myself so long as I continue to catch myself in the act.
This thought experiment undeniably shows us several aspects
of what it means for us to have the world in view. It throws into
relief that objects of experience are only fully realized because I
mind them; that my attention lends a hand to constituting the tissue of ordinary experience; and that the thought of a world must
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
7
always be coupled to the thought of its nothingness. But
Descartes’s errand is more ambitious than this, since, once he has
taken it apart, he then aims to piece the world back together on
his own terms, which is to say, in no uncertain terms. The connection between what can be absolutely evident to me and what
is self-evident is crucial here. The one discipline that impresses
Descartes at school is mathematics—less for what it has
achieved, he says, than for the kind of certainty it promises; the
clarity and certainty that are supposed to govern his inquiry in
the Meditations are therefore cast with an eye to that peculiar pattern. Since mathematics has always been regarded as the learnable and knowable discipline par excellence, this could hardly be
called a bad choice. For mathematical clarity to be our wholesale
guide to knowing as such, however, Descartes must conflate what
is knowable with what is self-contained in its own deduction—
that is, with what I am always in the position to recognize as selfevident. To set all of our knowledge on such footing, we must
each of us take up a position in which everything must be knowable in advance of our experience, in which to know means to be
certain, and in which what is not certain is demoted to arbitrary
and optional. I am asked to take up an autonomous position, a
vantage beyond belief, before which the objects of my thinking
are arrayed and assessed, before being assented to. My knowledge is the absence of mind—nowhere and no one in a position
to see it all.
It is this flattering affinity between what I am always in the
position to know and mathematical clarity that underpins the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity that has made up
our epistemic bread and butter ever since. These are not
Descartes’s explicit terms, but this casual and widespread way
of approaching inquiry undeniably has roots in something like
the Cartesian identification of truth with a specific experience of
certainty. What is objective is what cannot be denied without contradiction, what would be the case if I did not know it, what is
valid for all times and places, and so what must be impersonally
assessable and deducible. It is the realm of necessity, best exemplified by our usual deferential attitude toward mathematics and
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the sciences; it is the knowable as such that leaves no room for
doubt. Outside this impersonal I, however, there is a subjective
remainder—ambivalently understood as a domain of arbitrary
preference and convention, but also as a domain of pure privacy
and inner freedom, a place sealed and secret, from which I cannot
be shaken and to which I may always retreat, if I should be so
minded. It is the disengaged mental retina, the fixed point from
which I invest what is not objective with my own meanings, and
at which every man is for himself and on his own.
This is an admittedly unsophisticated and flat-footed version
of a picture that I find to be widely prevalent among my students,
though I also think that one need not squint too hard to see variations on this theme as the common guiding thread of modern philosophy. Whether in the form of Spinoza’s distinction between
natura naturans and naturata, or in Hume’s between relations of
ideas and matters of fact, or in Kant’s scission of nature from freedom, or Hegel’s counterpoint between what is ‘in itself’ and what
is ‘for itself,’ or more proximately in the Nietzschean or Weberian
opposition of facts to values, it is clear that the attempt to render
philosophy into a quasi-scientific a priori body of knowledge has
had the effect of sharpening under its pressure a corresponding
view of our inner freedom as a naked power of self-possessed
willing lying beyond the appeal of ordinary, shared reasons. For
every Descartes, there has then followed a Pascal.
This is an imprecise generalization, of course, but if anything
like this dialectic between necessity and freedom underlies our
picture of the world, then it would help to explain why our thinking somehow continues to circle back to Descartes. Perhaps the
most striking feature of the Cartesian project—which is to establish the full truth to one’s own satisfaction—is that it has the effect of forcing all its opponents to adopt it. Once Descartes has
withdrawn from the premises of ordinary shared experience, the
only strategies for flushing him out are to question the soundness
of his premises, to note the ways in which his position does not
itself acknowledge its historical debts, or to point out all the ways
in which his position of radical doubt would be incoherent in
practice. These might, in fact, be the only logical responses open
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to us. But they are responses that, Gorgon-like, turn us into the
kind of skeptic that we take ourselves to be trying to undermine,
because we feel we must turn to a priori thinking and presuppositionless logical analysis in order to refute him. This is what I
have found most striking in the classroom: because Descartes has
denied or removed the shared bases of ordinary experience, we
feel forced to take up a position somewhere on the unmediated
poles of subjectivity and objectivity—both of which in fact take
for granted the Cartesian picture of a fully self-constituting and
autonomous beginning to knowledge. We find ourselves having
to reason at him rather than with him, because we tacitly accept
his opening claim that there is no we who could reason in common. It is half way through Meditation III, only after Descartes
has established the existence of God, that he claims to prove that
he is not alone in the world (74), but it is a strange discovery for
him to make, since he has addressed his spiritual exercises to us
all along. Cartesian thinking is cinematic: it is a condition of our
witnessing it that we be excluded from its proceedings.
In what sense can objectivity be a Cartesian innovation,
though? It is clear that philosophy has always and everywhere
sought to describe what is permanently and universally true—as
Nietzsche put it, philosophy’s demand of itself is that it become
timeless. But it is equally clear that other analogous distinctions—between human and divine knowledge, say, or between
convention (nomos) and nature (physis)—are by no means congruent with the way in which we contrast subjectivity to objectivity. To take up the second example: physis in ancient
philosophy is something like a transpolitical domain subtending,
and prior to, any particular human arrangement. But it refers, on
the one hand, to a reality that is found variously embodied in
(rather than separated from) those arrangements, and, on the other
hand, to an ordered whole that is neither apodictically reducible
to, or immediately transparent to, discursive analysis. As Plato
shows in the Timaeus, the attempt to generate the order of the
world from the measurement of harmonious ratios results in a
leftover interval that balks the intellect’s designs to tidy it up.
Physis hides. She will not fully yield herself to logos.
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That this can no longer be our picture of the world—that our
universe is no longer cosmic, so to speak—should not prevent us
from realizing that communal friendship held a central place in
pre-modern philosophy, the very absence of which marks our
own somewhat impoverished oscillation between subjectivity
and objectivity. The Platonic Socrates is entirely at home using
the most cynical maneuvers of logical jujitsu, but he usually reserves those moves for his arguments with the sophists. In his
discussions with more generous interlocutors, he tries to establish
the kinds of philosophical affection (both for the truth and for his
fellows in speech) that distinguish him from the sophists he otherwise so much resembles. Similarly, we can hardly underestimate the importance of the first person plural in Aristotle. He
understands that the deepest truths are somehow already present
within his students’ ways of speaking and acting; starting from
shared conceptions, he works to deepen their understanding.
When he notes near the beginning of the Ethics that mathematical
exactness is not an appropriate standard for ethical investigations
because different inquiries are measured by different kinds of
precision, we register our distance from him by his deadpan indifference to justifying this assertion. And yet what kind of Cartesian argument could ever sufficiently establish such an
assumption? It is exactly at this point that we are hostage to the
demand for clarity and certainty, because the latter criteria are always in the position to undercut any such shared understanding.
It is Descartes’s innovation, then, to deny any implicit
“we”—a first person plural opening up upon the world—as a necessary or helpful middle term between my thinking and the objects of experience. His project is to dissociate friendship from
reason and to seek knowledge without community. Mathematical
precision is therefore paradigmatic of its aspirations for good reason: it seems to admit no ambiguity, seems to be independent of
historical circumstances, and seems to proceed on premises that
cannot be denied without contradiction. Agreement or disagreement do not seem to touch its truth. Mathematics is no respecter
of persons (you may depend on it). And again, mathematics is
bewitching to the extent that it promises to take the measure of
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the world prior to encountering it—hence the notion of a method
or an instrument of investigation that, once established, will be
able to generate results algorithmically and impartially. The
mathematization of nature gives us mastery over it—it affords us
vast powers of prediction and control even as it narrows the scope
of what we care to attend to. But applying such a common denominator to philosophical inquiry reduces it to only two areas
of discussion—that to which I am forced to acquiesce and that
which I am free to dispute. To the extent that I insist on being a
pure subject, I also insist on making the world purely subject to
me. If, however, there are forms of knowledge we can only know
by holding things in common—as we do in friendship or faith or
trust or loyalty or love—and if we take their pledges seriously as
more than private stimuli, then there is a whole set of goods that
are unavailable to Cartesian thinking, forms of knowledge whose
inside-out, rather than outside-in, character is checked from the
outset by the Cartesian demand for certainty. There may be
strength in numbers, but it is a strength that can lift you no higher
than yourself.
I want to indicate here—too hastily, perhaps—some of the
ways in which the Cartesian fascination for impregnable speech
has shaped modern philosophy. If it is the promise of disembodied speech to settle matters somehow in advance of knowing
them, then it cannot be surprising if there has been special hell
to pay in political and moral reasoning. The very project of the
classical contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—attempts to deduce the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a certain state of affairs by specifying the beginning point of all
possible human arrangements—obeys a Cartesian impulse to
project a point of fixed certainty into the world (although in this
domain it is Hobbes rather than Descartes who counts as the first
Cartesian). The state of nature served as a quasi-geometrical postulate from which, once accepted, certain prescriptive conclusions could be drawn. With some contemporary exceptions (like
Rawls), it is true that this approach was later abandoned under
pressure from historicist criticism. But nineteenth- and twentieth-century historicism itself obeys a neo-Kantian, and so quasi-
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scientific, impulse to read our historical formation as an a priori
schema governing all possible human experience. Historicism is
also Cartesian, therefore, in the sense of attempting to settle the
fundamental, constraining forms of human knowledge in advance
of any particular experience of them.
But if the issue of historicism has lost some of its urgency
since the end of the Cold War, I would ask you to consider what
we mean by morality. The term, understood as a system of prescriptions stipulating right conduct, is a modern one, itself a result
of the Enlightenment attempt to bring mathematical precision to
bear on our conception of the good. Aristotle’s Ethics and its medieval appropriations are not systems of morals (like Kant’s and
Mill’s), because they do not conceive their project as establishing
the goodness of certain practices and habits from a position outside of themselves. Nothing in Aristotle answers to this description. Our contemporary notion of morality, on the other hand,
aims at scientific rigor precisely to the extent that it purports to
deduce our duties from infallible rules—in other words, to specify how we ought to act regardless of our particular attachments
and responsibilities.
This apparent rigor has done very little to win the kind of
widespread consensus that might have been expected from it.
Moreover, it funnels ethical conversation into an adversarial, winner-take-all pattern. Most of my class discussions on ethical matters take the form of a predictable tug-of-war between “you’re
bad for judging others” and “I am entitled to my opinion that others are bad,” because everyone has independently realized that
the best strategy is to ask one’s opponent to define his or her
terms, and then to disparage those definitions in order to stalemate whatever may be supposed to follow from them. This strategy is not good enough to win any arguments, but it is a surefire
way not to lose any either. (The expectation of absolute moral
certainty thus goes hand-in-hand with relativism.) The underlying
Cartesian assumption is that a winning argument is one that no
one could reasonably find fault with, when in fact the predictable
outcome of such reasoning is dilemmatic casuistry about, for in-
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stance, how many innocent people to rescue from hypothetical
runaway trains. Even where we do share a general postulate—
say, that human beings are ends in themselves—it is by no means
clear that a notion of such generality could univocally help us
make an a priori judgment between competing kinds of goods.
In addition, Hume’s, Kant’s, and Mill’s moral visions continue
to rely on, in more or less obvious ways, the sensibilities of decent, Protestant, liberal citizens: that is to say, they all claim to
give contextless grounds for already existing forms of conduct.
This reliance is even clearer in Descartes’s list of practical
maxims in the Discourse—don’t mess with the law, stick to your
guns, control your desires, play to your strengths—which sound
little better than the avuncular therapy of self-control offered by
Polonius when contrasted with the rigor that Descartes otherwise
brings to bear on scientific matters. It is true that he presents his
maxims as provisional; they are designed to be cast off once he
has built his system of knowledge from the ground up. But his
subsequent silence on this point is therefore eloquent, as is his
affinity (along with that of many modern moralists) to ancient
Stoicism, which was the first philosophical school to preach withdrawal from the world and a steady diet of sour grapes as the
means of attaining happiness. Again, if to know is to be certain,
then I can be certain of my own pleasure (as Descartes might say)
or perhaps even of my duty (as Kant might say), but it is precisely
the character of this certainty that prevents my thinking from taking place somewhere in particular or inhibits my attending to
common cares and thoughts. So long as I try to reason my own
way into the world, I will not know exactly what to do with you.
I realize that I am myself running the risk of sounding reductionist and skeptical, since I might seem to be asserting that there
is no such thing as truth in moral matters except through some
sort of wishful or willful consensus. But that is precisely the
shape that Cartesian certainty forces on us, whereas I am trying
to call attention to differences between Cartesian and other forms
of disagreement. Neither antiquity nor the Middle Ages were conspicuous for their concord, respect, and unanimity—in philoso-
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phy or in any other area of life. It may be that the very opposite
is true and that quarrels are fiercest among brothers, as Aristotle
says. But it is also clear that most of the ferociously sectarian disputes about philosophical principles in Europe and the Near East
up to, and perhaps even including, the Reformation were understood as differences within and about a shared conception of the
world. And I am tempted to call this a kind of friendship—a commitment to common goods of thought. It is, in contrast, one of
the marks of our continuing dependence on Cartesianism that we
feel the need to reason from scratch, and that this need in turn
shapes the forms of speech that are available to us. Such forms
are by no means inadequate in all respects. Like a searing fire,
they dissolve and clarify, even if they cannot establish or sustain.
But so long as we understand philosophy as clinically disengaged
thought, we will continue to prize guarded and ungenerous forms
of speech that pretend to a scientific certainty they cannot achieve
(e.g., scholarship), we will continue to disagree about first principles erratically and without end, we will continue to excel only
at the philosophical genre of critique, we will continue to be
tempted toward forms of irrationality as the only exits from a stifling objectivity, and we will continue to find ourselves stuck at
Cartesian square one. Square one is no doubt a fine square. But
if a conversation is such that I can always undercut an argument
by refusing my agreement—if that is the exemplary form of critical thinking—then no conversation can exceed my current view
of how things stand. You are only right for all I know.
Accusing contemporary philosophy of solipsism will perhaps
seem strange, since the theme of intersubjectivity has been all
the rage for two centuries and counting. But I take this to be yet
another case in point—and a good example of how Cartesianism
unleashed caustic powers of analysis that we have not been able
to put back in the bottle. Descartes was the first to formulate what
has since been called the “problem of other minds” at the end of
Meditation II, in a passage where he looks out on a busy street
and questions his usual assumption that those moving figures are
people. They might, he says, be no more than automata draped
in hats and coats. Following Descartes’s lead, the “problem” of
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other minds has been understood as this: How can I justify my
inference that you have a mind no different from mine when it’s
clear that no amount of raw sense data could ever sufficiently
warrant it? It is worth noting that Descartes does not even register
this as a special problem, nor did any major philosopher in history up to and including Kant. The deduction and explanation of
intersubjectivity has, by contrast, been one of the main preoccupations of every single major post-Kantian thinker—from Fichte
through Husserl and Wittgenstein and Habermas—all of whom
have sought to establish intersubjectivity as a distinctly nonCartesian form of knowledge.
I do not say that we have learned nothing of value from these
attempts, but it may be that what we have learned has been in the
way of hungry people reasoning about bread. In other words, it
is worth asking what we think we have to prove, or why we continue to feel as if there is a problem that needs addressing, when
no one seemed to feel such a need until the mid-1790s and when
even now there is almost no one arguing the contrary. The very
term ‘intersubjectivity’—a barbarous neologism for what used
to be called philia—suggests that our solution only replicates the
problem, insofar as it represents an attempt to maintain an attitude
of impersonal detachment in my description of the most personal
of experiences—namely, what you mean to me. ‘Intersubjectivity’ has become a bit of fashionable jargon in philosophy much
like ‘interdisciplinarity’ is in education: both words elicit a buzz
of self-congratulation all around, even as they affirm the terms
that cause the very problem they are supposed to overcome. Both
of them take for granted from the outset a situation in which subjects or disciplines are atomic units in need of combinination.
And yet, if your recipe calls for oil and water, chances are you
will never end up with a solution. Intersubjectivity promises to
be an endless though limited subject of discussion for philosophy
not simply because we have discovered in ourselves over the past
two centuries unprecedented capacities for alienation and loneliness, but also because we formulate the discussion in the wrong
kind of speech for the experience it purports to get at. We expound in monologue on the great benefits of dialogue. Said an-
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other way: the problem of other minds is not a problem except
when it is formulated in terms that assume a fundamental difference between what is absolutely certain (my mind) and what is
qualitatively less certain (you out there), so that, like most other
problems of a Cartesian pedigree—like the relation of mind and
world, mind and body, reason and experience, freedom and nature, and so forth—it can neither overcome nor be satisfied by
the dualistic terms in which it is asked.
One recurring feature that vitiates from the outset Cartesian
questions such as these is the accompanying sense that the question
proscribes a personal middle term between the proposed extremes,
a term that, before Descartes, constituted the common ground I inhabit with others because we share a world. Just as Descartes prizes
mathematics because it admits of no shades of certainty, so too the
criteria of clarity and certainty mute the sense that I should accept
common practices and concerns as the best starting point for my
thought. As Descartes says in Meditation IV: “I have been so constituted as a kind of middle ground between God and nothingness,
or between the supreme being and non-being” (82): that is, there
is nothing outside me to break the fall between certainty and ignorance. The absence of this middle term then finds literal, and striking, expression in Descartes’s view of the soul.
I am not sure whether Descartes is rightly called a dualist—
certainly there are passages in the Meditations and in his correspondence with Elizabeth that suggest he was aware of the
difficulties entailed by the view that thinking things are substantially different from extended ones, and that the two may also interact. (Of course, realizing that you have a problem and wishing
that you did not have it don’t add up to not having it.) What seems
true of both the Cartesian picture and of its Kantian successor it
is that the mind/body distinction is produced under the pressure
of locating the certainty that I am intelligent and free within the
certainty that there is no object of experience that is not material.
This is no longer the same kind of question that generates the
parts of the soul in Aristotelian or Platonic psychology or in their
Christian descendants. Many of these earlier views include a third
part of the soul between reason and desire—a part that is charac-
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teristically human by virtue of being responsive both to reason
and desire, a part that is also (and not incidentally) represented
as the seat of our social spirit, the power of soul by which we can
take things personally. It is precisely this third, mediating part—
the part by which we are understood to be attached to others—
that is done away with by the Cartesian picture of the soul. The
distinction between mind and body is thus the distinction between
subjectivity and objectivity concretely instantiated within our
own selves.
A final passing note on how this missing personal middle has
affected even the most rarefied metaphysical questions: One
would think that if anything is objectively the case, it is questions
about being as such. And yet it is owing to Descartes’s polarization of subjectivity and objectivity that the notion of epistemology as a specialized, delimited discipline exists in contrast to
ontology. It was the Cartesian inspiration of early modern epistemology to focus more precisely on the conditions of possible
experience by surrendering the assumption that the world is intelligible in itself. This approach gave us what is valuable in Kant,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger, while simultaneously making inescapable the question, In what sense can things be said to be
both knowable and “outside” the mind? Ancient and medieval
metaphysics were by no means widely shared social attitudes,
and yet their stance toward their objects of inquiry was nonetheless personal, both because they understood inquiry into being
also as inquiry into the divine, and because knowledge of the
whole was understood as a kind of communion within which that
whole knew itself to be completed.
I have doubtless already said too much, or tried to. My main
point has been that our continued attraction to being repelled by
Descartes has less to do with the fact of his having formulated
some set of terms or themes or questions that we are still concerned with, and more with his having established a certain
stance toward philosophical speech that continues to reassert itself within our attempts to deny it. Quasi-scientific speech—contextless speech treating philosophical questions as problems to
be mastered once and for all from an ex ante position—is in fact
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a form of deeply skeptical speech, and so long as we understand
it as the only mode of philosophical speech, then we will continue
to fall back into the reductive, dualistic terms of the questions
framed by Descartes. It can be no accident that it has been one
of modern philosophy’s main post-Cartesian aims to mortify
skepticism once and for all. Indeed, it is only in modern philosophy that skepticism has been felt to be a real threat, rather than
a crank position held by unwashed men living in barrels. Fear of
skepticism is a sure mark that you have set out to reason on your
own: as you tighten the demands of certainty, you are gripped by
doubt. As you sharpen the light of clarity and distinctness, the
shadow of doubt lengthens and lengthens; and if you will be
guided only by your own self-evident terms, if there is no middle
term between absolute certainty and error, then any misstep
threatens to bring the world crashing down, and you will surely
encounter skepticism at every turn.
Skepticism’s lesson, however, is that the truth is more than
a matter of words, since it is not in speech that the most aggressive skeptic will meet his match. The cure for skepticism has always been the same. You provoke the skeptic to act—you ask
him to go outside for some fresh air or, if you must, beat him
with a stick—in order to show him that he is incoherent in deed
and so to ask him to rejoin a common world larger than his way
of thinking can conceive. This is sometimes felt to be a kind of
concession of defeat on philosophy’s part—as if the need for action here showed that reasons just come to an end—whereas it
should help us realize that reasons may sometimes outstrip arguments. If, that is, what is most distinctive about Cartesianism
is its posture of voluntary neutrality, its attempt to specify the
only kind of answer that would satisfy it from the outset, and if
that feature thereby marks it as skeptical, then we should also
not expect for it to yield to strictly theoretical answers. Heidegger may help us see how Cartesianism is merely one historical
episode within a larger philosophical arc, and Wittgenstein may
convince us that if only we talked long enough about Cartesianism we would be cured from the supposition that there is anything left to talk about. And yet so long as we think the limitation
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involved is logical or discursive, we do not possess the right kind
of response.
For this reason I do not take Cartesianism to be exclusively—
and perhaps not even primarily—a theoretical problem or error.
A first step in escaping its attraction is to rediscover forms of reasoning in common, to realize that friendship is essential to clear
thinking. The kinds of goods that Cartesianism cannot see—
goods requiring belief, trust, and shared conviction—are not ersatz reasons, nor do they lend themselves to proof if we do not
lend ourselves to abiding by and in them. It is true they are subject to groupthink abuses to which we are highly sensitive. But
they are goods of knowledge, knowledge of a sort that is the only
point from which to break the tenacious hold that Cartesianism
continues to have on philosophical thought at large—perhaps beginning with the thought that there is any such thing as philosophical thought at large. The goods of friendship are
distinguished, in contrast to Cartesianism, by the relinquishment
of a particular kind of certainty, in order to make room for a
greater one. We acknowledge our dependence on the given context and circumstances within which we serve to make the good
in common with others—a set of books and questions and friends
and places and tasks—in sum, on a tradition. We accept this tradition not as a bias clouding our view of a more universal knowledge, but as an anchor deepening our thought and lending truth
a voice in time. That is, we acknowledge the partiality of our position not as a reason for undermining it, but, like the acknowledgment of our mortality, as a condition of our taking root.
Unlike Cartesian knowledge, the goods of friendship are never
available from the outset. They are at once retrospective and
prospective. Friendship is a vow that I do not know everything,
and so a way of holding myself in readiness. It is the knowledge
that my words may only be generous where we own something
in common, and that the weight and resonance of their shared
truth goes beyond what could be called their correctness. Cartesianism’s denial of this dimension makes it difficult to change
the question, as I’ve noted, since all attempts to reason in terms
of certainty flatten everything else to their level. It is friendship’s
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promise, on the other hand, that we can compass the whole by
knowing it to be wider than our thinking, that it is because the
world exceeds our single grasp that we are capable of having it
in common reach.
If I have ventured these thoughts aloud here, it is because I
found one such community of learners in St. John’s, and because,
having been away some years, I realize now how few and far between are such settings for friendship. As Tocqueville noted,
Americans seem to be Cartesians from the cradle—there are always so many different competing views of the pursuit of happiness, that we tend to equate truth proper with what is outside the
scope of democratic contradiction. Because of this, Cartesianism
and American egalitarianism are apparent (though only apparent)
relatives. But the pressure of world-historical forces should not
prevent us from attending to the kinds of conversations concretely available to us. Nor should it prevent us from seeing that,
so long as we conflate the rigor of philosophy with the rigor of
mathematics, we will continue to be haunted by Descartes, the
first to speak the singular idiom of such a possibility. Perhaps it
is no longer possible to speak of public reason in the terms I’m
suggesting; but philosophy, after all, has never been comfortable
in public, and approaching it as a quasi-technical discipline has
only subordinated it further to the natural sciences.
There was once a man, the first philosopher of all, who, upon
being asked his name under duress, gave it out as Noman. At that
moment, he realized something each of us must discover for ourselves as adolescents: that reason is always in some sense slipping out of the bonds of the particular, that it cannot be fully fixed
in place, that our thinking runs out beyond our station and our
term of life. Intelligence draws lines, but in doing so it always
manages to straddle both sides of them; it can contain every multitude. It is outlandish—as Carl Page likes to say; there is no resting place it cannot quit. But Noman did not stop at that. He
recognized the anonymity of his cunning as an episode within
the larger story of the restoration of his name, which would only
be fully fleshed out as the name of a father, a son, a husband, a
king belonging to his land, a friend to a dog and to the pear trees
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he had planted in the orchard as a boy. In the same way, while
we are trying to squirm out from under the depthless vision of
the Cyclops, anonymity is our best and only protection. But so
long as that insight is not then relocated within the task of making
speech personal, of giving speech a way of dwelling in the world,
then our words cannot have place, cannot take root, and cannot
thrive. We will remain Cartesians.
�Jacob Klein: European Scholar
and American Teacher
Eva Brann
The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program
and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob Klein’s life
as being an embodiment of that slash, “and/or” and therefore an
occasion for asking what seems to me a question the answer to
which determines the success—I mean the lively and secure survival—of liberal education.
There is the much more often debated converse to the question: “Is there a specific pedagogy for liberal education?” This is
the question: “Is there a specific curriculum for liberal education
which goes with the kind of teaching you might call “liberal?” I
won’t dwell on the answer today, except insofar as it bears on
particular aspects of teaching. I’ll just say that I think the answer
is that almost anything can be taught liberally—to a point. In particular, the shop crafts are germane enough to the liberal arts
(which form one part of liberal education, as I’ll spell out later)
to serve as a suitable complementary curriculum. To prove it,
there’s that wonderful book by Matthew Crawford, who is both
a student of philosophy and a motorcycle mechanic: it is called
Shop Class as Soulcraft (and is the much worthier successor of
that cult classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance); it
shows how fixing things forms souls, just as reading books does.
Let me give my answer to the topic question up front. I’m
not a great believer in that mode of talking to my colleagues
which attempts to make a whodunit of the telling so that they get
to learn my resolution to the inquiry only when they’re mostly
long adrift in mind.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered as the keynote address at the
Jacob Klein Conference on Liberal Education held at Providence College on Friday, March 11, 2016.
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I am persuaded, even with a certain passion, that Liberal Education does have its most appropriate program, its preferable
matter, and that this matter particularly calls for its own pedagogy. Concisely and thus a little too peremptorily put: You cannot
achieve liberal education in the mode of a specialized teaching
authority, a professor. That is by no means to say that professors
who know their stuff inside-out can’t sometimes teach liberally—
but it will be, I think, in an alternative style for them: Ex cathedra, “from the podium” will have to become “in the trenches,”
on a chair around the table with the other human souls.
I was one of that diminutive number of refugees for whom
that little devil Mephistopheles’ shamelessly candid admission
held: “I am a part of that power that ever seeks evil and ever accomplished good.” (It comes from Goethe’s Faust which no German-born person can live through a year without citing thrice.)
The Nazi persecution brought me to America where, with some
practical know-how and some luck, anyone who knows how to
be happy, can be happy, and to St. John’s College, where several
of my older colleagues were refugees. I came very young and
grew very old in Annapolis, so this band of my seniors, including
Victor Zuckerkandl, a well-known Viennese musician, and
Simon Kaplan, a Kant scholar, who came in middle age, are all
gone. Jacob Klein, called Jasha by us all, including by some
cheeky students (who are supposed to accord each other and their
tutors, as I will do, the honorific “Mr., Mrs., Miss” and later
“Ms.”), was among them. As far as I could tell—and I observed
avidly—they were well appreciated, even well loved by their
American hosts who, in their gracious naiveté, admired them for
their thorough learning and marveled at them for their pronounced personalities. But Jasha held a special place.
All the refugees that I’ve known or read of who were fully
adult when they emigrated led a cleft life—a European formation
and an American re-formation. Mr. Klein grew up and studied in
Slavic and central Europe and fled to the Anglophone West, from
the Nazis’ politically, but psychologically also from an antically
tyrannical father. This ogre, however, also came to the States and
made Sonoma County, where he turned grapes into raisins, unsafe for habitation. Among the many stories about him that Jasha
told me was that of his wedding gift to Jasha and Dodo. Dodo
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Tammann was the divorced wife of Edmund Husserl’s son, and
she became a powerful presence at St. John’s. The wedding gift
was a smallish bag of these raisins.
The years of Mr. Klein’s life were split almost exactly between Europe and America: from his birth in 1899 to 1938, his
arrival in America—thirty-nine years, and from 1938, his arrival
in Annapolis, to 1978, his death while still teaching—forty years.
(Winfree Smith, in A Search For The Liberal College [1983],
gives an indispensable account of Mr. Klein’s early years at St.
John’s, ending with his deanship.)
To me there is, in my mythifying mood, something providential in this half-and-half life. For in Europe Mr. Klein was a
private scholar without institutional bonds. He studied, conducted
private seminars and above all, wrote his principal book, entitled
in English, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1934-36). It is a work of enormous scholarship, drawing
from primary and secondary works in all the modern and classical languages—oddly not Hebrew; this visibly Jewish man governed by a Jewish fate didn’t, as far as I could tell, have a Jewish
bone in his body. Let me interject here my understanding of this
apostasy. It was not the ordinary assimilation of convenience,
still so hotly debated when I was young, but an allegiance that
trumped everything, even his love for Russian novels, namely
his deep affinity for the Greeks—not the esthetic Greeks captured
in the formula “Noble naiveté, quiet grandeur” which appeared
in the first and greatest history of antique art, that of Johann
Winckelmann (1717-1768) and which dominated that famous
German philhellenism.—I myself grew up under its aegis. What
drew Mr. Klein to the Greeks was—let me joyfully risk some political incorrectness—a very masculine view of that Greek grace
as sober soundness, as, so to speak, the apotheosis of good sense,
a virtue which the Greeks call sophrosyne—literally, soundmindedness. It was a glory that I, who had spent my post-graduate
years as a Greek archaeologist, had never suspected—that behind
all those canonical great books, there might be a very specific intellectually handsome togetherness.
Since I’ve begun to understand something of the Origin of
Algebra, I’ve thought that its doctrine was a, perhaps the, principal example of this sense of Greek soundness. The book, after
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all, traces out a loss, the loss of just this whole-heartedness. Not
that Mr. Klein was a modernity-basher. Far from it—he had studied physics and found the revolution on which he was reporting
and its modernity (plus, I should say, its extreme realization in
post-modernity) irresistibly interesting, and so his account of our
condition seemed to me far deeper and more persuasive than the
socio-political explanations I was given as a history major in
Brooklyn College. There was, furthermore, I learned in time,
nothing Heideggerian in his approach to the mode of this loss,
no call for the Destruktion (mitigatingly translated as “de-construction”) for the sake of recovering a pre-traditional ontological
origin. But, it seems to me, there might actually be large, sensibly
practical consequences from a propagation of the thesis of the
Origin of Algebra.
Obviously, I should now say as concisely as possible what
this thesis, this teaching, seems to me to be. The very subtle, very
reliable paragraph by paragraph exposition of the thesis in all its
complexity is to be found in Burt Hopkin’s Origin of the Logic
of Symbolic Mathematics (2011). I see it, more simply, in this
way: The Greeks, meaning the relevant written texts we have (but
I think the artifacts harmonize), had a direct, an immediate approach, to beings of thought, what might be called a first innocence, and if you like, even a naiveté, perhaps after all, even of
a noble sort. Their direct intellectual sight accorded those beings
a fullness, a meaning-fraught concreteness. Their way of regarding numbers is a prime example and probably the most illuminating case—negatively, because for mathematics the psychological
element is much reduced so that the intellectual mode stands out,
positively because the loss of this immediacy enabled the principal
science at the foundation of our epoch, astronomical and terrestrial
physics. Greek numbers, arithmoi, are collections of things, a
counting-up of them, in German, Anzahl. These counted-up assemblage-numbers undergo, in a long-breathed conversion traced
in the book, a reduction to mere symbols, completed by Vieta and
Descartes. In the helpful medieval language, they are transformed
from first to second intentions, meaning that a word that once
reached for a thing now reaches for the thought-belabored abstraction of the thing. This second-intentionality dominates so
much of modern discourse as to be practically a signature of
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modernity. My favorite example is this: Socrates follows a way,
in Greek a methodos, “a way gone after” (a good example: Republic 596a). We tend to have not a “method” but a “methodology,” not a jigged way, but the conception of the jigged way. We
talk, very often, in concepts rather than objects. Mr. Klein, a most
natural and, I might say, earthy person—and I might also say, like
most flesh-and-blood people full of student-delighting singularities—kookiness in plain language—had a gut-aversion to this
world of abstractions. He used to expend himself in trying to persuade Johnnies that Socrates’ forms, the eide, were not “abstractions,” literally “drawn-off,” life-deprived, thought-ghosts, but
full of attractive being.
That brings me to the second half of Mr. Klein’s life, the
American part, spent almost entirely at St. John’s College. He
did, to be sure, write two more books in this epoch. The first was
A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (1965). The Meno is to St. John’s
College something like what the Declaration of Independence is
to the United States, the condition of its possibility; it is our enabling work for freedom from academicism. The Meno shows
under what conditions learning by inquiry, as distinct from
knowledgeableness by study, is possible. Like the Algebra book
(as it is, ridiculously, known at home) the Meno book contains
some unforgettable insights—unforgettable because as soon as
you’ve read them you think you’ve always known them. This
was the kind of mental plagiarism Mr. Klein chuckled over as a
mark of his insights having been understood and adopted. My
particular pick is his discovery that the capacity of “image-recognition” (eikasia: not “imagining” or “imagination”) attached to
the lowest section of the divided line presented in the Republic
(509 ff., the commentary on the Meno mines other dialogues for
relevant illuminations) ranges through all the divisions to the
highest, because imaging is the generating principle of the world
that flourishes under the “Idea of the Good.” Thus our lowest capacity is also our most encompassing. These assimilable insights
are life-changing; I’ll refrain from personal testimonials, but you
can see that at the least the thought of an imagination-ontology
will affect your way of reflecting.
The second late book, Plato’s Trilogy, on the Theaetetus,
Sophist, and Statesman (1977), I could never take to. It is written
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in a mode that seems to belong to old age: It paraphrases the text
with the intention that the reader will extract a commentary from
the emphases and deviations. David Lachterman’s review of the
book1 helped me to see its accomplishments, one of which is that
it really functions as a sort of provocation to reflection on texts
left intact by the interpreter. (I might say here that David was, to
my knowledge, the most universally learned student who ever
came out of St. John’s; he carried on Mr. Klein’s projects in his
own competently ingenious way.)
Most of Mr. Klein’s writing was for lectures directed to our
students, and these, insofar as they were recoverable, were edited
by Robert Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman and published by
the college. They have that same quality that he saw in the Greek
authors: simultaneously with having grasped it, it grasps you: it
sits naturally in the intellect—mine, at least, and many of my colleagues’.
But these published works are not what dominated the second part of his life. In fact, he was almost comically inimical to
publication. When I came in 1957 for my appointment interview,
he placed me in a chair and, so to speak, danced around me, holding the two pot-publications I had proudly sent with my application—I was then an archaeologist—between thumb and index
finger as if they were some loathsome matter and then tossed
them back to me. (Publication wasn’t and still isn’t a criterion for
appointment or tenure at St. John’s.) Taking his aversion to publication seriously, I translated the algebra book in secret and confessed only late, because I had questions to ask. Then, however,
with splendid inconsistency, he was eager for it to come out into
the world, where it first languished, only to emerge slowly and
steadily into some fame and influence, particularly of course,
under Burt Hopkins’s energetic shepherding.
So now to the point. If the first half of his life, the European
part, was under the aegis of learning and scholarly production,
the second, American half was predominantly a teaching life, be
it as a tutor (our replacement of the title “professor,” though it’s
not used in address) or as dean of the college (1949-1958). As
1. David Lachterman, “Review of J. Klein’s Plato’s Trilogy, Nous 13
(1979): 106-12.
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for the latter function, I remember vividly that when the end-ofclass bell rang he would issue from his office to stand at the bottom of the stairs of our main building and scan the faces of
descending students for signs of life. Once he caught me coming
down, maneuvered me into his office, and chided me for having
threatened with bodily harm a student who had not been able to
inflect the Greek verb “to be.”
Here is the serious aspect of Mr. Klein as a teacher in an institution whose faculty had bound itself to an all-required, coherent plan of liberal education, with the consequent abolition of
electives for students and specialization for teachers and the replacement of the ways of learning and modes of teaching then,
and even more now, current in universities and colleges—less in
the latter since some of these ways are functions of size and consequently of—phantasized—economies of scale.
In my young and ardent years as a tutor I saw in Mr. Klein
the incarnation of a teacher in a program which was conceived
by its founders, Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, as a contemporary re-animation of the traditional liberal education that
was first set out in the seventh book of Plato’s Republic and in
the eighth book of Aristotle’s Politics (where the word liberal,
“belonging to the free” [eleutherion] is, as far as I know, first
used to distinguish this upbringing from the vocational, utilitarian
sort). For Rome, the guiding text was Quintilian’s Teaching Program for Oratory, and in the Middle Ages, Hugh of St. Victor’s
Didascalicon and John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon (which is,
however, concerned only with the verbal arts). These works, to
be sure, often concentrate on the specific liberal arts, the skills
of learning, rather than on liberal education, which relies on texts
for reflection.
Indeed, when Mr. Klein arrived in late 1938, for the second
year of the college’s New Program, it was already fixed in its
broad organization into tutorials for the exercise of the liberal
arts and seminars for the discussion of great books. The liberal
arts were exactly the trivium, the three-way of words: grammar,
logic and rhetoric, their correctness, validity and persuasiveness,
and the quadrivium, the four-way of things: arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and music, their countability, extendedness, regular
motions and attendant harmonies. The program of tutorials stuck
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quite closely to this scheme—reducing it to language and mathematics classes with the modern addition of laboratory. Rumor
has it that in the library of those early days, physics books were
catalogued under music, the study of bodies in ratio relations.
Learnedness was required to find the finest working examples
for exercises in these arts, taken from the most highly regarded
works of language, mathematics, and science. The early faculty
had put enticing tutorials together by the time Jasha arrived.
What he also found was a particularly felicitous modern fusion, instigated by Buchanan, of the so-called Great Books with
the Liberal Arts, which had long been regarded as ancillary, particularly to the exegesis of Scripture. Canon-establishing lists of
Great Books go back to antiquity and forward into our times, so
our founders were well-supplied (especially: Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948;
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes, 2011). As it seems to me, Mr. Klein’s function with respect to the Program’s teaching matter was largely to add an additional element of competence and, most importantly, to
undergird the programmatic sequence with an intellectual history
that put the dawn of modernity found in the mathematical writers
of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century at the center of the
drama of a break between antiquity and modernity. It was a break
mirrored roughly in the discontinuity of our sophomore and junior years; its pathos is that of a great loss of human substance and
a huge gain of human power.
Buchanan himself was what is called a charismatic figure,
evidently (I didn’t know him) full of pedagogically energizing
outrageousness—very much the memorable master teacher dominating and drawing the college together—just what it needed in
its uncertain youngest years.
I must say here that the view I am about to offer of Mr. Klein
as presenting a model, perhaps the model, of teaching best fitting
a stable community of liberal learning is my own, perhaps to my
colleagues more of a construction than it ought to be, but very
plausible to me. It goes along with the conviction to which I’ve
confessed that a liberal education which is mindful of its tradition
and works pretty well day-to-day, with semi-frequent ascents into
sheer glory, has its own, proper teaching mode. I think that the
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delineation that follows fits not only a program of liberal education that has its own institution but also more partial, more tentative efforts. But I should report here that our founders
emphatically asserted that the program they were instituting was
not a curricular experiment. I think that attitude was crucial to
our holding together over the years: We thought—how shall I put
it?—that if this didn’t work out, then there was something wrong
with the world, not with the Program. And contrary to all pious
preaching about not being too inward-turned but more accommodating to reality, that passionate sense of being, for all our
flaws, on the right path turned out to be intensely practical. As I
recall him, Mr. Klein had a sovereign sense of being in a place
that had it right. I might add that I’ve visited a number of schools
where they did things quite differently but had the same sense of
“having got it right,” and the consequent affect between us was
immediate sympathy and potential friendship.
To begin with, then, he had the right temperament—a bit of
a gourmand (he, who despised academic grading would grade
Dodo’s uniformly delectable cuisine at every meal), a little indolent, pipe-puffing (a horrible weed called Balkan Sobranie),
amusedly tolerant toward all signs of intellectual effort in the
young and overtly repelled by adult intellectualism. In fact, he
took delight, not always fairly distributed, in the eager naiveté
and good-natured hijinks of the student generation of his first arrival; he had a special affection (which I’ve inherited) for the
scamps. (Our students of the present day, I might say, are more
experientially sophisticated and thus more psychologically
fraught—but none the wiser for it.)
I say “the right temperament,” but I mean a temperament; all
teachers in the liberal mode need a bit of a personality, both to
attract willing attention and to repel a too easy familiarity. Mr.
Klein had a lot of the appurtenances of personality, for example,
the ability to draw perfect circles on the board while facing the
class by pivoting his arm behind his back—a source of delight
to students studying Ptolemy. But these are gifts that you ape at
your peril.
Then there were other traits that were not a gift of nature but
the fruit of time. Older, more experienced teachers tend to carry
their authority with less strain and more élan, to maintain their
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repose and to intervene with aplomb, even when a learning occasion goes embarrassingly wrong—well mostly. These ways
you acquire more by keeping at it than by having a hero.
Then there were the bread-and-butter virtues of any teacher
in an institution, enforcing some discipline by mundane means—
calling on the silent, administering quizzes, requiring and attending to projects to be handed in. This dutiful fulfillment of
institutional requirements ought to be supervised by those in
charge, in our case that is the dean. Mr. Klein learned meticulous
dutifulness, as his wife told me, on the job; his pre-dean nature
was to let such things—such mere necessities—go in favor of
spontaneous life.
So far I’ve described a teacher at once too distinctively himself and too ordinarily dutiful to be a very imageable model. I’ll
now try to say how he came to be the paradigm of a teacher in a
school devoted to liberal education.
Let me begin by forfending the imputation that he followed
something called “the Socratic Method.” Neither Mr. Klein nor
we, the epigonoi as the Greek say, the successors, do any such
thing. On the one hand, it’s a contradiction in terms: Socrates
had, as I’ve said, a way, a pursuit, but not a method in the Cartesian sense of a set of jigged procedures for following an inquiry.
Mr. Klein used to say that each dialogue was its own world, and
in each conversation Socrates goes about his search in a different
way, taking into account the character of his conversational partners and of the object in question. So Socrates has his ways which
are not a method, and in that respect he is the very incarnation of
liberal teaching and our super-model. Yet, on the other hand, this
Socrates of the Platonic dialogues is, after all, Plato’s marionette,
who does as he’s told, which means he knows, or Plato knows
for him, exactly where he’s going. And that we never do know—
and we manage to rejoice in that fact.
And here finally begins my positive delineation of a pedagogy specific to liberal education and to Jasha Klein’s embodiment of it. It presupposes that liberal education, in its most
specific sense, is realized in a curriculum of texts handed to us
by the tradition, be they verbal, musical, visual. These works are
primary in the order of making or finding and prime in the ranking of quality or worth. Confronted with such works a teacher
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does well to recede into equality with the students, to inquire
along with them, and yet to be the safekeeper, the tutor of the enterprise. Mr. Klein was a master of the somewhat mysterious art
of leading from behind— by solicitous listening, by intimating
questions, even by expectant silence. He himself particularly admired a colleague, Richard Scofield, a gentleman of the old
American type, for his elegant tacitness.
This reticence had its infuriating aspects: The more a young
fellow-tutor wanted to be initiated into the deep lore we were
sure he possessed, the less forthcoming he was—sometimes, I
discovered, because he didn’t actually know, but more often because he was terminally disciple-proof; he would tolerantly respond to the admiring affection of beguiled students but would
not bind them to him by an inside teaching. It was part of that
soundness of his, which did have a Socratic look about it. His
most consequential discoveries fit, as I’ve said, into our own intellects as if there’d always been a place ready for them. Of
course, in time the insufficiencies emerged, not such as to undo
the insights, but such as to make them the center of a second sort
of attention, critical attention.
Playfulness, another Socratic element, is of the essence in
liberal learning—playfulness in making the most of the misfiring
of the inquiring intellect, playful exploitation of felicitous coincidences and other fortuities, playful extraction of sense from
nonsense, playful pinpointing of students’ personal ways—the
sort that feels to them not like offensive denigration but like gratifying spot-lighting. Playfulness, after all, goes with laughter, and
surprised laughter is the physical analogue to wonder, the beginning of philosophy. We young tutors, who had just emerged from
post-graduate studies, learned something wonderful: Learning
has a human face, and a teacher who can’t laugh, can’t be serious.
Seriousness is naturally next. Seriousness is opposed in one
respect to levity, for example a leaning some bright students
evince toward easily distractible intellectual gadgeteering. In another respect, seriousness is opposed to earnestness, dead earnestness, such as rigidly relentless industriousness. Both evade
entering into the “seriousness of the concept” (as Hegel terms it;
“Preface” 4, Phenomenology). “Seriousness” here means not be-
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laboring a thought but letting it work on you, not willfully grasping for insights but letting them come, by giving them room or—
as I like to put it—by futzing around. Time-taking patience and
messing-about belong to liberal learning, because these works
don’t open up to strategic invasions.
Serious teachers who join their students in dithering purposefully and procrastinating concentratedly must also sometimes appear in a formidable aspect. Socrates, for example, appears thus
formidable just once that I know of, though that leaves its daunting impression: When confronted with a young life going seriously wrong, here that of Callicles, he concludes with an
impassioned speech in a tone devoid of any tint of parity or playfulness: He says that he will follow his own account for a life of
virtue and bids Callicles and his crowd follow the same rationale
of conduct. “For,” he ends, “yours is worth nothing” (Gorgias,
end). On rare occasions I’ve heard that tone from Mr. Klein, a
tone utterly distinct from that of powerlessly querulous righteousness sometimes adopted by academics when great perturbations
are caused by small differences. These were moments when the
stakes were high—our students’ souls or our school’s survival,
particularly its resolute non-careerism—for this is, as I’ve said,
what the word “liberal” in “liberal education” originally betokens.
That brings me to the protection of the exchanges that are the
life of learning from dangers both within and without the classroom. Of these there are many, of which I’ll mention only one:
the corruption of conversation into debate, into argument, and
even into discussion, into all the modes of human communication
in which the passion of competition outweighs the desire for illumination. Mr. Klein practiced a pedagogy that incited in students the desire to shine but damped their impulse to outshine
each other. I think what made it work was his own sense that
some of the greatness of the works we were grappling with magnified us, but also that in the face of this grandeur our gradations,
natural or acquired, were minimized. But there was some kindly
cunning in it as well: to pretend in the face of much contrary evidence that everyone was genuinely at work and really up to it
and to keep pretending it until it—sometimes—came true.
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Perhaps I’ll mention one more vulnerability of any serious
community of young learners: the excitation of friendships
formed in the face of deep questions and difficult texts displaces
proper preparation and solid learning. For young teachers that
somewhat vacuous intensity wears out with time, but some of
our students do graduate having had more experience of the love
of learning than of learning. Characters like that hung around
Socrates, and, as I recall, Mr. Klein didn’t know what to do about
them either. However, to my mind there are worse ways to waste
one’s time.
I have not at all exhausted the pedagogical lessons that many
of my colleagues and I myself learned from Jacob Klein. Since I
can’t recall his ever mentioning to me a living model for himself,
this conclusion may be justified: What shaped the soundly ingenious scholar of intellectual history that he was in the first half of
his life, into the devoted teacher’s teacher of liberal learning that
he became in the second half, was a tiny college, St. John’s, with
an unadulterated program of liberal education, seated in the continent-wide American republic, with a continuous tradition of enabling liberty.—This half-European was as American as they
come.
I’ll finish with a little anecdote to show how Jasha was my
teacher and my model. When, after his death, Dodo was disposing of his library, she told me to take whatever I wanted. I was
simply paralyzed by the prospect of suddenly owning a lot of irreplaceable books. So I went minimal. I chose only his Greek
Plato in the Teubner and Oxford editions, multiple volumes,
falling apart with use and heavily underlined as well as annotated
in his tiny, legible script. Then, nearly two-score years ago, I
bound all the volumes up in a broad golden ribbon and never
looked inside them again until I was writing this talk. He would
have chuckled.
�On Negation: Other Possibilities in
Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World
Jason Menzin
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
—Wallace Stevens
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”
In three poems from Parts of a World (1942)1—“Of Modern Poetry,” “Landscape with Boat,” and “The Well Dressed Man with
a Beard”—Wallace Stevens reflects on the idea that poetry enables human life, and on the idea that the poet’s fictions can console us, compensating to some extent for the loss of older ideas
of order. This perspective is a shift in tone and sensibility from
the sharp irony, cool distance, and florid diction characteristic of
Harmonium (1923).2 Parts of a World seems to seek a solution
to the problem of Crispin in Harmonium’s “Comedian as the Letter C,” who is “washed away by magnitude,” overwhelmed by
the violence of untamed reality:
[Crispin] now beheld himself,
A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.
What word split up in clickering syllables
And storming under multitudinous tones
Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?
Crispin was washed away by magnitude.3
1. Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (New York: Knopf, 1942).
2. Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (New York: Knopf, 1923).
3. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode
and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 22.
Jason Menzin has taught philosophy at the Morrisey College of Arts
and Sciences, Boston College.
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“Of Modern Poetry” is a short, self-referential poem in the ars
poetica tradition. It enacts what it describes, pointing to itself at
its beginning and end:
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
...
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.4
This “poem of the mind” is mainly the imaginative act of the poet
in the process of creating. But for Stevens, the poem of the mind
is also a more expansive metaphor for all imaginative activities,
from faith and philosophy to history, literature, and science. It
stands for all fictive acts, all human attempts to find coherence in
the chaos of the world outside themselves. “The act of finding /
What will suffice” is this imaginative project, which is rooted in
the need for order, meaning, beauty, joy, play, and pleasure.
The “Modern” in the poem’s title indicates that the imagination faces new challenges. Poetry must adapt to contemporary
needs. In the past, the mind “has not always had / To find” because “the scene was set”; it merely “repeated what / Was in the
script.” The poet could borrow freely from religious, philosophical, political, economic, moral, and artistic certainties. But the
script of a scriptwriter God not only controls reality’s radical contingency, it also constrains the imagination’s possibilities. God’s
scripted world unfolds from birth to death with logical, or at least
dramatically plausible, necessity among thoughts and feelings.
Belief in such a coherent narrative could once, perhaps, have provided a sense of stability.
4. Ibid., 218-19.
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37
But Stevens signals the transformation of the world with a
line break—“then the theater was changed”—suggestively enjambing “To something else.” The broken line mimics a fracture
in the world, while the enjambment underscores the urgency of
transitioning to a new order. The gap between the first and second
sections of the poem, across which the enjambment moves, mirrors the imaginative leap required if the poet is to cross from one
structure of meaning to another.
When the scene changes, the past becomes merely a “souvenir”—a stale memento—and the poet must renovate the theatre
of human meaning.5 For Stevens, the poet must step into the gap
of feeling and meaning created by the collapse of the old verities.
The imagination
. . . has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice.6
It cannot any longer repeat God’s script, but must meet the new
realities head-on, connect to contemporary people and places, even
“think about war.” It must leave Romanticism behind and search
out reality in plain language. “And it has to find what will suffice.”
But what is the sense of sufficiency? In essence, it is a response that matches a need. In physics, it is the equal and opposite reaction to an action. It is not, however, an answer or a final
resolution, but a reaction that reestablishes balance. It is, for a
time, enough.
“Of Modern Poetry” presents Stevens’s thinking about the
voice of the poet, written in Stevens’s own voice, without the eva5. William Butler Yeats described the same change of scene in his wellknown poem “The Second Coming,” in which “things fall apart” so
that “the centre cannot hold.” He compares this change of scene to the
fall from paradise, an apocalypse auguring a new creation. William
Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner,
1996), 187.
6. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 218-19.
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sions of irony. The first lines of the poem are expressed in short
strokes with simple diction. The word it and its declined variations
occur fifteen times, and the whole of the piece lacks the sharp tone
in much of Harmonium. Despite the spare language, the governing
metaphor of the opening section is theatrics—plays and playing
in the theatre of the world. The image of poetry is a performance
before an audience. Play and performance run through the whole
poem, from a theatre with a set-scene, to an insatiable script-less
actor on stage, to a guitar-twanging metaphysician in the dark, to
a man skating, to a woman dancing. Play is part of a living being’s
response to the pressures of life, but it is also a self-sufficient act,
done for its own sake, a good in itself.
But if there is play, there is also work. And since “it,” the
mind of the poet, “has to find what will suffice” in a world where
“the theatre was changed,” the imagination must “construct a new
stage.”7 Stevens knows, as Nietzsche knew, that the death of God
means the loss of old givens. Several years after “Of Modern Poetry,” Stevens will echo Nietzsche, re-announcing that “the death
of one God is the death of all.”8 But Stevens also knows, with
Sartre, that human beings—and poets in particular—have the
artistic capacity to build a world out of their own experience. The
mind’s construction of a new stage is part of the poet’s construction of reality. This is Sartre’s existentialism compressed and
transmuted into the language of poetic creation.
Having constructed the new stage of poetic reality, Stevens
sets a single, long and complex sentence across the mid-point of
“Of Modern Poetry”:
It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 329.
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Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.9
The imaginative mind not only develops new forms through
which reality may be understood, it also, “like an insatiable
actor,” plays at playing a role, and speaks words to the world.
These are the two complementary halves of the poetic whole: a
created stage-world and a fictive performance. But as with the
woman singing by the sea at Key West, the relationship between
creator, creature, and spectator is not simple. And here Stevens
insists that the poet must speak carefully, “slowly and with meditation,” the words that suffice.
Stevens’s figure for sufficiency is consonance, like words
that rhyme: the echo of “ear” in “hear,” the repetition of “ear”
and “ear.” The sounds of rhyme, expectation and fulfillment, imitate the poem’s broader ability to satisfy a psychic need. It is first
the sound, not the sense, of his words that triggers a response in
the actor-poet’s invisible audience. It is the sound that prompts
the audience to turn inward, to feel an internal response, listening
“not to the play, but to itself.” This is the mystery of poetry. A
bridge of words, of sense and sound, emerging from nowhere and
crossing the gap between poet and audience. This is sufficiency,
a temporary unity of feeling, “expressed / In an emotion as of
two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one.” It is through
this unity, when it happens, that the poet changes the world.
Stevens not only fuses feelings—unifying people and emotions—but also transmutes the mind poetically. At the poem’s beginning, the mind is an actor in the world-as-theater. When “the
theater was changed,” the mind becomes an insatiable actor who
“has to be on that stage.” Then, allowing the analogy to disappear,
mind as actor becomes musical metaphysician. The fictive personae merge, echoing in poetic form the fusion of “two / Emotions
9. Ibid., 219.
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becoming one.” Actor-mind, now reconstituted as instrumentalist,
continues to make sounds:
The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.10
In a poem about poetry, Stevens inserts an image of a philosopher, one who lacks a Platonic sun, lacks the light of reason—a
metaphysician making music in the dark. And the sounds that
issue from his guitar are sounds of the imagination.
But why does he “twang”? And why on one string instead of
several? Again, the sound of words first moves the audience toward emotion. “Twang” is sensibly onomatopoetic, vibrating in
the mouth as a string vibrates in the air. The single string reflects
his harmonization of distinctions; his music briefly unifies minds.
From the sounds of the wiry string a new formulation of “what
will suffice” emerges. Moments of “sudden rightnesses” flash
into existence and create a temporary equilibrium of feeling, a
womb-like sense of containment, a nearly unimaginable fullness
of satisfaction: “wholly / Containing the mind, below which it
cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will to rise.” This is
not the permanence of a set-scene, nor the eternal verities of old
metaphysicians, but a moment of passing human integritas.
The poem closes with brief sketches of simple scenes from
human life:
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.11
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
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Gone is the metaphorical stage, the actor, and the musical metaphysician. What remain are simple figures of play and motion
and gentleness: “a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman /
Combing.” Prefiguring the tone in much of Stevens’s late poetry,
these are quiet, transient, and lonely images of sufficiency. Like
the poem itself, these are instances of what might suffice, “the
poem of the act of the mind.”
✢✢✢
Unlike his practice in much of Harmonium, Stevens employs
irony in Parts of a World not merely to mock, but also to clear
an imaginative space upon which to frame new possibilities.
“Landscape with Boat,” a poem with a painterly title about an
artist, reflects this development in Stevens’s ironic sensibility.
First published in the autumn of 1940, “Landscape with
Boat” has four main sections, each with its own distinct focus
and tone: the first, like the “Snow Man” of Harmonium, is largely
descriptive; the second is critical; the third revelatory; the fourth
calmly reflective. Moreover, the poem has two halves—the first
framing the life and art of an ascetic figure, the second exploring
the sense of other possibilities.
“Landscape with Boat” begins with a deceptively simple line:
An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.
He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turquoise hint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob
Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive
At the neutral center, the ominous element,
The single-colored, colorless, primitive.12
12. Ibid., 220.
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The opening—“An anti-master man, floribund ascetic”—is
a sentence fragment, an extended noun, a label, language that
might appear on a small card beneath a painting on the wall of a
museum. It signals the poem’s subject matter without incorporating the living action and motion of a verb. The syntax of this
phrase—the indefinite article, the negation, the missing verb—
hints at the meaning of the figure Stevens has introduced. The
anti-master man is defined in part by inversion. He is by being
what he is not. He is neither Nietzsche’s master man nor Hitler’s;
he is not even the anti-master man. He is merely an indefinite
“an.” But he is also a “floribund ascetic.” “Floribund,” a neologism, clearly suggests “florid,” probably also “abundant,” and
therefore forms an oxymoron with “ascetic.”13 Although “floribund” is not a word in English, floribunda, “many-flowering” in
Latin, is a species of rose popularized at the 1939 World’s Fair.
With some or all of this in mind, Stevens characterizes the antimaster man as an ironic paradox of empty-fullness, a man of selfdenial and roses.
But what is this floribund ascetic? He is an artist, a peculiar
abstractionist, who removes elements from a painted canvas: “He
brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, / Then the colossal illusion of heaven.” This painter is both poetic imaginer as well as
ambiguously broom-brush-wielding artist. Thunder is sound, not
shape. The illusion of heaven is idea, not image. Neither can literally be “brushed away.” But the ascetic artist does brush them
away, removing both the real and the imagined sky, the thunder
and clouds as well as heaven, the stale ideas of order and coherence lost to the modern world. This inverse painting, the brushing
of negation, is a necessarily imperfect, incompletable process.
The painter who removes all color from a canvas ceases to produce painting. This ultimate abstractionist would succeed in his
end only by failing as an artist. And just so, despite his brushing
13. In “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Stevens disaggregates this
fusion, in “happy fecundity, flor-abundant force” (Collected Poetry
and Prose, 336).
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away, “Yet still / The sky was blue.” The ascetic may succeed in
removing images and ideas, but he cannot brush away the blue
of the imagination.
But who is this anti-master man, this floribund ascetic? Is
this Stevens himself? The rich connoisseur of food and art and
flowers and books, living alone in a small upstairs room at home
in Connecticut? Is he the idea of a modern artist, a poet-painter
who denies the world and life to achieve a truth beyond the real?
Is it an echo of Nietzsche’s conception of the ascetic? A mockery
and critique of the poet? A critique of critique?
What is this abstractionist trying to do? What does he want?
What does it mean to take blue away from the imagination? Like
a refigured image of the earlier “snow man” of Harmonium, the
abstractionist tends toward negation and nothingness. He must,
in other words, “have a mind of winter” and “have been cold a
long time”14 to want “imperceptible air,” to want to see with a
single, cyclopean “eye” and not be touched by the blueness of
feeling and imagination. He would see with Homer’s monster’s
eye, without the depth of emotion, without color, half-blind, in
an almost perspective-less perspective without human sense—
an urge not for the chaos of senseless nonsense but for the bare,
“naked” barrenness of non-sense. He is also, perhaps, a figure
for the twentieth-century physicist, peeling back the surface of
both the world and the mind to find a colorless absence as the ultimate object beneath. Or, more comically, he is the poet carried
away by critique and the poetic reassessment of old ideas of coherence. He is Stevens critiquing himself and his own poems
about poetry, parodying the act of tossing too many things onto
the dump heap.15
This ascetic artist, a figure of negation, is “Nabob / Of bones,”
a non-man, shorn of everything but his internal frame. “He rejected, he denied,” brushing away his painting, his world, and his
14. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
15. Cf. Stevens’s poem “The Man on the Dump,” Collected Poetry
and Prose, 184-86.
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self, in an effort “to arrive / At the neutral center, the ominous element.” The danger of this kind of abstraction is acute. It turns a
man into a skeleton, pulls clouds from the sky, rejects, denies,
and destroys. It is the search for the “ominous” center, something
non-human, sub-human, and impossible: “The single colored,
colorless primitive.” The primitive, like the artist’s “eye,” is singular, so that the form of the seeker here matches the form of the
thing sought. It, like the artist figured in the poem’s opening line,
is oxymoronic, colored colorlessness, and, like the artist himself,
is a thing of negation, neither this, nor that, but “neutral.”
It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing that he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.16
This unsympathetic, comic-tragic figure’s effort fails, however, because lifeless life is not life but death, which is the end
of possibilities: “It was not as if the truth lay where he thought, /
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.” There is finally no colorless color to find, no human experience beyond human feeling
and human thought. Unreality, however, does not prevent its supposition. The abstractionist is not only ascetic, but also paradoxically floribund. He seeks a truth beyond the imagination by
means of supposing, by imagining. And within Stevens’s poetics,
this seeming inconsistency makes perfect sense, since “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.”17
16. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 220.
17. Cf. “The Plain Sense of Things,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 428.
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Hypothetically, if the truth beyond the imagination were
“nowhere else,” then it would be “there.” But this truth is not
only not the twice-repeated “nowhere else,” it is also not even
“there.” It is non-truth. It is only “nowhere” because it is an experience of nothing. The negated, brushed away world and the
mind of ultimate rejection and denial does not exist. Or, if this
non-truth does exist, it has no sense for the living human being.
It would be “a thing that he reached / In a place that he reached,
by rejecting what he saw / And denying what he heard.” Nevertheless, Nabob perseveres in his efforts; despite obstacles and
impossibilities, “He would arrive.” But at what ridiculous,
tragic cost: “He had only not to live, to walk in the dark.” Perhaps the floribund ascetic is not only florid and abundant, but
also florid and moribund, flowery and dead, since his is a poetics of death.
In a remarkable use of enjambment, Stevens both uncovers
the heart of the ascetic painter-poet and figures his inevitable
end, explaining that Nabob had only “To be projected by one
void into / Another.” At the exact mid-point of the poem, a position which here signals the ascetic’s central emptiness, he is projected by one void—himself—into the blankness of the
unfinished sentence at the end of the poetic line. He is thrown
into the nothingness beyond the poem, a senseless non-existence
beyond human meaning. Strongly paralleling the “nothing” of
the “Snow Man” in Harmonium, the ascetic is projected by one
void, the nothing that he is, into another void, the nothing of the
non-world that he seeks.18
Had Stevens concluded the poem at this point, it would
merely be an ironic recasting of the “snow man” into the figure
of an inhuman poet-artist—from snow man to no man. The continuation of the poem reveals an important aspect of Stevens’s
poetic development.
The third section opens with a continued reflection on the ascetic artist in much the same tone as before:
18. Cf. again “The Snow Man,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
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It was his nature to suppose,
To receive what others had supposed, without
Accepting. He received what he denied.
But as truth to be accepted, he supposed
A truth beyond all truths.19
These five lines form a bridge between the second and third sections of the poem. They recapitulate the opening half of the poem,
reminding the reader of the abstractionist’s practice of un-painting. The metaphor of brushing away images is here made plain—
the ascetic artist receives ideas and images from “others”
“without accepting” them, supposing without believing, inheriting and denying his inheritance. Nabob is a figure of critique,
whose only affirmative supposition is “a truth beyond all truths,”
a nothing-truth of emptiness, a metaphysics of non-.
Stevens uses repetition in the bridge-section to create expectation and emotional force. The empty suppositions of the ascetic,
reiterated by the repetition of “suppose” in the five lines of the
bridge passage, are finally overwhelmed by a new supposing, the
powerful revelation of other possibilities of life through creative
figuring:
He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise, part, the perceptible blue
Grown denser, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts.20
With a complete shift in poetic tone, Stevens undoes the ascetic artist’s opening act of de-creation. The return of the world,
with language that feels like air and sunlight overwhelming desolation, is beyond the abstractionist’s supposing. And although
carefully couched in the subjunctive “might” and the conditional
19. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 220.
20. Ibid., 220-21.
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“if,” the feeling of these lines, especially as it contrasts with the
sense of a world brushed away in the poem’s first half, contains
romantic—nearly biblical—force. The negating ascetic, of
course, “never supposed / That he might be truth, or part of it.”
And with the pulse-like repetition of “part,” Stevens brings back
the parts of a world brushed away by the ascetic in the poem’s
opening section. Stevens brings back the “turquoise tint”—now
“irregular”; the “blue”—now no longer the “imperceptible air”
of the ascetic, but “perceptible,” “grown denser”; the “clouds”—
now playful on the eye; the “thunder”—now magnifying the ear.
The painting of the poem’s opening has been restored, renewed,
with all but the “colossal illusion of heaven” reinstated. And
even that illusion, perhaps necessarily left off the canvas in
modernity, is transmuted in a second and final, restorative supposition:
He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.21
Echoing “Sunday Morning,”22 where divinity lives within the self
and within scenes of earthly emotion, this second supposition
projects the possibility of a new kind of divinity. Here the ascetic
is inverted. The thing sought is not nothing, but everything: the
world itself, the parts of a whole. This everything is not under
the canvas, not beneath the blue, or beyond, but here and now
and as things actually are. As in the flight of the angel in “Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction” and that poem’s “expressible bliss,”
here differences are collapsed, like a mystical epiphany, and truth
is seen everywhere.23
But surely this goes too far. Stevens’s skepticism and his poetics of sufficiency is not a poetics of totality. And indeed, all of
21. Ibid., 221.
22. Ibid., 53-56.
23. Ibid., 349.
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this would be too sentimental, too romantic for belief, if not for
the qualifying conditionals, the uncertainty of “might,” the indefiniteness of “suppose.” These are not assertions of certainty,
but expressions of possibilities, contrapuntal potentialities to the
ascetic artist’s negations. Yet even these evasions fit into the orchestrated whole of Stevens’s own poem. This suggests, if only
obliquely, that the two abstractions—one of negation, one of totality—are not equally plausible or equally human.
In “Landscape with Boat,” artistic repetition, not mere repetitiousness, signals the potential for actual order—both in the
poem and in the world. Even as “suppose” is repeated several
times in this section, the word “he” is repeated seven times in the
opening section, “it” eight times in the second, and “part” seven
times in the third. After the repetition of “it” in the second section,
“he” is repeated six times. Before the repetition of “part” in the
third, “he” is again repeated six times. These symmetries of repetition provide cohesion to the poem both in sense and sound.
They are like a pulse within the poem, from the ascetic “he” to
the non-truth of “it” to the revelatory “part.” The existence of
these parts of the poem themselves enact the “parts” described
within the poem. If artistically shaped patterns, structures of poetic repetition, point to the possibility of parts in the world, then
there may be a concordance between poem and cosmos. The
poem may make possible a belief in the possibility of parts, a belief in the possibility of a whole defined not by inversion but by
life itself.
Within the shape of this whole, Stevens completes the poem
with a reflective voice, moving into the warmth of sunlight, air,
and water. He ends with a “better” supposing, a life of motion
and sound and warmth:
Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer’s track
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And say, “The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.”24
Here, with the appearance of the steamer’s track, is a refreshed
“Landscape with Boat”—not the landscape brushed away by the
abstractionist, but a rich place, an image of what might be, of
what “might . . . might . . . might” be, of possible poetry and possible life. Here in the south of Europe a better painter, a man alive
to the scene before him, sits at rest on a sofa on a balcony overlooking the play of light and water on the Mediterranean. Unlike
the abstractionist—a void becoming void—this artist, like the sea
before him, is perhaps an “emerald / Becoming emeralds,” the
green jewels that are the parts of reality. This greater artist observes rather than destroys, and, instead of brushing away thunder
and clouds, watches palms flap leaves like green ears that can
hear a world in the warm air. This possible poet observes the liquid pleasure of wine and the liquid of the sea. He sees in the water
a “steamer’s track,” a relic of motion, a hint of the boat of the
poem’s title, an affirmation that this moment itself, this lived moment from the balcony above the sea, is the landscape with boat.
In the midst of this renewed world, the poet reflects in spoken
words on the sense of his own poetry: “The thing I hum appears
to be the rhythm of this celestial pantomime.” In harmony with
the poetics of the poem’s second half, this better poet feels his
poetry fitting into the rhythm of the world. He feels the rhythm
of his own language to be a sound of concord, a thing that might
reflect the greater poetry of a cosmos of moving parts.
✢ ✢ ✢
In “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” another short poem
with a painterly title, Stevens continues to work through themes
and ideas from “Of Modern Poetry” and “Landscape with Boat.”
Unlike the latter poem, however, with its two distinct halves,
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” consists of a body and
tail, a single stanza of sixteen lines and a one-line coda.
24. Ibid., 221
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After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.25
On initial reading, the negative conclusion of the poem’s
coda seems strangely paired with the humming affirmations that
end the main stanza. Perhaps a closer examination can help clarify the relationship between the coda and the whole.
The opening line is a compressed version of the two halves
of “Landscape with Boat,” in which the first half involves the
negations of the ascetic artist, while the second half makes affirmations that re-create the world. Similarly, this poem begins with
the recognition of a “no,” before moving to the affirmation of a
“yes”: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the
future world depends.” This sentence is obscure because “no”
and “yes” are not responses to particular questions, but instead
they express psychological polarities or even cosmic antitheses.
The “final no” is the end. It is death, rejection, perfection, and
apocalypse. This final no echoes the artistic purpose of the ascetic
painter-poet in the earlier poem. Here again, the “no” is not
merely an ironic negation, but rather an idea that clears the
ground for something else and greater—a “yes.”26
25. Ibid., 224.
26. Cf. the final line of Joyce’s Ulysses.
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Once the last “no” is spoken or thought, there is not nothing,
not silence, but the advent of a Christ-like “yes.” This “yes” is
the actuality of affirmation beyond negation. It is the basis of a
whole “future world.” “No” is the night, the absence of the world
in sleep; “yes” is the sun, the light of seeing, the world seen, the
imagination’s possibilities. “No was,” in the negation of past time
and non-existence, while “yes is” in the actuality of the evanescent present.
The long, dense conditional sentence that follows contains the
poem’s central imagery and points to the possibilities of a “yes.”
As in “Of Modern Poetry,” Stevens is again in search of what will
suffice—here the possibility of finding one thing that “would be /
Enough.” The skeleton of this sentence—“If the rejected things
slid over the western cataract, one thing remaining would be
enough”—echoes the structure of the poem’s opening line: from
no to yes. The protasis opens with negation—“the rejected things,
the things denied”—while the apodosis points to the potential for
something more, something “remaining,” that is sufficient. This
pattern, in small, suggests the whole of “Landscape with Boat,”
the possibility of moving from abstract negation to discovering
meaning to reclaiming a whole world. Stevens emphasizes the
conclusion of the apodosis through enjambment in the last line,
pointing from the potentiality of “would be” to the sufficiency of
a suggestively lonely “enough.”
Water passing over a cataract is an irreversible moment of
loss. The “western cataract” is the poem’s own “final no.” It is
the horizon of the setting sun, a spatialization of death. Like the
musty theatre from the opening of “Of Modern Poetry,” the rejected things that pass beyond are exhausted fictions, empty ideas
incapable of engendering meaning in the modern heart. But if not
every idea slides over the western cataract, if—in a remarkable
quadruple expression of singularity—“one, / One only, one thing”
should remain, then that “would be / Enough.” Even if the one
thing were physically infinitesimal, “no greater than a cricket’s
horn,” even if the one thing were intellectually insignificant, “no
more / Than a thought to be rehearsed all day,” it would be enough
because it would be something.
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The one thing, no matter how small, that survives the
decimation of time is actual and therefore powerful. The cricket’s
horn suggests both small size and enormous sound wholly
disproportionate to the insect’s physical magnitude. This
disproportion indicates the power of the one thing preserved from
the cataract’s eclipse. “[N]o more / than a thought,” rehearsed in
the mind (as if for a play on the stage in “Of Modern Poetry”),
the one thing remaining points to a passage on repetition in
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good.27
The one thing, rehearsed and repeated, final in itself, is poetic expression, the power of words to change the world. Echoing the
actor and the metaphysician in “Of Modern Poetry,” both of whom
use sound to move their audiences, the thing that suffices here is
“a speech / Of the self that must sustain itself on speech.” As much
as bread and water, the right words may sustain life.28
To complement the “better” supposing in the second half of
“Landscape with Boat,” here the idea that something might
survive oblivion provides pleasure, even to the point of eliciting
exclamations. The “douce campagna” blends with the sweetness
of “honey in the heart” and the vigorous receptivity of “green in
the body.” This is a place of peace and pleasure brought on by
words that are enough. The “douce campagna” is a dream-like
belief, “a thing affirmed,” a ghostly energy humming in the
night—like crickets—where the human being sleeps and dwells.
But what is the meaning of the coda, “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never”? Is Stevens undercutting the possibility of
encountering and experiencing the “douce campagna”? Is this an
27. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 350.
28. Cf. the final stanza of “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction”: “How
simply the fictive hero becomes the real; / How gladly with proper
words the soldier dies, / If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful
speech.” Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 352.
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anti-romantic backlash against the apparent sentimentality of the
poem? Is this the speech that ends possibilities? As with the conditionals and evasions in the revelatory third section of “Landscape with Boat,” it is reasonable to remember that Stevens
disdains the falsifying voice of naïve idealism. But perhaps there
is also more. Perhaps the coda is itself an instance of the “final
no” from the opening line of the poem. Perhaps the one thing that
survives the “western cataract” is the poem itself or the “petty
phrase” that is the poem’s opening line. By the poetic logic of
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” after the “final no” there
comes a “yes.” And if this is true, then the reader must feel the
inevitability of an as-yet-unspoken “yes” coming after the
poem’s final “never.” If the opening line is to be believed, then
the end of the poem is not the end. Despite the emphatic negations “never . . . never,” which point to the impossibility of permanent satisfaction, “yes” implies an unending process of poetic
refiguring, a never-ending poetic response to a never-ending
human need for something real.
✢✢✢
Stevens’s shifting usage of terms of negation is a critical clue to
a change in his poetic sensibility between the publications of
Harmonium and Parts of a World. In Harmonium, negation is
characterized, on the one hand, by desolation, as in the impossibly icy mind of a snow man who, “nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,”29 and, on the
other hand, by the half-mockery of Mon Oncle’s opening address,
in which “[t]here is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, / Like the
clashed edges of two words that kill.”30 But in Parts of a World,
despite the apparent similarity of expression, negation begets new
and potentially endless possibilities. In “Of Modern Poetry,”
“sudden rightnesses” create an emotional space for the mind
“below which it cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will
to rise,”31 signalling not the inability of the mind to progress, but
29. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Ibid., 219.
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the temporary bliss of sufficiency. In “Landscape with Boat,” the
ascetic “never supposed / That he might be truth,”32 signalling
not another layer of artistic demolition, but the opening of a new
vista on life. And in “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” that
“it can never be satisfied, the mind, never,”33 signals not the end,
but the never-ending need for poetry. “Never” and “not” and
“no” in Parts of a World signify affirmation rather than despondency. They point away from the precipice of the “western
cataract” and toward the solid ground of meaning, feeling, and
expression offered by a supreme fiction.34
32. Ibid., 220.
33. Ibid., 224.
34. The difference in Stevens’s understanding of negation in Harmonium and Parts of a World might well be compared to the final “no” in
Rev. 6:8 (“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat
on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given
unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with
hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth”) and the “yes”
of a future cosmos in Rev. 21:1 (“And I saw a new heaven and a new
earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there
was no more sea”).
�“The Student,” by Anton Chekhov:
A Story Told and Glanced At
Louis Petrich
We students take our pleasure in stories. We students love stories
that lift us to the light of meaning and fill us with confidence to
face life’s elements on friendly terms. We are nevertheless engaged in a precarious undertaking. The meaning and strength we
obtain may be shared and the stories proclaimed universal; or they
may be unshared—opposed to each other—their stories indeterminate and parochial. In this second case the meaning and strength
that we happen to find may appear to others as the desperate attempts of a literate organism to keep its skin warm and its way lit
in the local cold and dark. It may not be possible to tell the difference in truth between these two kinds of meaning and strength.
I would like to tell you a story now, written in 1894 by Anton
Chekhov, called “The Student.” It is a multi-layered story, but
very short—about three and a half pages—taking twelve minutes
to tell. If you are reading this lecture, please try to hear the words
of the story, here included, as if they were being told to you for
the very first time.
∽
The Student
Anton Chekhov1
The weather was fair at first and still. The blackbirds were calling and
a creature in the nearby swamps plaintively hooting as if blowing into
1. Translated by Michael Heim. Used by the kind permission of The Estate of
Michael Heim.
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where this lecture
was first delivered on November 3, 2017. It is dedicated to Amy Kass (19402015) and her husband, Leon (b. 1939). Like many others, the author was a student in their light of reflection for some years.
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an empty bottle. A woodcock flew past, and a shot boomed out merrily
in the spring air. But when the woods grew dark, an inauspiciously cold,
piercing wind blew in from the east, and silence fell. Needles of ice
stretched over the puddles, and the woods became disagreeable, godforsaken, hostile. Winter was in the air.
Ivan Velikopolsky, a seminary student and deacon’s son, was on
his way home from a hunt, following a path through a water meadow.
His fingers were numb, and his face burned in the wind. He felt that the
sudden blast of cold had violated the order and harmony of things, that
nature herself was terrified and so the dark of evening had come on
more quickly than necessary. Desolation was everywhere, and it was
somehow particularly gloomy. The only light came from the widows’
vegetable gardens by the river; otherwise everything far and wide, all
the way to the village four versts off, was submerged in the cold evening
mist. The student remembered that when leaving the house he had seen
his mother sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway polishing the
samovar and his father lying on the stove coughing. It was Good Friday,
so cooking was forbidden and he was terribly hungry.2 And now,
stooped with the cold, he thought how the same wind had blown in the
days of Rurik and Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great3 and there had
been the same crippling poverty and hunger, the same leaky thatched
roofs and benighted, miserable people, the same emptiness everywhere
and darkness and oppressive grief, and all these horrors had been and
were and would be and even the passing of a thousand years would
make life no better. And he had no desire to go home.
The gardens were called the widows’ gardens because they were
tended by two widows, mother and daughter. The crackling fire gave
off great heat and lit up the surrounding plowlands. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, plump old woman wearing a man’s sheepskin coat, stood
nearby, staring into it pensively; her daughter Lukerya, who was short,
pockmarked, and had a slightly stupid face, sat on the ground washing
a pot and spoons. They must have just finished supper. Men’s voices
came up from the river, local farmhands watering their horses.
“Well, winter’s back,” said the student, going up to the fire.
“Hello there.”
2. The Lenten fast that lasts for forty days calls for varying degrees of abstinence
from meat, dairy, fish, olive oil, and alcohol; on Good Friday, the somber anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion, Orthodox Christians observe the strictest fast
of the year and are meant to eat nothing at all.
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Vasilisa started but then saw who he was and put on a welcoming
smile.
“I didn’t recognize you,” she said. “God be with you and make you
rich.”
They talked. Vasilisa had been in the world: she had worked for
the gentry first as a wet nurse and later as a nanny, and she had a dainty
way of speaking and a gentle, stately smile that never left her lips; her
daughter Lukerya, a product of the village and her husband’s beatings,
merely squinted at the student in silence with the strange look of a deafmute.
“Peter the Apostle4 warmed himself at a fire just like this on one
cold night,” the student said, holding out his hands to the flames. “It
was cold then too. And oh, what a terrible night it was. An exceedingly
long and doleful night.”
He looked around at the darkness, gave his head a convulsive
shake, and said, “You’ve been to the Twelve Apostles service,5 haven’t
you?”
“I have,” Vasilisa responded.
“Remember when Peter says to Jesus during the Last Supper,6 ‘I
am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death’ and the Lord
says, ‘I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that
thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me’? When the supper was
over, Jesus, grieving unto death, prayed in the garden, and poor Peter,
weary of soul and weak, his eyes heavy, could not fight off sleep. And
sleep he did. Later that night Judas kissed Jesus and betrayed him to
3. Rurik: semi-legendary Viking hero of the Russian Primary Chronicle (1200),
who conquered in the ninth century and whose dynasty ruled the area occupied
by Kievan Rus until the sixteenth century. Ivan the Terrible: Grand Prince of
Moscow 1533-84, first ruler to be crowned Tsar, feared for his power and traditionally associated with cruelty. Peter the Great: Peter I, Tsar 1682-1725, first
to assume title of emperor; most famous for his efforts to modernize Russia by
westernizing it.
4. One of Jesus’s twelve original apostles, who plays a large role in the Gospel
events.
5. Twelve Apostles: Also called “Twelve Gospels” or the “Lord’s Passion”; the
service conducted on the evening of Holy Thursday consisting of twelve readings drawn from all four Gospels, leading up to and including the Crucifixion.
The passages Ivan cites are a combination of verses from Luke 22, John 18,
and Matthew 26.
6. The final meal Jesus shares with the twelve apostles just before he is taken
into custody and crucified.
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his torturers. He was bound and taken off to the high priest and beaten
while Peter—exhausted (he’d hardly slept, after all), plagued by anguish and trepidation, sensing something dreadful was about to happen
on earth—watched from afar . . . He loved him passionately, to distraction, and could now see them beating him . . .”
Lukerya laid down the spoons and trained her fixed gaze on the
student.
“Having arrived at the high priest’s house,” he continued, “they
began questioning Jesus, and the servants kindled a fire in the midst of
the courtyard, for it was cold and they wished to warm themselves. And
Peter stood at the fire with them, and he too warmed himself, as I am
doing now. And a certain maid saw him and said, ‘This man was also
with Jesus,’ meaning that he too should be taken for questioning. And
all the servants standing by the fire must have looked at him with suspicion and severity because he grew flustered and said, ‘I know him
not.’ And when shortly thereafter another recognized him as one of
Jesus’ disciples, saying, ‘Thou art also of them,’ he again denied it. Then
a third time someone turned to him and said, ‘Was it not thou I saw with
him in the garden today?’ and he denied it a third time, whereupon the
cock immediately crew, and Peter, gazing from afar at Jesus, recalled
the words he had said to him at supper . . . And having recalled them,
he pulled himself together, left the courtyard, and shed bitter, bitter
tears. The Gospel says: ‘And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.’ I can
picture it now: the garden, all still and dark, and a muffled, all but inaudible sobbing in the stillness . . . “
The student sighed and grew pensive. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly burst into sobs herself, and tears, large and abundant, rolled down
her cheeks, and she shielded her face from the fire as if ashamed of
them, and Lukerya, her eyes still fixed on the student, flushed, and the
look on her face grew heavy and tense like that of a person holding back
great pain.
The farmhands were returning from the river, and one of them, on
horseback, was close enough so that the firelight flickered over him.
The student bade the widows good-night and moved on. And again it
was dark, and his hands began to freeze. A cruel wind was blowing—
winter had indeed returned—and it did not seem possible that the day
after next would be Easter.
The student’s thoughts turned to Vasilisa: if she wept, it meant the
things that happened to Peter on that terrible night had some relevance
for her . . .
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He glanced back. The lone fire glimmered peacefully in the dark,
and there were no longer any people near it. Again he thought that if
Vasilisa wept and her daughter was flustered then clearly what he’d just
told them about events taking place nineteen centuries earlier was relevant to the present—to both women and probably to this backwater
village, to himself, and to everyone on earth. If the old woman wept, it
was not because he was a moving storyteller but because Peter was
close to her and her whole being was concerned with what was going
on in Peter’s soul.
And all at once he felt a stirring of joy in his soul and even paused
for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is tied to the
present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other.
And he felt he had just seen both ends of that chain: he had touched one
end and the other had moved.
And when ferrying across the river and later climbing the hill he
gazed at his native village and to the west of it, where a narrow strip of
cold, crimson twilight still shone, he kept thinking of how the truth and
beauty guiding human life back there in the garden and the high priest’s
courtyard carried on unceasingly to this day and had in all likelihood
and at all times been the essence of human life and everything on earth,
and a feeling of youth, health, strength—he was only twenty-two—and
an ineffably sweet anticipation of happiness, unknown and mysterious,
gradually took possession of him, and life appeared wondrous, marvelous, and filled with lofty meaning.
∽
So what should we do now? Is the story not sufficient in its
telling? The student glances back to see if meaning adheres to
what his listeners outwardly felt by that fire. Let us do that, we
movers-on: glance back with me to the outward-looking first
paragraph, and let us creatively accompany the author as we wonder about felt meanings.
The weather was fair at first and still. I wonder why authors
bother to describe the weather. Is it merely to assist our imaginations in making the story seem vividly real? Or does the weather,
as banal a subject as they come, determine our recognition of
things, profoundly, not merely superficially? We like it to remain
fair, but we know it always changes, never quite predictably, like
lines of verse that obey a form but surprise us at each step. Any
attempt to describe the weather must therefore be qualified with
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Chekhov’s: “at first.” The word “still” that follows “at first” and
earns its momentary stop is a favorite of his. It captures the punctual motion and rest that we would feel as hearers of his musically
made stories if we knew Russian. The weather, when “still,” feels
poised, self-same, and we can almost rest our hope in its authorized continuity. But this lovely stillness, because it is “at first,”
feels ready to tip over, betray its promises, despoil its fair face,
and move unplotted toward no home of rest. So begins the story
Chekhov called his most perfect. Perfection lacks nothing, contains everything that belongs to its life and form. For a story to
be perfect, should it not be the first story told, yet poised to bend,
alter, and pour itself out as someone else’s?
The blackbirds were calling and a creature in the nearby
swamps plaintively hooting as if blowing into an empty bottle.
There is, at first, a “calling” sound, and we recognize the
source—blackbirds, but Chekhov does not tell us the meaning of
their calling. Shall we tell ourselves as co-authors that they are
calling each other to fulfill the wondrous and marvelous biological yearning to make life on earth reproduce itself always and
everywhere? It is good to recognize a call out there and feel uplifted by strong purposes, rather than to face the silence of nothing or the cacophony of chaos. At the center of this story is the
call of a particular bird at a precise time. It is not uplifting to its
intended hearer, at first.
Appearing second in this sentence, without even a comma of
pause (so quickly the weather changes), is a hooting sound of
complaint from some unknown “creature,” implying a creator if
we take the word literally. (Do you take the word “creature” literally? I shall answer that for myself, at least, at the end.) The
hooting sound, issuing from nearby swamps, places of growth
and decay, reminds the storyteller of the blowing one makes into
an empty bottle, the origin of music and poetry, perhaps. It reminds me that the pains of creaturely life must be relieved, for
even the righteous who survive the floods of annihilation take to
emptying the bottle afterwards, as the Bible tells, whose story of
creation begins with an almighty poetic blowing upon the original
chaos and emptiness. Calls to life and complaints of death that
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sound together in a chord: take them as the telltale sounding of
this particular author, Chekhov. Do the birds and other creatures
display the signs of a certain kind of author? I shall answer that
as well, twice over, in proper time.
A woodcock flew past, and a shot boomed out merrily in the
spring air. Another bird is recognized in the atmosphere of
spring: a cock of the woods, now here—boom!—now gone. Supper is being provided with that merry shot. The hunter may now
go home to fulfill family desires and rest.
But when the woods grew dark, an inauspiciously cold,
piercing wind blew in from the east, and silence fell. The
weather changes, as we knew it would, and the former blowing
into bottled emptiness to make sounding motion arise from stillness, now pierces to silence the calling birds of spring. Darkness
spreads its cold wings. That supper of woodcock may be the last,
for some time.
Needles of ice stretched over the puddles, and the woods
became disagreeable, godforsaken, hostile. Winter was in the
air. The puddles of swamp, from which life, they say, arises,
adapts to air, and returns at last to mud are now become icy needles to sting and pierce the touch. Who is responsible for the infliction of sharp pain on sensory life? He whose breath once
hovered over the empty deep and spoke things into being from
nothing by naming them has forsaken the woods, and the air of
speech belongs to the winter wind. Whose name is pronounced
from out of that disagreeable, hostile air?
The name we hear at once, at the start of the next sentence
of a new paragraph, is “Ivan.” This name is common in Russian
history and literature, but there is one Ivan among them all who
is particularly relevant (note that word, please).7 Ivan Karamazov
faces the question of whether to stay close to home to protect his
dissolute father from the threat of murder. Ivan Karamazov, after
much deliberation, decides not to remain near home, and thus he
is complicit in his father’s murder. By denying practical relation
7. Chekhov often instigates comparison with his literary masters, in this
case, Dostoevsky, author of The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
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to a person existentially connected to him, he negates the existence of that person and puts his own in question. Ivan Velikopolsky faces the same question: whether to return home to a father
coughing his life away on the stove while his mother sits barefoot
on the dirty floor polishing the samovar, or to leave them there,
cold and stooping in the dust.8
While we are at it, let us consider the names of the two widows. Vasilisa is a common Russian name found in fairy tales for
a peasant or housekeeper who by elevation of marriage becomes
a princess (think Cinderella). Our Vasilisa has imitated her storied
namesakes by working among the gentry, learning to speak daintily, and smiling in a stately fashion determined to live happily
ever after. The thought of her, by name, makes the despairing student turn back to the fire at which she stared, the light of which
inspires his spiritual elevation. But by its connection to a character whose storied smiles turn to sobs, his elevation by that light
is associated in our minds with fairy tales.
Let us pause over the image of light to do a little theology,
shall we? Recall that in the beginning of John’s Gospel, the light
goes unrecognized by the world, though the world came to be
through that light, and the dark never masters it. To those who
do see the light, there is given the right to become children of
God, not born of the “fleshly desire of a human father, but offspring of God himself.”9 This is elevation to an absolute love
and happiness of the highest order. Is this elevation by means of
the light, seen and recognized, a fairy tale? It ends, true enough,
with “a narrow strip of cold, crimson twilight” still shining in
the west, not yet mastered by darkness. But after we hear that
exhilarating, final (one long sentence) paragraph, built on this
twilight image: do we see and recognize any light as master illuminator of our diminishing turning pages? Calls and complaints,
8. Ivan Karamazov, in consideration for the suffering of innocent children, frames his position to his younger brother in terms of a ticketed
earth traveler: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.” Without a ticket to the divine harmony
of things at the end of time, there is only the present, in which all things,
according to Ivan, are permissible.
9. John 1: 4-5, 10-13.
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fullness and emptiness turn, as leaves do, into the fading colors
of the persistent past.10 But who authors them and gives meaning
to their turnings?
Our consideration of Vasilisa’s name tasks us to pull together
our dispersed attention to fairy tales, John’s Gospel of light, a
storyteller’s poeticized feelings, and the miserable facts of nature
and society. Will we be elevated or broken down by our task? We
have one more name to consider before testing the outcomes.
Lukerya is so named to direct our attention to the Gospel of
Luke, who is said to have been a physician, like Chekhov, and
more relevant to the poor and oppressed than the other three
evangelists. Luke’s telling of Peter’s denial contains unique details seized by Chekhov for their dramatic interest. The maid who
first identifies Peter does so in Luke by staring at his face and
figure, not by his Galilean dialect.11 Lukerya lays down her
spoons and stares fixedly at the student’s face, as if, like the maid,
she were finding out his relation to a victim of torture, in order
to ask him something. Does he know and love that victim actively, or does he merely preach? Is he pierced by the present
look of suffering, more than by the icy wind on his skin? Lukerya
does not once look into the face of her mother, who by living
among the gentry distanced herself from her daughter’s cries of
pain. She holds in those cries like a deaf-mute, while staring open
the storytelling soul of the student for purpose of recognition.
We, too, shall stare open his soul, our souls, all of them.
To undertake which, recall this tremendously helpful insight
into the summoning power of storied words. Luke tells how
Peter and Jesus, the one uttering his third denial while the other
is being beaten by his guards, hear the cock crow (a new day!)
and turn their faces to meet and remember the words at the Last
Supper;12 so fantastical at the time of utterance, those words now
become scripted history. And only then, as a character in a story,
10. The last paragraph, a single sentence of prolonged poetic mastery,
elevates painful facts in thought and feeling to a realm of beautifully
expressed meanings, without the possibility, in a second sentence, of
contradiction.
11. Luke 22: 56.
12. Luke 22: 60-61.
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does Peter (in the student’s telling) “pull himself together.” Previously, he was dispersed, the input of his eyes denied by his
tongue relation to the history of his ears. Lukerya, tongue-tied
and stupidly staring, still waits for the crowing sound that will
summon recognition of her pain and give her the strength to pull
herself together as a character in a bigger story than her own,
but one that she can co-author.
The word “relevant” that I asked you to note often arises in
discussions of Chekhov. He was sharply criticized in his own
time for not writing relevant stories—that is, for not taking a position and prescribing a cure for Russia’s social and political ailments. He claimed that his only duty as a writer was to present
the truth of human life, as lived by late nineteenth-century Russians, as simply as he could, not to advocate particular reforms.
He honored Tolstoy as his master in truth-speaking letters, but
he had this to say of Russia’s bearded prophet of reform: “There’s
more love for mankind shown in electricity and steam engines
than in chastity and vegetarianism.” Chekhov puts the conflict
of purpose between relevance and truth at the heart of his story.
The student reaches for truth of the highest, most encompassing
kind, after he leaves the widows in their pain with nothing more
than a “good night.” While thinking of the meaning of the tears
of Vasilisa, not of their comfort or remedy, he stares back to see
the fire glimmer “peacefully in the dark,” with no people near it.
That solitary fire inspires his felt discovery of the truth and
beauty guiding the events of history. This was Tolstoy’s concern
in 1500 pages of War and Peace. The student gets the truth of
history in three and a half pages. But that is the art of Chekhov,
a writer trained by empirical facts as a physician to the discipline
of brevity. Can truth ever be relevant unless it accommodates our
brevity of breath? Chekhov understood the answer to be obvious.
He left relevance, as understood by his critics, to the secret workings on each soul of his briefly measured, immediately felt, simple words.
Perhaps you find no conflict between relevance and truth
even under pressure of mortality. For students as such are always
young, while they seek as lovers to meet the face of truth, like
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65
sea kissing sky at the horizon. Let us grant this fine sentiment to
ourselves—I think Socrates would. Three questions remain. Are
the truths met by the student credible? Do they justify the suffering that their instigation augments in the widows? And is growing
wise as the cock crows worth the bitter tears of heartbreak when
love of the dear old self is found facing you with a kiss at the
horizon? Let us try out two sets of answers to these questions,
which will, in turn, settle our earlier question about nature’s author. First, in sympathy with the student, let us glance back some
more (second paragraph).
The student is on his way home from a hunt on Good Friday.
He feels that the “sudden blast of cold”—like a shot from a gun—
has “violated the order and harmony of things.” But Good Friday
is supposed to be especially mortifying, and a seminary student,
no matter how cold his hands, ought to recognize the priority of
spirit over mere elements. In the Gospels, darkness covers the
land while Jesus expires on the cross mid-day, and an earthquake
splits rocks open when he breathes his last.13 But our student,
Ivan, remembers not these disordered phenomena, only the discordant postures of his earthly parents: his mother sitting barefoot
on the floor and his father lying on the stove. How hard it must
be to hold Gospel truths in mind before the uncouth suffering of
one’s dearest relations. As he moves homeward, he has a vision
of history inspired by the weather and his parents’ conditions.
The same wind always blows in your face—that is a fact of nature—and despite all proud conquest, unification, and modernization, Russians still squander the light stupidly, polishing their
silver samovars under leaky roofs, coldly coughing, downward
grieving, always dying. There is “the same emptiness everywhere,” which is also a fact of nature, scientifically understood
not to contain meaning in its dust. “All these horrors had been
and were and would be and even the passing of a thousand years
would make life no better.” The student has acquired a Biblical
prophetic cadence, but he has no good news to deliver, “no desire
to go home” to the ones he loves and cannot help.
13. Luke 23: 44; Matthew 27: 52.
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But what is most oppressive, we jaunty Americans might especially feel, is the tedium of all that Russian moaning and groaning. This native feeling of ours has received precise critical
formulation. In addition to being called “irrelevant,” Chekhov was
accused of indulging the “banalities” of useless complaint and
fantasies of hope. This criticism is easiest to appreciate in his
plays: while one character, stage left, let us say, is tearing her life
to shreds and another, stage right, is costuming hers in silk, inevitably a household servant from out of memory limps on stage,
trying not to spill a large samovar, and announces that it is time
to clear the table and drink some tea. That peasant woman, with
her insistence on commonplace reality, is sitting expectantly in
the background of this story: the student’s mother. When her son
arrives at home, full of the loftiest revelations of meaning, she
will be ready to serve the tea center stage and talk about the
weather and the proverbial world, for that is how people really relate. Chekhov, you understand, did not go for those Tolstoyan
episodes of being thrown to the ground half dead and looking up
at the infinite sky to encounter the life-altering repository of Truth,
ever solicitous of our human happiness. He thought, rather, that
the truth about relevance (another word for which is relationship,
or in the positive sense, love), is often a banal truth: you meet the
right person for mutual love and happiness, but at the wrong stage
of development, and the discordance of years or of readiness to
recognize each other’s relevance cannot usually be rectified by
the dramatic realigning of motions and ends, as Tolstoy performs
for Natasha and Pierre or Kitty and Levin.14 Nevertheless, it is not
too late in a Chekhov story, as in life, to make the best of bad timing by constant improvisation and large stores of quiet laughter
and watery eyes. When these fail and emptiness massages the
heart, resort from dread is taken in repetitions of phrase or gesture,
which like the polished samovar of tea punctuate the weary days
and awful nights with something familiar, shining, and collective
14. The first couple are major characters in War and Peace, the second,
in Anna Karenina.
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of people who seek warmth in the drink and light of life from the
banal superfluities of plaintive or fantastically hopeful speech.
Now to continue in sympathy with our student: as he first approaches the fire, the presence of the women being irrelevant to
his desire for warmth, he says “Well, winter’s back,” and he gets
no response. He then adds, “Hello there,” to which Vasilisa starts,
as one always jumps a little when something appears out of nothing. Then, seeing who he is, she puts on a welcoming smile, for
a student is good company to a woman who has learned to talk
above her station, and she says, “I didn’t recognize you. God be
with you, and make you rich.” Otherwise, what comes into being
out of nothing may quickly return to nothing. Her proverbial
words have an ultimate relevance, which Luke and John, in their
gospels, emphasize. They report, as instances of Peter’s denial,
these words, “I am not,” which are the precise negation of Jesus’
thrice repeated answer to the cohort who come to arrest him in
the garden, “I am he,” at which they fall to the ground, from
whose dust man first came into being.15 The student, like Peter,
puts his existence as a creature to question by approaching the
fire for bodily warmth while his soul at first goes unrecognized,
as if empty of riches, that is, of love. For take note of this: Peter’s
love for Jesus, which our translator describes with three words,
“passionately, to distraction,” is in Russian two words, bez pamjati, meaning literally, “without memory,” as if it were uncaused,
always there. To deny such a love, to empty it out at the moment
of trial, is to subject something timeless to historical criteria, according to which things without cause and memory go unwritten.
The student, recognized in memory, finds his existence as a
creature fortified when the widow invokes love without memory
in the proverb: “God be with you and make you rich.” She gives
evidence of the existential potency of these words by appearing,
like Peter in the courtyard, distracted by something always there.
She is wearing a man’s heavy coat, presumably her dead husband’s, and standing clean of dirt she stares into the fire pen15. Luke 22: 58; John 18: 5-6, 17, 25.
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sively. Chekhov does not say if she is distracted by her husband,
for what doctor knows where dead people go to occupy themselves, or what living people are thinking when they look occupied? No living men are present, though at any moment the
farmhands may appear from the river and change everything. The
daughter sits on the cold ground, ugly, stupid-looking, and
washes a pot and spoons. Who can tell what she is thinking?
Maybe we should consult the historical record of people who
have felt the same cold and terror of the dark. That is the student’s
approach to the mystery of three souls, who from out of all time
and space have become opaquely present to each other in bodies
lit by a fire in a garden on a particularly “doleful” night.
Peter, as we are told by Matthew and the student, follows
Jesus into the High Priest’s courtyard to watch from afar and see
the end of it all.16 Remember the empty bottle of the second sentence, which the student feels everywhere on his way home as
the condition of life. That emptiness, harboring potentials of
sound to creators, Peter will feel inside Jesus’ tomb. The end of
it all, which he would like to watch from afar, on the outside of
events, he must experience up close, from the inside. Our student
also sees afar in the past Peter’s bitter tears, but touches inside
the present the widows’ emotions.17 These two-sided aspects of
the “end of it all”—seen and touched, past and present, outside
and inside—are thematic in much of what follows.
In all four Gospels, it is a serving maid who first questions
Peter in the High Priest’s courtyard. The student adds dramatic
body to this verbal moment: the maid’s assertion of his identity,
“This man was also with Jesus,” lingers a few beats unanswered,
causing the other servants, men included (in John’s account, the
arresting police loom conspicuously),18 to look at Peter “with suspicion and severity.” Their hard looks “fluster” him into saying,
16. Matthew 26: 58.
17. The student is a Thomas who does not come up short on our modern
demand to test the veracity of past appearances by probing their present
wounds.
18. John 18: 18.
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“I know him not.” The flustering indicates that he begins not to
recognize himself inside as the recipient of those outside looks.
Who knows what Peter might have answered if only women were
present, without men to raise fears of what men do to each other
and to women? 19 If Peter had answered the maid honestly, thence
to be hauled away by those severe men, we would recognize him
today as another self-made hero of friendship (like those in
Homer and Virgil), rather than a runner to the empty tomb who
enters it alone and learns to fill it with the sounds of life.
That is something new, born of three denials, which we students practice all the time in three forms, for three worthy purposes of our own.20
I deny that a story is all about me for the purposes of sanity
and objectivity. I deny that I am free of past teachings and newly
elevated by present ones for the purposes of continuity and commonality. And I deny that it is art that moves me to imitate proud
combative heroes for the purpose of giving greater influence to
humble truth.
In practicing these three denials, I follow Peter, who points
every good student the way. First, he denies that Jesus’s ques19. Recall that it is the boasting of Peter in a group of men, each feeling
superior to verbal challenges as they compete for honor in the presence
of their beloved Jesus, which brings forth the prediction of his three denials and the crowing of the cock. The future is caused by a present
when both are understood as parts of one plot, whose characters serve
action, not speech—so cheaply uttered much of the time.
20. It was Chekhov’s story that made me attend to the richness in the
four Gospel accounts of Peter’s denials. His words of denial are not
identical, and neither are the questions they answer. They are three distinct replies to three different inquiries. Moreover, to fully understand
their meanings, we must remain aware of all seven layers of the story:
the Hebrew scriptures; the historical events and personages; the four
Gospel accounts of those events as fulfilling the scriptures; the student’s
retelling of Peter’s denials to the widows; Vasilisa’s attention to this
same story during the Twelve Apostles service the previous night;
Chekhov’s story of the student’s telling; and finally my telling to you,
this Friday evening, November 3, 2017, Chekhov’s story.
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tioning has everything to do with him personally. This gets him
admitted by the maid to the courtyard of objective seeing and discussion, with love kept safely impersonal. Second, he denies that
he is another, “of them,” loosed from the past and a newly authored beginning, rather than a conforming Jew. This keeps him
close to the fire of the ancient teachings. And third, he denies that
he is the memorable one from the garden, moved by a heroic
image appropriated from epic stories of martial friendship to
draw his sword and lop off the enemy’s ear. This denial keeps
him free from the suspicion that he comes, not in peace and civility, but wielding a sword.21 Without the practice of these three
denials, especially the third, there is no learning as we students
practice it here.
But then the cock crows, and Peter undergoes three distinct
responses, which successively undo the three denials. First, as
told by the student, he gazes at Jesus from afar, same scene as
before, but the questioning is entirely about him now. Second,
their faces meet and he recalls in the words said at supper that
he is one of them in character, people who associate and speak
differently, elevated but answerable to authority. And third, he
pulls himself together, leaves the courtyard, and weeps bitterly
for his beautiful, heroic image, emptied out for ease of breath and
freedom from pain. This third undoing, the most important, lets
the truth about Simon, the humble fisherman prone to sinking
and weeping, become the new fairness and stillness of human nature. We students, like Peter, undergo these same three motions
when we hear the cock crow and feel undone in our previously
objective, conformist, and anti-theatrical reading of stories.
What happens next? The Student sighed and grew pensive.
That sigh forces a little pause in the flow of events, where freedom is to be found. In that free pause, Vasilisa bursts into sobs
and hides her face, while Lukerya, still fixed on the student,
21. Matthew 10:34. Peter strikes at the ear (John 18:10) so that we might
recognize the meaning of this third denial: by it he escapes having to
suffer the priesthood’s violence, born like his from pride in its own severe agency, awarded precedence over the ear’s hearing of the Word.
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grows heavy and tense, “like a person holding back great pain.”
This would seem like a good time for the student to perform a
kind outward act, or, since he is pensive, to ask the obvious question: “What is going on inside your soul?” But instead, at the approach of the male “farmhands,” the opportunity to “move on”
he quickly takes. Since we are in sympathy with him, we shall
say that he bravely risks his spirit to solitary thought in the cold
and dark.
The reflection of light off the farmhands makes the outer
world of men’s affairs touch the inner one being stared opened by
women. It is like the crowing of the cock that instigates Peter’s
going out to stir the stillness of the world with tears, detesting
what he knows about his inside in relation to outside questions
and cruelties. The student knows that he has made an old woman
cry and her daughter much upset. He goes out from them into a
world whose facts deny the coming of Easter. But he makes Easter
happen in himself. How does he perform this transformation?
He performs it in three stages of physical and mental action.
First Stage: his thoughts turn to Vasilisa; her “abundant” weeping and its shame he interprets from afar this way: “if she wept,
it meant…[Peter’s] relevance for her”; but this conclusion, without external support, is forced by his inner hunger; so he dares to
glance back for evidence, and for that glance we must praise him;
he sees the fire glimmering peacefully in the dark, absent of people; again he thinks of Vasilisa—and also of her daughter—and
again he thinks, more confidently now, that those events narrated
from long ago must “clearly” have relevance to both women and
“probably” to “everyone on earth;” and this is so not because of
the universal art of storytelling that he has mastered—he is a
modest student in that regard—but owing to the “whole being”
of the old woman taken by concern for Peter’s soul, as if he were
her present child;22 for souls feel intimate with each other across
time and space by means of repeated words and common gestures
issuing from similar bodies. Second Stage: the soul of the student
stirs with joy, as the stillness of the freezing hour flows towards
22. Mark 12: 30-33.
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ends he sees and touches; he pauses to catch his breath, as the
former sigh of his spirit’s slow death is reversed in a quickening
of life;23 history he now thinks of as an unbroken chain of events
that conducts motions from end to end, not as a circle does, always repeating the same misery, but as a satisfying linear progression from beginning to ending, like a story told by a
master—but what kind of story? Third Stage: he crosses the
river—we hear nothing of the painful ice needles now; he climbs
the hill—nothing is felt of the biting wind now; he gazes upon
the village of his birth—no glimpse of the beatings and cringing
of life; he sees the last bit of crimson sunset, and again the light
encourages him with supreme confidence to find what he has
been seeking—the truth and beauty guiding human life in gardens and courtyards past and present; “in all likelihood and at all
times” they form “the essence of human life and everything on
earth”; and finally, life appears to him “wondrous, marvelous,
and filled with lofty meaning.”
The first sentence of the first stage is the key to all the rest:
“The student’s thoughts turned to Vasilisa: if she wept, it meant
the things that happened to Peter on that terrible night had some
relevance for her . . .” This sentence ends in the Russian with the
word, otnoshenie, translated by Michael Heim as “relevance.”
(Literally, it means “relation” or “relationship.”) This word is followed by an ellipsis that makes it linger critically in our thoughts.
The new paragraph answers at once to criticism: “He glanced
back.” The concern for relevance turns the head of the student to
see the light of the fire, which he first approaches in order to
warm his hands, but at which he stays to tell a well-known story
to two differently staring widows. It is not the warmth, but the
light of the storyteller’s truth—the fire that gives inspired voice
to the face—that the student and Chekhov insist on delivering.
The widows go home deeply moved by that voice and face. The
student, as we just witnessed, moves on to three revelations: universal relevance and intimacy of souls; the pulsing chain of interconnected events; and their guidance by truth and beauty,
23. 1 Peter 3: 18.
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always and everywhere. We can take these three stages and revelations as demonstrative of how the mysterious words that begin
John’s gospel actually operate in human beings: all that comes
to be is sensitive to the Word, and the relevance of the Word to
all the living is as light, which shines in the dark, and is never
mastered by the dark.24 Of course, as a reminder, our present
glances at the story are precisely those that sympathizers with a
seminary student would be expected to take.
But there is another story to tell about our relation to this
story. Just as Matthew reminds us in his Gospel that another story
is told among the Jews about the empty tomb of Jesus—that the
body was stolen, not raised—so there are another set of answers,
in the negative, to the three questions we asked earlier.25 Are the
student’s truths credible? Are the sufferings of the widows justified? And is the love at the horizon ever other than of self?
Matthew discredits the thieving story as a Jewish conspiracy.
Chekhov lets us relate to his story unhindered by his authorial
elbows. Here follows the negative relation to Chekhov’s story,
no less probable to thought and feeling, I think, than the positive
one we just experienced.
Let us begin by repeating two impressive words from the
first stage of the student’s transformation: “whole being.”26 Now
recall the two great commandments taught by Jesus in keeping
with scripture: to love the Lord your God, who is the one and
only God, with your whole being—all your heart, all soul, all
mind, and all strength; and, like the first, to love your neighbor
as yourself.27 The student fails to obey the second command to
turn self-love outward, to make it relevant, and this failure to be
relevant undermines his adherence to the first command to identify entirely with the truth of the ever present living God—living,
therefore, in the widows, presently. Let me now give standing
to these claims.
24. John 1: 3-5.
25. Matthew 28: 11-15.
26. “Peter was close to her and her whole being was concerned with
what was going on in Peter’s soul.”
27. Mark 12: 30-31; Matthew 22:39.
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In the garden, Jesus asks his three closest friends, Peter included, to stay awake with him. That is not a lot to ask, but the
love of self, rooted in bodily needs, overmasters their willing
spirits. The student is a sleeper of a much deeper kind, a waking
dreamer who loves life in the abstract, far from miserable people,
malleable to the hungers of his thought. Consider the characters
again. Lukerya is the innocent victim of her husband’s beatings.
She fixes her gaze upon the student, holding in the great pain that
his picturing power aggravates; but he walks away suddenly,
without a word of recognition, just as her husband inexplicably
died one day, leaving her unrecoverable, with “the strange look
of a deaf-mute.” Vasilisa, bettered by conformity to high society,
denies present relation to her dirty daughter by hiding her face
in shame not of her tears, as the student conveniently thinks, but
of her whole being, whose career has entailed denial of child for
the sake of worldly gains. Ivan treats both women not as neighbors to be loved by command as a suffering of unlovely particulars, but as characters to be drawn into making his dreary return
home part of a story that he wants to end triumphantly, without
any upsetting questions. He catches his breath from their sobs
and flusters.
This alternative understanding of character accords with the
following re-interpretation of the three denials. The student first
denies that he and the widows are concerned wholly with what
is going on in their own souls, not with the goings-on in Peter’s
soul. The wholeness of their beings they do not give away to anyone. Second, the student denies that history is open-ended, plotless, free to become better, worse, or incomparably different from
the past, not auto-progressively chained to it.28 Third, the student
denies that life is guided by ego and chance much of the time,
not by truth and beauty. (You might want to roll up your
sleeves—we’re going to push hard now.) What truth makes Vasilisa smile all the time? It is the ego of a social climber. What truth
28. Ironically, his retelling of Peter’s story contains his own creative
additions, in which he ought to recognize his freedom to occupy a better
or worse state of mind.
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makes her shield her face as she sobs by the fire? The shame of
happiness found out as pretense. What truth makes her sob so
abundantly? The fact that ego and its pretensions require ongoing
sacrifice of the one you love. Lukerya is guided by what solicitude? The chance that the husband who beats her may die sooner
rather than later. What beauty is there in a face that squints to see
things in the dark, is stupidly silent for fear of another beating,
and becomes fixed in a stare, heavy and tense, when the pain calls
her back unrelieved? Ivan Karamazov would applaud her insistence on the right of suffering innocence to hold back from brokered Easter reconciliations. Here, then, is the truth, if you really
want it relevant to modernity: try to better yourself by abandoning the dear ones who would otherwise keep you stuck in their
dull care, or by hoping for the early death of a painful relation,
until fortune can be mastered to achieve those ends. And if you
glance back, consider not the human wreckage, only the golden,
solitary fire. New days call for new gods and horizons of riches.
All this ugliness the student denies, though it is plain and ordinary
to see (and points the way to necessary social reforms), because
at the age of twenty-two he cannot help standing closer to birth
than death. Still healthy, strong, able to give his head “a convulsive shake” to throw off the encompassing dark, ferry the cold
river, and climb with ample breath the hill to see the last rays of
light shine upon his place of nativity, of course he feels, in the
days of egotistical youth, that everything on earth is guided by
similar motions of self-fulfilling vitality.
The student gets his Easter going by freely misconstruing
what is terrible and ugly in the souls of the widows, and moving
on from them. Their Easter is still hostage to shame and anger in
the day of desolation. Perhaps we cannot do better than to practice, like him, the denials that get us, in despite of others, the way
home from emptiness. But should we not try to hear the cock
crow after every twilight seminar song, like a gunshot?
Apropos of that question, I have to tell you something about
Chekhov’s acoustic tastes. He liked gunshots a lot. A year after
he wrote “The Student,” he was finishing his first major successful play, The Seagull. It contains a mother—an actress who lives
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entirely for herself in art—and it ends with her son’s suicide by
gunshot. Chekhov’s subtitle: A Comedy in Four Acts. Its opening
in St. Petersburg was a fiasco, and Chekhov was dismayed by an
art that gave its form over to the freedom of actors and audience
to misconstrue by their unlovely particular contributions. But
when The Seagull was staged a few years later by Stanislavsky
and the new Moscow Art Theatre it was a triumph, and
Chekhov’s name was on the way to becoming an adjective of reality—“Chekhovian.” The Moscow players knew how to let the
cock crow in the silent beats of the comedy, and so the minor
keys in its music were heard, and its mutually incomprehensible
characters, whose talking substitutes for plot, were pulled together by an audience properly concerned with the complicated
simplicities of their own knotted relations of love. Anyway, that
is what I meant a moment ago: we have to hear the cock crow if
we want to triumph in our egotistical comedies of living and
dying.
I am almost done talking, not improperly I hope. Jesus, you
know, was executed for talking very improperly: “blasphemy,”
his crime was called, which is the opposite of empty, unplotted
talk. To blaspheme, as you students know from the Greek, is to
injure the relations among men, women, and God by speech.
Peter denies knowing the accused blasphemer because he is
rightly afraid of the power of speech to make hate happen. In
fact, his second and third denials (in two of the gospels) become
vehement; he even curses his questioners for not believing him,
though cursing is itself a kind of blasphemy.29 Here, in miniature,
we witness the degeneration of speech from having lethal power
over the devotional lives of people, to self-contradiction, incredulity, bitterness of failure, and over time to empty talk and
shallow feelings that make nothing happen and no one takes seriously. The student follows Luke and John by leaving out from
his story the anger and cursing of Peter, and he follows Matthew
and Mark by leaving in the weeping. We may suspect that he
lacks the instinct for righteous anger, while possessing the pity
29. Matthew 26: 72-74; Mark 14: 71.
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of a young heart. Chekhov, too, lacks anger, his critics would say,
while he waters the eyes too much. He does not know the blasphemer, they would say, for he is a connoisseur of empty talk
who honestly shows us the vanity of literary pretensions. That is
why he points out at the end of this most perfect of his stories
that the storyteller is only twenty-two: all his transformational
thinking and feeling are but the workings of his youthful metabolism, which throws off the impertinent assaults of winter when
it is that time in the calendar—no more significant than a change
in the weather.
But wait a minute. If Chekhov has the honesty to admit that
the weather and chemistry are the powers that either kill or resurrect the sick soul, then is his admission not justly called by us
“blasphemy”? Try the question out this way: Chekhov, a doctor
who writes about ailing people denies relation to higher sources
of meaning in the names of applied biology and meteorology.
This injures the respect owed to his literary art—to speech itself—by making storytelling a pre-scientific substitute for drugtaking and social revolution. The making of love then loses its
articulate way and people become incomprehensible bodies one
to another. That denial of relation to higher meanings, with those
consequences, should sound like blasphemy to the priesthood of
letters and its seminar students, I think.
But wait one last minute, please. Remember that Chekhov
showed signs of tuberculosis in his twenties, but denied for years
the implications. He wrote “The Student” at the age of thirtyfour, while coughing up blood. During the ten years of worsening
health that remained, he devoted much precious time to playwriting, and he married an actress, Olga Knipper, whom he made
love to mostly from afar in the form of wonderfully articulate letters. He stopped practicing medicine. I think, in the end, he was
trying to pull together in new dramatic forms the movements of
bodies much given to dispersive talk by denials of love and death.
Have we not seen how his student, Ivan, needs the expressive
bodies of the widows for him to call Biblical characters into
presence to speak, as in a theater, into the outer darkness of the
world, to test the light of words? Remember also that the outer
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plot revealed by Jesus requires only that Peter deny him three
times before the cock crows. The anger or weeping is Peter’s
free contribution, or rather, a creative act by the particular storyteller. And that act makes all the difference to the soul. Our student does not get angry, does not weep, as Lukerya and Vasilisa
do; yet all three respond freely in body and soul to the same story.
There are many ways to deny that the cold and dark are curable;
yet the student still seeks, by the last glimmers of light, the way
home to the unlikely love that gave him improbable birth. When
he arrives, a young man still, but older than he was, he will drink
tea with his parents, his mother soon also to become a widow,
and I like to imagine that he will continue his story, taking note
of the weather and its changes, which he is learning to read.
And what about the widows? I myself would learn from Lukerya’s fixed face to beware the anger born of suffering that feels
betrayed and trapped by the egotism of love, for what is more
prone to hate than misery of heart that hears itself as the only
story being told? And from Vasilisa’s career I would beware of
guilt that relieves its burden in self-pity, hidden from the fire and
faces of the injured, turned to the stately world of swelling
speeches and fairy-tale smiles. And finally, speaking as I began,
let us students remember our creators in the days of our youth,
before the songbirds fall silent and the guardians of the house
stoop to dust.30
Thank you for listening to Chekhov’s story of the student,
and my attempt to show how much, and little, there is to tell.
30. Ecclesiastes 12: 1-4.
�Tetrastichs
Elliott Zuckerman
Preludes have long since ceased
to promise Fugues. What’s here—
each time after a silence—is yet another
interruption of uncertainty.
Meanings will spread, as when a loaded brush
touches some cotton-wool too wet
to limit bleeding. Etymons
will crawl along the fibers.
I think you will particularly like
Siberia. Let us all know
about the customs and the cold.
Think of us on holidays.
Do not say that Sometimes
it is only a cigar.
The point is not
to denigrate cigars.
The plaster hand, the portrait of Busoni,
all music put aside to try again
to stop the wrist from getting stiff:
What was this a lesson in?
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. These forty tetrastichs have been selected from a collection of 120. Each quatrain is meant to be a separate poem.
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A love potion? There is no need for one.
Just dramatize a double suicide
and leave the poison out. It can be done
with lemonade.
There was a different tenor in each act.
She sang her song of rapt transfiguration
and in her tones of ecstasy made clear
that she was ready to take on three more.
In the closing pages of your lecture,
you can take your leap. They’ll say
you haven’t proved you got there step by step.
There were no steps—the lecture started there.
Let’s celebrate the woman who
was tired of trees.
No longer to be reasoned with, no longer
listening, it’s one way to be old.
Your face is next to mine,
and even lingers—
the warm surprise of graceful lankiness,
my prince factotum.
After a thousand and three in Spain alone,
what clearer signs of drawing to an end
than throwing parties for the peasantry
and asking almost anyone to dinner?
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
The trees themselves
sensing how much space they need
plotted their equidistance
like dancers with extended arms.
I’d like the actor who agrees
that he must get inside the role he plays
to tell me what he tries to feel when he
portrays hypocrisy.
Hers were not hymn-tunes,
square in meter and in rhyme.
Her dashes represent
unmeasured time.
I’m happy that the Shropshire Lad
has his own pad.
I used to think that he
lived here with me.
I cannot hear the pipe unless
the shepherd blows it.
How can I tell the music
from the music?
At the doorpost of the tenement
I studied densities of old enamel:
pastel maps,
an opaque residue of smell.
81
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
After the concert, she told the other ladies
the pianist had a memorable rubato.
The ladies took it that the two of them
had spent the night together.
There is an elf
who charms me at the root of being.
Yet elfhood serves
no evolutionary purpose.
One must be
an artist
not to find
a food one likes.
Can one do in words a vast expanse
of every possible hue and shade of green
with somewhere a small patch of cadmium red?
Has it just been done?
The seven types of ambiguity
are not so clearly differentiated
as the seven
deadly sins.
The man who asks us
to excuse his pun
fears that we
may overlook his wit.
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
When rhetoric already lies
we cannot tell
whether what lies beneath the cant
is lying.
Imagine a garden without any toads
but the birds are real
and named by their song: two cuckoos, a quail,
and a nightingale.
It was hard to accept him as half of a pair
and the girl couldn’t hide her victorious air;
I tried not to stare at the hand on the knee
and acted a plausible copy of me.
I slice and sculpt and sand what happened till
an anecdote redecorates my past.
Such labor is the compliment
that humor pays to truth.
Someone says that wit began
with not the word but laughter alone.
It follows perhaps that early man
wept before the cause was known.
What if everything that came to mind
arrived with (so to say) a grade from God?
Little would change, for half the world would wonder
whether God was good at giving grades.
83
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
Elders who are troubled all their lives
by doubts that they’ve gone deep enough,
may want to test the thickness now
that so much surface has worn off.
Have I condemned nostalgia? It is the source
Of aching loveliness, maligned because
we had to wait for it, and at its dawn
it gave scant notice that it might return.
Nausicaa washing at the water
was grace itself.
But follow the line of her white arm
to reach the hand of merely human gesture.
The irises were cream and indigo,
a lazy bird prepared herself for flying—
and in the middle distance: Lo
and behold! the silver gateway of implying.
At ninety she retained the girlish charm
they taught her and she took to at sixteen—
a habit long impervious to reform,
no longer fired by flesh but baked in bone.
This castle runs on wheels, with makeshift brakes.
It inches on, headed askew. It leaks,
sudden, burning. The royalty worship the days—
Good morning, Good afternoon—and clutch their keys.
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
I used to say that song need not be sounded.
Now pitches are distorted in the treble.
No doubt the tones I hear have been confounded
by some didactic Muse, to cause me trouble.
Americans with European souls
need not restrict their comedy to manners.
The question of what continent we’re born on
takes second place to why we’re born at all.
Faces are plaster masks, egg-white, cream, and gray.
Silenus, spent, will hobble down the hall.
Three actions are complete: the quest, the crux, the fall.
Old age is not a coda, but a satyr-play.
When once again you tell that anecdote,
acquire a gurgle as you near the end.
They’ll think that you’ve just found renewed delight
in the climactic phrase already planned.
A musical trick was employed by the muscular Icarus
when inventing the famous lament about flying too high.
His appoggiaturas brought tears to a cynical eye
while his anapests lent the lament their precipitancy.
85
�
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Pastille, Willaim
Brann, Eva T. H.
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St. John's Review
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 58.2 (Spring 2017)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Assistant
Sawyer Neale
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Joseph Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
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© 2017 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
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ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Leibniz’s Monadology and the Philosophical Foundations of
Non-locality in Quantum Mechanics .....................................1
J. H. Beall
Depth Versus Complexity .................................................................25
Eva Brann
A Note on Apollonius’s Reconceptualization of Space ....................43
Philip LeCuyer
“Aristotelian Forgiveness”: The Non-Culpability
Requirement of Forgiveness ........................................................52
Corinne Painter
On Two Socratic Questions ..............................................................77
Alex Priou
Poem
Sabbatical..........................................................................................93
Louis Petrich
��Leibniz’s Monadology and the
Philosophical Foundations of
Non-locality in Quantum Mechanics
J. H. Beall
One of the most troubling aspects of our understanding of modern
physics generally, and quantum mechanics specifically, is the
concept of “non-locality.” Non-locality appears in an entire class
of experiments, including the so-called “two-slit” experiment. In
these, particles and “quanta” of light can be emitted and absorbed
individually. Yet in the way these particles or quanta traverse the
space and time between emission and absorption, they appear to
behave not as point particles, but as though they were distributed
throughout the entire spatial volume and temporal extent of the
experiment. That the phenomenon of non-locality has recently
been corroborated over macroscopic distances of the order of 10
kilometers makes these effects all the more remarkable.
In this lecture, I shall review the experiments and arguments
that have led to an acceptance of non-locality in modern physics,
and will suggest that the concept of space and time that this
understanding implies is consistent with Leibniz’s Monadology,
in which our ideas of space and time are fundamentally different
from those given to us by our intuitions.
1. Leibniz’s Monadology
Leibniz’s writings on the philosophical, mathematical, and
natural sciences represent a coherent, if somewhat surprising
whole. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the
Monadology, the Discourse of Metaphysics, and the LeibnizClark correspondence.
Leibniz begins with the view of God as a maker, a being who
makes the world the best it can possibly be.
Jim Beall is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. This
lecture was originally delivered on December 4, 2015.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Part and parcel of this view is Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient
Reason. It goes something like this: one monad can only be
different from another because of its different character or
qualities. I’ll use a modern idea of a monad to illustrate this: an
elementary particle like an electron. I hope my choice will become
plausible a bit later when we start the discussion of quantum
mechanics.
Is one electron the same as another? If so, if there is no
difference between “this electron” and “that electron,” then they
would be the same, since by the Principle of Sufficient Reason
they cannot be distinguished. But my simply pointing to them is
an indication of the differences. “This electron” is different from
that one, because it has an explicitly different representation that
is indicated by my pointing at them. If I were to insist on a
Cartesian representation of this difference, I can make a threedimensional coordinate system with a particular origin and three
orthogonal axes, labeled x, y, and z. Numbering these axes, I can
locate “this” electron and distinguish it from “that” electron by
the use of three numbers, x1, y1, z1, and x2, y2, z2. I can then say
that I have a representation of each of these two electrons as
different, given these two sets of three numbers. I can even
represent their separation of this electron from that electron by a
three-dimensional version of the Pythagorean theorem.
Leibniz makes this explicit several places in his works. For
example, in the essay, “On Nature Itself,” he states this point in
arguing against Descartes’s reliance on geometry in physics.
Given such an identity or similarity between objects,
not even an angel could find any difference between its
states at different times, nor have any evidence for
discerning whether the enclosed sphere is at rest or
revolves, and what law of motion it follows. . . . Even if
those who have not penetrated these matters deeply
enough may not have noticed this, it ought to be accepted
as certain that such consequences are alien to the nature
and order of things, and that nowhere are there things
perfectly similar (which is among my [Leibniz’s] new
and important axioms) (Paragraph 13).
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
3
Of course, electrons have other properties as well: charge,
mass, angular momentum (they seem to spin like tops), magnetic
moment (they act like tiny bar-magnets), velocity, momentum,
and kinetic energy, among other things. Each of these qualities
or characteristics can also be represented by a series of numbers
or “coordinate expression.” I’ve always fancied that in a very
formal sense an electron or any other elementary particle (had
Leibniz known about them) could be represented as an aggregation of numbers (or coordinate expressions) related to another
monad. This other monad could also be represented in a similar
way. By the Principle of Sufficient Reason, some of these coordinate expressions are different from the coordinate expressions
of all other monads.
The other thing to mention about monads is their unity.
They are “simple.” They do not have parts. According to
Leibniz, they represent a unity of different properties, much like
a geometric point that is the nexus of many geometric lines.
Leibniz states that:
Everything is full in nature. . . . And since everything is
connected because of the plenitude of the world, and
since each body acts on every other body, more or less,
in proportion to its distance, and is itself affected by the
other through reaction, it follows that each monad is a
living mirror or a mirror endowed with internal action,
which represents the universe from its own point of view
and is as ordered as the universe itself (Principles of
Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, Paragraph 3).
Some even have the property of being “be-souled.” So look
around you. According to Leibniz, you are sitting among a
reasonably large group of monads, each of which is capable of
noticing you and regarding you as separate, individual “beings.”
There is one final thing about monads (among their many
interesting properties) that bears on our discussion of quantum
mechanics. As Leibniz says at another point in the Monadology:
The monads have no windows through which something
can enter or leave (Monadology, Paragraph 7).
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Monads have no “windows.” Yet each monad is a representation
to a greater or lesser extent of everything else in the Universe
because it is linked to all other monads by means of its relation
to God. That is, each monad is a reflection of the entire
Universe precisely because it is in some way a projection of a
part of God. The debt Leibniz owes to Plato’s Republic for this
concept (note that I did not say “image”) is nowhere directly
acknowledged by Leibniz, but it is manifest. The one quarrel
Leibniz would have with my associating him with the image of
the Cave in the Socratic dialog is simply that it is an image
rather than something that dwells in the understanding. For
Leibniz’s God is, at least to my thinking, a Mathematician, and
He, like Dedekind, holds that mathematics has no need of
geometry.
In this conception, then, there is a profound similarity
between all of our connections with one another and with the
physical, social, and moral world.
It seems clear, therefore, that Leibniz does not think that
space has an actual existence. As he states explicitly,
As for my own opinion, I have said more than once that
I hold space to be something relative, as time is, that I
hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order
of successions (Letters to Clark, Leibniz’s Third Paper,
Paragraph 4).
This is radically at odds with Newton’s Principia, in which
Newton seems to deduce the existence of absolute space from
the existence of absolute (i.e., accelerated) motion. For Newton,
space is the “sensorium of God.”
Let us ponder this for a moment. For Newton, space has an
existence. We can look out into the space before us and hold it in
our minds as something, even though we can (as Kant does) in
our imaginations remove all of its contents from the space that
holds it. What is left over is space, be it a cubic centimeter in
front of us or a volume 100,000 parsecs on a side.
When Leibniz sees this emptiness, he views it as an actual
metaphysical void, something that not even God can relate to. As
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
5
such, it is an abomination. Leibniz cannot accept a thing that God
cannot act upon, and the idea of an actual void is such a thing.
Since God must be able to act on all creation, a genuine
metaphysical void cannot exist. This is one of the reasons why
the Leibniz-Clark correspondence (Clark was taking Newton’s
part) makes little headway to change the authors’ minds. The
grounds of the conversation are radically different.
It is a worthy anecdote to relate that Leibniz and Newton
never acknowledged the other’s invention of the differential and
integral calculus. And it is helpful to note that Newton’s development of the calculus relies on geometrical constructions, while
Leibniz’s relies on an evolution of Descartes’ algebra. It is true
that Leibniz uses sketches of curves and lines for his derivations,
in part because we are visual creatures, but Leibniz’s derivations
do seem to be less reliant on images of extension.
Thus, for Leibniz, extension has no actual existence. What
we interpret as extension, as space, is a representation given to
us by God. It is very likely that the same is true for time in
Leibniz’s metaphysics. This separation is like a three-dimensional
Pythagorean theorem whose terms are given to us. What we
interpret as a spatial extension is a coordinate interval that we
call space, just as temporal separation is a coordinate expression
that we call time. What separates us, what we interpret as
distance, is just a shadow on a Cave wall caused by our origin
within a common light. What separates us from the amber light
of ages past is an equivalent coordinate expression whose
regularity is provided by God.
I cannot resist at this point recalling for you the yarn in the
Odyssey when the hero is among the Phaeacians, and Homer
brings us back from the story Odysseus is telling into Alkinoos
and Arete’s palace hall with its feast and polished stone floors
and torchlight. The momentum of that telescoping does not stop
there, but places us back firmly into the present where we realize
that we are reading words two thousand years old about a story
that is a thousand years distant even from that remote past. Like
Leibniz’s God, Homer has linked us to the ages, and three
millennia are as nought.
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
One other element of Leibniz’s philosophy will prove
useful later: Leibniz directly addresses the problem of a Deity
that weaves out our destinies to construct the best of all possible
worlds. This Deity knows everything we are capable of doing,
knows all of our potentialities, and further, knows all of our
past.
And since every present state of a simple substance is a
natural consequence of its preceding state, the present is
pregnant with the future (Monadology, paragraph 22).
Thus, the “demon” in Laplace’s Essay on a Theory of Probability
takes its inspration from Leibniz. Laplace says explicitly:
We ought then to regard the present state of the universe
as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the
one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which
nature is animated and the respective situation of the
beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast
to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the
same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of
the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing
would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be
present to its eyes (Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on
Probabilities, Chapter II).
Leibniz seems to recognize the determinism of such a God, but
sidesteps the troublesome argument of the lack of free will by
claiming that God knows all possible predicates of our being, and
so chooses the path which we would follow anyway!
I regard the foregoing comments about Leibniz’s Monadology as a preamble to our discussion of the problem of nonlocality in quantum mechanics, especially as the concept of nonlocality has been articulated by interpretations of the work of
John Bell, an elementary particle theorist who worked at CERN
before his untimely death in the Fall of 1990. But first, I shall try
to provide some background on the landscape in which Bell
developed his justifiably famous theorem.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
7
2. An Eternal, Golden Braid: Quantum Mechanics in
Rutherford, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, and Einstein
It is surprising at first glance that of the four papers Einstein
published in 1905, the one for which he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics was not the paper on special relativity, entitled
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (Annalen der
Physik 17 [1905]: 891-921); nor the famous E=mc2 paper, “Does
the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?”
(Annalen der Physik 18 [1905]: 639-641); nor the one on Brownian motion, “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in
Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of
Heat” (Annalen der Physik 17 [1905]: 549-560).
(As an aside, it is worthy of note that this is the one
hundreth anniversary of the publication of the 1915 paper on
General Relativity, and the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of
Maxwell’s publication of his theory of light as electromagnetic
waves.)
The actual phrasing from the Nobel Prize Committee was
“for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his
discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” The so-called
“photoelectric effect” paper has a curious title: “Concerning an
Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation
of Light” (Annalen der Physik 17 [1905]: 132-148). This was the
publication that marked the beginnings of what is now called
Quantum Mechanics.
In the paper, Einstein characterizes the wave theory of light
in the following manner:
The energy of a beam of light from a point source (according to Maxwell’s theory of light or, more generally,
according to any wave theory) is continuously spread over
an ever increasing volume.
In the next paragraph, Einstein notes that
The wave theory of light, which operates with continuous
spatial functions, has worked well in the representation
of purely optical phenomena and will probably never be
replaced by any other theory.
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
But in the next paragraph, he says,
It seems to me that the observations associated with
blackbody radiation, fluorescence, the production of
cathode rays by ultraviolet light, and other related
phenomena connected with the emission and transformation of light . . . are more readily understood if one
assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously
distributed in space. In accordance with the assumption
to be considered here, the energy of a light ray spreading
out from a point source is not continuously distributed
over increasing space but consists of a finite number of
energy quanta which are localized at points in space,
which move without dividing, and which can only be
produced and absorbed as complete units.
On the one hand, Einstein allows for a “wave theory” like
Maxwell’s waves in a luminiferous aether in which the light is
transmitted, reflected, and refracted. He “heuristically” considers
light to be a particle during light’s emission from and absorption
into material bodies. It is perhaps ironic that Einstein was never
able to reconcile his conception of the dual nature of light with
the equivalent, dual character of particles as both material bodies
and waves, a solution posed by de Broglie to provide an explanation of Bohr’s model for the energy levels of the hydrogen atom.
Of course, this entire “braid” began with efforts to apply
models from classical physics that explain everything from
cannonballs to asteroids to planets to the very small structures
within matter such as atoms and elementary particles via Galileo,
Thomson, Millikan, and Rutherford.
By way of a truncated outline of the argument, Bohr used the
existence of hydrogen spectral lines and the contemporary work
by Planck to explain so-called blackbody radiation. Planck made
the hypothesis that discrete oscillators in matter had only certain
fundamental modes with which they could vibrate. He asserted
that these oscillators were in equilibrium with the thermal
radiation from matter with a particular temperature, and thus
explained blackbody radiation. Bohr wondered what the “Planck
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
9
oscillators” could be, since the classical picture of an orbiting
charge holds that it should radiate continuously. He hypothesized
that his atom settled into quasi-stationary states and emitted and
absorbed radiation during transitions from one energy level to
another.
It is likely that everyone in the audience is familiar with
Bohr’s model from high school science classes and many popular
lectures and books on the subject of science. You Seniors are in
the process of completing this sequence of papers.
In fact, the Bohr model has become a commonplace picture
of the atom. But such familiarity hides the utter strangeness of
the concept. The atom is stable for a while, and then is excited or
de-excited by the absorption or emission of light at a specific
frequency. These energy levels are Bohr’s answer to why the
spectra of light from certain gases contains only certain
frequencies. If you sprinkle salt onto the logs in your fireplace,
the resultant light is a brilliant yellow. That yellow light contains
only certain frequencies, frequencies that are as much an indication of the presence of the sodium in salt as your finger prints
are of you as an individual person. We know the constitution of
stars precisely because of this line-spectrum identification of
elements, stars that can be hundreds or thousands of light years
distant.
The strangeness of the idea of the Bohr atom bothered de
Broglie, who reasoned by a kind of symmetry derived from
Einstein’s photoelectric effect paper (wherein light can have a
particulate nature, as well as a wave-like nature) that particles
could perhaps have both a discrete nature and also a wave-like
nature. In an immensely clever argument (he won the Nobel
Prize for it), de Broglie argued that one can calculate the
“wavelength” of a particle by assigning it a specific momentum,
which implies that it has an energy. That energy can be used to
calculate a characteristic wavelength, E = hν = hc/λ. It is a
stunning triumph for so simple an argument that the wavelengths
thus calculated for an electron in the Bohr orbits for hydrogen
is exactly the circumference of the quasi-stationary orbits for
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
electrons in the hydrogen atom. So the electrons are not exactly
particles when they are inside the atom. They also have wavelike qualities.
Schroedinger was a young assistant professor when de Broglie
published his astonishing idea. I have it on good authority that
Schroedinger was assigned the task of giving the journal club
lecture at his university the next week. It’s a bit like these Fridaynight lectures, but less formal and typically they are on a weekday
afternoon. The assignment was something like, “Take a look at
de Broglie’s paper and give us a synopsis of it at the journal club
next Tuesday.”
Schroedinger had a ski trip planned for that weekend (Friday
through Sunday, apparently). Being the persistent soul that he
was, he took a copy of de Broglie’s paper and a book on
solutions to differential equations in various coordinate systems
(rectilinear, cylindrical, and spherical) with him on the ski trip.
The short version of the story is that he didn’t get much skiing
done, but he came back well on the way of inventing wave
mechanics, an explanation for the energy levels of atoms as kind
of standing waves in space. His “eureka” moment came when
he said to his bewildered ski companions, “I have just fit the
energy levels of the hydrogen atom in a way you would not
believe!” The standing waves were similar to the threedimensional oscillations of sound waves in a concert hall. But
standing waves of what?
I believe Schroedinger originally thought of the standing
waves as waves of charge density. The electron has wave-like
qualities à la de Broglie, and it has charge, so it would make
sense as an extension of de Broglie’s hypothesis. But electrons
have discrete charges when they are measured by Millikan in
his famous oil-drop experiment. How come we never see
fractional charges?
Schroedinger’s description of electrons (or any elementary
particle, for that matter) was that they are aggregations of waves
that reinforce in a certain region and cancel out everywhere else.
This makes sense in explaining the energy levels of a hydrogen
atom, but causes other conceptual problems.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
11
Schroedinger’s description of a
particle as an aggregation of waves
of some sort caused Heisenberg to
analyze the behavior of such particles
when we try to measure them. If we
try to localize the particle as we do in
the act of measurement, we confine
it to a narrower region in space. That
means we add up more and more
waves. Each wave has a slightly
different speed. Schroedinger needed
these different speeds for different
wavelengths in order to get the
“wave-packet” to behave like a particle. But that means that the
momentum of the particle becomes less certain over time, since, in
order to localize the particle, we need to add more wavelengths, and
adding more wavelengths means the velocity (and therefore the
momentum) become more uncertain.
There is actually a calculable limit to the uncertainty in the
momentum times the uncertainty in the position of a particle. It is
greater than or equal to Planck’s constant. This is of course the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation. It says that there is a fundamental,
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and not simply an experimental, limit to our knowledge of the
location of a particle and its momentum.
A particularly helpful illustration of the Heisenberg derivation (and one that will be useful to us later in this lecture can
be had by looking at single-slit diffraction of a plane wave. The
wave can be a wave of light, an elementary particle like an
electron, or even a water wave. If it originates from a far-distant
source, the wave is essentially a series of parallel troughs and
peaks with its propagation direction perpendicular to those
troughs and peaks. When we allow it to approach a screen so that
the peaks and troughs (as seen from above) are parallel to the
screen, we can watch the interaction of the barrier with the
oncoming waves. If there is an opening in the barrier that is of
the same order as the wavelength of the waves, a fraction of the
waves can pass the barrier. When this happens, a part of the wave
front gets through the barrier, but for some fraction of the waves,
the direction of the waves is changed because of the wavefront’s
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interference with itself. This interference produces a dispersion
of the wave front that gives its velocity a vertical component. It
is important to note what has happened here. We have limited the
wavefront in the vertical direction to a δx that is essentially the
width of the slit. It has produced a dispersion in the velocity of
the wave in the vertical direction, a δv.
In Schroedinger’s terms, this dispersion in the velocity of the
wave in the vertical direction (that is, in the same direction as the
opening of the slit) is an uncertainty in the velocity. If we
consider the wave as representing the motion of a particle, then
the localization of the particle within a δx produces an uncertainty
in the momentum of the particle of order δp. This illustration is
not entirely fanciful. In fact, Heisenberg uses it as one of his
derivations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation. Furthermore,
the smaller the slit, that is, the smaller the uncertainty in position,
the greater the uncertainty in the momentum.
This has led to no end of problems in interpretation. One
example of this is the fact that elementary particles (be they
electrons, protons, or photons), when emitted from a source and
directed toward a screen or grid whose spacings are the same size
as the wavelengths of the elementary particles, will show a
diffraction pattern on a screen downstream from slits. For the
sake of clarity, we will consider only photons, although the
discussion could as well apply to any elementary particle,
including neutrons, protons, electrons, etc.
Let a stream of photons set forth across the chaotic gulf toward
a screen. Imagine this as like a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost
as Satan launches himself across the chasm between hell and
paradise. These photons are transmitted and diffracted as though
they are electromagnetic waves. When they reach two slits in the
screen, the waves interfere with one another so that there is a very
specific pattern of light and dark lines on the screen downstream
from the slits called a “two-slit” pattern.
Suppose we turn down the intensity of the light. Let us make
the light exceedingly dim, so that when we look at the screen or
detector, we find only one cell on the screen illuminated or
exposed (you remember photographic film, I trust) at a time.
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What happens next is remarkable. This figure shows the
buildup over time of electrons in a two slit experiment at very low
flux levels. We see one quantum at a time arriving . As we watch,
the diffraction pattern begins to develop. We see the characteristic
two-slit pattern. But we have allowed only one quantum (in this
case, electrons) to be emitted at a time. How can we possibly get
a two-slit pattern. Such an experimental apparatus exists. The
results from it behave exactly as I have said.
Apparently, the individual light or particle quantum goes
through both slits at once. It is spread out over the entire space
of the experimental screen (or more properly, the experimental
volume) and then excites only one element of the detector. If this
seems quixotic to you, it is. It is known as “the problem of
measurement” in the vernacular of Shady Bend. The wave
function (remember all those waves adding up to produce the
wave packet) is spread out even for a single particle or quantum
of light. The moment before it hits the detector screen, it is
everywhere on the screen. At the next instant, it collapses into a
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single point. This is known as the “collapse of the wave
function.” The collapse is apparently instantaneous. If these are
material particles or quanta of light, they sort themselves into a
single area on the screen instantaneously.
There were many objections to this explanation, not the least
of which was that it violates causality. The wave-packet description of the two-slit experiment requires that the waves instantly
collapse to a single point, after having, a moment in time before,
occupied the whole of the experiment.
Bohr and Heisenberg made noble efforts to resolve this
apparent contradiction by supposing that the wave function
description of elementary particles was merely a calculation of
likelihood or probability. Since probability is only a likelihood,
the collapse of the wave function is merely the result of a
measurement. And like any measurement, once it occurs, the
answer is always, “Yes. That’s what happened!”
Einstein would have none of it. His famous quote, “God
does not play dice!” about the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was an indication of his
objection to the probability interpretation of the psi-function. In
his view, there was an underlying causal relation between the
elements of the experiments and their outcomes that was not
represented by quantum mechanics (QM). Yet QM is a remarkably successful theoretical method.
In a paper in response to the probability interpretation of
QM, Einstein, Podolski and Rosen (EPR) tried to show that the
uncertainty relation developed by Heisenberg was flawed, and
that some variations of the single or two slit experiment would
give an inroad into figuring out precisely what the momentum
and position of the particle would be. One of the thought
experiments proposed to measure the momentum transferred to
the screen by the impact of the particle, This (by conservation
of momentum) would allow the particle momentum to be
measured exactly, while the position would be localized to the
region within the slit. But when one took into account the
uncertainty in the position of the screen, the Heisenberg
Uncertainty limit returned.
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A variant of one of the thought experiments used two
particles that interacted prior to the slit, and then had one transfer
its momentum to one screen while another’s position was
determined independently. Again, by conservation of momentum
the second particle’s momentum and its position were to be
determined beyond the Heisenberg limit. Each response to EPR
by Heisenberg and Bohr led EPR to further amplifications of the
experimental apparatus. While the correspondence in the
scientific literature led many to accept the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Heisenberg Uncertainty limit, Einstein was
never able to believe the probabilistic nature of Bohr and Heisenberg’s interpretation.
Yet the alternative to a probabilistic interpretation was an
instantaneous collapse of a physical wave function. This instantaneous collapse would clearly exceed the speed of light, and thus
render it difficult to accept, since the limiting speed of the transfer
of information in Special Relativity is the velocity of light. This
is one of the fundamental hypotheses of Special Relativity.
This led John Bell to a further analysis of the two slit experiment, and the theoretical development of Bell’s Theorem (or
Bell’s Inequality), which has allowed many experimental test of
locality, causality, and the predictions of quantum mechanics. It
appears to contradict Einstein’s hopes for a “hidden variable”
theory, wherein true causality would be returned to the world.
Apparently, this is not to be realized.
3. Bell’s Theorem (or Bell’s Inequality)
But how does this happen? Bell’s theorem is essentially a test of
whether or not two particles, once they interact, can be separated
enough so that their states do not influence one another.
Remarkably, it is posed in such a way that it can be implemented
as an experimental test.
Schroedinger called this phenomenon, in which the wave
function of two particles becomes joined by their interaction, an
“entanglement” of the wave functions of the particles. And you
recall that all particles have a wave function description that
guides or governs their behavior.
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This hypothesis bears on EPR’s paper. To reiterate, if two
particles interact, then the momentum of one could be determined
by inference due to measuring the momentum of the other, since
the momentum of the pair has to be conserved. At the same time,
the position of the first particle, for which we inferred the momentum, could be accurately measured for its position as long as
the pair were sufficiently far apart. Thus, the momentum and
position of a particle could be measured at a precision which
violated the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. At this point, EPR
could claim that the Heisenberg Uncertainty relation was merely
a practical limit, and that there was some underlying, governing
relation which we simply needed to find, some sort of “hidden
variable” that really determined the evolution of the system.
J. S. Bell was sympathetic to EPR’s view. His theorem (called
variously Bell’s Theorem or Bell’s Inequality) was an attempt to
establish whether or not EPR’s hypothesis could be tested
experimentally. The experimental setup is remarkably simple, but
not trivial. Two particles would be allowed to interact, to become
“entangled,” and then would separate and go off in opposite
directions. After a time, the particles would each be measured to
determine their properties. As with the EPR paper, the hypothesis
that their states could no longer interact would produce one result,
whereas the hypothesis that their states were still entangled when
they were measured would produce another result.1
The next figure (overleaf) shows the results of one of the
experimental tests of Bell’s Theorem, in this case the orientation
of the polarization of photons measured by two separated systems.
The straight line shows the limit of a “local, realistic” hypothesis,
that is, that the results are uncorrelated. Any experimental result
below the diagonal straight line indicates a correlation (that is, an
entanglement) between distant particles and their experimental
1. For a readable proof of the theorem, see Nick Herbert’s book Quantum Reality (New York: Random House, 2011) and his account at
http://quantumtantra.com/bell2.html, as well as his articles “Cryptographic approach to hidden variables” in the American Journal of
Physics 43 1975): 315-16 and “How to be in two places at the same
time,” New Scientist 111 (1986): 41-44.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
apparatuses. Perhaps most important, the results predicted by QM
show a very close agreement with the data!
In some later experimental tests, groups have tried to
estimate the speed of the transmission of the correlations by
changing slightly the timing of the setting of the measuring
apparatuses. In a ground-breaking paper by Robert Garisto
entitled “What is the Speed of Quantum Information?” (Quantum
Physics 2002 [arXiv:quant-ph/0212078v1]) the result of a
measurement conducted at CERN is that the correlations happen
at a velocity at least 10,000 times the speed of light over a
distance of 18 kilometers. I say “at least” because the electronics
of the experi-mental setup could not measure a faster correlation.
So for all intents and purposes, this speed is a lower limit. The
correlations occur effectively instantaneously.
What are we to make of such results? Henry Pierce Stapp’s
paper, entitled “The S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory”
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(Physical Review 3 [1971]: 1303-20), provides a highly recommended discussion of Bell’s Theorem, despite the imposing title.
(By way of a friendly warning, it’s best to get a bit of orientation
first by reading Section X, “Ontological Problems,” and Appendix B, “World View.”)
To give you some idea of Stapp’s take on Bell’s Theorem, I
quote from his paper at a point just after he shows a concise proof
of that theorem.
A conclusion that can be drawn from this theorem is that
the demands of causality, locality, and individuality
cannot be simultaneously maintained in the description
of nature. Causality demands contingent predictions;
locality demands local causes of localized results;
individuality demands specification of individual results,
not merely their probabilities.
As Stapp puts it:
I can see only three ways out of the problem posed by
Bell’s theorem.
1. The first is to accept . . . the idea that human
observers are cognizant only of individual branches of
the full reality of the world: The full physical world
would contain a superposition of a myriad of interconnected physical worlds of the kind we know. An
individual observer would be personally aware of only
one response of a macroscopic measuring device, but a
full account of reality would include all the other
possible outcomes on an equal footing, though perhaps
with unequal “weights.”
2. The second way out is to accept that nature is
basically highly nonlocal, in the sense that correlations
exist that violently contradict—even at the macroscopic
level—the usual ideas of the space-time propagation of
information. The intuitive idea of the physical distinctness
of physically well-separated macroscopic objects then
becomes open to question. And the intuitive idea of space
itself is placed in jeopardy. For space is intimately
connected to the space-time relationships that are
naturally expressed in terms of it. If there are, between
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far-apart microscopic events, large instantaneous connections that do not respect spatial separation, then the
significance of space would seem to arise only from the
statistical relationships that do respect it.
3. The third way out is to deny that measurements that
“could have been performed, but were not,” would have
had definite results if they had been performed. This
way out seems, at first, to be closest to the spirit of the
Copenhagen interpretation. However, it seems to contradict the idea of indeterminism, which is also an
important element of the spirit of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Some comments are clearly in order here. The third option
Stapp articulates bears remarkable similarities to Laplace’s
Demon or Leibniz’s God as architects of the best of all possible
worlds. In that instantiation of reality, what we choose is exactly
what we will. But what we will as a predicate of our being is
completely known by the Deity and determined by it.
The first option is known as Stapp’s “many-worlds”
interpretation. That option is often mentioned in the same breath
as Schroedinger’s Cat.
In that interpretation, as Stapp says, the cat is both alive and
dead in the multiply unfolding universe of outcomes. Each point
where the quantum hits the screen represents a starting point for
a separate future.
As an interesting aside, we have some hopes of conducting
Bell’s Theorem type experiments here at St. John’s in a room in
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the basement appropriately called the Quantum Lab. But of
course, no cats will be allowed in that room.
Most people find the second option, non-locality, most
“appealing,” if that is the right phrase.
In the case of the first experimental measurements, conducted with two low-energy neutrons colliding; then recoiling
down separate arms of a vacuum line; and finally having their
angular momenta determined by a Stern-Gerlach apparatus (I will
spare you the details), there were (some thirty or forty years ago)
five measurements, four of which agreed with Bell’s inequality.
Since then, all of the experimental tests of Bell’s theorem have
confirmed it.
To emphasize how surprising this has been, I recall a
conversation I had with Professor Carol Alley at the University
of Maryland when I was a graduate student there. He is a famous
experimental physicist, one who used a laser to measure the
distance to the Moon from a site near Goddard Space Flight
Center during one of the Apollo Lunar Landing missions. As we
talked about Bell’s theorem, and it’s apparent experimental
corroboration, standing in the hallway in the Physics Building at
the University of Maryland, he was clearly quite perplexed that
there was any corroboration of the inequality. As we spoke, his
voice was getting louder and louder. Finally, I said to him,
“Professor Alley, you realize that you are shouting at me?” He
laughed and said, “Well, it’s certainly not you that I’m shouting
at, Jim. It’s the idea of this result!”
Left with the options Stapp articulated, which would you
abandon: causality, locality, or individuality. You cannot have
all three! Most people, faced with these options, give up
locality.
4. Like shadows on a Cave Wall: Leibniz’s ideas of “space”
as a kind of answer to the problem of non-locality
It is time to recall one of the things I am attempting in this lecture:
to use Leibniz’s conceptions of space and time in the Monadology as a metaphysical foundation for the idea of no-locality in
quantum mechanics.
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Let us reiterate the properties of monads. Monads are
singular. That is, they have many properties, but no parts. They
have no windows. All their impressions and reflections of the
Cosmos come through their reflection and articulation of the
Deity, which they represent in a small part.
Finally, it is likely, based on the experimental results of Bell’s
Theorem, that our intuitions of space and time are far removed
from the way the Universe actually is.
5. Concluding remarks
I conclude this lecture with two principal points and some
speculations.
First, it was many years ago that Roger Penrose in a book
called The Emporer’s New Mind, tried to explain the coherence
of mind by the physical effects of non-locality on a relatively
small scale—the electrochemical and quantum mechanical
processes in the human brain (cats, also, most likely, since
Penrose is fond of cats). This coherence would require entanglement of the prior physical states of these electrochemical wave
fronts, but this does not seem terribly surprising.
Second, entanglement does not depend simply or perhaps
even necessarily on proximity. At a fairly formal level, entanglement depends on interaction. The entanglement of cognitive
processes with the experiential world might be sufficient to
explain the commonality of experience, a term which I coin here
in this essay, especially given that the correlations persist over
manifestly macroscopic differences.
This bears, quite generally, on our ideas of culture, also. As
an example, think of how easy or difficult it can be to change
one’s entire conception of the world via a single conversation. I
thank Mr. William Braithwaite for the suggestion.
The concept of non-locality thus articulated can extend far
beyond the possibility of common experience to the possibility
of kindredness with our common weal. We might not, actually,
be separate spheres, hoping to connect, hoping to touch and
know the world. Like shadows on a cave wall, both we as
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individuals and the rest of the sensible world could actually
spring from a common light.
Finally, and this is a bit more speculative, but hardly
original, the entire evolution of the history of the Cosmos has
involved some pretty heavy entanglement. We now call it the
Big Bang.
This brings us to a further point regarding Leibniz’s Deity.
God might not have simply said, “Let there be Light.” God
might have actually been that light.
�Diver Tomb, Posidonia (Modern Paestum)
ca. 480-470, Museum, Paestum
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Depth Versus Complexity
Eva Brann
What a great honor it is to be invited to speak to the philosophers
of Athens, though I came flying into Atlanta through the blue
skies by airplane rather than sailing into the Piraeus over the
wine-dark sea by trireme!
My topic is a duality, an opposition in the way our world offers itself to the search for knowledge, which is mirrored in our
personal predisposition for a way of inquiry.
I’ve learned not to expect an audience to sit with bated breath
until I reveal my own inclination and also not to indulge myself
in post-modern indeterminacies. So I’ll say up front where, as
my students say, I’m “coming from” and, as matters more, where
I’m going with my title, “Depth Versus Complexity.” I think that
the first dimension of depth describes such bottom-seeking
knowledge as we’re capable of searching out; it may be called
philosophia, “love of wisdom.” The second dimension, on the
other hand, describes such surface-covering information as we
can attain by research; it could be named, to coin a term,
philotechnosyne, “love of skillful fact-finding.” Since it seems
to me hazardous, both aimless and dangerous, to plunge into the
depths below a surface that I’m not acquainted with, it also seems
to me that those who attempt such a plunge, which is always
made with eyes closed, should have their eyes wide open above
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia on September 16,
2016.
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and be acquainted with much of the wide surface, always keeping
in mind Heraclitus’ dictum that “Eyes and ears are bad witnesses
to humans that have barbarian souls” (D-K 107). I will cite rather,
in behalf of being extensively informed, Socrates, who lived in
that first Athens as an ardent urbanite. He seems to Phaedrus, his
ostensible guide, like a stranger outside the city in the country
around Athens, and he says that he, Socrates, only learns when
within the city; but he shows that he has far more real local
knowledge than his companion.
The direct opposite of complexity would be simplicity; of
depth it is shallowness. I’m not disavowing but rather avoiding
those antitheses, for now. So I’ll describe the two ways not as directly opposite, but rather as orthogonal to each other. Therefore
let me begin in a somewhat unlikely way: with the most basic
Cartesian coordinate diagram of classical physics, in which the
horizontal x axis represents the fundamental independent variable, time, and the vertical y axis orthogonal (that is, at right angles) to it represents some other physical dimension—early on,
distance, velocity, and acceleration. That’s so even in latter day
elementary textbooks. But at a crucial moment in physics, its first
modern moment, the direction is different. The second theorem
of the Third Day of Galileo’s Two New Sciences (1638), sets out,
under the title of “Naturally Accelerated Motion,” the earliest
clearly quantified law of nature, that for free fall at the surface
of the earth,1 where acceleration is naturally uniform. Here time
is represented by an upright line, while the horizontal stands for
velocity. Moreover, time begins not at what will later be called
the origin, the intersection of the representative lines, but at a release point. Picture the diagram as rendering Galileo, nearly half
a century earlier, standing at the top of the Leaning Tower, about
to start his experiment by letting go of a ball. That experiment
was not, to be sure, an experiment at all but a demonstration of a
remarkable fact already known by Galileo, namely that balls of
different weights would, absent friction, hit the ground together.
1. The third day of creation in the Hebrew Bible is when the earth appears (Genesis 1:9).
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That’s somewhat to my point, since so-called information, gathered by experimental research is, I would guess, far less often put
to use as the source of new discoveries than as the corroboration
of pre-conceived knowledge.
What is a little off my point is the mind-boggling and modernity-determining way Galileo proves the law on the basis of a
postulate suggested by the Pisan demonstration. The postulate
says that, since weight is not involved in free fall close to the
earth’s surface, the simplest possible relation of velocity to time
is to be assumed, namely that the former varies directly with the
latter. Then the velocity-lines, set up horizontally on each moment of time, increase proportionally with the time of falling and
so assume the outline of a triangle whose base represents the velocity at the moment of impact. The interior of this triangle is a
kind of proto-integral, a summation of all the near-infinitesimal
velocity-lines, with side t for time and d/t for distance per unit
time, or velocity. These sides, when multiplied, yield twice the
area of a triangle representing the dimension t·d/t . Simply put,
the area of a triangle, a plane figure, now represents a distance,
a linear figure. I’m moved to say that this counterintuitive procedure instantiates the crucial effect of quantification: the symbolic quantity has no immediately apprehensible similarity to the
quality of the symbolized phenomenon, here distance.
I must interrupt my account here to say, very emphatically,
that Galileo clearly saw what was eventuating and did his clever
and careful best to circumvent the representation of distance by
area, so that his proof is conceptually clear but mathematically
cumbrous. More efficient and less mindful ways would soon be
found.2
As it turns out, the tsunami of information now available is
largely numerical in form and bears a ruptured relation to its qualitative subject. Incidentally, the law of free fall then simply stares
at you from the diagram: Since by the postulate the velocity ratios
2. Of course, this transmogrification had already preceded, when a
length uniformly increasing had been made to symbolize a similarly increasing rate, namely, the ratio of distance to time or velocity, d/t.
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are the same as the time ratios, we can substitute the time for the
velocity and say: In free fall on earth, in abstraction from friction
and in the absence of a force that might increase acceleration, the
distances vary as the squares of the times, d ~ t 2 Let me repeat:
I’m a little off topic with this tale, but only a little, since the story
of non-similar symbolism is deeply implicated in the tale of depth
vs. complexity.
My recall of a moment when time went diagrammatically
downward rather than outward is intended to remind you of other
ways time goes downward—and inward. If Galileo’s ball hadn’t
been stopped at ground zero it would have gone inward toward
the center of the earth.
There is another discipline in which time heads down. In archaeology, the deeper we dug (I say “we” because in my pre-Socratic days I was an archeologist), the later it was in our personal
day, the earlier it became in the world’s time: the deeper down,
the farther back. On our earth, the buried past lies progressively
deeper below the visible now that presents itself on the surface.
These material survivals went, if undisturbed, in readable stratifications, way back into prehistoric times.3
I refer to digging because it is an analogue, perhaps even the
source of metaphor for a psychic capacity called remembering.
In remembering we dive into our memory tank, often to meet a
memory floating or flashing up to forestall or even anticipate our
search. But sometimes we must recollect, dig laboriously downward through stratum after stratum of compacted memories, until
the desired one halts the search. Socrates distinguishes memory
(mneme) from recollection (anamnesis)—e.g., in Symposium
208a, and Meno 81d. Augustine, that great Platonic theologian,
devises an imaginative topology of the soul which visualizes that
3. “If undisturbed:” I recall a day of excitement at the American Excavations of the Athenian Agora (Marketplace), when a pristine Neolithic
deposit was thought to have been discovered. By evening the excavators
had reached bottom—and there lay a little button bearing the legend:
Army of the Hellenes. It came from a Greek army tunic; its presence
spoiled the temporal virginity of the find and with it much of its informational value.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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depth-sounding destination of recollection (Confessions, Bk. X,
Chs. 11, 12, 17). Our quasi-sensory memory images densely fill
the innumerable fields and caves and caverns of our inward
quasi-spatial memory. Here we wander in remembrance. But yet
deeper within the huge inner world are placeless places for imageless presences such as true mathematical figures (meaning
those drawn with breadthless lengths on an inner quasi-plane),
precepts of the liberal arts, including logic, and the invisible
being of things discerned within, “themselves by themselves,”
the Platonic forms. These flee into the remotest recesses and must
be “excogitated,” literally “driven together and out,” that is, laboriously recollected. Then Augustine extends the depth—or
height—of the soul beyond memory and its recollective recesses.
“I will transcend” (transibo), he says, my memory and “ascending” (ascendans) through and beyond my memorial soul I will
mount up to God who is above me.
To my mind, this is a remarkable correction, or perhaps a
consummation, of Socrates’ account, who never tells, except in
post-mortem myths, how the forms and their ruling principle, the
Idea of the Good, actually come into the soul—or it to them. In
Augustine’s account, they penetrate, they enter, the innermost
depth of the soul, that is to say, the soul opens onto the heights
of Heaven. Depth and height are strangely identical. I will dwell
on this later, but here recall to you that the Latin word altus means
both “high” and “deep,” and also that Heraclitus says “The way
up and down is one and the same” (D-K 60).
Like Augustine, the enhancer of Platonic psychology,
Freud, its traducer, has an outside-in psychic topology. He himself called psychoanalysis “depth-psychology” (Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1926). His early typology in the Interpretation of
Dreams (1900) names at the upper end the perceptual system,
that is, awareness; behind or below comes the preconscious system, that is, the subconscious, where reside psychic facts not
presently in awareness but readily accessible. And deep down
there is the place of the unconscious, a hermetic hell, reachable
only by the experts in deep penetration, by the psychoanalysts.
The motto of Freud’s early book is “If I cannot bend heaven, I
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will raise hell” (Virgil, Aeneid VII 312). And that is why I call
Freud a traducer of the two ancients: For them the light increases with depth, for him the murk. As Lady Macbeth, who
might, poor woman, be a Freudian case, says: “Hell is murky”
(Macbeth, V.i.41).
I’ll return to Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI (23, 27, 28), to
me the highpoint of the inquiry into time. Here memory becomes
the place and the condition of time. Time is a “distention” of the
mind, a dilation brought about by its accumulating memories, and
the amount of this mental stretching is the measure of times. Neither
future nor past are; only the present, the here and now, exists. The
future is expectation now and the past is memory now, and time is
the presently felt extent of this expectational and memorial stretching upward into the future and downward into the past respectively.
To be sure, Augustine says nothing about up or down. But
Husserl, who takes his departure from Augustine in what is probably the greatest application of the phenomenological method to a
subject, namely his Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1905), does exactly that in describing his own “Diagram of
Time” (para. 10). He speaks of the new nows changing into pasts
that continuously “run off’ and plunge “downward” into the depths
marked on a vertical line which symbolizes the “retention,” that is
to say, the memory of impressions.
Before showing you where I plan for all this to be going let me
take a minute to tell you about the etymologies of the words “deep”
and “down.” I am far from imagining that recovered meanings, be
they the careful etymologies produced by learned linguists, who
trace a word to its speculative Indo-European root, or the creative
derivations devised by imaginative amateurs, which have no basis
in research, prove anything at all. The dead-serious but linguistically
dubious etymologizing of certain philosophers strikes me as an improbity, while the apt hijinks of others seem to me good fun.4 But
both linguistically sound etymologies and imaginative verbal jeux
4. An example of—how shall I put it?—unstraightforwardness is Heidegger’s translation of Greek aletheia, “truth,” as “un-concealedness,”
as from alpha-privative a (“un”) and Lethe (“forgetfulness”), from a
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d’esprit can be thought-provoking, the latter because they’re meant
to be, the former because they may tell us something about the development of human reflection. But all in all, etymologies are incitements, not revelations, and poetic play, not philosophy.
Here is the linguistically respectable etymology of “deep.”
The Indo-European root, dheub, gives rise to “dip,” “dive,” as
well as “deep.” Thus it is reasonable to infer that “deep” originally signified plunging into an element and bringing up some
of it. The deepest dipping and diving our earth affords us is the
ocean, the deepest of the deep the Mariana Trench; let it stand
for non-metaphorical, literal, depth and diving. The “down” adjective is similarly physical; it is derived from dune, “hill”;
“down” means “off the hill,” moving from top to bottom.
Now let me do the same for “complexity.” “Com-,” Indo-European kom, signifies “beside, near, with”; “-plexity” derives
from plek-, “to plait,” originally from “flax,” a plant yielding textile fiber. So like depth, complexity is rooted in our dealing with
material objects. I’ve read that the most complicated object
known to us is our brain. I don’t need to insist that its complexity
is non-metaphysical, literal, just because I believe that complexity hardly ever is a metaphor.
We deal with complexity by “ex-plicating,” that is, undoing
the im-plicating entanglements of complexity, or by “ex-plaining,” that is, setting complexities out plainly. The two meanings
of the word “plain,” that is, “clear” and “flat,” have the same origin: the wide “plain” is where things are plain because view is
unobstructed, and the mathematical flat surface, the “plane,” has
the same origin. Hence “explaining” is a mode of extracting
meaning that explicates its subject by projecting it onto a flat surface. Thus, for instance, the brain is contained by a roughly round
skull (because, I imagine, the sphere is that mathematical solid
verb that means “to elude notice.” The etymology has some support,
but there is no evidence that to early and classical authors aletheia
meant anything but truth and genuineness as opposed to falseness and
counterfeit. An example of fun is from Plato’s Phaedrus (252c): Pteros
means, “Winged Eros” since pteron means “feather.”
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which has the lowest ratio of surface to content), so that its involutions need to be explicated in plane surfaces: in marked cross
sections for viewing and labelled schemata for functions and
plane mappings for neural networks.
What I’ve just said can serve to deal with an annoying sort
of argumentative deflection. Someone will interject, to derail
you: “It’s more complex than that.” To which the answer is: “Well
then, if you mean it, draw me a picture.” For complexity is the
eminently diagrammable, spatializable problem; it can be set out
plainly. To be sure, complexity is the opposite of simplicity, and
what these folks often say as the final put-down is: “You’re being
simplistic, you’re over-simplifying.” To which the apparently
merely eristic, that is, merely contentious, answer is: “And you’re
being shallow, superficial,” meaning: your overview has too few
nodes and connections to begin with and doesn’t go into the matter to boot.
It will be the point of my talk to show, perhaps a little too
briefly, that it is not merely argumentative to say that complexity
is a superficial view of the world, but has real non-derogatory
meaning, and then to conclude by attempting a description and—
I’ll be upfront about it—a defense of depth. Just as I don’t want
to say that they are opposite kinds of thinking, so, far be it from
me to claim that complexity and depth are “kinds” of thinking at
all. To my mind, it is plain unthinking to claim that there are different ways of thinking. Thinking is always thinking—always
the same in being “about” something, thus always qualified by
what it is about. It is always the same but often about something
different. For, of course, there are different objects of thought,
different ways to see what you must think about.5 Thus the people
who used to be referred to as primitives, and before that as savages, felt surrounded by well- or ill-intentioned spirits and, most
rationally, concluded that these needed to be propitiated in ways
they themselves might respond too—just as we would.
5. People also employ different devices, modes, ways of thinking, such
as figures, analogies, conjectures; it is hard to see how they could do it,
except against a backdrop of plain mentation.
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Or take Socrates. Some folks say that he was interested in
defining certain objects, that is, in delimiting them in the universe of discourse, in explaining them and their interrelations
verbally. Well, so he was, but only when they were heavily affected with non-being, as in his multi-definitional pursuit of the
sophist in the dialogue of that name, the results of which I’ve
spent some amusing hours diagramming. But when he is within
view of a true being, like one of the human excellences, asking
that notorious “What is . . . ?” question, definition is not his aim,
but a delving descent to depths attained in literal “under-standing” (as we say) or in a truth-following ascent to the heights
achieved through “over-standing” or epi-steme (as the Greeks
say). It is always thinking but sometimes of words, or about objects, or from different positions. Consider that if thinking
weren’t always just that we wouldn’t even know when we have
different intentions.
Now to some gist. What is complexity? Well, first, there are
several kinds I’ve discerned and no doubt others I haven’t.
There’s Wittgenstein’s kind, very clearly set out in the Philosophical Investigations (Part I, 1945, Part II, 1949). He says at
one point: “The deep aspect eludes us easily” (I 387, 594). “Do
not try to analyze the experience in yourself” (my italics, II xi).
So we are to turn to the public use of words, for example, explanations (I 69) and the behavior it induces, called the “language
game.”6 The external view, he says, “reveals a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (I 66). His
figure here appears to be one-dimensional, a thread of overlapping fibers (I 67), but since these also criss-cross, the real figure
6. It seems to me that the language game, which teaches meaning by
ostension, doesn’t work except for a dull-witted apprentice: Master
teaches pupil the word “slab” (flagstone) by pointing to an exemplar
and then sends him to fetch another from a pile (I 6). If he’s dull enough,
he’ll come back with a slab, but if he’s brightly observant, he’ll come
back and say: “I didn’t see another just like this one.” The master will
be thrown back on communicating The Slab, itself by itself, since no
one, I think, can see likeness except through modelling essence—but
the last clause goes beyond my present point.
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is clearly two- or three-dimensional. This is verbal complexity,
and it is characterized by overtness, extensive relationality, and
interconnectivity: “family resemblances” (ibid.); its point is to
get on with practicalities; speech is known from its use in the
world.
Another kind of complexity can be characterized as computable: It has sharply defined digital elements related by rules
of computation, that is, problem-solving procedures, algorithms. This complexity is hard-edged: digits in clear calculational relations. The point is to get the solution to the kind of
pre-formulated question called a “problem,” whose relation to
human experience is determined by the fiat of postulation.
Yet a third kind of complexity is informational, characterizable as bits of fact, raw or inferred, singular or aggregated in
categories. Information has only relative existence; in its first
nature it is like a mud flat, which becomes discrete only when
handfuls are molded into a clump of clay. Abstract information
is therefore irrelevantly pre-formed pseudo-knowledge. Thus
information, even when verifiable, consists of relational factoids that become active facts in a context of human intention.
Information becomes relevant to final decision-making when
a desire is formulated and an intention is formed. Then the
point is usually to underwrite the desired action, or to modify,
even to cancel it, if the facts are really terminally unspinnable.
My final, but surely not last, kind of complexity is psychical and social—that is, human. I won’t attempt to delineate it.
Its elements are too various in kind and degree and their relations too difficult, be it by human intention or natural obscurity.
Ungifted experts tend to deliver very gross conceptual depictions of the human world, but very great psychologists and anthropologists (the latter need to be the former more than the
converse, I think) manage to combine an extensive overview
with penetrating insight. I am thinking of the Greeks’
Herodotus and our Tocqueville. They manage to survey the
many phenomena that surface on our earth and to clue out underlying, I would say, the underlying distinctions and commonalities.
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Here, by a natural and easy transition (as Robert Brumbaugh
used to say, when he meant quite a leap7) I shall try to speak of
depth. It might seem presumptuous, did I not think that one may
speak of it without having been there: Trying is all.
To begin with, the deep divers that I have read and even
known, display respect for and acquaintance with phenomenal
complexities.8 I say “phenomenal” because the juxtaposition of
phainomena and onta, sensed “appearances” and intellected “beings” must surely underlie the distinction between complexity
and depth. Let me here say again that complexity usually is and
means to be a literal description of its realm, while depth is a
metaphor, a figural application of a this-worldly phenomenon:
dipping and diving into a material element.9
Thereby hangs a tale, a tale I will foretell in a sentence:
There is no, repeat, no way of speaking of the soul and of the
realm whose emissary it is except by analogy (prosaically) or
by metaphor (poetically). Indeed, all philosophical speech is, I
dare to claim, figurative. Let me remind you of two prime examples. Plato’s Socrates speaks of eidos, literally “look” or “aspect.” But the word is used “meta-phorically,” which means
“carried over” into the realm of thought, in which reside the beings that have “invisible looks.” (Mythically and punningly their
place is in the underwold: Aides aeides, “Hades the Invisible,”10
Phaedo 80d, Cratylus 404b.11) Or take the Stoic invention of the
7. At Yale, I slipped in and out (more out) of his lectures, the only graduate class in philosophy I ever attended at all (1951). The required undergraduate course at Brooklyn College was a big nothing
8. “Even known”: Jacob Klein, Dean of St. John’s College when I arrived (1957).
9. Thus descriptions that mean to delve are usually simplifications. Of
whom is it truer to say “you’re simplifying” than of a novelist who is
experienced in the delineating soul and the world?
10. Aeides: an allusion to the un-murky Greek Hades (Aides), the underworld where dwell luminously invisible things.
11. In other dialogues they are located up high (Symposium 211), in the
heavens (Phaedrus 247).
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“concept,” literally a “grasping together [of particulars].” These
metaphorical ways, the poetry of philosophy, are not, to my
mind, primitive evidence of some logic-overleaping access to
the Unconcealed that hides itself from the prosaic professors,
but our one possible way to reach beyond the sensory world by
taking advantage of the deadness of the metaphors that make up
our latter-day language. It is a semi-extinction that allows us to
use our words as if they had always meant what we mean them
to mean: non-sensory beings directly denoted by pure imageless
speech. Who hears “concept” as an assembling grasp, or “logic”
as a collecting art?12
Aristotle and Wittgenstein actually agree—imagine this!—
that there is articulable thinking not in need of quasi-sensory
imagining. For Aristotle it is the highest kind that functions without imagination: intellecting, noesis, the direct apprehension of
the knowable. For Wittgenstein no understanding of a proposition
is in need of imagining (On the Soul 1129a ff.; Philosophical Investigation I 396). I can believe it of Aristotle that his mind, his
nous, had such a capacity for viewless thinking, sightless insight—do any of ours?13
So, I claim, whether or not we are practicing etymologists,
whether we are literally the “truth-tellers” about our first words
(for that is the etymology of “etymology”), their defunct spirits
tug at us to return to them.
—No way to speak of underlying being non-somatically, I
said a moment ago, and no way to go into sightless depths (divers
without goggles do keep their eyes closed) without first taking
in the surface, the place of laid-out overtness, of infinite particularity, of connecting context. Here’s another Socratic corroboration: Socrates is generally and inattentively presented as
denigrating the multifarious and shifting phenomenal surface on
which we crawl about. But recall that he, an inveterate urbanite,
who says that country places don’t teach him a thing, had more
12. Logic: from Greek logos, whose root is leg-, as in “collect.”
13. It is practically undecidable whether either Socrates or Plato ever
claimed to have come within sight of the forms.
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local knowledge and more scenic sensibility than his companion,
a suburban stroller. That’s in the Phaedrus (229b ff.). And in the
Symposium (206b ff.), Socrates, we learn, has been taught to
think that the ascent into the heights of being must start with the
surely complex, and mostly surface-captivated experience of
falling in love, which is also the first glimpse into psychic depths.
And the same is true of Aristotle and Thomas and Hegel, who all
seem to know a lot about worldly and human complexity, especially the monk.14 I’m not just dropping names here but citing
concrete examples of experiential expansiveness.
With complexity given its due, what then is depth, this mode
figuratively orthogonal to complexity, a mode more askew of than
opposite to it? But I will stall one last time: What is depth and
the way down not?
1. It cannot, by its very nature, be governed by the formalisms of logic. For it is always reached through the revealing
veil of metaphor, which assures that the blunt first law of logic
be set aside, the one that proscribes “p · ~ p.” This law of noncontradiction forbids that a proposition be at once true and not
true, though for its first formulator, Aristotle, this is not a formal
axiom but an affirmation that its intentional object, the thing
meant in declaratory speech, is always a determinate being,
which either is or is not. So with acquiescence in the law of thinking and being goes this very implication, that the spatial world is
determinately, positively, what it is. Not so the depths. The way
down is very much a via negativa on the one hand: “I don’t really
mean what my speech is saying”—and therefore, on the other, a
via in-ventionis, a way of “going into,” of discovery—of things
not quite thinkable.
2. Nor is depth-diving a way of deduction, of the logical descent from maxims to conclusion, nor of induction, the logical
ascent from facts to generalizations.
3. Nor are the depths a mere alternative universe of dis14. Thomas: His “Treatise on the Passions” in the Summa Theologiae
seems to me unsurpassable; consider also Aristotle’s researches in the
animal kingdom and Hegel on history and the arts.
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course, an idly eccentric language game, since, I am convinced,
urgent intimations from that quarter, from our internality, those
pulls that precede articulated speech, are a common, an ineluctable, human experience. This is a claim scarcely capable of
verification other than by testimonial. But I simply believe that
even people who revel in their own and their world’s brute materiality are visited by such transcendent innuendos.
4. Nor is the way into depths subject to a Cartesian method,
prescribed by teachable rules for the direction of the mind.15
*****
What then, finally, is depth and the way down?
Well, to begin with, as Heraclitus says: “The way up and
down is one and the same” (D-K 60).16 I’ll adapt it to my purpose.
Perhaps I can put it thus: The way of our search and its discoveries leads deep down into the depths of our soul, mind, or consciousness, towards what is found last but is in itself first, a
grounding principle.17 Once discovered, it becomes the ruling
principle (arche) of our account-giving as we come back up onto
earth. So the delving and climbing reach the same end, an “alpha
and omega,” the insight and its expression.
That is the way, but the mode of our search is question-asking
rather than problem-solving. In this phraseology, depth is the
15. Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), Rules for the Direction of
the Mind (1628).
16. He might concede that my experience of the way up and back is different, because I’m facing in opposite directions, but still, the overseeing Logos will give the same account of both. For the Heraclitean Logos
is both immanent, as determining the ratios (logoi) of the elemental
transformations of nature, and transcendent, as the one who gathers,
collects (legei) Everything into One; it is the latter Logos who contracts
up and down into one.
17. My version of Aristotle, Physics 184a: “The way is from things
more knowable to us and clearer, to things clearer by nature and more
knowable.” There is another meaning of “ground,” not mine here. It is
the a priori, the conceptually prior basement upon which to construct
an epistemological edifice, an explanatory system such as Kant erects
(Critique of Pure Reason, B 860).
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venue of questions, complexity of problems. Statements of problems can actually do without question-marks, they are perplexities presented to be explicated, straightened out, conceptually or
practically. Or, if you like, a problem is a hard-edged, well-defined question with a correspondingly jigged answer drawn from
a predetermined pool.
For example, here’s a metaphysical problem: to discern the
number of causes operative in the world. The solution is constrained by such presumptions as these: Everything this-worldly
has a cause, including apparent chance (Aristotle, Physics Bk.
II iv ff.); therefore, if anything is uncaused or self-caused it is a
divinity (Physics, Bk. VIII; Metaphysics, Bk. XII); causes are
multiple, because the world is complexly constituted, and “responsible,” meaning that they come to us as responses forced
from the beings pinned down by an interrogation. And so forth.
The solution is definite, and the discussion continues only insofar as some people reject it.
Here’s a practical problem: On my way back from Athens, it’ll
be a problem how to circumvent the notoriously long security lines
of your Atlanta airport. When I get to the front, I’ll think of other
things. Solving practical problems takes this-worldly know-how;
solving philosophical problems takes other-worldly activity. In either case, when a problem is really solved it is also dissolved; it
becomes moot. People preoccupied by solved problems are told to
get a life. (There actually are some solved philosophical problems
that stay solved, mostly those involving a superseded physics.18)
Questions, on the other hand, seem to me not properly perplexities. They don’t go away, they are perennial, not because
they are demonstrably insoluble but because they are not properly
proposed for solving but rather for going into, deeper and deeper.
The mode of engagement with questions, as I delineate it
for myself, is what Socrates calls aporia—literally, waylessness.19 Therefore the way of searching out the deep is indeed a
18. Some of these do in fact remain interesting, sometimes as testimonials to the concrete impasses that make grand theories implode.
19. Or “unprovidedness.” The above meditation on modes of searching
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meth-odos, a “way-to-be-followed,” but only in the sense of
an oriented movement, not in the modern meaning of a method,
a progress guided by procedures.
Entertaining questions thus requires wisdom, a considering,
reflecting frame of a mind still resonating with past experience
but now focused by desirous expectation. Otherwise put: Questions are a mode of blessed ignorance, a thorough apprehension
of our own cognitive limitations which clears our minds of mere
opinions and, while it prevents us from reaching for personal
originality rather than objective origins, moves us inward.20
A question, then, is a receptive opening in us—who knows
in what capacity of ours. The reception is expectant of an answer—of a spontaneous intimation rather than a driven determination, of an incitement more than a settlement, of a mental
vision or a verbal hypothesis instead of a conclusive solution.
has as a background Aristotle’s Book III of the Metaphysics, which
marks the transition of philosophy from amateur question-asking to professional problem-solving, the second such transition in the West. The
first was from pre-Socratic initiation into Logos or Truth by a divinity
to the Socratic search by going into oneself.
The word “problem” is not actually used by Aristotle in Book III; in
fact he speaks of “difficulties” and aporiai, which I think he assimilates
to “problems” in our sense. Plato already uses problema in the geometry-derived sense. A problem asks for a construction, which yields a
product, as opposed to a theorem, which gives insight. Some ancients—
this is to my point—objected to the notion of a mathematical problem
since mathematics is about knowing, not making (Heath, Euclid’s Elements, I 125). By this distinction hangs a tale extending into modernity,
but beyond the scope of this talk: the development of mathematical objects from concrete items to abstracted symbols.
20. “Blessed ignorance” is my adaptation of Nicolas of Cusa’s title, Of
Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia, 1440)—“blessed” for
“learned” because, of course, it’s precisely not learned. Even though
lots of graduates might be correctly awarded an I.D., an Ignorantiae
Doctor, it would be in the wrong spirit. What Cusanus means by learned
ignorance is the fully realized desire to know that has become unobstructed when we have thoroughly learned our ignorance (Bk. I i). Directing features of this desire are the via negativa (the way of gaining
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Such responses are often fraught simplicities, not abrogations of
difficulties but rather problem-generating fecundities.21
The aim of asking questions is to penetrate spatio-temporal
experience so as to reach the atemporal inwardness, commonly
called the essence, whose surface is the appearance. Here I should
stop because I am being carried away toward an ontological speculation from what I would be glad to call a meditation on, or at
most a phenomenology of, inquiry.22
*****
a foothold in the transcendent by what it is not), conjecture (the way
of holding a well-motivated opinion firmly enough to go on with but
flexibly enough for alteration), and analogy (the way of levering up
thought by recognizing similarities in different venues and through
these likenesses discovering differences). I think that these ways are
mutually implicated, but I have neither studied Cusanus enough nor
sufficiently thought out my notions.
21. Prime examples are to be found in the sayings of Heraclitus and
Parmenides, the two pre-Socratics distinguished by being not “physical”
(Aristotle, Physics 186b), but meta-physical. Here is one example: Parmenides says: “For it is the same both to be aware (noein) and to be”
(D-K 3; D-K 8, line 34)—most often translated along these lines: “For
the same thing can be thought as can be.” Heidegger interprets ingeniously in line with his notion of unconcealment: Being’s essence involves being apprehended (Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), 106).
I think we should not subvert bold depth by refusing to read what is
written. Parmenides regards Being as One, for which his figure is a
sphere. So he countermands the multiplicity inherent in his spherical
metaphor by gnomically intimating that Being is self-aware, self-translucent, self-implicated—as unextended, partless, undifferentiable, being
everywhere and nowhere, just as is awareness when its object is itself.
22. I regard it as somewhat corroborative of the descriptive verity of
my depth metaphor for a tendency of inquiry that it plays no discernible
role for Heidegger either in Being and Time (1927), where phainomena
and onta are assimilated [31, 35] or in the Introduction to Metaphysics,
where Being is self-emergent and involves its own manifesting appearance as a defining delimitation [77]. The reason for this absence is, I
think , that Dasein (an abstraction from a human being) which is only
in caring about its being, is altogether temporal and this-worldly—so
perforce a-metaphorical and un-deep.
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Are there consequences to the preceding exposition? To my
mind, there are personal ones surely—such as the acquisition of
a template to gauge what you’re doing and to judge if a quarter
turn inside and down may be desirable. There are disciplinary
ones probably, such as querying cognitive scientists concerning
the feasibility of inward-turned mental depth emerging from the
ultimate complex structure, the brain. And there are institutional
ones possibly—such as a reconsideration by philosophy departments of their highest degree, now the Ph.D., Philosophiae Doctor. It is, after all, a comical title which claims that you are a
proficient preceptor, a doctor, of the love of wisdom, a teacher,
that is, of love—a situation nowadays full of moral and legal pitfalls. Departments might add a secondary but more sensible degree, the Ph.D.2, to be read as Philosophiae Dilector, a “delighter
and dilettante in the love of wisdom.” For I think that while the
mapping of complexity, which is an institutional way of “doing”
philosophy, can keep you promotion-worthily busy and often
contentedly absorbed, the dilettantish delvers into depths, amateurish because philosophy true to its name cannot be a profession, might also have their diploma, though such diving may
bring up nothing but deep delight:
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song
To such a deep delight ’t would win me . . .
Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
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A Note on Apollonius’s
Reconceptualization of Space
Philip LeCuyer
Apollonius re-envisions Euclidean space. He does this indirectly
by slowly and carefully re-envisioning one of the two most important objects in Euclidean space—the circle. Apollonius reopens the question that Euclid seemed to have settled in
Definition 15: what is a circle?
Euclid’s Elements is the only mathematical work used by
Apollonius in the Conics. The Elements constitute Apollonius’s
intellectual inheritance, a fundamental aspect of which is a concept of space that is essentially negative. Euclid’s series of five
negations is conveyed through the five postulates. The first one
states: “from every point to every point to draw a straight line.”
This means there are no holes in Euclidean space. The second
postulate states: “to produce a finite straight line continuously in
a straight line.” This means there are no edges to Euclidean space.
The third postulate, “to describe a circle with any center and any
distance,” means there is no directionality in space—all radial
directions are equivalent. The fourth, “all right angles are equal,”
means there is no handedness, no distinction between left and
right.
The famous fifth postulate is longer:
If a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles,
the two straight lines, if produced toward infinity (ep’
apeiron), meet on that side on which the two angles are
less than two right angles.
This means that Euclidean space has no curvature. No holes,
no edges, no directionality, no handedness, no curvature. It is an
essentially negative concept.
Philip LeCuyer is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The author thanks Grant Franks, also a tutor in Santa Fe, for fashioning
the figures.
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Apollonius does not—as Lobachevski, Bolyai, Riemann, and
the topologists do many centuries later—change any of these postulates. Rather, he exposes an unarticulated postulate which pervades or underlies the five stated ones, and in so doing introduces
a positive characteristic to space.
There are two sides shown in the fifth postulate: 1) the side
on which the three lines form a triangle, and 2) the other side on
which the lines produced toward infinity diverge forever. Euclid
leaves this other side of things in knowing silence. The Elements
is about the triangle, which is a figure, and about the circle, which
Euclid also defines as a figure, a schema. What then is a figure?
Euclid defines a “figure”as “that which, beneath (hypo) any
boundary or boundaries, is contained (periechomenon)”—literally, that which has a perimeter, a horizon, around it, something
characterized by “surroundedness.” The Elements stands as the
authoritative study of two and three dimensional figures and the
notion of containment. It culminates in the construction of the
five regular solids, and, as its finale, Euclid presents for our contemplation a comparison of the respective linear edges of the five
solids when contained in the same sphere. The definition of figure
governs the Elements from start to finish.
Figures are present in Apollonius’s Conics, but they are not
what is being studied. What is being studied is a set of curves,
first encountered as conic sections, to which Euclidean figures
are attached like monitoring devices on an athlete or a patient.
And what are these curves as a class? As a class, they are not figures because they do not all enclose finite areas. The exact same
reasoning, the same proofs, apply to those that do enclose areas
(ellipses and circumferences of circles) and those that don’t (hyperbolae and the special case of the parabola). If they are not figures, what are they?
One can see a sharp difference between Euclid and Apollonius in the way that each generates what is conical. Euclid does
this by revolving a right triangle around one of its two shorter
legs while that leg, held stationary, becomes the axis of a right
cone. Euclid’s cone is a three-dimensional figure made by revolving a two-dimensional figure. Each type of right cone pro-
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duces a different kind of conic section: one that has a right angle
at its vertex, made by revolving an isosceles right triangle, will
yield a parabola when cut by a plane perpendicular to its surface;
an acute cone will yield an ellipse, and an obtuse cone will yield
an hyperbola. This is true, but it is not true enough. Apollonius
will demonstrate that every size of every shape of each type of
conic is present in every conic surface—both right cones such as
Euclid generated finite versions of, and oblique conic surfaces
such as Euclid never dreamt of.
Apollonius’s foundational definition states:
If from a point a straight line is joined to the circumference of a circle which is not in the same plane with the
point, and the line is produced in both directions, and if,
with the point remaining fixed, the straight line being rotated about the circumference of the circle returns to the
same place from which it began, then the generated surface composed of the two surfaces lying vertically opposite one another, each of which increases to infinity (eis
apeiron) as the generating line is produced to infinity (eis
apeiron), I call a conic surface, and the fixed point I call
the vertex.
A conic surface is not a figure in the Euclidean sense. It is a
boundary, but not a boundary that contains by closing back on itself. Apollonius studies the conics, the parabola, ellipses, hyperbolae, and the circumferences of circles not as boundaries
containing areas, but as lines which reveal something deeper and
more important than space as inert content. (Note that when
Apollonius includes circles in a list together with conic sections,
he always calls them “circumferences of circles.”)
Before I turn to consider the step-by-step transformation of the
key Euclidean proposition through which Apollonius re-understands what a circle is, and so what space is, I will take up briefly
the remarkable last proposition of Bk. I of the Conics. The implications of this theorem are momentous. The pair of opposite hyperbolic sections produced by cutting the upper and lower conic
surfaces with a plane (the upper and lower curves in Figure 1) produce a second set of opposed curves, also hyperbolic and conjugate
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to the first set (the dotted curves). No point on this second set of
curves is on the conic surface. They are merely in co-planar space
with the first set of curves.
How did Apollonius do this? He prepared this moment by
defining (in Definition 11) a “second” diameter, which simply
names what Apollonius had just demonstrated for the ellipse in
Proposition 15. This “second” diameter in the ellipse is conjugate
and is also the mean proportional between the first diameter and
the first diameter’s upright side. It is therefore finite. Do opposite
hyperbolic sections have a “second” diameter? They do have a
conjugate diameter which as such bisects all the external lines
between them parallel to their first diameter (Proposition 16). But
is it finite? This conjugate diameter of the original vertical hyperbolic sections does not touch them anywhere. These sections
extend up and down to vertical infinities whereas the conjugate
diamter extends sideways—neither in nor on, but outside the
conic surface. Apollonius, citing Definition 11, states in Proposition 38 that the finite “second” diameter that was demonstrated
to exist in the ellipse, a finite curve, is also present in hyperbolic
sections. Based on this undemonstrated analogy with the ellipse,
the assumed “second” diameter of the original hyperbolic sec-
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tions is pressed into service as the first diameter of these conjugate curves, which therefore exist, but which were not produced
by cutting a conic surface. Not only that: these conjugate opposite
curves could themselves produce, in reciprocation, the original
hyperbolae without reference to any conic surface.
If this constitutive analogy between hyperbolae, ellipses,
and circumferences of circles holds, it means that conic curves
have no more or less to do with conic surfaces or cones than the
number four has to do with how many legs are on a cow. How
we discovered these curves, how we first produced them, does
not amount to a sufficient account of what they are. Neither
conic surfaces nor cones are ever again considered by Apollonius after this moment of liberation in the last proposition,
Proposition 60, of Bk. I.
The crucial proposition in Euclid, which Apollonius transforms by relentless generalization, occurs at the conclusion of
Bk. II of the Elements (and again in Bk. VI, 13). There Euclid
demonstrates that the square on any ordinate in a circle—i.e., on
any line from a point on the circumference of a circle perpendicular to a diameter, is equal in area to the rectangle on the resulting two segments of that diameter (Figure 2a). His first move, so
to speak, is to substitute this property of a circle for Euclid’s definition. We see this accomplished immediately in the first propositions in Bk. I of the Conics.
In his fourth proposition in Bk. I, Apollonius demonstrates that
the section produced by a cutting plane parallel to the circle used
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to generate the conic surface is itself a circle. Here he does use as
the basis of his proof Euclid’s definition of a circle as a closed figure (schema) in which all the straight lines falling on the circumference from a point within the circumference are equal to each
other. But in the very next proposition, Proposition 5, Apollonius
does not use that definition, but rather the Euclidean property that
the square on the ordinate is equal in area to the rectangle on the
diameter segments, in order to prove that what is called a sub-contrary cut in an oblique conic surface is also a circle. Having substituted this property for Euclid’s definition, the rest of the act of
re-understanding is accomplished by generalization.
The next step is to re-label the lines which embody the property (Figure 2b). Line “a” is still the ordinate. Line “b” is now
the perpendicular (least) distance from the point on the circumference to the one tangent of the ordinate’s diameter, and line “c”
the least distance to the other tangent. This re-labeling brings all
the components of the crucial property together at any and every
point on the curve (except the points of tangency themselves).
In Figure 2c, the restriction on which tangents are allowed is
broadened to include any tangents to the circumference. If both
of the tangents do not touch the same diameter, they will intersect. The line connecting the two points of tangency is no longer
a diameter but now a chord. The distance “a” is revised as shown.
Lines “b” and “c’”are still the least distances from some point on
the circumference to the new generalized tangents. How does it
stand with the square on the revised ordinate “a” vis-a-vis the
rectangle “bc”? This is a difficult problem, and as we gather from
the letter to Eudemus, Euclid was not able to solve it. Here we
have our first glimpse of the full-bodied three-line locus problem.
I will try to indicate why it is important.
Now comes the fundamental proposition—Bk. II, 29 (See
Figure 3). The curve has been generalized into “a section of a
cone or circumference of a circle.” The proposition demonstrates
that AD is a diameter, but Apollonius can only establish this by
a reductio ad absurdum proof. This means that it is not a direct
deduction from particular prior theorems, but an inference from
the system as a whole. It is not true because some other thing is
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true. It is true because otherwise all the other truths would collapse. In this sense, this proposition reveals a principle. It is this
principle, I think, this “additional thing,” that Apollonius was referring to in his letter to Eudemus when he wrote:
The third book contains many incredible theorems of use
for the construction of solid loci and for limits of possibility of which the greatest part and the most beautiful
are new.
And when we had grasped these, we knew that the
three-line and four-line locus problem had not been constructed by Euclid, but only a chance part of it and that
not very happily. For it was not possible for this construction to be completed without the additional things found
by us.
Apollonius’s construction of the locus problem itself in
Proposition 54 of Bk. III looks like figure 4. He cites Proposition
29 of Bk. II as the basis and backbone of his proof. The upshot
of it is that the square on HX (the distance from any point on the
curve to the chord connecting the tangents) is in a constant ratio
(not necessarily equality) to the rectangle BY, ZC. These in turn
are the distances (not necessarily the least) of the same point H
(which can be any point on the curve) to those two tangents. The
angles do not have to be right angles, and they can differ from
each other. Still, whatever the ratio is, it is constant.
These curved lines investigated by Apollonius reveal a property of space that lies deeper than the bundle of Euclidean characterizations. It is the property of constancy. Any two points,
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every two points, though differently located, can have in common
a ratio not of distances simply, but of areas specified by those
distances to three co-planar lines. The areas are no longer statically contained, no longer aristocratically contained “beneath”
the imposed boundary of a figure. They change incessantly. Only
the ratio between them, which is itself not an area, is constant. It
is as if all the points on a conic curve are the same point, exhibiting the same essential relationships to three given co-planar lines,
and differing only in location. The coherence of a conic line
comes about not by an artifice of drawing, nor from without by
the act of cutting a cone, but is intrinsic to the curve itself. A conic
curve is not a figure. It is a law.
For Apollonius, space is no longer the passive recipient of
figure or form that Plato described in Timaeus 51, (“a dream from
which we cannot awaken”), and as Euclid also thought. It is no
longer merely a medium which tolerates logic. The Apollonian
property of constancy in space matches with, and is manifested
by, conic curves, just as the presence of oxygen in the air is manifested by fire, by oxygenation. Space is not outside of time, not
merely eternal; it is constant in and through time. Apollonius has
in this way re-conceived space as a medium which is hospitable
to and enabling of certain lines, conic curves, that share this property. Through Proposition 54 of Bk. III we see that these curves
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in mathematical space can crystallize into a physical path, and
we understand why.
After Apollonius, between every two points there is not only
the austere straight line of Euclid’s first postulate, but an abundance—an actual infinitude—of self-defined intelligible curves.
It will take a bit more generalization to re-join the two sides of
Euclid’s fifth postulate. The three co-planar lines of the locus
problem, the two intersecting tangents and the chord connecting
their points of tangency on the curve, are Euclid’s two non-parallel lines and the line transecting them that we encountered on
the finite side of the fifth postulate. They will be re-drawn as nontangents and a non-chord, as any three co-planar lines, thereby
allowing the part of the curve within the triangle and the part beyond it—the converging finite and the diverging infinite— to be
re-joined as one thing. The constancy of the ratio of areas still
holds over the whole curve. Descartes would undertake that task,
but the heavy lifting in this new conception of space had already
been accomplished by Apollonius.
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“Aristotelian Forgiveness”:
The Non-Culpability Requirement
of Forgiveness
Corinne Painter
Introduction
Forgiveness is a topic of much historical, contemporary, crossdisciplinary scholarly and popular work. However, the literature
on Aristotle’s account of forgiveness (sungnomē)1 is not as significant as the treatment of other ethical, political, or psychological phenomena in his work, probably because his own treatment
of forgiveness is not given as much attention as other matters in
his thought.2 Although the existing scholarship dealing with Aristotle’s thought on forgiveness is extensive,3 this essay does not
1. For simplicity’s sake, I will use the English translation of this term
throughout the essay.
2. Gregory Sadler also acknowledges this in his article “Forgiveness,
Anger, and Virtue in an Aristotelian Perspective,” American Catholic
Philosophical Association, Proceedings of the ACPA 82 (2008): 229247, on 229-230.
3. For example, a recent general volume that includes a discussion of
forgiveness in Aristotle and other ancient authors is Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, ed. Charles L. Griswold and
David Konstan (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and another
still fairly recent monograph that examines forgiveness beginning with
ancients is Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration
(NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Both of these books are interested in situating their interpretations of Aristotle’s thought about
Corinne Painter is Professor of Philsophy at Washtenaw Community
College in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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intend to present an examination, critical or otherwise, of the literature. Much of the work that investigates Aristotle’s thought on
forgiveness tries to locate it in an historical account of forgiveness
or focuses narrowly on the question of whether forgiveness is itself
a virtue or whether it is merely associated with virtue in Aristotle’s
thought. Neither of these interesting questions is my concern in
this essay. Instead, without settling the question of whether forgiveness is a virtue or is merely associated with virtue,4 I will examine Aristotle’s claims5 about forgiveness that appear in Books
III, V, and VII of Nicomachean Ethics,6 within the framework of
his discussion of unwilling, willing, and chosen, deliberate actions.
forgiveness within a broader context of other historical and contemporary accounts of forgiveness. Additionally, Gregory Adler’s essay (see
fn. 2) is an instructive essay that focuses on the relationship between
forgiveness, anger and virtue, as is Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald, ”What
Should Forgiveness Mean?” The Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (2002):
483-498. Like Adler, Boleyn-Fitzgerald also examines the relationship
between forgiveness and anger—especially helpful since I will not consider the topic of anger here. Obviously this short list of references is
not meant to be exhaustive. Another subset of the literature focuses on
the role that forgiveness plays in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, typically in
the context of Aristotle’s views on the emotions, where the latter appears
to be of primary concern. In this connection, see Essays on Aristotle’s
Rhetoric, ed. Amelie Oskenburg Rorty (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996) and Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oskenburg
Rorty (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980).
4. Beyond being interesting in itself, this question is also difficult to answer, since Aristotle’s analysis of forgiveness seems to allow both interpretations. I will attempt to show that we can discover much of value
in Aristotle’s account of forgiveness without answering this question.
5. I point this out in order to emphasize that I will be focusing on Aristotle’s text rather than on interpretations of his text by other scholars,
since my aim is to offer a coherent account of Aristotle’s remarks on
forgiveness rather than a comparison of how other interpreters of Aristotle have understood him.
6. Abbreviated hereafter as NE. I use the translation by Joe Sachs, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Translation, Glossary, and Introductory
Essay, (MA: Focus Publishing, 2002).
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First, I try to explain which actions Aristotle claims are forgivable, when forgiveness ought to be granted, and why. Second,
based on this explanation, I compare Aristotle’s unassumingly
rich account of forgiveness to the leading contemporary secular
view of forgiveness that is advanced by Jeffrie Murphy, whose
account I take to be representative of what may arguably be characterized as the “standard” contemporary secular account of forgiveness.7 By focusing on Aristotle’s claim that forgiveness is only
appropriate for those wrongdoers who are not morally responsible
for their actions, I show that unlike the leading account of forgiveness—and perhaps even against our intuitions—forgiveness is intimately connected both to excusing and to justifying wrongdoings,
and that resentment need not precede forgiveness. Third and finally,
I conclude with the claim that Aristotle’s account of forgiveness
is more coherent than the leading account, and I wonder whether
it is not also more compelling, given the importance Aristotle
places on compassion for wrongdoers as opposed to holding them
accountable and then foreswearing the resentment held against
them, which take center stage in the contemporary account of forgiveness.
§1. The Forgiveness of Unwilling and Willing Action
There is more than a little disagreement in the literature regarding
Aristotle’s ethics—which depends upon his conception of virtue,
its general nature, its various instantiations, and how one becomes virtuous— and about his complicated account of the emotions—which he ruminates about in many of his works. Still,
while Aristotle does not define forgiveness in the most straight7. I do not mean to suggest that there is only one contemporary account
of forgiveness, or that there is no disagreement amongst contemporary
thinkers who reflect on forgiveness. As a perusal of the contemporary
literature on forgiveness shows, however, there are fundamental elements of the contemporary secular accounts of forgiveness that are held
in common, even if some of the details are debated. In the second part
of the paper, I focus on what I take to be the key element of the leading
contemporary account of forgiveness, critically comparing it to Aristotle’s account.
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forward manner, a reasonable account may be constructed on the
basis of attending to relevant descriptive remarks about forgiveness that he offers in NE.8 For example, in Bk. III, Ch. 1 and Bk.
V, Ch. 8, where Aristotle distinguishes unwilling, willing, and chosen, deliberate actions, we find explicit remarks about forgiveness
suggesting that chosen, deliberate wrongful actions are not properly forgivable, whereas “for unwilling actions [that is, actions
whose source is external force or certain forms of ignorance
(1110a1-2)] there is forgiveness” (1109b33), and that “there is also
forgiveness” (1110a24) for some acts that could be construed (in
a qualified sense) as “willing” since their “source . . . is in oneself”
(1110a16), i.e., in the wrongdoer.
§1a. Forgiveness and Unwilling Action
Regarding unwilling actions, Aristotle says that in addition to externally forced actions,9 the ignorant actions that are candidates
for forgivability are actions about which the wrongdoer knows
that the action ought not to have been done. Aristotle identifies
these actions as actions done “on account of ignorance of the particulars . . . with which the action is concerned” (1110b351111a3), which cause the wrongdoer to suffer and about which
the wrongdoer expresses regret or repentance (1110b19;
1110b24, 1111a20-21).10 In Book V, however, Aristotle clarifies
8. To be sure, Aristotle also discusses forgiveness in other works, especially in his Rhetoric; however—although there is no room here to defend this claim in the confines of this paper—his remarks about
forgiveness in the Rhetoric and elsewhere, if attended to carefully, can
be seen as consistent with those made in NE, even though they arise
while he is attending to different guiding themes or questions.
9. Not incidentally, Aristotle notes the difficulty of determining when
actions have their cause in an external force (see Bk. III: Ch. 1).
10. Aristotle uses “suffering” (or pain) as a synonym for “remorse,”
which is an effect that the wrongful act has on the wrongdoer’s feelings,
whereas he uses “regret” as a synonym for “repentance,” which is not
an effect on the wrongdoer’s feelings but involves in the wrongdoer’s
thinking. Importantly, neither of these effects require the passage of
time; for Aristotle seems to view these “effects” as sometimes experi-
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that not all unwilling actions are forgivable (1136a5), distinguishing differing forms of ignorance as follows: “for those
things that people do in error not only while being ignorant
but as a result of ignorance are forgivable, but those that are
done not as a result of ignorance but while one is ignorant
and as a result of a passion that is unnatural and inhuman are
not forgivable” (1136a6-9, emphasis mine). Aristotle also
states that
what is done on account of ignorance is in every instance not a willing act, but it is unwilling by its
painfulness and by one’s regretting it, while someone
who does a thing on account of ignorance without
being in any way distressed by the action has not
acted willingly, since he did not even know what he
was doing, [but] he has not acted unwillingly either,
since he is not pained by it (1110b18-23).
Since there are actions that do not fit neatly into the willing
or unwilling classifications, Aristotle creates the category of
“non-willing action” (1110b24) to mark off those “unwilling”
wrongful actions about which the wrongdoer is unware of the
wrongness and thus is neither pained by nor regretful of. It might
seem difficult to discern whether the newly categorized actions
are forgivable in Aristotle’s view; however, directly after constructing this new category of action, and despite the fact that he
uses “on account of ignorance” in his remarks both about “unwilling actions” and about “non-willing actions,” he states that
“acting on account of ignorance seems different than acting while
being ignorant” (1110b26, emphasis mine), where the latter
enced while the wrongful act is being performed; and in any case, these
dispositions demonstrate the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the
time at which forgiveness is to be granted. I do not defend this claim
here, as I am fairly certain that this is commonly agreed to by scholars
of Greek who work on Aristotle. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out
for those who are not familiar with Aristotle’s use of these terms and,
more importantly, because I will come back to this point in part two of
the paper.
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seems to mean that the person is ignorant in a robust sense. This
distinction appears to be determined on the basis of whether the
ignorance is associated with incomplete knowing or complete ignorance. Regarding incomplete knowing, this could be associated
with failing to know the particulars that frame the conditions for
the action when such knowledge is not expected, or with the
wrongdoer being innocently unaware of the wrongful nature of
the act, which occurs when there is no reasonable expectation for
the person to have known better. While the former acts are those
actions about which wrongdoers feel regret and pain and the latter
are acts about which wrongdoers do not feel pain or regret, both
kinds of actions seem to be unwilling actions of the sort for which
the ignorant wrongdoer is not to be blamed but should be forgiven, on Aristotle’s view (Bk. III, Ch. 1).
In contrast, the ignorance that is associated with complete ignorance appears, for Aristotle, to arise out of unnatural, inhuman passions, which, in turn, tends to result in not knowing about the
wrongness of the action in question even though one ought to know.
While these, too, are actions about which the wrongdoer does not
feel pain or regret, in this case, these actions appear to be non-willing
actions for which the wrongdoer is at least possibly blameworthy,
depending on other conditions or circumstances that characterize the
action or the disposition of the wrongdoer. As an example of this
kind of action, in Book V, Aristotle writes that “people apply punishment for ignorance itself if the one who is ignorant seems to be
responsible for it, as when . . . people are drunk, for the source is in
oneself, since one has the power not to get drunk, which is the cause
of the ignorance (1113b30-34). Although there are good reasons that
are known to us now that should move us to advance a more complex account of drunkenness that addresses its possible link to alcoholism, which is as an addiction over which those who suffer from
it have little to no control, this is a problem that goes beyond what
can be considered in this paper. In any event, it is reasonable to interpret this passage as suggesting that Aristotle appears to characterize (at least a certain kind of) drunkenness as the result of a
controllable passion that is unnatural and unsuitable for humans,
given that it causes us to act ignorantly in a blameworthy sense.
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However we interpret the distinction Aristotle makes between
the different kinds of actions based on ignorance—i.e., acts that are
performed on account of ignorance and acts that are performed while
one is ignorant—Aristotle’s remarks about unwilling and non-willing action reveal a long-debated tension in his thought that arises in
many contexts and is rooted in his teleological account of nature in
general and of human nature particularly. For the present consideration, the important question involves whether Aristotle claims that
wrongdoers should be held responsible for non-willing wrongful actions that are caused by what he calls “unnatural” and “inhuman”
passions, since the answer to this question determines whether such
an act is forgivable and, thus, whether the wrongdoer should be forgiven. This challenging question will be addressed shortly.
§1b. Forgiveness and Willing Action
Like unwilling actions, only some willing actions are forgivable,
namely, “when one does what one ought not to do on account of
motives” such as insufferable conditions that “strain human nature too far, that no one could endure them” (1110a25-26), or,
“when one endures something shameful or painful in return for
things that are great and beautiful” (1110a21-22). Here, one
might be motivated to argue that this last kind of action would
be better characterized as a chosen, deliberate action, given its
apparent utilitarian nature. But the appropriateness of this characterization depends upon whether all the conditions for an action’s having been intentionally chosen and deliberated upon are
met, which (amongst other things) include (in the case of vicious
action) whether the action is chosen from out of an unshakable
and firmly vicious character, and whether it is performed merely
for the sake of immoderate or otherwise excessive self-interest
or gain (see 1105a-27-35).11 Since the action that Aristotle describes here does not meet these conditions—for it is neither
11. I assume at least basic familiarity with Aristotle’s virtue ethics and
with his attendant account of virtuous and vicious action, and so I do
not offer a consideration of his Ethics here, especially as this would
take us too far afield from the focal concern of this paper.
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viciously performed nor done for self-interest of the sort described but for things that are “great and beautiful”—it is properly characterized as a willing, though unchosen, action. The
(complicated) distinction between these two classifications of
action and whether they are forgivable is discussed in what follows.
Notwithstanding this distinction, like unwilling actions for
which wrongdoers feel pain and regret, wrongdoers who perform these sorts of willing acts also feel pain and regret; however, unlike unwilling actors who are either externally forced
to perform wrongful actions or are ignorant of some necessary
information about the circumstances that would lead to a right
action, here, the actor is not forced by external causes to act,
since the source is in the actor and “anything for which the
source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not”
(1110a17). Moreover, the (in a sense) “willing” wrongdoer
knows the wrongful nature of the action, including the “particular circumstances in which the action takes place” (1111a23),
but she cannot be expected to act differently, given the conditions that accompany the wrongful action, including its possible
consequences.
Given Aristotle’s complex consideration of the distinction
between willing and unwilling acts, which motivated him to
add non-willing acts as a new category of action, it seems clear
that what distinguishes forgivable unwilling actions from forgivable willing actions is (a) the source of the action—is the
cause external force or is it in oneself, at least in a qualified
sense?—as well as (b) whether there is ignorance involved and
if so, (c) what sort (1111a22-24). Additionally, in those cases
in which there is sufficient knowledge and ability to act in a
wrongful manner that either prevents a greater evil than the
wrongful action itself (1110a5) or “for the sake of something
beautiful” (1110a6)i.e., in order to bring about genuinely noble
ends – such actions are, indeed, forgivable, which is supported
by the distressed state in which this kind of wrongdoer finds
herself, which is characterized by suffering and regret.
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§1c. Forgiveness and Chosen, Deliberate Action and the
Double-Tiered Nature of Non-Willing Action
Careful reflection on his remarks in Book III and Book V suggests that Aristotle’s account of forgiveness does not allow
wrongdoers who perform chosen, deliberate actions, which are
those that are properly associated with virtue, or, in this case,
vice, and, thus, those that are in the fullest sense blameworthy,
to be forgiven. For it is clear that he speaks only of unwilling
(not non-willing) and some willing actions as those that are appropriately forgivable; indeed, chosen, deliberated upon wrongful actions are conspicuously absent from Aristotle’s account.
Hence, wrongful actions appear to be unforgivable if they are
committed (i) deliberately and intentionally (certainly not accidentally or in ignorance), (ii) with full knowledge of the
wrongful nature of the action, (iii) where there is a realistic possibility of choosing not to act wrongfully, (iv) on the basis of a
considered choice to gain pleasure or avoid pain (of the trivial,
self-interested sort), and (v) on the basis of the stable (virtually
immutable) disposition of the wrongdoer, which are the conditions that describe genuinely vicious action, insofar as it is performed viciously and not just in accordance with vice (see
1105a-27-35).12
It is important to acknowledge that for Aristotle, truly vicious action is not performed on the basis of losing a struggle
against a natural tendency to act in accord with a particular passion, such as being too quick to anger, for example, since the
vicious person no longer struggles to keep her unsuitable13 pas12. Again, I assume basic familiarity with Aristotle’s virtue ethics; but
for further elucidation of the conditions for virtue and vice and for the
genuinely virtuous and vicious action that is associated with these dispositions, see also: 1103b23-25; 1105b1-4; 1111b5-7; 1112a16; 1113b4-6;
and 1114b21-15.
13. In what follows, I use “unnatural” and “inhuman”—Aristotle’s
terms—and “unsuitable” and “unbefitting”—my terms—interchangeably, since I think Aristotle employs these terms as a way to describe
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sions in check but gladly takes pleasure in choosing to act in
accord with these “inhuman” passions while knowing that
doing so is inappropriate; for, this is a sign that a firm and unshakable character is at work, which is a condition of genuinely
vicious, and thus, fully blameworthy action (1103b23-25;
1105b1-4).14 However, in acknowledging this, we are moved to
re-consider the difficult question about non-willing action that
was posed earlier regarding whether Aristotle claims that
wrongdoers should be held responsible for non-willing wrongful actions that are caused by “unnatural” and “inhuman” passions, especially since the answer to this question provides the
key to determining whether these actions are forgivable. For,
simply put, if a wrongdoer is responsible for her wrongful act,
then her act is not forgivable, on Aristotle’s view, and, hence,
she ought not to be forgiven.
It was already acknowledged (in section 1a) that wrongful
actions that arise out of complete ignorance that is based in a person’s so-called “unnatural” passions and are therefore not accompanied by remorse or regret are neither willing nor unwilling
actions; however, these actions also do not appear to be chosen,
deliberated upon actions, given that they are performed in complete ignorance, i.e., while one “is ignorant.” Indeed, this is why
Aristotle created the new category of “non-willing” action. But
along with this, we noted the tension this newly created category
of action creates. For it seems that wrongdoers who perform nonwilling actions should not be held responsible for their actions
since they have no appreciation for the wrongness of their actions, given their basis in an apparent natural tendency to act in
passions that steer us away from achieving a virtuous character, which
is the means by which we can achieve our proper human telos, according to Aristotle. Again, it is not my aim to elucidate or examine Aristotle’s moral theory (or, for that matter, his teleology) in this paper.
However, in what follows, I discuss what I take to be Aristotle’s understanding of the meaning of “unnatural” and “inhuman” in the context
in which he uses these terms in this passage.
14. See fn. 12 for further textual evidence of this.
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accord with “unbefitting” passions over which such wrongdoers
do not seem to have control, at least not initially (and maybe
never). All human beings have passions and tendencies with
which they simply find themselves without having willed or chosen them. In fact, the attempt to develop a morally virtuous character involves our struggle to rid ourselves of the tendency to act
in accord with these “unsuitable” passions, which move us to act
in excess or deficiency of the mean that constitutes virtuous action, whatever this may be.15
This further clarification allows us to formulate the tension
at issue here more precisely: on the one hand, we neither will nor
choose to possess the natural passions and tendencies with which
we find ourselves but which present obstacles to the development
of a virtuous character. But, on the other hand, Aristotle’s further
consideration of non-willing actions that arise out of our natural
tendency to act in accord with these passions identifies these passions as “unnatural” and “inhuman” (1136a6-9), which appears
to motivate him to characterize these as actions for which the
wrongdoer may, ultimately, be responsible and for which, therefore, forgiveness ought not to be granted. I think this apparent
tension can be resolved, first, by noting that Aristotle characterizes these passions as “inhuman” and “unnatural” because they
present obstacles that must be overcome in the process of developing a virtuous character, and second, by acknowledging (a) that
this characterization is not only not inconsistent with the recognition that it is perfectly natural to possess tendencies to act in
accord with our passions, but (b) that it is necessary for us to possess such passions and tendencies in order for genuine virtue to
be possible. For the process of becoming virtuous requires us to
possess passions that we must attempt to reign in from the extremes of deficiency and excess to which they naturally tend until
15. What constitutes virtuous action and how one develops a virtuous
character is not discussed here; rather, the conditions for vicious action
are outlined only briefly in order to make sense of why Aristotle claims
that chosen, deliberate, wrongful action is not forgivable, unlike unwilling and most willing actions, which are forgivable.
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we are no longer struggling against this challenge, as was previously acknowledged.
Recognizing this prompts us to assign a “double-tiered” character to these sorts of actions. At first—and probably for much if
not all of our lives – these kinds of actions are non-willing actions
that arise out of entirely unwilled, unchosen “natural tendencies”
to follow passions with which we simply find ourselves, and
about which Aristotle remarks that “there is more forgiveness for
following natural tendencies . . . [particularly] for those that are
of a sort that is common to all people” (1149b4-5). Furthermore,
while Aristotle distinguishes between some natural tendencies that
appear to be common, such as “spiritedness and aggressiveness”
(1149b7) and those that appear to be less common, such as “desires that are for excess or desires that are for unnecessary things”
(1149b8), this is a difficult and nuanced distinction to understand,
not to mention one that does not allow us to easily identify the
specific actions that belong in each category. Nevertheless, he
clearly states that (at least) the former are forgivable, further elaborating on this in Book VII, Chapters 7—10, within which Aristotle initially distinguishes different forms of “unrestraint,”
claiming that persons who act in an unrestrained manner that is
associated with excessive desires are “more shameful” than persons whose unrestraint is associated with natural spiritedness
(1149b25-26). However, he subsequently identifies the former —
i.e., the more shameful—as “dissipated persons” who, “without
regret,” “choose” their actions typically for the sake of “gaining
pleasure for themselves,” not only characterizing them as “incurable” (1150a20-23), but distinguishing them from unrestrained
persons, who are “capable of regret . . . and curable” (1150b3234). He furthermore claims that acting in an unrestrained manner,
while certainly not admirable, is not vicious (1151a7):
the unrestrained person is not even like someone who
has knowledge and is actively paying attention to it,
but is like someone who is asleep or drunk. And
though he acts willingly (since he acts while knowing
in some manner what he is doing and for what end),
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he is not vicious, since his “choice”16 is that of a decent person (1152a15-18).
With this claim, Aristotle intimates that such persons are not (robustly) responsible for their actions and that they should therefore
be forgiven.
Importantly, even if we acknowledge that distinguishing dissipated from unrestrained actions is difficult and cannot be done
outside the concrete context within which actions are performed,
it seems clear that in order to determine when forgiveness ought
to be granted, we must be able to discern when a wrongdoer passively follows17 her natural tendencies or desires, for example, to
act aggressively (or to pursue unnecessary ends), or whether the
wrongdoer deliberately chooses to allow her natural tendencies
to act in accord with her immoderate, unsuitable passions to govern her actions, which can be accomplished by observing the
wrongdoer.18 For Aristotle argues that only if the latter occurs,
should persons be held responsible for the actions that arise out
of them, given that this demonstrates a deliberate, committed re16. Here Aristotle uses “choice” in a looser sense than when he uses it
while discussing actions that are richly and robustly deliberated upon,
the latter of which is a condition both for truly virtuous and for truly
vicious acts; but here, as the passage makes clear, he is attaching
“choice” to willing actions that do not rise to this level.
17. Joe Sachs offers an extremely helpful discussion of the passive nature of unrestraint, advancing that “Aristotle repeatedly refuses to call
unrestraint anything but a passive experience.” See footnote 201, Ch.
7, Bk. VII, p. 122; see also footnote 183, Ch. 3, Bk. VII, p. 122, which
provide evidence for how challenging it is to interpret Aristotle properly
with respect to how he conceives of unrestraint and the actions that flow
from it. For example, as Sachs points out, while Aristotle sometimes
speaks of unrestrained action as a “hexis,” namely when making indirect summary statements that include mention of unrestraint along with
other phenomena (e.g., 1151a27; 1151b29; 1152a35), whenever he
speaks about unrestraint on its own, he calls it a “pathos” (e.g., 1145b5,
29; 1147b 8, 16; 1148b6).
18. Probably for most of us, our actions will be motivated by a mix of
these “extremes” throughout out adult lives.
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fusal to attempt to overcome natural tendencies to act in accord
with unbefitting passions; indeed, despite knowing the wrongness
of our actions, in this case we allow our unsuitable passions to
rule us to such an extent that they become part of our very character, which we are unwilling to change. If this happens, we take
pleasure in intentionally and knowingly performing wrongful actions and we certainly don’t feel pain or regret over them. Consequently, these actions are unforgivable, and, thus, forgiveness
ought not to be extended to persons who perform them.
Having said this, it is imperative to underscore that for Aristotle, it is extremely difficult to develop the kind of character just
described, from out of which truly unforgivable actions arise,
which means that most wrongful actions are ultimately forgivable
in Aristotle’s view. For careful reflection on the reasons, conditions and circumstances that frame wrongdoings typically render
them excusable or justifiable rather than inexcusable or unjustifiable actions for which wrongdoers are morally responsible, and
when this is the case, forgiveness ought to be extended, according
to Aristotle. As we will now see, this is in contrast to the leading
contemporary account of forgiveness.
§2. A Closer Look at Forgiveness: Culpability,
Resentment, Excusing, and Justification
Aristotle’s account may strike one as strange, particularly if one
is familiar with the contemporary literature on forgiveness, since
in these accounts,19 in contrast with Aristotle, for whom it is the
non-culpability of the wrongdoer that makes the wrongdoer’s act
forgivable and the wrongdoer deserving of forgiveness, it is typically claimed that the question of forgiveness does not arise unless the wrongdoer is morally culpable for her wrongdoing. For
example, Jeffrie Murphy, a contemporary philosopher and legal
scholar whose work on forgiveness is amongst the most well19. As I mentioned in the Introduction, I take the work of Jeffrie Murphy on forgiveness as representative of the “standard” contemporary,
secular account.
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known, well-regarded, and frequently cited,20 appealing to the
account of forgiveness offered centuries ago by Bishop Butler,21
defines forgiveness as “the foreswearing of resentment, the resolute overcoming of the anger and hatred that are naturally directed toward a person who has done an unjustified and
non-excused moral injury” (504). Although Murphy (and others)22 may not agree with every aspect of Butler’s account of forgiveness, which I will not recount here, this definition highlights
that in addition to being preceded by the negative attitudes and
emotions of resentment, anger and, even, hatred, forgiveness requires the moral culpability of the wrongdoer. As Murphy states,
“we may forgive only what it is initially proper to resent; and, if
a person . . . is not responsible for what he did, there is nothing
20. For example, see Jeffrie Murphy, Getting Even: Forgiveness and its
Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and “Forgiveness and
Resentment,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 7, Social and Political
Philosophy, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard
K. Wettstein (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 503516. Further references to Murphy refer to his 1982 article. But it is
worth noting that his more recent text takes an even stronger “anti-Aristotelian” position, in advancing the general thesis that forgiveness ought
to be more sparingly extended than it is and that resentment (and associated negative attitudes) ought to be more greatly valued and explicitly
cultivated as morally legitimate responses to wrongdoers.
21. Joseph Butler, “Sermon VII: Upon Resentment” and “Sermon IX:
Upon Forgiveness of Injuries,” in Fifteen Sermons (London, 1726). Not
incidentally, most contemporary scholars working on forgiveness appeal to Bishop Butler’s account of forgiveness in their analyses, and indeed, further references to Bishop Butler’s account refer to Murphy’s
analysis of it and are cited accordingly.
22. Two additional informative contemporary essays on forgiveness
include: Norvin Richards, “Forgiveness,” Ethics, 99.1 (1988): 7797 and Joanna North, “Wrongdoing and Forgiveness,” Philosophy,
62.242 (1987): 499-508, who, in agreement with Murphy, advances
that “one cannot forgive when no wrong has been done, for there is
no breach to be healed and no repentance is necessary or possible”
(502).
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to resent. . . . Resentment—and thus forgiveness—is directed toward responsible wrongdoing” (508).23
Indeed, Murphy goes to great lengths to distinguish forgiveness from several other concepts with which he claims it is often
confused (506), including the concepts of excuse and justification
(ibid.). According to Murphy, the essential role that resentment
plays in forgiveness gives rise, necessarily, to the distinction between these notions and forgiveness (ibid.), since these other dispositions are not defined by a foreswearing of resentment. In
elaborating on the distinction between forgiveness and excuse
and justification, Murphy maintains that
to excuse is to say that what was done was morally
wrong; but because of certain factors about the agent
. . . it would be unfair to hold the wrongdoer responsible or to blame him for the wrong action. [And] to
justify is to say that what was done was prima facie
wrong; but, because of other morally relevant factors,
the action was—all morally relevant factors considered—the right thing to do (ibid.).
Put plainly, neither excusing nor justifying actions of a wrongdoer are to be identified with granting forgiveness to a wrongdoer, on Murphy’s view, since it is only legitimate to raise the
question of forgiveness if the person who is wronged is justified
in resenting the wrongdoer, and resentment is only justified if the
wrongdoer is culpable for her action, which is a condition that
is not met when “wrong” actions may (or should) be excused or
justified.
In the context of forgiveness, Murphy sees the primary justification for and appropriateness of resentment as a tool that allows individuals to demonstrate proper self-respect, so that what
23. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Murphy’s consideration of
resentment, leaving aside a discussion of anger or hatred. This is both
because Murphy focuses his own analysis on resentment and because
resentment is the feature of his account that is most closely connected
to his claim that forgiveness requires the moral culpability of a wrongdoer, which is the point of disagreement that provides the primary
ground for my thesis that Aristotle’s account is more compelling.
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is at stake in the relationship between resentment and forgiveness
is a proper sense and celebration of one’s worth and the recognition of the significance of how intentional wrongdoings are a sign
of disrespect (505; 507). From this it follows that, on Murphy’s
view, the foreswearing of resentment that is a necessary element
of forgiveness is only appropriate in a moral sense24 if it is
granted under the condition that (a) forgiving the wrongdoer expresses rather than denies the autonomy and self-respect of the
person wronged, as well as (b) the moral agency—i.e., the culpability—of the wrongdoer is respected (ibid.; 508).25
24. I highlight the language of morality in order to reflect Murphy’s understanding that genuine forgiveness is to be identified with moral forgiveness, since it is granted for the “right” – i.e., for moral – reasons
(508). Additionally, although Murphy considers whether forgiveness
might be obligatory (511), ultimately, he claims that “we are not obligated to forgive… and no one has a right to be forgiven…. [though] we
can have good reasons for bestowing forgiveness” (ibid.). Dissimilarly,
Aristotle seems to articulate when and why a wrongdoer deserves – has
a right to – forgiveness, which suggests that he believes these cases may
be obligatory.
25. Murphy also lists a third condition that must be met in order for forgiveness to be appropriate, namely, that the generally accepted rules of
morality, whatever they are, must not be violated (505; 507; 508). In
addition, although I will not address this claim explicitly in this paper—
primarily because it seems both obvious to me and certainly not incompatible with Aristotle’s view of forgiveness—it deserves mention that
on Murphy’s view, genuine forgiveness should be identifiable neither
with forgetting a wrongdoing for the sake of therapeutic (e.g., emotional) reasons (507) or with letting a wrongdoer off the hook with the
hope of bringing about her repentance, the latter of which is a position
often argued for in religious contexts (512). Forgetting a wrongdoing
for therapeutic reasons would be motivated by a desire for self-preservation, whereas letting a wrongdoer off the hook in order to motivate
her repentance may be rooted in arrogance, neither of which is an explicitly moral motivation for action. Moreover, while these practices
may be personally or socially beneficial, they are not necessarily consistent with maintaining self-respect or autonomy, or, with respecting
the moral culpability of the wrongdoer; and in some cases, they may
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There are many reasons that Murphy analyzes as those typically offered as justifications that may be consistent with the conditions he lays out for appropriate (moral) forgiveness. However,
before briefly examining these, we would do well to note that
Murphy’s account of the distinction between forgiveness, excuse
and justification is perplexing. For in explaining why excusing
and justifying wrongdoings are not to be confused with forgiveness, he cites the fact that the wrongdoer is not responsible for
her wrongdoing due either (a) to the excusability of her action,
which is based on conditions about the wrongdoer (i.e., in Murphy’s terminology, the wrongdoer’s agency), or (b) to the justifiability of the action, which is based on conditions surrounding
the action in question (506). But isn’t this precisely why otherwise wrong actions are forgivable and why such “wrongdoers”
should be forgiven? As Murphy himself admits, these wrongdoers are clearly not responsible for their actions and thus they
should neither be resented nor be held accountable (ibid.). So,
why does Murphy (and many other scholars who agree with him)
refuse to claim, as Aristotle does, that these wrongdoers should
be forgiven? The reason appears to be his unwavering commitment to the idea that foreswearing resentment is a necessary element of the process of forgiveness and since there can be no
(proper) resentment in the case of wrong actions that are excusable or justifiable, forgiveness must be different than these (ibid.).
Sadly, the commitment to the existence of a necessary connection between resentment and forgiveness appears to be dogmatic, as I do not see any argument for the necessity of this
connection. For in Murphy’s analysis of the meaning and condibe incompatible with these values. Genuine, i.e., moral, forgiveness
should also be distinguished from letting a wrongdoer off the hook too
quickly (505), without engaging in proper reflection about whether the
wrongdoer deserves forgiveness, which is discussed in what follows.
It should be noted that there are other interesting aspects of Murphy’s
account of forgiveness that I do not consider in this paper, as I intimated previously, but this is only because I focus on what I take to be
the most glaring deficiency in his account, especially when compared
to Aristotle’s account.
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tions of forgiveness within which he discusses why resentment
is the precursor for forgiveness, he claims, as was acknowledged,
that the primary value defended by resentment is self-respect
(505; 507; 508). However, while it seems reasonable for a person
to resent moral injuries that are intentionally performed against
oneself, and that to fail to do so could signify (amongst other
things) a lack of self-respect, what does not seem reasonable is
(a) that wrongdoers who perform moral injuries intentionally are
the only appropriate candidates for forgiveness, as Murphy
claims, or, for that matter, (b) that such wrongdoers should be
forgiven, certainly not if they are pleased about the intentional
wrongdoing. Regarding (a), what seems to distinguish Aristotle’s
view from Murphy’s is whether it makes sense to consider an action “wrong” and the person who performs it a “wrongdoer”
when the action may legitimately be justified or excused (e.g.,
for one or more of the reasons Aristotle articulated). Given that
(in this context) the language of justification and excuse implies
that an action was performed that is taken to be wrong in some
sense—otherwise this language would not be used—we should
be compelled to acknowledge that wrongdoings may in principle
be justified or excused. It seems that Aristotle was aware of this,
given that his account of forgiveness relies on and promotes this
understanding of the way in which judging a questionable action
as justified or excused and, thus, as forgivable, ultimately presupposes its “wrongness” in some relevant sense.
Regarding (b), in order to determine whether wrongdoers
who perform their wrongful actions intentionally should be forgiven, it is helpful to consider the reasons that Murphy offers as
possible justifications for moral forgiveness and to compare them
with Aristotle’s view of when forgiveness should be extended
and when it should not. According to Murphy, the most promising justifications for forgiveness include: (i) the wrongdoer’s repentance or change of heart, (ii) the wrongdoer’s sincere apology,
(iii) the wrongdoer’s good or well-meaning intentions, and (iv)
the wrongdoer’s suffering being sufficient to demonstrate a relevant transformation of the wrongdoer (508). While Murphy goes
on to discuss each of these justifications separately (508 – 511),
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it is sufficient to note that they share in common that the wrongdoer may be separated from her wrongdoing (508; 509),26 since
only in these cases is forgiveness potentially appropriate, given
that this separation not only (1) allows respect for the worth and
autonomy of the one wronged as well as for the initial moral culpability of the wrongdoer (ibid.), but also, paradoxically, (2) recognizes the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the time at which
forgiveness is granted (509).
Importantly, although, unlike Murphy, Aristotle does not
propose a necessary relationship between resentment, foreswearing resentment, and forgiveness, nor does he (explicitly) emphasize the importance of upholding self-respect and autonomy, and
although he outright rejects the notion that forgiveness requires
the culpability of the wrongdoer, arguing the opposite, Aristotle
nonetheless supposes the separability of the wrongdoer from her
wrongdoing, just as Murphy does. We need only recall the examples of unwilling and willing actions that Aristotle claims are
forgivable to see this, which were outlined in section one. In
fact, some version of each of the reasons listed, which Murphy
defends as potentially compatible with what he characterizes as
moral forgiveness, can be interpreted as present in Aristotle’s
account of forgiveness, given that they all imply the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the time at which Murphy claims forgiveness is appropriate. Indeed, when Murphy’s reasons for
forgiveness are examined carefully, it appears that wrongdoings
are forgivable for him, too, only when wrongdoers are no longer
responsible for their actions, which suggests that although the
acts retain their “wrongness,” they are nevertheless either excusable or justified: they are still “wrong,” but because of conditions that are true about the actor or about the circumstances
framing the action, it would be unfair—i.e., wrong (pardon the
26. In this connection, taking cues from St. Augustine, Murphy writes:
“to the extent that the agent is separated from his evil act, forgiveness
of him is possible without a tacit approval of his evil act” (ibid. 508,
emphasis his) viz. the well-known religious proclamation to “hate the
sin but not the sinner.”
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pun)—to hold the wrongdoer responsible, as Murphy himself
admits (506; 511).
The main difference between Murphy and Aristotle on this
point was introduced in an endnote within which not only the
synonymous meaning of “suffering,” “pain,” and “remorse” as
well as the synonymous meaning of “regret” and “repentance”
was noted, but it was also noted that although these dispositions
refer to a “gap” in the wrongdoer’s feelings or thinking, this does
not necessarily imply a passage of time, as these dispositions
could be experienced simultaneously. For Aristotle, there is no
requirement that there be a point in time at which the wrongdoer
is inseparable from her action and thus should be resented but
then at some later time she is separable from her act because, for
example, she has repented, apologized or otherwise demonstrated
her regret and sorrow. Instead, Aristotle claims that if a wrongdoer is to be forgiven it is because either (i) her “wrong” act is
performed unwittingly (e.g., because she had incomplete knowledge), (ii) she regrets and is suffering from it, either while she
performs it or later, which, for him, means that her character is
not the (vicious) character of an intentional wrongdoer, which is
immutable,27 (iii) she means well insofar as she attempts to prevent a worse outcome than her action (e.g., she was well-intentioned), and/or (iv) she cannot reasonably be expected to act
otherwise, all of which make the wrongdoer non-culpable, and
hence the act justified or excused.
It seems to me that despite his appeal to the wrongdoer’s disposition at different points in time, Murphy ultimately agrees with
Aristotle, especially since he claims that the strongest case for forgiving a wrongdoer occurs when she has genuinely repented, apol27. Recall that for Aristotle, the transformation of a genuinely vicious
character is not possible, as was briefly discussed in section 1c of the
paper. To be sure, whether genuinely vicious (or virtuous) characters
are mutable is a feature of Aristotle’s virtue ethics that can (and continues to) be debated; however, with respect to the question of forgiveness,
as I will argue in the conclusion, his account is coherent and compelling
in a way that Murphy’s is not.
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ogized, or otherwise demonstrated remorse (509-511). For this
likely means that the wrongdoer is no longer culpable and thus
should no longer be resented, given that she has become a different person (511). Of course, Murphy would say that these kinds
of actions are only candidates for forgivability if their wrongdoers are initially culpable for their actions but later become no
longer culpable; for otherwise they were either never culpable
to begin with, since this is a requirement of forgiveness for Murphy, or they did not undergo a process that changes them from
an initially culpable wrongdoer to a person who is no longer that
same culpable wrongdoer. But beyond insisting on (a) the necessity that forgiveness requires the initial culpability of the wrongdoer and (b) foreswearing the resentment that appropriately
directs itself toward the culpable wrongdoer, Murphy does nothing to convince us of the connection between these. For, recall
(again) his attempt to distinguish forgiveness from excuse and
justification: when excuse is appropriate, something about the
wrongdoer’s ability to act makes it unfair to hold her responsible
for her action, thereby making her action excusable; and when
justification is appropriate, something about the conditions or circumstances framing the action also makes it unfair to hold the
wrongdoer responsible for her action, thereby, making her action
justified (506). As I think this (and related) passages in Murphy’s
analysis show, despite Murphy’s attempt to distinguish forgiveness, excuse, and justification, ultimately, even for him, proper
(moral) forgiveness cannot be granted to culpable, resentable
wrongdoers but should only be extended to wrongdoers whose
actions, at the time at which they are forgiven, are excusable or
justifiable, just as is the case for Aristotle.
§3. Concluding Remarks: On the Compelling Nature of
“Aristotelian Forgiveness”
On Aristotle’s account, resentment is not a necessary element of
forgiveness, not initially or in the form of needing to overcome
it, because from the outset, the kinds of wrongful actions that are
forgivable are not attached to wrongdoers who should be resented;
rather, their actions are excusable or justified, as was argued. I
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submit that Murphy (and others who agree with him)28 should give
up his reliance both on the moral culpability of the wrongdoer and
on the accompanying resentment and its eventual foreswearing as
essential ingredients of forgiveness for at least three related reasons. First, as I argued, even Murphy admits that at the time at
which forgiveness is appropriate, the wrongdoer is not culpable
because something about her or the conditions under which her
acts was or is performed—e.g., she repented or apologized or
meant well—result in the wrongdoing being justified or excused
without eliminating its “wrongness.” Again, Murphy himself admits this (506), betraying the incoherence of his position.
Second, holding onto resentment until the wrongdoer undergoes some sort of magically transformative process, which, with
Aristotle, we have good reason to believe is not possible if the
wrongdoer is someone who genuinely takes pleasure in intentionally acting wrongly, may be unreasonable to expect from a
person who is wronged, regardless of whether doing so upholds
autonomy or self-respect, which is by no means a foregone conclusion. This is especially true, given that there are many ways
that self-respect and autonomy can be maintained that do not require harboring dangerous, negative emotions that may easily
transform themselves into attitudes or actions, such as hatred and
vengeance, which (at least arguably) often fail to respect anyone,
and certainly speak against a sense of humility, not to mention
an appreciation for a shared sense of humanity (which is a point
to which I return in what directly follows). Furthermore, overcoming resentment requires some emotional gymnastics that it
is not clear could or should be cultivated, particularly given the
shaky foundation Murphy offers for why wrongdoers should be
resented, which Murphy does not support with much more than
his insistence that Bishop Butler is correct on this point. Again,
why should it be the case that forgiveness must involve the
foreswearing of resentment, since either it is unclear that the
wrongdoer should be resented in the first place, or, taking Aris28. Recall that Murphy’s account represents the mainstream, leading
contemporary secular account of forgiveness.
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totle’s lead, it is unclear that she should ever be forgiven? Put
plainly, why not understand forgiveness, as Aristotle did, namely,
as an attitude one takes with respect to a wrongdoer who deserves
it for one or more of the reasons outlined, none of which require
the one wronged to resent the wrongdoer, and all of which
demonstrate the non-culpability of the wrongdoer?
Third, given that there is no reason to believe that the absence
of resentment or its foreswearing in Aristotle’s account of forgiveness results in the one wronged failing to respect herself or
to exercise her autonomy, as I already hinted, Murphy would do
well to discard his insistence that forgiveness requires resentment
at all. Instead, he should offer an account of forgiveness that calls
for us to take on the perspective of the wrongdoer, as this is compassionate and respectful of the worth of all persons who deserve
it. I cannot help but wonder whether Aristotle’s account instructs
us to treat wrongdoers in an (appropriately) compassionate way,29
which allows us not only to exercise self-respect but also to respect the other and her circumstances more easily than Murphy’s
account permits. For the latter not only advances an arguably fictive distinction between forgiving and excusing and justifying
that fails to withstand philosophical scrutiny, but also fails to attend robustly to the reality that all persons are potential wrongdoers in the ways that both Aristotle and Murphy articulate. For
although Murphy acknowledges what he refers to as “moral humility” (513), he concludes from this only that we “should be
open to the possibility of forgiveness” (ibid.). In contrast, Aristotle suggests that relating to wrongdoers through compassion is
the goal, since this demonstrates human decency, which he intimately connects with compassion and thoughtfulness, which, in
turn, he claims should govern our relations with (most) others
(1143a20-22).
Thus despite what may remain unclear in Aristotle’s account
of forgiveness, “Aristotelian forgiveness” is (1) internally coher29. I take it that compassion—generally speaking, not within Aristotle’s
theoretical framework—can be inappropriate; however, I do not defend
this here, as to do so would take us too far afield from the paper’s focus.
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ent, (2) properly appreciative of the many reasons a wrongdoer
should not be held responsible for her act and should be forgiven,
which (3) is consistent with respect both for those who are
wronged and for those who perform wrongdoings, (4) calls for
compassion towards others and an appreciation for our shared
humanity, and finally, (5) does not fall prey to the emotional
quagmire that may threaten our attempts to forgive when we
ought and to refrain from forgiving when we ought not. Consequently, Aristotle’s account of forgiveness ought to be preferred
over the leading contemporary account.
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On Two Socratic Questions
Alex Priou
What pointless images come up on account of a
single word. Take the word something, for example. For me this is a dense cloud of steam that has
the color of smoke. When I hear the word nothing,
I also see a cloud, but one that is thinner, completely transparent. And when I try to seize a particle of this nothing, I get the most minute particles
of nothing.1
The most famous Socratic question—ti esti touto?—is often preceded by a far less famous, but more fundamental question—esti
touto ti? Thus we read, for example, in Plato’s Hippias Major:
Socrates: So, then, are not also all the beautiful things
beautiful by the beautiful?
Hippias: Yes, by the beautiful.
Soc.: By this thing that is something (tini)?
Hipp.: That is something, for what (ti) [else] is it going
[to be]?
Soc.: Say, then . . . what is this thing (ti esti touto), the
beautiful? (287c8-d3)2
Or, in the Symposium, where Socrates asks Agathon, “Is love love
of nothing or of something?” (199e6-7) Aristotle implicitly affirms the priority of this question to its more famous counterpart by only claiming that there is a science of being after
having confronted the “most difficult and necessary aporia of
all to look into,” namely, whether or not “there is something
1. Luria 1968, 132.
2. All citations are to Plato and his Euthyphro, unless otherwise noted.
All translations are my own.
Alex Priou is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kutztown
University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. This paper was first delivered at
the Annual Meeting of the Association of Core Texts and Courses on
April 16, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia.
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(esti ti) aside from the particulars,” “something one and the
same (hen ti kai tauton)” that would make such knowledge
possible (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 999a24-9, 1003a21-2).
Though this question is posed in many dialogues with respect to myriad topics,3 in every instance it receives but one
answer: it is something, namely something that is. The dialogue devoted to why this question always meets with an affirmative answer would appear to be the Parmenides, for
there Parmenides throws into question whether the eidē are,
only to establish that, if we have opinions that there is some
unity in being, such unity must be. 4 Nevertheless, the dramatic setting of the Parmenides is the quarrelling of the PreSocratic schools, and the popular dismissal of philosophy
that their quarrelling engendered. For a dialogue that establishes that the object of inquiry is simply because we have
3. Some examples (by no means exhaustive): Charmides 161d1-5 and
168b2-4, Parmenides 132b7-c2, Phaedo 64c2-3, and Theaetetus 160a9b4 and 163e4-7. Of course, Socrates often doesn’t ask this preliminary
question, perhaps with some reason for his silence in mind, the most
obvious and necessary example being Minos 313a1.
4. This claim condenses the respective thrusts of the first and second
parts of the Parmenides. Let the following suffice to establish the above
claim. The second part’s inquiry into the one that is preserves the intelligibility of unity without addressing the skepticism raised at the peak
of the first part, i.e., the view that there is no access to the one that is or
that the one simply is not (cf. 133a ff.). Parmenides addresses that skepticism in the final five deductions, which function as a reductio ad absurdum. This reductio culminates in a denial of unity not just in
being—for being could nevertheless still always appear to be, without
being—but in appearance and opinion, as well. This conclusion proves
untenable, since as a matter of fact unity is opined to be—indeed, at
many points during that very conversation. Thus the dialogue pushes
us to the conclusion that is enough that unity is opined to be for it simply
to be, i.e. for the claim that one is to be true, at least so far as human
beings may recognize. It’s on this point that the Parmenides and Euthyphro converge.
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opinions about it, we must, as I hope to show, turn to the Euthyphro. 5
From the very beginning of the dialogue, Socrates’s whole
way of life is in question. For an indictment has brought him to
the stoa of the king, thus compelling him to leave his usual haunts
in the Lyceum, where we find him in dialogues as early in his career as in the Charmides and as late as in the Euthydemus and
Lysis.6 To some extent, then, we share in Euthyphro’s surprise at
finding Socrates in such a place. Euthyphro expresses his surprise
by asking Socrates, “Has something new (ti neōteron) come to
be?” (2a1) Euthyphro’s phrasing, quite unintentionally prescient,
shows that more than Socrates’s way of life is in question. For
when Euthyphro later asks Socrates what Meletus claims
Socrates does (ti poiounta), Socrates will respond that Meletus
claims that he makes new gods (kainous poiounta tous theous)
(2a8-b4). Socrates appears to have made a new ti, a new something or what, and so to have radically revised how we think
about nouns.7 Not (just) Socrates, but his question is on trial (cf.
Apology 22e6-3b4). Euthyphro, however, understands Meletus
to mean by these “new gods” Socrates’s daimonion, and thus
takes Socrates to be his fellow religious innovator, to be something of an ally.8 But they are in many ways quite different.
Whereas Euthyphro expresses the utmost pride in his wisdom,
5. “The theoretical or methodological assumption (that to ask about
piety is to ask about an idea or form), if it is to be something more than
an assumption, requires a non-methodological—a conversational or dialectical—justification” (Bruell 1999, 127).
6. Cf. Bruell 1999, 118.
7. Cf. Davis 2011, 217.
8. Religious innovators, of course, could hardly ever be allies.—Geach
1966, 369 follows Euthyphro’s interpretation of the accusation. Burger
2015, 25-7 and Strauss 1996, 15 suggest that these gods may be
Socrates’s eidē. Meletus’s use of the plural in every version of the accusation we have suffices to dismiss Geach’s proposal (cf. Apology
24b8-c1; Xenophon, Memorabilia, I.1.1; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of
the Eminent Philosophers, II.40). Cf. Bruell 1999, 118-20.
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Socrates expresses shock when he first hears about Euthyphro’s
unorthodoxy and closes by cautioning him against deviating from
orthodoxy.9 To be sure, Socrates seems unique in his (however
ironic) respect, if not reverence, for Euthyphro, even going so far
as to say he is a desirer of Euthyphro’s wisdom, though others
laugh at him (14d4, 3b9-c2). Nevertheless, the situation is not
one of two religious innovators, but of two men with some inclination toward unorthodoxy. The one succumbs; the other resists.
If Socrates is not so unorthodox as he initially appears, then to
what extent is his allegedly new “what,” his ti, in reality new?
To what extent is Socratic philosophy latent in orthodoxy itself?10
9. Euthyphro twice affirms his wisdom with an oath by Zeus (cf. 4a12b3, 5b8-c3). The first oath comes after Socrates expresses shock with
an oath of his own at Euthyphro’s innovation (4a11-12). A little later,
Euthyphro momentarily slides into the third person while speaking of
his precise knowledge. That is, he speaks of himself as spoken of by
others. Socrates exploits Euthyphro’s vanity in his response by imagining a conversation, in which he speaks of him as wise before another
(cf. 5a3-b7, esp. 5a9-b1). Socrates is successful, for upon hearing this
imagined conversation Euthyphro swears his second oath. Socrates’s
closing caution against innovation occurs at 15c11-e2.
10. In this way, the question of the Euthyphro is much broader than
much of the literature assumes. For what is at stake is not just “the relation between religion and ethical knowledge” (Hall 1968, 1 [emphasis
added]), with the dialogue presenting “a powerful argument against any
attempt to base moral judgments on religious foundations” (Mann 1998,
123), but the relation between religion and knowledge as such. (For a
helpful list of secondary literature on this question, see Mann 1998, 123
n. 1.) The principal difficulty with this view is that the argument in question has a much broader range than the ethical or moral. No form of
dikaion or its cognates occurs in the argument in question (cf. 9d111e1). The argument thus abstracts completely from what the basis of
the gods’ love is. Indeed, the whole purpose of the argument is to raise
the question of whether there even is such a basis. Thus the fundamental
dilemma of this crucial passage, and so of the dialogue as a whole, is
not between a knowledge-based and religion-based ethics, but between
passive obedience to divine whim or wisdom and the active search for
wisdom by human beings, between reason and revelation.
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It is necessary to begin from the position of orthodoxy, as
represented by the reaction Euthyphro’s father has to the murder
of one of his servants. Euthyphro relates that his “father, binding
together his”—i.e., the murderer’s—“feet and hands, sent to
here”—i.e., Athens—“to hear from an interpreter (exēgētēs) what
(hoti) it’s necessary to do (poiein)” (4c6-d1). In certain circumstances, the position of orthodoxy makes clear precisely what we
are to do. Suspected criminals are to be bound. But in those circumstances where we don’t know clearly and precisely what we
are to do, the position of orthodoxy compensates for this lack by
having us defer to an interpreter. Such interpreters answer our
questions about what is to be done—in this case, say, regarding
what punishment is fitting for a hired servant who has killed a
household slave. Within the position of orthodoxy, then, there is
some reason for questioning—of what sort, though, we are as yet
unclear. Despite his apparent orthodoxy, Euthyphro’s father
clearly believes the fitting punishment to be death, for, when the
hired servant dies in his bonds, he is untroubled.11 Indeed, everyone except Euthyphro seems to agree with his father—the rest of
his family, the Athenians generally, and even Socrates. And
though this gives Euthyphro’s decision to proceed against his father a foolish air, it at least minimally redeems his efforts at religious innovation, since everyone, as it turns out, has arrived at
what orthodoxy demands on their own.12 That is, everyone plays
the interpreter. The ubiquity of interpretation comes to the surface
11. Edwards 2000, 218, following Allen 1970, 21, points out that Euthyphro’s father assumes he has “a right of summary justice which dispensed him from any duties to the man accused of murder,” a right that,
Edwards adds, Euthyphro implicitly denies. Both Euthyphro and his father appear more ambivalent than Edwards’s characterization allows.
After all, his father does send for an exegete, and Euthyphro does wait
some time before bringing the accusation to court.
12. Though Euthyphro questions the justice of the punishment his father
inadvertently visited upon the hired servant, not even Euthyphro questions that such a punishment is what the interpreter would have advised.
Indeed, Euthyphro is speciously silent on what the messenger said the
interpreter proscribed.
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when Socrates, in an attempt to explain his line of questioning
about what piety is, mentions his confusion about the words of a
poet. In attempting to clarify his confusion, Socrates begins to
speak of parts (though not of wholes)—that is, to use the ontological language more familiar from the Parmenides.13 Accordingly, if Socrates’s apparently unorthodox question lies latent in
the position of orthodoxy, it is in the role of interpreters (whether
ourselves or officials) and the phenomena that make them necessary to the position of orthodoxy.14
It is clear that Euthyphro considers himself a sort of interpreter, inasmuch as he bases his religious innovations on the traditional stories told about the gods. Socrates is surprised to learn
that Euthyphro has such an orthodox view. He goes so far as to
have Euthyphro swear before Zeus that he truly holds these things
to have come to be thus (6b3-4: su hōs alēthōs hēgēi). Socrates’s
second invocation of a god suggests that he is perhaps as surprised here at Euthyphro’s extreme orthodoxy as he was earlier,
when he learned of the extent of his unorthodoxy. Indeed, so surprised is Socrates that he interrupts a particularly simple argument, familiar from the Meno and Theaetetus—about what
constitutes an adequate answer to the ti esti touto question—to
affirm Euthyphro’s orthodoxy. Socrates’s interest in Euthyphro
thus stems from the fact that his religious innovations have one
13. Once Euthyphro says Socrates speaks correctly in claiming that the
pious is a morion of the just (12d4), Socrates (with Euthyphro following
suit) only refers to it as a meros (cf. 12c6, d2, 5, 6, 8, e1, 7, 9). In so
doing, Socrates throws into question (immediately after Euthyphro has
deemed it beyond question) the agreement that the pious is a proper
part, in the sense of having a natural joint, rather than just a piece or
fragment of justice.
14. In other words, the basic issue of the dialogue is this: “How can
[Socrates] make his ignorance prevail . . . over [Euthyphro’s] knowledge?” (Bruell 1999, 125) In order to so prevail, we must understand
why Socrates’s ignorance “permitted or compelled him to draw positive
(or negative) conclusions about the most important matters” (Bruell
1999, 124).
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foot in orthodoxy and one foot out. His case shows how the orthodox requirement for interpreters allows for such unorthodoxy
as we see in Euthyphro, an unorthodoxy that Euthyphro, Meletus,
and many others identify—whether rightly or wrongly—with
Socrates’s peculiar mode of questioning. Additionally, by asking
Euthyphro to say what the pious is, Socrates draws on Euthyphro’s desire to play the interpreter (exēgētēs), thus exploiting
Euthyphro’s offer to explain (diēgeomai) many things concerning
the divine (6c5-d2). Euthyphro’s offer comes on the heels of
Socrates’s surprise that Euthyphro believes or holds (hēgeomai)
such an extremely orthodox view (6b2-c4). Socrates uses hēgeomai for believing or holding some view in place of Euthyphro’s
earlier use of nomizō (5e6). In this context, Euthyphro offers to
show how what “human beings themselves happen to believe
(nomizontes)” gives “a proof that the law (nomou) is such” as
Euthyphro interprets it (5e2-6a3). Socrates’s substitution of hēgeomai for nomizō thus aims to arrive at certain phenomena present within law, the phenomena of believing, interpreting, and
explaining. By posing his idiosyncratic question in this context,
Socrates tests the extent to which the ti of the ti esti touto lies latent
in such phenomena, and thus in the view of orthodoxy itself.15
Socrates touches on the relationship between the ti of ti esti
touto and the phenomena within law most pointedly during an
argument famous for articulating the so-called “Euthyphro
problem.”16 In this argument, Socrates attempts to show Euthyphro that the love of all the gods is not a sufficient criterion for
determining what particular acts are pious—that is, that the godloved is an inadequate definition of the pious. Toward this end,
Socrates distinguishes between active and passive participles,
between the loving and the loved (10a10-11). The passive participle, i.e., the verb reified as a substantivized verbal adjec15. After Euthyphro’s proof, no forms of nomos and nomizō occur, an
especially surprising fact in a dialogue concerned with the rules or opinions that guide correct action with respect to the gods.
16. See note 10.
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tive,17 is then argued to be the consequence of the finite, passive
verb form, rather than the other way around. That is, Socrates
intends to show that something is a loved thing because it is
loved, but not that something is loved because it is a loved thing
(10c10-12). When brought to bear on the claim that the pious is
the god-loved, the priority of the finite verb to the substantivized
form shows that the gods’ activity of loving is but an affect or
experience of the pious, and not what it is. Socrates thus argues
that the ti of ti esti touto is, independent of how anyone—god
or man—is disposed to it intentionally. What something is is not
dependent on our inclinations, then, but our inclinations on what
it is. Yet Socrates’s argument is flawed principally because there
are some who love something simply because it is a thing loved,
i.e., a thing loved by another or others. Certainly some such phenomenon is what makes the Athenians laugh at Euthyphro or
grow angry with Socrates, what makes the Athenians inclined
to view such acts of interpretation as unorthodoxy. The position
of orthodoxy thus seems to exclude the ti of Socrates’s ti esti
touto. For from the perspective of orthodoxy, the fact that something has been said provides sufficient justification that it has
been said well (7a11-b1).18 No appeal to being is necessary, just
to opinion.
Nevertheless, orthodoxy’s manner of justification is not so
exclusive as it first appears. In his presentation of the aforementioned “Euthyphro problem,” Socrates expresses this manner of
justification in rather confusing language. His language poses a
significant problem for understanding his argument, not simply
because the logic is unclear or the use of “because” (hoti) is
17. Because rendering the passive verb forms in Greek into English requires using the verb “to be” with the participial form, the distinction is
somewhat elusive, as many notice (see, for example, Geach 1966, 378).
The distinction turns, I maintain, on the reification of an experience or
affect as a quality—and an essential one, at that—of what they seek to
define. Thus I have chosen to render philoumenon as “a loved thing.”
18. Reading eirētai gar at b1 with all the manuscripts and against their
seclusion by Burnet and others.
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equivocal,19 but rather because it is difficult to know which sense
Socrates intends hoti to have in this or that clause. More than
once, Socrates uses hoti to mean both “because” and “that,” i.e.
to indicate a fact and a justification, in a single sentence. Further, in his summary of his argument, Socrates clarifies that Euthyphro has failed to say what (hoti) the pious is, using hoti in
the sense of ousia, i.e., in the sense familiar from ti esti touto
(11a6-8). Socrates thus uses hoti in its three primary senses—
what we could call its justificatory, factual, and essential
senses—and in a way that appears unnecessarily confusing.
Thus in an argument meant to delineate a causal relationship
between particulars and universals, Socrates uses a word that
mixes all three into one. As we read, then, we must determine
in each instance which sense Socrates means hoti to have. In
the process, however, we cannot help but note that, as separate
as these senses may be syntactically, they are also quite inextricably linked. In accordance with proper usage, Socrates uses
hoti in the justificatory sense interchangeably with dioti. But
dioti is itself a contracted form of another phrase Socrates uses,
dia touto hoti, which employs hoti in its factual sense. If hoti
in the justificatory sense is equivalent to dia touto hoti, then
hoti in the justificatory sense contains within it hoti in the factual sense.20 Reasons rely on facts. But this still excludes hoti
in the essential sense, the sense interchangeable with the ti of
Socrates’s question, ti esti touto. Is the factual sense of hoti
completely separable from its essential sense? How could essential hoti be excluded, but factual and justificatory hoti main19. On the difficulty of understanding the sense of “because,” see Geach
1966, 379; Hall 1968, 6-9; and Cohen 1971, 6-8.
20. In reality, the justificatory language is far more complex: hoti is used
at 10a2, 3, c2 (twice), 3 (twice), 10 (twice), e5; dioti at 10b1, 4, 5, 7, 8,
9 (twice), 10, 11, d6, 9, e3; dia at 10b2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, d4, 5; dia touto
hoti at 10d4, 6-7, e2-3, 6-7; and the substantivized infinitive as an instrumental dative at 10e5-6. Of the forty-three occurrences of dioti in
Plato, twelve are in the Euthyphro alone, i.e., just over a quarter of the
occurrences in just fifteen Stephanus pages—really, on one page alone.
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tained? Doesn’t the lexical intimacy of these three senses suggest
a necessary connection between them? And if so, what is it?
This question amounts to whether the particular acts piety
dictates we perform are wholly particular, or rather must be
viewed in light of some general understanding of what piety is.21
Euthyphro seems reluctant to venture beyond these particulars.
When knowledge of piety first comes up, Euthyphro seems interested in teaching Socrates the pious and impious things, and
not the pious as such (4e4-5a2). Likewise, when Socrates first
asks Euthyphro about the pious as such, Euthyphro understands
the neuter singular to hosion to indicate a single pious thing, and
not the idea common to all particular, pious things (5c8-e2). And
much later, when Euthyphro begins to pull away from Socrates,
he is clear that what he would have to teach Socrates is not some
one thing, but a number of things (14a11-b1). Nevertheless, even
in his first definition, Euthyphro does come up with a somewhat
general rule that applies not just to his case, but to many others.
Likewise, when Socrates gives voice to the objection he and the
Athenians raise against Euthyphro’s innovation, his formulation
is rightly general (cf. 4b4-6). Indeed, the disagreement between
Euthyphro and the Athenians regards which general rule (or example become rule, e.g., Zeus’s “prosecution” of his father) applies to the particular case of Euthyphro’s father, his hired
servant, and the household slave.22 Justificatory hoti thus entails
21. It is an old question as to whether the Euthyphro “is meant to imply a
full-blown theory of Forms” (Geach 1966, 371). For a thorough discussion,
see Allen 1970.
22. At one point, Socrates shows Euthyphro that those disputing in courts
don’t dispute whether one should pay the penalty for injustice, but whether an
injustice was committed (8b7-d3). Shortly after this, Socrates expresses the
general rule guiding Euthyphro’s prosecution of his father in as particular a
form as he can, indeed to quite comic effect (cf. 9a1-8). Euthyphro’s initial
(and nearly absurd) inability to put himself in the shoes of the accused amounts
to an inability to see the ambiguity of how this or that law applies to a particular
deed, i.e., it amounts to the mistake of restricting the general entirely to the
particular. As Euthyphro’s quick retreat shows, this mistake is untenable, even
to those most devoted to the precision of the laws. Cf. Benardete 2001, 201.
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not just factual hoti, but essential hoti, as well. For which particular act is pious depends on the general rules that collectively
constitute what piety is. Consequently, it is not the case, as earlier
surmised, that, from the perspective of orthodoxy, the fact that
something has been said provides sufficient justification that it
has been said well (7a11-b1). As Socrates observes, other things
are said that don’t quite jibe with what has been said, thus necessitating further interpretation or conversation from us (7b2-5).
Indeed, without the question of which rule to apply to this or that
particular situation, there would be no need for interpreters.23 At
least in the present circumstances, then, the altogether orthodox
question of which rule or law applies to these or those circumstances provides sufficient grounds for Socrates to ask his apparently unorthodox question, ti esti touto?
But are these grounds sufficient in all circumstances?
Socrates suggests so when he compares his question about the
relationship between piety and justice to an account of fear (deos)
and reverence or shame (aidōs) in a pair of epic verses (12a6b1). When introducing these verses, Socrates speaks of the poet
as making two things, one of these being the verses, the other
being something he wishes to compare to what he and Euthyphro
were just discussing (12a7-8: epoiēsen, poiēsas.) But what the
poet made that is comparable to what they were just discussing
lies on an entirely abstract level. Thus, the poets don’t just make
verses; they make ideas, or rather determine their relationship.24
Socrates thus compares his inquiry into the ti of ti esti touto to
his interpretation of the poet’s verses (cf. Republic 515d2-7). But
23. “Euthyphro,” and, I would add, everyone else, “is unwilling . . . to
leave matters at the merely factual relation of a pious deed to the approval the gods confer on it by loving it, to let the piety of the deed be
determined by that love alone” (Bruell 1999, 129).
24. Burger 2015, 83-5 points out that grammatically the object of poiēsas
is Zeus himself, an allusion back to Meletus’s charge that suggests that
not Socrates, but the city’s poets are the makers of (new) gods. On the
complex way in which the poet’s genetic account relies on an eidetic account, see Bruell 1999, 131-2 and Burger 2015, 83 ff. (esp. n. 44).
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in his interpretation, Socrates criticizes the poet on the basis of
his and Euthyphro’s experience of deos and aidōs (cf. 12b2-c9).
Though Euthyphro happily goes along with Socrates, Meletus
would be unlikely—to put it mildly—to take Socrates’s criticism
of a fellow poet so lightly (cf. Apology 23e5). Nevertheless, Meletus’s claim that Socrates is “a maker (poiētēn) of gods,” namely
“one who makes (poiounta) new gods while not believing (nomizonta) in the archaic or original ones” (3b1-3), seems at best a halftruth.25 In a certain respect, Meletus appears to be right. As Socrates
argues, action requires discerning (diakrinō) what is good or bad,
noble or shameful, and just or unjust, so as to reach a sufficient
judgment (krisis) about what to do (7c3-d7). But in his mode of
questioning, Socrates exposes the insufficiency of all judgments by
exposing his interlocutors’ inability to answer (apokrinō). Meletus
is therefore correct that Socrates doesn’t believe (hēgeomai, nomizō)
in the archaic or original gods, since his investigation of the phenomena within law (nomos) exposes that answers are not forthcoming. Meletus is wrong, however, to conclude from this that Socrates
seeks to replace the archaic or original gods with new ones. For at
the core of Socratic refutation is the same issue that plagued Euthyphro and his father, that makes interpreters necessary and court
cases unavoidable: the ambivalence or multivalence of particular
deeds as to which vomos they fall under, and thus whether the deed
is pious or impious, or, should the particular deed already be agreed
to be pious, which nomos makes it so or is implicit in it and thus
renders like deeds pious.26 These altogether pious questions invoke the factual, justificatory, and essential uses of hoti that pro25. It is only “at best” a half-truth because, as Burger 2015, 35 notes,
Socrates is the (perhaps inadvertent) cause of both the dangerous liberation from generally accepted opinion and the subsequent return to that
opinion.
26. Socrates gives two competing formulations of the subject of his question. The first—tou hosiou te peri kai tou anosiou (4e2-3)—suggests a clear
and precise separation of the pious from the impious, while the second—
peri . . . tōn hosiōn te kai anosiōn (e5-6)—suggests that the same things
can be both pious and impious. On the connection between this issue and
polytheism, see Bruell 1999, 130-1 and Burger 2015, 59-61.
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vide the necessary and sufficient conditions for Socratic philosophy.
What is at bottom unorthodox about Socrates, then, is not the
introduction of new gods per se, but the willingness to confess
ignorance about which laws apply to which particulars, and the
attempt to articulate the recalcitrance of the opinions contained
in law to clear and easy application to particulars. For in his
mythical self-presentation, Socrates says that Daedalus is both
his and Euthyphro’s progenitor—that is, that the circular character of Socratic refutation is not exclusively Socrates’s, but human
(11b9-c6). Man is somehow fundamentally Socratic, and it is
Socrates’s exposure of this fact that arouses the Athenians’s ire
(cf. 3c9-d2). They simply kill the messenger. Under this interpretation, what Socrates does may be an unorthodox failure of
piety, but it is the humble failure to rise to piety, rather than an
attempt to go above and beyond it. What is missing from this interpretation, however, and unfortunately takes us beyond the Euthyphro, is Socrates’s anticipation in the Sophist that a stranger
from Elea may be a theos elenktikos (216a1-b6). This substantial
revision of Homeric theology appears to guide Socrates’s reaction
to the god’s assertion of his wisdom, which assertion Socrates attempts to refute as though that were unproblematically pious
(Apology 21b9-c2). In this revision, Socrates implicitly claims
that not just human beings are beholden to the above ambivalence
or multivalence of particulars with respect to generals, but gods
as well. Let it suffice to conclude that this deeper implication of
what Socrates uncovers in the Euthyphro amounts, paradoxically,
to an accusation against orthodoxy of impiety: not Socrates, but
the city has made new gods in place of the theoi archaioi.27 For
27. Compare the alternative of Strauss 1996, 16-17. The present understanding of Socratic piety falls outside of the debate that McPherran 1985, 283-4 frames as between the constructivists, who take there
to be a view of piety latent in what follows the “aporetic interlude”
of 11b-e, and the anticonstructivists, who deny the same. For that debate presupposes considerable agreement, namely that what is referred to as “Socratic piety” relies on a definition of what the pious
as such is, whose reconstruction they respectively claim to be possi-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
not just man is Socratic, but his god as well.28
ble and not. If there is anything like “Socratic piety,” it cannot be based
on a static definition, but rather only on the awareness that no sufficient
definition is forthcoming.
28. The deeper implication of Socrates’s substitution of hēgeomai for
nomizō lies in the former’s secondary, original sense of “to lead,”
which suggests that believing is the active attempt to guide oneself
(and others), and not the passive acceptance of laws (on Plato’s use of
voice—middle, active and passive—see Davis 2011, 205-21). That is,
the laws present themselves as the answer to some desire for guidance.
But that desire, in posing the question the laws purport to answer,
proves not just prior to (and thus of higher status than) the laws, but
more general than the laws, which are always these particular laws.
The primary or principal phenomenon within law would thus be man’s
longing for such wisdom as would allow him to live well. On this phenomenon as that of soul, see Burger 2015, 73-5 (with 69 n. 36), as well
as Davis 2011, 217-18 and passim.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PRIOU
91
Bibliography
Allen, R. E. 1970. Plato’s Euthyphro and the Earlier Theory of Forms.
London: Routledge.
Benardete, Seth. 2001. Plato’s “Laws”: The Discovery of Being. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Bruell, Christopher. 1999. On the Socratic Education. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Burger, Ronna. 2015. On Plato’s Euthyphro. Munich: Carl Friedrich
von Siemens Stiftung.
Cohen, S. Marc. 1971. “Socrates on the Definition of Piety: Euthyphro
10a-11b,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 9: 1-13.
Davis, Michael. 2011. The Soul of The Greeks. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Edwards, M. J. 2000. “In Defense of Euthyphro,” American Journal of
Philology 121: 213-24.
Geach, Peter. 1966. “Plato’s Euthyphro: An Analysis and Comentary,”
The Monist 50: 369-82.
Hall, John. 1968. “Plato: Euthyphro 10a1-11a10,” Philosophical Quarterly 70: 1-11.
Luria, A. R. 1968. The Mind of a Mnemonist. New York: Basic Books.
McPherran, Mark. 1985. “Socratic Piety in the Euthyphro,” Journal of
the History of Philosophy 23: 283-309.
Mann, William. 1998. “Piety: Lending Euthyphro a Hand,” Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 58: 123-42.
Strauss, Leo. 1996. “An Untitled Lecture on Plato’s Euthyphron” (David
Bolotin, Christopher Bruell, and Thomas Pangle eds.), Interpretation 24:
3-23.
��POEM | PETRICH
93
Sabbatical
Louis Petrich
I would have thought the broad summer airs,
By amplitude of want, more friendly shared.
Life—no surprise—opportune in corners,
Echoes up the cry of fire and ashes:
Teach us to care and not to care,
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks.
Island mine, sit me still, hair to skin light,
Sun beaten by the whip of wind and salt spray,
Stomach fitted upon rocks and coral,
Mostly hidden, unseparated below,
Sharp and aspiring above,
Good to take counsel over cares hard gone,
These straight and crooked cravings of my sea soul
To pour each drop of time that remains
Into practice of present looking toward,
Looking after what I found fine in you—
Deep-eyed causes,
Welling up close to speak
Through summer lips—
Oh, stay a little, and kiss the strewed rocks
Forsaken of stars, but here my remaking.
How fine the faces of sea and sky at the horizon meet!
Their line of appointment never bent
To give up place and tell long secret looks.
Unmeasured goings, no reckoning of returns!
An hour’s breath is allowed this body
To go beneath and feel no heaviness:
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He wrote
this poem while on sabbatical in Bonaire, Dutch Caribbean.
�94
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Quiet there, beauty there,
Vast riches, strange attachments,
Currents you would never guess,
Cold-eyed passers-by at ease
In the whirligig of Becoming.
Counting down to the last,
I follow with borrowed sufficiency
The beaded gleams of light
Up to the birth meeting,
And pour handfuls of new looks upon the awful leavings of Love.
Contend less much, eternal counselors—
A made man collects by the shore.
���
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 58.1 (Fall 2016)
Editor
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Frank Hunt
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John Van Doren
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Elliott Zuckerman
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Pre-Socratics or First Philosophers? ..........................................1
Eva Brann
Prefacing the Absolute in Hegel’s Phenomenology..........................19
Andrew Davis
Alcibiades’s Image of Socrates in the Symposium............................37
Alan Pichanick
The Night Watchmen; or, By the Dawn’s Early Light ....................47
Eric Salem
Poem
Kansas Articles from the
Ellis Review Centennial Edition ................................................69
Philip LeCuyer
Book Review
David Lawrence Levine, Profound Ignorance:
Plato’s Charmides and the Saving of Wisdom ...........................72
Eva Brann
��Pre-Socratics or First Philosophers?
Eva Brann
Think how peculiar this appellation is: “Pre-Socratics.” A whole
slew of thinkers, poetical, aphoristic, prosaic—condemned to be
known as the precursors of a man who wrote nothing! Forerunners are, it seems, ipso facto inferior to the rightly anointed. Take
John the Baptist, the canonical precursor, who says of himself,
“he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not
worthy to bear” (Matthew 3:11). That holds not only for individuals but also for communities. Our forefathers, the writers of the
Federalist Papers, thought of those Greek city states, the poleis,
whose frame or politeia was a direct democracy, as the unstable
antecedents of the reliable representative republic they were proposing for America—not that the Greek democracies did not have
some representational features, but as Madison, remarkably, puts
it: “The true distinction between these and the American Government lies in the total exclusion of the people in their collective
capacity from any share in the latter” (Federalist 63). So the superiority of our successor republic lies in erasing direct popular
participation altogether—and here is my presumption: Just as the
founders as successors to the Greeks had a deeper understanding
than these did of the chief, philosophically opaque, element of
modern politics—namely, representationalism—so, on the contrary, John the Baptist as forerunner of the Christ lacked his revelatory power: John baptizes with water, but Jesus will baptize
with the Holy Ghost; what John is doing is significant but
opaquely primitive.
My point is that, as “pre-somebodies,” the Pre-Socratics may
be thought of as deficient, lacking something, primitive in the
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was the keynote address at the annual meeting of the
Metaphysical Society of America in Annapolis, Maryland on Friday
March 18, 2016, whose theme was “Thinking with the Pre-Socratics.”
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derogatory sense. But, of course, there is also the opposite perspective: These men were not primitive, without sophistication,
but primeval, deeper, more receptive to origins, to everything
for which the Germans have that awe-bestowing prefix ur, as
in Ursprung, the “original leap.” Of course, I am thinking of
Heidegger, for whom what professional philosophers like to regard as a progress is, in fact, a progressive occultation and a withdrawal of Being.
What did the man who devised the designation actually
mean? In 1815, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the philosopher-theologian (and the superb translator of Plato), in an address “On
the Worth of Socrates as a Philosopher,” declared that Socrates
was pivotal in the history of philosophy. The reason seems a
little underwhelming; it was that before him there were different schools of philosophy pursuing different kinds of philosophy, but after him, although the kinds were still distinguished,
every school cultivated all kinds. Thus Schleiermacher is
kindly crediting Socrates with preventing an incipient academic specialization. This view must have seemed plausible,
because Schleiermacher’s label “Pre-Socratic” stuck and is
now used for collections of texts without further comment.
Of course, the notion that Socrates was epochal, not as the
human phenomenon of the Platonic dramas, but as a historical
event, appears in the first history of philosophy, Book I and II of
Aristotle’s Physics and again in Book I of the Metaphysics. In
the latter, Socrates is presented as “busying himself with moral
matters and not at all with the Whole of nature [as did the preceding so-called “physicists”], however seeking in those matters
the universal, and being first to fix his thinking on definitions”
(I.6)—a far more epochal distinction than Schleiermacher’s.
Here, too (I.5), he calls those who became “the Pre-Socratics”
the “first wise men.” This description seems to me significant in
two ways: First, it implies that they were not “lovers” of—here
meaning “not in secure possession of”—wisdom, but that they
were actually wise, and that delineates accurately the prevailing
one of the two modes I will single out in a moment. Second, it
raises a question. In calling them the “first wise men,” does he
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
just mean “earliest” or is there a hint that they studied “first
things,” and were concerned with what Aristotle calls “the first
[science]” or “first philosophy” (VI.1)?
Let me inject myself here, unhopefully, into this epoch-framing debate. Why don’t we give up “Pre-Socratics” and call these
folks “Pre-Professionals” and their successors “Post-Socratics,”
with Socrates as pivot between them? That would relocate the
disparagement away from the “wise men” to the professionals,
where Heidegger, at least, might agree it belongs.
That, however, isn’t going to happen, because nothing is
more sticky than historical epoch terms. Take, for example, our
grandest epoch-division, with which I grew up: B.C. and A.D.,
“Before Christ” and “In the year of our Lord,” Anno Domini. In
our era of offense-taking, some folks couldn’t bear to live in the
epoch of a young Jewish rabbi, so now we write B.C.E., “Before
the Common Era,” and C.E., “Common Era.” But the turning
point is still the birth date of Joshua or Jesus of Galilee, whenever
that actually was, except we’ve masked that fact. Concerning
Socrates, as an epochal figure, I have my own take on the respect
in which he is indeed a pivot: It is he who turns the wisdom
(sophia) of the divinely initiated into the longing for wisdom
(philo-sophia) of a mere mortal left to his own devices, so that
Pre-Socratic truth passes into Socratic inquiry; past this inflection, this cusp, which is the human singularity called Socrates,
his hypothetically held thoughts stiffen into doctrines maintained
by schools.
So back to the Pre-Socratic epoch of philosophy. Aristotle,
as I said, the first practitioner of history of philosophy—perhaps
as rousingly mystifying a notion about philosophy as ever arises
within it—refers to an early school he calls, as I said, the “physicists” (physikoi) or the “accountgivers of physis (physiologoi),”
among whom he places all the Pre-Socratics including Heraclitus
(III.5), but evidently not Parmenides (I.2), both of whom were
certainly older than Socrates. These so-called physicists were
surely philosophers—as Aristotle says of them, they were “the
ones who philosophized first” (Metaphysics I.3). And they were
not crude materialists, mere believers in stuff, in matter. They
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“thought that the principle of all things was in certain kinds of
material,” which changed the qualities of matters while persisting
beneath them. So when I translate Aristotle’s term for the physicists’ focus, hyle, as “material” and not as “matter,” I mean that
they thought of the underlying principle, be it water, air, earth,
or fire, not as sensory stuff experienced by its own qualities, but
as bestowing sensible moistness, lightness, lumpishness on the
distinct matters that constitute nature in one of its aspects. To
these they added agencies of continuous or periodic change;
somewhat imaginatively or, if you will, mythically conceived,
such as Love-and-Strife.
When Aristotle calls these deep inquirers into the principles
of the palpable world “physicists,” he implies, I imagine, that
they are not yet what I might call “meta-physicists.” They give
an account of physis in terms which yet belong to the sensed
world; they ground nature in its own terms. (The Pythagoreans
are, perhaps, an early exception; their principles are numbers and
ratios, though these appear sensorily.)
We all know that the title of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the greatest
book in its line, is explained in two ways. First, mundanely: the composition that came “after,” meta, the Physics. And second, more
thoughtfully: The composition called The Metaphysics follows the
one called The Physics (a plural in English as in Greek), because the
many-faceted inquiry called “physics,” the search for the notions explaining bodies undergoing change, precedes “metaphysics,” the singular inquiry into the principles “beyond,” meta, those reached in
the book on moving beings, the Physics. You will all remember that
the Physics ends with a logic-driven proof that if the inquiry into
moving bodies is to find a resting place, then there must be a true
principle of motion, a real beginning, which must be such that it can
move others without itself being in want of an explanation of its motion—that is, an unmoved mover. And then the Metaphysics is the
subsequent inquiry which develops the terms that can be used to
transcend physics and delineate an unmoving but movement-causing
divinity: Nous, the god who is mind, an unloving beloved, the aboriginal unmoved mover, the self-sufficient “self-thinking” being,
Thought of thought (noesis noeseos).
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
For the rest of my talk, I want to excise the physiologues who,
though on the brink of this step beyond, and thus philosophers,
are still not quite metaphysicians—except for these two: Heraclitus and Parmenides. By generation, they certainly belong to the
first philosophers, but I will claim that they are also “first philosophers” in Aristotle’s sense of the term “First Philosophy”: the
knowledge of the ultimate individual being (ousia), if there is one,
and of Being (to on) as Being (Metaphysics VI.1)—its ever pursued and ever perplexing subject (VII.1). “First” philosophers
they are—but not quite.
Heraclitus, the first of the first, needs more defense in this respect than Parmenides. Aristotle counts him among the physicists
because he makes fire a first principle. It is a misunderstanding:
Heraclitus does indeed bring in a physical fire, an analytic agent,
so to speak, of matter. But his primary fire is identical with his
world principle, the Logos. This fiery Logos is both a discerning,
dividing, analytic cosmic ruler and an intra-world arche or ruling
beginning. Arche is the word usually translated as “principle,” literally “what seizes first place.” Heraclitus is far more wonderful
than that; the Logos-Fire is not a mere cosmic captain.
While I’m at it, let me relieve him of a silly but tightly attached epithet: the “Philosopher of Flux,” who is said to have
said that “All is flux” (panta rhei, “everything flows”; nothing
stays), a notion which no one of his taut ingenuity, which made
him the first discoverer of physical transformations tightly controlled by numerical ratios, could have perpetrated. (I’ll come
back to those ratios, logoi in Greek.) As to “Everything flows”—
in fact, he didn’t say it. Plato reports “that those around him” attributed the notion that all things are in flux to him, and has
Socrates add “like leaky pots” (Cratylus 440 c.). I’ll add: Beware
of Heracliteans, the Heraclitus-followers; they make willful
mincemeat of him, including the propagation of his obscurity:
“Heraclitus the Obscure.” He isn’t obscure; he’s saying deep
things concisely. Heraclitus just isn’t disciple-friendly, congenial,
sociable—the pre-schooler of philosophy, you might say.
Heraclitus is generally believed to be somewhat Parmenides’s elder, perhaps by a “short” generation, a quarter cen-
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tury. But though close in time, they lived apart in place. Heraclitus, the one generally thought of as the philosopher of flux, was
entirely sessile as far as we know, living all his life among his
despised Ephesians. Parmenides of Elea, on the other hand, the
defender of motionlessness, travelled as far as Athens, where he
got into a chronologically difficult, but intellectually entirely feasible, conversation with young Socrates (Plato, Parmenides).
I want to interject myself here again: I had the good fortune
to find myself on the site of his beloved city, Elea, where he functioned as statesman. I can tell you: I was suddenly seized with
awe, because here the most astounding thought of all occurred
to a human being capable of giving it utterance—that of all-pervasive Being.
My point is that nonetheless neither place nor time seem to
me of the slightest consequence to my project for the rest of this
talk: I want to put Heraclitus and Parmenides into conversation
with each other, and in doing so to transmute a problem in the
empirical history of philosophy—meaning an only circumstantially insoluble puzzle, into a reflective question within philosophy itself—meaning an abiding perplexity stemming from the
nature of things. That genuine question is: Which philosopher is
truly first? More precisely put: What is first, Logos or Being? Or
is that perhaps not the best way to put the question? Should it
perhaps be: Are the two Founding Fathers talking about different
things in somewhat the same way or about the same thing in different ways, or—may the god Apollo helps us—about different
things in different ways?
Let me right now exclude this last possibility. If it were actual, the history of philosophy would be as insignificant as the
dated list of English kings which their young subjects used to be
driven to learn by heart. For what animates philosophy’s history
is that it is dialectical, that is to say, conversationally antithetical:
It moves in oppositions that are congenial enough to be heard
and taken up in responsive talk. I think it can be shown that these
first two were—and I don’t know how else to put it—providentially fraternal in their opposition. Sometimes the heavens don’t
wait for the historians to bestow meaning on what is usually a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
mere mess of happenstance, but actually arrange for significance
to eventuate.
What then are Heraclitus and Parmenides speaking about that
is the same—one writing appropriately in aphorisms, the other
fittingly in hexameters?
They both speak of the All. Heraclitus, as we would expect,
always says it in the plural: panta, “all things” (in fourteen relevant places). Parmenides always uses the singular, pan,
“everything” (D.-K. 8). This ambition to comprehend the
whole of what there is, not from within as a sensing being
among sensible things, but from without, as an apprehending
intelligence that can reach beyond the sensed world, puts these
two squarely among the “transcenders,” among Aristotle’s
meta-physicians.
They bear themselves, however, not as lovers of a wisdom
to be pursued, that is, as philo-sophers, but as knowers of a wisdom that has been imparted to them. Both speak as initiates, Heraclitus in an oracular style rivaling that of Apollo’s temple in
Delphi (D.-K. 93), Parmenides as an initiate, outdoing Homer,
the poet-pupil of the Olympian Muses, who could not claim to
have reached the inner heart of truth in a piping chariot, as did
the philosopher-poet (D.-K. 1).
What is the frame of mind of a human being who is the first
in his world to utter: “all things” or “everything”? It is scarcely
possible to recapture the wonder of it for the speaker who has
so leaped beyond the world that is home, to imagine his sense
of being set apart from the rest of humanity, which sees from
within and not from beyond. Evolutionists are committed to the
notion that intelligence developed in a continuum, in tiny increments. Yet insight does not seem to arrive that way, but rather
in a life-altering jolt: the world-principle speaks to a solitary
who can hear, or a youth’s chariot bursts through the welcoming
gates of the House of Truth—and their thinking veers into new
ways.
The Logos, Speech itself, speaks to solitary Heraclitus and
bids him see and hear and feel in what way “all things” cohere.
Aletheia, Truth itself, speaks to Parmenides, the future states-
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
man, and orders him to forgo all speech but the one word that
conveys the way in which everything “is” seamlessly one.
What the Logos tells Heraclitus is that it—perhaps I should
say “he,” for it is a god we’re speaking of (D.-K. 32)—Speech
himself, discriminates and collects all things just as his subordinate words, his logoi, do: They distinguish all things by different
names, proper names, and they gather all things under the same
name, “Gathering,” for behind the word logos stands the verb legein, whose first meaning is “to gather” and only then “to speak.”
What Truth tells Parmenides is the one and only word that
tells the truth: “Is,” esti. Greek syntax permits esti to be a complete sentence, one word that comprehends the whole.—There is
no personal pronoun to divide “is” from itself, to make us ask
“what is?”: Issing is. All “not-is” is not to be spoken, and the diversity it spawns not to be regarded, says Parmenides’s Truth
while Heraclitus’s Logos enjoins both listening to his utterance
and looking into the teeming Cosmos (D.-K. 89). Truth demands
silence and withdrawal into Being. (I should remind you here that
Parmenides also enters a second way, the “Way of Seeming
[doxa]” which yields a fanciful cosmogony. I used to be in some
perplexity about why he spoiled his single-minded grandeur by
taking the previously proscribed way of the “double-pated” folk
[dikranoi, D.-K. 6], who dither distractedly. Then I read Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics [1935] in which he asserts that
even Parmenides’s solidly homogeneous Being requires a complementary “restriction” by Seeming [74 ff.]. Now I’m in total
perplexity: Isn’t that a nullifying intrusion into the unbreachable
uniformity of Being that is Parmenides’s great insight?)
Let me at this point recollect what I’ve laid out so far and
make clear where I’m going. These two have in common the
thought of a whole. This is a spectacularly new thought—the notion that the Whole is to be comprehended in its Wholeness, the
idea that Wholeness comes from outside the Whole, is imparted
from beyond. It is, as I would put it, a logical necessity that
wholeness should elicit the following duality: A whole might be
a “one-over-many,” a captained collection, an embattled unity of
co-existences. Or it might be a “one-is-one,” and all alone, a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
fused unity devoid of inner discrimination. The third case, a
whole of total multiplicity, is not thinkable, like that “all is flux”
falsely attributed to Heraclitus: If there is only multitude, sheer
diversity, then there is no whole and nothing to transcend, since
such a flux is subject neither to an inner organization nor to an
outer delimitation. For if there were limits, somewhere the fluxing would have to cease, double back on itself, develop vortices
or whatever—some structure.
For all their primeval grandeur, Heraclitus and Parmenides
were human, and so had temperaments. Perhaps some context of
their lives, respectively in Asia Minor and in Western Italy had some
effect on their thinking—who knows? In any case one of them, Heraclitus, chose to stay put and to behold the world as a heterogeneous
collection, while the other, Parmenides, decided to travel and to
view it as a homogenized unity. Having claimed that their first concern was the same, the Whole, I would now like to show how they
lay out these wholes in what I’ll call “antithetical complements.” I
mean that they don’t talk past each other but—almost—responsively, to each other. They don’t, however, argue; they announce.
One more preliminary: To do these Pre-Socratics justice as
being, both of them, “ontologists,” devotees of Being, it is, I
think, necessary to believe what you see in the transmitted texts.
For example, when Heraclitus utters paradoxes such as this one:
the cosmic wisdom does and does not want to be called by the
name of Zeus (D.-K. 32), we must not set it aside as high-handed
obscurantism but receive it as an exact enunciation of a significant thought: The Logos both appears and withdraws as a godhead, appears so when the initiate is in a mood of worship,
withdraws when he is in the mode of thinking. Or when Parmenides says that “to be and to think is the same” (D.-K. 3), we
must accept it as a remarkable possibility instead of diddling the
text into saying something flabby like: “The same thing is there
for thinking and being.” Both of these apostasies are committed
by willful scholars. Yet, in dealing with these early wise men,
“having it your way” is the same as “not getting it.”
So now to some specific comparisons, five particularly responsive appositions, some of which I have already broached.
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Take them, if you will, as testimonials to what seems to me, once
again, to be one of the few truths revealed by time: The Western
philosophical tradition is “dialectical,” I mean self-opposing,
from its very inception—and ever after, even when dialectic becomes quibbling.
The participants in this conference will recognize my source references, and they’re cited in my manuscript (by the fragment numbers in Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker; “D.-K.” is
omitted hereafter). Heraclitus (b. circa 540 B.C.E.) always comes
first, because he is usually regarded, as I’ve said, as being Parmenides’s (b. circa 515) elder by a short generation. (A “generation”
that puts fewer than thirty years between the birth of the father and
the son is sometimes called a “short” generation by chronologists.)
So then, One: Heraclitus exhorts us to listen to Speech Itself,
to the Logos Himself and to “say the same,” homologein, as says
the Logos about his cosmic “collecting,” to agree with him.
(Again, I say “his,” because this Logos is Heraclitus’s divinity.)
The actual word for “collect,” syllegein, is not voiced but is, I
think, to be heard by the hearing listener (50). Parmenides, on
the other hand, is effectively consigned to silence by the goddess,
Truth Herself, when she proscribes negation and predication (8).
The fact that the goddess herself speaks and uses negation is an
overt self-contradiction that presages the downfall of this grandest of all thoughts (Plato, Sophist 237 ff.). Heraclitus’s paradoxes
speak his mind while Parmenides’s contradictions refute his. As
their enjoined missions differ, so do their means. Heraclitus
speaks in pithy paradoxical prose, often framed as “nominal” or
“gnomic” sentences, meaning sentences that lack the copula “is,”
and speak verbless, that is, timeless wisdom; such as hen: panta,
“everything [is] one” (50). For Parmenides this copula-word, esti,
becomes, as I’ve said, all by itself a sentence; it is the positive
proposition of his teaching (2), which is delivered in epic hexameters. The stylistic contrast mirrors their character, Heraclitus
is, as I said, a sessile solitary, a curmudgeonly despiser of his
unreceptive fellow-citizens (21), who speaks to them sparely
and brusquely of cosmic truths, and who devises his own aphoristic prose; Parmenides is a well-loved statesman in his city and
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a traveler in Greece, who came to Athens, where he instructed
an eager young Socrates in dialectic (Plato, Parmenides), and
who sings his teaching in Homeric resonances.
Two: The basic terms of their language (as distinct from their
style) also attest their antithetical fraternity. As I said, Heraclitus
always speaks severally of “panta,” “all things,” “everything” (8,
10, 50). Parmenides always speaks jointly of “pan,” “all, the
whole” (8). The antithesis itself is this: For Heraclitus the constituents of “everything” are alternately locked in mutually supported stasis, in inimical stability, hostile reliance, like stand-up
wrestlers who butt at and abut on each other in a temporary hold
(51), and then again are pulled apart by the referee, here the Logos.
Thus the collection of striving elements is transformed, not chaotically, but according to precise mathematical ratios, called logoi,
in Greek, the plural of logos. These ratios are the mini-agents of
the Logos at work in the world; they supervise transformations of
matter obeying the dictates of a very modern chemical law: the law
fixing the ratios of masses in the transformation of substances; for
instance, so much of water into so much of earth, in every case of
transformation (31). This Heraclitean cosmos is simultaneously
positive and negative, discontinuous and unbounded, with a ruling
Logos who at once governs from beyond the collection and is actively immanent (4, 108). Such a world is twice oppositional: Each
being opposes its other individually, and all elements collectively
dissolve and supersede one another; there is strife and stability, decomposition and reconstitution.
Parmenides’s “whole” is internally without differentiation
and so without negation, qualification, change, or locomotion—
a perfect, impenetrable, well-balanced sphere, continuous and
contained, homogeneous and bounded (8). This impenetrability
of Being to otherness is also its translucence to itself, as thought
is penetrable to thought—for Being is Thought (3). Parmenides
never asks about the features of its surround, since all that is, is
within. Nor does he ask about the name of its location, since that
would have to be the Is-not, the Nothing, the very term and
thought he has forsworn. I might remind you here that Heidegger
will, as it were, supplement Parmenides in his essay “What is
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Metaphysics” (1929). He surrounds the region of beings and
Being with “The Nothing” for which Dasein is the “place-holder”
amidst worldly beings, having been pulled into the Nothing by
means of an ontological feeling called “anxiety,” thence to view
beings as a whole.
Three: Heraclitus’s cosmos is a rational, that is, ratio-governed, collection of numerically related elementary stuff; the bodies shaped from it are in relations of tension, which is a force
governing matter that is at once attractive and repulsive and
everywhere the same in the tension-effecting connection, say a
bow-string (51).
Parmenides’s world is, on the contrary, a thought, as I’ve just
mentioned. He says unequivocally: “For it is the same to think
and to be”—to gar auto noein esti te kai einai (3, and he says it
again, 8). That’s the text, which Plotinus (Enneads V.1), who has
Pre-Socratic empathy, translates just as I have. I’ve already mentioned that some scholars can’t believe their eyes: Parmenides,
in the early fifth century B.C.E., is speaking like a German idealist—Fichte, Schelling—of early nineteenth century C.E.! To
me it makes sense: Utter simplicity is the inception of idealism.
The ratifying text here is Plato’s Parmenides, in which Parmenides seems to have travelled to Athens just to demonstrate in
young Socrates’ presence that contradicting conversation, the
kind called dialectic, is potent and necessary training for formulating perplexities but perfectly impotent and even stymieing in
attaining ultimate insight. For example, to settle the HeracliteanParmenidean question, “Many or One?”, which is also, not accidentally, the central issue of Plato’s dialogue, thought must
outstrip speech. Thus, incidentally and cunningly, Parmenides secures his goddess’s silence as ultimate: Dialectic must go silent
within sight of Truth, as Plato emphasizes in his Seventh Letter
(341c ff.).
Four: These antithetical brothers share the root of irreconcilability: extremism, but in opposing directions. Heraclitus is, to
my mind, sui generis, one of a kind, never repeated among his
successors, even those who actually quote him. Plato makes Eryximachus, the physician-banqueter of the Symposium (his name
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means “Belchbattler;” he cures Aristophanes’s hiccups), draft Heraclitus into the service of harmonizing Love (187a). Nietzsche
finds him—ludicrously—comforting (Ecce Homo, 3). Even
Schopenhauer, closest to Heraclitus in advancing strife as a
world-principle—though, to be sure, farthest away in the ultimate pessimism of his world-mood—ends by looking for an escape from conflict in disinterested esthetic contemplation and
renunciation of the trouble-making will (The World as Will and
Representation, Bk. VI). Heidegger, who, to be sure, understands Heraclitus’s cosmic war as both world-generating and
world-preserving, attributes to him not, indeed, an ultimate, but
an originary unity, a “collectedness of Being” (Introduction to
Metaphysics, 47, 130)—which is contradicted in a fragment that
says: “Out of all things, one and out of one, all things” (10)—
turn by turn: all things collected into a unity and the unity dispersed into all things.
Those mitigators are the Post-Socratics. Not so, never so,
Heraclitus. He finds kingliness in war (polemos, 53), justice in
strife (80), advantage in abrasiveness (8) and truth-telling in selfcontradiction. He even censures Homer for praying that battle
might disappear among gods and among men. I might inject now
that Heraclitus seems to me, in his feel for his tensely muscular
cosmos and his adoption of a brusquely handsome language,
closest of all to Hobbes—though Hobbes is, most peremptorily,
no metaphysician, but both a materialist and a mechanist, while
Heraclitus’s discerning Logos is both a meta-physical principle
and an immanent operator. Under him, stress and strain is thus
ultimate, neither in fact nor in wish resolvable; when the antagonists come apart, when their enlivening agon and their invigorating agony ceases, it is only to mark a world-transformation and
a new polemical array. There is, in my reading, nothing else like
this in ontology—this ultimate clash of joyfully irreconcilable,
vividly assertive beings, held in their controlled confrontation by
the World-speaker, a Referee, the divine Logos himself: articulate
thinking in the service of a pervasively tensed cosmos.
Parmenides’s holism too is never again equaled in the western ontological tradition, as far as I know—though perhaps it has
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its negative counterpart in the Nirvana of the East. His Being
commands total submersion and ultimate silence. These are not
conditions much to the taste of actively thinking human beings
and so, in Plato’s greatest ontological dialogue, the Sophist
(241d), a sort of “parricide” is committed: Father Parmenides is
dialectically killed so that the Unity of Being may be penetrated
by Otherness, diversity of kinds established, gradations of beings
grounded, speaking and its negations recovered, the capacity to
tell truths and falsehoods regained and with it the ability to distinguish thoughtful human beings from pretenders, philosophers
from sophists.
So much for their shared extremism at opposite ends of the
ontological spectrum, Heraclitus at the remote end of terminal
discord, Parmenides at the far terminus of ultimate union.
Five: In my title-question, “Pre-Socratics or First Philosophers?” I suggest that these two men might have been philosophers. Well, I must now draw back, as I’ve already intimated, and
say instead: They were actually pre-philosophers. For though the
word philosophy was said to have been coined by Pythagoras for
his attachment to his arithmetical principles (D.-K. I 454, 35), I
think of philosophy in the Socratic sense: wisdom loved, as distinct from wisdom possessed. Heraclitus himself, a younger man
than the Pythagoras he despised, uses the word—he often borrows where he denigrates (40)—as an adjective. He says: “Wisdom-loving (philosophous, 35) men must inquire into a pretty
large lot of things.” (For “inquire” he uses the verb of the term
historia with which Herodotus starts his History.) That seeking
of information, now called “research,” is not, at least to Socrates,
the way of philosophy, which goes inward by way of recollection
to recover congenital knowledge rather than outward in a roving
search to find facts. Heraclitus doesn’t even use “wise,” sophos,
much of human capacities (118); his words are phronesis and
nous, discretion and intelligence—for him gifts of discrimination,
befitting the Logos and his manifold cosmos.
Parmenides doesn’t, in what we have, speak of wise men or
wisdom-loving at all, but rather he calls himself “the man who
knows” (eidota phota, 1), whom Truth has chosen “to find out
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all things” (panta pythesthai, 1). The others are “double-pated
know-nothings” (dikranoi, eidotes ouden) who think, indiscriminately, that “ever-to-be and not to be” are the same—or just that
“nothing is” (6).
Heraclitus and Parmenides are both men who alike think of
themselves as in the know, not conceitedly, as self-sufficient
discoverers, but proudly, as recipients of gifts from their respective divinities. Yet what they know is nearly antithetical: The
Whole is Many/One.
I’ll conclude, first with an observation about these great
Greeks—but perhaps not only them. It could be that many thinking Greeks and their successors adopted this mode because it both
suited their dispositions and their experiences, the mode namely
of complementary antithesis, of reciprocally necessary opposition. The Latinate languages help; for example, ob-ponere and
cum-ponere, “to oppose” and “to compose,” to confront and to
reconcile, are etymologically and semantically abutting notions.
A prime philosophical product of this way of seeing the world is
the old Pythagorean Table of Opposites (Aristotle, Metaphysics
I.5), among whose pairs are One/Many and Men/Women. An even
earlier example, a poetic case of such complementing opposition,
is presented by the Iliad and the Odyssey, each of which is the
other’s specific other: Short-lived Achilles/long-lived Odysseus,
confining camps/rovable seas, warring males/seductive demigoddesses, stark reality/vivid fantasy. Or, in the hybrid realm of
fictional hero and real-life initiate, there is the elderly hero
Odysseus “of many turns,” who has sailed all over the sea and
has known the towns of many men and the young, inexperienced
sage-to-be, Parmenides, who drives his chariot overland, straight
into the heart of a single truth; both tell of their journey to realms
beyond in epic hexameter.
So these two, Heraclitus and Parmenides, incarnate the oppositional mode—as it were, providentially—at the very beginning of articulate thinking and published thought: Heraclitus is
the teller of Manyness, of ultimately unresolvable, paradoxically
unifying antagonisms, Parmenides the voice of Oneness, of primordially unbreachable, speech-defying, seamless unity.
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This might be a good moment to ask an intriguing but essentially idle question: Why does the proponent of multiplicity
precede the adherent of unity chronologically, even if it is by a
little? Let me try a conjecture: I’m persuaded that thinking and
speaking can occur separately—people can think without speaking and speak without thinking—but all I’ve read tells me that
they develop conjointly. Now “infants,” meaning “speechless”
babies, who, soon after birth, can see pretty perfectly, who can
distinguish depths, discern bodies, notice identities, are still
“non-speakers” and probably only potentially thinkers, “not-yetthinkers.” In other words, the discernment of the senses precedes
the reflection of the intellect: Seeing precedes listening. Perhaps
philosophy recapitulates ontogeny, and our tradition of inquiry
into Being tracks our development as human beings. We can see
and distinguish the Manyness before we can think and say its
Oneness. Who knows?!
Were these two fathers superseded by their progeny? Were
they left behind in the progress of thinking, in the course of which
seers turned, via one true amateur, Socrates, into professionals
and revealed wisdom pivoted, by way of question-asking into
problem-solving? Were they voices crying in an uncultivated
wilderness, foretelling the anointed proficients? Were they primitive beginners—or never-again-equaled originators?
Hegel and Nietzsche had deep respect for them as forerunners; Heidegger, more radically, regards them as the bearers of
Being, our existence’s only true preoccupation, whose illuminations were dispersed and vaporized by subsequent professors
of philosophy. Their wisdom is to be brought back in an act of
re-petition (Wieder-holung) which is accomplished by the “destruction” (Destruktion), or, in the accepted mitigating translation, the “deconstruction” of the ontological tradition between
us and them (Being and Time, §6).
To me, Socrates, the pivot-point between the few Pre-Socratics and all the subsequent philosophers, seems to be the incarnate
answer to this Heideggerian extremism. The first philosophers
speak awe-inspiring but riddling truths, which demand mulling
over and questioning—enough for two-and-a-half millennia and
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then some. Their own natural awe, which still elicits ours, is earliest. The latest is Heidegger’s explicitly willful, that is, forcibly
disruptive, questioning and his insistence that philosophical questioning is about “extra-ordinary things” and is done by extra-ordinary people (Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 16, 10, 133), by
rare “authentic” existences impelled by ontological anxiety.
Between awe and anxious aggression stands Socratic question-asking in its modestly receptive, ironically knowing, faithborne openness. That, to me, makes him the game-changing
pivot-point, and rightly the name-bestowing epoch-maker.
Though deeply indebted to both Heraclitus and Parmenides, he
serves, in the Platonic dialogues, particularly in the Sophist, as
the instigator of equally deep inquiry into these Pre-Socratics’
great terms: Logos, Being, Nonbeing. And he also—critically—
anticipates his latest and, for the time being, last successor, Heidegger, in respect to questions and instigations. For Socratic
questions are not driven by will but drawn by love (Symposium
204e, Phaedrus 234c; both play on the homonymic features in
Greek of “love” [eros, gen. erotos] and “question” [erotesis].)
His occasions are not the extraordinary but the ordinary, and his
philosophizing is carried on in that self-confidently self-deprecating mode called eironeia in Greek, for which the translation
“irony” is not quite adequate: It means a dissembling modesty
that claims ignorance but intimates knowledge. This Socratic
irony, it seems to me, is the precise counterpart to a question. For
a question also claims ignorance—else, why would it be
asked?—and intimates knowledge—else, how could it recognize
its answer? (Meno 80d).
Let me finish by putting the same thought in a different way.
What is it that put Socrates between “Pre-” and “Post-”? Why is
he, in truth, a hinge, a cusp, a point-of-inflexion between
primeval awe and anxious willing? To be sure, it is a very asymmetric “pre” and “post”—half a century before, two-and-a-half
millennia after. Nonetheless, the nineteenth century name for the
subjects of our conference does put him at the center and declares
him a turning point. Why, really? Because he turns wisdom into
the love of wisdom (sophia/philosophia), by putting a question
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mark to reverent awe; awe with a question mark is “wonder”
(thauma), and, as he says: “This passion especially belongs to
the philosopher—wondering; for there is no other origin of philosophy than this” (Theaetetus 155d). I think that Socrates is
epochal because he undergirds truth-seeking with the motivefeeling of wonder, which is not an excludingly arcane anxiety,
but an inclusively ordinary capacity—that for a non-rapacious
arousal of interest. From that vantage point the question of my
title, “Pre-Socratics or First Philosophers?”, can be answered like
this: If the wonder-inciting knowledge of his own ignorance be
the philosopher’s mark, then Heraclitus and Parmenides, the initiates, were pre-philosophers, Pre-Socratics, not yet knowing ignorance.
But if they did come within hearing and within sight of what
is now and ever will be the concern of philosophy, namely, telling
Speech and stable Truth, and if they confidently announced what
the one heard and the other saw, they were indeed doubly first—
the first men to engage in First Philosophy and to launch it with
their antithetical principles: an active, discerning, world-governing Logos and a steadfast, translucent, world-constituting Being.
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Prefacing the Absolute
in Hegel’s Phenomenology
Andrew Davis
The power of Spirit is only as great
as its expression, its depth only as
deep as it dares to spread out and
lose itself in its exposition.1
Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit begins by stressing that there can be no preface to a system of philosophy. A system must be an immanent, self-moving and self-contained whole
and so it cannot be brought to completion through a preface or
an appendix of any kind. This seems simple enough. But Hegel
goes on to write a substantial preface. At sixty pages it is three
times the length of Kant’s already lengthy preface to the Critique
of Pure Reason. How, then, is Hegel’s preface related to the Phenomenology that follows it?
Hegel’s preface seems to move on from the problem of prefaces after a few pages but, on closer inspection, the problem with
prefaces proves thematic throughout Hegel’s own preface. Prefacing books is a species of another problem that Hegel, at one
point, calls “anticipating” the absolute (Werke 3:27; Miller, 13).
In what follows, I look at two ways of anticipating the absolute
that Hegel addresses in his preface: one concerns explanations
and the other concerns propositions. By considering the problems
these anticipations stir up, we can deepen and enliven our symAndrew Davis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Belmont University. This lecture was first delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland on 2 October 2015.
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenologie des Geistes, in Werke, Band 3
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 18. (Further references to the
Werke will be abbreviated noting the volume number followed by the
page number. For example, this reference would appear as Hegel, Werke
3:18.) The translation appears in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. A. W. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 6.
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pathies for the idea that opposes mere anticipations of the absolute: the idea of a system of philosophy, an idea has fallen on
hard times and could use our energetic reconsideration.
Part 1: The Problem with Explanations
Here is a translation of the preface’s first sentence that preserves
much of the word order of the origianal German:
An explanation, as is advanced, according to custom, in
the preface of a written work—concerning the purpose
[Zweck] that the author has intended, as well as the
causes of and the relation in which he believes it to stand
to earlier or contemporary treatments of the same object—, [such an explanation] appears, for a philosophical
work, to be not only superfluous but, given the nature of
the subject-matter, even inappropriate or contrapurposive
[zweckwidrig] (My translation, Werke 3:11; Miller, 1).
Hegel opens with the word most at issue here: “explanation” (Erklärung). The intermediate words of the sentence then
all bear on what kind of explanation a preface gives us until we
get to the end, where Hegel announces that the sort of explanation we expect in a preface seems to work against to the very
purpose of a philosophical book. Prefatory explanations to
philosophical works purport to reveal the purpose of the work
and run counter to the purpose at the same time.
Hegel takes advantage of the way that the German language
can suspend a thought in a single long sentence to invite the
reader into the expectation of a prefatory explanation before he
tells us at the end of the sentence that such explanation seems
unphilosophical, even anti-philosophical. This first sentence of
the preface is our first contact with the inversion of expectation
that becomes the Phenomenology’s stock in trade. The first dialectical movement of this book is to grasp philosophy, the
broad subject of the book, not through a positive definition but
as a negation: whatever philosophy is, it is not explanation of
the kind that appears in prefaces. Hegel’s preface begins to reveal something about the purpose of his book not by stating that
purpose but by negating the customary purpose of a preface,
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which is to explain the book. What, then, does Hegel mean by
explanation?
Explanation plays a decisive role in a later stage of the Phenomenology named “Force and the Understanding.” By turning
to look at what Hegel says about explanation there, we can better
see what is at stake in this first sentence.
A word of warning: I’m about to summarize what many consider the most challenging section of Hegel’s book in a paragraph.
Let’s begin with the play of forces, the reciprocal interchange between an active and a reactive force (Werke 3:113; Miller, 84).
This play is troubling because consciousness can’t keep straight
which force is active and which is reactive. You punch the wall,
but the wall punches back. To deal with this causal confusion,
we articulate this reciprocity as governed by a fixed law which
describes the movement of force but does not move itself (Werke
3:120; Miller, 90). Newton’s third law is always the same and always true of the events for which it is a law. What Newton’s third
law describes may be disconcerting to us (that all force will be
met with equal and opposite force) but by codifying our confusion, we feign understanding. The restlessness of the force is not
so easily subdued, however, and a second inverse law appears as
an equally good candidate for describing our confusion. This is
what Hegel calls “the inverted world” (Werke 3:128; Miller, 96).
The resolution of these twinned worlds of law and anti-law occurs when both are grasped together as what Hegel calls, “infinity” by which he means self-relation.2 We now grasp movement
not as an effect of confusing forces of electrity or magnetism or
gravity, but as self-motion, as the self-unfolding of life.
Hegel reminds us at the moment he reveals infinity or selfrelation as the truth of forces and their laws (Werke 3:133; Miller,
101), that the play of force was translated not just into a fixed
2. Hegel calls the infinite “the absolute unrest of pure self-moving [Sichselbstbewegens]” (Werke 3:133; Miller, 101). The equivalence of the
true infinite and self-relation is made more explicit in the treatment of
infinity as the result of the self-negation of the finite in the Science of
Logic and Encyclopedia Logic (e.g., Encyclopedia Logic, §96A).
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law but into an explanation, which itself is a “movement of the
Understanding” (Werke 3:126; Miller, 95). When we explain
something, we translate the movements of the outer world into
the movements of our inner world. What is notable about the development toward explanation here is that movement will out;
all attempts to supress movement or fix terms in place fail. Fixed
laws require application in explanations because explanations
mirror the movement of force but allow consciousness to own
the movement and so not to feel alienated by it. We now replace
the inner motion within the thing observed (which proved unthinkable to the understanding) with the motion of desire within
ourselves. We discover self-motion not in the thing but in ourselves. Yet the transition from law to explanation reveals even
more. It indicates that the so-called objective world is not best
understood through wholly objective terms. Laws are constantly
in danger of becoming meaningless abstractions unless they are
taken up into explanations. But explanations prove tautological.
The explanation does not preserve a distinction between force
and law. An explanation of lightning explains it by saying it is
an instance of the law of electicity (Werke 3:124; Miller, 94), and
justifies the law of electricity by saying that it is what explains
lightning. Explanation does not provide satisfaction by deepening
our understanding of nature. Instead, Hegel says, it satisfies us
for another reason:
The reason why explaining affords so much self-satisfaction is just because in it consciosuness is, so to speak,
communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself; although it seems to be busy with something else, it is in
fact occupied only with itself (Werke 3:133; Miller, 101).
Explanation shows the understanding that its interest lies
more in itself than in the thing explained. After all, it is not for
the sake of the magnet that we explain magnetism. An explanation is a translation of immediate perception into reflective subjectivity. Subjective awareness, we later learn, is characterized
by desire: “Self-consciousness is desire in general” (Werke 3:139;
Miller, 105). While the objective consciousness believed itself to
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be standing back from and not influencing what it observed, in
the stage of self-consciousness, the object is actively pursued in
order to be consumed, enslaved, worked upon, intellectually nullified or otherwise transformed to fit into the world as desired by
the self-consciousness.
Explanation, it turns out, is the pivot between observation
and desire, between consciousness and self-consciousness. Hegel
writes: “The Understanding’s explanation is primarily only a description of what self-consciousness is” (Werke: 3:133; Miller,
101). If self-consciousness is desire, then an explanation is “primarily only” a description of desire. And this is why it satisfies
us, because in the explanation we remake the event of force in
our own image, in the image of desire. The explanation does not
take us deeper into nature’s secret self, but deeper into our own
plans. If we consider the scientific program outlined by Francis
Bacon, we can see that it is explicitly aimed at power, at utility,
at manifesting desires. Bacon writes in the New Organon:
“Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing,
because ignorance of cause frustrates effect. For Nature is conquered only by obedience; and that which in thought is a cause,
is like a rule in practice” (New Organon I.3).3 For Bacon, the scientist does not observe the world simply, but explains the world.
Bacon says we only give an account of cause for the sake of practice. We explain the natural world in relation to human desire.
We can now return to the preface to apply what we have discovered about the relationship between explanation and desire.
In the preface, explanation plays a different but complimentary
3. Francis Bacon, New Organon in Selected Philosophical Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). What Bacon calls “human knowledge” here
is what Hegel calls explanation. For Hegel, true Knowing, das Wissen,
and its production, die Wissenschaft, Science, is something more than
the manifestation of desire. To borrow a formulation from Hegel’s favorite philosopher, Aristotle, Science is “desire fused with thinking.”
(Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA:
Focus, 2002) 1139b7.) Hegelian Science aims at the education of desire
through systematic recollection.
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role, it is what a literate audience expects from a dutiful author.
Prefaces, Hegel tells us, should explain why the author “wrote
the book” and how the book relates to other books past or present
“on the same subject.” A preface should give us just what we
need to know in order to use the book. Scientific explanations instrumentalize nature. Prefaces instrumentalize books. Both outline their subject-matter in seemingly objective language that
runs cover for subjective purposes.
Philosophical prefaces take what might otherwise be ownerless arguments and explain them, that is, they translate them into
the language of self-consciousness, the language of desire. The
customary preface frames the book with a candid statement by the
author that should translate her thinking from the terms of the field
of inquiry into the more subjective terms of her own intellectual
biography and the particular historical circumstances surrounding
it. The generally accepted opinion is that a preface should appeal
to a broad audience and make philosophical thinking more accessible. But Hegel argues it does just the opposite. Hegel writes:
Demanding and supplying these explanations passes readily enough as a concern with what is essential. Where
could the inner meaning of a philosophical work find
fuller expression than in its purposes [Zwecken] and results and how could these be more exactly known than by
distinguishing them from everything else the age brings
forth in this sphere? Yet when this acivity is taken for
more than the beginnings of cognition, when it is allowed
to pass for actual cognition, then it should be reckoned as
no more than a device for evading the real issue [die
Sache selbst], a way of creating an impression of hard
work and serious commitment to the problem, while actually sparing oneself of both (Werke 3:12-13; Miller, 2).
Hegel’s complaint here might seem unfair. Who has ever suggested that a preface was more than a beginning of cognition
(erkennen)? The preface is supposed to ease us in to the book,
not replace it. Is Hegel arguing that providing an explanation of
the purpose and circumstances of the book at the start actually
makes any further philosophical thinking impossible?
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If he is arguing this, then it is yet more strange that Hegel remarks in paragraph 16 that he will now give us a sketch of the
purpose of his book and distinguish his method from other ways
of doing philosophy. After pages of polemics against prefaces
and the culture that prefers them to the hard work of reading
whole books, Hegel seems to have gotten the venom out of his
system. He seems to reconcile himself to writing something like
the traditional preface he is criticizing, but this is only an appearance.4 I decided to translate this passage myself to try to capture
just how tentative Hegel’s language here is:
Considering that pointing toward a general picture
[Vorstellung], before any attempt at an exposition, makes
the latter easier to grasp, it is useful to hint at an approximation of [the exposition], at the same time taking the
opportunity to distance [the exposition] from certain
forms [of thought] whose habitual [use] is a hindrance
for philosophical knowing (My translation, Werke 3:22;
Miller, 9).5
If we look closely, Hegel avoids, above all, describing his
endeavor as an “explanation” and chooses instead to call it
“pointing toward a general picture” and “hinting at an approximation.” He does not suggest that the preface is a clarification
or that it is more clear than the exposition it prefaces. He emphasizes instead that it is more general and more rough. Hegel
admits that some preliminary sketch of a project may serve the
reader, and that distancing his approach from some other ap4. Miller, by translating Vorstellung as idea and also interposing a second idea from das Ungefähre, loads this sentence with one of the most
important words in the Hegelian lexicon—idea—which Hegel himself
uses consciously and systematically.
5. In der Rücksicht, daß die allgemeine Vorstellung, wenn sie dem, was
ein Versuch ihrer Ausführung ist, vorangeht, das Auffassen der letzteren
erleichtert, ist es dienlich, das Ungefähre derselben hier anzudeuten, in
der Absicht zugleich, bei dieser Gelegenheit einige Formen zu entfernen,
deren Gewohnheit ein Hindernis für das philosophische Erkennen ist.
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proaches may also serve the reader. The former is what replaces
the customary account of the author’s aim and the latter is what
replaces a historical account of other works in the field. What
Hegel says he will give us is more tentative, less personal and
less historical than the usual preface author’s statement of aims,
results and contexts. We learn nothing determinate about what
other books, past and present, this book intersects with and we
learn nothing of Hegel’s own Aha! experience that led to the
writing of this book.
If paragraphs 1 through 15 compile a series of problems with
the culture of prefaces, then paragraphs 16 through 37 give us a
sketch of the aim of Hegel’s book.6 Hegel, with a nod to the typically subjective mode of the preface, even begins paragraph 17
with a clear, first person claim: “In my view which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns
on grasping and expressing the true not only as substance, but
equally as subject” (Werke 3:22-23; Miller, 9-10).
I know of no other place where Hegel uses this construction
“according to my view.” Hegel presents the system here as if it
were his system, not simply the system. Normally, Hegel avoids
this. Hegel’s own personal view is not the issue. In the Phenomenology, for example, the perspective shifts back and forth between how things look to the moment of consciousness under
consideration and then how they look from the point of view of
the so-called Phenomenological Observer who stands at the end
and looks back, recollecting the shapes of knowing in relation
6. The paragraphs from 38 to 67, describe the “formal” (mathematical
and logical) methods from which Hegel distances his own method.
Paragraphs 38 to 52 deal in large part with “mathematical cognition”
as a paradigm for philosophy and paragraphs 53 to 67 deal with the sort
of argumentation common to the analytic understanding as the paradigm
for philosophy. Throughout, Hegel reiterates that his method is the “selfmovement of the Concept.” In the end (from paragraph 68 to 72), Hegel
returns to a consideration of the common sense view that demands prefaces and contrasts it with the universality of knowledge made possible
by a true system of philosophy.
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to each other.7 Neither of these positions are supposed to be
Hegel’s own.
Yet here in the preface, Hegel gives us a strange double
speak: it is his view (the word is Einsicht—literally, “insight”) it
is his insight but it can only be justified by the presentation itself,
not his assurances. I take Hegel to make himself appear right at
this moment in order to more fully sublimate himself to the work.
His view is that his view isn’t important. His insight is that the
thinking of the book must stand on its own. There is good precedent for this position, of course, Heraclitus begins one of his fragments “Listening not to me but to the Logos,” (Hermann Diels
and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. [Zurich:
Weidmann, 1985] B50), and Socrates issues a similar reminder
regularly; for example, in the Phaedo he says, “give little thought
to Socrates and much more to the truth” (Phaedo 91C).
Hegel’s preface, just when it seems to drop its critique of
prefaces and offer its own summary of aims, actually deepens the
attack. Hegel begins to expose the conceptual problem to which
the prefacing of books belongs: the problem of anticipating the
absolute. Anticipating the absolute avoids an encounter with the
Sache selbst, the real issue. The real issue here is not appearances
or material underlying apperances or even fixed intellectual
essences or forms, but movement, development, the meaningful
movements that reveal the wholeness of things. Anticipations are
fixed images, not the live unfolding of the subject mattter itself
on its own terms.
Part 2: The Problem with Propositions
Hegel argues in paragraph 23 that just as truth cannot be presented in a preface, it cannot even be expressed in ordinary sentences and propositions. Hegel begins paragraph 23 remarking
7. It is worth noting that this widely-used term “Phenomenological Observer” is not Hegel’s own but derives (as far as I can tell) from Findlay’s
commentary on the Phenomenology (cf. Miller, 507). Hegel himself signals the shift in perspective throughout his book with the first person
plural pronoun “we” or prepositional phrase “to us.”
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that the need to represent the absolute as subject has found expression in the following sentences: “God is the eternal, God is
the moral world order, God is love, and so on” (Werke 3:26;
Miller, 12). Before we get the details of the argument, Hegel’s
tone communicates a great deal. He rehearses several potent theological propositions in quick succession followed by “and so
on.” Hegel draws our attention to the fact that these are merely
words, words and more words, however hallowed their supposed
referents. Soon he will remind us that without a predicate, the
word “God” is “just meaningless sound” (Werke 3:27, Miller, 13).
Even the word “God” must get content from a predicate like
“eternal” or “love.” But then, if God gets all content and meaning
from the predicate, why not simply give the predicates without the
name, the meaningless sound? Hegel says this is what ancient
philosophers did with claims like “Being is” or “The One is.” The
reason this is not preferable, Hegel argues, is because here we have
no subject, no element of the sentence that is “reflected into itself.”
“Being is” leaves open the question of how being is, because it
leaves open the question of how being is related to itself such that
it can be at all. The predicate gives the content of the judgment, it
tells us what the judgment is, but the subject gives the judgment
form, it tells us how or in what way the content is. The content
“red” may be said equally of an imaginary unicorn, or a sensible
rubber ball or a rationally grasped living animal. In each case, the
redness has a different sort of being, it is in a different way.
Here a subject is not an individual or person, but rather what
makes a person a person—that is, “subject” names a kind of selfrelation. To give only the substance “Being” without the subject
“God” leaves a subject implied but outside consideration. This is
effectively what statements in mathematical physics do when they
give accounts of substance without any account of subject. What
kind of subject is “the universe” such that it can relate itself to itself
according to electron charges or gravity? The universe is not considered to be a subject, it is not self-aware or self-relating, not reflected into self. Nor is “Being” just as such. In both cases we are
merely describing indifferent elements alongside one another with
no inner life. As a result, God still lurks as the unstated ultimate
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | DAVIS
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subject, the way that the content relates to itself, how the content
has being at all.
“God is eternal,” on the other hand, manages to make a statement that reflects content (eternal) into a subject (God). This
seems to be substance becoming subject. But it is not. Hegel reminds us:
The subject is assumed as a fixed point to which, as support, the predicates are affixed by a movement belonging
sto the knower of this subject, and which is not regarded
as belonging to the fixed point itself; yet it is only
through this movement that the content could be represented as subject (Werke 3:27; Miller, 13).
The named subject, God, has been assumed as a fixed point
and the movement by which it acquires its content (eternity) belongs to “the knower” of the name. That is, the movement belongs the person who utters the sentence. The problem with
sentences, taken singly, is that the words in them must have fixed
designations to function. “Bring me the hammer” only “works”
if “hammer” is fixed enough to mean the tool I need. We have
pragmatic reasons for fixing the meaning of subjects and predicates in sentences. Yet if “God” is taken as a fixed point, then in
what way am I attributing eternity to God? That is a question for
you to ask me, not God. “God is eternal”, when I say it, is a statement of mine, not God’s. You ask me, what do you mean by eternal and I say “uncreated” or “having endless duration” or
“perpetual presence.” At any rate, the movement of knowing described in my sentence is my imposition, not the self-movement
of the grammatical subject, God. Ordinary language and predicate logic reflect only the subjective movement of knowers making connections, not the inner connections within the things
known. Again, this is perfectly acceptable for sentences like
“bring me the hammer.” But not for “God is Eternal.” With that
sentence, we meant to do something different. We meant to describe truth, not just the way things appear to us.
In a similar fashion to how God seemed to be lurking as the
hidden subject of the sentence “The universe is fourteen billion
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years old,” we discover that the ego, the “I,” is the hidden subject
of the sentence “God is eternal.” Sentences, taken as assertions
or propositions, foreground not the subject as such, self-relation,
but the finite subjectivity of the speaker.
Hegel tells us at the end of paragraph 23 that the proposition
offers, at best, an “anticipation” of the absolute. This may be obvious. Who claims that single sentences express the nature of
God or Being or the Absolute? But the problem of sentences like
“God is eternal” goes deeper:
This mere anticipation that the Absolute is Subject is not
only not the actuality of this concept, it makes this [actuality] impossible; for it sets [the subject] as a fixed
point, when it is self-movement (Werke 3:27; Miller, 13).
Sentences not only fail to capture the self-relation of self-relating beings, they cover this actuality over with an illusion of
fixed categorial stability. Hearkening to the grammar of sentences
we would never catch sight of the absolute.
So we have a problem: the ordinary way language functions
is too fixed, too rigid, to mirror the self-moving soul, self-moving
nature or a self-moving God. We cannot fix this problem with
new names or new definitions or new observations about the
properties of matter. Philosophical analysis of language and research in the physical sciences, two popular models for discovering truth in the 20th century, are both barred from truth
methodologically, according to Hegel, because they have no
method by which to realize the self-movement of the Concept.
Both rely, in fact, on the now common ontological assumption
that everything remains at rest until something else moves it.8 As
a result, the terms and objects we describe lie indifferently along
side one another and lack the account of self-movement that
would link them together.
The point of these remarks on the subjectivity of propositions
becomes clear in the following paragraph. Hegel begins:
8. See Hobbes (Leviathan, Chap. ii) for a clear formulation of this position.
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Among the various consequences that follow from what
has just been said, this one in particular can be stressed,
that knowlege is only actual, and can only be expounded,
as Science or as system; and furthermore, that a so-called
basic proposition or principle of philosophy, if true is also
false, just because it is only a principle (Werke 3:27;
Miller, 13).
The remedy to the conceptual rigor mortis imposed by anticipations of the absolute in propositions is what Hegel calls “system.” In a system, the system itself becomes the subject instead
of the speaker or writer. I think we are familiar with this from
reading books. When one reads, the book as a whole is the measure of each sentence, the testing ground of each claim. Neither
our own personal preferences nor those of the author are to be
privileged over the work taken as a whole. This, we might say, is
systematic or scientific reading in Hegel’s sense of those terms.
Our trust is not in individual words, propositions, intentions, mental states, discourses or deep grammars, but rather in the method
that self-organizes into a whole, what Hegel, elsewhere in the
preface, calls “the self-moving Concept” or “the labor of the negative.” Truth is not an attribute of sentences but of method.
In paragraph 61 of the Preface, Hegel notes that philosophy
is so difficult to read because philosophical speech does not fix
the meaning of terms in place like ordinary, pragmatic speech
does. Some find this pretentious or intentionally obscure, but
Hegel insists that it is a necessary consequence of writing that
tries to reflect the movement of thinking itself. Thinking is much
more mobile than ordinary language conveys. Philosophical sentences (including what Hegel calls “speculative” propositions)
encourage a “floating center” of meaning that Hegel compares
to the rhythm that emerges from the conflict between accent and
meter found in reading lines of classical poetry.9
9. In paragraph 62, Hegel gives two examples of speculative propositions: “God is being” and “the actual is the universal.” In each of these,
the predicate is a self-relating subject in its own right. Predicates usually
give determinacy. A second subject in the predicate position produces
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To read Hegel we accustom ourselves to the rhythm of thinking instead of passing judgment on each and every statement in
isolation. We cannot make substance subject through a subjective
connection (as langauge and logic suggest). Substance must become subject through itself, not just for us. When we read a book,
the meaning of the whole emerges from the movement of the
book’s parts. We can assert a connection between any two parts,
but the whole might suggest another arrangement.
Prefatory explanations seem to introduce us to a work but
they actually hold us apart from it. Propositions seem to allow
us to describe the qualities and characteristics of the absolute but
actually obscure the absolute from view. Neither prefaces nor
sentences qualify as presentations of truth. This is why we need
a system. A system is not some rigid architectonic imposed from
outside, that is what Hegel calls “formalism” and argues against
throughout most of the preface. System in Hegel’s sense is nothing but self-relating method and this is perhaps best understood
as analogous to the growth and development of a living organism.
System is the complete self-elaboration of something as it runs
through the whole course of its own movement. For Hegel, the
System is self-completing, it is thinking thinking itself.
Conclusion: The Need for System
By the end of the preface, Hegel’s doubts about prefaces return.
In paragraph 70 he describes the average, common sense reader
who “in order to keep up with the times, and with advances in
philosophy” reads reviews and prefaces and first paragraphs of
new philosophical books. He follows this by insisting that
[t]rue thoughts and scientific insight are only to be won
through the labor of the Concept. Only the Concept can
an expansion of thinking and a dizzying effect. Instead of contending
with one subject in need of determinacy, we now have two reciprocally
mobile subjects, each orbiting around the other in turn. The two subjects
illuminate one another not by placing new determinate limits (as a predicate might) but rather by negating the conventional limits present in
normal usage of each subject. Thus philosophical writing has to “be read
over and over before it can be understood” (Werke 3:60; Miller, 39).
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produce the universality of knowledge [die Allgemenheit
des Wissens] which is neither common vagueness nor the
inadequacy of ordinary common sense but a fully developed, perfected knowing; not the uncommon universality
of a reason whose talents have been ruined by indolence
and the conceit of genius, but a truth ripened to its properly matured form so as to be capable of being the property of all self-conscious Reason (Werke 3:65; Miller, 43).
This passage reveals Hegel’s hope for his new work, the Phenomenology of Spirit. He hopes that this book, by introducing us
to thinking’s self-development, to the labor of the self-moving
Concept, will inaugurate the universality of knowledge. “Universality” here translates the German word Allgemeinheit, which literally means “all-togetherness” and calls to mind both the
all-togetherness of the things known and the all-togethernness of
the knowers that know them. This universal knoweldge to be
shared by all human beings is not the lowest common denominator, it is not a truth so vague and prosaic that everyone can
agree to it, nor is it the universality of an abstraction derived by
one person of genius and accepted on authority by others.
For Hegel, the turn toward science, system and philosophy
is a turn away from a private sort of thinking on offer in prefaces,
explanations and propositions. Philosophy turns away from these
and toward the act of thinking itself, the rhythm of thinking that
we all experience. Hegel argues that such a thinking held in common can only be the product of the self-elaboration of thinking,
thinking unfolding itself on its own terms. This amounts to losing
ourselves in thinking itself which will turn out to be our innermost self, though at first it feels like we are abandoning the self
we know. This means that to raise ourselves to the universality
of knowledge, we must, as Hegel says, “lose ourselves in the exposition” (Werke 3:18; Miller, 6).
Hegel contrasts this self-discovery through self-loss with the
prefatory explanation, which “grasps after an Other yet remains
much more preoccupied with itself” (My translation, Werke 3:13;
Miller, 3). Prefaces offer a poignant example of writing that
seems to make knowledge common or universal, but really does
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the opposite. Prefaces turn truth into a subjective possession of
the author. The truth of their work is recast in the contingent
terms of their personal aims and historical context. This is the
ironic reversal of explanation that recurs in “Force and the Understanding.” Explanations appear to be about something else,
but are really narcissistic affairs.
The view Hegel opposes here can be found in many of his
contemporaries. As Schelling puts it in the fifth of the Philosophical Letters,
Every system bears the stamp of individuality on the face
of it because no system can be completed otherwise than
practically, that is, subjectively. The more closely a philosophy approaches its system, the more essentially freedom and individuality partake of it and the less it can
claim universal validity [Allgemeingültigkeit].10
This, Schelling goes on to say, is why there will always be
conflict between multiple opposed systems of dogmatism and criticism and why no system of philosophy will ever be complete.
Hegel might agree that this assertion of subjectivity can indeed be seen in philosophical writings, but to attend to it over the
argument is to miss the common activity of thinking that brings
us together with each other and with the thinkers of the past.
In a lecture on Schelling’s philosophy given in 1826, Hegel
remarks that
[s]ince the presupposition of philosophy [for Schelling] is
that the subject has an immediate intuition of this identity
of the subjective and the objective, philosophy thus appears
as an artistic talent or genius in individuals that comes only
to “Sunday’s children.” By its very nature, however, philosophy can become universal, for its soil is thinking, the universal, and that is the very thing that makes us all human.11
10. F. W. J. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, trans.
Fritz Marti (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 170-71, and
the statement in the following paragraph appears on page 172.
11. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 3, trans.
Robert F. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 260-61.
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This recalls us to paragraph 70 in the preface to the Phenomenology where Hegel has opposed philosophy as genius
with philosophy as the universality of knowledge. For Hegel, a
properly immanent philosophical system does not, as Schelling
argues, “bear the stamp of individuality.” Isolated propositions
do, prefaces do, explanations do, but a system is precisely the
form of expression that no longer bears the stamp of individuality. A system turns us toward the activity of development itself,
not its intermittent results. As adults we differ in many ways but
we share a common developmental path of growth in body and
soul from infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood that
points toward a single activity of self-unfolding human being.
For example, height may differ from person to person, but that
we grow taller and at some point stop, this is something we all
share. Hegel is not claiming that all opinions will be shared in
some utopia of same-mindedness, but rather that the philosophical system aims to make access to knowing universal, that is, it
makes access to speculative or philosophical thinking universal.
Because it begins with what is immediate and proceeds step by
step (or negation by negation), Hegel’s system demands not talent, not genius, but patience. By contrast, anticipations of the
absolute appeal to our laziness and keep philosophy proper as a
guarded activity for the few.
In Plato’s Meno, Meno gets frustrated. He accuses Socrates
of paralyzing him and then he tries to paralyze Socrates. He asserts that if we don’t know something already, we won’t recognize it even if we do stumble across it. Meno assumes, of course,
that the soul is not immortal and does not know all things already.
As a result, knowledge should become impossible. This impasse
contains the seed of recollection within it, but what Meno has in
mind is a kind of learning that, to use Schelling’s words, always
“bears the stamp of individuality.” What Meno has in mind is not
knowledge, but opinion.
In a similar fashion, Hegel indicates that a need for prefaces
casts doubt upon the possibility of knowledge as such, because
this need suggests that all learning requires personal and historical qualifiers. Accordingly, philosophy becomes “unconscious
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memoir” to use Nietzsche’s words.12 Hegel’s response is that we
need a self-unfolding system. While this may sound imposing
and abstract, what he has in mind is not far from what Socrates
proposes to Meno. Socrates even hints at the possiblity of the
universality of knowledge, just as Hegel does, when he says to
Meno:
For, nature as a whole being akin [syngenous] and the
soul having learned all things, nothing prevents someone,
once he has recollected just one thing—what human beings call “learning”—to discover all else if he is courageous and doesn’t grow weary in the search (Meno 81d).
According to Hegel, we need a system of philosophy because
without it our thinking falls on narcissistic habits, it becomes too
self-involved to be self-expressing. We need a system of philosophy because we need confidence in a whole that will gather up
all the movements of thinking so that we can engage thinking
courageously, even when we seem to be making mistakes. We
need a system of philosophy so that truth isn’t measured by each
proposition or by each person in a different way and so that each
of us has a fair shot at knowing something together in common.
Hegel’s preface exposes the tendancies that seem to advance universal knowledge but actually incline us against the common pursuit of truth.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman
(New York: Vintage, 1989), §6: “Gradually it has become clear to me
what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”
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Alcibiades’s Image of Socrates
in the Symposium
Alan Pichanick
The problem of akrasia is manifested in a famously perplexing
report from Alcibiades, who in describing his conversations with
Socrates presents a phenomenon that we have difficulty accounting for: he claims that when he converses with Socrates he is persuaded that Socrates is right, but that once he leaves his presence
he returns to his old ways of life that Socrates had questioned.
Alcibiades exemplifies the weakness of will (or lack of control)
to listen to what one knows to be rationally defensible, to accept
what is true and good, and to follow it in one’s life. It is odd that
we see human beings do this, even (or especially?) when it is ourselves. In this essay, I would like to explore why Plato uses this
particular character, Alcibiades, to describe this phenomenon in
the Symposium. I would like to claim that an investigation into
the akrasia of Alcibiades is necessary in order to understand Socratic philosophy itself.
Alcibiades is first of all a disrupter. He drunkenly enters a
party where the participants had agreed not to drink while saying
their praises to the divine Eros. Nor does he end up giving a
speech glorifying Eros, as the other participants have done. It is
rumored that he comes to the party having just committed a great
act of profanation of what the city holds most sacred. This
should remind us that the party itself is taking place against the
background of the Peloponnesian War and Alcibiades had a less
than wholesome role as a leader of the Athenians. Alcibiades
changed sides, more than once, and was instrumental before that
Alan Pichanick teaches in the Augustine and Culture Seminar Program
at Villanova University. This lecture was first delivered to the Society for
Ancient Greek Philosophy at Fordham University in October, 2010.
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in persuading the crowd of Athens to undertake the disastrous
venture to Sicily. Thucydides claims they had an overwhelming
eros for this expedition. One might go so far as to say that they
were drunk on their own ambition.
The drunk man thus enters and is led by those present to sit
between Socrates and Agathon. Earlier Socrates had said that
Dionysus, the god of wine, would be the judge “between” him
and Agathon. Perhaps it is this drunken man, sitting between
Socrates and Agathon, who stands in for Dionysus himself. Alcibiades is so drunk that he does not at first see Socrates. Then
when he does see him, he is surprised to see Socrates seated there.
Socrates should be sitting by Aristophanes, according to Alcibiades. All of this is strange, and yet it is not without a sense that
hopefully will become clear.
It is Socrates who claims to be a lover of Alcibiades first
(213c-d), prompting us, the readers, to ask who is the lover of
whom. But it is Alcibiades who is next in line in the speaking
order due to the newly disrupted seating arrangement. He claims
that he simply cannot give a speech in praise of Eros in the presence of Socrates, for Socrates would not tolerate any human
being or god being praised while he is around (214c-d). This of
course would be great hubris, which quickly becomes the theme
of Alcibiades’s ensuing remarks. But why does Alcibiades see
such hubris in Socrates? Doesn’t such a statement contradict what
we readers have seen in the dialogue prior to Alcibiades’s arrival?
Have we not seen Socrates listen to several other speeches before
Alcibiades showed up? So we must ask: where is Socrates’s
hubris manifested? Socrates doesn’t disagree, but tells Alcibiades
only to keep quiet about what he just said. Alcibiades claims, several times, that he will tell the truth and this is the very purpose
of his “images”, though he admits he is drunk. The drunken man
is at least one paradigmatic instance of the akratic man, in opposition to the moderate (sophron) man. So perhaps the truth we
should be interested in concerns what Alcibiades says and shows
about his own soul.
But with that, Alcibiades’s speech about Socrates begins,
making two comparisons between Socrates and the statues of
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Silenus and between Socrates and the satyr Marsyas. The first
one is as follows:
I say that he is very like a statue of Silenus you see sitting
in the statue shops, the ones the craftsmen make with
pipes or an aulos in their hands, and when you open them
up they are shown to have images of the gods inside
(215a-c).
This first image—the statue of Silenus—is very, very strange.
Of course it highlights the ugly outside of Socrates that hides
Socrates’s interior, an interior that Alcibiades has somehow
glimpsed. Silenus statues were odd—think of a balding man with
a snub nose and bulging eyes; now add ears, tails, and hooves of
horses, and give him an erection. (One can see why Alcibiades
might say that we think he is out for laughs rather than truth.)
But additionally, these strange creatures are supposedly lustful
and follow Dionysus around.
There is also something odd about Alcibiades’s very use of
an image of a statue. Statues are themselves images, not originals. So the image he is describing is about images that point to
something else. But on top of that, the exterior of this image—
the statue of Silenus—is not the end of the story. There is an interior to this statue—this image—which holds “Images (!) of
gods”. Alcibiades thus presents an image describing an image
containing images! Later on, Alcibiades will say that not only
Socrates, but Socrates’s speeches are like these statues of Silenus.
But by now we should be wondering if Alcibiades’s own speech
is similar to these statues of Silenus. What is the exterior of his
speech? What happens when we open it: what are the images
within? And, most importantly, does Alcibiades himself know
what his own images within point to?
The first image does not sit by itself, however. The second
image, a comparison to Marsyas, highlights three elements, a
comparison in form, flute playing, and hubris:
And I say that he is like the satyr Marsyas. Now I don’t
suppose, Socrates, that you yourself would dispute that
you are like them in form. As for how you are like them
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in other respects too, listen to what’s next. You are
hubristic. Or aren’t you? If you don’t agree, I will provide
witnesses. Well aren’t you an aulos player? And a far
more amazing one than Marsyas. For he enchants people
with an instrument, through the power of his mouth . . .
his music, whether a good aulos player plays it or some
no good-aulos girl, it alone makes the audience possessed, and makes clear which of them have need of the
gods and of initiation rites, for it is divine. But you so far
surpass him that you do the same thing without an instrument, with words alone (215b-d).
The element I would like to highlight in Alcibiades’s image
he presents here is the connection he must perceive between
Socrates’s hubris and Socrates’s aulos playing, the analogue for
Socrates’s words and the effect they have on listeners.
Socrates’s speeches have a powerful hold on Alcibiades. They
are enchanting, possessing, stunning, and divine. Not only that,
Socrates’s power is greater than the satyr’s. He needs no instrument to accomplish his divine enchantment of his listeners. His
is accomplished by his human power of speech alone. If this
was not hubristic enough, one might suppose, it is Socrates’s
speeches, to the exclusion of all other speeches—Alcibiades
claims—that informs one who is in need of the gods. Are the
claims in this speech not merely charges of hubris, but charges
of impiety, compatible with the charges that Socrates faces
when he is on trial for his life? Yet these very charges are being
launched against Socrates by a man whose guilt in the Apology
he shared by association. That is, it should strike us as odd that
in the Symposium we see Alcibiades—of all people—attack
Socrates for anything that resembles impiety. It is at this point
that we are compelled to ask how Socrates can be defended
against this charge. And how does Alcibiades’s future career
not implicate Socrates? What in the Symposium answers this
question?
I think it is no coincidence that it is this speech of Alcibiades, regarding the power of Socrates’s words, that leads finally
to his confession of his akrasia:
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Even now I know myself that if I were willing to listen,
I’d not be able to tough it out, but the same thing would
happen to me. For he forces me to agree that though I
am very much wanting I still do not take care of myself
but instead manage the affairs of the Athenians. So I
force myself to plug my ears and run away from him, as
from the Sirens, so I do net end up growing old sitting
there at his side.
And he’s the only person before whom I’ve experienced something one would think I didn’t have in me:
being at all ashamed. He is the only one who has ever
made me feel ashamed. For I admit that I am unable to
argue that it is not necessary to do what he bids me to do.
But whenever I leave him, I am overcome by the honor
which comes from the many. So I go on the run and flee
him, and when I see him, I am ashamed because of the
things I’d agreed with him. There have been many times
when I would have been glad to no longer see him among
the living, but if this were to happen, I know well that
I’d be far more upset. So I just don’t know what to do
with this man (216a-c).
Alcibiades cannot live up to what he “knows” is right. If
the popular conception of akrasia were correct, we would say
that when Alcibiades leaves Socrates’s presence he is overcome by pleasures. But this can’t be right, according to
Socrates in the Protagoras. Alcibiades himself doesn’t seem to
be couching the problem in pleasure language either. It is honor
that pulls him away from what he knows. And it is shame in
Socrates’s presence that brings him back to himself again. If
indeed we want to compare the pleasures associated with pursuing honor from others and pursuing sex, then we must ask
how to compare the desires associated with them—sexual desire and desire for recognition or desire for power, for example.
This attention to kinds of desires might necessitate a division
of the soul, similar to what is carried out in Book III of the Republic and in the Phaedrus. In the Symposium, the very first
speech given at the party, by Phaedrus, placed great emphasis
on feeling shame before one’s beloved. So perhaps we see Al-
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cibiades here enacting the very first insight that is given to us
by the very first speechmaker.
Although it is Socrates who claims to be the lover of Alcibiades first, if Phaedrus is right, it is clearly Alcibiades who is
madly, exclusively in love with Socrates. Notice how this fits
with the language of force and compulsion that Alcibiades uses
in his speech confessing his akrasia: “if I were willing,” “I’d not
be able,” “he forces me,” “I force myself,” and of course “I am
overcome.” Who else but Socrates has achieved this mastery over
Alcibiades? But notice—and this I think is what Phaedrus does
not see, among other things, in his account—how self-aware Alcibiades seems in his description of his own experience, his own
psychic conflict.
Alcibiades claims to know what the right course of action
is. But he also knows himself that he can’t stick to it, and knows
what the result will be emotionally when he talks with Socrates
again. Yet that doesn’t deter him from his old way of life: his
ambition is simply too strong. Alcibiades is thus interesting to
us because he has (some) self-knowledge and knowledge of others, but rather than being combined with a desire for pleasure, it
is combined with a desire for honor that brings about his akratic
state. The primary players that have now emerged are selfknowledge and ambition and their conjunction in the akrasia of
Alcibiades. If we continue with Alcibiades’s speech, we see that
Socrates himself—his self-knowledge and his hubris—conjoin
in a way that is not akratic, but in a way that is both erotic and
moderate, a conjunction that seems absurd for the rest of us—
only possible if we are divided against ourselves, in perpetual
conflict. But for Socrates this conflict vanishes because both his
erotic condition and his moderation turn out to be deeply connected to his pursuit of self-knowledge, oriented by knowledge
of the whole itself. It is the simultaneous search for the Good
and the nature of the soul that underlies both Socratic eros and
moderation.
Alcibiades describes Socrates’s interior condition as having
moderation (sophrosune), which hides underneath the exterior
hubris (216c-d). What then does Plato want us to think about
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what Alcibiades claims to have glimpsed inside of Socrates? Has
he obtained a genuine insight? How much of this insight speaks
the truth about Socrates, his claimed intention? Or—how much
of what Alcibiades sees on the inside describes Alcibiades himself—is it deeply rooted in his own psychic conflict?
Recall that Socrates is the only person in front of whom Alcibiades has ever felt ashamed. According to Phaedrus’ speech
about love this must arise from the lover-beloved relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates. But should we not also wonder
why Alcibiades never feels shame in front of anyone else? And
what about Socrates? Does he ever feel ashamed? I think not. If
he has moderation it seems not to do with shame. In the
Charmides, the dialogue about sophrosune, Socrates throws
Homer at young Charmides, reminding him that shame is no
companion for one who is needy. The most needful thing must
be eros. So for the Socratic, shame and eros get pulled apart.
This is why Socrates looks hubristic on the outside. He is
shamelessly beyond the view of others. He is, we might say, borrowing Plato’s favorite word, atopos (placeless, unlocated, disoriented). Or at least his topos is not the city in the same way that
it is for the rest of us. (It’s related here that Socrates is no fan of
crowds.) Alcibiades thus appears more and more like an alter-ego
to Socrates. Alcibiades is motivated by shame and honor, while
Socrates is not. Alcibiades desires to please the crowd, whereas
Socrates sees that as an impediment to desiring wisdom and healing the soul. In Alcibiades I, at the climax of the dialogue, Socrates
suggests to a much younger and sober Alcibiades that he needs to
stop looking outward to the things of the body, to his belongings
and to the city, and to look inward. In this conversation he not
only couples self-knowledge with moderation (131a), but also
claims that he himself—Socrates—is the only one who ever truly
loved Alcibiades, for he loved him for his soul and not his body,
his possessions, his power, or anything else external to him (131e132a). He fears Alcibiades’s corruption by the city (132a) and he
asks Alcibiades how the “self itself” (129b) could be discovered,
encouraging Alcibiades to compare the discovery of his own
thinking to an eye looking into a mirror, seeing itself (133a).
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So, my friend Alcibiades, if a soul is to know itself, it
must look into a soul, and particularly into that region of
it in which the excellence of the soul, wisdom, resides,
and to anything else that this is similar to? . . . It seems
so to me Socrates (133b).
The question for us is: does Alcibiades succeed in doing this?
We know he has described looking into Socrates, and seeing his
sophrosune within. He does not claim to see wisdom there. But
Socrates says that there might be something similar to wisdom in
the other person’s soul that can bring about self-knowledge in Alcibiades. I think this similar thing is moderation, which for
Socrates is tied up with his erotic nature. Because for Socrates,
moderation properly understood is knowledge of the whole.
Sophrosune is not just restraining desires or showing endurance—
two states that could accompany a completely unerotic individual.
Rather sophrosune is linked to understanding one’s place—one’s
topos. The erotic ascent Socrates describes, through Diotima, can
be seen actually as a description of Socrates orienting us. So on
this account, his place (topos) is not in reference to the city, but in
reference to the beautiful itself. We must understand where we are
in this ascent to the beautiful, and how it provides the context for
our desires, if we are to understand ourselves.
This would certainly look hubristic from the outside, especially to Alcibiades. For Socrates seems to be teaching an ascent
past the human constraints of the human. And this ascent might
even support his refusal to sleep with Alcibiades. What a horrible
offence! But what does Alcibiades see? Has he not shown selfawareness of his own disorientation? Alcibiades is really an amalgamation of two people: the one who exists in the presence of
Socrates and the one who exists in the presence of the crowd.
Both these identities center around Alcibiades’s desire for control.
He seeks to master and seduce the Athenians and he seeks to flee
from what he experiences as mastery and seduction by Socrates.
This, I would say, manifests in Alcibiades’s symptom: his akrasia. There is clearly a kernel of truth in his symptom. The occasion for Alcibiades’s accusations against Socrates are a discussion
of love, and he reports a failed seduction. Socrates can really
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come off looking like he has abused Alcibiades, and he might appear to be simply not that interested in sex.
But this kernel of truth is just a kernel. The bigger truth that
needs to come into view both for Alcibiades and for us—is that
Alcibiades sees Socrates in a certain way because of this rejection, and has not yet understood Socrates. In fact, the charges he
has launched against Socrates—Socrates as a hubristic seducer—
may indeed be accusations that are actually targeted at himself.
But he is unable to acknowledge these self-accusations, and so
he must repudiate Socrates, both by projecting the hubris, seducing power, and desire for control he sees in himself outward at
Socrates, and by placing Socrates in the superhuman, unattainable realm, which will prevent him ever coming into real contact
with Socrates, contact for which he showed potential as a
youth—the dialogue that takes place between two souls. Just as
Charmides was unable to strip his soul bare for Socrates, Alcibiades is unable to look at Socrates and see his real self reflected.
So the dialogue with Alcibiades in Alcibiades I failed. When the
young Alcibiades agreed not to follow his ambition and pursue
self-knowledge, this agreement only took place on the rational
plane. When the older, drunk, uninhibited Alcibiades “disrupts”
the party, it is the conflicted and corrupted Alcibiades we see who
has not incorporated Socrates’s teaching. He has described looking within Socrates, but he has not understood that the mirror has
shown himself, his projected image, back to him. He is thus still
disoriented.
The new orientation Socrates through Diotima is attempting
to teach here thus must take aim at the non-cognitive part of us,
in order to educate and heal the soul. If this were successful on
Alcibiades, he should come to have self-knowledge—in a more
complete sense of the term. This must begin, in Alcibiades’s case,
by getting past his desire for mastery. The desire to rule others
and to possess others, which is a vital element in his pursuit of
Socrates and his rejection from him, is what prevents him from
seeing others and thus seeing himself. Alcibiades’s words about
seeing images are right. But underneath his images are a lust for
power that must be broken. The model of acquisition, of posses-
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sion, is a potentially misleading and potentially disastrous image
for the desire for wisdom. Even the image of “knowledge ruling”,
the one that is used in the Protagoras, might not be the best
image. Rather, Alcibiades has to learn to “see” the other, and in
this way begin his ascent. If that happens he will see the hidden
moderation and self-knowledge inside. Of course we know that
this does not happen with Alcibiades. But his failure then should
instruct us to, as Socrates says “take care of ourselves” and pay
attention to our internal disruptions and conflicts. They are the
beginning points.
In closing, I would like to return to the seating arrangement.
Recall that when Alcibiades disrupts he is placed between
Socrates and Agathon, the tragic poet who is perhaps good in his
appearance only, in his name. If Alcibiades is indeed the judge
(as Dionysus) between these two, then perhaps the real enemy of
philosophy—represented by Socrates—is to be found in the
tragic poet’s speech. Agathon’s account of love can’t stand up to
Socrates’s questions, and its theme is human, all too human.
Agathon seems not to have paid attention to what Eryximachus
and Aristophanes introduced to the discussion—an orientation to
what is beyond my powers if I were a rational, purely cognitive
being. To think of myself this way is to lack self-knowledge. To
think the structure of the world, and my desires and wants, are
transparent to me (taking into account this purely rational picture
of what it is to be minded) might even be hubris. Hubris on the
outside and the inside! Alcibiades should thus be able to judge
from his own psychic conflict, his akrasia, that Agathon’s account of love is an incoherent, unsatisfactory story. But this takes
a new seeing. For there is no room for Dionysus in Agathon’s account. What Alcibiades does not see—what he never comes to
see—is a place for Dionysus in the speech he never hears from
Socrates. It is left to us to understand what this place is.
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The Night Watchmen; or,
By the Dawn’s Early Light
Eric Salem
The Laws is a very strange book—it is strange even by Platonic-dialogue standards. Its setting is strange: all the other
dialogues are set in and around Athens; this one takes place
on the distant island of Crete. Its cast of characters is also
strange: a mysterious, unnamed, elderly stranger from
Athens speaks with a Cretan (Kleinias) and a Spartan
(Megillus), two old men who have had almost no contact
with philosophy or its evil twin, sophistry. And though the
subject matter of the dialogue is in a certain sense familiar—as in the Republic, the talk is about a well-ordered city,
and after a certain point the old men set about constructing
a “city in speech”—the manner in which that subject is
treated is very strange indeed (702d).1 The Laws is not only
huge—longer by far than any other dialogue—but its structure is positively labyrinthine. The Republic may be hard to
follow in spots, but the attentive reader always knows
where he is; orientation is not an issue. The Laws, by contrast, is full of passages that cry out for the most basic sort
Eric Salem is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This essay
was first published in Ramify 5.1 (2015): 1-19, and is reprinted here
by permission.
1. All quotations from the Laws are from Thomas Pangle’s translation
of Plato, The Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); quotations from the Republic come from the Allan Bloom’s translation of
Plato, The Republic (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
of explication: sudden transitions and arguments cut off
in mid-development, unexpected turns and apparent dead
ends, are nearly the norm.2
One of the most surprising of these turns—and the one I
will focus on here—comes near the end of Book X. The immediate question is what to do with young men who are naturally
just but openly impious; the solution the stranger proposes is to
imprison them “for no less than five years” in a place called the
Moderation Tank and have them meet regularly with the members of the Nocturnal Council “for the purposes of admonition
and the salvation of the soul” (909a). What is strange here—to
begin with—is the sudden introduction of a new political institution. The Athenian has already treated the offices and institutions of the city at length in Book VI: there we get accounts of
the terms, duties and means of choosing the Guardians of the
Laws, the members of the Council, the Field, City and Market
Regulators, the Generals and Priests, and so on—but no mention
is made of a Nocturnal Council (753b-756e; 758a-766d). We
might at first be tempted to think that what the stranger is introducing in Book X is not a new institution or office but an ad hoc
solution to an occasional problem. Yet, by the end of Book XII,
the Nocturnal Council is being called the chief “safeguard of
our regime and laws” (960e); in fact it is now called “the Nocturnal Council of Rulers” (968a). By the end of the Laws, the
Council has become, in some sense and for some reason, the
chief institution, the ruling source (arche) of Magnesia, the city
that Kleinias is tasked with founding.
What are we to make of the stranger’s alteration or
emendation of his own act of founding, his engagement in
what one might call self-innovation? What in the argument
or action of the Laws in Books I-X has made the introduction
of the Nocturnal Council necessary? And what light does
2. The most glaring example comes between Books II and III. The subject
of Book II is education and music; we are led by the end of the book to
expect a discussion of gymnastic in Book III, but instead get a capsule history of the world. Is that history a stand-in for gymnastic? We are not told.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | SALEM
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its introduction shed on the Laws as a whole? To address
these questions we will need to look closely at all the tasks
ultimately assigned to the Nocturnal Council; we will also
need to reflect on the way the Council changes shape over
the course of Books X and XII. But to get started we might
want to ask a more basic question. The Athenian stranger’s
introduction of the Nocturnal Council in Book X—and, for
that matter, Book X itself—presupposes the existence of impiety in some portion of the citizenry of Magnesia; it presupposes that impiety is a problem that must be reckoned with.
Yet piety seems to infuse the whole life of the city and to
give shape to its very topography. As the city in speech is
being founded in Book IV, the very first speeches addressed
to future citizens virtually identify goodness with reverence
for things divine; the Olympian gods top the list (716a717b). The preludes to the laws elaborated in Book V likewise underscore the importance of the gods, as does the
division there of city and countryside into twelve sectors,
each assigned to a different god (726a-727e; 738b-738e;
745b-e; also 771b-d). By the time we get to Book VIII, the
role of the gods and worship in civic life has grown even
larger. We learn that there will not only be twelve monthly
festivals, each dedicated to one of the Olympian gods; there
will also be daily sacrifices: “Let there be three hundred
sixty-five without any omissions, so that there will always
be at least one magistrate performing a sacrifice to some god
or demon, on behalf of the city, the people, and their possessions” (828a-d). If the whole city of Magnesia is engaged
in a daily worship of the gods, if every citizen leads a hallowed life, surrounded by altars and temples, how is it that
impiety becomes, how is it that it can become, a problem
large enough to need dealing with?
The answer, I think, must be that impiety arises naturally,
spontaneously, in the souls of some young men. In the case
of Magnesia, the disease seems unlikely to be of foreign origin, since great efforts have been made to isolate the city
from irregular external contact. The city itself is at a signif-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
icant remove from the sea, and its topography has been
arranged, not only to affirm the Olympian gods, but to seal
off the city: the artisan class (which consists exclusively of
foreigners) is forced to live in a kind of extra-urban ghetto,
and contact between it and the citizen body is kept to an absolute minimum (704a-705b; 848e; 850b-c). Apparently
rearing the young in a piety-infused atmosphere and keeping
them away from the sort of pre-Socratic materialism the
Athenian uses to shock and stir the Cretan Kleinias is not
enough to curb the insolent among them: impiety will out
(885e-887c; 888e-890e).
Nor, for that matter, is it clear that we are meant to condemn outright all kinds of impiety in the young. In fact, the
stranger draws a sharp distinction between two basic types.
In one case, the impious “in addition to not believing in the
gods or believing them to be careless, or appeasable, become like beasts”; they live without restraint, “hold human
beings in contempt,” and attempt to take advantage of their
supposed superiority to others by becoming diviners, magicians, tyrants, demagogues and sophists (905d-e; 909ab). The punishment for these men is unrelievedly harsh, at
least from the point of view of their fellow citizens: they
are condemned to live in total isolation, and after death their
bodies are to be cast out beyond the borders of the country,
unburied (909b-c).3 In the other case-the case mentioned
earlier-the impious are naturally just: they hate bad men, are
disgusted by injustice and seek the company of the just
(908b-c). Insofar as honesty and justice go together, their
chief fault seems to arise from their virtue: “full of frankness” and unable to believe in the gods themselves, they go
about the city making fun of gods, sacrifices, and oaths
(908d). The young man who belongs to this group must be
stopped because “if he didn’t get a judicial penalty” he
3. Whether a committed atheist would care what happens to his body
after death or mind living (at the city’s expense) in isolation from the
fellow citizens he regards with contempt is another question.
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“would perhaps make others like himself” (908d). Still, he
does not sound bad—in fact, to repeat, he hates the bad and
is “without bad anger and character” (908e).4
What will five years in the Moderation Tank do to him
and for him? What exactly is the task of the Nocturnal
Council in the case of such a young man? We are not told
much, only that moderation is the goal and admonition the
means. One possibility, of course, is that the proper work
of the Council is to browbeat the young atheist until he accepts the traditional or conventional view of the gods. But
five years is a long time and a lot of admonishing, and so
perhaps admonition (nouthetesis) should be taken literally
here: not as browbeating but as setting (tithemi) the intellect
or intelligence (nous) in order. After all, lack of intelligence
(a-noia) is the condition from which this type of young atheist is said to suffer (908e). In other words, perhaps we are
to imagine the young man being forced to spend five years
in the company of the Council reflecting on divine matters
until he either accepts some version of the natural theology
articulated in Book X or, recognizing his ignorance about
such matters, learns to keep quiet in the presence of conventional religious practices. To my mind, at any rate, this
young atheist sounds like a fairly decent, spirited young
man in the first throes of philosophic passion—impatient
with conventions of all sorts, including conventional views
of the gods, and eager to uncover the limitations of every4. It’s worth noting that, while the focus in the punishment section of
Book X is on atheists, the body of Book X treats three forms of impiety:
the belief that there are no gods, the belief that gods exist but are indifferent toward human affairs, and the belief that gods exist and care for
human things but are indifferent to justice. The stranger observes that
the second position has its roots in a concern for justice: rather than
admit that the gods tolerate or even support the flourishing of the unjust,
the impious youth of this type would rather believe that the gods are indifferent to human concerns (899d-900b). In this case, at least, a kind
of passion for cosmic justice leads to impiety. Might something similar
be at work in the other cases?
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one’s thinking but his own. The best thing to do with such
young people is to keep them away from the innocent and
set them wrestling with matters of fundamental importance
(909a). And that, I suspect, is the proper work of the Nocturnal Council.
*****
Or rather, that is the work of the Council described in Book
X. No mention is made of the Nocturnal Council in Book
XI, but in Book XII it turns up twice. I have just been suggesting that behind the talk of admonition and soul salvation in Book X, we catch a glimpse of something else—that
the Nocturnal Council is there to provide a place for citizens of a certain type and age to confront questions that fall
outside the purview of ordinary Magnesians. Do we see
anything akin to this in the second appearance of the Council? I think we do, but before we can properly absorb what
is said there, we need to take note of an extraordinary new
feature of the stranger’s city and the series of extraordinary
admissions that accompanies it.
The new feature is this. We have already noted the deliberate efforts described in earlier books to block the flow
of foreign opinions into Magnesia. We see more of this in
the passage from Book XII that we are about to consider.
The issue under discussion is what to do in general about
contact with other cities, and the worry, as one might expect, is that indiscriminate intermingling will corrupt the
city, “as strangers produce innovations” (950a). The first
solution proposed by the stranger is again one we might expect: select citizens will be allowed to attend and observe
foreign religious festivals, but “when they return home,
they will teach the young that the legal customs, pertaining
to the regimes, of the others are in second place” (951a). In
keeping with this policy we learn that commercial visitors
from other cities will be watched carefully “lest any of such
strangers introduce some innovation” (952e-953a). But then
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the stranger does something astonishing. He posits a second
class of observer (theoros): “If certain citizens desire to observe (theoresai) the affairs of other human beings at greater
leisure, no law is to prevent them” (951a). The language is
very strong here: should a desire arise in certain men to observe, that is, to contemplate, other ways of life, that desire
is not only to be tolerated—the regime is not permitted to
forbid it. (This is a regime given to forbidding a great many
things.) Of course, there are certain limits on who can travel
and what one can do with what one has seen. Observers
must be between fifty and sixty years old and men of good
character, they must receive permission to travel from the
Guardians of the Laws, and if they come back “corrupted,”
they must live as private men, and not claim to be wise; otherwise, like twice-convicted “good” atheists, they must die
(909a; 951c-d; 952c-d). Still, it is remarkable that men who
find in themselves an Odyssean appetite to see the cities and
learn the minds of men are to be given the leisure and
time—up to ten years if they wish—to satisfy it. The regime
that just a moment ago seemed closed off from what is foreign apparently has a well-defined hole at the top.
Still more remarkable are the reasons given for letting
such a hole develop. According to the stranger, even the best
city—presumably the one with the best citizens—needs to
have experience of bad as well as good human beings
(951a). Nor can it “guard its laws, unless it accepts them by
knowledge and not solely by habits” (951b). Moreover,
there are “certain divine human beings . . . who do not by
nature grow any more frequently in cities with good laws
than in cities without” and only with their help can good
laws be given “a firmer footing” and bad laws corrected
(951b-c). Earlier in the Laws it looked as if the whole task
of the lawgiver was to find a good set of laws and fix them
in place; even in cases where time and experience are
needed to determine the best laws, as soon as the time is up,
laws were to be fixed once and for all. The more Egyptian
a set of laws, the better—that seemed to be the earlier per-
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spective (656d-e). But now we learn that it is not enough
for a city to find and settle on good laws. Good laws are
simply not good enough. Somewhere in the city there needs
to be a knowledge, grounded in experience, of the whole
range of human possibility, good and bad. Likewise, somewhere in the city there needs to be a knowledge of the
grounds of law, that is, a more than habitual understanding
of the law. Perhaps, too, somewhere in the city there needs
to be a recognition that the very best human beings, the
ones who approach most closely to the divine, arise by nature, not by convention—not even by the best conventions.
At any rate it is precisely such men that the second sort of
observer, the theoretical theoros, is to seek out and such men
who are best able to aid him to see what’s lacking in problematic laws and what grounds the better sort. In sum, we
are now to see that a comprehensive understanding of
human affairs, ongoing reflection on one’s own laws and
an openness to change are absolutely essential to the wellbeing of a well-founded city, and that contemplation of
other cities as well as contact with the best natures are conditions for all three.
Where does the Nocturnal Council fit within this new
picture of what Magnesia needs? Right at the center, as it
turns out. For the Nocturnal Council is the body to whom
this second sort of observer is to report—immediately after
arriving back in the city—and the Council is the body
charged with reflecting on what he has brought back and
what to do with him (952b). In fact, the broader work of
the Council that emerges here for the first time strongly
suggests that it is precisely this body that is intended to be
the proper home in Magnesia for the kind of comprehensive reflection on political matters I have just described.
For we are told that the Council will meet every day, just
before dawn, and that “the intercourse and speeches of the
men are always to be about laws and their own city, and
anything they may have learned elsewhere that is different
and pertains to such matters” (951d-952a). “[A]nything
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they may have learned elsewhere” is a pretty clear reference to the reports of Magnesian observers, and this is confirmed just a little later, when we are told that, upon his
return, the observer must tell the Council “if he’s found
some persons capable of explaining some utterance concerning the laying down of laws, or education, or upbringing, or if he himself should return having thought some
things up” (952b). The more one thinks about it, the more
sense it makes that the Nocturnal Council is later called
the safeguard (soterion) of the city, and the more it seems
appropriate the name Moderation Tank (so-phronisterion)
seems for the place where the Nocturnal Council does its
work. On the one hand, the Council attempts to save (sozein)
the souls (and lives) of the impious young by persuading
them to be moderate, that is, sound-minded, so-phron, with
respect to the gods; in so doing, it keeps the city and its religious practices safe, soos, from a kind of internal corruption. On the other, the Council keeps the city safe and sound,
soos, by collecting thoughts about “the laying down of laws,
or education, or upbringing,” by engaging in its own soundminded (so-phron) deliberations about the city’s laws, and by
remaining mindful, phronimos, of the possibility of a healthy
kind of innovation. In both cases, reflection on fundamental
matters is the chief means and medium of the Council’s
work—reflection on the divine, in the one case, and on
“regime and laws,” on the other.5
Let us see if we can take this one step further. It makes
a certain sense that the word “philosophy” never appears in
the Laws.6 The natural home of philosophy is Athens, not
5. It is surely no accident that these are also the two themes enunciated
at the opening of the Laws: here we have the first of several indications
that the work of the Council mirrors the conversation between the
stranger from Athens and his Dorian companions.
6. Though the noun philosophia never appears in the Laws, the verb
philosophein turns up twice, once in Book IX to characterize the “free doctor” and again in Book X to characterize pre-Socratic atheism (857d; 967d).
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Crete. In Magnesia, the gymnasia and agora are strictly for
business—no idle chatter allowed. And of course there’s no
Peiraeus—no local harbor where a young Magnesian could,
say, get stirred up by the sight of local and foreign religious
ceremonies and then spend the night in the company of
friends and foreigners pondering radical political possibilities
and asking whether justice is a good thing. On the other hand,
given what we have seen, it is worth wondering whether,
with the institution of the Nocturnal Council, the stranger
hasn’t quietly made a small but significant place for philosophy right in the middle of the city. The word philosophy is
not used—but perhaps the thing itself is right there in front
of us.
Is this further step warranted by the text of the Laws? Two
features of the Nocturnal Council would seem to speak
against it. In the first place, the orientation of the Council appears to be decidedly practical. It is initially instituted to fix
a problem—the intransigent impiety of the young; at any
rate, this problem forms the context within which we first
hear about it. Likewise, in the first appearance of the Council in Book XII, the whole emphasis is on the study of law
and what to do to ground it and otherwise safeguard the
city. True, the stranger mentions other “branches of learning” in addition to the study of law, and true, too, the work
of grounding the law and safeguarding the city may require
reflection and deliberation of a very high order (952a). But
as the stranger presents it, these other branches of learning
are clearly subordinated to the study of law, while the reflections and deliberations of the Council have as their aim,
not knowledge or wisdom, but the safety and preservation
of the city. If anyone in Magnesia looks like a philosopher—that is, a man who loves and desires wisdom simply
for its own sake—it is the man who “desire[s] to observe
the affairs of other human beings at greater leisure,” but,
again, the Council’s interest in such men seems to be
largely limited to knowing whether they have information
useful to the city or pose a danger to it (951a).
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The second feature of the Council that might make us
hesitate to call it a place in which philosophy would be at
home is its composition. The dominant figures in the Council are all drawn from the ranks of the highest offices in
Magnesia, and the stranger makes a point of emphasizing
their ages: the ten oldest Guardians of the Law, the present
and past Supervisors of Education, and the Auditors (assuming that “priests [of Apollo] who have obtained the prizes
for excellence” is a reference to this group) (951d-e).7 Now
it makes some sense that an institution tasked with reflecting on laws should include men of deep and broad experience, especially men who have spent their lives
(respectively) keeping guard over the laws, keeping an eye
on the virtue of young, and keeping magistrates honest. It
is less obvious that such men would be willing and able to
engage in genuine philosophic inquiry—we might even
wonder how open such men would be to reflecting on laws
with a view to grounding and improving them. After all, as
the stranger observes in Book II, old men tend to be stiff in
soul, and these men, heavily invested as they are in the laws
of Magnesia, might be stiffer than most (666b-c). Perhaps,
then, it is a good thing that younger men also form part of
the Council, in equal numbers with the old—though here,
too, we might ask what sort of men the elderly Guardians,
Supervisors, and Auditors would be likely to pick as their
Council mates and what sorts of conversations they are likely
to have. Who knows—perhaps the most lively and most
searching conversations in the Moderation Tank would be
those between the members of the Council and the impious
young? In any case, if the stranger were genuinely interested
in making the Council a place for philosophic inquiry, one
would think he would make the second type of observer, the
7. Guardians of the Law, Supervisors of Education, and Auditors must
all be at least fifty; Guardians leave office at seventy and Auditors at
seventy-five; Supervisors (who come from the ranks of the Guardians)
have a five-year term.
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theoretical theoros, a regular part of the mix. Here, after all, is
a man of a certain age who combines impeccable credentials,
including experience in war, with a tremendous breadth of
experience and a philosophic appetite.
*****
We are now prepared to turn our attention to the third and
final discussion of the Nocturnal Council. For it turns out
that in this account the theoretical theoros has become a regular
member of the Council; those observers who pass the test
“are to be considered worthy attendants of [or “sharers in,”
axiokoinonetos] the Council” (961a). But this is just the beginning of a whole series of revelations about the work and
composition of the Council that point in the direction of philosophy. In its initial appearance in Book X, the Council
looked a little like a re-education camp; in its first appearance in Book XII, it looked like a cross between a debriefing
center and a think tank. Now, as we will see in a moment,
the Council looks more and more like an ongoing study
group or seminar.
This is not to say that practical aims of the Council have
been abandoned. On the contrary, when the stranger revives
the discussion of the Council near the end of Book XII, the
issue at hand is finding a safeguard for the city they have just
finished founding; that concern is never left entirely behind
in what remains of Book XII. (The word soteria, sometimes
translated by Pangle as “salvation,” sometimes as “safeguard,” turns up several times in this section, along with a
number of other “soos” words.) What we see instead is a
broadening and deepening of what it means to be a safeguard—an enlargement so comprehensive that it now includes questions that we normally associate with philosophy,
or at least political philosophy.
Let me start by sketching out the first stages of this
movement. The whole discussion begins with an elaborate
series of serious jokes about ends (tele). With the treatment
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of burial rites for citizens who have “met their end
(teleutesantas),” the stranger notes that their work of “legislation would be just about at an end (telos).” But first they
must discover and discuss a “perfect (teleos) and permanent
safeguard” for the city, to keep it from meeting a premature
end (960b). The first topic broached in the account of this
safeguard—which proves to be the Nocturnal Council—is
that it must have intelligence (nous) of the end, telos, of the
city, where telos is now understood in the sense of aim or
goal (skopos). But to have a coherent aim is to have—in contrast to other cities, which are all subject to “wandering”—
one aim (962d). Kleinias reminds the stranger that their city
in speech has such an aim: virtue (963a). But is virtue
one—or four? The stranger argues that it is at least two—
courage and prudence are very different from one another—and presses Kleinias to explain how they are one
(963c-964a).
And so it goes. The argument is off and running, and it
is not difficult to see where it is headed. Already with the
first step the stranger has, as it were, upped the ante of the
argument. The question is no longer simply what to do here
and now or what laws to lay down to address this or that
problem or infraction. If the statesman is to safeguard his
city, he must know what he is doing, and nothing less than
a comprehensive understanding of the end of politics and
political life will do: “What about the city? If someone
should be evidently ignorant of the goal at which the statesman should aim, would he, in the first place, be justly called
a ruler, and then, would he be able to save this thing—
whose goal he didn’t know at all” (962b)? The same kind
of comprehensive approach is required in the case of virtue.
It is not just Kleinias who must understand in what sense
the virtues are one and many—and especially the sense in
which they are one—the guardians of the city must as well:
“Then it’s necessary to compel, as is likely, even the
guardians of our divine regime to see with precision, whatever is the same in all four: what it is that we assert is one
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in courage, moderation, justice, and prudence, and is justly
called by one name, virtue” (965c-d). If nothing else were
to convince us that something like Socratic philosophy has
now become the business of the Nocturnal Council, the
stranger’s sudden introduction into this context of the familiar Socratic terms eidos and idea should: “Is there any way
in which there would be a more precise vision and seeing
of anything than that which is the capacity to look to one
idea from the many and dissimilar things?” (963c; 965c).
But the one aim of politics and the one meaning of
virtue are not the only ideai to which the council must look.
The stranger also insists—and Kleinias agrees—that it is
not enough for the guardians of the city to know that the
beautiful and the good are each many; they must also know
“how and in what sense” they are one—presumably an
enormous task, especially because the stranger emphasizes
that they must be able to “demonstrate” these matters
“through argument” (966a-b). And even this is not the end
of its intellectual tasks. Not only must the members of the
Nocturnal Council grasp the sense in which intelligence,
nous, is the leader of and core of the virtues, and not only
must they themselves become the intelligence of the city—
they must make every effort to discern the intelligence at
work in the whole of things (965a; 966e-967b; 967e). That
is, the Council must take up in its own right and as its own proper
task the very questions and arguments that formed the subject matter of Book X and which were there addressed to
the impious young—questions about the existence and character of the gods and, even more, questions about whether
life or soul is prior to body and whether intelligence can be
ascribed to the motions and order of the cosmos (966c-e).
Here in Book XII, however, there is no suggestion that
such subjects must be taken up primarily to address a practical
problem, i.e., impiety in the young. As usual, practice is not
out of the picture: the person who grasps these things “as
well as the subjects of learning that presumably precede
these matters . . . should see what is common to these things
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and the things that concern the Muse, and should apply this
understanding, in a harmonious way, to the practices and
customs that pertain to the habitual dispositions” (967e968a). But the study of the whole and the foundations of the
whole—a study which would surely include wrestling with
the materialistic claims of pre-Socratic philosophy outlined
here and in Book X—is also called “one of the noblest
things,” that is, something worth pursuing for its own sake,
and we are told twice that no one will be admitted to the
Council who has not labored over these questions before joining the Council, that is, independently of any use that might
be made of the results of that study (886d-e; 889b-c; 966c
d; 967b-c). “[M]ost of those in the city . . . only go along
with what the laws proclaim” about the gods or the divine,
and the Council member must “make allowance” for this
passivity or indifference to fundamental matters—perhaps
by practicing a kind of moderation or perhaps, to follow the
suggestion above, by fashioning, through music, practices
and customs that accord with his discoveries (966c). But
the man worthy to be a member of the Nocturnal Council
must himself be alive to the urgency of those questions—
that is, he must be philosophic.
***
And here the attentive reader of the Laws runs into a major
difficulty. I earlier asked whether—given the age and probable orientation of its dominant members—the Nocturnal
Council would be up to the demands of philosophic reflection. It might now seem as if that question had been misguided from the start. For, as we have just learned, a proven
thoughtfulness about fundamental matters is a prerequisite for
membership in the Council. No doubt we are to picture the
seasoned older members of the Council, long steeped themselves in the intricacies of dialectical inquiry, carefully picking like-minded young men who would in their turn
contribute energy to an ongoing conversation—a conversa-
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tion leavened by the suggestions of the those who have seen
the larger world and whom we now know are to be regular
participants in the Council’s reflections. But here’s the rub.
Have we seen anything in the account of civic education in
Magnesia to suggest that that education would prepare the
citizens of Magnesia for such a life of thought and inquiry?
Perhaps there have been hints—more on this in a moment—
but the bulk of the education in Magnesia lies in weapons
training and the practice of conventional piety, and it is hard
to see how either could constitute a serious preparation for
the life of the mind.8
In fact, the Athenian himself seems to take pains to underscore the difficulty we have just run into. A few pages
from the end of Book XII he suddenly admits that the young
and old among the members of the Council, who are to
function, respectively, as the eyes and intelligence (nous) of
the city, must not only have “the best natures,” but also
enjoy a different sort of education, one marked by precision.9 “Are we to have them all the same and not have some
who are brought up and educated with greater precision?”
(965a). This “more precise education” of the men he now
calls simply “guardians” is indeed under discussion as the
8. The serious study of serious poetry can of course raise all sorts of
fundamental questions. But apparently Homer and Hesiod are not features of the Cretan landscape (680b-c; 886c-d). And there is no place
for tragedy in Magnesian education (817a-d).
9. Between 964d and 965d there are five occurrences of precision
words. Another one turns up a bit later in the discussion of astronomy
and cosmic intelligence (967d). I believe the only place in the Laws
where we get a similar flurry is the first discussion of mathematics and
astronomy, in Book VII (818a). The discussion of the education of the
“free” man here should probably be connected to the two discussions
of the “free doctor,” who “investigates [maladies] from their beginning”
and who uses “arguments that come close to philosophizing, grasping
the disease from its source, and going back up to the whole nature of
bodies” (720d; 857d).
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dialogue ends. But this leaves us, the readers of the dialogue, in something of a quandary. We are in something like
the position of Polemarchus, Adeimantus, and the rest at the
beginning of Book V of the Republic, metaphorically tugging
on Socrates’ sleeve and asking for more of what will prove
to be a lengthy account of the education of the philosopher.
Or rather, that is our situation and condition—wanting
more—but we are at the end of the book, not less than
halfway through. What is a reader to do?
One thing we can do is to look back over the Laws to see
if there are hints about the character of the “more precise
education” of the guardians. We can begin by reminding
ourselves that the regime of the Laws is not simply hostile
to reflection on the laws: the laws of Magnesia, or at least
some of them, have preludes. Might these quasi-philosophic
defenses of the laws not encourage and even provoke a kind
of thoughtfulness about the laws, at least on the part of some
men? Again, the mathematical and astronomical education
described at the end of Book VII resembles in some respects
the preliminary education of the philosopher-kings in Republic VII (817e-822c).10 It is easy to imagine that the primary
10. It also differs from it in two important ways. In the Republic, arithmetic and geometry are treated separately; as a consequence, incommensurability, the remarkable discovery that some pairs of geometrical
magnitudes do not share a common measure and so cannot be described
in terms of ratios of integers, cannot arise. In the Laws, by contrast, the
study of mathematics proper seems to culminate in the study of incommensurability. Again, in the Republic, astronomy is treated as the study
of the pure motions of pure mathematical solids. In the Laws, by contrast, it is the study of the actual motions of actual heavenly bodies, primarily with a view to “saving the appearances,” that is, to showing that
what look like wandering motions nevertheless make sense. What are
we to make of these differences? To begin with, we might note that the
treatment of the city and its human inhabitants in each book is analogous to its treatment of the stars: just as actual starry motions in the
Laws replace possible mathematical motions in the Republic, so human
bodies and their actual motions, especially their erotic motions, loom
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targets of this education are potential members of the
Council. At any rate, the passage points explicitly to the
end of the dialogue, and we are told twice that a precise education in these matters is reserved for “the few,” not “the
many” (818a). And then there is the curious matter of the
composition of the Council: in the very passage in which
we first learn that approved observers of foreign ways will
be invited to become part of the Council, Supervisors of
Education suddenly drop off the list (951e; 961a). It is hard
to know what to make of the apparent omission, but it is at
least thinkable that these former observers will be the Supervisors—that arrangements are quietly being made to ensure that the most philosophic among the Magnesians, and
larger in the Laws than they do in the Republic. But I think this analogy
points to a deeper issue, an issue also signaled by the problem of incommensurability. There is a kind of intractability, a resistance to being
ordered and accounted for, present in the very being of things, including
human things. Incommensurability is one sign of this intractability; the
study of incommensurability is an attempt to come to grips with it, to,
as it were, account for the uncountable by counting up the kinds of incommensurables and discovering their order. The wandering of the stars
is another sign, and astronomy as it is presented in the Laws is an attempt to discover—or confer—intelligibility on their wandering, especially, apparently, the wandering of Venus or Aphrodite (821c). The
wandering of regimes is yet another—and perhaps the most important—
sign of this intractability in things (962d). Now the wandering of most
regimes is the subject of books VII and IX of the Republic, but the wandering of every regime, even the best one, is only alluded to there, in
the elusive discussion of the marriage number, where of course the intractability of Aphrodite or eros is the issue. The Republic, then, quite
deliberately avoids or abstracts from any sustained treatment of the intractability issue. The Laws, on the other hand, comes as close to confronting it as one can. In this sense, the Republic is a kind of comedy
and the Laws a kind of tragedy; indeed, “the tragedy that is the most
beautiful and the best . . . the truest tragedy” (8l7b). And in this sense,
Plato is the man who “knows how to make comedy and tragedy” because, like his teacher, he knows about “erotic matters” (Symposium
177e; 223d).
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therefore the most likely to see to it that “the best natures”
are properly nurtured, will be in charge of education.
This, then, is one possibility: although we are never
given a full account of the “more precise education” that
members of the Council will receive, much less an account
of the way that education will be integrated with the normal civic education and other institutions in Magnesia, nevertheless, if we look closely, we can see the beginnings of a
sketch. And since the stranger offers to continue working
out the details of that education with Kleinias, we can perhaps have some confidence that, within the imagined world
of the dialogue, the sketch will be filled in and the fit between it and other Magnesian institutions will be a good one.
Still, I think that even the most generous reader of the Laws
is bound to feel some dissatisfaction with this “solution.”
The reader is left, not only wanting a fuller picture of the
Nocturnal Council and the education that supports it, but
wondering whether a full picture is possible—whether the
more philosophic the Council is, the less likely it is to fit
neatly within the civic structures of Magnesia. Is the soil of
Magnesia or of Crete generally one in which the Council—
that is, philosophy—can take root? The concluding paragraphs of the Laws leave that question unanswered—but then
again, those paragraphs may not be the right place to look
for an answer.
Where should we look instead? Until now our attention
has been focused, for the most part, on the argument of the Laws,
that is, on the account the stranger gives of the Council and
related matters. But suppose we shift our attention away from
the argument of the dialogue to its action, its dramatic features:
a different picture of the situation then comes into view. Notice, first, that Kleinias manages to remain involved in a very
long and often difficult to follow conversation.11 Think of
Cephalus and his quick surrender of the argument and withdrawal from the conversation in Book I of the Republic: the
11. Megillus is much harder to read; he is so, well, laconic.
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contrast is striking. Then notice the way that Kleinias becomes
involved in the closing books of the Laws, especially Books
X and XII. In Book X, he is clearly disturbed and intrigued
by the stranger’s account of the various claims of philosophic
impiety and manifestly eager to hear what arguments the
stranger can marshal against them (886e; 887b-c; 890d-e).
In Book XII, we see more of the same. Kleinias recollects
claims that were made back in Book I, urges the stranger to
address important questions, and is ready, as the book draws
to a close, to press forward with the inquiry into who should
become a guardian, what they should study, and when and
for how long they should study it (968b-d). In other words,
over the course of the dialogue, Kleinias becomes increasingly engaged by the stranger’s claims and arguments—especially when they touch on subjects that fall within the
purview of the Council—and by the end of the book is
worlds away from the polite, overly confident, somewhat
dismissive Kleinias that we see at the beginning. In
Kleinias we see a kind of demonstration in deed of what it
might be possible to accomplish in Crete—with the right
sort of hands-on education aimed with “precision” at a certain sort of soul.
Does this mean that Kleinias has become a philosopher
by the end of the Laws? I think not; he is too old, too dependent on the stranger, and probably still too attached to
his own city and its laws. But it seems clear that something
of the stranger’s way of seeing and talking has taken root
in Kleinias; he has become a friend to philosophy, and he
is bound to take that friendship with him into the founding
of Magnesia. (No doubt the stranger’s influence over him
will be greater if the Athenian chooses to help out, but the
very enthusiasm with which Kleinias—and Megillus—urge
him to stay is already evidence of his staying power [969cd].) We cannot know what form that friendship will take,
how it will show itself in his activity as founder. The Magnesia Kleinias founds in deed may not resemble in every
particular the Magnesia they have founded in speech; it
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may not even contain a Nocturnal Council. But the city is
likely to be, in its own way, much more friendly to philosophy than it would have been otherwise; certainly one of
its prominent citizens will be. One might put it this way:
near the end of the Republic, Socrates notes that “the man
who has intelligence”—the philosopher—will live while
“tending and looking “fixedly at the regime within him”;
he will “mind the things of this city,” the city in speech,
whatever the shape of the political landscape around him
(591e-592b). Move down one rung and you get Kleinias:
guided and shaped by the lingering image of his conversation with the stranger, he will live—and act—taking his
bearings, not by the Kallipolis of the Republic, but by its second sailing, the Magnesia of the Laws (527c; 739a-e).
As for the Nocturnal Council: as it appears within the
city in speech, it is not quite a Council and not quite Nocturnal. It is not quite a Council because it is not a Boulē (the
word used to characterize the institution we learn about in
Book VI) but a syllogos, a word that can refer to assemblies
but is literally a gathering, or better yet, a gathering in
speech; the word can also mean “collectedness” or “presence of mind.”12 It is not quite Nocturnal because it meets,
not at night, but at dawn or perhaps just before dawn. And
yet there is indeed a nykterinos syllogos “in” the Laws: it takes
as its starting point “regime and laws”; it includes a
Guardian of the Laws, a priest of Apollo, and an observer
of foreign lands who doubles as the Supervisor of Educa12. For Boulē see 755e, 756b and 758d. Syllogos in fact appears at 755e;
it is used of the gathering of citizens that chooses military leaders in the
absence of a Boulē. Pangle there translates it as “public meeting.” In
syllogos we get the intersection of two of the basic meanings of legein:
gather/select and speak. Of the two meanings “gather” is the more basic:
all speaking is a kind of selective gathering, of subject and predicate in
the most elementary form of logos, in the case of a syllogismos, thought
and thought. For the notion of “collectedness” or “presence of mind,”
see Phaedo 83a, where philosophy is said to urge the soul “to gather
(syllegesthai) and collect itself into itself.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tion; it begins before dawn, remains in session throughout
the day and lasts far into the night; the last quarter of it certainly takes place under the star-studded Cretan sky, the
proper object of the Council’s highest inquiries.13 The true
Nocturnal Council, a gathering in speech that emerges from
the collected presence of mind—the syllogos—of the stranger
and the stranger’s author, is the Laws itself.
13. Near the end of Book IV we learn that the discussion of “regime and
laws” began “about dawn” and that it is now “high noon.” Even though
the conversation takes place on or around the longest day of the year, it
must, at this rate, end long after sunset; in fact, if the conversation moves
uniformly, at the rate of four books per six hours, it should end around
midnight. My guess is that the stars become visible in the middle of Book
X, just as the subject of astronomy comes back on the scene.
�POEM
Kansas Articles from the
Ellis Review Centennial Edition
Philip LeCuyer
Her intimate things, her tapestry of care
and soft concerns were now as literal
as table flowers in the window light.
And there were rooms adjoining where I am,
rooms and labyrinthine ways which lead
each to its own peculiar quietness.
My father William T. Perry was born
in Vigo County, Indiana, September 23rd, 1843,
and my mother Julia Gross was born
in the same county in 1848.
Father was a union soldier in the civil war
and once he was captured by the confederates
and confined for a time in the Libby prison.
My parents were married at a big celebration
on July 4th, 1866 near Middletown, Indiana.
I was born September 7th, 1867.
We left there in covered wagons.
It was a hard trip for mother
with the baby Aldora. Clarence Vigo 3 years,
Sabina 6, John Cameron 5
and myself only 8 years old.
At Hays father traded a horse
for shoes for us children.
In 1878 my mother succumbed to the hardships
and privations of that life and died,
leaving six children, the youngest only 10 months old.
69
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Our seed is formed an austere taut design
burnt in the earth, and being in the earth
the inert law lay consummate with all
the sudden vastness which is prairie . . .
bluestem grass across the flat dry dirt
speckled through with smaller summer flowers
stretching equidistant every way
to the enormous sky. The meadowlark
is motionless, her songform being filled
with this immensity.
A strange little man dressed in homespun
John knelt to pray three times every day
on the open prairie, regardless of the weather . . .
near cemetery hill at sunrise,
along the railroad right-of-way at midday,
and past the westend of town at dusk.
Horrigan appeared in Ellis in 1870
having no known ties, his exact age undetermined.
In the civil war he was a teamster
for General Logan. Though he never enlisted
the corded hat he wore was part
of a soldier’s uniform. As he prayed
John would place the hat in front of him.
Those who saw noticed he would drop something in
and take it out during this time,
but no one ever got close enough
to see what it was.
Many were curious why
he lived his life of solitary prayer.
Faced with occasional questions as to his reason
John maintained a fragile indifference.
His crudely made clothing seemed too large for him.
�POEM | LECUYER
71
A leaf of faded newsprint now detached
from the day of its delivery,
and strayed along the fences and the streets
past rooms and parks and silent public buildings
might stay somewhile in a vacant space.
Mingled there with weeds and old boards
our cipher speech. our diagrams
brush near the pinburst of a thistle flower.
Thought softness and chill precision
of lines from the stem to form a sphere
can dissolve the grammar of the mind.
Our voice in darkness not explicable . . .
Or again, as a windseed parted
from its root, his age set him adrift
about the city. The spirit of this man
surrounded by commercial signs and held
in traffic lights, deranged a memory
of loveliness where once he had been lost
like a wild rabbit caught, transfixed
by headlights on a lonely section road
can hear in her paralysis the daybreak.
Philip LeCuyer is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
David Lawrence Levine, Profound Ignorance: Plato’s Charmides and the Saving of
Wisdom. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2016. 372 pp.
Eva Brann
Plato’s Charmides is not one of the more famous dialogues or
one often thought of as central, and it is not on the St. John’s reading list. The latter fact is probably irremediable; the former opinion is now, once and for all, remedied by Profound Ignorance.1
I’ve long had a fleeting intuition, which David Levine has
now worked out deeply and extensively, that the Charmides is of
all the Platonic dialogues the one that most immediately bears on
our own contemporary political condition, the one that most directly illuminates the root problems of modernity. The Table of
Contents in fact signals his understanding of this dialogue as peculiarly future-fraught. There are ten chapters, all but the first of
which are devoted to a lively and careful exegesis of successive
sections of the text. The first chapter, however, is a retrospective
of ancient tyranny from the viewpoint of the “mega-phenomenon”
that is modern totalitarianism. It seems to me that, whereas in the
Republic we are invited to analyze the full soul as writ large in an
imagined city, in the Charmides we are bidden to focus on the
shrunk soul of an actual tyrant-to-be in a real city. The tyrant’s actions are infinitesimal in murderous effect compared to those of
recent totalitarian leaders, but by that very smallness possibly
David Levine, tutor at St. John’s College on the Santa Fe campus, was
dean there from 2001 to 2006. Eva Brann, tutor on the Annapolis campus, was dean there from 1990 to 1997.
1. It is an informal rule that a tutor proposing an addition to our seminar list should also suggest the reading to be eliminated. Since every
book is loved to an over-my-dead-body point by somebody, changes
are hard to achieve—as they ought to be.
�BOOK REVIEW | BRANN
73
more comprehensible in their badness than is the all but incomprehensible evil of the last and this century. David Levine works
out these comparative realities in the initial chapter. The surface
differences between old tyranny and new totalitarianism are, in
brief, “lawlessness and terror,” expressed in an untrammeled appetite, as against “criminal rationality” expressed in a brute ideology. But there is a root similarity: “profound ignorance.” It is
most perfectly exemplified in Critias, the eventual main figure of
the Charmides, as Charmides, the externally beautiful boy without
a mind of his own, recedes—only to return at the end with ominous threats, boyishly delivered.
This first chapter further sets out the way of understanding
the dialogue that is pursued in this book. We are asked to “remember” certain Socratic truths now mostly displaced, which
will show, as the author puts it, not that antiquity prefigured
modernity but that modern life “might not be so distinctively
modern after all.” The central question of the dialogue is: What
is sophrosyne?, which is here translated literally: “saving [sozein]
thoughtfulness [phronesis].”2 This excellence, this goodness, is
one of Socrates’s four cardinal virtues, the one most expressive
of Socrates’s unsettling claim that all genuine goodness is, rightly
understood, not ethical but intellectual, that virtue is knowledge.
This “saving-thougthfulness” is, of all the virtues, including wisdom, the deepest and most complex, the most humanly revealing
and politically consequential of all the standard virtues or excellences in Socrates’s and his conversational partners’ lexicon. The
Charmides is devoted to revealing what this virtue is, but beyond
that what it means for human beings to lack it.
This is the moment to say that the book is copiously and interestingly annotated, and that the opinion of scholars is given its
due in the notes. The Charmides exposes Socrates to the charge
that he was party to the education of two of the most evil men
known to Athenian history. Critias was the de facto leader of the
“Thirty Tyrants,” an oligarchy that instituted a reign of terror in
2. Or “sound [sos]-mindedness.” The author’s etymology promotes, as
is perfectly permissible, his interpretation of the dialogue.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Athens, which, as I think of it, was not matched in history until
the Nazi occupation of the city during the Second World War.
There appears to be no relief here for admirers of Socrates, who
agrees, under pressure, to “chant” over Charmides, Critias’s ward
and cousin, that is, to accept him as a patient and companion.3
—Socrates is either naïve as a psychoanalyst or dubious as a
teacher. David Levine, however, will show that Socrates understands, both in bold strokes and in subtle elaborations, what is
the matter with these two; Socrates does his best.4
Readers may have shaken their heads at my use of the modern, Freudian term “psychoanalyst.” It is, however, justified by
a heading in the second chapter, where “psychoanalysis” is qualified by “philosophical.” I cite this rubric of “philosophical analysis,” the soul-stripping of a boy whose bared body is irresistible,
because a consultation of its supporting footnote shows how independent of conventional categories David Levine’s inquiry is.
It turns out that this philosophical depth-analysis is conducted
more through the surface phenomena than is the modern Freudian
kind, which is indeed “skeptical of appearances.” Thus “Doctor
Socrates” (the title of the third chapter) shows Socrates presented
with a boy who complains of a certain somatic heaviness or
“weakness” of the head which, it is pretended, Socrates knows
how to cure.
Once again the situation is unprofessional by our standards.
Not only is Socrates merely a pretend-member of the physicians’
guild, but after Charmides’s cloak falls open—or is thrown open,
Socrates is enflamed—or pretends to be. Socrates the soldier, just
returned from a brutal campaign, immerses himself in his city
with a whirl of protective pretense that signifies his non-naivety,
3. Socrates’s inner forfender, his daimonion, would sometimes intervene
to prevent unsuitable associations. Here’s a question: Why not this time,
since pedagogic failure is, on the basis of this conversation, a foregone
conclusion?
4. He fails with these ambitious, politically involved “followers,” but
of his narrower inner circle, according to Xenophon, not one ever incurred censure for immorality.
�BOOK REVIEW | BRANN
75
his circumspection, in dealing with this future-burdened lot. He
prescribes a thoroughly “alternative” cure, a talking cure (hence
the Freudian analogy), which shifts the diagnosis from body to
soul and readies it for remediation by engendering the virtue of
thoughtfulness-saving sophrosyne.
The fourth chapter presents a crucial soul-physician’s
dilemma. Charmides, questioned about this virtue in himself, gets
tied up in embarrassment; he blushes. For he can’t attribute
sophrosyne, a kind of modesty, to himself in public without appearing immodest. That self-consciousness in turn presents his
doctor with this dilemma, the “paradox of sickness”: If he confronts his patient with his defect he will seem offensive; if he desists he will seem irresponsible. Socrates finds a device. He levers
the inquiry from a personal into a general inquiry: What is
sophrosyne? The result is to display the boy as obtuse and otherdependent in his opinions. The yet implicit truth is that true
sophrosyne is most particularly not a virtue you can have unawarely.
In the next chapter, Charmides’s “shamefacedness” (aidos,
usually and less revealingly translated as “modesty”) undergoes
examination. His final opinion, which he’s heard somewhere,
is that sophrosyne is “doing one’s own affairs.” Johnnies will
recall that this is the understanding of justice in the Republic,
of which the boy is apt to have heard from his guardian, an occasional early associate of Socrates. The latter here exposes the
selfish, anti-social meaning of Charmides’s version as compared to his own, political cohesion-producing intention in the
Republic.
Charmides concedes that he just doesn’t know the meaning
of his own putative virtue—but he snickers and looks to his
cousin, his guardian. This elicits from Socrates the address “o
miare,” an address as double-tongued as the mode he’s in. It is
on occasion jokingly used, but literally it means “O Bloodstained One,” and that is how the author translates it. The occasion is a revelation about the boy; it displays his “profound
ignorance” about himself, probably incurable. The “unreflective
adoration” of such a potential leader by his followers, in youth
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
or adulthood, is a devastating mistake to which a popular
democracy is vulnerable, then and now.5
In Chapter Six, Critias, who has been growing increasingly
antsy, lashes out, incited by his ward’s poor showing, not in behalf of the cousin he had earlier so extravagantly praised, but to
shame this boy who has shamed his guardianship. Socrates now
faces a much cleverer controversialist. What his ward is totally
without, autonomy, his guardian has in terrifying excess. Doctor
Socrates identifies it as “the principle of exclusive self-interest.”
He is “a law onto himself,” self-legislating.6 Here Critias reveals
his future, as, in Xenophon’s words, “the most greedy, the most
violent, and the most murderous” of the Thirty Tyrants. Here
“philosophy becomes ‘prophetic.’”
Clever Critias’s opinions are not logically fallacious; they are
ethically pernicious. In other words, Socrates opens up a distance
between intelligence and goodness, without compromising his
faith that, as virtue is knowledge, so vice is ignorance, and, of
course, such “Ignorance is not simply erroneous, it is dangerous.”
Acknowledged ignorance or ineptitude, however, such as
Socrates deliberately displays before the two, is the very opposite—because it is self-knowledge.
Socrates incites Critias, as he did Charmides, to successive
self-revelations—not to Critias himself but to us. Among them
is the separation in Critias’s mind of a “knowledge that” from a
5. I can’t resist a comment, seriously meant. One difference between
the tyrannical natures of antiquity and totalitarian types of our times is
that the former were beautiful. To wit, Charmides and Alcibiades versus
Hitler and Stalin. I ask myself whether it is to be considered as a deep
or a superficial distinction between antiquity and modernity, that moderns are more ready to adore physically unattractive demagogues—a
problem worth reflection.
6. David Levine refers, without naming him, to Kant’s morally opposite
notion of autonomy: Our will is to free itself from all passivity, all passion, to be fully active in accordance with its own nature as “practical
reason”—meaning that it makes only universalizable decisions, that it
subjects itself to its own law-giving, without self-indulgence.
�BOOK REVIEW | BRANN
77
“knowledge what.” The Critian man of sophrosyne knows that
he is pursuing his own affairs, but he doesn’t know what he is
doing. His is an ultimately insubstantial, all-subjective knowledge. Moreover, Critias has his own “liberation theology”: a godlike freedom for unrestrained self-expression. All this
self-assertion makes Socrates, in contrast, now withdraw for a
while to inquire within himself.7
What follows is an inquiry into Critias’s “proto-tyrannical”
consciousness. Its main characteristic is an “extraordinary selfawareness” which is, at bottom, an empty self-involvement with
its attendant “conceptual thicket . . . , the problem of reflexivity,”
that is, self-attention unmediated by an intentional object.8 For
Socrates, genuine knowing has an object, it is “of” something,
namely the forms.
Critias has concocted a unique understanding of sophrosyne
as a second-order knowledge that is practical in the sense of being
utilitarian, universal in the sense of ruling over all other kinds of
knowledge without being “of” them, and self-certified—the wisdom of self-interest, of political calculation, and of irresponsible
domination.9
Chapter Seven and Eight are both devoted to working out the
“Lesson of Ignorance.” It begins with Critias accusing Socrates
of sophistry, because after all, every search, even if it has a real
object, is self-interested—we want to be engaged.10 Socrates’s
nobility of inquiry is here delineated in terms of his personal
7. As he does on other occasions, e.g., Phaedo 95e7.
8. An “intentional object” is what cognition intends, what thinking is
“of” or “about.”
9. To me these passages, to the exegesis of which in Profound Ignorance
I’ve not done justice, are the high point of the dialogue, since they throw
a lurid light on philosophy’s main preoccupation in modern times, epistemology, the knowledge of knowledge.
10. Every teacher knows that this is an honest problem peculiar to adolescents: Every way of being unselfish is selfish because we take pleasure in self-denial. In older people it’s contentious, since it muddies
commitment before completing the analysis.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
qualities. But then a deeper difference, the central subject of the
book, is broached: The emptily barren, assertively dominating,
totalitarian knowledge that one knows takes over when what one
knows lacks wholeness. This is the missing element in Critian
self-knowledge: the knowledge of ignorance, in oneself and in itself. The exposition of the extendedly paradoxical nature of the
knowledge of ignorance—a deeply subjective, yet impersonal,
interpersonal, world-engaged kind of cognition—is, I think, not
only the center but also the high point of Profound Ignorance.
So Socrates opposes to Critian sophrosyne a more complete
virtue in the service of the self, a second sophrosyne, now a virtue
in the service of self-knowledge. This is then the dual enigma: Is
“the knowing of what one knows and what one does not know
that one does not know” ever possible? And what is the benefit
of that knowledge? Charmides, who is, after all, the patient here,
is to be involved in the inquiry.
The nature of psychological reflexivity and logical privation,
deep features of thought and of things, is now at issue. Here
David Levine injects two digressions. One recounts Hegel’s history of self-consciousness, in which Socrates is given the crucial
role of rescuing the suspect subjectivity of the sophists by insisting on the “‘inherent independence of thought’ from private and
particular determinations.” The other digression recounts some
extreme scholarly opinions reluctant to credit ancient Socrates
with making full self-awareness thematic.11 And if he is born too
soon for fully reflexive self-knowledge, then, too, he cannot
know his ignorance. —But, Profound Ignorance proves, the dialogue says otherwise: Socrates achieves a profound self-knowledge which includes the knowledge of his ignorance.
The profoundest perplexity is that of reflexivity, the soul’s
power of self-relation, of which self-knowledge is a complexly
perplexed part: Socrates cannot “confidently affirm” whether a
11. To me these digressions are the more interesting for touching on a
question that ought to be everyone’s preoccupation: Can chronology
preclude some thoughts from being thought by those caught in its
frame?
�BOOK REVIEW | BRANN
79
knowledge of knowledge—and of ignorance—can come about.
That disaffirmation itself is knowledge of ignorance. The profound enigma behind the latter is the above-mentioned notion of
privation (that is, the deprivation of all positive qualities) and the
consequent unspeakability of the “not” in ignorance; its knowledge would be the knowledge of a no-thing, a nothing. Such
knowledge would then be described as the knowing of not-knowing, which, if it isn’t straight self-contradiction, comes close to
it. All this ontological logic is way above the pair’s heads, but
that need not preclude admission of one’s own ignorance—the
doctor’s prescription for Charmides. Moreover, ontological perplexities aside, there is a brutely practical problem with this crucial kind of self-knowledge: Some soul types just lack the “prior
Socratic reflective reflexivity” that is needed.
Having set out this discouraging preliminary, the author now
reports Socrates’s challenge to Critias, which is to show that his
second “Socratic” sophrosyne, which he has so easily adopted,
is beneficial. Socrates reports that it throws Critias into “incapacitating confusion,” rather than into an enabling perplexity. This
could be a moment of self-discovery; Critias’s defective soul,
however, is not turned upward but forced “back on itself in
shame.” He is, to be sure, self-oriented (reflexive), but not selfknowing (reflective); he lacks that “prior Socratic reflexivity.”
Critias has not “reflected on the nature of beings” enough to be
thinking about sophrosyne. His thinking is an empty totalism. He
is stuck in his incapability, but we, listening, have indeed had actualized in us the knowledge of another’s ignorance. So that
much is possible.
We now come to the two concluding chapters. Critias’s reflexivity did not lead him to the knowledge of his own ignorance, but now Socrates wants him to recognize that his
self-cognition, which does not include knowing what, is overgeneralized, “abstract,” to the point of vacancy: vacant self-assertion. Particularly as a political virtue, substantial knowledge
of content-imbued expertise is necessary. A reference to the hitherto unsatisfactorily settled question “What is the benefit of
sophrosyne?” is implied. Socrates begins to dream, a dream of
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the—political—benefits of his sophrosyne. It is but a dream,
since for these two rulers-to-be complete self-knowledge is not
possible.
What is Critias really after, since the knowledge delineated
by him has proved empty? Critias says, out of the blue: The
knowledge that makes one happy is that of good and bad. For the
second time Socrates addresses one of this pair, now Critias, as
“O Bloodstained One.” What is so terrible here? Critias is shown
by Socrates to have implied that sophrosyne is a ruler’s peculiar
virtue, entitling one to rule who knows nothing substantial but
has this master-knowledge: How to get his own good out of what
people know how to do. He has claimed a “primordial ruling
knowledge that would subordinate the good to some yet more
primordial sense of ownness.” It is indeed the notion of a man
who will be bloodstained.
In this last dialectic passage with Critias, Socrates comes off
almost deflatingly aporetic, perplexed, about knowledge in general and goodness in particular. Critias, in contrast, is self-confidently without doubt. Though he has some beginnings in
common with Socrates, such as the primary importance of the
good life and the centrality of self-knowledge,12 finally, in this
dialogue, Socrates is, in contrast to Critias, profoundly ambiguous about “human intentionality and intelligence.” Moreover, he
is overtly deflating about his own dialectical participation in the
search, which was indeed, as David Levine says, both “over-involved to the point of being opaque” and forgetfully simpleminded. But that was intentional; the purpose was to let Critias
reveal his profound ignorance.
In the ultimate chapter, Doctor Socrates turns back to
Charmides, his reluctant patient, who declares that he—still—
doesn’t know whether he has sophrosyne and—still—depends
on the grown-ups to tell him. However, he now enrolls himself
as Socrates’s willing patient. Indeed, the two incipient evil-doers
verbally coerce a by now reluctant Socrates to take the boy on.
Charmides’s external beauty cloaks an internal violence.
12. And, I would add, the identification of virtue with a knowledge.
�BOOK REVIEW | BRANN
81
Socrates’s very last words are: “I will not oppose,” and this
apparently willing submission to a future of blood has troubled
interpreters; is it craven? However, not only has Socrates’s conduct of the conversation been the opposite of complicit, but
David Levine shows that “sophrosyne is the better part of
valor”—that is, real sophrosyne: discretion, circumspection. Accordingly, Socrates has conducted a complex, ad hominem conversation receptive to two principles of interpretation: “integrated
wholeness” (nested, sometimes circular development) and “dramatic argumentation” (implicit deeds, sometimes countermanding the words). In this conversation he has disjoined the assumed
virtue of the boy from its ordinary meaning: control of appetites,
moderation, temperance, and continence. He has instead attached
it to self-knowledge thoughtfully understood. To be sure, Socrates’s
“therapeutic thinking in the service of higher ends is transmogrified
[by Critias] into calculative thinking serving baser ones.” But he
has tried. This is the answer to the troubled interpreters: Socrates
has “circumspect courage.” On campaign he is a staunch warrior
saving his comrades; in the city he is a canny lover of wisdom,
protecting the truth-effort.
Some postscripts articulate David Levine’s deepest intentions: To recall to use a generally unremembered dialogue, the
Charmides, that itself memorializes a great event; to recommend
to us a guide, Socrates, who can take the measure of a human
soul; and, of course, to reveal behind both dialogue and character
an author, Plato, who writes inexhaustibly interpretable texts.
The book ends with David Levine’s own brief interpretative
synopsis of his book.
I want to emphasize once more what a curtailed report my chapter-by-chapter sketch is. Moreover I’ve not engaged the author
in critical debate. The reasons are the same for both deficiencies:
The devil (meaning the subversions of the book) is, as they say,
in the details, which are wittingly and intricately worked out. To
take issue with them would be more the matter of a conversation
than of a written report. Moreover, David Levine is alive and well
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and lives in Santa Fe; go and talk to him. For my part, it seems
to me that what he says is profoundly right: Socrates has a close
and knowing relation to his own ignorance and that is his most
telling virtue, his sophrosyne, his deep discretion, while the future
tyrant is profoundly ignorant of his ignorance. Here is my own
ultimate question: Is profound ignorance morally imputable badness or psychologically hopeless insanity? –To me, it’s the question concerning evil.
I also want to say a word of the uses to which this book might
be put: A senior might find it inciting to an unusual senior essay;
a tutor would find it encouraging to a rarely offered preceptorial;
any reader will find it illuminating in thinking about all sorts of
totalitarianisms.
In sum, Profound Ignorance: Plato’s Charmides and the
Saving of Wisdom is a book that shows what a Platonic dialogue
is and what a reading of it can be.
�
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The St. John's Review 58.1 (Fall 2016)
St. John's Review
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 57.2 (Spring 2016)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Allison Tretina
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401-1687.
©2016 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
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Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
http://www.sjc.edu/blog/st-johns-review
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Res tene, verba sequentur ........................................................1
Eva Brann
WHERE, Then, Is Time?...................................................................12
Eva Brann
Music and the Idea of a World ..........................................................25
Peter Kalkavage
On Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical
Thought and the Origin of Algebra ..............................................47
Arian Koochesfahani
Which Sciences Does the Political Science
Direct and Use and How Does It Do So? .........................................70
Edward M. Macierowski
Ass, You Like It? Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Political Philosophy ......................79
Nalin Ranasinghe
��ESSAYS & LECTURES
1
Res tene, verba sequentur*
A Reflection on Three Questions Concerning
the Re-telling of Sacred Stories and of Myths
(An Academically Disreputable Inquiry)
Eva Brann
For John Roth
Questions:
I. Are there canonical sources—gold-standards—for myths, and
how would we recognize them?
II. Should our re-visioning of sacred persons and mythical people
stay true to the standard version?
III. Should there be myth-dilations?
Brusque answers:
I. Yes, the two Bibles for sacred stories, and Homer, mainly, for
pagan myth.
II. Yes, at least as far as their vitals, their life-data, the given facts,
are concerned.
III. Yes, myths demand amplification.
I. Gold-standards: Which and Why?
1. The Hebrew Bible (including the Apocrypha) and the Christian
Bible palpably differ in authority from, say, gnostic gospels, such
as the Gospel of Judas, which is flagrantly fantastic and deliberately contrarian. Since this little essay is mainly about pagan
myth, I shall stray into the Bible-related answer to the second
question with a testimonial and then have done with the Bible as
a canonical source.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
*Cato the Elder: “Hold onto things, the words will follow.” Quoted in
Jane Hirshfield’s essay “The Question of Originality,” in Nine Gates:
Entering the Mind of Poetry (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998).
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Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (1933-1943) is the
most expansive re-telling of the Hebrew Bible I know of, twentysix chapters of Genesis (24-50), roughly thirty-five pages, expanded more than fifty-fold into eighteen-hundred pages. As far
as I can tell, this meticulous detailing, this exposé of the human
story behind the sacred story and of events not only on the living
earth and its terrestrial underworld, but also in a heaven of disaffected angels, does not deviate one jot or tittle from the given
Biblical fact, what you might call the life-structure of the twelve
brothers and their one father and several mothers, nor are Mann’s
thousand-and-one concrete realizations of the laconic original in
any way factually incompatible with it. This disciplined faithfulness, I will claim below, imparts to the retelling a pithy vitality
that a looser treatment would dissipate.
2. What can I mean by the “vital facts” of a mythical being? Here
is an anecdote that intimates what is meant by a fact:
Clemenceau, French prime minister from 1917-1920, during a
friendly discussion with a representative of the Weimar Republic
about what historians might write concerning German guilt for
the First World War, said: “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.” Facts,
when ascertainable, are interpretation-proof residues of reality.
By “vital” facts I mean biographical data of that sort.
Where are the facts of myth to be found? In the canonical account, the gold-standard telling. I will give an example of divergent facts in different texts, which bear on the biographical
armature of Helen—the Helen of whom Marlowe asked: “Was
this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
Stesichorus, a prolific sixth-century B.C. poet of a wholly
lost oeuvre, wrote, conventionally, of a Helen who went to Troy.
For this imputation on her respectability, the gods blinded him
until he produced a palinode, a counter-song of retraction (retold
by Plato in Phaedrus 243), in which she never was in Troy, but
was rescued from her abductor Alexander in Egypt by its king.
Homer, we may infer, refused this retraction, which would have
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
nullified his Iliad—and remained blind. The counter-canonical
tale, in which Troy harbored a phantasm of Helen, is accepted by
Herodotus (Persian War, 2.112 ff.). His motive is, I think, to relegate to the status of “mythical” in the derogatory sense this early
West-East incursion. It is mere pre-history; history begins with
the datable antecedents to the East-West invasion of the Persian
War. Euripides later picks up this version in his Helen, a romance.
3. Now why is Homer’s version the standard reference? How can
I know that? Well, first he precedes Stesichorus by roughly a century, so the later writer is being reactive, derivative. Second,
Homer’s poems were saved, presumably deservedly. These are,
however, mere appeals to circumstance. The truly telling argument appeals to Homer’s greatness and the consequent poignant
actuality of his people.
I aver that books come in an arguable continuum of judgment-categories from really bad, through enjoyably competent,
to seriously good. But “great” is a category discontinuous with
this spectrum; it breathes in a different ether. The criteria are, in
fact, specifiable, although here only in abbreviated fashion: it is
sufficient to observe that the band of those who have actually
read the books in question tends to come together over their classification. For example, despite Hesiod’s wintry charm, I, at least,
have never heard anyone argue that he is seriously comparable
to Homer.
Why not? What propels Homer, for those who have savored
him line by line, into a darling of the gods who blinded him not
as a punishment but to make him the fitter a conduit for the
Muses’ song—an artful “maker” (Greek: poietēs) of epic poetry,
yet not out of matter created by himself, but from fully formed
figures imparted to him by the Musical divinities (a distinction
elaborated below, in II.3 and 4).
Take this very case—Helen. Stesichorus’s Helen is the
choice-less victim of an abduction, perhaps a rape. This Helenversion saves her reputation but at the expense of her vitality.
Homer’s Helen is in every respect fully actual: She is, before her
escapade as she is after her recapture, tired of her limp husband
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Menelaus. She willingly runs off with the pretty-boy Alexander,
taking along Spartan treasure and leaving behind her baby-girl.
A real abductor would have forced her to bring the child, a valuable house slave, as we learn in the Odyssey (14.447). Helen is
indefeasibly seductive—she will make up to Alexander’s brother
Hector in Troy and beguile Odysseus’s son Telemachus in
Sparta—but she never likes the man she’s with. A funny line in
the mostly unfunny Iliad comes after she has watched her present
man skedaddle from the single combat with her husband, the contest arranged to end the Trojan war then and there. She has been
watching it from Ilium’s topless towers (or rather high walls) and
Aphrodite comes to her with an order: “Go to your man, he’s
waiting in your bedchamber.” And she says (at some length):
“Why don’t you go?” (3.395). This fatally beautiful, flagrantly
defective female is unsteady and willful and altogether a presence—the real Helen, a woman who makes choices, bad ones.
At home in Sparta she could have bid the charming Trojan prince
a suppressedly tearful good-bye. And he would have seen enough
to make that devastating choice, the so-called Judgment of Paris,
that threw the goddesses into the war-mode. This heedless preference for the mortal Helen over three immortals expressed by
Priam’s most light-weight son is, incidentally, alluded to only in
one line, late in the Iliad (24.28) and in very vague language not
naming Helen; clearly Homer thinks it’s a very subsidiary cause
for his war. So Helen’s vitals are not to be tampered with, unless
lots of evidence is adduced. —She was in Troy, all right.
4. Some texts are excused from this obligation to preserve factuality. For example, Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in bulk the post-pagan
counterpart to Mann’s post-biblical Joseph, is not to be held to
any fact, but can be as factlessly atmospheric as the author likes,
because Ulysses is not Odysseus in his own place and time; rather
Bloom is the Jewish-Irish reincarnation, the avatar of a remote
pagan.
Similarly Kazantzakis’s Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938),
a continuation grafted onto the twenty-second book of the
Odyssey, is a deliberate fantasy, a contravention of Homer’s ac-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
count of the hero’s return. In this epic, Odysseus returns for
good—a final return confirmed by a last short voyage in which
the sailor takes leave of his odysseian travels by going way inland, there to build a sailor’s cenotaph. Kazantzakis’s willful rewriting of the Odyssey, three times the length of the Homeric
epic, pays a price: This new, entirely modern—here meaning indeterminately straying—Odysseus and his wildly fantastic pilgrimage are difficult to take in (and I can’t pretend to have gotten
far). Moreover, this new Odysseus, who takes off into the wild
blue yonder, introduces a duplicity, a rending, into the mythical
world: There are now two Odysseuses. This doubling is not the
same as two perspectives on one character. For example, we may
ask whether Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra commits an assassination
or performs an execution and if his Orestes commits a vengeful
matricide or performs a divinely-ordered retribution—but only
if there is one queen and one son about whom we ask.
5. So Homer is not one of many, an idiosyncratic poetaster and
lax researcher who failed to acknowledge alternative versions.
His Helen is the Helen, not because, as I shall claim below, he
concocted, conflated, composed her cleverly, but because she
came to him. One way to put this is that, as he lived, blessedly,
with a tradition of tales from which to harvest concretely present
detail for his figures as well as hints of immemorial depth, so he
was unburdened by the scholar’s notion of “literature,” which replaces the natural coherence of the imaginative world with the
learned administration of written texts. His highly formal and
consequently very expressive prosody, his clever punning and
sparely-expressed psychological complexity, are only embellishments spun out of his artistry. —His people come from elsewhere
and they bring their own inimitable souls and their proper eventfulness. He holds on to his people and the words do come: Res
tene, verba sequentur.
II. Canonical Revisioning: How and Why?
1. From the writer’s perspective, adherence to the prototype is
profitable because the unconstrained, uncontained imagination
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goes flaccid; it becomes tautly concentrated when encased by the
cincture of fact.
2. From the story’s perspective, one might well ask “what’s the
difference?” as long as the tale is well told. Well, it makes a great
difference for the epic world, the world of the imagination, into
which the story taps. In bringing an invented alternative, an innovation, into this world, the writer, as I said above, rends it, tears
its fabric—for the pagan myths form a coherent universe in their
own time and place. Now there will be two homonymous but different beings, both now vagrants in their territory, vying for legitimacy. There seems to me to be an obligation for latter-day
writers to integrate their re-telling into its world—or why call
your creation “Helen”? Two Helens offend against Ockham’s
Razor by needlessly multiplying entities—a mere misdemeanor
in the realm of logic but a sort of sin against the land of the imagination.
3. Once the factual frame is subverted, the discipline is gone and
mere invention supervenes—that ludicrous human arrogation of
divinity called “creativity.” The tale now issues not from the character’s essence but from the writer’s, the faux-creator’s, invention. No longer does this author call on the Muses—“Sing,
goddess, the wrath” and “Speak to me, Muse, of the man”— but
on his own “creativity,” and all too often that piddling confection,
a literary creation, comes forth. Not, however, I hasten to say, inevitably, for human invention and artifice too can produce clever
and convincing works. So let me repeat here how a maker-poet
differs from a creator-poet. The former applies his well-trained
artistry to received material, of which more below (II.4); the latter
imitates God by making something out of nothing—in modem
parlance, out of his unconscious.
4. Disregard of Homer’s givens is an invitation to what appears
to me the most deleterious mode for making fictions: subjectivity.
Put positively, the poets that seem to me to make the most vital
fictions, beings that have more life and surely greater longevity
than real people (or animals: what real dog has lived through the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
millennia that Odysseus’s old Argos has?), are objective reporters. Beings come to them, become manifest, and press to be
bodied forth. They appear, to be sure, in the imagination, but they
are not made by the imagination. The poet is to be credited for
his acute internal vision. It achieves his beings’ thereness: their
imaginative concretion and verbal articulation, their human-alltoo-human particularity and definitive description. That
Odysseus has a long torso and short legs is well-observed by
Homer and his vivid word pictures come from keen looking—
the kind of seeing that blindness fosters.*
There is a curious notion that poetry is self-expression: Well,
lyric poetry perhaps, but surely not epic or epic-derivatives, in
which the rare “I” is authorial, or better, reportorial, and not personal. There is a second strange idea that authors’ sufferings bring
gravity to their work. Well, if so, probably more for readers who
seek in fiction the warm motions of feeling rather than the cool
delights of imagination. To me it seems that the maker’s emotional vulnerabilities aren’t in it, at least not as generative principles; sympathy for victimized women, abhorrence for brutal
men, these are imported latter-day sensitivities, romantic in mode
and contemporary in content; so conceived, figures can’t come
into their own. Take, on the other hand, a case of an author clearly
in love: Tolstoy with Natasha Rostov, as actual a being, both as
an enchanting girl and as a dowdy, demanding mater familias, as
ever walked the earth. —Surely, she appeared to him first, and
he couldn’t help but love her. I can’t imagine that she was conceived to bolster the self-esteem of young wives thickening
around the middle.
There is, to be sure, good subjective fiction as well, but its
appeal is to readers’ personal sensibilities or their special interest
in the author. Such fictions tend to lack that poignant particularity
which is the facade assumed by universality in epics and novels.
In the course of the fifth century B.C., Odysseus seems to
have lost his Homeric standing—his vivid imaginativeness de*So the English Homer in his blindness sees and tells “of things invisible to mortal sight” (Paradise Lost 3.55).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
graded into self-serving lying, his ingenious versatility into base
scheming, his meaning-laden adventures into comic episodes.
Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Euripides’s satyr play, The Cyclops,
and minor pot-paintings are the evidence. Honest Homer gives
some cause for this view, to be sure, but why it took over, I don’t
know; perhaps Odysseus was regarded as a naturalized Athenian
and so fair game. But the Odysseus, Homer’s Odysseus, who has,
as the commander of his homeward-bound fleet, episodes of culpable obliviousness, and, as the returned repossessor of his
palace, a moment of murderous rampageousness, is accorded
some justification: sheer exhaustion on the seas, and once at
home, the discovery that his palace is infested by a hundred-plus
uninvited suitors who have eaten out his substance, plotted to
murder his son, and all but committed outrage against his wife.
The Homeric Odysseus is a dilatory but faithful husband, bound
to a wife who is his equal and partner; he is an ever-mindful parent who—as far as I know alone of all the heroes encamped before Troy—regularly refers to himself as a father, “the father of
Telemachus” (2.260, 4.354), a usually temperate and self-controlled man, and, above all, a great poet, the poet of his own
odyssey. To see him as repulsive is to put in suspension his full,
his objective, his primary Homeric being in deference to a preconceived sensibility.
5. What, then, is the function of human imagination in making
fictions, and particularly in filling out myths? I think that there
are two imaginative functions: one is like a workshop, the other
like a reception area.* The workshop is an internal place where
human artfulness goes to work on given material to curry and articulate it. The reception area is an internal place just waiting for
the Muses to present beings and the actions that spring from their
essence—that being a fancy way of saying outright what our con*Kant’s apparently similar “productive” and “reproductive” imagination
are toto caelo different, the first being a deep faculty for bringing together sensibility and understanding to make cognitive experience possible, the other being analogous to ordinary memory. See his Critique
of Pure Reason, B 181.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
temporaries find insupportably embarrassing: No one, no one
whosoever, has a non-evasive answer to the question where these
self-sustaining fictional beings come from. This I do know: that
their appearance in the imaginative chamber is what makes great
fictions objective—given rather than created. And that is precisely why it seems to me pusillanimous to refuse to consider a
theological explanation.
6. Another charge against subjectivity in myth-adaptation is that
it invites indeterminacy. For while objectivity is apt to let cheerfulness break out, the subjective mode tends to ally itself with
the suffering moods. Now objective suffering has some tragic
clarity, but subjective suffering tends to willful irresolution.
Irresolution, indeterminacy, is the via ignava, the “craven
way,” of the intellect; it is the enemy of openness, for it is a powerful pre-entrenchment. The mantra “Life is very messy” shifts
responsibility to a non-being, “Life”; in sober fact, it is people
who make messes, and people are meant to unmake them. Some
tragic dilemmas have no solution, but all human conditions have
a resolution: a way we come to deal with them, either by a masterful coping or by a determined resignation or by a decision to
take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.
It seems to me that art, especially narrative art, should not be
so unlike human reality as to be terminally indeterminate, when
the human life-span is a concatenation of crises-plus-resolutions,
and the whole often reveals order in retrospect. So, also, then,
should works of art offer not escapism, to be sure, but some sort
of sublimation—which is but a sort of condition-transcending
conclusiveness.
7. Aristotle says that plot (mythos) is the source, and as it were,
the soul of tragedy, because tragedy is primarily an imitation of
actions, and therefore only secondarily an imitation of agents
(Poetics 1450a40 ff.). In other words, the event structure determines the character. That may be true of tragedies, which are
brief cut-outs of extended life, concentrating on an event and its
actors. Epics, however (perhaps not the anonymous bardic songs
but surely the attributed Homeric poems), which are not under
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the Greek one-day time-limitation customary for tragedy, but are
time-extensible ad libitum (Aristotle, Poetics 1449b8-9), may be
said to work in reverse: the character extrudes, so to speak, the
events. Here the person determines the myth, at least in its detailed realization: Its people act out who they are, and an old story
of one of those East-West women-stealings (which for Herodotus
are, as I said, the dubious pre-historic antecedents of the Persian
War) is turned by the canonically envisioned Helen-character into
a willful running-off. For real, round people, in life or fiction, are
not mere victims for long—and especially not in fiction, where
victim-types tend to make the plot peter out and thus to prevent
finalities. After all, waiting to be rescued is no life, and such
supine characters have no after-life either. Hence, one might
make it a rule of receptive imagining and so of fiction-writing—
a first bit of advice to authors-to-be: Before you even begin to
write, know what happens after your telling is done. For if you
don’t know that, you don’t know the meaning of your story. Real
characters must live out the afterlife you’ve made for them, and
their fate must backlight your story.
8. Even a great work, like Charlotte Bronte’s best, Villette, is diminished by willful indefiniteness: By the last page we do not
know whether Lucy Snowe will receive her intended husband
back, saved out of the tempest encountered by his returning ship,
or will be left with the cold comfort of being the directress of a
well-established girls’ boarding school. There are, to be sure,
heavy hints at a shipwreck, but that is because the author, while
reluctant to burden her long-suffering heroine with one more final
disaster, also wishes to capture for her story the romantic gravity
of ultimate misfortune. But it is not done in good faith; Charlotte
Bronte must know whether his proper mythos makes the man
emerge safely—or drown.
Terminal indeterminacy, abandoning the reader in medias
res, is not only irritating, it is irrealistic, for in real life M. Paul
either walks in the door of that pensionnat in the “clean
Faubourg” or he doesn’t. So also one of these options should turn
out to be a fact of the Muses’ tale; why, then, muddy the waters
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
with that indecisively raging tempest at sea? Better to build in
some clear clues of eventuation; that done, it is, to be sure, a neat
trick of the story-telling art to finish before the conclusion, leaving it for imaginative readers and epigonous myth-makers to clue
out the fact.
III. Should there be myth-dilations?
One feature of a solid, well-rounded item of reality is that its substance is attended by millions of strange shadows, or conversely,
that it offers indefinitely many perspectives: angular ones, as the
observer circumambulates the object, radial ones, as the viewer
pans in for close-ups and beyond. Well-actualized beings of the
imagination are just the same. The Muse-delivered prototype entrains multitudes of re-tellings; for the captivated imagination
there is no end of new views.
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WHERE, Then, Is Time?
Eva Brann
Let me first explain my odd-sounding title. It is a variation on
the most famous question-and-answer about time ever posed. It
comes from the eleventh book of Augustine’s Confessions, published about 400 C.E.: This is his question: “What, then, is time?”
And this is his preliminary answer: “If nobody asks me, I know;
if I want to explain it to him who asks me, I don’t know.” But
that’s only the beginning. What follows is, to my mind, the deepest and most persuasive positive solution to the perplexity.
I
In modern times the most sophisticated and detailed answer is
given by Edmund Husserl in his book The Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Internal Time, finished in 1917. It is essentially
an elaborated version of Augustine’s solution. Its title tells why
I have substituted “where” for “what” in Augustine’s famous
question: Time is, in both works, understood primarily as an
event within our soul (or, as it is called for the sake of scientific
respectability, the psyche). I might say here by way of clarification that “soul” is traditionally used for the power from which
emanate all the activities of life, from sense perception through
all kinds of thinking to the intuition of supra-sensory being, while
“consciousness” applies only to the part of life that is aware or
self-aware.
Now I hope you’ll forgive me if I do some more name-dropping. It’s for distinguishing a second answer to the question
“Where is time,” namely outside, in the world, in nature. Three
great names—apparently—stand for this location: Plato, Newton,
and Einstein.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
This lecture was originally presented at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. on 11 December 2015.
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Plato’s dialogue Timaeus (circa 360 B.C.E.) is, into modern
times, the classical astronomer’s very own work. The reason is
that it provides one set of conditions under which it is plausible
to make finite models of the world. That condition is that there
be a uni-verse, a well-ordered cosmos consisting of an encompassing starry sphere, an inner array of closed, non-intersecting
planetary orbits, including that of the sun, and a stable center for
the human observer, the earth. Of this world it is possible to produce a moving mathematical model called an orrery. And the reason we can model the world is that it is itself the incarnation of a
timeless ideal model, a mathematical paradigm for an incarnation
that is the work of a divine craftsman.
Time is built into this cosmic universe by the god, who, upon
having “thought of making a certain movable image of eternity,”
at once so ordered the heavens that they were “an eternal image
going according to number, which we have given the name Time.”
In other words, the whole cosmos is a clock, whose starry sphere
is a moving dial at night and the tip of whose hand is the planet
Sun, marking out the hours of the day by its positions in the sky
or by the shadows it causes the style of a sundial to cast.
Next, Newton, who states very definitively in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy of 1687, his Principia, that
there is an “Absolute, true and mathematical time,” an equable,
independent flux, distinct from that relative time which is only
the measure of some, presumably reliable, even motion.
And finally, in his introduction of special relativity, the 1905
paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Einstein says
boldly that for local time, the definition of time can simply be
“the position of the small hand of my watch” (I, para 1). In other
words, time is what the clock tells.
These three understandings of the source of time seem certainly to place it squarely outside of consciousness, into nature,
namely as the divinely made heavens themselves, or as a universal stream within them, or as a humanly made artifact, a clock.
However, the externality really only works for Einstein, for
whom time, local or astronomical, is operationally defined in
terms of a theory of measurement based on the postulates of rel-
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ativity, a measurement by which astronomically remote clock
time can be compared with local time. But even in that case it
isn’t clear whether time so defined is established as external or
rather abolished altogether, being a mere designation for locations on an analogue dial or a digital register.
One more name here, actually the earliest to do away with
time: Aristotle, in the fourth book of his Physics (after 335 B.C.E.),
defines time as the counted number of a locomotion according
to before and after. In other words, time is no visible or sensed
something, such as a designated heavenly appearance or a pervasive flux, but just an activity of counting passages. And, as I
said, it seems to me that Einstein’s positivist, boldly practical understanding has the same effect: It’s not time but stations of
movement, the position of mobiles like clock hands, that is real.
So if time is outside, it’s just one unit motion measuring out or
counting up another motion. But then again, counting is ultimately a psychic activity; if we didn’t have the experience of
counting up moments internally, we couldn’t interpret a digitally
displayed aggregate as time that has passed.
It’s even worse with Plato’s and Newton’s view of time. Consider this: Some of the greatest works at the beginning of the sciences of nature are theologies. Certainly the Timaeus introduces
a divinity, a divine artificer. But above all, so does Newton’s
Principia. He devotes its final pages to an exposition of God in
Nature which ends with the words: “And thus much concerning
God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does
certainly belong to Natural Philosophy.”
In his Optics Newton says, moreover, that these appearances
betoken an incorporeal Being “who in infinite Space, as it were
in his sensorium, sees the things themselves intimately.” He
means that space is that part of God’s soul in which he receives
sensory impressions—presumably including primarily the temporal flux, which could, perhaps, be understood as his stream of
consciousness.
So also does Plato in the Timaeus ultimately put time inside
the soul, an encompassing world soul: For his divine craftsman
wraps the cosmos with bands of soul-stuff, structured by musical
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ratios so as to impart rationality and beautifully proportioned motion to the world within. In this strange and wonderful cosmology, the soul is the cincture, the sash of the world’s body.
The point I’m making is that if you ask the question: “Is time
internal or external?,” there appear to be some great scientists
who believe the latter, but if you ask it differently: “Is time in the
world or in consciousness, the number of such believers is reduced, because they think that the world itself is comprehended,
activated, by a sort of soul. And, as I said, there are those who
reduce going time to the counting of passage and told time to the
number pointed at on a dial (which is itself a motionless imitation
of a celestial circuit) or displayed on a screen (which is a lifeless
imitation of a soul seen counting). In effect, they too do away
with time as a distinctive “something.” It is nothing but one motion used to measure another.
II
The questions “What or where is time” now seem to need to become ultimate, to demand: “Is there time at all?” Perhaps a version of more immediate interest to you is: Is the dimension “t”
really needed in formulas of physics? I have tried to read books
like Julian Barbour’s The End of Time (2000), whose high level
arguments for the abolition of time from physics I am not competent to understand. But there is a very elementary consideration
along the same lines: Diagrams in elementary kinematics tend
to get loci of paths by plotting distance against time, but time itself is represented by distance, the t-axis (Galileo, Two New Sciences, Book IV, Theorem 1). Now most objects we symbolize,
we re-present in the dimension in which they actually exist, be
they visual, that is spatial, or auditory or tactile. For example,
the eight-sided sign that verbally says STOP, or crosses out motion
with the cross-symbol X, is itself in the plane dimension of space,
and that, in turn, is the dimensionality of the viewing plane of our
vision—for the third dimension is an experiential inference from
the two-dimensional picture plane onto which sight-lines from the
depths of space are projected—ultimately our retina. But when an
item is not representable in its own physical dimension (because
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it has none), be it an idea, an angel, or infinity, we are alerted that
something about it is not, so to speak, kosher. And all the images
of time I know of are indeed either spatial extensions marked by
selected now-points or registered counts of sensory pulses from
heart beats down to atomic periods.
But if that’s the only way to get hold of time, then time has,
as I said, been nullified: It’s just a way of measuring something,
say, life lived or ground covered, by means of the continuous motion of some uniformly moving mobile or the continual accumulation of some equably occurring events.
Are these notions a scientist needs to worry about? Well, no,
the realm in which questions of Being or Nonbeing are at home
is not a venue for result-oriented research. It’s a place to park
questions that need to be bypassed when you have engaging and
preoccupying research to do. They’ll keep there for the time
when you can’t help yourself because you really want to understand the postulated conditions of science, which cannot themselves be science.
The American psychologist William James knew as much
about the human soul as about the scientific psyche. I mentioned
“Phenomenology” before, when I cited Husserl’s work on internal time. Phenomenology is the careful description of the constitution of consciousness. I believe that James was actually the
transatlantic founder of this European movement, because I cannot think of a more acute analysis of our internal life than he presents in his short Psychology of 1892. In the Epilogue to this
classic he says plainly and candidly what we all need to hear. He
regards himself as a natural scientist and takes that to involve two
postulates: 1. Determinism—that all events are rigidly constrained by the laws of nature, and 2. Atomism—that the stuff
participating in these events consists of massy elementary particles, which are in force relations to each other. These claims applied to psychology make it a science and the psyche a naturally
constrained entity. In effect this means that our physiology determines our psychology.
Ethics, James then says, makes a counterclaim: Our wills are
free. Scientists do not concern themselves with spontaneity and
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freedom. Then he goes on: “The forum where they hold [such]
discussions is metaphysics. Metaphysics means only an unusually
obstinate attempt to think clearly and consistently.” He continues:
A specialized scientist’s “purposes fall short of understanding
Time itself . . . and as soon as one’s purpose is the attainment of
the maximum of insight into the world, the metaphysical puzzles
become the most urgent of all.”
III
So let me launch into one account of time that I find both in accord with experience and elegant in its presentation. It is that of
Augustine, with which I began. I am not quite sure if his understanding is metaphysical or theological. I’ve never read a great
theologian about whom I was clear whether he was more metaphysician or more believer—probably each for the sake of the
other: “I believe so I may understand” says Anselm in his Proslogion of the later eleventh century—and, though he denies it, perhaps the converse is true as well. Allow me to point out that
scientists do just the same: They accept postulates on faith so that
they may do research, and they do research so that they may find
a truth.
If it is the case that time never makes its appearance out in
the world but only motion is in evidence, then either time is not
or it is in the only other venue of which I can think, inside our
soul. As one of our seniors (Maxwell Dakin) put it to me when I
took him to lunch: “We aren’t in time, but time is in us.” For Augustine time is internal psychologically but also external theologically. When physical time has been shown to lack all physical
evidence and therefore to be scientifically void, it might still be
theologically real.
Augustine’s manuscripts contain no diagrams, as far as I
know. Yet his exposition of time seems eminently diagrammable,
and that’s how I’ll present it—to be internally imagined rather
than externally projected.
Inscribe, then, in the mental field of your imagination an upright line. Make it finite in length, for it is to stand for your mortal
soul, but also indefinite, for it is to represent that expansible stor-
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age, the part of the soul called the memory, and also those forward-projected images termed expectations. That is to say, points
on it are moments of memory, long ago or recent, and also hopes
and fears, near or far off.
Now set this perpendicular across a horizontal straight line.
That line will be quite definitely finite, for it represents the world
moving from the week of its creation to the last judgment and
the somewhat less well-defined end-time: Solvet saeclum in favilla, “Secular time will dissolve into ashes,” as goes the sacred
text, the Requiem. The crossing, it would be the “origin,” the zero
point (if we were to think of this picture anachronistically as a
diagram of Cartesian x- and y-axes) represents the location where
we, our aware soul or consciousness, take place, so to speak,
where we are actually present in and to the ongoing world as its
participating eye-witnesses. The part of the psychic upright below
the world-line represents the past, all the memories left by the
passing present that have been pushed down, point by memorypoint, into the deeper past, way back to earliest childhood. The
part of the upright above the world-line represents what we might
call “future-memory” or expectations, our projection of images,
drawn from modified memory, onto the future motions of the
world. The closer to the origin, the present, the sooner and more
likely are our predictions to come about and the more effective
are our anticipatory decisions.
So far this is a plane figure, but there is also a line through the
origin into the third dimension. Augustine calls this z-axis extensio,
which means roughly “outreach.” It represents the access we have
to unmoving timeless realms, such as mathematics, eternal verities,
and, above all, to the Divinity, whose time is the so-called “standing now” (nunc stans) of theology, within which our moving world
is an infinitesimal interlude. “Extension” is thus our stretching toward immortality, and it has no definable extent.
The upright soul-axis, on the other hand, he calls “distention.” By the z-axis we reach out beyond ourselves; by the x-axis,
our consciousness, we are distended, prolonged, so to speak,
within ourselves. Though we live in zero-time, within the present
moment, on the cusp of now, we carry above and below this
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crossing of world and awareness all our past in memory and our
future in expectant imagination. Though pointillistic beings in
actual world-presence, we are all there simultaneously in temporally ordered memory and expectation. We contain all the time
there is for us individually, all our past and all our future, present
within us. So I will quote Augustine’s famous formulation of exclusively internal time. He says:
Such three [past, present, future] are indeed in our
soul and elsewhere I do not see them. The present
of what has gone by is memory, the present of what
is present, eyewitness, the present of what is future,
expectation. (11.20)
The future, therefore, is not a long time, for it is not,
but the long future is merely a long expectation of
the future. Nor is the time past a long time, for it is
not, but a long time past is merely a long memory
of past time. (11.28)
In my youth I was an archaeologist, digging up the past in
Greece. You astronomers are, similarly, the archaeologists of the
universe, the experts of experts in pastness. Nothing comes to
your eyes but what is aeons in the past.
How then can Augustine say to us that the past that is not
specifically ours as memory has passed away? Well, if I dig up,
say, an Attic cooking pot, rough, undecorated, and with a blackened bottom, that pot is not past but present. The same for the
stars of which you capture evidence in your observatory. What
makes the pot a survival of the past, the kind called “historical
evidence,” is what might be called external memory. The fact that
the pot is deep beneath the earth’s surface, buried in strata that
are analogous to the soul’s memory stratification doesn’t help to
make it past; its thereness is still now. But the fact that there are
written epics and histories and other transmitted memories of the
“glory that was Greece,” together with some common sense
which tells me that they too boiled their beans—those circumstances make me infer a past beyond my own birth, a past-pot,
so to speak, made 2,500 years before I was born.
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I think it must be the same for you: You have ways of calculating the distance of the starry objects you focus on and you
know the travelling speed of the signals they emit, and so you
calculate your way back into a past that is, in fact, over: That
past, however, is now for you or it is not at all. There is an argument that world time must be real because it comes in different
configurations: The orbital times of classical Newtonian dynamics are cyclical and reversible. You can run the heavenly clock
backwards without damage to the laws of nature. And there is the
so-called “arrow of time” for a thermodynamic understanding of
the world as progressing, or rather deteriorating, into disorder in
the absence of shots of energy. And there is the theological view
I just referred to, in which the universe occupies a stretch of time
inserted into an atemporal eternity with a dramatic first week and
a less clear-cut end. This theological time-line is mirrored in cosmology by the claim that time has a spectacular beginning but a
fizzling end, if any. I should add here quickly that I am not pretending to understand these temporal possibilities. I just read
about them. But this I do see: All these theories are actually about
the measurements of motions and in them time may be a convenient symbolic dimension, but it’s not a substantial being; the present alone, our being there, is real. It is not time that displays
diverse qualities but particles of matter that obey different laws
of motion. Augustine, it seems to me, saves our sense that we
ourselves are temporal in the absence of any evidence that nature,
the world of bodies in motion, is so.
Let me, finally, speak of a culminating clarification Augustine
has accomplished. He has explained why time is naturally thought
of as having three phases. The explanation is in terms of three psychic capacities: In our memory we store away in a time-generating
order reproducible moments of the world’s motions and events
that have come to our attention. Those observations yield a past
with a chronological structure. Through sensory awareness we
live now, in an actual, if momentary, presence. That is our present,
our now. And in our imagination, which is memory in its transfiguring mode, we prefigure, expectantly, in hope, fear, or resignation, things that might come to be. That’s the future.
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IV
Allow me to end with a particular preoccupation of mine. When
I say that only the now is real, I may seem to claim that life in
the “just now” is the life there is. The Latin word for “just now”
is modo, from which comes our word “modernity.” Living in the
“just now,” in expectation of the next “just now,” does seem to
be a primary feature of modern life with its obsession for the
short-term, for speed and novelty. In fact, the adverb “now” is
etymologically related to “new” (Indo-European: newo). I’m all
for making the most of our moments, but not so much insofar as
they confront us with that hard-edged brash factuality, called reality. I have more faith in actuality, which I think of as bringing
vibrant significance to our lives. But that’s a long story not for
today, so let me dwell instead for a moment on the comparative
residual powers of the past and the future.
The past has passed away; we say “it was.” But the verb was
is a tensed form of is. For my part, I do not believe that anyone
can succeed in recalling the past into the present, as a German
historian (Leopold von Ranke) famously demanded of history: It
should render the past “as it really, effectively had been” (wie es
wirklich [or eigenlich] gewesen ist). That is impossible for two
reasons: First, because, since a human day has 24 x 60 = 1440
minutes, called “specious presents” by William James (Psychology (1892), Chapter XVII), meaning lived moments, an adequately real history would have to take account of and pass
judgement on each of these moments, both psychic and physical,
of every dead human being as well as every resultant group activity—which would be a practically infinite task even if the material were actually accessible. And second, it is impossible
because I believe that a thoughtful person coming to grips with
the past will have to go schizophrenic, that is, “split-minded,” in
order to entertain the following, unavoidable dual persuasion: On
the one hand, it is simply not determinable that there is a past
that has actually happened, because the conduct of human individuals, like the behaviors of electrons, may be terminally uncertain for an observer in a way analogous to the Uncertainty
Principle of physics: The historian’s observational perspective
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cannot help but suppress one feature of a situation in focusing on
another. Or even worse: Perhaps human life is just not ultimately
determinable because of our incurable inability to penetrate people’s interior or, yet worse, because human beings are in themselves indeterminable, perhaps more radically than electrons.
On the other hand—and here’s what splits the mind—who
can avoid believing that there really was one way it had actually
been in the past, that some things were the case and others not?
Thus when some revisionists were arguing that the Germans had
not indisputably initiated the First World War, the French statesman Clemenceau said something to this effect: “At least no one
will claim that on the night of August 3, 1914 the Belgians invaded Germany.”
So, all that said, whether the established past is always a tiny
selection of the real past, or the real past is itself in principle uncertain, either within clear limits or with large latitude, it seems
extreme to say that the past is totally not. There is a roughly recoverable past, especially by means of written works. And (I want
to say this briefly but emphatically) the depth and coherence of
the present depends on being mindful of this past. That too is a
subject for a different lecture.
So I come to my concluding expression of personal opinion.
Just as it seems to me essential to coherent living to ascribe actuality
to the past, so it seems to me essential to effective action to deny it
to the future: The future is far more not than the past. In fact it is a
big Nothing—at least the human future is just a nonbeing.
I am an amateur reader of anthropology, and here’s a pertinent anthropological discovery from the Andes.* In most cultures
the future is thought of as confronting us, coming toward us, existing ahead of us. In the Andes of South America there is, however, a language, Aymaran, and its speakers for which the future
comes up from behind. These people use the Aymaran word for
*Rafael Nuñez and Eve Sweetser, “With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time,” Cognitive Science
30 (2006): 1-49.
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“back” to refer to future events and gesture behind them to indicate its coming. This way is highly unusual, but to me it makes
perfect sense. There is a future that is fixed from the past, that
future which is predictable because past events are determinately
causative. Thus having a bad drought in the summer just behind
you makes a poor harvest in fall to come a practical certainty.
Above all, celestial motions, which are fixed by natural law, are
highly predictable; thus an Ephemeris gives the coordinates of
celestial bodies way into the future. That’s a way of saying that
the future is determined from behind us, since prior causes determine posterior effects—certainly in large-scale nature.
There’s a huge “but.” Determinists will argue that we human
beings are also bits of nature and entirely determined by brain
action. If we only knew the brain’s condition in every detail we
could entirely predict a human being’s action. Never mind the
practical impossibility of complete information; if we are altogether parts of nature, absolute prediction is in logical principle
possible, and impracticable only in mere fact. Then there is indeed a future, though not one coming at us but one issuing from
our circumstances.
But it is possible that we have a capacity for spontaneity of
action based on liberty of choice and freedom of decision. If that
is the case, then the human aspect of the future is indeed a great
big Nothing until we, here and now, decide to give it the shape
we choose. It may be that the antecedent causes of choice, which
are trains of thought, are even more exigently binding than the
laws of nature, but they include an element of weighing and judging that is inviolably ours. If there is this parallel track of free
choice, then this is what those future-gurus deserve who undertake to tell us what the future holds and sends at us, “like it or
not,” and who advise us to prepare for and accommodate to these
futuristic advents, even if we judge them to be bad—on pain of
being overrun by them. They deserve to be told that they are trying to invade the realm of our expectations and intending to highjack our imaginations. In other words they are attempting to
curtail our freedom, and their bid to have us bow to their inevitabilities should be met with a counter-bid for them to butt
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out. For to the question “where is time?” the answer is: For sure
not in the future; the human future is nonexistent until we imagine it and act accordingly—and by then it’s already the present.
Let me hasten to say as my final point: Our free choice,
which is, as I’ve said, sure to be ultimately quite constrained by
the demands of truth-seeking thought, has at least an initial moment of spontaneity, when we focus our attention on a subject
and commit ourselves to thinking it through—on its terms. This
spontaneity, this freedom, seems to me to be anchored in two,
somewhat iffy facts. One is the powerful, personal experience of
being my-self, my own mistress, unavoidably in charge. The
other is the powerful public sense of not belonging entirely to
myself but of willingly surrendering part of me to my community—and that this is a particularly telling practice of freedom.
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Music and the Idea of a World
Peter Kalkavage
“Music, too, is nature.”
—Victor Zuckerkandl,
Sound and Symbol
This lecture explores the differences between two perspectives on
music: one ancient, one modern. The texts I have chosen are
Plato’s Timaeus, a dialogue that freshmen will read in seminar toward the end of the year, and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will
and Representation, a great book not on the program. Each of
these works presents an all-embracing account of the world—a
cosmology—that highlights the bond between world and music.
I hope that my study in contrast will lead us to a deeper understanding of music as it relates to the whole of all things, our human
condition and our happiness. I also hope that it will show why
music is the most comprehensive of the liberal arts, and why it is
the case that to speak about music is to speak about everything.
My talk has three parts. In the first, I focus on the central role
that music plays in Timaeus’ cosmological optimism. According
to Timaeus, the world of Becoming is a beautiful work of art
ruled by the supreme goodness of intelligent divinity. In Leibniz’s
phrase, it is the best of possible worlds. In the second part, I turn
to Schopenhauer’s cosmological pessimism, according to which
the world is not the shining forth of intelligent purpose but the
work of a blind urge that Schopenhauer calls the will. Music, for
Schopenhauer, is the most potent and truthful of the arts because
it is a “copy [Abbild] of the will itself.” In the third part of my
talk I offer, by way of a coda, some thoughts on music and world
in the context of the Bible.
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was first presented in Annapolis on 6 November 2015.
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Part One. Rootedness and Musicality
The Timaeus is Plato’s most overtly musical work. Music is
prominent in other dialogues as well, notably in the Republic and
Laws, and in the Phaedo, where Socrates calls philosophy “the
greatest music” (61A); but it is so much a part of the form and
substance of the Timaeus that the dialogue may be said to be all
about music.
The projected drama of the Timaeus is a performance by
three illustrious political men, whose task is to entertain Socrates
with a feast of speech: Timaeus of Italy, Hermocrates of Sicily
and Critias of Athens. A fourth was supposed to have joined them,
but he is a no-show. The men who did show up form a trio of
poet-rhetoricians, who have agreed to gratify Socrates’ desire to
behold his best city, which he had described on the previous day,
engaged in the words and deeds of war (19B-20C). The star of
the show is officially Critias, who boasts about how he will harmonize the particulars of Socrates’ city in speech with those of
an ancient unsung Athens. This Athens of old, Critias claims, really existed once upon a time and nobly fought against the insolent kings of Atlantis. But Timaeus upstages Critias with his long
speech about the cosmos and proves the superior poet. How can
one top a magnificent, richly detailed speech about the whole of
all things—the cosmology that is the unmatched model for all
cosmologies to come?
Early in the Timaeus, we hear about the importance of music
in human communal life, as Critias recollects what his greatgrandfather and namesake experienced when he was a young boy.
This Critias joined other boys in a music contest in which they
sang poems recently composed by the lawgiver Solon (21B). The
contest was part of the boys’ initiation into their family tribe and
took place during a festival in honor of Dionysus, the god of intoxication. It depicts the very moment in which impressionable
youths are officially rooted in their tribe, and by extension their
city. Through the act of singing, the opinions of Solon take root
in these young souls and become authoritative. They become
things not merely heard and obeyed but imbibed, incorporated
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and cherished. A similar ritual enrooting is at work, as we shall
see, in the speech of Timaeus.
We know from the Republic that music, which for the Greeks
includes poetry, is dangerous. Because music has the power to
shape the soul for good or ill, to make it orderly or disorderly, an
account of the best regime must include a critique of music as
one of its prime components. At one point Socrates tells us why:
So, Glaucon, . . . isn’t this why nurture in music is most
sovereign? Because rhythm and concord most of all sink
down into the inmost part of the soul and cling to her
most vigorously, bringing gracefulness with them; and
they make a man graceful if he’s nurtured correctly, if
not, then the opposite (401D5-E1).1
The passage underscores the tremendous power of music and
shows why music is crucial to moral-political education. It recalls the final book of Aristotle’s Politics, which treats the musical education of those who are to be free human beings and
good citizens.
Plato and Aristotle realize that we are on intimate terms with
music. The intimacy verges on the supernatural, since music
seems to be a kind of magic that causes the listener to be held
and spellbound. Music, like Orpheus, enthrals. Aristotle observes
at the beginning of his Metaphysics that sight is the privileged
sense, the one that we hold most dear and that most reveals the
differences of things. Musical hearing can lay claim to another
kind of privilege. Music has an intense personal inwardness, an
immediate emotional effect and a power to form our character,
opinions and way of life. In moving our affections it moves our
whole being. This is the ground of the danger that music poses.
In music there is no safe distance between perceiver and perceived, as there is in sight. There is also no refuge: we cannot
turn away from music as we can from a thing seen, since music
is not spatially bounded but sounds everywhere. Moreover, in lis1. I have slightly modified the translation by Allan Bloom, The Republic
of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
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tening to a piece of music, we are not free to survey its parts at
will, as we can with an object that is seen, but must wait for a
moment to sound.2 The tones come when they want to. And yet,
listening to music is more than mere passivity, for it affects us
by virtue of its forms and structures. Listening, in other words,
is an act, in which we not only feel but also perceive. This is the
paradox that is music, which can overwhelm our reason and selfcontrol but always through the order and precision of its tones
and rhythms. To borrow terms made famous by Nietzsche, music
could not be Dionysian if it were not thoroughly Apollinian,
which it must be if it is to be an art at all.
As I mentioned earlier, Timaeus’ speech—or, as he famously
calls it, his “likely story” (29D)—is an effort to put the world of
Becoming in the best possible light. It is a defence of Becoming
in response to Socrates’ indictment in the Republic. In that dialogue Socrates tells Glaucon that genuine education turns the soul
away from Becoming or flux and toward the changeless realm
of Being (7.518C). It leads the potential philosopher out of the
cave of opinion and up into the sunlight of truth. The likely story
takes us in the opposite direction—from Being down to Becoming. It tells us how a craftsman-god, who is without envy and
very ingenious, and who gazed on archetypal Being, brought
order to the primordial chaos through a combination of providence and the beautiful structures of mathematics. Timaeus calls
his speech both a mythos or story and a logos or account. Socrates
calls it a nomos, which in Greek means law and song, as well as
custom and convention (29D). The word implies that Timaeus’
cosmology is a form of quasi-political music. This music estab2. For a discussion of the difference between seeing and hearing, see
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966): “For the sensation of
hearing to come about the percipient is entirely dependent on something happening outside his control, and in hearing he is exposed to the
happening . . . he cannot let his ears wander, as his eyes do, over a field
of possible percepts, already present as a material for his attention, and
focus them on the object chosen, but he has simply to wait for a sound
to strike them: he has no choice in the matter” (139).
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lishes our right relation to the cosmic whole whose offspring we
are. It makes us law-abiding citizens of the world—good cosmopolitans. By playfully re-enacting the birth of the cosmos,
Timaeus is attempting to persuade his listeners, Socrates in particular, that the world of body and flux, properly understood, is
worthy of our serious attention, emulation and praise. All the
mathematical constructions and stories are songs that commemorate the Great Founding. By “singing” these songs of law and
order, we celebrate our cosmic roots. Moreover, since the world
for Timaeus is a god (34B), physics comes on the scene as the
truest act of piety.
Musical references abound in the likely story. The primordial
chaos is said to be unmusical or out of tune (30A), and the movement of the stars resembles a choric dance (40C). The elusive receptacle or matrix—the cosmic “mother” who shakes the four
elemental bodies into their proper places when they wander, like
wayward children—gives the world a rhythmic sway (52C-53A).
The sway is evident in all cyclic movement: our heartbeat,
breathing and walking, in the vibrating string and pendulum,
swings and cradles, and the undulating surface of the sea. The
construction of the regular geometric solids is also music. Here
Timaeus ingeniously harmonizes these beautiful sphere-like
shapes—tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron and cube—with
the observable properties and behaviour of the four elements:
fire, air, water and earth (53D-E).
The greatest musical moment in the story is the construction
of the musical scale out of ratios of whole numbers (35A-36B).
It is based on the Pythagorean discovery that the intervals that
make up melody—octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, etc.—are
produced by string-lengths that are in small whole number ratios.
Much can be said about the god’s act of scale building, especially
in light of the problem it solves, namely, the natural incompatibility of some intervals with others. Here I must rest content with
a brief summary. Timaeus’ god builds the world soul out of musical ratios, having first mixed together forms of Being, Same
and Other. He then cuts and bends the scale-strip to form the rotation of the celestial sphere and the orbits of the planets (36B).
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These periodic movements, which constitute time, are not only
the music in the sky but also the reflections of divine thought,
whose image we carry around in our sphere-shaped heads.
For Timaeus, musicality is the sum of human virtue and the
ground of happiness. By musicality I mean the adjustment of all
our actions to the regular, periodic movements of the heavens.
To be virtuous and happy is to conform to the cosmic law and to
move in sync with the music of the whole. It is to live a life that
is in every respect well timed, symmetrical and balanced—the
life of a star. We achieve balance when, for example, in devoting
ourselves to study, we also make sure we get enough rest and
physical exercise (88A). The most essential human musicality
comes from astronomy. This is not because the beauty of the
whole is most apparent in the visible heavens, but because the
heavens are the home of thought in its healthiest, most regular
form. To think the heavenly motions, to discern the ratios in the
sky, is to be one with that condition of intellectual health and consummate musicality enjoyed perpetually by the world soul.
I have said that the likely story is a song that celebrates our
cosmic roots. But it is also the story of a fall. In the book of Genesis, there is creation and fall; in the Timaeus creation is fall. As
I noted earlier, world building starts at the top and goes down—
just like a Greek musical scale. It goes from Being to Becoming
and from the best things in the world to the worst. The lower,
subhuman animals are generated by intellectual devolution. This
is the process in which human beings lose their divine intelligence by having lived an acosmic, disorderly life and must reenter Becoming in an animal form suited to their moral and
intellectual degradation. The likely story begins with the heavens
and ends with shellfish, creatures that contain the souls of humans who in their previous lives exhibited what Timaeus calls a
“total lack of musicality” (92B).3 But even these lowest beings
enhance the beauty of the whole, since without them the cosmic
scale of life would lack its lowest notes and be incomplete.
3. Translations of the Timaeus are from Plato: Timaeus, trans. Peter
Kalkavage (Newburyport, MA: Focus Press, 2001).
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According to Timaeus, our souls originated as pure intellects,
each living in its own star. In being born, we become profoundly
disordered. We leave off being star-lords and become mindless,
inarticulate babies, beings incapable of controlling any of their
movements. That is why education is necessary—because, as
fallen stars, we must recover “the form of [our] first and best condition” (42D). Mathematical astronomy is the most important
part of education because it is the means by which we humans,
whom Timaeus calls heavenly plants, return to our roots in the
sky (90A). It is also the highest form of therapy. By engaging in
astronomy, the human intellect, which grew ill at birth, comes to
itself and recovers its circular movement, former health and
proper functioning as the guide and navigator of daily life. We
study astronomy so that by “imitating the utterly unwandering
circuits of the god [Cosmos], we might stabilize the wanderstricken circuits in ourselves” (47C). Music that is heard and felt
plays a similarly therapeutic role. The gods gave us music “not
for the purpose of irrational pleasure…but as an ally to the circuit
of the soul within us when it’s become untuned, for the purpose
of bringing the soul into arrangement and concord with herself”
(47D-E).
On this note of music as therapy, I conclude the first part of
my talk. I now turn to a very different account of music and
world.
Part Two. From Divine Circles to the Wheel of Ixion: Music
in a World of Woe
The first and main volume of The World as Will and Representation is divided into four books.4 Thomas Mann, the greatest admirer of Schopenhauer in the twentieth century, called it “a
symphony in four movements.”5 Mann, himself a cosmological
pessimist, was keenly sensitive to the role that music plays in the
work. In his essay on the philosopher, he observes that Schopen4. The second volume consists of supplements to the four books in Vol. 1.
5. “Schopenhauer,” in Thomas Mann: Essays, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter
(New York: Random House, 1957).
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hauer, who was very musical, “celebrates music as no thinker has
ever done” by making music metaphysically significant. Mann
proceeds to speculate: “Schopenhauer did not love music because
he ascribed such a metaphysical significance to her, but rather
because he loved her.” For Mann, will rather than intellect is the
source of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, where will signifies everything in us born of passion and feeling. The supremacy of will over intellect is the most important respect in
which the world of Schopenhauer differs from the world of
Timaeus.
As its title indicates, The World as Will and Representation
depicts the world as having two distinct sides or aspects. One
side, representation, is the topic of Book One. As representation
or Vorstellung, the world is everything that is vorgestellt, “placed
before” us and made present in the daylight of consciousness. Although a more accurate rendering of the word would be “presentation,” which suggests original coming-to-presence as opposed
to derivative imitation, I have chosen to keep the traditional term.
Representation is the realm of perceived objects—finite determinate things and all their properties, which appear in space and
time and interact according to the principle of sufficient reason,
that is, through the relation of cause and effect. Representation
is the world as a well-ordered surface. It is what most of us would
call the world simply.
Schopenhauer turns to the other, inner aspect of the world in
Book Two. He uses terms from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
whereas representation is the world as appearance or phenomenon, will is the world as thing-in-itself or noumenon. Will, here,
is not a psychic faculty. It is not my will or your will, or God’s
will, since for Schopenhauer there is no God. Will is the universal
force and infinite striving that underlies all things and rises to
self-awareness in man. Schopenhauer calls the will “eternal becoming, endless flux” (164).6 As the world’s “innermost being”
and “kernel” (30-31), will is the source of meaning (98-99). Will
6. Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the edition by E. F.
J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969).
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reminds us that life is more than the cool perception of objects:
it is also feeling and care. Objects of representation are vessels
of my care. They are meaningful, important to me in all sorts of
ways. This object I desire and strive to possess, that one I avoid.
This event I hope for, that one I dread. This human being I love,
that one I despise. My body is the embodiment of my care. It is
the seemingly concrete reality to which I am intimately joined
and which I care about in a thousand ways. My living body reminds me that I am constantly in the condition of seeking to preserve my life and to stave off harm, pain, frustration and death.
My being and my life consist in striving to be and to live. I cannot
escape striving, not even when I sleep, for it is more obvious in
dreams even than in waking life that representations matter to me
and are the creatures of my care. Dreams are my hopes, fears,
anxieties and desires made into a private movie, often a surreal
one. Most of us would say that as a human being with a certain
nature I am subject to this care. Schopenhauer is far more radical:
for him, I am this care, this infinite striving to be and to live as
this individual with this body.
Dreams are to desire what the whole phenomenal realm is to
the noumenal will. Schopenhauer reminds us repeatedly that what
we call life is a dream. The will is not the cause of the world,
since causality operates only within the dream world of phenomena or appearances. There is no intelligible principle or intelligent
god (as there is for Timaeus) that is responsible for the natural
order. Nature is unaccountably there, just as human beings are
unaccountably there, “thrown” into existence. The will does not
cause nature but rather objectifies itself as nature—just as our
care objectifies itself in dreams. Hence the phrase, “the world as
will and representation.” The self-objectification of the will is
the basis of Schopenhauer’s cosmology. The will objectifies itself
in a fourfold way: as inorganic nature, plant life, animal life and
human life. Schopenhauer constructs an ingenious isomorphism
or analogy between these four grades of nature and the tones that
make up the major triad with its octave (153). The work of the
will is especially noteworthy in the case of our bodily parts,
which are so many ways in which the will objectifies itself:
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“Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse; grasping hands and nimble
feet correspond to the more indirect strivings of the will which
they represent” (108). This striking rendition of the human body
is a modern counterpart to Timaeus’ outrageous stories about our
bodily parts, which are mythically represented as manifesting,
and ministering to, our souls. But whereas Timaeus is tongue-incheek, Schopenhauer is in deadly earnest.
The identity of will and meaning shows why music is metaphysically significant. As Schopenhauer writes in another work,
music, especially melody, “speaks not of things but simply of
weal and woe as being for the will the sole realities.”7 From the
standpoint of the will, being is meaning. Music is unique among
the arts because it depicts the inner world of care—pure meaning
apart from all objectivity. It represents not the rational world soul
but the passionate world heart.8 Music, moreover, is not an elitist
Pythagorean who speaks only to her learned inner circle but
rather the “universal language” that is “instantly understood by
everyone,” intuitively and without the aid of concepts (256).
In my account of the Timaeus I highlighted the therapeutic
function of astronomy and music, both of which minister to fallen
man. They are a corrective to the cosmic necessity of our having
been born as mortal beings subject to mortal flux and mindless
desire (42A ff.). Being born, for Timaeus, is in one sense a gift—
the gift of organic life. But it is also, for the reasons I mentioned,
our burden and our fate. Being born is a mixed blessing. For
Schopenhauer it is an outright curse. To be born is to become an
egocentric individual afflicted with insatiable desire, in particular
sexual desire. To be is to be subject to “the miserable pressure of
the will” (196). The will, as I noted earlier, is infinite striving—
7. Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974), 430.
8. “The heart, that primum mobile of animal life, has quite rightly been
chosen as the symbol, indeed the synonym, of the will” (Vol. 2, 237).
The atheist Schopenhauer says at one point: “like God, [music] sees only
the heart” (Vol. 2, 449).
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striving with no ultimate good or end. Moments of contentment
and joy appear, but only as passing tones, ripples in a sea of frustration, ennui and renewed desire. To live is to suffer. Schopenhauer here reveals the hard edge of his pessimism and his “tragic
sense of life.”9 He cites approvingly poets like Calderon who define original sin as “the guilt of existence itself,” and who affirm
that it would be better never to have been born.10
Schopenhauer’s recurring image of life as suffering is the
wheel of Ixion. Ixion was King of the Lapiths. After being shown
hospitality by Zeus, he lusted after Hera and tried to seduce her.
For this attempted outrage Zeus bound Ixion on a wheel of fire
and consigned him to Tartarus. Only once did the wheel of torment stop—when Orpheus descended to the Underworld and
charmed its inhabitants with his song.11 This, for Schopenhauer,
is the human therapy that all fine art offers, in particular the art
of music. Music represents the will as thing-in-itself, meaning
apart from all things and pictures, and is for this reason metaphysically significant. But music also gives us momentary relief
from the fiery wheel on which we are bound, the wheel of infinite
longing. In music, as in all aesthetic contemplation, we are no
longer self-interested individuals but “pure, will-less subject[s]
of knowing,” subjects who are “lost in the object” (209). In art,
as Schopenhauer puts it, “We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal
servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still” (196).
The third part of Schopenhauer’s book is devoted to the arts,
which are beyond the principle of sufficient reason. This is evident in music, where tones, though tightly connected, have no
causal relation to each other. The opening phrase of Beethoven’s
9. The title of Miguel de Unamuno’s book.
10. Schopenhauer quotes from Calderón’s Life Is a Dream: “For man’s
greatest offence is that he has been born” (Vol. 1, 254). This is “the guilt
of existence itself”—original sin. Death is, in effect, the correction of an
error. Schopenhauer would say to the dying individual: “You are ceasing
to be something which you would have done better never to become”
(Vol. 2, 501).
11. Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.42.
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Fifth Symphony, for example, does not cause the second.12 Unconcerned with causality and deduction, art is the intuitive apprehension of the Ideas, which Schopenhauer takes from Plato,
for the most part from the Timaeus. The Ideas are the eternal archetypes of nature—the four grades of the will’s self-objectification that I mentioned earlier.13 In the human realm they are the
universals of experience. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are
a distillation of what is eternally true of human life. In the complex ambition of Macbeth, jealousy of Othello and tragic integrity
of Cordelia, we behold archetypes of will at its highest grade.14
Art is therapeutic because, as the aesthetic contemplation of universal Ideas, art detaches us from the particular objects of our
care. That is why we take pleasure in even the saddest music,
which calls upon us us not to weep but to listen.
Art, however, is not an enduring release from Ixion’s wheel
and offers only “occasional consolation” (267). The fourth part
of Schopenhauer’s book takes us from artist to saint, who alone
is truly happy—if one can call resignation happiness. The saint
has neutralized the will to be and to live through the knowledge
that objects of care are nothing but illusion (451). He needs no
artworks. This neutralization of the will makes the saint good. In
the obliteration of his ego, he is released from his private suffer12. Schopenhauer makes this point in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F. J. Payne (La Salle, IL: Open Court,
1974), 127: “In just the same way, the succession of sounds in a piece
of music is determined objectively, not subjectively by me the listener;
but who will say that the musical notes follow one another according
to the law of cause and effect?”
13. It is important to note how the Ideas for Schopenhauer differ from
how Plato describes them. For Schopenhauer, the Ideas cannot be genuine beings, for that would undermine the ultimacy of the irrational will.
They are simply eternal modes or ways in which the will objectifies itself. The Ideas are more like adverbs than nouns.
14. These archetypes recall Vico’s “imaginative universals.” See The
New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and
Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). See
Paragraphs 381 and 460.
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ings and free to take compassion on the suffering of other human
beings and even on that of animals (372).
I now turn to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, which
appears in Volume One of his book and again in Volume Two.
These chapters contain the most fascinating discussions of music
one will ever read. They are an attempt to identify music as a
source of truth, indeed the deepest truth: “The composer reveals
the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty
does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she
is awake” (260). Schopenhauer illustrates his general ideas with
many references to specific musical phenomena. I shall address
only a few of them.
I begin with music as imitation. According to Plato and Aristotle, music, in its tones and rhythms, imitates the dispositions
and passions of the soul. As Aristotle observes in the Politics,
melodies and rhythms are “likenesses of the true natures of anger
and gentleness, and also of courage and moderation and all the
opposites of these and the other states of character” (1340a20).15
Aristotle is referring to the Greek musical modes—Dorian, Phrygian, Mixolydian, etc., which achieve their different effects
through a different placement of half steps in their scales. The
Dorian mode, Aristotle says, gives the soul “a moderate and settled condition,” whereas the Phrygian “inspires.” A difference in
mode can be heard in our familiar opposition of “bright” major
and “dark” minor. This huge musical difference hinges on no
more than whether there is a whole step or a half between the
second and third degrees of the scale. It is gratifying to hear
Schopenhauer, a philosopher, respond to this fact with fitting
amazement (261).
What Timaeus and Schopenhauer add to the imitative relation between music and soul is the connection between music
and world. We are responsive to music because the so-called external world has an interior, as do we, and is always already
15. Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus
Press, 2012), 250.
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music-imbued. For Timaeus, music in the form of the diatonic
pattern—the recurring order of whole and half steps—is woven
into the fabric of the cosmic soul, of which our souls partake.
That is why we respond to the diatonic modes. We look with
longing at the stars because that is where our souls come from,
and we take delight in identifying Same and Other in the things
of the world because our souls are made of Same and Other. So
too, we welcome music into our souls because we detect in it the
inflections of our psychic modalities—our various soul possibilities. Where there is music and listener, music calls to music. It
is a case of sympathetic vibration grounded in the nature of the
ensouled cosmos.
Schopenhauer differs from Timaeus in his understanding of
interiority. He rejects the soul as a principle of being on the
grounds that it makes real what is in fact illusory, namely, our individuality.16 The principle of individuation in general, like the
principle of sufficient reason, applies only to the world of phenomena, which Schopenhauer regularly calls the “veil of Maya”
or illusion. In listening to music, we suspend our individuality
and are in touch with will as process rather than with a stable
mode of soul and character.
From a musical standpoint, Schopenhauer differs from
Timaeus by going beyond the Pythagorean idea of interval as
sensed ratio and treats music as the embodiment of tension or
force. This modern concept of force, also known as conatus or
endeavour, is prominent in the physics of Newton and Leibniz
and was introduced into natural science by Hobbes, who, like
Schopenhauer, rejects a highest good and depicts desire as an infinite striving “that ceaseth only in death.”17 Dissonance in music
is a kind of tension or force. As the vector-like impulse to move
in a definite direction, it is the analogue of desire.18 The suspen16. “[S]oul signifies an individual unity of consciousness which obviously does not belong to that inner being. . . . The word should never
be applied except in a metaphorical sense” (Vol. 2, 349).
17. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 11.1.
18. “Hitherto, the concept of will has been subsumed under the concept
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sion is a good example of how dissonance works in music. In a
suspension, two lines or voices start out in consonance but then
produce dissonance when one of the voices moves while the
other holds its note. A resolution of the dissonance then follows.
Schopenhauer writes: “[Suspension] is a dissonance delaying the
final consonance that is with certainty awaited; in this way the
longing for it is strengthened, and its appearance affords greater
satisfaction. This is clearly an analogue of the satisfaction of the
will which is enhanced through delay.”19
The word “analogue” is important here. The suspension is
not the image or likeness of a specific desire that is eventually
gratified but rather a tonal event that communicates, in a purely
musical way, a universal truth about the will. When Schopenhauer says that music is the universal language, he is not being
poetic. He means that although tones are not words, they function
intuitively in the same way that words function conceptually—
not as likenesses of the things they signify but as symbols, bearers
of universal meaning. In the case of music, this meaning is perceived and felt rather than inferred. Listening to music is nonverbal symbol-recognition.
Music as force flourishes in the tradition of modern tonal harmony. This long and glorious tradition reaches from Bach and
Handel, through Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, up to Brahms
and Wagner, and continues in our own century. Tonal music, as
opposed to the mode-inspired music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, exhibits the directed tension I mentioned earlier. There
of force; I, on the other hand, do exactly the reverse, and intend every
force in nature to be conceived as will” (Vol. 1, 111).
19. Vol. 2, 455-6. An even better instance of the connection between
dissonance and will is the appoggiatura or leaning tone. This unprepared dissonance on a strong beat delays a tone of the melody and intensifies expectation. It is the perfect musical imitation of longing. A
fitting example occurs in Tamino’s love song in the Magic Flute.
Tamino gazes on a picture of Pamina and falls in love with her. By
singing in response to a picture, he moves from the world as representation to the world as will. His repeated leaning tones on the words “I
feel it,” “ich fühl es,” embody the universal truth of erotic love.
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is a play of forces—tonal dynamism. Needless to say, such music
is friendly to the language of will, for will is tension, and force is
will that has not yet attained self-consciousness. The musicologist
Heinrich Schenker applied this very term to music: Tonwille, the
will of the tones. In tonal harmony tension is not confined to isolated events, like the suspension, but pervades the whole of a musical piece and constitutes its unity. The term “tonal” refers to the
rule of a single tone, the tonic or keynote, to which all the other
tones in a tonal work point or, as some theorists prefer to say, the
centrality of the tonic triad, the I-chord. These tensions—Victor
Zuckerkandl calls them dynamic qualities—compose the major
scale and cause it to sound like a journey with clearly defined
stages and a predetermined end: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.20 Tension is especially urgent in degree 7, which strives toward 8, as desire
craves its satisfaction. Degree 4 tends, less urgently, down to 3.
Together, degrees 4 and 7 produce the dissonant interval of the
tritone. This is the best example of directed tension in music, since
the tritone, when combined with degree 5 in the bass, makes up
the dominant seventh chord, which points to the tonic triad and
so fixes the music in a key. Thanks to their dynamic relations,
which operate at many levels, tones and the triads they form generate musical wholes through the artful prolongation and eventual
resolution of their will-like tension.
I cannot leave the topic of musical tension, and of tone as the
symbol of desire, without citing Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. In
this work we hear extreme chromaticism, constant unresolved
cadences and the deceptive shifting of tonal centers. These phenomena form the tonal analogue of eros as infinite longing. As
others have noted, the work pushes tonal harmony and musical
tension to the absolute limit by extending the striving of tones
over the course of several hours. The historical connection between Wagner’s musical drama and Schopenhauer’s book, although fascinating, is beyond the scope of this lecture. Here I
simply observe that the opening phrase of the Prelude, with its
20. The Sense of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959),
18-28.
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famous “Tristan chord” resolving to a dominant-seventh chord,
is perhaps the most powerful evocation of tension-as-desire in all
of music. Wagner’s phrase sets up a cadence that is not completed
until the very end of the work, when the crashing waves of the
orchestra overwhelm the transfigured Isolde before settling into
the blissful, post-climactic froth of B major. For Schopenhauer,
this immense prolongation of musical tension is the noumenal
interior of the lovers’ prolonged phenomenal eroticism. More
cautiously stated, it is the analogical, symbolic representation of
that interior. The universal, undying truth of the story is not in
the death-bound characters but in the tones.
The central teaching of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of
music is that music is “a copy [Abbild] of the will itself,” not of
the Ideas of the will, as in tragedy (257). To be sure, all the arts
objectify the will, but the non-musical arts do so “only indirectly.” They present universality through the medium of things,
whether the Parthenon or the complex individuality of Cordelia.
Music, by contrast, makes no such appeal and represents, imitates, the world’s pure subjectivity. It does so through tones all
by themselves.
We must bear in mind when reading Schopenhauer that by
music he means “the sacred, mysterious, profound language of
tones.”21 This signals the primacy of what Wagner called “absolute music” and we now call instrumental music.22 Music as
the language of tones, captures, for Schopenhauer, the Absolute
through non-visual representations. It is the will “speaking to us”
through the medium of composers, who are the will’s symbolists,
somnambulists and high priests.23 Because tones are meaningful
all by themselves, Schopenhauer can make the astonishing claim
that music, in passing over the Ideas and everything phenomenal,
21. Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, 432.
22. See Wagner on Music and Drama, ed. Albert Goldman and Emil
Sprinchorn (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 171.
23. For a critique of the thinker’s claim that “through him speaks the
essence of things itself,” see the chapter entitled “Heidegger and Theology” in Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, in which Jonas connects Heidegger with Gnosticism and finds in Schopenhauer’s theory of music
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“to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world
at all” (257). The reason is that music, in negating the world as
thing, contains that world from the perspective of its deepest interior, its immortal heart. Schopenhauer states this with maximum concision in the other work to which I referred earlier:
“Music is the melody to which the world is the text.”24 In other
words, tones all by themselves represent the indwelling, immortal
spirit of the world. If we imagined the phenomenal world as a
staged opera or a movie, then the orchestral parts and score would
stand to it as inner to outer, essence to appearance, truth to seeming. As I observed in the case of Wagner’s Tristan, the real drama,
the world in its truth, would be taking place not in what we see
but in what we hear. It would be a drama of tones.
But although music transcends the world as thing, it also has
a profound connection with that world—again, by analogy.
Schopenhauer is fascinated by this analogism and speaks like an
Archimedes who has just made remarkable discoveries and cries
“Eureka! I have found it!” As I mentioned earlier, the major triad
with its octave captures in symbolic form the four natural grades
of the will’s self-objectification and is a mirror of the Whole. The
ground bass mirrors inorganic nature. Each note of this bass functions as the fundamental to the overtones that faintly sound above
it (258). This mirrors what happens in nature as a whole, where
higher grades of being develop out of the lowest, and where organic nature constantly depends on the inorganic, as the upper
partials depend on their fundamental. The tones between the bass
notes and the melody that floats above are the musical analogue
of plant and animal. These tones form the harmonic organism that
binds lower bass and higher melody. They mirror the way that
the sole philosophic precedent for Heidegger’s claim that poets and
philosophers embody “the voice of Being” (257). Jonas comments:
“Schopenhauer’s fantasy [unlike Heidegger’s] was innocent, for music
is nonresponsible and cannot suffer from the misconception of a duty it
does not have” (258). There is good reason to think that music is not as
“innocent” or “nonresponsible” as Jonas thinks.
24. Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, 430.
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plant and animal life mediate between the inorganic realm and our
higher, human nature. This analogy exists within the scale itself,
where the hierarchy of tones mirrors “the whole gradation of the
Ideas in which the will objectifies itself” (258). To hear an ascending scale is, in a sense, to hear the entire cosmos. Even the inevitable impurity of intervals that exists in all tuning or temperament
is an analogue of phenomenal nature. An interval that is slightly
“off,” say an equal-tempered major third, mirrors natural idiosyncrasy—“the departure of the individual from the type of the
species” (258-9). The incompatibility of some intervals with others, the very problem that makes temperament necessary, is also
an aspect of the will: it is the musical analogue of the will’s “inner
contradiction,” which is the whole concern of tragedy (266). Even
death finds its way into the world of tones. Death occurs, says
Schopenhauer, in modulation, where a change of key “entirely
abolishes the connection with what went before” (261).
Finally, there is melody as the musical analogue of phenomenal
man: “in the melody, in the high singing, principal voice, leading the
whole and progressing with unrestrained freedom, in the uninterrupted significant connexion of one thought from beginning to end,
and expressing a whole, I recognize the highest grade of the will’s
objectification, the intellectual life and endeavour of man” (259).
Melody, the ultimate mythos and symbol of human life, “relates the
story of the intellectually enlightened will, the copy or impression
whereof in actual life is the series of its deeds.” But melody, for
Schopenhauer, “says more” because it goes beyond outward deeds
and events. It also “relates the most secret history [my emphasis] of
the intellectually enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will, everything which the faculty of
reason summarizes under the wide and negative concept of feeling,
and which cannot be further taken up into the abstractions of reason”
(259).
To sum up, there is nothing in the natural world, or in the inner
and outer life of man, that does not find its counterpart in the all-embracing realm of tones. Music as symbol is the whole of all things.
It is the world. That is why, as Schopenhauer says, “we could just as
well call the world embodied music as embodied will” (262-3).
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Coda. Another World of Longing
I end my musical-cosmological reflection with a piece of music
that depicts the world as a certain kind of music, polyphony. It
is Palestrina’s motet, Sicut cervus. Beloved by St. John’s students, the piece is a musical setting of the opening of Psalm 42
in the Vulgate: Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita
desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus (“As the hart longs for flowing
streams, so longs my soul for you, O God”). The motet is a good
example of what Nietzsche called Palestrina’s “ineffably sublime sacred music.”25
Every musical composition is both a world unto itself and an
image of the world. This is the central proposition of my lecture.
The world of Sicut cervus is that of the Bible and the biblical
God. Creation, here, is good. It produces beings, not images of
intelligible originals or illusory phantasms. The world is not confined to head and heart, to our subjectivity, but is “out there” and
solidly real. The God of the Bible is not a craftsman who leaves
the world after having made it, or an indifferent prime mover, but
the God of promise and history—the God who makes covenants
with his people. He is someone to whom one can pray. Salvation
comes not from dialectic, or astronomy, or art, or the death of
care based on the gnosis of cosmic nothingness, but from faith
in God.
Although the words of the motet express longing, the tones
do not represent longing as stress and strain. The music is a continually graceful gesture that transmutes the pain of longing into
a serene order of voices—voices that seem always to know their
place. Sicut cervus is composed in two senses of the word: it is
well constructed, and it has an unperturbed disposition. During
the piece, motion goes on and time passes, but the overall “feel”
seems beyond time and change, like a musical emanation of the
nunc stans or eternal Now. It is as if grace were already present,
and the singers were experiencing, in the very midst of their
yearning, prospective joy in the object for which they yearn.
25. The Birth of Tragedy, 19.
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Aquinas cites three criteria of beauty: unity, wholeness and radiance or claritas.26 Sicut cervus has these in abundance, especially
radiance. The music seems to be suffused with warm light. It is
full of feeling but also sounds intelligent, lucid and self-possessed. The movement is a continuous flow, in imitation of the
waters for which the hart thirsts. The tones move, it seems, not
because they have to but because they want to, not out of compulsion but out of freedom. The sound is a spontaneous unfolding, as if the four vocal parts are miraculously improvising their
lines as they go along, only gradually discovering the perfectly
coordinated whole they are in the process of forming. Dissonances occur to enhance consonance and beget motion, but they
are not prominent, and the piece as a whole could not be described as a play of forces. Sicut cervus is music without will.
This brings me to the most important respect in which Palestrina’s motet is the image of a world. Sicut cervus is polyphony
that lacks (because it does not need) the tonal-harmonic principles at work in the polyphony of Bach. Vertical relations are for
the most part the result of simultaneous horizontal relations. The
four voices that compose the piece enter one at a time in points
of imitation. The voice that follows seems to be inspired to enter
by the one that leads. The parts move in obedience to the rules
of good voice leading but do more than exhibit formal correctness. They seem to delight in each other’s company and to be
naturally social. At times, they even graciously step aside for each
other, as if rejoicing in the being and individuality of other lines.
Sicut cervus, in its non-urgent flow, is a musical community that
captures the sound of friendship. And just as friends engage in
all sorts of play, the vocal lines play off one another, often exhibiting contrary motion—simultaneous movement in opposite
directions. Thanks to this friendly contrariety, which keeps the
parts audibly distinct, the voices celebrate, contrary to what
26. Summa Theologica I, Q. 39, a 8. For an excellent discussion of the
three formal criteria of beauty, see Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of
Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Gredin (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1988), 64 ff.
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Schopenhauer asserts, the reality and truth of the principle of individuation, as they conspire to form a perfect, natural sounding
republic of tones. The voices of Sicut cervus, in this respect, may
be said to enact the contrapuntal play that we find among souls
in Dante’s Paradiso.
With this non-tragic image of the world, my study in contrast,
with its Biblical coda, reaches its end. These two great books,
Plato’s Timaeus and Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, differ greatly in how they view being, becoming and
the human condition. But they also go together because, more
than other great discussions of music with which I am familiar,
they invite us to consider that music is more important than even
music lovers might think—that music is, to quote Mann, metaphysically significant and captures the whole of all things, not in
concept but in image and feeling. Are the cosmologies of
Timaeus and Schopenhauer, separately or together, an adequate
account of music? I think they are not. There are limits to the
hyper-rational Pythagorean approach to music, just as there are
limits to Schopenhauer’s Romantic conception of music as representing feeling and irrational will. Both accounts are nevertheless inspired efforts that hit upon certain undeniable truths.
My closing note is inspired by the philosopher Schopenhauer’s personal love of music, which I share. Music, even the
saddest music in the world—music that is worlds apart from Sicut
cervus and may even be the sound of despair and crushing
grief—is dear to us and makes us happy, if only for a while.
Maybe this is because music, as a living presence that comes to
us, offers itself to us, assures us that we are not alone: that there
is something out there in the world that knows our hearts and
may even teach us to know them better. Thanks to music, we experience what it means to be connected to the whole of all things,
even when that whole seems tragic; what it means to have a soul
and not just a mind; to have depth, and not mere rightness, of
feeling and being; and, above all, what it means to be open to
ourselves and our world through listening.
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On Jacob Klein’s
Greek Mathematical Thought
and the Origin of Algebra
Arian Koochesfahani
Introduction
Descartes described his mathematical physics as a “practical”
philosophy by which human beings could “make ourselves like
masters and possessors of nature.”1 Today this feature of mathematical physics is almost uncontroverted and is usually the first
line of defense against skeptics.2 The proximity to truth of a physical theory is often considered directly proportional to its utility.
Jacob Klein (1899-1978) separated the utility claims and truth
claims of physics, arguing that since not all of the mathematical
equations used in modern physics can be translated into natural
language, physics is deficient in meaning and is “not so much the
understanding of nature as the art of mastering nature.”3 It is in
his book Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra4
(GMT) that Klein grounds the strongest version of this claim: the
“‘exact’ [mathematical] nature [sought by mathematical physics]
Arian Koochesfahani is a graduate of James Madison College, Michigan State University.
1. Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Richard Kennington (Indianapolis: Focus Publishing, 2007), 49.
2. By “skeptics” I mean nihilists, historicists, philosophical skeptics,
the “it’s just a theory” people—anyone who argues that modern physics
does not uncover significant truths about nature.
3. Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 60.
4. Trans. Eva Brann (Boston: MIT Press, 1968), henceforth abbreviated
GMT.
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is not something that is concealed behind the appearances, but is
rather a symbolic disguise concealing the original ‘evidence’ and
the original experience of things.”5
In GMT there are three levels of argument at work. On the
surface, Klein makes the mathematical side of physics appear
strange and new by contrasting the unity of mathematics and ontology in Greek philosophy with the universal, tool-like character
of symbolic mathematics.6 In the middle layer, Klein argues that
this difference is characterized by the transformation of the Greek
notion of arithmos into the modern concept of number, a transformation with profound implications for all modern physical
concepts (gravitation, energy, etc.).7 Finally, there is Klein’s
philosophical thesis: symbolic mathematics is symbolic in that
it takes numbers to be mental operations, i.e., numbers are understood either as concepts or are defined in terms of the mathematical operations the mind performs. As a result, symbolic
mathematics legitimizes physical quantities that are intuitively
5. Klein, Lectures and Essays, 84. For Klein, what are disguised by
mathematical physics are the implications of the meanings that are
given in natural language and that arise from the sensible world, i.e.,
the material of Greek philosophy (GMT, 118-120).
6. GMT, 4.
7. Ibid., 117-121. Klein suggests that mathematical physics identifies
nature with a mathematical representation of nature. I believe this is
correct as a description of many of the practitioners of mathematical
physics, but incorrect as a description of the theories themselves. Consider magnetism. Magnetic action-at-a-distance has been eliminated
in practice, i.e., in the discourse of scientists, by filling space with
“fields” which, as mathematical objects, don’t actually constitute an
explanation of the phenomenon. The replacement of magnetic actionat-a-distance with magnetic fields bearing magnetic force is an example of identifying the presented (magnetic action-at-a-distance) with
the represented (fields, mathematical objects). But this is just how magnetism is thought about. It is not a logical consequence of anything in
mathematical physics. However, this statement has to be qualified because what is and is not a consequence of a physical theory can be difficult to determine.
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impossible.8 The challenge to physics is the claim that such
quantities are mere constructions of the intellect. These constructions may help us understand how things happen (“the structure
of the world”), but they don’t tell us what nature is.9
In what follows, I try to reconstruct Klein’s argument about
mathematics to put into context his suggestion that symbolic
mathematics makes certain equations in modern physics absurd,10
before discussing the entire argument in the conclusion. Klein’s
argument in GMT is that modern mathematics is no longer an ontological science of quantity but an epistemological science of
order. To grasp this, we need to understand that, for the Greeks,
mathematics—or at least arithmetic—springs from a reflection,
buttressed by a few basic preconceptions, on the experience of
counting.
Arithmos and Arithmetic
Two distinctions are fundamental to the Greek mathematical tradition.11 First is the philosophical distinction between being and
8. See Joseph K. Cosgrove, “Husserl, Jacob Klein, and Symbolic Nature,” at the Providence College Digital Commons, 2008 (http://digitalcommons.providence.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context
=philosophy_fac).
9. Ibid., 185. However, if general relativity tells us that shape is relative
to velocity, isn’t this a case of scientific progress refining our intuitions
about the properties of physical things and thereby refining our intuitions about nature? Assume that velocity does affect shape. Our ability
or inability to see velocity affecting shape is irrelevant to the discovery
of this truth. We should no longer think of shape as a monadic property,
and this constitutes a refinement of intuition. As Jodi Azzouni puts it,
“we didn’t see that coming.” See Jodi Azzouni, “Can science change
our notion of existence?,” in ProtoSociology 28 (2011): 206 (pdf version, http://www.protosociology.de/Download/Azzouni-Existence.pdf,
5).
10. I simplify certain aspects of Klein’s argument for the sake of clarity.
In cases where different interpretations are possible, I pick the one I
find most provocative.
11. GMT, 10.
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becoming. Since what can be known can be passed on essentially
unchanged, knowledge, for the Greeks, is knowledge of what is.
Greek mathematics is in this respect the paradigmatic Greek science. In fact, the Greek word mathesis means what is knowable
and teachable in general. Hence, for the Greeks, mathematics is
especially oriented towards being. The second distinction is made
within mathematics, and is the distinction between multitude and
magnitude, or between discrete and continuous quantity. To the
study of the first corresponds arithmetic and logistic, while to the
second corresponds geometry.
The difference between arithmetic and logistic is central to
Klein’s argument inasmuch as logistic, which occupies shifting
territory in Greek mathematics, has been perfected by modern
mathematics. To appreciate the difference between arithmetic and
logistic, it is necessary, before even defining these sciences, to
understand how the Greeks understood “number” (arithmos).
The notion of arithmos emerges from the experience of
counting.12 When we count, we always have a multiplicity of
things before us. When faced with a single thing, we do not count
it. If we say that it is “one,” we are speaking about its unity or
we are asserting that it exists. One is not many. Therefore, “one”
is not an arithmos. The first arithmos is “two.”13 Further, when
we count, not only do we always count definite things, but we
always count things of the same kind. When we count apples and
bananas, we count fruit, and when we count in addition the plates
on the table, we count objects. Thus, the definition of an arithmos: a definite count of definite things. In the case of ten sheep
and ten apples, the counts are equal, but the arithmos in each
case, the decad, is different. This is why the Greeks use funny
terms like “sheep-number” and “bowl-number.”14 Every arithmos
is a “counting number,” not a “counted number.” If I ask how
many of something there is and the answer is “two,” this is just
12. Ibid., 46.
13. Ibid., 49.
14. Ibid., 12.
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an abbreviation of “two of the thing in question.” Therefore,
arithmoi are expressed in sentences, not by symbols, and they
are not definable by the ways they can be produced by operations,
algebraic or otherwise.
One might object that we can speak of “two” without reference to any kind of thing. The Greek response is that such talk
tacitly refers to imperceptible entities: pure units. This claim is
based on an answer to the question of what it is that is the same
for everything that can be counted, a question that the Greeks
take as auxiliary to the question of what it is about every countable thing that makes it countable. The latter question is the focus
of arithmetic. On their way to answering this question, the Greeks
take their cue from the fact that we count in terms of kinds, and
they conclude that to be countable means (1) to be uniform with
respect to other countable things and (2) to be delimited, to possess a clear determination.15 After all, uniformity and delimitation
are properties of kinds. The countable as such is therefore externally discrete and, as a determined whole, internally indivisible.
In other words, to be countable as such is to be a “one” among
homogeneous “ones.” These “ones” are therefore “noetic beings”
(pure units) accessible to thought alone. The purely “intellectual”
quality of the pure units explains how we can speak of “two”
without referring to two things in the sensible world. This line of
argument also shows, incidentally, that the “one” is the arche or
source of arithmos, since without the “one” there could be no
arithmos; a fact accorded ontological significance by Plato.16 But
here, in the context of arithmoi, the “one” is always among other
“ones,” and as the paradigmatic expression of multiplicity, these
“ones” constitute an infinite field.17
Arithmetic, then, is the attempt to comprehend all these “ones”
and, in so doing, to explain the possibility of counting. It will become pertinent later that the specifically Platonist arithmetician tries
15. Ibid., 53.
16. Ibid., 49.
17. Ibid., 51.
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to determine how an arithmos, which is many things, can at the
same time be one, namely, this particular arithmos.18 This is a version of the general question about the existence of noetic arithmoi,
since in this context “being one,” “having unity,” and “existing” are
all equivalent. In any case, all arithmeticians rely on classification
to comprehend the arithmoi. The idea is to organize arithmoi by
recognizing a consistent distribution of well-defined properties,
each property being called an arithmetic eidos.19 The Platonist is
again an exception, in that the Platonist does not conceive of eidē
as properties so much as actual “entities” which allow each arithmos to be “one,” to have “unity,” or to exist.20 While it turns out
that both Plato and Aristotle criticize this way of accounting for the
existence of arithmoi as either incomplete (Plato) or incorrect (Aristotle), it is nonetheless true that classifying arithmoi is the main occupation of arithmeticians, their focus being on the truths, directly
ontological or not, about these mathematical objects.21
18. Ibid., 49.
19. Ibid., 57. This is in part because through the use of a gnomon we
can see that certain groups of arithmoi share similar “shapes.” A gnomon is a configuration of points which, after being fitted around a single
point (the “one”), can be continually expanded to produce a figure always similar in appearance. For example, starting from the one, three
points form a square, an addition of five points forms a larger square,
and so on for every odd number. Following the Pythagorean heritage,
each eidos is rooted in a genus, e.g., the “limited” or “unlimited,” and
this rooting anchors them in ultimate principles. The most comprehensive eidē are the “odd” and the “even.” The “odd” captures all those
arithmoi which cannot be divided without a remainder, while the “even”
captures all those that can be so divided. The “odd” links back to the
“same” and thus to the “limited” because only discrete quantities cannot
be divided without remainder. Because continuous quantity can be divided without remainder, the “even” links back to the “other” and thus
to the “unlimited.”
20. Since there are more eidē than the “odd” and the “even,” each arithmos is constituted by its own network of eidetic-memberships (e.g., five
is prime, while nine is composite as an “odd-times-odd”).
21. Ibid., 79, 102.
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Logistic and Greek Ontology
Logistic, in contrast to arithmetic, is concerned neither with
counting nor (derivatively) with adding or subtracting, but with
multiplying and dividing.22 Arithmetic and logistic work together:
arithmetic classifies arithmoi and accounts for their existence
while logistic determines the relations that hold between arithmoi
of pure units. If arithmetic is concerned with the eidos or “form”
of arithmoi, then logistic is concerned with their hyle or “material”—the units themselves.23 Consider multiplication: if I have
two pure units and am told to multiply this arithmos by two pure
units, I simply add together as many of the former as there are
units of the latter. Of course, whenever the multiplier is two units,
the operation is called doubling. Logistic is thus the study of the
relations or ratios that necessarily hold between arithmoi depending on which eidē the arithmoi belong to.24 It is especially important to think of logistic not as studying the relations between
eidē of arithmoi. It is always the arithmoi, not the eidē, that are
the objects of investigation. After all, you can’t multiply eidē.
How the eidē are understood has an important impact on logistic. Platonism makes logistic impossible. According to Plato,
the noetic arithmoi are given existence by the arithmetic eidē because these eidē are organized by the Ideai (the Ideas in the “theory of Ideas”).25 For Klein, Plato conceives of the Ideai as being
to the eidē just as the noetic arithmoi are to the pure units.26 This
22. Ibid., 19.
23. Ibid., 16.
24. Ibid., 24.
25. Ibid., 70.
26. Ibid., 89. For Plato, it is evident that in the phrase “each is one but
both are two,” the word “two” expresses a unity that belongs to each
only in their togetherness, by virtue of a special koinon or commonality
between them that gives rise to a koinōnia, a communion. Thus, in The
Sophist, three possibilities for the “ontological methexis” problem arise:
“(1) There is no koinōnia [of the eidē] at all. (2) All the eidē are mutually related. (3) There is partial koinōnia, in the sense that some eidē
can ‘mix’ with each other but others not.” The first two possibilities are
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is convenient for Plato because by conceiving of the Ideai as
quasi-arithmetic structures, he can solve the ontological problem
of the participation of the species (eidē) in their genus (Idea) and
the mathematical-ontological problem of the existence of the
arithmoi. The argument is this: the arithmetic “two” exists because it is an image of the foundational, absolutely separate eidetic two, the two, which is the Idea of Being, which holds
together the eidē “rest” and “change.”27 Platonism makes logistic
literally unthinkable, which leaves the third. The third indicates the
arithmetic character of the Ideai in that it implies that the eidē constitute
communities or “arithmoi” of “unique eidetic ‘units’,” which, on account of their uniqueness, cannot be counted, but exist in their togetherness.
27. Ibid., 82-3, 87-8, 95-6, 98, 235. To elaborate: assume rest and
change to be, as it were, the fundamental elements, and assume of rest
and change that each is and both are. We do not address in both some
“third thing,” because Being is to be understood as an arithmetic koinon.
But how can each be? If Being belonged to any one of the two, then
only that one would “be.” On the other hand, if both “were” simultaneously, then rest and change, which are not combinable, would be combinable. Plato resolves the dilemma like this: just as Being, as an
“arithmetic” structure, is other than rest and change, so too “are” rest
and change, which cannot be without each other, only because they are
other than each other. Since Being is therefore other than both (although
not both together), while each must be other in order to be at all, this
means that Being is always also Non-Being, namely, Other. And this in
turn means two things. First, that the conjunction of the “opposites” rest
and change is in fact only the “‘co-existence’ of elements other in kind,”
so that oppositions are only “appearances” (96). Second, that we may
“rightly speak of all things whatsoever as ‘non-beings,’ and conversely,
because things partake of being, as ‘being’ and ‘beings’” (96). But this
means at the same time that otherness is, in accordance with the first
point, recognized as the bond between every Idea and its eidē, and thus
as the source of all articulation. The ordinary way of speaking, on the
other hand, in accordance with the second point, ceases to make sense.
We can say with equal correctness that a horse is an animal and not an
animal. Thus, the answer to the principal question in the Sophist—how
images, which somehow both are and are not what they represent, are
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impossible because the pure unit is regarded as not only indivisible but as fundamentally separate from the sensible world, just
as the “one” which is the archē of arithmoi is regarded as an
image of the “One” of which there can be no Idea and which is
altogether beyond being.28 Since a unit that is indivisible and selfsubsisting can’t have fractional parts (not to be confused with
fractions, which dispense with units), the Platonist denies the existence of what makes possible the precise calculation already familiar to the Greeks. Platonism and logistic are thus
incompatible. This inability (in principle) of Platonists to theorize
calculation is a potential reductio of Platonism.
Aristotle’s philosophy, on the other hand, is more robust.
According to Aristotle, arithmoi receive their existence from the
existence of the kind of counted thing.29 This is first of all because the pure units are what is common to every kind of thing,
that is, they have the properties common to all kinds. Because
the noetic arithmoi are given existence not by their eidē but by
their units, which exist even less concretely than natural kinds,
it follows that all the noetic arithmoi exist in the same, highly
general way—a far cry from the fundamental differentiation of
noetic arithmoi that results from the Platonic position that the
noetic arithmoi get their existence from different eidē. Aristotle’s
position implies that the arithmetic eidē, rather than being the
sources of existence for arithmoi, are merely qualities of them.30
possible—is that being itself has a “‘mirror-like nature’” (82). On the
one hand, the uncountable ordering of being through the Ideai depends
on the archē of otherness, the indeterminate dyad. As the twofold in
general, it is the expression of all possible being and non-being, and
the source of imageability. This imageability stretches from the sensible
things to the eidē (which they image) and likewise from the arithmoi
to the Ideai. In the human realm, this imageability is expressed in
speech about being, because speech is considered the “image” of
thought. On the other hand, the archē of being (and therefore of
thought), the “One Itself,” is simply beyond being (98).
28. Ibid., 98, 100.
29. Ibid., 106.
30. Ibid., 110.
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This “demotion” of the eidē goes hand in hand with how Aristotle authorizes fractional parts of noetic units.
For Aristotle, fractional parts are actually whole units with
respect to a new measure.31 In other words, the indivisibility of a
unit is just a property of the unit insofar as the unit is a measure.
Why are all units measures? Because noetic units are a product
of abstraction, the selective disregard of a thing’s visible properties.32 Rather than thinking that the sensible things qua countable
presuppose the noetic units, we are to think that the noetic units
presuppose the sensible things. In every case, noetic units depend
for their existence on sensible or imaginary objects, making every
arithmos a “multitude measured by a unit.”33 In practice, this
means that if we split a unit in half, each “half” is now a whole,
because the original unit, say, one apple, has given way to a new
unit, the “half-apple.” It is a simple matter of determining the
unit measure, though this does not mean that we give existence
to the noetic units or that we can can pick units of measure with
total freedom. The appropriate measures are always limited by
what it is we want to measure, and the noetic units are always
there for us in the first place. Abstraction is just how we access
them. This intertwining of the sensible and noetic neatly blocks
the one-many problem that vexes the Platonist. Because noetic
units are always abstracted and never counted, the one-many
problem does not arise. The point with respect to the fractional
part of the unit is just this: since the noetic unit is always abstracted, it can be “divided” because its division is simply equivalent to the assumption (via abstraction) of a new unit of measure.
Note that this does not abolish the distinction between continuous
and discrete quantity, inasmuch as we cannot measure a line by
both a unit and infinitely decreasing fractional parts of that unit
simultaneously.
Aristotle’s position begins to blend arithmetic and logistic:
it explains the existence of noetic units in a way that explains the
31. Ibid., 109.
32. Ibid., 104.
33. Ibid., 109.
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possibility of precise calculation. Because the existence of arithmoi is not always “on loan,” as it were, from the eidē, Aristotle
can hold, with reference to Plato, that the “real” eidē of arithmoi
are nothing other than their “multitude” or “quantity” as such.34
The triad is “once three” independently of whether its “material”
is noetic or sensible. Aristotle thus identifies that aspect of “number” to be treated by logistic as the very being of “number.” This
is important because the shift from Greek to modern (highly logistical) mathematics involves (1) substituting the concept of
number for the existence of number and (2) treating the two as
equivalent.
However, the disagreement between Plato and Aristotle on
the “nature of number” takes place within a fundamental agreement that mathematics is an ontological science of quantity, that
“numbers” are always of units, and that “numbers” of pure units
do not exist in the mind alone.35 This is why the Greeks did not
develop symbolic formulae. As the next two sections show, what
made possible such a revolution is the notion that numbers are
concepts.
Viète’s Reinterpretation of Aristotelian Logistic:
Calculating with Concepts
Klein brings out the implication of Aristotle’s approach: “The
transformation of the ontological conception of mathematika
which leads by way of Eudoxus to the Aristotelian doctrine,” results in “the reversal of the ‘Pythagorean’ thesis that the mensurability of things is grounded in their numerability.” It is “now
numerability [that] is, conversely, understood as a—not even always complete—expression of mensurability.”36 Especially relevant is that Euclid not only takes up logistical matters under the
34. Ibid., 110.
35. Ibid., 179-180. The general theory of proportions is to Aristotle’s
ontology roughly as arithmoi are to Plato’s. Aristotle considers it to be
(1) methodologically akin to the study of being qua being, and (2) part
of that study itself.
36. Ibid., 240.
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name of arithmetic (causing henceforth the constant confusion
of the two) but also has logistic appear as a “special case” of the
general theory of proportions.37 This makes arithmetic (read “logistic”) seem subordinate to geometry, and it is from this perspective that François Viète introduced symbols into mathematics
through his reinterpretation Diophantus’s Arithmetica, the authoritative Aristotelian logistic.
Diophantus, following Aristotle, understands eidē as qualities
of noetic arithmoi.38 His calculations make use of eidē because
the solutions are supposed to exhibit relations that necessarily
hold between noetic arithmoi of certain eidē. The point is to show
that if the same calculation is performed with arithmoi of such
and such eidē, the resulting arithmos will always have certain
qualities. This is why, in the course of his calculative procedures,
Diophantus introduces signs that serve both as abbreviations for
eidē and as stand-ins for a single arithmos belonging to each
eidē.39 Recall that eidē can’t be multiplied (or manipulated in any
other way). For the Greeks, only arithmoi, definite counts of definite things, can be “operated” on. Diophantus’s letter-signs are
therefore “mere word abbreviations” for “some one arithmos belonging to this eidos.” They are not variables. Does this mean
that the mathematician has to perform an infinite amount of calculations to complete one proof? No: the generality and therefore
the theoretical character of Diophantian logistic is based on the
fact that a given procedure of calculation works for all cases of
the same type.40 Whether Diophantus proves this is open to question since Klein does not say, but it seems clear that if no such
proof appears in the Arithmetica, then Diophantian logistic is
open to attack—and this would include Viète’s transformation of
Diophantus’s letter-signs into objects of calculation.41
37. Ibid., 44.
38. Ibid., 143.
39. Ibid., 145.
40. Ibid., 132.
41. Ibid., 148.
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In light of Euclid’s blending of logistic and geometry, Viète
takes logistical analysis and synthesis as parallel to geometric
analysis and synthesis, believing that true analysis (algebra)
must “exhibit” magnitudes in figure or number because it is
about “numbers” with a “direct geometric interpretation.”42 The
point for our purposes is that Viète therefore (1) regards as superfluous the final computation and exhibition of a particular
arithmos, and (2) considers multitudes to have the same determinacy possessed by the magnitudes put to work in geometric
proofs, so that the determinacy of any multitude lies merely in
the proportion that it makes with other multitudes.43 Aiming to
realize Euclid’s general theory of proportions as a theory of
equations, Viète understands every proportion to be the construction of an equation and every equation, once transformed, to be
the solution of a proportion, thereby permitting an “arbitrary”
amount of determinate solutions “on the basis of numbers assumed at will.”44
Hence, to realize the general theory of proportions as a theory
of equations is in fact to transform the former—whose generality
lies specifically in demonstrating truths that hold for all instances
of a mathematical form—into an art of calculation which,
tellingly, Viète calls the “logistic of species.”45 First, about the
“logistical” aspect: Viète stresses the law of homogeneity, a law
which ensures, in contexts where magnitudes are represented by
multitudes, that the mathematician compares only homogenous
magnitudes—in other words, that one employs the same units of
measurement for each magnitude involved in a calculation.46 We
may not take the length of a line and add or subtract it from the
42. Ibid., 157, 164. See Burt C. Hopkins, The Origin of Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 273-275, 520, for a discussion of how Viète blends
these two modes of analysis and synthesis.
43. Ibid., 165.
44. Ibid., 163.
45. Ibid., 184.
46. Ibid., 172.
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area of a plane. In this, Viète follows the Greek logistical tradition. But he departs from this tradition by removing the distinction between theorems and problems. As Hopkins paraphrases
Klein, “[Viète] understands theorems to be problems whose solution is not so much the truths themselves about mathematical
objects but the ‘art of finding or the finding of finding’ of the
general solution to all mathematical problems.”47 As for the
“species” aspect of the “logistic of species,” the species are what
make possible the general solutions.
Having transformed the general theory of proportions into
a theory of equations, complete with the equality sign and syntactical rules that allow mathematical operations to be symbolized, Viète requires a general object to operate on, an object
defined by quantitativeness as such.48 For this purpose, he appropriates the Diophantian eidē and reads them as “variables.”49
Their determinacy, which makes them operable, comes automatically from their being set up in an equation. Once in an equation, a letter sign becomes interpreted not as a quantity but as
quantity-in-general. What distinguishes a symbol (in Klein’s
sense) from a Diophantian letter-abbreviation is that it signifies
the concept of quantity. Viète’s “species” can in this respect be
understood as a generalization of the “true” arithmetic eidē of
Aristotle (not to be confused with the eidē that feature in Diophantus’s logistic as mere properties of arithmoi). Recall that
for Aristotle the triad itself constitutes an eidos. Viète not only
replaces this eidetic triad with the concept of threeness, inseparable from the symbol 3 (or any stipulated mark), but replaces
the eidē of arithmoi in general with the concept of the quantity,
inseparable from the symbol A (or any stipulated mark). Viète’s
innovation, and the essence of symbolic mathematics, is to allow
47. Hopkins, Symbolic Mathematics, 496.
48. GMT, 166.
49. For the sake of brevity, I omit Klein’s interpretation of the role
played by the law of homogeneity in Viète’s appropriation of the
eidē.
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calculation with concepts.50
Is it nonsense to add the concept of twoness to the concept
of twoness? No: the problem is linguistic. The concept of twoness
is equivalent to two-in-general. To add two-in-general to two-ingeneral is simply to disregard the units involved. The difference
between three-in-general (the moderns) and the triad (Aristotle)
is that the latter cannot exist without units of some sort. If we
have three apples, then we have one triad. If we then apply abstraction to get noetic units, then we have two triads. There is no
triad-in-itself. Moreover, there is no Greek equivalent for quantity-in-general. For the Greeks, “quantity-in-general” refers to
every instance of quantity at the same time, not to something that
can be individually picked out by the mind as being any quantity
whose units we have disregarded. With the idea of quantity-ingeneral, the moderns cause something like a paradigm shift in
mathematics without justifying it philosophically. For Klein, the
one who produces the closest thing to a justification is Descartes.
Mental Operations as Symbols
Descartes explains that the concept of quantity is indeed suited to
be the subject of calculative operations.51 In the first place, a concept does not have the permanence of a being. It exists only insofar as it is “present to the intellect,” and it is present only insofar
as the intellect is “turned towards itself.” In other words, a concept
exists only so long as the mental act of conception is maintained.
The concept of quantity, in particular, arises when the intellect
takes the idea of number (which, residing in the imagination, always goes together with enumerated units) and separates (“abstracts”) from it the character of being a number (i.e., a quantity).
The intellect thus obtains for itself the concept of quantity.52 However, a paradox arises. On the one hand, because of its dependence
on the imagination, the concept of quantity can’t absolutely ex50. GMT, 175.
51. Ibid., 207.
52. Ibid., 201.
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clude the original beings “imaged” in the imagination. On the
other hand, as a concept, its content can’t include any determinate
beings. Therefore, to acquire the content of the concept of quantity, the intellect returns to the imagination and produces for itself
the “indeterminate content,” the countable or measurable in general, in the form of an arbitrary image having figure (in this case,
a letter-sign).53 The idea is that any image of a shape or a figure
can in principle be equated with any amount of an appropriate
measuring unit. This same mental operation applies to the “idea”
(in the imagination) of twoness, threeness, and so on.
This means that when we deal with a variable in an equation,
we present to ourselves our own mental act of conceiving of
quantity-in-general.54 We don’t err in identifying the object of
representation (the content of the concept of quantity) with the
means of its representation (the arbitrary image), because in this
case the two really are identical.55 The identity of an arbitrary
image and the content of the concept of quantity is the paradigmatic symbol in Klein’s sense. For Klein, this amounts to a new
“possibility” of “understanding,” according to which symbols are
the key to knowledge of the world.56 Klein’s point is that
Descartes gives an account of the sort of abstraction by which
we disregard the units of a quantity as well as the determinacy
of any quantity, similar to the way in which Aristotle explains
our access to pure units. One interpretation is that Descartes
builds on Aristotle’s philosophy, since his “symbol-generating
abstraction” depends on the prior activation of Aristotelian ab53. Ibid., 205.
54. Cf. Hopkins, Symbolic Mathematics, 521.
55. GMT, 123.
56. Ibid., 200, 210. To make this mode of cognition work, Descartes
characterizes the intellect not exactly by incorporeality but by an unrelatedness to corporeality. Descartes’s dualism is in this sense strictly
logical rather than ontological. The surprise is that this dualism makes
the mind a necessary condition for the substance of the world. Descartes
relates the corporeal directly to the imagination through the senses. But
for Descartes, corporeal things are the only things in the world, and the
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straction (interpreted in a certain way) to get “ideas” of arithmoi
into the imagination.57 The first abstraction provides “numbers”
of pure units, the second provides “pure numbers” and “pure
number in general.”
However, Descartes ascribes an epistemological “independence” to algebra that was achieved by John Wallis, who can be
interpreted as taking a fully “operational” view of numbers.58
Wallis drops Descartes’s notion that algebra exhibits the order of
the world (see footnote 56), but he spontaneously fulfills Viète’s
requirement of homogeneity by conceiving the homogeneity of
numbers to be given by their symbolic character.59 For Wallis,
numbers are homogeneous because they are dimensionless, and
they are dimensionless because treating numbers strictly in terms
of the “numerical genus” is identical to conceiving them symbolically.60 This allows Wallis to equate “numbers” with “indices
imagination, which is corporeal, receives its impressions of things without error. Therefore, since the imagination deals most easily and simply
with extended things, the essence of corporeality is extendedness (the
concept of extension), which is therefore the substance of the world.
But the content of the concept of extension is the measurable in general,
the same as the content of the concept of quantity. Therefore, the substance of the world is the concept of quantity. Descartes concludes that
correct algebraic equations exhibit the order of the world.
57. Ibid., 202.
58. It was the Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) who
carried out the “complete and effective assimilation of the ‘numerical’
and the ‘geometric’ realm” under the concept of quantity by assimilating “the concept of ‘number’ to operations on ‘numbers’ already long
established” (GMT, 197, 293). Stevin thus “no longer deals with numbers of units which are determinate in each case but with the unlimited
possibility of combining ciphers” according to definite rules, thereby
allowing irrationals, negatives, and—crucially for the “continuity” of
number understood as a complete numerical correspondence to measurable magnitudes—fractions to become “numbers” (193).
59. GMT, 218.
60. Ibid., 217.
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of ratios.”61 “2” thus becomes equivalent to “2/1.” Moreover, because Wallis says that a ratio—which is dimensionless because
it tells us how many times one magnitude is contained in another—results from the division of one magnitude by another, his
implicit understanding of symbolic numbers is that they, in addition to the symbols for operations, image the mental operations
of calculation. It it true that we have to distinguish mental operations such as Descartes describes—concept-producing operations we aren’t aware of—from mental operations such as
division or squaring—straightforward operations we are aware
of. But “numbers” are in both cases understood as embodying
mental activity.
Because equating indices of ratios with number implies that
“number” has no connection to a particular multitude, Wallis,
with his “symbolic” reinterpretation of Euclidean ratio (radicalizing the “parallelization of ‘arithmetical’ with ‘geometrical’ procedure” initiated by Viète), detaches algebra from any real
objects.62 This makes the number symbols themselves the “beings” that correspond to knowledge , so that “the content of reasoning [i.e., mathematical propositions and inferences] . . . ipso
facto engender[s] its form [i.e., symbols], the latter doing nothing
more than formulating the very movement achieved by the mind”
in its ordered progression from quantities that are known to those
that are desired.63
It is in this sense that symbolic mathematics is an epistemological science of order and arrangement. Each symbol signifies
a mental operation (whether of calculation or conceptualization)
and symbolic (unit-less) numbers are substituted for the “definite
counts of definite things” familiar to the Greeks. Hence, to define
numbers, such as imaginary numbers, solely in terms of opera61. Ibid., 223.
62. Ibid., 212.
63. Quotation from Étienne Gilson in David Lachterman, The Ethics of
Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1989),
182.
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tions and the equality sign is just an extension of the “definition”
of numbers as mental operations.64 What prevents symbolic
mathematics from becoming arbitrary is its rootedness in the concept of quantity, a concept grounded in turn in the idea of arithmoi. Symbolic mathematics can therefore be seen as a system
with a hard core (involving conceptualized quantities) expanded
upon by postulations.
Conclusion
Is mathematical physics vitiated if symbolic numbers embody
mental operations? As Cosgrove shows with reference to the theory of special relativity, Klein’s work suggests an affirmative argument.65 In special relativity, time- and distance-measurements
are relative to a frame of reference described by a coordinate system. All coordinate systems are defined by four variables: three
for the dimensions of space, one for time. However, where space
is represented directly as x, y, z, time is represented indirectly as
66
67
√(-1)·ct. This way, every variable has units of distance, and
since (√(-1)·ct)2 = -c2 t2, it follows by substitution that s2 = dx2 +
dy2 + dz2 - c2dt2 is formally equivalent to s2 = x1 + x2 + x3 + x4. This
allows for an elegant mathematical characterization of the theory,
which flows from the fact that there are equations (the Lorentz
transformations) which take us from two mathematically described positions in one frame of reference to those same meas64. The imaginary “unit” (i) is that number which, when multiplied by
itself, gives negative one: i2 = -1. It is also stipulated that it is equal
only to the positive square-root.
65. Cosgrove, “Husserl, Jacob Klein, and Symbolic Nature,” 14-16.
Cosgrove advances an argument on Klein’s behalf, since Klein does
not fill the gap between his work on mathematics and his suggestions
that mathematical physics identifies nature with mathematical representations.
66. c is the constant velocity of light in a vacuum, t is an interval of
time.
67. Given that the velocity of an object multiplied by an interval of time
gives the distance traversed.
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urements in another frame of reference that is in uniform motion
relative to the first. From these equations it follows that all frames
of reference share the property s2 = dx2 + dy2 + dz2 - c2dt2.68 Each
value of s2 is called a space-time interval.69
Restricting consideration to one spatial dimension, and replacing, as Cosgrove does, c2 (a constant) with 1, the equation
reduces to s2 = dx2 - dt2.70 If we now regard the space-time interval
as a physical quantity given in units of space-time, then dx2 - dt2
is an intuitively absurd subtraction of units of time from units of
distance that yields units of space-time. We perform the subtraction only by operating on symbolic numbers. Thus, our path from
measurements in the sensuous world to space-time passes
through a mathematical symbolism that filters out our intuitions
inexplicably. In this way, we cover nature with a symbolic disguise, namely, space-time.
The main problem with this argument is that it begs the
question. It assumes that the space-time interval is a physical
quantity and argues for the shattering of our intuitions. But it is
not a logical consequence of the theory that the space-time interval is a physical quantity. The physical significance of the
space-time interval does not require the latter to be an “absolute” quantity representing the “real world” of space-time.
We can simply regard space-time interval as a quantity whose
value implies certain facts about any two events being related
to one another across all frames of reference. That is, we can
characterize the correlation between equations and experiments
68. x2 is in units of distance, c2 (as the constant velocity of light) in units
of velocity, and t2 in units of time. d tells us that we are dealing with
the difference between two coordinate values.
69. That the space-time interval is invariant with respect to all frames
of reference is the mathematical certification of special relativity, inasmuch as it preserves the universality of the laws of nature.
70. Cosgrove gives s2 = t2 - x2, but the difference is immaterial since in
either case the value of s2 is invariant between frames of reference. I
will object to Cosgrove’s substitution of 1 for c2 shortly.
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in terms of a network of inferences. For example, if dt2 is
greater than dx2, making s2 negative71 (this is termed a “timelike” interval), then there is no frame of reference in which the
two events being related to one another occur simultaneously.
From this inference-oriented perspective, to posit an “absolute
world” of space-time is an act of philosophical interpretation.72
As regards Cosgrove’s substitution of 1 for c2, this step, while
mathematically permissible, is required only by his assumption
that the space-time interval is a physical quantity.73 However, that
the space-time interval be given in units of distance, not units of
space-time, is the desired result of representing the time coordinate indirectly as the variable √(-1)·ct. Though we might want to
know where we can find the distance s2, this distance is nowhere
because it cannot be measured. It can only be calculated. But this
is no problem. From the claim that some quantity is in units of
distance it does not follow that this quantity can be measured. A
quantity can be imaginary—it can be a mathematical artifact—
without voiding any of the reasoning that leads to or away from
it. This is why the space-time interval can be imaginary and still
have physical significance. From its value, we can draw conclusions about any two events being related to one another across
all frames of reference. The space-time interval is meaningful
and intuition-preserving within the total context of the theory of
special relativity. It is only when it is interpreted as a physical
quantity that it covers over the sensible world like a symbolic
disguise. No experiment can prove the existence of space-time,
with reference to the special theory of relativity.
Therefore, assuming similar arguments can be made for similar “concepts,” I don’t think that Klein is correct to suggest that
71. For why this is unproblematic, see Cosgrove, “Husserl, Jacob Klein,
and Symbolic Nature,” fn. 43.
72. The interdependence of space and time, and even the mathematical symmetry of the two, is not equivalent to the existence of a single
physical medium.
73. As Cosgrove argues: “Clearly the quantity c2t2 - x2 cannot itself be
a space-time interval since it has units of distance” (15).
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modern physics is vitiated by mathematical symbolism—that it
substitutes a symbolic nature for nature itself. This is because the
character of symbolic mathematics as a reasoning tool is the heart
of symbolic mathematics. One could take the foundation laid by
Klein and argue that it is because symbolic mathematics allows
us to exhibit our own mental activity that the mathematical part
of physics can’t be responsible for generating a symbolic nature.
It only allows us to make that mistake. Of course, the example
of the space-time interval certainly supports Klein’s view that the
goal of modern physics is to identify immutable relationships
(“laws of nature” representing the “structure of the world”)74 that
hold between things insofar as the properties of the latter can be
measured. At least, reformations of our basic concepts, including
space and time, do not seem forthcoming.75 This frees us to philosophize in the Greek mode, drawing out the implications of the
meanings given in natural language, so long as we take into account the achievements of mathematical physics and science in
general.76
On the other hand, the intimate connection that Klein draws
between the Greeks and the theoretical character of algebra is
suspect. It is not clear that symbolic mathematics is logically dependent on Greek mathematics, because Klein does not discuss
any theories about mathematics other than those of the Greeks
and that of Descartes. He pulls off his argument by assuming that
showing how modern mathematics came to be is equivalent to
revealing its theoretical underpinnings. Though Klein refers at
least once to his work as “historical” in the ordinary sense, he is
concerned to reveal a “special kind of conceptualization,”
namely, “symbol-generating abstraction,” that is necessary for
symbolic mathematics.77 Thus, Klein concludes by asserting that
74. GMT, 184-185.
75. See Azzouni, “Can science change our notion of existence?”
76. The reason to prefer a proposition that issues from a theory over a
proposition that issues from intuition is that to discount the former is to
discount the theory. So, it can be reasonable to doubt one’s intuitions.
77. GMT, 4, 147.
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Wallis’s conception of arithmetic (which we may identify with
symbolic mathematics) “can be understood only in terms of a
symbolic reinterpretation of the ancient ‘numbered assemblage,’
of the arithmos.”78 I think it is fair to say that this has not been
demonstrated.
78. Ibid., 223.
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Which Sciences Does the Political
Science Direct and Use and
How Does It Do So?
Edward M. Macierowski
Core texts are at the heart of any educational tradition. Since they
are so close to heart, they deserve reading and rereading, and
sometimes in rereading we discover key forks in the road, decisive moves that lead us to think along certain lines rather than
along others. A recent translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics highlights one of these forks in the road and leads us to
reexamine the question about what Aristotle calls the “architectonic” role of political science, its role as master-builder over the
other sciences. In this paper I propose to do four things: (1) to
call attention to a seemingly trivial editorial choice made by Ingram Bywater in his influential edition of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Ethics; (2) to show that this editorial choice has no basis
in the manuscript tradition and is therefore misguided; (3) to
show what is at stake for political practice; and (4) to show in
what ways political science directs and uses the other sciences
and in which ways it does not.
1. Noticing the problem
One of the great merits of a recent translation of Aristotle’s Ethics
is that it meticulously adheres to Ingram Bywater’s 1894 Greek
critical edition in the Oxford Classical Texts. Let me first quote
from this translation Book I, chapter 2, and then from a note that
calls attention to a thought-provoking oddity. Here is Aristotle:
If, therefore, there is some end of our actions that we
wish for on account of itself, the rest being things we
Edward M. Macierowski is Professor of Philosophy at Benedictine
College in Atchison, Kansas. This paper was first delivered at the
twenty-first annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and
Courses held in Plymouth, Massachusetts on 10 April 2015.
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wish for on account of this end, and if we do not choose
all things on account of something else—for in this way
the process will go on infinitely such that the longing involved is empty and pointless—clearly this would be the
good, that is, the best. And with a view to our life, then,
is not the knowledge of this good of great weight, and
would we not, like archers in possession of a target, better hit on what is needed? If this is so, then one must try
to grasp, in outline at least, whatever it is and to which
of the sciences or capacities it belongs.
But it might be held to belong to the most authoritative and architectonic one, and such appears to be the political art. For it ordains what sciences must be in cities
and what kinds each person must learn and up to what
point. We also see that even the most honored capacities—for example, generalship, household management,
rhetoric—fall under the political art. Because it makes use
of the remaining [here note 10 calls attention to the elimination of a word] sciences and, further, because it legislates what one ought to do and what to abstain from, its
end would encompass those of the others, with the result
that this would be the human good. For even if this is the
same thing for an individual and a city, to secure and preserve the good of the city appears to be something greater
and more complete: the good of the individual by himself
is certainly desirable enough, but that of a nation and of
cities is nobler and more divine (1094a18-b11).1
Let us now read their useful note 10:
The MSS add at this point the word practical (or sciences
“related to action”: praktikais), but Bywater, followed by
Stewart and Burnet, deletes it.2
Let us now attend to the key sentence once again, with and without Bywater’s deletion. First with the deletion:
1. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan
D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2-3.
2. Ibid., 3.
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Because it makes use of the remaining sciences and,
further, because it legislates what one ought to do and
what to abstain from, its end would encompass those
of the others, with the result that this would be the
human good.
In this version, political science seems to “make use of the remaining sciences” without any restriction. Now let us see what
the text sounds like without Bywater’s deletion:
Because it makes use of the remaining practical sciences and, further, because it legislates what one ought
to do and what to abstain from, its end would encompass those of the others, with the result that this would
be the human good.3
Our first question is this: To what did “the manuscripts add” the
restrictive word “practical”? Our second question is: From what
did Bywater delete the word “practical”? These questions bring
us to the next stage of our argument.
2. Evaluation of Bywater’s Deletion
It is easier to answer the second question than the first: Bywater deleted the restrictive adjective praktikais from the universal testimony of the Greek manuscript tradition. The only
possible answer to the first question is that the manuscripts all
and each added something to what Aristotle had said. But apart
from the manuscripts themselves, how would one know what
Aristotle said or thought? At any event, Bywater reports no
variant in the Greek manuscript tradition. The medieval Latin
3. “Because it makes use of the remaining practical sciences and, further,
because it legislates what one ought to do and what to abstain from, its
end would encompass those of the others, with the result that this would
be the human good” (1094b4-7; italics mine): chrōmenēs de tautēs tais
loipais [praktikais] tōn epistēmōn, eti de nomothetousēs ti dei prattein
kai tinōn apechesthai, to tautēs telos periechoi an ta tōn allōn, hōste
tout’ an eiē t’anthrōpinon agathon. Burnet reports no variant manuscript
readings and simply asserts of the bracketed word “seclusi”—“I have
set it aside.”
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translation must be based upon a Greek manuscript of the same
manuscript tradition; for it also keeps the restrictive adjective
“practical.”4 Even the medieval Arabic manuscript tradition reports the same reading.5 In short, Bywater flies in the face of
the universal testimony of all the surviving manuscript evidence. A scholar of Bywater’s stature must have had some reason. Can we find it?
It should be noted that a year after his Greek edition of the
Ethics he did provide a justification for his departure from the
manuscript tradition. Here is what he says about the passage
in question:
I, 2, 1094b4 chrōmenēs de tautēs tais loipais [praktikais] tōn epistēmōn.
loipais, though recognized indirectly by Aspasius (p.
6, 3-5), is represented in his paraphrase by praktikais
(hyparchei de tēi politikēi kai to chrēsthai tais praktikais tōn epistēmōn, p. 6, 11). From this I infer that
praktikais is really a gloss, which in the inferior MSS.
has found a place in the text along with the genuine
word loipais, and which in Kb, as sometimes happens
in this MS. (v. supra p. 19), has dispossessed it. In a
context like the present the limitation involved in praktikais is inappropriate; for if politikē is the one supreme
art, all other arts must come under it, not the practical
arts merely. The qualification was no doubt suggested
by what is said later on at the end of Bk. VI. (1145a 6),
4. The medieval Latin translation of this passage from the Ethics (found
in the Leonine critical edition of Aquinas’s Sententia Libri Ethicorum,
[Rome: Leonine Commision, 1969] T. 47, 7) obviously depends upon a
Greek manuscript with the same reading: “Utente autem hac reliquis
practicis disciplinarum, amplius autem legem ponente quid oportet operari et a quibus abstinere, huius finis complectitur utique eos qui aliarum,
quapropter hic utique erit humanum bonum” (italics mine).
5. The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Anna A. Akasoy and
Alexander Fidora, trans. Douglas M. Dunlop (Boston: Brill, 2005), 114.7
“Since this art employs the practical sciences . . . ”; 115.7, line 8: “fa-idh
kānat hādhihi-ṣinā‘a tasta‘milu-l-‘ulūm al-‘amaliyya . . . ” (italics mine).
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but that point is not yet of any importance for the argument; and it would have required a much more distinct statement, if Aristotle had meant to insist upon it
at this early state in his discussion.6
Here Bywater prefers the authority of the second century
commentator Aspasius to that of the universal manuscript tradition, but attempts to eliminate the praktikais reported by Aspasius himself. On the other hand, Bywater himself admits
two circumstances, which limit and impair to some extent the value of the evidence in his Commentary.
(1) We must remember, in the first place, that the
Commentary, as we now have it, from MSS. of very
late date, has suffered sadly in the process of transmission to us. . . .
(2) In the second place, the Commentary is really
more of the nature of a paraphrase, with quotations
from the original interspersed or incidentally worked
into the text. Hence it is that in his restatements of Aristotle Aspasius often allows himself a pretty free hand;
he substitutes, for instance, his own connecting particles; he inserts what he thinks conducive to clearness,
and ignores what he deems trivial or unimportant for
the general meaning.7
The key to Bywater’s justification for preferring his inference from the spongy evidence of Aspasius against the universal manuscript tradition is therefore this doctrinal claim: “if
politikē is the one supreme art, all other arts must come under
it, not the practical arts merely.” Does Aristotle hold that “politikē is the one supreme art” without qualification?
6. Ingram Bywater, Contributions to the Textual Criticism of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892; reprint, New
York: Arno Press, 1973), 22-23.
7. Bywater, Contributions, 1-3. For a recent survey of the scholarship
on the role of Aspasius in transmitting the text, see the introduction by
Joaquín E. Meabe to Aristóteles, Ética a Nicómaco (Buenos Aires: Las
Cuarenta, 2014), 1-24. The introduction is available on-line: https://
www.academia.edu/7973667/Ética_a_Nicómaco
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3. So what? Why is it practically important to keep the restriction in place?
Aristotle was a thoughtful and careful writer. Thoughtful and
careful writers do not use words without purpose. Aristotle
elsewhere distinguishes three kinds of thought: “If all thought
is either practical or productive or theoretical, physics must be
a theoretical science.”8 The productive sciences are concerned
with making something; e.g., a carpenter produces a cabinet,
which is able to stand on its own as a separate product once it
is finished. The practical sciences are concerned with doing
something; e.g. a singer acts only so long as she is singing: the
song, the singing, and the singer are actually inseparable. The
theoretical9 sciences involve the attitude of an on-looker; e.g.,
the spectator at a football game does not change anything in
the game merely by watching it. If there are any theoretical
sciences, that is, ways of knowing things that trace them back
to unchangeable first principles whose truth is self-contained,
8. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1025b25, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908). Against the background of Mill’s utilitarianism and
Marx’s obsession with practice (e.g., the conclusion of the eleven theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world
in various ways; the point is to change it” in Karl Marx and Frederick
Engle, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur [New York: International Publishers, 1947], 123), it is not surprising that theoretical philosophy in the nineteenth century might get out of focus. The polemic
against theoretical philosophy was more obvious even earlier in
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part IV (1651): “Of the Kingdome of
Darknesse.”
9. It is important not to misunderstand what Aristotle is getting at here.
Today, the words “speculative” or “theoretical” connote some idle, ungrounded, tentative attitude that may not even have anything to do with the
truth. For Aristotle, by way of contrast, theoretical sciences aim to take in
the truth of things as they are. Indeed, Aristotle argues that there are three
main theoretical sciences: a study of changeable beings, which he calls
physics or natural science; a study of beings dependent upon matter for
their existence but not for their intelligibility, which he calls mathematics;
and a study of being precisely as such which he calls sometimes “wisdom,”
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then there might be a possible tension between a political
leader who wants everything to be under his control and a
philosopher who recognizes that some things cannot be otherwise than as they are. Aristotle, however, respects the authority
of the political leadership, focusing attention on “the most honored capacities”; note, however, that theoretical philosophy is
not on the list. Aristotle’s three examples are all practical disciplines: “generalship, household management, rhetoric.”
4. Conclusion: in what ways political science directs the other
sciences and in which ways it uses them.
By way of conclusion, I should like to call attention to a recently published translation of Thomas Aquinas’s commentary
on this passage, wherein he finds “two characteristics of an architectonic science”: (a) “that it dictates what is to be done by
the art or science subject to it,” e.g. horsemanship orders the
activity of bridle-making and (b) that the architectonic science
uses the sciences subject to it “for its own ends.”10 If one blurs
the distinction between “practical sciences” and “sciences”
without qualification, as Bywater’s deletion does, the speculative sciences become entirely invisible, and so does Aristotle’s
point. Let’s focus on (a)—how politics dictates what is to be
done.
Now the first of these is applicable to politics or political
science both in regard to the speculative and in regard
to the practical sciences, in different ways, however. Political science dictates to a practical science both consometimes “first philosophy,” and sometimes “theology.” Aristotle makes
no explicit mention of any “theoretical” sciences in this passage, but, granting that the universal testimony of the manuscript tradition is right, this
should indicate to careful readers who know something about philosophy,
that there might be something somehow over the horizon of political thinking. Only in the last book of the Ethics does he point to a distinction between
two types of happiness: that of the citizen and that of the philosopher.
10. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. Joshua Parens and Joseph
C. Macfarland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 274.
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cerning its use—whether or not it should operate—and
concerning the specification of its act. It dictates to the
smith not only that he use his art but also that he use it
in such a fashion as to make knives of a particular kind.
Both are ordered the end of human living.11
Given that there are also theoretical sciences to take into account,
we can now appreciate the contrast:
But political science dictates to a speculative science only
concerning its use and not concerning the specification of
its work. Political science orders that some teach or learn
geometry; and actions of this kind, in so far as they are
voluntary, belong to the matter of ethics and can be ordered to the goal of human living. But the political ruler
does not dictate to geometry what conclusions it should
draw about a triangle, for this is not subject to the human
will nor can it be ordered to human living, but it depends
on the very nature (ratio) of things.12
As to the second point (b), “the use of subordinate sciences belongs to political science only in reference to the practical sciences.” In modern terms, even a Stalin cannot make two plus two
equal to anything but four, though he might be able to intimidate
people into saying otherwise. “Hence,” Aristotle adds, “we see
that the most highly esteemed, that is, the noblest, skills or operative arts fall under political science, namely, strategy, domestic
economy, and rhetoric, which political science uses for its own
end, that is for the common good of the city.”13
Aquinas then notes the distinction between political science,
which “is most important, not simply, but in the genus of the practical sciences” which treats the ultimate end of human life, but
leaves room for the study of the “ultimate end of the whole universe . . . which is the most important without qualification.”14
11. Ibid., 274. Italics mine.
12. Ibid., 274. Italics mine.
13. Ibid., 275.
14. Ibid., 275.
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Against the background of the fuller range of Aristotle’s
properly philosophical thought, we can see in what sense Bywater’s position is right and in what way it needs to be qualified.
“The qualification,” he said, “was no doubt suggested by what is
said later on at the end of Bk. VI (1145a 6).”15 What is that?
And yet prudence does not exercise authoritative control
over wisdom or the better part [of the soul, just as the art
of medicine does not do so over health either, for it does
not make use of health but rather sees how it comes into
being; it is for the sake of health, then, that medicine issues commands, but it does not issue them to health. Furthermore, it would be just as if someone should assert
that the political art rules over the gods because it issues
commands about all things in the city.16
If Aristotle’s principal audience for his ethical lectures should
be gentlemen rather than philosophers, the reason “that point is
not yet of any importance for the argument” might well be that
gentlemen would not even think of disagreeing. Perhaps, as Bywater says, “it would have required a much more distinct statement, if Aristotle had meant to insist upon it at this early state in
his discussion.” But is there any dispute between a philosopher
who might claim to prove the existence of unchangeable beings
and gentlemen who would surely not contest the immutability of
the gods of the city? Aristotle does not trouble perfect gentlemen
with the fine points of theoretical philosophy, but he counts on
them to recognize that certain opinions held by gentlemen offer
a bulwark against tyranny. As for Aquinas, his proximate audience would likely not be gentlemen, even if they were scholars.
Aquinas does, at any event, show why the restrictive adjective
“practical” is not superfluous.
15. Bywater, Contributions, 23.
16. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, 134.
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Ass, You Like It?
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream as Political Philosophy
Nalin Ranasinghe
William Shakespeare’s early comedies are marked by the pervasive presence of twins. Remarkably, this theme extends even to
the level of the plays themselves: comedies and tragedies with
striking similarities appear on stage at about the same time. While
each play in such a dyad conforms to the requirements of its respective genre, the presence of a doppelgänger creates irony, and
raises questions about the comic or tragic conclusions reached in
each play.
One such pair is Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. Both were written and performed in the mid-1590s, and
both raise very similar questions about love, marriage and politics
while yet describing exactly opposite—and thus perfectly complementary—dramatic trajectories. In Romeo and Juliet we see
a potential comic resolution to a political impasse turn tragic
through a malefic combination of religious meddling and starcrossed accident. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the other
hand, presents an inherently tragic situation that slips into a conventional comic conclusion. Its characters are not weighed down
by determinate causality and intractable philosophical struggles
with their own natures; the whole play seems to share Puck’s airy
comment on human affairs: “Lord, what fools these mortals be”
(III.ii.115). The attitude of the fairies is broadly benevolent; they
revel in what’s comic and contingent in human matters, advancing rather than hindering the interests of mortals. Despite much
misunderstanding and maladroit manipulation, the actions of the
Nalin Ranasinghe is Professor of Philosophy at Assumption College in
Worcester, Massachesetts.
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play’s characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are hardly fatalistic. For the most part, humans entangle themselves in homespun webs of false necessity. They are foolish, but not wicked.
Unlike Romeo and Juliet, which shows the disaster that can arise
from imposing social, political, and clerical structures on human
life, A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers a self-portrait of Shakespeare, a man as playful as Puck and as wise as Bottom, as he attempts to reconcile the divine and the human in our nature, and
tries to repair the rupture between reason and religion.
In repudiating the reductive cruelty of Old Comedy, and rehabilitating, in the spirit of Erasmus, the gentler magic of a
Menander or Plautus, Shakespeare offers a truly Christian alternative both to the austere anti-theatrical hellfire of Knox and to
the corrupt ritualism of the Old Church. The new and overzealous
religious piety of Shakespeare’s time banished all playhouses
from London and re-situated them on the other side of the river.
Similarly, the young lovers Hermia and Lysander escape the
harsh laws of the city by taking refuge in the dark woods of the
imagination. I argue that A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes the
case for ending the ancient feud between philosophy and poetry,
which in Shakespeare’s day had become a conflict between rational but politicized religionists and pagan pastoral poets.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream signals its comic intent by
rewriting the myth of Theseus and Hippolyta. Anyone conversant
with the Greek tales would know that on the eve of Theseus’s
marriage to Hippolyta an Amazon invasion of Attica took the
bride’s life—a conclusion as contrary to the sunny ending of
Shakespeare’s play as any that could be dreamed. It seems, then,
that because of the events Shakespeare relates, the tragic outcomes of the myth were averted. Hippolyta did not die in battle
against her own people; Theseus did not take another wife, Phaedra; and Hippolytus, the son of Theseus and Hippolyta, did not
die misjudged by his father because of his haughty insensitivity
to his stepmother’s passion for him. Shakespeare’s alternative
mythology transmutes tragedy into comedy.
But Shakespeare does not leave the tragic behind entirely.
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We are reminded of darker forces at the very start of the play.
Theseus, in ordering Philostrate to encourage exuberance in the
kingdom, makes a reference to sorrow by way of contrast: “Go,
Philostrate, / Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments; / Awake
the pert and nimble spirit of mirth; / Turn melancholy forth to funerals; / The pale companion is not for our pomp” (I.1.11-15).1
Almost immediately, an old man bearing his father’s name,
Egeus, appears with a complaint against his disobedient daughter
Hermia. The original Egeus, Theseus’s father, threw himself into
the ocean when he failed to see the victorious signal flag that
Theseus forgot to fly over the ship returning him to Athens from
his mission to defeat the Minotaur in Crete. The Aegean Sea remains an enduring monument to Egeus’s precipitous despair.
Shakespeare’s Egeus is similarly hasty in despairing over his
child. Hermia has fallen madly in love with Lysander rejecting
her father’s wish that she marry the almost identical Demetrius.
For his part, Demetrius has recently turned his affections to Hermia, despite having previously wooed and won the love of Helena, who had once been Hermia’s closest friend. Shakespeare
paints the two pairs of lovers as being almost indistinguishable
in character from each other.2
Angry Egeus demands that the full weight of the patriarchal
Athenian law be applied against his disobedient daughter. If Hermia persists in denying her father’s legal right to overrule her affections, she must choose between execution and perpetual
confinement in a nunnery (I.i.69-73). Although Theseus is sympathetic toward Hermia, he claims to be powerless under the law
he must uphold; he gives her the same four days to make her
1. Citations from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are keyed to The Norton
Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt,
Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katharine Maus, (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997).
2. My reading of the play has been greatly influenced by Rene Girard’s
“Love by Another’s Eye: Mimetic Punning in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream” in his book A Theatre of Envy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 72-79.
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choice that stand between him and his approaching nuptials.
(I.i.83ff.) According to Duke Theseus, Hermia should view her
father as a god. She is but wax, subject to his formative power,
to be defaced or reshaped in any way he chooses (I.i.47-51). It is
also clear that Egeus is willful; even though there is no real difference between the two men vying for his child’s hand, his own
freedom of choice is all that really matters. In other words, to
Egeus reason means nothing more than his authority to rule arbitrarily over the desires of those under his power. His law is not
just; it is merely the tyranny of age over youth. It is no wonder
that Hermia and Lysander try to flee from it.
Yet when we follow the lovers to overhear their conference,
we rapidly lose our respect for them as well. It is as everything
they know about love came from a poor staging of Romeo and
Juliet—a play, I think, which Shakespeare spent much of his career trying to atone for. In choosing Juliet’s adolescent passion
over Egeus’s self-centered authority, the lovers find themselves
hooked on the other horn of the dilemma. Pure passion is as mad
as puritanical rationality. Furthermore, since A Midsummer
Night’s Dream actually contains a poor performance of a crude
version of Romeo and Juliet, we see our lovers obliviously mocking a play that accurately reflects their own follies and vices. To
their elders, they are victims of Eros, tortured on the rack of passion.
Lysander and Hermia are quite certain that “the course of true
love never did run smooth” (I.i.134). To them this means that the
intensity of their mad passion is reinforced by the conventional
love-perils they must overcome—and they are unaware of the
fact that having love-perils is itself a convention. But this surely
amounts to choosing “love through another’s eyes,” (I.i.140) the
very command Hermia rejects when told her eyes must see with
her father’s judgment. Further confirmation of the self-conscious
madness induced by this kind of love is given by Helena, who
tells Demetrius of the lovers’ plan to flee Athens, thus jeopardizing her chance to be rid of her rival merely because she expects
to be thanked by him for this favor. Helena is all too aware of the
fickle nature of love, which “looks not with the eyes but with the
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mind” (I.ii.234), but she is no less prone to be ruled by a force
that elevates “to form and dignity . . . things base and vile”
(I.ii.232). Her judgment is ruled by forces to which she submits,
even as she laments their tyranny. We are again reminded of her
namesake, Helen of Troy, and her excuse “a god made me do it.”3
This divinization of love—both affirmed and denied in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the extent that it reveals love to be random and supernaturally potent—seems to distinguish between
two distinct ways of being influenced by love: we can fall under
the spell of an imaginary love we create for ourselves, or we can
actually succumb to the real thing. Although A Midsummer
Night’s Dream seems to warn that the effects of imaginary love
are as short-lived as they are rare, we will shortly receive an account of the transcendent origins of this sickness. This disease is
so potent that just the desire for it can lead to follies that lack all
the divine power and inspiration imparted by true love.
Meanwhile, in accordance with Theseus’s demand for merriment, a troupe of lowly but loyal Athenian artisans are preparing to stage a play. Although these men are far lower on the social
scale than the lovers, their affairs, and the account of imagination
that attends them, are of particular interest because Shakespeare
himself did not belong to the nobility, while he is almost universally considered one of the world’s greatest poets. Like the demideity Eros, whom Diotima describes in Plato’s Symposium as the
offspring of Need and Plenty,4 Shakespeare is a unique combination of low status and high imagination. Despite being out in
“the wind and the rain” like Touchstone at the play’s end, Shakespeare nevertheless had the honor of being summoned to entertain the highest nobility. One could say that Titania is the
alter-ego of Queen Elizabeth.
Thus, despite the ridicule they suffer, the players called “rude
mechanicals”—and Bottom in particular—will teach us how to
laugh at them; this will prepare us for the self-knowledge that
will have us laughing at ourselves together with Puck. The deep
3. Homer. Iliad, 6.349.
4. Plato, Symposium, 203b-d.
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self-knowledge that is to be imparted here is comic rather than
condemnatory: the doctrine of original sin and limited redemption is replaced by the doctrine that men are fools with immortal
yearnings that make us both sublime and ridiculous. Shakespeare’s theater takes the place of the church and its rituals, just
as Athenian theater sought simultaneously to worship, to edify,
and to entertain. As in the Christian liturgy, the Theater of Dionysus—a god-man who was torn apart and consumed by his devotees—brought grace and desire into close contact. In theater, the
performance is not marred by the personal imperfections of the
individual performers, just as in the Mass the sacrifice of the Eucharist is not tainted by any sins that may attach to the priest performing the service. Indeed, the theater constitutes a polite but
decidedly pagan challenge to the church’s claim to be the sole
pathway to God. Shakespeare’s comic theater does not insult divinity, and thus it avoids both hubris and original sin. On the contrary, it takes the ancient Greek view of the sacredness of theater
and joins to it the Christian humanistic belief in the ultimate
goodness of both creation and its God.
Now the rude mechanicals are anxious not to offend the nobles
in the audience; for this reason they try to explain away any troubling aspects of their performance. This concern is essentially political. Theater has always been a vehicle for breaking through class
constraints, and an indirect organ of social criticism, as the ruling
classes have always been well aware. Recall Elizabeth I’s alarm at
recognizing herself in Richard II: she is supposed to have said, “I
am Richard II, know ye not that?”5 Shakespeare too is aware of
the political implications of his art. By calling his play a “Dream”
and presenting it as fantasy, he makes it easy for his audience to
escape the strictures of society. This in turn allows them eventually,
like the young lovers in the play, to be delivered from the shackles
of self-ignorance that are tightened by society’s prohibitions—as
illustrated by the Myth of the Cave in Plato’s Republic.
5. See Jason Scott-Warren, Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: The Authenticity of Lambarde’s “Conversation,” Review of English Studies 64:
(2012), 208-230.
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Bottom the weaver stands out from all the other players. His
profession suggests that Shakespeare intends him to be a parody
of Plato’s statesman, who weaves together all the different constituencies of a city. He resembles the kind of poet most feared
by the guardians of the Republic in his zany desire to play every
role and steal every scene.6 His wild malapropisms suggest that
he cares little for the nature of things, and that nothing is stable
in his whirligig view of reality. For Bottom, at bottom, all things
are one. This would be worrying enough to the forces of order,
but what is worse is his earnest desire to “play” the tyrant (I.ii.2122, 33). Fortunately, no one has to take Bottom seriously. Although his boundless energy, incorrigible ingenuity, and good
humor might have stood him in good stead at a higher station in
life, Bottom’s Christian name, Nick, indicates his actual condition: he is “nicked,” or safely penned within the confines of social
reality.
The play now turns to the fairies in the depths of the forest.
We meet Puck (an emancipated version of Prospero’s indentured
spirit Ariel in The Tempest), who is the chief factotum of Oberon,
King of Fairies. If Bottom is the hidden solid base of our play,
Puck is its grand unifying principle; his task is “to jest to Oberon
and make him smile” (II.i.44). This sprite seems to delight in jolting all things out of their accustomed positions and thereby causing their true natures to be revealed. Nature, after all, involves
continual growth and self-revelation: as Heidegger pointed out,
in Greek the term for nature, phusis, essentially means “growth.”7
The nature of a city too must involve growth, repeated overturning of established categories, and continual revelation of its character. The static order of a city is only its body; a city only
becomes a polis by striving toward the beautiful and the just,8
and it often needs the aid of guiding daimon to do so. In fifthcentury Athens, Socrates played this role through his persistent
6. Plato, Republic, 398a.
7. Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. William McNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 189.
8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b.
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practice of public dialectic. In the Athens of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Puck plays this role through his persistently playful upending of public norms. The continual reconsideration of
settled categories shows that the telos of the city, its true end and
purpose, cannot be sustained by economic and social stability
and self-sufficiency. Such as structure results in a stifling hegemony like that of Egeus, in which the old use the law to punish
the sexual desires of the young in order to advance their own
vices, which are directed more at gaining and preserving power
than at fertile productivity.9
Puck reports a quarrel between Oberon, his master, and Titania, the queen of the fairies. It seems that they have fallen out
over a changeling boy on whom they both have claims. While
the queen loves him for the sake of her dear friend, his dead
mother, with whom she spent many a pleasant hour, Oberon
seems to want him for reasons that have more to do with jealousy
than genuine affection. It seems that the mimetic impulse to desire another’s possession simply because the other takes delight
in it extends far beyond the human realm. But we also see the
contrast between this kind of jealous desire, which can only express itself through contending over things inconsequential in
themselves, and true friendship. When we recall how the longstanding friendship between Hermia and Helena was swiftly
ended by the introduction of mimetic romantic desire, we wonder
how and from source wanton fancy, a sort of love in idleness,
gains the tragic desire to uproot itself from what is natural and
orderly. Mimetic desires must reflect, however deceptively, some
transcendent reality that the natural order can only understand in
terms of transgression and outrage. Otherwise, we cannot explain
how the imagination effortlessly overturns the natural order,
strikes out after goals that cannot be grasped by the likes of old
Egeus, and threatens to turn us all into lunatics, star-crossed
lovers, and bad poets. Small wonder that the outraged rulers of a
city choose to fight this force using every means in their power.
9. See Montaigne, “On Repenting” in Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1958), 610-620.
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Some explanation of the origin of these desires is provided
when Oberon and Titania make their entrance accompanied by
their entourages. While they bicker we learn that both Theseus
and Hippolyta owe much to the fairy queen and king: although
their beneficiaries are oblivious to this, Oberon and Titania have
provided these lucky mortals whom they love with supernatural
assistance in their heroic exploits. It is striking that the benevolence of the fairy rulers is bestowed upon Theseus and Hippolyta
on the basis of erotic attraction. Even for fairies, love seems to
defy all the conventions of marital fidelity. Although they know
how to use love’s power far more efficiently than humans, the
fairies are clearly not immune to the madness of love. This is why
their quarrel over the changeling boy has produced terrible consequences in the physical world. Nature’s order has been terribly
disrupted: the harvests have been ruined; the seasons do not
change on time; indeed, all the limits of nature have been transgressed. Titania admits that she and Oberon are the progenitors
of this mad chaos. Their erotic desires are not fulfilled by sexual
union, but rather by infusing those they love with their power.
The rhythm and order of the cosmos, and of all the creatures in
it, seem to be kept through their meeting and dancing, which their
quarrel has prevented.
After Hippolyta’s angry departure, Oberon schemes to torment her for this “injury” to his pride. Now Puck is told to employ magic against Titania; he must use the juice of a flower, once
touched by one of Cupid’s arrows, to make her fall madly in love
with the next living creature she sees (II.i.172). Insofar as A Midsummer Night’s Dream analogizes the politics of its time, neither
Cupid’s arrow nor Puck’s flower-juice hit the mark. The intended
victim, the Queen of England, seems to have been immune to
love’s otherwise irresistible power. Elizabeth was about sixty
years old when the play was first produced, and by that time, it
appears, she understood the reality of love, and was not to be
ruled by its false signifiers.
While Shakespeare may tread, however lightly, on dangerous
political ground, he does not seem to be in open conflict with the
unstated doctrines of love that we have managed to derive from
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the play. We distinguished earlier between the real madness of
love and merely falling victim to the concept of love. Now let us
remember Plato’s Phaedrus, from which the language of lunatic,
lover, and poet is derived, and recall Socrates’ famous palinode
in defense of truly divine love.10 Like Elizabeth, Socrates—
whose only claimed area of expertize was in matters of love—
was immune to the blandishments of false love: he was more than
able to resist the sexual attraction of the all-but-irresistible Alcibiades.11 These examples of being able to separate true love
from false love show that love is not in itself madness. Nevertheless, it is also the basis of the various forms of lunacy come
over us because of our craving for love, a craving that is often
just as blind as it is selfish. We must distinguish between beholding the genuine object of love, falling into the genuine madness
of love, and embracing the base imitation of this genuine madness—recall Plato’s condemnatory suspicions in the Republic of
imitations twice and thrice removed from the truth.12 Moreover,
in the Phaedrus Plato describes even the god of Olympus as
being only a bit better than humans at pursuing true hyper-Uranian beauty.13 Although Oberon and Titania are not comparable to
the Olympian gods, they are still located on much higher rungs
on the ladder of love than humans. If Plato is to be believed, the
fairies can confer the benefits of love on those below them, while
they themselves also remain subject to the power of love.
Returning now to the play’s action: Oberon, hiding in the forest, observes Demetrius and Helena. Plato’s image of the magnetic chain of attraction from the Ion is the key to their behavior.14
Demetrius searches wildly for Hermia, despite being well aware
of the repugnance she feels for him; Helena meanwhile com10. Plato, Phaedrus, 244a ff.
11. Plato, Symposium, 219 b-d.
12. Plato, Republic, 602b-c.
13. Plato, Phaedrus, 247a-c.
14. Plato, Ion, 533d-536d.
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plains quite explicitly about the magnetic attraction that her
sometime lover still exerts on her. She is well aware of, but unaffected by, his repeated claims to be sickened by the sight of her.
Demetrius is disgusted Helena’s masochistic appeal, “The more
you beat me, I will fawn on you: / Use me but as your spaniel,
spurn me, strike me, / neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, /
unworthy as I am, to follow you” (II.i.204-5). But this reaction,
she says, only increases her desire for him.
Oberon watches them leave, the maid in hot pursuit of the
man, and he feels sympathy for hapless Helena. He instructs
Puck, who has just returned with the magic juice, to apply some
of it to the eyes of the man in Athenian garb so that he will return
the affections the young woman he has just spurned. While Puck
is occupied in this task, Oberon will treat sleeping Titania’s eyes
in the same way. While the fairy king’s intentions toward his own
queen are clearly mischievous, he sincerely wishes to help poor
spurned Helena win back her beloved. Unfortunately, or perhaps
serendipitously, Puck sprinkles the flower-juice on Lysander as
he sleeps some distance away from Hermia following a minor
disagreement over whether or not it would be correct for them to
lie in repose beside each other. Then, as luck would have it, Helena comes by, still chasing Demetrius. She awakens Lysander
only to see him fall madly in love with her. Helena, in a self-pitying mood after her encounter with Demetrius, believes that
Lysander is playing a cruel trick on her. She cannot understand
how else he would now speak so dismissively of his beloved Hermia, while lavishing the most fulsome praise on herself. Helena
then flees, hotly pursued by the newly ardent Lysander.
Meanwhile Hermia, waking up from a nightmare to find herself alone in the dark forest, panics. Certain that Lysander would
never have abandoned her, she is convinced that something quite
terrible has happened to him. By this time, however, her categorical certainty about Lysander has been undermined, for the audience at least, both by the implicit sexual overture he made to her
and by the subliminal message in her dream of a serpent stealing
away with her heart. Hermia takes this a warning that Helena will
betray her, as indeed she has (though not in relation to Lysander).
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Here we begin to note that the course of their love will be compromised equally by their own characters and by the impediments
others will throw in their paths. Whatever their fate will be at the
play’s end, their mimetically idealized expectations of each other
will have been modified by these magically induced events. The
four lovers, trapped between the stifling laws of the city and the
mad passions released in the forest, are consumed in pairs, just
as Theseus’s Minotaur devours the pairs of young people in
Crete. As the second act ends, attention is drawn to Titania, who
slumbers in her bower. She too will soon awaken to find herself
drawn to a most unexpected erotic object.
When the third act begins we are again reminded by the mechanicals’ elaborate precautions to avoid giving offense, that
Shakespeare too is conveying weighty and sensitive matters in
an allegorical fashion. Bottom begins the rehearsal by declaring
that some things in their comedy “will never please” (III.i.9). He
believes that gentle ladies in the audience will never bear the
sight of Pyramus killing himself. But, rather than leaving the
killing offstage as the Greeks would, Bottom proposes writing a
prologue that would dispel all fear by revealing not only that
Pyramus is not really killed, but also that Pyramus is actually
Bottom the Weaver. Further, since the sight of a lion would occasion even greater fear, the lion should name himself and wear
a mask exposing half the actor’s face. As a final absurd precaution, this fearful lion should expressly entreat the audience not
to show fear or even tremble as he comes before them; for that,
he should tell the onlookers, would be the pity of his life.
The players then address several ridiculous technical problems, with Bottom once again taking the lead. They consider how
to represent the moonlit night when Pyramus and Thisbe meet,
and decide it would be best for one to enter with a bush of thorns
and a lantern, saying “that he comes to disfigure or to present the
person of Moonshine” (III.i.51-53). Next, since the lovers speak
through a wall, Bottom proposes that another dress in materials
“that signify wall” and use his fingers to make a hairy, chalky
cranny through which Pyramus and Thisbe speak words of love
to each other (III.i.57-60).
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While it is very clear that Shakespeare intends Bottom’s audience to find these primitive representations hilarious, and in
the last instance even obscene, he fully expects, on the contrary,
that most of those in his own audience will be oblivious to his
taking similar—if markedly less absurd—precautions to obviate
offense and fear. He takes these measures in order to prevent his
audience from suspecting that they are being deceived. Just as
Helena should not have been convinced that Lysander and
Demetrius were mocking her intentionally, although they themselves in their separate delusions were quite sincere, Shakespeare
has to do all he can to prevent his audience from indulging in the
paranoid suspicion the playwright, or even the whole world, is
deliberately engaged in a conspiracy against them—as tempting
as such a conclusion may seem to their solipsistic egos. Shakespeare takes great pains to reveal the extent to which coincidences, accidents, and errors pervade the human world. Gods and
fairies seldom act with perfect foresight; more often, they are
scrambling to repair the damage done by blind chance, mortal
mistakes, and even their own well-intended plans.
The climax of A Midsummer Night’s Dream arrives when
Puck decides to place an ass’s head on Bottom. As a result of this
strange transformation the other players run away in terror and
the unsuspecting weaver is left alone with Titania. This fulfills
Oberon’s desire that his queen should fall madly in love with a
“vile thing” (II.ii.40) when she awakens to see Bottom with her
anointed eyes. Oberon’s aim is to embarrass Titania in order to
make her more willing to surrender to him her former favorite,
the little changeling boy. Yet, once again, while carrying out the
king’s instructions to the letter, Puck has somehow added an element of inspired randomness that produces unexpected results.
The “translated” Bottom somehow does not believe himself to
be changed in the least respect. His essential nature unchanged
by Puck’s trick, Bottom retains his characteristic aplomb and
does not give any credence to the fearful observations of Snout
and Quince that he is “changed” and “translated” (III.i.102-105).
He denies these allegations and refuses to be made an ass of,
telling Snout that he sees an ass’s head of his own—that is, Bot-
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tom sees that all other men are asses. His use of the word “ass”
in addressing both Snout and Quince also suggests that he does
not see himself in this light. Bottom believes that they are knavishly trying to frighten him. He refuses to be frightened. Is he
more or less the ass for this?
When Bottom begins to sing in order to show his fellow players that he is not afraid, he awakens Titania. Professing to be as
enchanted by Bottom’s singing as by his shape, the queen goes
on to declare that she has fallen in love with him at first sight.
He responds by telling her that, while she has little reason to feel
this way about him, he sees that “reason and love keep little company nowadays” (III.i.126-29). Bottom finds it a pity that some
honest folk cannot reconcile them, self-consciously owning that
he can “gleek” (III.i.129), or jest knowingly, on occasion; he is
perhaps laying claim to being that rare philosophical poet, one
capable of addressing the desires rationally. The enamored Titania then tells the asinine sage that he is as wise as he is beautiful—a claim that cannot be faulted. Bottom modestly denies both
claims, adding that he would be quite satisfied with sufficient wit
to find his way out of the forest. Just like the lovers, Bottom understands that he is trapped in a maze, but he is unable to see that
he now resembles the original bull-headed denizen of the Cretan
labyrinth.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a retelling, and perhaps a rectification, of the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Bottom is as strange a hybrid beast as the man with the head
of a bull that Theseus slew in Minos’s labyrinth. Because he is a
weaver, however, he is tied to the ball of string that Ariadne gave
to Theseus in order to help him escape from the maze. His double
nature is sewn together when Titania falls in love with him, and
she too expresses a double nature: she is both Ariadne, who provides Bottom with the way out of his predicament, and Pasiphaë,
the wife of Minos who falls in love with the bull of Poseidon.
How will Shakespeare’s Duke Theseus overcome the monster
Bottom in a manner that is consistent with comedy? Will he retain the moral ambiguity of the original Theseus, who cleverly
outwitted the Minotaur to save his Athenian comrades but also
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betrayed his promise to marry Ariadne, leaving her behind on
an isolated island where she finally is rescued by the god Dionysus? Will Duke Theseus act in a similar way toward Bottom?
And will Dionysus, god of the theater, rescue him?
While the love-stuck Titania is plying the amazed Bottom
with gifts, even promising to purge Bottom of his “mortal grossness” and place at his disposal attendant fairies who will fetch
him “jewels from the deep” (III.i.139-142), the four young lovers
are rushing headlong into their own labyrinth—the labyrinth of
undifferentiated confusion into which they have been led by their
impulsive passions.
At the beginning Helena and Hermia were best friends
(III.ii.199-220). This relationship mirrors the pure friendship enjoyed by Titania and the changeling boy’s mother. Duke Theseus’s appropriation of the changeling reminds us that the original
Theseus violently snatched Hippolyta from her Amazon kingdom. This is why the Amazon invasion of Athens, which, as mentioned earlier, does not occur in A Midsummer Nights Dream,
becomes a significant non-event. Instead of an angry female reaction to male violence, the play substitutes the quarrel between
Hermia and Helena that erupts towards the end of Act III, scene
ii. Their forthcoming marriages alienate them from each other.
Their female sisterhood is fractured by the approaching demands
of sexuality and childrearing. The breast takes precedence over
the heart. Moreover, friendship, the candid sharing of souls, is
about to be replaced by the demands of economic necessity and
patriarchal power. (Patriarchal tyranny over womens’ lives is represented, as suggested earlier, in the figure of Egeus. Recall
Lysander’s angry jab at Demtrius: “You have her father love,
Demetrius; / Let me have Hermia’s: do you marry him” [I.i.9394]. Lysander is unacceptable to Egeus precisely because he has
wooed Hermia directly, rather than submitting to Egeus’s patriarchal rule over his daughter’s life.)
While it is certain that Demetrius becomes interested in Hermia after successfully wooing Helena, it is not clear whether this
occurred before or after Lysander gained Hermia’s love. In either
case, the bond between the two women had been broken. As
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Hermia and Helena progress from childhood friendship to adolescent romance to parentally approved marriage, they move
away from genuine friendship toward the social roles that stifle
self-realization.
Perhaps this move toward conventional roles could also explain Demetrius’s attraction to Hermia. If his conventional relationship with the beautiful but rather passive Helena became
dissatisfying, he would naturally seek the wonderful qualities that
his fiancée praised so highly in her friend. (To paraphrase the
song from Two Gentlemen of Verona, “Who is Hermia? what is
she, / that Helen so commends her?”)
By contrast, Lysander’s romance with Hermia, by virtue of
being disapproved by her father, may not yet have been soured
by familiarity or proximity. Short, dark, and thus less attractive
by normal standards of beauty, Hermia certainly seems to possess
more spirit than the somewhat masochistic Helena. Yet she will
be shocked to discover that Lysander’s attraction to her, despite
his apologies when she refuses to let him sleep beside her, is ultimately sexual in nature. He is not seeking a friend in marriage,
but a sexual partner. This natural urge toward marriage turns out
to be even less fulfilling than the conventional one to Hermia,
and perhaps to anyone who has shared true friendship with another soul.
It is all too easy to see how Lysander, after being spurned by
Hermia, finds the more physically endowed Helena to be more
attractive. On the other hand, Demetrius, whose sole reason for
being drawn to Hermia has been mimetic, loses interest in her
the moment he finds that Lysander is now drawn to Helena. This
fact makes her rise in stature in his eyes. Demetrius makes the
mistake Socrates points out in the Euthyphro: to him, Helena is
not loved because she is inherently desirable; she is loved because another person loves her.15 Whatever inherently desirable
qualities Hermia may possess, they become invisible to
Demetrius when he sees that Helena is loved by Lysander.
15. Plato, Euthyphro, 10a-11b.
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Though Hermia may be a far better object of mimetic desire,
once Oberon anoints Demetrius with the magic juice, he only has
eyes for Helena. When Puck brings Helena to meet the now enchanted Demetrius, he is delighted to find that she has Lysander
in tow. As Demetrius sleeps, Helena bitterly denounces Lysander
for his treachery. By using the very oaths he swore before Hermia
to now pledge his love to her, he is only proving that he is just as
false now as he was then. Things only get worse when Demetrius
wakes up. When he too professes his undying love, Helena smells
a rat. She believes mistakenly that both Lysander and Demetrius
are playing a cruel joke on her (note how this runs parallel to Bottom’s belief that the other players were trying to trick him!). She
is rightly convinced, however, that the feelings they profess are
not genuine. Their praise is for an idea rather than a real person;
they are not talking about her at all. Being the masochist she is,
Helena would rather be hated honestly than endure this kind of
rhetoric. She is also convinced that all this is part of their rivalry
for Hermia’s hand. While both Lysander and Demetrius deny this
charge, Hermia reappears, and Helena tells the two men that they
now have a chance to prove their claim before Hermia in person.
(Quite unlike Bottom, Helena has real difficulty accepting any
good fortune.)
With Hermia’s return matters reach a climax. First Lysander
brutally tells her that Helena’s beauty took him from her side,
and then Helena herself accuses a stunned Hermia of being a part
of a cruel conspiracy. Sadly recalling the blissful childhood years
they spent together as the closest of friends, growing together
“with two seeming bodies but one heart” (III.ii.215)—a state not
unlike that of Aristophanes’s circle-men of Plato’s Symposium—
Hermia accuses of Helena of betraying not just herself, but all
women. The distinction between true friendship and mimetic love
is now perfectly clear: in fact, A Midsummer Night’s Dream does
not depict one instance of true reciprocated love. Hermia’s
amazement at Lysander’s betrayal is redoubled when she finds
that Demetrius, whom she has just roundly abused for pursuing
her, has now returned his affections to her antipodes—the despicable Helena. Her world has been inverted.
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Even after Hermia states her astonishment at these accusations—“I am amazèd at your passionate words” (III.ii.221—another reference to a maze—Helena reiterates her charge of
conspiracy, drops a dark hint about death, and tries to leave.
When Lysander attempts to prevent her departure, calling her
“my love, my life, my soul,” (III.ii.247), Demetrius claims to love
her more and challenges him to a duel. Hermia then seeks to prevent Lysander from pursuing Helena, only to hear Lysander call
her an “Ethiope” and a “tawny Tartar” for her darker complexion,
and a “serpent” whom he will shake off as she clings to him
(III.ii.257-264). Worse, when Demetrius charges him with not
being really in love with Helena, Lysander haughtily responds
that he will not kill such a worthless thing as Hermia just to prove
his feelings towards Helena.
Nothing in her past life has prepared Hermia for this. Asking
him what can harm her more than hate, she asks “Am I not Hermia, are you not Lysander?” Yet her words “I am as fair as I was
erstwhile” (II.ii.274-275) do not recognize that beauty resides in
the eye and not in the object itself. This is why she, formerly
thought fair, is now but a dark tawny “Ethiope.” When Hermia
goes on to accuse Helena of having literally seduced Lysander,
maybe recalling too late his wish to sleep with her, Helena then
calls her a “puppet” (III.ii.289). Although Helena means “deceptive,” outraged Hermia takes this as a reference to her height.
Dubbing poor Helena a “painted maypole,” (II.ii.297) Hermia
claims she is yet tall enough to scratch her eyes out. Helena then
says that she will take her folly back to Athens. Her only fault,
in her eyes, was to betray the lovers’ plan to Demetrius whom
she still loves despite his offenses. When she declares her fear of
Hermia (“She was a vixen when she went to school / And though
she be but little, she is fierce [III.ii.325-326]) both young men
prepare to come to blows over who will defend her.
Now Oberon and Puck decide to step in. Puck denies that he
is to blame for the pandemonium but admits to being gladdened
by the “jangling” (III.ii.354). Oberon instructs him to separate
the two angry young men from each other by imitating their
voices in turn until they fall asleep, exhausted by chasing after
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illusions. Puck must then crush an antidote to the “love in idleness” in Lysander’s eyes, restoring his normal way of seeing
things. Oberon claims that this will take away “all error”
(III.ii.369) from his sight, and he declares that when the lovers
awaken, they will believe that everything they have seen and
done was nothing but a dream. He is sure that once back in
Athens they will be reunited “with league whose date till death
shall never end” (III.ii.374). While Puck attends to that, Oberon
will wheedle the changeling away from Titania before undoing
the spell on her and restoring peace to all things.
At this point, Puck urges Oberon to hurry before the daybreak,
as ghosts flee from the first rays of the sun. But Oberon corrects
him, saying that “we are spirits of another sort” (III.ii.389), who
need not fear the glorious day. It is as though Puck represents
something older and a shade darker; more mischievous than Ariel,
he is also a pagan force of chaos and disruption. There is a bit of
Mephistopheles in Puck; he inadvertently serves the ends of goodness, despite seeking to fool, trip and disrupt.16 While this residual
pagan element seems to interfere with and interrupt both the perfection of God’s creation and the order of the city, there is a vital
sense in which Puckishness saves what is joyful and spontaneous,
and thus truly human, from the rules, rites, and routines of
preachers, prudes, and prigs. Although he acted at Oberon’s bidding, Puck can take pride in his masterpiece of confusion—the
translated Bottom is Puck’s finest creation.
While the lovers sleep in the woods, Act IV finds Titania,
in her own words, “doting” on Bottom while her four attendant
fairies cater to his every whim. After he has been fed, scratched
and serenaded, Titania sends her fairies away and Bottom falls
asleep in her arms. Shakespeare—at least as tactful in his consideration of his audience’s sensibilities as is Bottom of his audience—presents no overt signs of a sexual encounter between
Bottom and Titania. But the connection to the myth of the
16. “Part of the power / That constantly wants evil and constantly does
good.” Goethe, Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy, trans. Margaret
Kirby (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2015), 1335-36.
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Minotaur dispels the possibility that their union is purely platonic. According to the original story, Pasiphaë’s mad desire for
the bull of Poseidon prompted her to have Daedalus build her
a portable wooden cow, within which she could position herself
in order to copulate with the bull.
Oberon and Puck arrive to find Bottom cradled in Titania’s
arms, and Oberon feels pity for her. After securing custody of the
changeling boy, he no longer feels the need to continue the farce.
He drops the juice on Titania’s eyes to remove the magic, then he
orders Puck to remove the ass’s head so Bottom may return to
Athens and “think no more of this night’s accidents / But as the
fierce vexation of a dream” (IV.i.66). Titania wakes and tells
Oberon of a most strange vision: “Methought I was enamored of
an ass,” though once awake she exclaims, “mine eyes do loath his
visage now!” (IV.i.73,76). While Bottom sleeps on, his head removed, the king and queen dance and are reconciled. They will
now bless the union of Theseus and Hippolyta. It is a fair inference
that, had this interlude in the woods with Bottom not taken place,
the royal pair would not have been reconciled, the marriage would
not have been graced by their presence, and the bloody Amazon
invasion, symbol of sexual strife, would have come to pass.
Meanwhile, Theseus and Hippolyta, while hunting in the forest, find all four lovers asleep. When Egeus finds out that
Lysander and Hermia were fleeing Athens in defiance of his will,
he asks Theseus to punish them, looking to Demetrius for support. Yet Demetrius confesses that his desire for Hermia has
“melted as the snow” (IV.i.163). Recalling this passion as he
would a sickness, he barely remembers or feels it now. Helena is
again the sole object of his love. This frees Theseus to decree that
the two couples shall be married along with him that very day.
This should be welcome news, yet the lovers are still in shock.
When the four lovers are alone, they canvass one another’s
memories and find, as Hermia puts it, that “everything seems
double” (IV.i.187). In other words, no identity is as stable as it
was a night ago when she was Hermia and he Lysander. Likewise, Helena reflects that she has “found Demetrius like a jewel,
mine own and not mine own” (IV.i.188). We all have deeper iden-
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tities that cannot be owned even by ourselves, let alone by others.
While Lysander, who was twice enchanted, has very little to say,
it seems to Demetrius that they are still asleep and yet dreaming.
As he observed earlier, things once indubitably certain now seem
distant and mutable “Like far-off mountains turnèd into clouds”
(IV.i.185). All that they are certain of is Theseus’s order that they
follow him to the temple. To Demetrius, only this proves that
they are awake. In essence, it is by the temple, the cave, and the
city—for all three are equivalent—that the uncertainties of the
nightmare in the forest are safely secured. This is why they
meekly return to the cave, despite knowing full well that they
shadows they behold there have unsuspected depths. The four of
them will no doubt fashion an agreeable account of what happened to them in due time.
And then there’s Bottom. He was never truly lost in the bottomless ambiguity of the enchanted wood because he’s his own
bottom. The “bottom” is the piece of wood around which a
skein of thread is wound, so that Bottom is connected, as we
said, to Ariadne’s thread. Bottom is able to exit from his enchanted confusion because of his ability to thread his way
through many different roles. Though comically ignorant, he is
nonetheless self-possessed, ingenious, and imaginative, and
these qualities lead him through his labyrinthine trials successfully, even as he playfully mangles all the roles he steps into.
After meeting Titania—an experience more supernatural than
anything the lovers undergo—Bottom is indeed purged of his
“mortal grossness,” as Titania promised. And yet he has enough
“bottom” to take up all the jewels that Titania’s fairies bring
him from the depths of the ocean.
Bottom’s appearance is deceptive, even to the spirits. Puck
ridiculed Bottom’s wit. Oberon confidently expected that the
ass-headed monster would forget everything about his wild
night in the woods. But they both seriously underestimated the
worth of humble weaver. A man who is stable and “bottomed,”
or self-contained, who can assume the humiliating mask of ass’s
head to hide his gravity, is not to be scorned if he is a master of
the royal art of weaving—that is, of statesmanship. Only such
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a person can guide us safely through the dark woods of imagination and the subterranean cave of opinion.
It is unclear whether Theseus, when he discovers the four
young lovers, ignores Bottom or whether Bottom is invisible to
him. In any case, Bottom’s experiences from that night in the
woods far surpass the lovers’ experiences. The lovers have only
encountered Hegel’s “bad infinite”—the anarchic possibilities
that haunt the soul on a dark night—but Bottom has seen things
sublime and trans-rational. Since he was never enchanted—it was
Titania who was magically induced to fall in love with him—he
does not need to be disenchanted; Oberon simply orders Puck to
“take off this head” (IV.i.77). Despite being discovered in the
queen’s arms, Bottom escapes punishment by being taken for an
ass. What would Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII have made of this
lèse majesté?
When Bottom awakens from his fairy-induced slumber, he
at first believes that no time has elapsed at all and that he is still
awaiting his cue in the play. Then he realizes that something has
happened to him: “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a
dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but
an ass if he go about to expound this dream” (IV.i.199-202). Bottom sees that he lacks the categories to describe his experience.
Instead, dipping into the stores of his memory, he produces a garbled version of 1 Corinthians 2:9 to describe the inability to describe his dream: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man
/ hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his / tongue to
conceive, nor his heart to report what /my dream was” (IV.i.21114). Shakespeare prudently stops Bottom from continuing on to
the next verse of the scripture, which details the blessings God
has prepared for us—that would be a blasphemous comparison
between Titania’s bounty and God’s. Instead, Bottom will “get
Peter Quince to write a / ballet [ballad] of this dream: it shall be
called Bottom’s / Dream, because it hath no bottom.” (IV.i.21416). And he will sing it after Thisbe dies, presumably because his
vision provides intimations of a glorious afterlife. Perhaps his
mystical vision will be the metaphysical basis of any future
comedies Bottom himself may create.
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Act V begins with Theseus and Titania discussing the four
young lovers’ account of their recollections from the preceding
night. The act is strikingly undramatic: nothing significant happens. So deliberately flat an ending seems to demand that we shift
from action to interpretation. Our focus goes from Helen to Hermes, from the enchantments of love to questions of hermeneutics.
It is amusing to see two well-known figures from mythology arguing over how much credence should be given to “antique stories” and “fairy toys” (V.i.3)—especially when Theseus uses
images from Socrates’s palinode in Plato’s Phaedrus, where the
philosopher defends divine madness and poetic inspiration. As if
to drive this point home, Theseus speaks of how “The poet’s eye
in full frenzy rolling, / doth glance from heaven to earth, from
earth to heaven” (V.i.12-13). This image derives from Plato’s
Symposium, in which Socrates recounts what Diotima told him
about Eros, the child of Need and Plenty.17 In A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, the child of need and plenty would correspond to
any offspring of the union between Bottom and Titania, who
would represent a weaving together of the human and divine
realms.
Since the matter of Theseus’s argument only serves to unweave its content, Shakespeare urges us to agree with Hippolyta
when she points out that the harmony of the four tales “More
witnesseth than fancy’s images / And grows to something of
great constancy [consistency]” (V.i.25-26): the stories are not
merely the fanciful products of over-heated imaginations. While
Theseus denounces the tendency of humans to exaggerate—
“How easy is a bush supposed a bear!” (V.i.22), this only makes
it harder for us to accept his own heroic, but no doubt exaggerated, deeds. It seems as if he kills monsters by denying that they
exist. This daylight dilution of night’s truths, anticipating the
Enlightenment’s tendency to disparage everything that cannot
be measured, strengthens the very irrationality it tries to contain.
Theseus’s hyper-rationality may well have caused the threat of
the Amazon invasion, which happily has been averted. Largely
17. Plato, Symposium, 202e-203a.
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thanks to Bottom’s intervention, nothing happens. As W. H.
Auden put it, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”18 The curse of
reification has been lifted from nature.
When Theseus is asked to choose among several alternative
forms of entertainment to fill the three hours before supper and
bed, it is clear that his strong preference is for comedy—and the
more banal the better—over epic, tragedy or lyric. This is quite
consistent with the tendency to reduce a bear to a bush, or turn
the Minotaur into an amazed ass. The first three choices offered
by the master of revels are (1) the battle with the Centaurs, (2)
the murder of Orpheus by the Bacchae, and (3) a lament over
the decline of learning by the nine muses. Theseus rejects the
first two: he has told Hippolyta about the one and already seen
the other. When the third choice is thought too satirical for the
day, all that remains is our “tedious brief scene” Pyramus and
Thisbe, of “very tragical mirth” (V.i.56-57). So the Duke
chooses it, albeit over the strong objections of Philostrate. The
strange combination of comedy and tragedy that is contained in
the promise of “tragical mirth” probably has more to do with
Theseus’s aristocratic predilection of finding amusement in unintended buffoonery than with Socrates’s assertion in the Symposium that the art of making tragedies is also the art of making
comedies.19
Even after being informed that the play both “tedious and
brief” (V.i.58), and only comic in that it is likely to be poorly
performed, Theseus is determined to favor the rude mechanicals
with his patronage. Hippolyta expressed a reluctance to see the
simple-minded players embarrassed undertaking a task that is
beyond their capacities, but Theseus replies that the audience
ought not to incline toward harsh criticism: “Our sport shall be
to take what they mistake: / And what poor duty cannot do, noble
respect / Takes it in might, not merit” (V.i.90, 92). But the intent
to judge the players by their “might”—by their widow’s mite,
18. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B Yeats” in Selected Poems, ed.
Edward Mendelson, (New York: Vintage, 1989), 80.
19. Plato, Symposium, 223d.
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one might say—fails, even though Theseus claims that he has
the power to see beyond appearances:
Where I have come, great clerks have purposèd
To greet me with premeditated welcomes,
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practiced accent in their fears,
And in conclusion dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I picked a welcome,
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity. (V.i.87-99)
But this self-estimate is not accurate: the play is so bad that it
cannot help but elicit derisive comments even from Theseus. He
cannot get beyond reductive charity. Though he wishes to make
the meaningless speech of the rough artisans orderly, he lacks the
imagination to see that Bottom at least is pointing towards something that far exceeds the capacities of his station in the shadow
world of the cave. To Theseus, art is a diversion from reality,
filled with impractical ideals and impossible dreams, that must
be tolerated by a kind of benign neglect—which is precisely the
attitude that Theseus bestows on the mechanical.
Since the Duke does not allow Bottom speak his epilogue,
Shakespeare’s audiences must imagine it for themselves. The
contours of this epilogue are clear enough: first, it must conclude
the mechanicals’ rendition of Pyramus and Thisbe; second, it
must explain A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and third, it must also
explain Bottom’s mystical vision. This is why Bottom wants to
place it after Thisbe’s death: it has to reveal what lies beyond
death, what sustains life, and what justifies love. Bottom’s epilogue is the “bottom line” to be extracted form his near-death experience with Titania.
There are clear parallels between Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania. This is why the four roles are almost always
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played by the same pair of actors. The male power of reason imperiously believes that it can censor, control, and shape the
thoughts of the disordered female soul. But through his mystical
vision, Bottom has been initiated into a suprarational wisdom by
Titania. Can this wisdom be stolen from him as easily as Oberon
tricked Titania or Theseus raped Hippolyta? A Midsummer
Night’s Dream trusts the power of drama to resurrect visions long
forgotten by seers and heroes. “The best are but shadows and the
worst are no worse if imagination amend them” (V.i.208-209). It
must be the audience’s imagination, not the actor’s, that redeems
the poet in the cave. Every time A Midsummer Night’s Dream is
performed, it becomes the vehicle, being ridden by an ass,
through which salvation may enter the world.
Theseus cannot see that art bestows deeper meaning on
human life than order. The wall dividing Pyramus and Thisbe
represents the strife between reason and desire, between philosophy and poetry, city and theatre, law and will, civilized religion
and pagan nature. The role of Lion, who threatens to destroy
Pyramus and Thisbe, was one of those coveted by Bottom; it too
stands for the Minotaur, the monster that devours young lovers
in the dark labyrinth of desire that is nature. Yet it is the translated
Bottom who finds that Titania, the feminine principle at the heart
of nature, is far from monstrous. It takes imagination and charity,
qualities Bottom possesses in abundance, to reconcile principles
that seem to be separate and opposed. But this is precisely why
Theseus, acting in the name of the male principle that dominates
the city, must overcome overcome the horned beast by denial,
standing on his claim to have slain the Minotaur. The truth revealed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to be this: Men like
Lysander and Demetrius become horned monsters when they are
trapped in the labyrinthine coils of desires they cannot own or
even recognize. Their paramount ambition is to possess the
women they love and maintain their amour propre; that is to say,
they only want to know other souls as objects, without genuinely
trying to behold them as independent selves. But to burn with
unloving passion avails us nothing. To quote St. Paul, though in
a slightly different sense than he intended it, “Though I give my
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body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”20
Despite his ignorance, Bottom, having been opened up to the
grace of Nature by Titania, sees much further than the lovers.
By comparison, they wear the heads of asses. True beholding
of another self creates a loving obligation to protect and nurture
the inner life of the other’s soul. One sees into that soul, as it
were, through the eyes of a god. One the one hand, a love like
this is infinitely preferable to the sort of “love” that motivates
Egeus’s feudal claims over his daughter Hermia, who is for him
“but as a form in wax, / By him imprinted and within his power
/ to leave the figure or disfigure it” (I.i.49-51). On the other hand,
because of the godlike glance into the other’s soul, a Christian
audience may well be inclined to regard it as blasphemous.
Other elements of Bottom’s epilogue would have to clarify
the various ways in which love can go wrong. One way is that
lustful or selfish love, in seeking spiritual support for its desires,
falls into despair when the poetry it gets hold of is bad. Another
way is that abstract reason, in seeking to domesticate the untamed
aspects of eros, falls into nihilism. To avoid these and similar errors, the passions must be educated by poetry—not manipulated,
as Oberon does, or rejected, as Theseus does. It is true that wellcrafted laws can mitigate or even remove the possessiveness inherent in some kinds of selfish love (such as the property rights
Egeus claims over Hermia). Indeed, such laws can help to ensure
equality and even aid in the perennial human struggle to climb
out of the cave. But neither law nor logos is easily taught to
lovers. It would be better, if fate allows, to attend to our own
soul’s need for love before being gripped by the passions. Our
own soul’s unique charity for itself is to become equal to itself,
to see itself clearly and love itself for what it truly is. This is the
preparation that makes us capable of dealing with our passions
competently. And the test of success in this preparation is to return
to the cave—as Bottom returned to Theseus’s court after his mystical vision, or as Socrates willingly entered the courtroom to deliver his apology—bringing love, disorder, erotically charged
20. 1 Corinthians 13:3.
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chaos, and “mirthful tragedy” to our fellow humans rather than
submitting to the reductive comedy of life constrained by generic
rationality. To draw an example from another magical play: It is
surely thus, after consolidating his mystical wisdom, that Prospero
returns to Milan as its Duke after the events of The Tempest.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is as anarchic a carnival, we
must imagine, as Bottom’s mystical vision must have been. Its
mad antics and category-crossing magic represent the way of
wonder, an approach to a wisdom that cannot be contained within
the rational confines of the logos. This wisdom, the wisdom of
the spirit, comforts and inspires us when we reach the limits of
the logos.
Spirit works in the spectral forests encircling the sublime, in
the element of amazed ignorance; wonder is its vehicle, enlivening us much more vitally than anything or anyone we may try to
possess. Its counterpart, logos, works with abstract categories,
trying to convince us that the divine is not deeply irrational, nor
jealous, nor unjust; but its reassuring arguments fail to convince,
because they fly in the face of human experience. Spirit, on the
contrary, addresses the passions, the absurdities, the savageries,
and the secrets of the individual soul—its struggles have more in
common with Dostoevsky’s novels than with Hegel’s System.
Each individual soul’s passage through the dark woods of imagination is different, and all are dialectical in the sense that the
traveler learns as much from error as from truth. Similarly, love’s
benefits come from giving, forgiving, losing, and laughing: these
acts strengthen and liberate the soul, whereas their contraries—
taking, accusing, winning, and excessive seriousness—weaken
and strangle it. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a feast for the
soul, and we leave it with richer eyes, emptier hands, and longer
ears. Only a beautiful ass can save us.
�
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Pastille, William
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Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
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Kalkavage, Peter
Koochesfahani, Arian
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Ranasinghe, Nalin
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The St. John’s Review
Cumulative Index, Spring 1969 – Spring 2016
Recent issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml and through the St. John’s College Bookstore.
Requests for other issues and essays may be made to The Greenfield Library through interlibrary loan.
Citations listed below are to volume, issue number, and date.
Achtenberg, Deborah
Human Being, Beast and God: The Place of Human Happiness According
to Aristotle and Some Twentieth-Century Philosophers
38.2 (1988)
Aldanov, Mark (trans. Joel Carmichael)
The Holdup at Tiflis on June 26, 1907: the “Exes” (from The Suicides)
34.2 (1983)
Alexander, Sidney
The Rainfall in the Pine Grove; The Donkey Rides the Man;
The Mannequins (poems)
Allanbrook, Douglas
The Spanish Civil War
Three Preludes for the Piano
Power and Grace
Truth-Telling and the Iliad
The Inefficacy of the Good
A Hero and a Statesman
The Program Old and New
Two Sonnets About Bird Watching
The Taking of Time
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Dance, Gesture, and The Marriage of Figaro
Don Giovanni, or the Triviality of Seduction
Mozart’s Cherubino
Mozart’s Happy Endings: A New Look at the “Convention” of the
“Lieto Fine”
‘Ear-Tickling Nonsense’: A New Context for Musical Expression in
Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ Quartets
Mozart’s Tunes and the Comedy of Closure
Alvis, John E.
Publius 1804
Jan Blits. Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus. (review)
Anastaplo, George
Addition and Subtraction Without End in Oresme’s Quaestiones super
Geometriam Euclidis
34.1 (1982-83)
24.1 (1972)
24.4 (1973)
28.4 (1977)
34.3 (1983)
35.2 (1984)
37.2-3 (1986)
38.1 (1988)
41.2 (1992)
45.3 (2000)
26.1 (1974)
31.1 (1979)
33.2 (1982)
36.3 (1985)
38.1 (1988)
41.2 (1992)
36.3 (1985)
49.3 (2007)
46.3 (2002)
1
�Anderson, Kemmer
The Iliad of Assateague Island (poem)
Two Villanelles (poem)
41.1 (1991-92)
56.1 (2014)
Appleby, David
Unbecoming Conduct in the Reign of Tiberius According to Tacitus
54.2 (2013)
Ardrey, Daniel
My Memoir of Our Revolution
34.2 (1983)
Arnhart, Larry
Abraham Lincoln’s Biblical Literalism
36.3 (1985)
Aron, Raymond
For Progress
Soviet Hegemonism: Year 1
31.2 (1980)
32.3 (1981)
Austin, Victor Lee
Ugolino’s Tale: Eating the Flesh
44.2 (1998)
Bacon, Helen H.
The Contemporary Reader and Robert Frost
32.3 (1981)
Badger, Jonathan
Friedrich Nietzsche: Prefaces to Unwritten Works;
On the Future of Educational Institutions (review)
49.3 (2007)
Barr, Stringfellow
Tribute to Robert M. Hutchins
29.3 (1977)
Bart, Robert S.
Hell: Paolo and Francesca
Commencement Address, Annapolis 1975
Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
The Miraculous Moonlight: Flannery O’Connor’s The Artificial Nigger
23.2 (1971)
(July 1975)
30.2 (1979)
37.1 (1986)
37.2-3 (1986)
Barzun, Jacques
William James, Moralist
34.1 (1982-83)
Baumann, Fred
R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (book review)
Affirmative Action and the Rights of Man
31.1 (1979)
32.1 (1980)
Beall, James H.
Solstice on the First Watch; The Horizon as the Last Ship Home (poems)
Foxfire; Wendy; Republic (poems)
34.3 (1983)
41.1 (1991-92)
Bell, Charles G.
The Number of My Loves (poem)
Two Sorts of Poetic Revision
22.2 (1970)
25.3 (1973)
2
�Prodigal Father (narrative)
Five Translations (poems)
31.2 (1980)
33.2 (1982)
Benedict, Steve
A Visit to Santayana
48.2 (2005)
Benardete, Seth
Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero (Part I Style)
Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero (Part II)
36.2 (1985)
36.3 (1985)
Ben-Gad, Shmuel
To See the World Profoundly: The Films of Robert Bresson
43.3 (1996)
Benjamin, Marlene
The Laws of Physics (poem)
THE EXTINCTION of SPECIES (poem)
53.2 (2012)
57.1 (2015)
Berg, Gretchen
Via Positiva; Via Negativa (poems)
The Old Gods (poem)
35.2 (1984)
35.3 (1984)
Berman, Ronald
Orwell’s Future and the Past
35.2 (1984)
Berns, Gisela
Schiller’s Drama – Fulfillment of History and Philosophy in Poetry
Idealism, Ancient and Modern: Sophocles’ Antigone and Schiller’s
Don Carlos
33.3 (1982)
39.3 (1989-90)
Berns, Laurence
The College and the Underprivileged
Reasonable Politics and Technology
Memorial to Leo Strauss
Memorial for Simon Kaplan
Moral Reform in Measure for Measure
21.1 (1969)
22.3 (1970)
25.4 (1974)
31.2 (1980)
46.2 (2002)
Blanton, Ted A.
High School Workshop
Memorial to Leo Strauss
25.4 (1974)
25.4 (1974)
Blistein, Burton
Some Notes on the Lost Wax Technique
25.1 (1973)
Blits, Jan H.
Paradoxes of Education in a Republic
36.3 (1985)
Blum, Etta
From The Hills as Waves (At Yad Vashem; Stranger; Sun Rises, Sun Sets;
Hippie at Western Wall; Than Jonah; “The Story of My Life” (poems)
32.3 (1981)
Bolotin, David
3
�On Sophocles’ Ajax
Irwin’s Plato’s Moral Theory (review)
Delphic Examinations, David Leibowitz’s The Ironic Defense of Socrates:
Plato’s Apology
32.1 (1980)
32.2 (1981)
53.1 (2011)
Bonfante, Giuliano
The Birth of a Literary Language
31.2 (1980)
Boon, William B.
Some Thoughts on Aristotle’s Analogy Between Nature and Art
44.1 (1997)
Born, Timothy
Poésie, by Paul Valéry (translation)
25.3 (1973)
Bosco, Joseph A.
Defeat in Vietnam, Norman Podhoretz’s Why We Were in Vietnam
(review)
Henry Kissinger on China: The Dangerous Illusion of “Realist” Foreign
Policy (review)
34.1 (1982-83)
54.1 (2012)
Braithwaite, William
Reading the Constitution as a Great Book
53.1 (2011)
Brann, Eva T.H.
A Reading of the Gettysburg Address
The Venetian Phaedrus
The Poet of the Odyssey
Commencement Address, Annapolis, 1974
A Letter
The Perfections of Jane Austen
Graduate Institute Commencement Address, 1975
Concerning the Declaration of Independence
On the Imagination
Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
For Bert Thoms
Inner and Outer Freedom
Kant’s Imperative
“Plato’s Theory of Ideas”
Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance”
The Permanent Part of the College
Against Time
Intellect and Intuition
The Roots of Modernity
The Program of St. John’s College
The Golden Ages of St. John’s College
Politics and the Imagination
Mental Imagery
Through Phantasia to Philosophy
Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind (review)
Thomas Flanagan’s The Tenants of Time (review)
The English War and Peace: Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (review)
21.1 (1969)
24.2 (1972)
26.1 (1974)
26.2 (1974)
1.1 (1974)
27.1 (1975)
27.4 (1976)
28.2 (1976)
29.4 (1978)
30.2 (1979)
31.1 (1979)
31.1 (1979)
31.2 (1980)
32.1 (1980)
32.3 (1981)
33.1 (1981)
34.3 (1983)
35.1 (1984)
35.2 (1984)
35.3 (1984)
35.3 (1984)
36.1 (1985)
36.3 (1985)
37.2-3 (1986)
38.1 (1988)
38.2 (1988)
38.3 (1988-89)
4
�The Music of the Republic
George Steiner’s Antigones: A Review
Depth and Desire
Mo and Mao (review)
What is a Book?
The Seal with Seven Books
Two Reviews
Hegel on Time
Telling Lies
Two New Books by Alumni (review)
Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy (review)
The Past-Present
Recollection and Composure: Douglas Allanbrook’s See Naples (review)
Visions of a Botanist: Wade Davis’s One River (review)
A Call to Thought: Pope John Paul II. Fides et Ratio (review)
What, Then, Is Time?
The Feasting of Socrates: Peter Kalkavage’s translation of Timaeus (review)
Philosophy Revived: Stewart Umphrey’s Complexity and Analysis (review)
The Empires of the Sun and the West
Kant’s Afterlife: Immanuel Kant’s Opus Postumum (review)
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen (comments)
Kant’s Philosophical Use of Mathematics: Negative Magnitudes
Eve Separate
For the Graduate Students in Classics at Yale
The Eumenides of Aeschylus: Whole-Hearted Patriotism
and Moderated Modernity
Jacob Klein’s Two Prescient Discoveries
Portraits of the Impassioned Concept: A Review of Peter Kalkavage’s
The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
John Verdi’s Fat Wednesday: Wittgenstein on Aspects (review)
Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening
The Dispassionate Study of the Passions
The Rehabilitation of Spiritedness (review)
The Actual Intention of Plato’s Dialogues on Justice and Statesmanship
The Mutuality of Imagining and Thinking: On Dennis Sepper’s
Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images
To Save the Ideas: Book Review of Daniel Sherman’s Soul, World, and Idea:
An Interpretation of Plato’s Republic and Phaedo (review)
Momentary Morality and Extended Ethics
World Without Time
Res tene, verba sequentur
WHERE, Then, Is Time?
39.1-2 (1989-90)
39.3 (1989-90)
39.3 (1989-90)
40.3 (1990-91)
41.1 (1991-92)
41.2 (1992)
42.1 (1993)
42.2 (1994)
42.3 (1994)
42.3 (1994)
43.1 (1995)
43.2 (1996)
43.3 (1996)
44.1 (1997)
45.1 (1999)
45.3 (2000)
46.2 (2002)
46.3 (2002)
47.1 (2003)
47.3 (2004)
48.2 (2005)
48.2 (2005)
49.1 (2006)
50.1 (2007)
50.2 (2008)
52.1 (2010)
52.1 (2010)
52.2 (2011)
53.2 (2012)
54.1 (2012)
54.2 (2013)
55.1 (2013)
55.2 (2014)
55.2 (2014)
56.1-2 (2014-15)
57.1 (2015)
57.2 (2016)
57.2 (2016)
Bridgman, Laura
R.F. Christian, ed., Tolstoy’s Letters (review)
31.1 (1979)
Brogan, Michael
Dwelling in the Land of the Confessions
57.1 (2015)
Brown, Ford K.
Commencement Address, Annapolis 1973
25.3 (1973)
5
�Bruell, Christopher
Thucydides and Perikles
32.3 (1981)
Buchanan, Scott
The New Program at St. John’s College
The Analysis of Fictions
24.3 (1972)
35.3 (1984)
Buchenauer, Nancy
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
37.1 (1986)
Bulkley, Honor
Letter from Nicaragua and Guatemala
32.2 (1981)
Burke, Chester
Reflections on Justice in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
55.1 (2013)
Cantor, Paul
The Ground of Nature: Shakespeare, Language and Politics
34.3 (1983)
Carey, James
Aristotle’s Account of the Intelligibility of Being
Jorge H.-Aigla: Karate-Dō and Zen (review)
The Discovery of Nature
Vedic Tradition and the Origin of Philosophy
in Ancient India
Aesthetics Ancient and Modern
Getting to Know Kierkegaard Better: Book Review of Richard McComb’s
The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegard (review)
35.1 (1984)
43.1 (1995)
46.1 (2000)
49.3 (2007)
53.2 (2012)
55.1 (2013)
Casey, Dylan
Fields, Particles, and Being
54.2 (2013)
Carey, James
Book Review of Christopher Bruell’s Aristotle as Teacher:
His Introduction to a Philosophic Science (review)
57.1 (2015)
Carl, David
Everything is One (review)
53.2 (2012)
Carmichael, Joel
The Lost Continent, the Conundrum of Christian Origins
34.1(1982-83)
Carter, Richard B.
Dionysus: The Therapeutic Mask
54.2 (2013)
Clark, Allen
The Logic of Morality
36.2 (1985)
Cochran, Leonard, O.P.
Ovid, Banished (poem)
46.3 (2002)
6
�Cohen, Joseph
Miracles and Belief
54.2 (2013)
Cohen, Martin
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
37.1 (1986)
Cohen, Mariam Cunningham
From Biology to Psychology: An Aspect of the Development of Freud’s
Notion of the Unconscious
40.3 (1990-91)
Collins, Arthur
Kant’s Empiricism
The Scientific Background of Descartes’ Dualism
Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation:
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, by Richard Rorty (review)
The Unity of Leibniz’s Thought on Contingency, Possibility,
and Freedom
Ambiguities in Kant’s Treatment of Space
31.1 (1979)
32.2 (1981)
33.2 (1982)
34.1 (1982-83)
34.2 (1983)
Collins, Linda
Going to See the Leaves (narrative)
A Nighttime Story (narrative)
33.1 (1981)
34.1 (1982-83)
Colston, Ken
How Liberty Won the Sweet Sixteen
from The Tales of the Liberty Renaissance
38.1 (1988)
Comber, Geoffrey
Conversations with Graduate Institute Alumni
25.1 (1973)
Comenetz, Michael
Chaos, Gauss, and Order
30.1 (1978)
Conway, Daniel W.
Autonomy and Authenticity: How One Becomes What One Is
42.2 (1994)
Cooper, Laurie
Pears; Preparation; While You Are In The Hospital (poems)
45.3 (2000)
Cornell, John F.
Faustian Phenomena: Goethe on Plants, Animals, and Modern Biologists
Memorial to a Woman with an Alabaster Jar:
Speculations on Matthew 24 to 26
Philosophy and Resurrection: The Gospel According to Spinoza
Reinventing Love: An Introduction to Plato’s Phaedrus
Coughlin, M.L.
Reply to Tertullian (poem)
After Hecuba; Penelope’s Dream (poems)
43.1 (1995)
45.1 (1999)
47.1 (2003)
56.2 (2015)
36.1 (1985)
36.3 (1985)
7
�Crockett, Steve
On Becoming Free
44.1 (1997)
Cross, Derek
THE REVIEW: an Apology
1.1 (1974)
Darkey, William A.
In Memory of Mark van Doren
Franz Plunder
In Memorial John Gaw Meem 1895-1983
25.1 (1973)
26.2 (1974)
35.1 (1984)
Datchev, Radoslav
Where is Greece?
42.3 (1994)
Davenport, Richard
A Sonnet
“The Appealing of the Passion is Tenderer in Prayer Apart”
1.1 (1974)
1.2 (1975)
David, Anne
Reading Landscapes: Maternal Love in Classical Tamil Poetry
52.2 (2011)
David, Amirthanayagam (A.P.)
Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable:
Part I: The Paradigms of Theaetetus
Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable
Part II. The Mathematical Meaning of the Indeterminate Dyad
46.1 (2000)
46.2 (2002)
Davis, Michael
Euripides Among the Athenians
44.2 (1998)
Dawson, Grace
A St. Johnnie in the Job Market
25.1 (1973)
Dean, John
Talking with Pictures: ‘Les Bandes Dessinees’
31.1 (1979)
Deane, Stephen
Letter from Moscow
32.1 (1980)
De Gandt, François
Newton’s Nature: Does Newton’s Science Disclose Actual Knowledge of
Nature?
45.2 (1999)
de Grazia, Margreta
Nominal Autobiography in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
34.3 (1983)
Dennison, George
Family Pages, Little Facts: October (narrative)
Shawno (narrative)
32.2 (1981)
33.2 (1982)
8
�Densmore, Dana
Cause and Hypothesis: Newton’s Speculation About the Cause
of Universal Gravitation
45.2 (1999)
Diamond, Martin
On The Study Of Politics In A Liberal Education
23.4 (1971)
Dink, Michael
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
The City: Intersection of Erôs and Thumos? Paul Ludwig’s Erôs and Polis
37.1 (1986)
47.3 (2004)
Domino, Brian (compiler)
A Bibliography of the Writings of David R. Lachterman
42.2 (1994)
Donahue, William H.
Newton’s Theory of Light and Colors
45.2 (1999)
Dorfman, Alan
Freud’s “Dora”
30.1 (1978)
Doskow, George
Leven’s Creator (review)
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
32.1 (1980)
37.1 (1986)
Dougherty, Janet A.
The Nobility of Sophocles’ Antigone
Toleration, Eva Brann’s Homage to Americans
39.3 (1989-90)
53.1 (2011)
Drake, Stillman
Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Luck
32.1 (1980)
Druecker, Robert
“YOU ARE THAT!”: The Upanishads Read Through Western Eyes
52.1 (2010)
Dry, Murray
The Supreme Court and School Desegregation:
Brown vs. Board of Education Reconsidered
Making the Constitution:
Robert A. Goldwin’s From Parchment to Power (review)
34.3 (1983)
44.2 (1998)
Dublin, Max
A Lover’s Afterthought; The Effects of Gravity on Health (poems)
36.2 (1985)
Dulich, Jean (pseud.; trans. Colette Hughes)
Letter from Vietnam
33.2 (1982)
Durgin, Frank
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
37.1 (1986)
Eagleson, Hannah
Troy (poem)
55.2 (2013)
9
�Ekman, Gerry
Une Petite Chanson pour Monsieur Charlie
1.1 (1974)
Engelberg, Joseph
James Joyce’s Soul
36.1 (1985)
Fain, Susan
The Opera Singer as Interpreter: A Conversation with Sherrill Milnes
36.1 (1985)
Fehl, Philipp P.
Life Beyond the Reach of Hope: Recollections of a Refugee, 1938-1939
31.2 (1980)
Ferrero, Guglielmo and Mosca, Gaetano
Letters on Legitimacy
34.2 (1983)
Ferrier, Richard
The Analytic Art of Viète
Viète on the Solution of Equations and the Construction of Problems
38.3 (1988-89)
48.1 (2004)
Fisher, Howard
The Great Electrical Philosopher
Dynamic Symmetry, A Theory of Art and Nature
The Body Electric
31.1 (1979)
36.1 (1985)
41.1 (1991-92)
Flaumenhaft, Harvey
Memorial for Simon Kaplan
Foreword to the Issue:
“Beyond Hypothesis: Newton’s Experimental Philosophy”
What Was New About the New Republic?
Foreword to the Issue: “Classical Mathematics and Its Transformation”
Why We Won’t Let You Speak Of the Square Root of Two
Flaumenhaft, Mera J.
Looking Together in Athens
Housebound or Floating Free: The American Home in Huckleberry Finn
“Sportive Tricks”: Ian McKellen’s Film Richard III (review)
The Persians and the Parthenon: Yoke and Weave
Part One: The Persians
Fletcher, Charlotte
The Early History of St. John’s College in Annapolis (review)
1784: The Year St. John’s College Was Named
Author’s Preface
King William’s School and the College of William and Mary
An Endowed King William’s School Plans to Become a College
King William’s School Survives the Revolution
1784: The Year St. John’s College Was Named
John McDowell, Federalist: President of St. John’s College
31.2 (1980)
45.2 (1999)
45.3 (2000)
48.1 (2004)
48.1 (2004)
35.2 (1984)
36.3 (1985)
44.1 (1997)
50.2 (2008)
35.3 (1984)
36.3 (1985)
40.2 (1990-91)
40.2 (1990-91)
40.2 (1990-91)
40.2 (1990-91)
40.2 (1990-91)
40.2 (1990-91)
10
�Fontaine, John
Chameleons (poem)
35.1 (1984)
Fox, James
Toucan Dreams
40.1 (1990-91)
Freis, Richard
Bandusia, Flower of Fountains (poem)
Watching Plains Daybreak (poem)
35.3 (1984)
36.1 (1985)
Fried, Michael N.
A Note on the Opposite Sections and Conjugate
Sections In Apollonius of Perga’s Conica
Similarity and Equality in Euclid and Apollonius
48.1 (2004)
55.2 (2014)
Frost, Bryan Paul
Tocqueville’s Worst Fears Realized? The Political Implications of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendental Spiritualism
55.1 (2013)
Gable, Harvey L., Jr.
Interpreting Genesis Through the Foundational Symbols of Earth, Water,
and Air
43.2 (1996)
Gallerano, Victor
The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery O’Connor
36.1 (1985)
Ginsburg, David
Ideals and Action: Commencement Address, Santa Fe, 1974
26.2 (1974)
Goerner, E.A.
The Shattering of the Natural Order
37.2-3 (1986)
Gold, Elizabeth
Price of Liberation – a review of The Vagabond
1.2 (1975)
Gold, Michael W.
A Preservationist Looks at Housing
29.4 (1978)
Goldsmith, William M.
An Open Letter to St. John’s Alumni
29.4 (1978)
Goldwin, Robert A.
The First Annual Provocation Address
St. John’s College Asks John Locke Some Questions
Of Men and Angels: A Search for Morality in the Constitution
21.2 (1969)
23.1 (1971)
28.2 (1976)
Gottlieb, Robert
The Emperor’s New Clothes
34.1 (1982-83)
Graves, Leslie
The Potential of Man: Aristotle in De Anima
1.1 (1974)
11
�Gray, J. Glenn
The Sense of It All: Commencement Address, Santa Fe, 1977
29.2 (1977)
Grenke, Michael W.
The Question of Questions
54.2 (2013)
Griffin, Jonathan
Translation of Poetry: Some notes on theory and practice
Rimbaud, translated
29.1 (1977)
29.1 (1977)
de Grummond, Nancy
Editorial Policy
34.1 (1982-83)
Guaspari, David
The Incompleteness Theory
33.1 (1981)
Hadas, Rachel
Poems (Summer; Magnolias in Princeton; The Service of Sidonie)
34.2 (1983)
Ham, Michael W.
Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration of Community
(review)
25.1 (1973)
Harper, William
The First Six Propositions in Newton’s Argument For Universal
Gravitation
45.2 (1999)
Harris, Geoffrey
The Human Condition
37.2-3 (1986)
Hassing, R.F.
The Exemplary Career of Newton’s Mathematics:
Francois DeGandt’s Force and Geometry in Newton’s Physics (review)
44.1 (1997)
Hazo, Robert G.
Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
30.2 (1979)
Heller, Gene
What is an Opening Question?
Future REVIEWS
1.1 (1974)
1.1 (1974)
Higuera, Henry
The Human Sense for Justice:
Clifford Orwin’s The Humanity of Thucydides (review)
43.2 (1996)
Higuera, Marilyn
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
Prelude to Vocation
37.1 (1986)
44.3 (1998)
12
�Hilberg, Raul
The Holocaust Mission, July 29 to August 12, 1979
34.1 (1982-83)
Himmelfarb, Gertrude
Adam Smith: Political Economy as Moral Philosophy
34.2 (1983)
Hoben, Sandra
Leda and the Swan; Like the Inhabitants of Plato’s Cave; Parallel Lines
(poems)
Two Poems (Odysseus and Calypso; St. John’s College)
41.1 (1991-92)
42.3 (1994)
Hoffacker, Charles
Lecture Review: “Grace Redemption in Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement”
by Prof. Philip Fehl
1.1 (1974)
Holmes, Stephen
Benjamin Constant on Ancient and Modern Liberty
34.2 (1983)
Holt, Philip
Sophocles’ Ajax and the Ajax Myth
33.3 (1982)
Hook, Sidney
Memories of John Dewey Days: An Autobiographical Fragment
31.2 (1980)
Hopkins, Burt C.
Jacob Klein and the Phenomenological Project of Desedimenting the
Formalization of Meaning
The Husserlian Context of Klein’s Mathematical Work
Meaning and Truth in Klein’s Philosophico-Mathematical Writings
47.2 (2003)
48.1 (2004)
48.3 (2005)
Hornyansky, Monica C.
A Meditation on the Present Plight of Philosophy and the Pursuit of Truth
40.1 (1990-91)
Hoving, Chris
Personality and Class
Interview with Robert Goldwin
1.1 (1974)
1.2 (1975)
Howland, Jacob
The Eleatic Stranger’s Socratic Condemnation of Socrates
Platonic and Jewish Antecedents to Johannes de Silentio’s Knight of Faith
42.2 (1994)
53.1 (2011)
Isaac, Rael Jean and Erich
The Media—Shield of the Utopians
34.2 (1983)
Jacobsen, Bryce
“When Is St. John’s Going to Resume Athletics?”
22.1 (1970)
Jaffa, Harry V.
Inventing the Past
33.1 (1981)
13
�Jenson, Kari
On Marrying
34.1 (1982-83)
Johnson, Dennis
Still Life
1.2 (1975)
Jones, Gregory S.
On Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (review essay)
34.2 (1983)
Jones, Mary Hannah
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
The Return of Odysseus
37.1 (1986)
37.2-3 (1986)
Josephs, Laurence
Four Poems (Elm Tree; Late Winter Poem; The Porch; Unfinished
Self-Portrait and Seascape)
Io; Hephaestus (poems)
Two Poems (Achilles; In Memoriam: John Downes)
33.1 (1981)
33.2 (1982)
34.1 (1982-83)
Kalkavage, Peter
The Song of Timaeus
Dante and Ulysses: A Reading of Inferno XXVI
Hegel’s Logic of Desire
Peter of the Vine: The Perversion of Faith in Inferno 13
Plato’s Timaeus and the Will to Order
Principles of Motion and the Motion of Principles: Hegel’s Inverted World
Passion and Perception in Mozart’s Magic Flute
Peaceniks and Warmongers: The Disunity of Virtue in Plato’s Statesman
Three Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (poems)
In the Heaven of Knowing: Dante’s Paradiso
Music and the Idea of a World
36.1 (1985)
40.3 (1990-91)
43.2 (1996)
45.1 (1999)
47.1 (2003)
52.1 (2010)
53.2 (2012)
55.1 (2013)
55.2 (2014)
56.2 (2015)
57.2 (2016)
Kaplan, Simon
Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
30.2 (1979)
Kass, Amy Apfel
The Liberal Arts Movement: From Ideas to Practice
The Education of Telemachos
25.3 (1973)
41.1 (1991-92)
Kates, J.
Five From The Old Testament (poem)
36.1 (1985)
Kelley, Bill
Meditation before a New Publication
1.1 (1974)
Kerszberg, Pierre
The Myth of the Reversed Cosmos in Contemporary Physics
42.2 (1994)
Kieffer, John S.
A World I Never Made
Iola Scofield, A Memorial
21.1 (1969)
24.2 (1972)
14
�The Myth and the Logic of Democracy
35.3 (1984)
Killorin, Joseph
A Search for the Liberal College (review)
35.3 (1984)
Kirby, Torrance
Eva Brann’s What, Then, is Time? (review)
46.2 (2002)
Klassen, Johann A.
The Comedy of Christian Existence: On Kierkegaard’s Resolution of
Hegel’s Paradox
44.2 (1998)
Klein, Jacob
The Problem of Freedom
A Giving of Accounts (with Leo Strauss)
The Myth of Virgil’s Aeneid
On Precision
Discussion As A Means Of Teaching And Learning
Speech, Its Strengths and Its Weaknesses
Memorial to Leo Strauss
Plato’s Phaedo
The Art of Questioning and the Liberal Arts
The Copernican Revolution
On a Sixteenth Century Algebraist
The World of Physics and the “Natural” World
(trans. and ed., D.R. Lachterman)
Two Manuscripts of Jacob Klein’s from the 30s:
Left and Right; The Frame of the Timaeus
The Problem and the Art of Writing
History and the Liberal Arts
21.4 (1969)
22.1 (1970)
22.4 (1970)
23.3 (1971)
23.4 (1971)
25.3 (1973)
25.4 (1974)
26.1 (1975)
30.2 (1979)
30.2 (1979)
30.2 (1979)
33.1 (1981)
35.2 (1984)
35.3 (1984)
47.2 (2003)
Kluth, Charles
Editorial Policy
34.1 (1982-83)
Kohl, John C. Jr.
Aurum Antiquum: Reflections in and on Virgil’s Aeneid
50.1 (2007)
Kojève, Alexandre
The Christian Origin of Modern Science (trans. D.R. Lachterman)
35.1 (1984)
Koochesfahani, Arian
On Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra
57.2 (2016)
Kraus, Pamela
Foundations and the Discourse on Method
John Keats’ Bicentennial
41.2 (1992)
43.1 (1995)
Krivak, Andrew
Four Poems (The Swimmer: A Later Disciple of Thales; Deriving the
Wave Equation; Approaching Inertia; Always After Shooting)
43.3 (1996)
15
�Kutler, Emily
Woodcut
39.3 (1989-90)
Kutler, Samuel S.
Mathematics As a Liberal Art
Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
Brilliancies Involving Equilateral Triangles
21.2 (1969)
30.2 (1979)
38.3 (1988-89)
Lachterman, David
Preface to the Issue: “Four Essays on Plato’s Republic”
What is “The Good” of Plato’s Republic?
Torah and Logos
39.1-2 (1989-90)
39.1-2 (1989-90)
42.2 (1994)
Lalande, Andre
On Some Texts of Bacon and Descartes (trans. Pamela Kraus)
43.3 (1996)
Laloy, Jean
John Paul II and the World of Tomorrow
32.1 (1980)
Landau, Julie
Some Classical Poems of the T’ang and Sung Dynasties (translations)
Some Chinese Poems (translations)
31.1 (1979)
33.3 (1982)
Lazitch, Branko
Not Just Another Communist Party: The Polish Communist Party
34.1(1982-83)
LeCuyer, Phil
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
37.1 (1986)
Lederer, Wolfgang
How Does One Cure a Soul?
What Good and What Harm Can Psychoanalysis Do?
28.1 (1976)
35.1 (1984)
Lee, J. Scott
Enriching Liberal Education’s Defense in Universities and Colleges:
Liberal Arts, Innovation, and Technē
56.1 (2014)
Le Gloannec, Anne-Marie
The Federal Republic of Germany: Finlandization or Germanization?
33.2 (1982)
Lenkowski, Jon
The Origin of Philosophy
Meno’s Paradox and the Zetetic Circle
The Work of Education
Definition and Diairesis in Plato and Aristotle
37.2-3 (1986)
43.3 (1996)
52.1 (2010)
56.1 (2014)
Lessing, Gotthold
Ernst and Falk: Conversations for Freemasons
(translation and notes by Chaninah Maschler)
34.1 (1982-83)
16
�Levin, Michael
“Sexism” is Meaningless
Levine, David Lawrence
An Ennobling Innocence: The Founding of Socrates’ Republic
The Forgotten Faculty: The Place of Phronesis or Practical
in Liberal Education (Plutarch and Aristotle)
“At the Very Center of the Plentitude”: Goethe’s Grant Attempt to
Overcome the 18th Century; or, How Freshman Laboratory Saved
Goethe From the General Sickness of his Age
Levy, Robert J.
Three Poems
(In Sickness; The Tristan Chord; On the Pythagorean Theorem)
33.1 (1981)
43.2 (1996)
49.3 (2007)
55.1 (2013)
38.3 (1988-89)
Lieberman, Ralph
Bramante and Michelangelo at Saint Peter’s
40.1 (1990-91)
Liben, Meyer
Three (Lady, I Did It; King of the Hill; The Relay Race) (short stories)
The Streets on which Herman Melville Was Born and Died
Not Quite Alone on the Telephone (narrative)
New Year’s Eve; Treasure Hunt; Meetings, Recognitions (narratives)
32.1 (1980)
32.2 (1981)
32.3 (1981)
34.1 (1982-83)
Linafelt, Tod
On Biblical Style
54.1 (2012)
Linck, Matthew
Knowing and Ground: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Book Review of Eva Brann’s Unwilling: An Inquiry into the Rise of the
Will’s Power and the Attempt to Undo It (review)
56.2 (2015)
57.1 (2015)
Littleton, Michael S.
Prayers
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
Chasing the Goat From the Sky
22.2 (1970)
37.1 (1986)
37.2-3 (1986)
Locke, Patricia M.
Hegel’s Reading of Antigone
39.3 (1989-90)
Loewenberg, Robert
The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an Aspect of Modern Idolatry
That Graver Fire Bell: A Reconsideration of the Debate Over Slavery from
the Standpoint of Lincoln
Marx’s Sadism
33.2 (1982)
33.3 (1982)
34.1(1982-83)
Loring, Carolyn Wade
Two Poems
38.2 (1988)
Ludwig, Paul
Mind in the Odyssey: Seth Benardete’s The Bow and the Lyre (review)
45.3 (2000)
17
�Odysseus’s World of the Imagination: Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments
(review)
Liberalism and Tragedy: A Review of Jonathan N. Badger’s Sophocles and
the Politics of Tragedy: Cities and Transcendence (review)
47.3 (2004)
56.2 (2015)
Lund, Nelson
Guardian Politics in The Deer Hunter
Sidney Hook, Philosophy and Public Policy (review)
32.2 (1981)
33.1 (1981)
Lurçat, François
Understanding Quantum Mechanics with Bohr and Husserl
49.1 (2006)
Macierowski, Edward M.
Truth and Rights
Which Sciences Does the Political Science Direct and Use and How
Does It Do So?
28.4 (1977)
57.2 (2016)
Mackey, Kimo
The Odyssey of the “Cresta”
27.1 (1975)
Maistrellis, Nicholas
Raskolnikov’s Redemption
55.1 (2013)
Maschler, Chaninah
Ernst and Falk: Conversations for Freemasons (translation and notes)
Class Day Address 1983
A Note on Eva Brann’s “Roots of Modernity”
Oedipus the King and Aristotle’s List of Categories: A Note
Joseph and Judah
Eva Brann’s The Ways of Naysaying (review)
What Tree Is This?: In Praise of Europe’s Renaissance Printers, Publishers
and Philologists
Two Images (addendum)
Mawby, Ronald
Measured Passion, Golden Rationality:
Eva T.H. Brann’s The Past-Present (review)
Opening Questions
“My Subject is Passion”: Eva Brann’s Feeling Our Feelings:
What Philosophers Think And People Know
34.1 (1982-83)
34.3 (1983)
36.1 (1985)
39.3 (1989-90)
42.1 (1993)
46.2 (2002)
47.1 (2003)
48.3 (2005)
44.3 (1998)
47.2 (2003)
51.2 (2010)
Mazur, Barry
What is the Surface Area of a Hedgehog?
54.1 (2012)
McClay, Wilfred M.
The Tocquevillean Moment
52.2 (2011)
McGrath, Hugh P.
An Address for the Rededication of the Library
Plato’s Gorgias
21.4 (1969)
50.2 (2008)
18
�Mensch, James
Between Plato and Descartes—The Medieval Transformation in the
Ontological Status of the Ideas
35.2 (1984)
Michnik, Adam
Letter from a Polish Prison
34.1 (1982-83)
Middleton, Arthur Pierce
William Smith: Godfather and First President of St. John’s College
35.3 (1984)
Mongardini, Carlo
Guglielmo Ferrero and Legitimacy
34.2 (1983)
Montanelli, Indro
Kekkonen, the “Finlandizer”
33.2 (1982)
Morrisey, Will
DeGaulle’s Le fil de l’épée
32.2 (1981)
Mosca, Gaetano
(see Ferrero, Guglielmo)
Mullen, William
Nietzsche and the Classic
Navrozov, Lev
One Day in the Life of the New York Times and Pravda in the World:
Which is more Informative?
A Dead Man’s Knowledge: Varlam Shalamov, Graphite (review)
Updike and Roth: Are They Writers? John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich, and
Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (review essay)
33.2 (1982)
33.1 (1981)
33.2 (1982)
33.3 (1982)
Neidorf, Robert A.
Biological Explanation
The Ontological Argument
Old Wars: Commencement Address, Annapolis, 1972
Statement of Educational Policy and Program
22.1 (1970)
24.1 (1972)
24.2 (1972)
29.2 (1977)
Nelson, Charles A.
In the Beginning...The Genesis of the St. John’s Program, 1937
49.1 (2006)
Nelson, Christopher B.
The Liberty Tree Ceremony (October 25, 1999)
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish
“The Things of Friends Are Common”
45.3 (2000)
50.1 (2007)
51.2 (2010)
O’Flynn, Janet Christhilf
For Bert Thoms (remarks)
31.1 (1979)
O’Grady, William
The Power of the Word in Oedipus at Colonus
29.1 (1977); 37.1 (1986)
19
�About Jacob Klein’s Books About Plato
Odysseus Among the Phaiakians
Odysseus With His Father
A Scene from Electra
About Sophocles’ Philoctetes
On Almost Seeing Miracles
About The Winter’s Tale
Plato’s Republic and the Search for Common Objects
About Human Knowing
Reflections on Beginning Ptolemy
Negation, Willing, and the Places of the Soul
About Dante’s Purgatory
A Way to Think about Dark Times
Sadness and Courage
The Bible and the Human Heart
Hegel and Marx: Studies in Man’s Self-Assertion
Kant’s Moral Philosophy
Theory and Practice in Hegel’s Phenomenology
30.2 (1979)
31.1 (1979); 37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
37.1 (1986)
Ossorgin, Michael
“How Is the Seminar?”
Two Writings in the Sand: Santa Fe Baccalaureate Address
21.1 (1969)
26.2 (1974)
Page, Carl
From Rationalism to Historicism: The Devolution of Cartesian Subjectivity
Jacob Howland: The Republic (review)
The Power & Glory of Platonic Dialogue
42.2 (1994)
43.1 (1995)
46.1 (2000)
Painter, Corinne
What It Means To Be Human: Aristotle on Virtue and Skill
The Stranger as a Socratic Philosopher: The Socratic Nature of the
Stranger’s Investigation of the Sophist
47.3 (2004)
56.1 (2014)
Paalman, Susan
“In Want of a Wife” – or a Husband – in Pride and Prejudice
57.1 (2015)
Papenfuse, Dr. Edward C.
What’s In a Name? Why Should We Remember? The Liberty Tree on St.
John’s College Campus Annapolis, Maryland, June 3, 1999
45.3 (2000)
Pappas, John D.
The Concept of Measure and the Criterion of Sustainability
56.1 (2014)
Peperzak, Adriaan
Anselm’s Proslogion and its Hegelian Interpretation (trans. Steven Werlin)
42.1 (1993)
Perazzini, Randolph
The Dialectic of Love in War and Peace
42.1 (1993)
Pešić, Peter D.
The Fields of Light
38.3 (1988-89)
20
�Petrich, Louis
Full Fathom Five: A Tutor’s Sea Change (reflection)
“Please, Don’t Eat the Swans”: My Revolution in Romania
52.2 (2011)
57.1 (2015)
Pickens, Leo
Petrella’s Blood (story)
38.3 (1988-89)
Pihas, Gabriel
Dante’s Beatrice: Between Idolatry and Iconoclasm
57.1 (2015)
Platoff, John
Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze de Figaro and Don Giovanni
36.1 (1985)
Platt, Michael
Aristotle Gazing
31.2 (1980)
Prevost, Gary
Carrillo and the Communist Party in Spain (review)
31.2 (1980)
Quint, Peter E.
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen (comments)
48.2 (2005)
Raditsa, Leo
Thucydides, Aristotle’s Politics, and the Significance of the Peloponnesian
War
July 1975
Words to the Class of 1977: Class Day Address, Annapolis
29.2 (1977)
For Bert Thoms
31.1 (1979)
The Collapse of Democracy at Athens and the Trial of Socrates
31.1 (1979)
Letter from Budapest and Pécs
31.2 (1980)
Eyes of His Own – and Words:
George Dennison, Oilers and Sweepers and Other Stories (review)
32.1 (1980)
Recent Events in the West
32.2 (1981)
Afghanistan Fights: The Struggle for Afghanistan, by Nancy Peabody
Newell and Richard S. Newell (review)
33.2 (1982)
Laos: Marie-Noele and Didier Sicard, Au nom de Marx et de Bouddha,
Revolution au Laos: un people, une culture disparaissent (review)
33.2 (1982)
The Division of the West—and Perception
34.2 (1983)
Toast to the Senior Class, May 12, 2000
46.3 (2002)
The Collapse at Athens and the Trial of Socrates
46.3 (2002)
Ranasinghe, Nalin
Ass, You Like It? Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as
Political Philosophy
57.2 (2016)
Rangel, Carlos
The Latin-American Neurosis (trans. Hugh P. McGrath, Leo Raditsa)
32.2 (1981)
Recco, Gregory
Plato’s Political Polyphony: Book Review of Plato: Statesman,
translated by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (review)
55.1 (2013)
21
�The Soul’s Choice of Life
55.2 (2014)
Rees, John
Play Review – The Alchemist
1.2 (1975)
Riezler, Kurt
The Homeric Simile and the Beginning of Philosophy
37.2-3 (1986)
Roemer, Arlene
Orpheus
1.2 (1975)
Rogers, Mary
A Laboratory Fantasy
1.1 (1974)
Roochnik, David
Platonic Pedagogy? Eva Brann’s The Music of the Republic:
Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and Plato’s Writings (review)
48.2 (2005)
Rooney, Melinda
Autopsy (story)
38.3 (1988-89)
Roth, Robert
In the Audience (narrative)
32.3 (1981)
Rubino, Carl A.
The Least Deceptive Mirror of the Mind: Truth and Reality in the Homeric
Poems
41.1 (1991-92)
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Bach’s Rhetoric
Profile of an Alumnus: David Moss
Trial in Berlin
German Resistance to Hitler: Elites and Election
Student Rebellion and the Nazis: “The White Rose” in Its Setting
The White Rose: Munich 1942-43; The Short Life of Sophie Scholl (review)
Some Interpretations of The Magic Flute:
The Auden Translation of the Bergman Film
The Tuning Fork
26.1 (1975)
28.1 (1976)
28.4 (1977)
31.1 (1979)
35.1 (1984)
36.2 (1985)
38.1 (1988)
48.2 (2005)
Russell, Moira
Two Poems (Illusory; Strange Meeting)
42.1 (1993)
Rustan, Paula
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
37.1 (1986)
Sachs, Joe
Aristotle’s Definition of Motion
An Outline of the Argument of Aristotle’s Metaphysics
The Fury of Aeneas
The Parable of Don Quixote
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
27.4 (1976)
32.3 (1981)
33.2 (1982)
36.1 (1985)
37.1 (1986)
22
�God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
Antigone: All-Resourceful/Resourcelessness
The Battle of the Gods and the Giants
What is a What-is Question?
Tragic Pleasure
Three Little Words
Measure, Moderation and the Mean
Wholes and Parts in Human Character
37.2-3 (1986)
39.3 (1989-90)
41.2 (1992)
42.1 (1993)
43.1 (1995)
44.1 (1997)
46.2 (2002)
46.3 (2002)
Salem, Eric
Sun and Cave
Prudence and Wisdom in Aristotle’s Ethics
Justice in Plato’s Statesman
43.3 (1996)
47.2 (2003)
55.1 (2013)
Saxonhouse, Arlene W.
Theater and Polity: Mera Flaumenhaft’s The Civic Spectacle (review)
43.2 (1996)
Scally, Thomas
All Shallows are Clear: Hume’s Reading of Cervantes
40.3 (1990-91)
Schalliol, Gregory
Nietzsche, Solitude, and Truthfulness
42.2 (1994)
Schoener, Abraham
The Problem of Place in Oedipus at Colonus
Going in Silence
39.3 (1989-90)
49.1 (2006)
Schuler, Kurt
Editorial Policy
34.1(1982-83)
Scofield, Richard
The Habit of Literature
21.4 (1969)
Scolnicov, Samuel
Plato’s Euthydemus
31.2 (1980)
Seeger, Judith
Socrates, Parmenides, and the Way Out
53.2 (2012)
Sepper, Dennis L.
Seeing Through the Images: Eva Brann’s World of Imagination (review)
42.1 (1993)
Sedeyn, Oliver (trans. Brother Robert Smith)
The Wisdom of Jacob Klein
47.2 (2003)
Shiffman, Mark
Erotics and Heroics in Genesis 1-6
Platonic Theōria
45.1 (1999)
56.1 (2014)
23
�Silver, Joan
An Editor’s Plea
An Appeal to the Community
1.1 (1974)
1.1 (1974)
Simpson, Thomas K.
Faraday’s Thought on Electromagnetism
Newton and the Liberal Arts
“The Scientific Revolution Will Not Take Place”
Prometheus Unbound
22.2 (1970)
27.4 (1976)
30.1 (1978)
31.2 (1980)
Sinnett, Mark W.
Educating by ‘the Question Method’: The Example of Kierkegaard
The Finest Fruits of Reason: Michael Comenetz’s Calculus: The Elements
47.3 (2004)
50.1 (2007)
Slakey, Thomas J.
Personal Freedom
Toward Reading Thomas Aquinas
The God Who Is and The God Who Speaks
22.3 (1970)
33.3 (1982)
40.1 (1990-91)
Smith, Edward C.
Frederick Douglass’s Influence on the War Strategy of Abraham Lincoln
41.2 (1992)
Smith, Jay
Kant’s Rational Being as Moral Being
53.1 (2011)
Smith, J. Winfree
The Teaching of Theology to Undergraduates
Commencement Address, Annapolis, 1970
Aristotle’s Ethics
Memorial to Leo Strauss
Commencement Address, Annapolis, 1976
Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
Memorial for Simon Kaplan
St. John’s under Barr and Buchanan:
the Fight with the Navy and the Departure of the Founders
Sermon Preached at St. Anne’s Church, Annapolis
Truth Given and Truth Sought: Two Colleges
21.2 (1969)
22.2 (1970)
24.4 (1973)
25.4 (1974)
28.2 (1976)
30.2 (1979)
31.2 (1980)
33.3 (1982)
35.3 (1984)
38.1 (1988)
Smith, Brother Robert
Excerpts from the History of the Desert Fathers
Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
Proof and Pascal
Montaigne
Steiner’s Stand (review)
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen (comments)
28.1 (1976)
30.2 (1979)
33.2 (1982)
36.3 (1985)
40.3 (1990-91)
48.2 (2005)
Smith, George E.
How Did Newton Discover Universal Gravity?
45.2 (1999)
Sonnesyn, Patricia
For Bert Thoms
31.1 (1979)
24
�Spaeth, Robert L.
The Head and Heart of Science Fiction
An Interview with Barbara Leonard
Alumni Profile: John Poundstone
An Interview with Robert Bart
An Interview with Alvin Fross and Peter Weiss
Profile: Louis L. Snyder, ’28
U.S. Catholic Bishops, Nuclear weapons and U.S. defense policy (review)
1.2 (1975)
24.3 (1972)
24.4 (1973)
25.1 (1973)
25.3 (1973)
25.3 (1973)
35.2 (1984)
Sparrow, Edward G.
Simplicio’s Triumph
Logic and Reason
Noun and Verb
A Reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
1.2 (1975)
23.1 (1971)
23.2 (1971)
30.1 (1978)
37.1 (1986)
Stephenson. David
Is Nature a Republic?
Ptolemy’s Truth
Introduction to “The Tuning Fork” (memoir by Beate Ruhm von Oppen)
Muthos and Logos
35.2 (1984)
34.3 (1998)
48.2 (2005)
48.3 (2005)
Stickney, Cary
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
On Beginning to Read Dante
37.1 (1986)
37.2-3 (1986)
Storing, Herbert J.
The Founders and Slavery
28.2 (1976)
Strauss, Leo
A Giving of Accounts (with Jacob Klein)
What is a Liberal Education?
An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s
Social Science and Humanism
22.1 (1970)
25.4 (1974)
30.2 (1979)
36.2 (1985)
Strong, Lester
‘I Have Become a Problem to Myself’: Augustine’s Theory of Will and the
Notion of Human Inwardness
43.1 (1995)
Suber, Peter
Infinite Reflections
44.2 (1998)
Tamny, Martin
Boyle, Galileo, and Manifest Experience
31.2 (1980)
Tantillo, Astrida Orle
Nature and Creativity in Goethe’s Elective Affinities
45.3 (2000)
Thaw, Eugene V.
The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene V. Thaw
28.1 (1976)
25
�Thoms, Hollis
Rolling His Jolly Tub: Composer Elliott Carter, St. John’s College Tutor,
1940-1942
53.2 (2012)
Thompson, Homer A.
The Libraries of Ancient Athens
32.2 (1982)
Thompson, Jerry L.
A Glance, A Look, A Stare
48.3 (2005)
Thompson, William
The Breathing Side of Ocean (poem)
35.4 (1984)
Tolbert, James M.
Remarks at Ford K. Brown Memorial Service
Twenty Years in Retrospect
Twenty-Five Years in Retrospect
29.3 (1977)
21.3 (1969)
26.3 (1974)
Tuck, Jonathan
Dead Leaves: Illustrations of the Genealogy of the Epic Poem
38.2 (1988)
Unguru, Sabetai
Words, Diagrams, and Symbols: Greek and Modern Mathematics or
“On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics” Revisited
48.1 (2004)
van Boxel, Lise
What Did You Learn (reflection)
53.1 (2011)
Van Doren, Mark
How To Praise A World That May Not Last
23.4 (1971)
Velkley, Richard
Reason’s Parochiality: Carl Page’s Philosophical Historicism and the
Betrayal of First Philosophy (review)
43.3 (1996)
Venable, Bruce
Philosophy and Spirituality in Plotinus
33.1 (1981)
Verdi, John
How We Do Things With Words: An Introduction to Wittgenstein
We Nietzscheans
On Seeing Aspects
44.3 (1998)
46.1 (2000)
52.2 (2011)
von Moltke, Freya
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen (comments)
48.2 (2005)
Wachtel, Albert
Mimesis on the Treacherous Slopes: Joyce’s Commitment to Community
Cordell Yee’s The Word According to James Joyce (review)
44.3 (1998)
26
�Walker, Ben
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen (comments)
48.2 (2005)
Walker, Delia
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen (comments)
48.2 (2005)
Wasserman, Adam
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (review)
33.1 (1981)
Weatherman, Donald V.
America’s Rise to a Mature Party System
36.3 (1985)
Webb, James
Mission over Hanoi (narrative from A Country Such as This)
34.3 (1983)
Weigle, Mary Martha (Marta)
Brothers of Our Father Jesus—The Penitentes of the Southwest
July 1975
Weigle, Richard D.
The Liberal Arts College: Anachronism or Paradigm
Report of the President
Report of the President
Report of the President
Report of the President
Celebration of an Anniversary
Report of the President
Report of the President
Report of the President
Report of the President
Report of the President
21.3 (1969)
21.3 (1969)
23.3 (1971)
24.3 (1972)
25.3 (1973)
26.2 (1974)
26.3 (1974)
27.3 (1975)
28.3 (1976)
29.3 (1977)
(October 1979)
Werlin, Steven
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen (comments)
48.2 (2005)
West, Thomas G.
Cicero’s Teaching on Natural Law
32.3 (1981)
White, John
Imitation
A Biological Theme in Aristotle’s Ethics
Bodies
39.1-2 (1989-90)
42.3 (1994)
45.1 (1999)
Wiener, Linda
Of Lice and Men: Aristotle’s Biological Treatises
Artistic Expression in Animals
40.1 (1990-91)
55.2 (2014)
Williamson, Ray and Abigail
Plastering Day
26.2 (1974)
Williamson, Robert B.
Eidos and Agathon in Plato’s Republic
39.1-2 (1989-90)
27
�Wilson, Curtis A.
Reflections on the Idea of Science
Jacob Klein at 75
Commencement Address, Annapolis, 1977
Remarks at Ford K. Brown Memorial Service
Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
On the Discovery of Deductive Science
Ancient Astronomy and Ptolemy’s ‘Crime’ (review)
Kepler and the Mode of Vision
The Origins of Celestial Dynamics: Kepler and Newton
Homo Loquens from a Biological Standpoint
A Comment on Alexandre Kojève’s
“The Christian Origin of Modern Science”
Logos and the Underground
The Archimedean Point and the Liberal Arts
Groups, Rings and Lattices
Memorial Address for William O’Grady
A Toast to the Republic
Commencement Address (Annapolis, 1988)
Dynamical Chaos: Some Implications of a Recent Discovery
A Forgotten Revolution: Lucio Russo’s La rivoluzione dimenticata (review)
Redoing Newton’s Experiment for Establishing
the Proportionality of Mass and Weight
Paolo Palmieri’s A History of Galileo’s Inclined Plane Experiment and its
Philosophical Implications (review)
22.4 (1970)
26.1 (1974)
29.2 (1977)
29.3 (1977)
30.2 (1979)
31.2 (1980)
31.2 (1980)
32.1 (1980)
32.2 (1981)
34.3 (1983)
35.1 (1984)
35.2 (1984)
35.3 (1984)
36.2 (1985)
37.1 (1986)
37.2-3 (1986)
38.2 (1988)
43.1 (1995)
44.3 (1998)
45.2 (1999)
52.2 (2011)
Winiarski, Barbara Dvorak
Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
30.2 (1979)
Woodard, Joseph Keith
The Distinction of the Virtues in Aristotle’s Ethics
40.3 (1990-91)
Yee, Cordell, D.K.
T.S. Eliot: The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry
43.1 (1995)
Zeiderman, Howard
Fictional Selves and Ghosts: St. Augustine’s Confessions
Caged Explorers: The Hunger for Control
38.2 (1988)
53.2 (2012)
Zelenka, Robert S.
The Ruin (translation)
Hommage à Dietrich Buxtehude (poem)
Blackwater (poem)
26.1 (1975)
26.1 (1975)
34.3 (1983)
Zuckerkandl, Victor
On Mimesis
35.3 (1984)
Zuckerman, Elliott
The Magic Fire and the Magic Flute
What is the Question?
21.1 (1969)
25.1 (1973)
28
�Memorial Service for Jacob Klein (remarks)
Don Alfonso (poem)
Black and White; Arrival; Sixteen Eighteen; With Örjan
At the Great Japan Exhibition (poems)
Beyond the First Hundred Years: Some Remarks
on the Significance of Tristan
Cordelia (poem)
Passage (poem)
Self-Portraits
Sartorial (poem)
Two Translations of La Fontaine
(La Cigale et la fourni; Le Corbeau et le renard)
Another Fable of La Fontaine
Editor’s Preface to Issue: “St. John’s Forever”
The Music of Gilbert and the Wit of Sullivan
A Note on Ibsen and Wagner
Three Poems (At One Sitting; Saga; Lost and Found)
Words Should Be Hard (poem)
Introduction to Issue: “Essays in Honor of David Lachterman”
One Man’s Meter
A Handbook That Provides No Help:
William Packard’s A Poet’s Dictionary (review)
Dedicatory Toast: The Opening of the Greenfield Library
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen (comments)
Where the Poet Lives; Early Pupil; She and the Tree; Outlay (poems)
Falstaff and Cleopatra
To the New Recruits (poem)
The Love Song of the Agoraphobic (poem)
The Second Sense (poem)
Two Poems (Not Twins; Carrying Cordelia) (poem)
Tercet (poem)
30.2 (1979)
34.1 (1982-83)
34.2 (1983)
35.1 (1984)
35.1 (1984)
35.3 (1984)
36.1 (1985)
36.2 (1985)
38.1 (1988)
38.2 (1988)
40.2 (1990-91)
40.3 (1990-91)
41.1 (1991-92)
41.2 (1992)
42.1 (1993)
42.2 (1994)
42.3 (1994)
43.2 (1996)
43.3 (1996)
48.2 (2005)
48.2 (2005)
52.1 (2010)
53.1 (2011)
53.2 (2012)
55.2 (2014)
56.1 (2014)
56.2 (2015)
29
�
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 57.1 (Fall 2015)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
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Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
World Without Time ..............................................................1
Eva Brann
Dwelling in the Land of the Confessions..........................................15
Michael Brogan
“In Want of a Wife”—or a Husband—in Pride and Prejudice.........33
Susan Paalman
“Please, Don’t Eat the Swans”: My Revolution in Romania............56
Louis Petrich
Dante’s Beatrice: Between Idolatry and Iconoclasm........................84
Gabriel Pihas
Poem
THE EXTINCTION of SPECIES...................................................117
Marlene Benjamin
Reviews
Education and the Art of Writing
Book Review of Christopher Bruell’s Aristotle as Teacher:
His Introduction to a Philosophic Science ..............................120
James Carey
Book Review of Eva Brann’s Unwilling: An Inquiry into the Rise
of the Will’s Power and an Attempt to Undo It ............................149
Matthew Linck
��ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
1
World Without Time
Eva Brann
Here is a theory of time. It is neither new to me nor new in the
world. I formulated it for publication in 1999* and had it
formulated for me, so I could make it my own, sixteen hundred
years ago by Augustine in 399 C.E. and some three quarters of a
millennium before that by Aristotle, post-335 B.C.E. There is a
certain advantage in revisiting old thoughts, although they have
become second-nature and have lost the footloose feel of thinking
that is yet on the path to discovery: these long-held notions have
also sloughed off some of their complexity and are more
amenable to summary.
The theory is, first, that time is not a being, a thing, or a
substance in the world, nor does it operate as a power, a force,
or a destiny in our life. It has no external existence, and all speech
attributing reality to it is unwittingly metonymic, meaning that
the word “time” is used by a sort of obtuse poetry for processes
that have better names of their own.
The theory has a second element, namely that it would be a
better world, and we would be better off, if more people thought
that time was unreal and spoke accordingly.
Before closing in on the gist of this theory, I want to
acknowledge an intelligent resistance that a listener might feel
arising within. If you have a notion proposed to you as true and
are immediately told that it is also beneficial, shouldn’t you rear
up and resist as a matter of principle? Don’t we keep ourselves
honest by tinting our glasses grey? Isn’t a truth that comes
Eva Brann is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was delivered at the Symposium on Time held
at Belmont University in Nashville, TN on September 23, 2014.
*Eva Brann, What Then Is Time? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1999.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
embellished with utility very suspect? Of course it is, because it
might be nothing but a Pollyannaish optimism, a self-pleasing
thoughtless this-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds” optimism.
What I’ll be proposing has behind it a sense that demands more
reflection. I call it “ontological optimism.” Ontology is the
account of being. The very notion of Being requires a
complement: Appearance. The true Being of which true
philosophers strive to give an account comes to our attention as
opposed to what only appears or is merely incidental. The two
greatest philosophers of classical antiquity, Plato and Aristotle,
were ontological optimists. They do not in the least think that
everything within this world is always for the best, but they do
think that its sources, be they at work from beyond or within, are
wonderfully good and therefore attractive to our knowledgehungry souls.
I’ve briefly set out a reason for not foreclosing on a proposed
truth because it is beneficial to believe it – although in the later
history of inquiry into the nature of things there will be those who
make pessimism – a sense that things are as bad as possible – the
test of truthfulness, because the way things are is in truth ugly.
To deal with this split in the human sense of the world requires a
lifetime’s conversation. For now, I’ll posit a guarded optimism.
There is a second misgiving that a canny listener might have:
Does every truth want announcing? Shouldn’t prudent people
suppress some parts of what they feel compelled to believe? I’ll
give an example with major consequences. Our Declaration of
Independence claims that “all men are created equal” in respect
to “certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.” Just read Lincoln’s speech on the Dred
Scott Decision (1857) for his sense – a true believer’s sense – of
the vulnerability of the document’s basic assertions, assumptions
that have by now become even more questionable for us. For the
Declaration grounds our equality in a common divine Creation,
and that is no longer a faith to be taken for granted. Is the
questionableness of the ultimate equality of human beings, then,
a proper subject for public inquiry? Not on your life – not in
principle and surely even less in fact. Some topics have to be left
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
alone if we’re to live together. When you hear some of my claims
about time you might wonder if time isn’t such a topic.
Of course, I’m speaking tongue-in-cheek, precisely because
I think that a public reflection on the reality of time might lead
to a revision of some current mantras which seem to me humanly
deleterious, whereas the doctrine of equality seems to me
humanly beneficial. And also, in all candor, because the kind of
ontological reflection I mean to put before you is in fact very
unlikely to be of major consequence to the world – though I share
with all speakers at academic symposia a secret desire to be
dangerous.
So I’ll barge on, telling first what time is not, and then what
it is insofar as it is anything, and finally why an affirmation of
its unreality, of a world without time, is advantageous to life.
First, What time is not: Look into the world and try to detect
time. Our environment is full of time-telling, but the thing told
is never in evidence. David Hume’s consequence-laden
observation was that we never actually see a cause, only a
constant conjunction of events. So also with time: We never
observe it, only changes in space. Time is told either by location
in space or by counting in . . . what? Wouldn’t the natural
completion of that phrase be “counting in time?” That’s circular,
to be sure, though in fundamental thinking circularities are often
revealing, because they display ultimate involvements. In this
case how we catch something bears on what it is.
Second, then, What time is: Basically time-instruments are
in the analogue mode. Timaeus, in the Platonic dialogue named
after him, says that what we call time is “a certain movable image
of eternity . . . an eternal image going according to number” (37d
ff.). Time is an “image of,” or is analogous to, eternity because it
is everlasting and has neither beginning nor end. It is a mere
image because it appears as change, and so it doesn’t achieve the
undifferentiated nowness of eternity; it is movable as traversing
circular distances. Its generating and telling instruments are the
visible heavenly bodies. In other words, the heavens both are and
tell the time of the world; they are both cosmic time that goes on
forever and a heavenly clock that needs no rewinding. The
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
watches most of us wear on our wrists are in turn made in the
heavens’ image; they are analogues of the circular motion of the
sun (as it appears to us) or of the earth (as Copernican theory
persuades us). Whether the time-piece is cosmic or miniscule, it
tells time by an indicator, sometimes a heavenly body, sometimes
“a hand” moving over a portion of a circle’s circumference. So
even a little ladies’ watch is an analogue of the cosmos. There
are also in our day digital time-pieces that involve counting and
will open a can of worms. I will speak of them later. One
difference between analogue and digital clocks comes across in
a preference for the round watchface as expressed by a friend of
mine who said: “I want to know what time it is, but I also like to
see what time it isn’t.” Analogue watches tell time in terms of
the everlasting revolutions of the heavens together with the
conventional divisions of the human day.
Aristotle picks up on the “going” of the image “according to
number” – or so it seems, when we read Book 4 (chaps. 10-14)
of his Physics (which contains his account of time) in
juxtaposition with the Timaeus. Probably he clued it out himself.
In any case, he puts motion together with number to spectacular
effect – the first instance I know of in any writing of time being
effectively undone as a something. He doesn’t say: “I’m first; this
is a conceptual revolution.” He would much rather make his
thinking persuasive by presenting it as a tweaking of thoughtful
predecessors. Yet, in brief, he has discovered that time is
incidental to change. And since he thinks that all change is at
bottom locomotion (chap. 7.7), this means that time is attendant
on motion from place to place. Moreover, this motion is
numerable. For although it is continuous, it is divisible into even
measures at any of the points of the trajectory of a mobile object.
Every motion, of course, implies a moving object which
generates, one might say, a path, whose diagram is an open or
closed orbital trajectory. Then time is the counted collection of
all the measured linear units: 12 (EST), for example, is the
counted number of dial-measures in which the sun reaches high
noon, the zenith of its orbit, from a fixed starting point opposite.
Or 13 (years) is the number of the sun’s yearly circuits on the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
ecliptic, the day after which a young Jew is said to be a man. For
motion to be thus countable, it needs to have a recognizable
“before and after”: here before, here now, here thereafter. Thus
Aristotle defines time in this way: “Time is the number of motion
with respect to before and after.”
Here, we might think, Aristotle has gotten himself into deep
trouble. “Before and after” are, after all, primarily time-words:
past and future divided by a non-time, a span-less, point-like
“now.” Thus rewritten, “Time is the number of motion counted
according to the progress of time” doesn’t sound very helpful.
But Aristotle has a perfect defense: For him every motion that is
not violently unnatural is a development of potentiality from
implicitness to fulfillment. Therefore every motion – sublunar
ones that begin and end and heavenly motions that never cease –
every single motion has discernible phases even before time is
brought in. So “before and after” can indeed be pre-temporal, as
are the implicit stages of a development.
But there is a more serious stumbling block, and I will make
a gift of my book on time to anyone who removes it for me in
Aristotle’s terms. He emphasizes that time is the counted number,
not the counting number (4.2). So if I say “twelve o’clock high”
I mean the twelve counted path-segments of the sun’s motion,
not my counting thereof. But Aristotle is also quite clear about
the fact that there can be no counted number without a counting
consciousness. (Aristotle, of course, says “soul,” and so should
I, though the word is at present proscribed, and “consciousness”
is de rigueur, I think principally because it is from Latin and has
three syllables and seems less naïve than “soul,” which is from
good Old English and has but one.)
So the counted motion, which is time, requires a counting
soul. Here is the problem: The counting soul does not just beat
with a steady pulse: one, one, one. . . . That’s what the digital
watch does, thereby electronically causing a prescribed series of
numbers to appear on a spatially moving dial. The soul actually
recalls the pulses accumulated. Its numbering is ordinal: first,
second, third. It saves bygone pulses in their order and projects
future ones, and it is present, here now, at each moment of
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
counting. But if it is counted motion that is time, then the
counting soul is pre-temporal. What then is the substrate of its
serially ordered activity? Aristotle, in making time external and
incidental, something that is found in nature only as a mere
measure, has also made human counting an enigma. What name
shall we give the psychic development that directs ordered,
ordinal, counting?
One reason why Aristotle has effectively reduced time to
nothing in itself is that it is in its conceptual structure dramatically
unlike its representational analogue, the linear path, the
visualizable trace, of a mobile object. The time-line segment
before the now, called “the past,” is gone, erased; the future time
path is not yet and invisible; the now is analogous to a point
which has, as Euclid says, no parts and “in” which nothing can
exist. If you cast yourself into time, you’re done for; there is no
time span in which to exist – though plenty of spatial extension
in which to move.
Here’s an interesting addendum to the Aristotelian difficulty.
It is taken up and solved more than two millennia later in his own
terms by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1787) – not the
enigma of existence, namely, what span time’s “no-longer” and
“not-yet” leave for us to be in – but time’s particular relation to
counting. Recall that Kant thinks that all our experiences, whatever
appears to us in an eventually apprehensible way, already comes
directly formatted temporally and spatially. But this forming frame
is, so to speak, amorphous and beneath awareness. It needs to be
brought together (in Greek, “synthesized”) with thinking, with the
understanding. Kant assigns to the imagination the mysterious
work of joining intuition and understanding, distinctionless time
and a determinating concept. Kant thinks that this latter is the
concept of quantity, and that when intuited time is made
determinate by quantity, counting is the result. The way I put it to
myself is this: Time makes its appearance in consciousness by a
kind of pulsing that is a now-counting: now1, now2, now3 . . . , or
one, two, three. . . . This analysis seems to me true to experience.
Sheer temporal awareness seems to be a kind of pure enumeration
of beats – it may actually be our heart-beat felt as a pulse, the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
throbbing of our arteries following the pumping of the heart. What
makes a span of time, time lived through, is having laid up that
cardinal count in memory, where it becomes ordinal: first beat,
second beat, third beat. Thus the mere beating turns into a first,
second, third moment of remembered past.
So Kant solves the problem by bringing time totally within
the consciousness of a “subject,” that is, a thinking I. Time is not
soul-numbered motion entering into the world from outside, but
number itself arises as a conceptualizing of intuitional time
within the subject. But then, so does everything within the reach
of our comprehension arise within me, the subject; this
elucidation of time is bought at the price of near-total subjectivity.
Moreover, the deep origin of time as a form of our sensibility,
though in us as subjects, is not for us as knower: The grounds of
the possibility of our experiential knowledge are not within our
experience. Thus one might say that for Kant, too, aboriginal time
is a non-being, not a knowable something – that inferred ghost
which he calls a noumenon.
Third, What time is insofar as it is anything: So I’ll leap back
through the ages to Augustine, who seems to me the greatest
phenomenologist of time, that is, the finest observer of the
internal experience we have of it, and the first analyst of its
elements.
That is not just my opinion. The most comprehensive and
acute work on time in modernity that I know of, Husserl’s On the
Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1893-1917), is
essentially an acknowledged elaboration of Augustine’s own
answer in the Confessions to his famous phrasing of the enigma
of time: “What, then, is time? If nobody asks me, I know; if I
want to explain it to someone who asks, I don’t know” (10.14).
Augustine allows that we all know time as an experience,
sometimes an acutely and deliciously painful one: Here’s
Shakespeare, Augustine’s rival in time-consciousness:
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu. (Sonnet 57)
Who among us has not spent a world-without-end hour sitting
by the telephone? Who is not acquainted with the swift “time’s up”
of dense experience, short in felt duration, long in remembrance,
or the dragging “are we done yet?” of bored disengagement, endless
as a happening but miniscule in memory? Or the brute standing still
of time in pain? Or the relative pace of experienced time that
Rosalind describes in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell
you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal,
who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.
(3.2, 299-302).
That’s the experience described – but now to the experience
explained. How does it arise? Here is Augustine’s answer, which
I’ll frame as a diagram for you to envision.
Imagine a horizontal line of indefinite length. It represents
all the world’s simultaneous motions, its goings-on, from the
stars’ revolutions to the mosquitos’ dartings. For Augustine, the
Christian, the line must have a beginning, Creation, and an end,
Judgment Day. In God’s omnisciently comprehensive sight it is
all there at once. But human beings experience it as an extension.
Imagine a second vertical line, best drawn orthogonal to the world
line, and moving along with it. The moving point of crossing is
an “origin.” It represents our mind, existing now, in contact with
the world and borne along by its motion. So it is not really a
mathematical point but a living moment in a moving world. Later
writers, beguiled by Aristotle’s analogy of the temporal now to
the spatial point of no extent, will see the need to call it the
“specious present.” But it is not a specious – that is, pretend –
present, at all, but a real psychic event, albeit a mystery.
Where then in this diagram is past and future? The vertical
line represents, as I said, the mind. And the mind has, as Augustine
puts it, distentio – its lengthening, its existence, its longitude, we
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
might say. Diagrammatically, it extends above and below its
origin, its moment of existence, its contact with the world. The
part of the vertical below the moment of existence in the present
world represents a build-up of memory-moments, deeper and
deeper in the soul, lower and lower on the upright.
Next, all the moments of memory are connectible by parallel
oblique lines to the world line that the mind has traversed. If we
imagine the forward motion of world and human being
progressing toward the right, then the world line to the left of the
origin represents motions and events left behind in the past, and
each of our true memories down on the “distention” of mind
connects to, projects on, a receding point to the left part of the
world’s motion line. Of course, scrambled connections (crossed
projections) and false memories (wandering projections) can
occur. That is how we have a past; the past is a stack of nows
now in our distended minds – and all one now in God’s collected
mind.
Likewise with the future: Think of it as all the plans and
expectations, further and further away from the present, rising
upward on the upper half of the mind’s line and projectible by
parallel-oblique lines onto the future motions of the world.
That there is in fact a past, though for us only partially and
only indirectly recoverable and real only in memory, is common
belief; whether there is in fact a real future and how our plans
and expectations bear on it is a great theological problem – in
fact, the problem of free will. But this much Augustine shows
clearly and, I think, truly. He says that we must speak of “a
present of bygones, a present of presences, a presence of future
things” (11.2), and continues: “For some such there are in the
soul, and I do not see them elsewhere. The present of things gone
is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of
things future is expectation” (11.20, 28). In my words, time is
entirely the effect of memory and expectation. Insofar as time is
anything, it is a so-called epiphenomenon, an idle, ineffective
affect supervening on the real operations of memory and
expectation.
But no – “idle” is an inadequate word for our potent sense of
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time, which is to be understood as our sense of our mind’s
longitude, its present lengthening into the before and after of the
now of our existence – and of course that fact underwrites,
overwrites, potently affects our life.
So now I can zero in on a sense of time that seems to me both
spurious and deleterious. It is time not as an internal enlargement
of existence but as an external being or force. Continuous time,
thought of as being in the world, may be conceived as a
continuous stream bearing things along, an absolutely primal,
equable flow (of what? we may ask) that is unaffected by
anything else in the world; this is Newton’s absolute time
(Principia [1686], First Scholium). You may even hear it, as
Shakespeare (once again) makes Hamlet speak of one who “only
got the tune of time,” a hum conveying its “most fond and
winnowed opinions” (5.2, 183). You may figure it as a linear,
open-ended, unbounded mere going-on, or as a closed, everrepetitive, bounded cycle. In these metaphors, the laws of motion
apply indifferently whether time is run forwards or backwards.
Or you may imagine the continuous temporal substrate as
directed by a forward arrow, a principle of unidirectional change
or development that prohibits reversal. This sort of time is not,
one might say, “when-neutral”; you might call it change in the
abstract, or the substrate of embodied change. In all these forms,
some sort of quasi-event or pseudo-motion is imagined as
continuous.
The other metaphor, the second figurative way of imagining
time is, on the other hand, continual: The now, the present,
continually divides the stream of time into gone-by and not-yetarrived, into past and future. Thus time breaks into a lost past and
a not-yet-gained future around a continually new-event-now. This
new-now nullifies the past as living; it leaves the passed-away
past, so to speak, set in stone. It is, quixotically, both hard-andfast and intangible: You can’t change it – or so they say. It is
indeed, often literally, set in stone; for instance, epigraphy is the
discipline of deciphering inscriptions, often found on marbles.
Its watchword is saxa loquuntur, “the stones speak.” But does
that really mean you can’t change it?
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For consider that these testimonials are not past, not in the
past. They are in the present, and we must make of them what
we can – or will. This curious circumstance, that the past is real
only in the present, might be thought of as the incarnation of the
memory that Augustine calls “the present of things gone.” You
can see that a thoughtful consideration of the past opens a can of
worms. What is memory, the storage house of time-expired
presences? How invulnerable to change is the memorial past?
What about that secondary, often public, memory that is built up
from present testimonials of past events? What is more
changeable than the past – perhaps even transformable into the
present?
But this can of worms is replaced by a bucket of serpents
when it comes to the future. For who would doubt that except for
a God-inspired prophet, no one can have the future in mind? The
future, by the very meaning we attach to it, cannot provide us
with any testimonials; it hasn’t happened. All we have are our
hopeful or fearful expectations, dim intimations of blessings or
harms to come, and uncertain conjectures, projections of our past
experiences embellished with change-vectors, their rates and
directions of change, and, above all, an impetenetrability made
less or more pliable by our weak or resolute will. The will is the
human force whose very name announces future-directedness,
by means of which we take hold in our minds of the yet-to-be
and try to bring it about in the world to our satisfaction. To be
sure, we may make vivid pictures of the future, but closer
examinations will show that they are, depending on our mood,
imaginary recollections from a golden age, or over-the-top
distortions of present trends. But they are not images of originals
that reside over there in the future – for there’s no there there.
Fourth, and finally: World without time: You can probably
tell from my tone, that my desire to cancel time has much to do
with the damage that can be done to us by the notion of a real
future. Let me now enumerate three elements of a theory that
presents time as unreal in the world, as not thing-like, not forcelike – a theory by now surely exposed as part of a program of
resistance to certain ways of life. Then I will complete my talk
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by fleshing out briefly these refusals to cooperate with “time.”
So then, my three recalcitrances: (a) to the past as passed away,
bygone; (b) to the present as mere passage, transition; (c) to the
future as an imperative power.
(a) Insofar as the past is the span of time behind us, if time is
something real, those spans are really dead, and their relics are
mummies, either to be carefully prepared, with ointments of
honey or baths of vinegar, to live the museum life of the
embalmed departed, or to be discarded upon that notorious
rubbish heap of history as no longer “relevant” to our time, the
present. Thus, for those of a venerating temperament, the past
becomes a silent tomb near which they sit rigidly in worship. For
others, whose dispositions long for change, the past is a spent
force, a deadweight on their innovative energy. To neither party
is the past, if it is anything, the time-proof treasury that houses
all our inheritance of thought and imagination, once human
memory has reluctantly let go of what is too delicate, or
cheerfully chucked out what is too trashy, for prolonged life. But
how the past is properly present to us is a tricky and timely
subject for another day. So much can be said in a sentence:
Unless we want to cut ourselves out of humanity’s will and
remove ourselves as beneficiaries of its estate, we had better give
up thinking of the past as having a date of expiration.
(b) Those who feel the past as a march of obsolescence are
in fact consigning their personal present to mere transition. For
the life-principle of obsolescence is innovation, and innovation
is not the heart-stopping or mind-boggling perpetual newness of
an imagination-arousing work or a truth-revealing theory or a
potent device. Newness is ever-fresh and invulnerable to obsolescence, because it is not a mere time-marker, a mere date-stamp,
on the work of art or on the discovery of an explanation, or on
the invention of a contrivance. Newness is rather inherent to these
wonders insofar as they break into the ordinary course of ongoing life and enhance or redirect it. Time cannot stale its infinite
variety.
Innovation, on the other hand, is systematic, intentional novelty,
willful newness. In the innovative mindset (this is a derogatory
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term: fully alive people don’t have mind-sets), small novel
differences often trump great solid worth. People succumb to the
persuasion that “we live in a time of change,” giving to time an
independent power, as if it were an accelerator that puts life in
overdrive without the need of my foot on the figurative pedal –
a vehicle racing through each present to the next, a car in need
of a factory recall. Otherwise put: People accept that they live in
“a time of . . .” and that it is prudent to “get with it,” to clue out
what this time-tyrant commands and to do it – in our case, to
treat each moment of life as just a bridge to the next novelty. But
there is no such time-potentate. There are only people willing to
go along – not, to be sure, with the non-existent times, but with
what each person thinks the others think, or whither his or her
option-dissipated likes weakly tend. What a humanly actual
present – I am tempted to say, a time-less present – might be,
what, in short, it means actually to exist, is, once again, worth a
long conversation.
(c) So then, finally, the future, the chief and least existent
venue of real time. You all know the vocabulary of futurepossessed people. Some say: “The future is here” – really absurd
speech; if it’s here it’s too late. They might have meant: Be
proactive! Clue out what is coming and preempt or prevent it.
The original meaning of “prevent” was “go before,” as in the
Psalm 18, in which David is fearfully imagining: “The sorrows
of death compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.”
He means “came before me, confronted, me” (18, 5). In that
sense, the anticipation of the future, in literally “foregoing” it,
also “prevents” it; it forecloses the future. Human beings are
surely entitled, even required, to prevent the future in the sense
that by anticipating their version of it they’ll bring it about or
keep it from happening – as long as they understand that they are
going towards something, an “it,” that is not there to meet them.
How we think about our plans makes a great difference: whether
we justify our intentions as accepting, managing, and yes,
serving, what is coming at us in the false, even craven, belief
that there is a real future; or whether we, believing the Future
(capital F) to be a false reification, a confusion between an
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abstraction and a reality, make ourselves think now, in our
present, about what is best and most desirable and also humanly
possible – and then do that.
And, once again, there is endlessly more to say about the
future. But instead of pursuing it, I will end with this observation:
Being future-recalcitrant is the very opposite of being reactionary,
for the non-existence of the future – or at least our ineradicable
ignorance of it – is the very condition of our practical freedom.
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Dwelling in the Land
of the Confessions
Michael Brogan
It’s surprising that a lover of wisdom should lavish as much attention on the particulars of his own life as Augustine does in the
Confessions. While any number of philosophers before him had
sought to live by the maxim inscribed in Apollo’s temple at Delphi—gnōthi seauton, know thyself—none known to me had
taken this as a directive to reflect on the contingencies of his own
biography, let alone publish his thoughts on such intimate matters
as a vexed relationship with his mother, a childish loathing of
school, a troubled sexual history, or an enduring tendency to
overindulge at the dinner table. In the Phaedo, Plato does have
Socrates recount how he lost his youthful enthusiasm for the
study of nature (96a-100a), but in their exclusive attention to the
evolution of his philosophical orientation, these autobiographical
remarks hardly compare with the astonishingly inclusive narrative of a sinner’s wandering path to God that Augustine gives us
in the Confessions. Socrates, his account of his “second sailing”
notwithstanding, lives out the Delphic command not by brooding
over his individual history or unique identity but by enlisting dialogue partners in a collaborative search for the truth of those experiences potentially shared by us all in virtue of our common
humanity. To oversimplify a bit, he’s interested not so much in
who he is as in what he is, not in this individual man called
Socrates but in what it means to be a human being in general.
Even more pronounced is the contrast between Augustine
and Plotinus, the thinker who perhaps exercised a greater influence on him than any other pagan writer. The Neoplatonist’s disregard for merely individual selfhood is memorably captured in
the testimony of his disciple Porphyry, who writes that “Plotinus,
Michael Brogan is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
This lecture was first delivered on November 22, 2013.
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the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in
the body. So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never
be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace.”1 No mere quirk of temperament, this reticence is governed by Plotinus’s overriding ambition to identify completely
with the incorporeal intellect in its capacity for timeless contemplation of the divine One. It’s this aspiration that motivates his
refusal to share even the bare facts surrounding his origins as an
embodied self.
For all that he owes to the self-effacing Platonic sage, however, Augustine himself has no qualms about directing his gaze
and ours to the particular circumstances and events of his unique,
unrepeatable, and still-unfolding life. Quite to the contrary, he
writes in the confident hope, reiterated at several key points in the
Confessions, that by reflecting on that life, seeking out the narrative threads that bind it into a unity, he and his readers might be
drawn ever closer to the eternal, divine truth. But how does a lover
of wisdom—one, moreover, as indebted to Neoplatonism as Augustine acknowledges himself to be—arrive at a hope like this
one? How is it that he comes to see his embodied, time-bound existence as no mere image to be forgotten as quickly as possible in
the ascent to its divine original but as something worthy of the
most serious and sustained attention?
Now, one approach to the question immediately comes to
mind. As an orthodox Christian believer, the author of the Confessions fully accepts the doctrine of the Word made flesh. God
himself, on this account, took on all the characteristic features of
human finitude: he was born of a particular woman at a particular
time and place, spoke a particular language, practiced a particular
religion, lived in relationship to particular human others—we
could extend forever this list of “accidents” that individuate the
incarnate beings that we ourselves are and that Christians believe
God in Jesus became. While some of these properties and rela1. Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His
Work,” in Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (New York:
Penguin, 1991), cii.
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tionships are undoubtedly less important than others, who are we
to scorn the whole lot of them if God himself has deigned to take
them on? Who are we to be “ashamed of being in the body” if the
Creator of all things, of corporeal substances no less than of the
spiritual, saw nothing shameful in becoming incarnate? If the humanity of Jesus Christ, indeed his very flesh and blood, is indispensable to our salvation, shouldn’t we at least have second
thoughts about renouncing our own humanity, or attempting to locate it exclusively in a disembodied intellect that manages to shed
the burdens of finitude?
But of course these are very big “ifs”— too big, I think, for a
community like ours whose conversation appeals to no higher authority than natural reason. While Augustine believes he can find
in the writings of the Neoplatonists themselves the doctrine of the
Word that was with God and that was God, not even he claims to
apprehend the incarnation of that Word on any basis other than
faith. My ambition tonight is to see how far we can go toward
making sense of the intensely personal approach of the Confessions without appealing to postulates drawn from sacred doctrine.
While I suspect that Augustine’s unprecedented way of applying
the Delphic maxim becomes fully intelligible only against the
background of his specifically Christian commitments, we might
nevertheless begin to understand the peculiar strategy he employs
in the Confessions by considering the deficiencies that come to
light there of a philosophy conducted in a wholly impersonal key.
However dazzling a glimpse it may afford of the eternal truth,
Neoplatonic introspection, we shall see, fails to open out onto
what Augustine calls “the way that leads not only to beholding
our blessed fatherland but also to dwelling therein” (7.20.26).2
PART I
Before examining their limitations, however, I want to begin by
briefly considering why the “books of the Platonists” (7.9.13)
2. All Augustine quotations are from The Confessions of St. Augustine,
trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960).
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were attractive to Augustine in the first place. His study of them
comes directly on the heels of his disillusionment with the
Manicheism he had been espousing for the better part of a
decade. Disheartened by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy
he has found even among the elite members of that sect, he has
also come to reject their sharply dualistic vision of good and evil
as coeternal principles locked in cosmic combat. Such a view, he
concludes, is irreconcilable with his dawning certainty that God
must be beyond all change, corruption, or violation. Nothing can
harm a divinity worthy of the name, and this means that God
could have no compelling reason to engage in battle with eternal
forces of darkness. In fact, such forces are no more than the figments of an overheated mythic imagination: for together with
being immutable, God is by nature infinite; it makes no sense,
therefore, to posit a reality that would constrain in any way his
power to implement his perfectly good will.
With his Manichean convictions thus in tatters, Augustine
finds himself not so much freed as unmoored, drifting toward a
radical skepticism that, for all its philosophical plausibility, can’t
possibly quiet the clamor of his restless heart. It is in this state
that he becomes newly open to the possibility of reconciling with
the Catholic Christianity in which his mother attempted to raise
him, an orthodox faith which, largely due to Bishop Ambrose’s
brilliant preaching on the allegorical sense of the Old Testament,
he has ceased to disdain as the bastion of simple-minded literalism. He realizes, for example, that our being in God’s image need
not entail that he be confined to a body like ours, as the Manichees
had mocked the Catholics for allegedly believing. At this stage,
however, Augustine finds he can do no better than replace such
anthropomorphism with a less crude but no less materialist notion
of God, now imagined as a subtle body extended throughout infinite space, permeating and exceeding a created world conceived
on the analogy of a sponge submerged in a vast sea (7.5.7). To
think in this way, he realizes, commits him to the absurd view
that an elephant, for example, must contain more of the divine
presence than a sparrow, yet he remains frustratingly unable to
understand God or anything else in nonmaterial terms. He writes:
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“Whatever was not extended over, or diffused throughout, or
compacted into, or projected up to definite measures of space, or
did not or could not receive something of this kind, I thought to
be completely non-existent” (7.1.2).
It’s this crucial error that the books of the Platonists enable
him to overcome, not simply by introducing him to an impressive
theory of incorporeal being but by showing him a path leading
to nothing less than a direct experience of the purely spiritual,
first within his own soul and ultimately in the divine being itself.
Taught to shun the external and direct his gaze inward, he eventually catches sight of what he calls the “unchangeable light”
above the mind. After ascending beyond bodies and the power
to perceive them and onto the soul’s rational faculty of judgment,
he says that in realizing its own mutability, this reasoning power
raised itself up to its own understanding. It removed its
thought from the tyranny of habit, and withdrew itself
from the throngs of contradictory phantasms. In this way
it might find that light by which it was sprinkled, when
it cried out, that beyond all doubt the immutable must be
preferred to the mutable. Hence it might come to know
this immutable being, for unless it could know it in some
way, it could no wise have set it with certainty above the
mutable. Thus in a flash of its trembling sight it came to
that which is. Then indeed I clearly saw your “invisible
things, understood by the things which are made” (7.17.23).
Many of you will no doubt recognize the final sentence here
as a citation from Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:20). By quoting
Scripture, however, Augustine does not mean to imply any essential difference between the experience he is recounting and
the one described by Plotinus and his disciples. As in the writings
of those philosophers, the inward turn of Confessions 7 corresponds to a movement away from absorbed attention to the particularities of the material world and toward the timeless,
intellectual contemplation of the “unchangeable light” at the
source of all finite things. That eternal light is one and the same
for Plotinus as for Paul, for Augustine as for you or me. If our
highest good is indeed to gaze upon it, it’s understandable that a
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thinker like Plotinus would regard attending to those things that
differentiate us individuals, the temporal accidents of birth and
biography, as at best a distraction from our true calling. In the famous treatise known as “On Beauty,” Plotinus insists that what
we ought to be doing is chipping away like sculptors at everything exterior to the eternal light within us. “Do you see yourself,
abiding within yourself, in pure solitude?” he asks.
Does nothing now remain to shatter that interior unity, nor
anything external cling to your authentic self? Are you entirely that sole true light which is not contained by space,
not confined to any circumscribed form . . . ? Do you see
yourself in this state? Then you have become vision itself.
Be of good heart. Remaining here you have ascended aloft.
You need a guide no longer. Strain and see.3
But what if “straining” isn’t enough? What if “remaining
here” proves too difficult? For all the serene confidence that
marks Plotinus’s writings, even he and his disciples sometimes
seem to acknowledge the impossibility of simply willing the soul
to arrive at and persist in its transcendent vision. Porphyry, for
instance, claims to have had the experience just once, in his sixtyeighth year,4 and while Plotinus says that for him “it has happened often,”5 he also characterizes it as something that comes
“suddenly” (exaiphnēs)6 upon a soul that is all too quickly sent
back down into the comparative dullness of mere discursive reason.7 Now, I suppose it’s possible (thought personally I doubt it)
that if Augustine had experienced nothing worse than this inevitable slide from nous to dianoia, from pure contemplating to
the difficult labor of thinking things through, and if, moreover,
he had found some way to reconcile the suddenness of the introspective vision with Plotinus’s confidence in the sufficiency of
3. Enneads 1.6.9, in The Essential Plotinus, trans. Elmer O’Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett , 1964 ), 43-44.
4. Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus,” cxxii.
5. Enneads 4.8.1.
6. Enneads 6.7.34.
7. Enneads 4.8.6.
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effort (“straining”) to bring it about, he just might have remained
content with what the books of the Platonists were able teach
him. But as he recounts in such compelling detail in the Confessions, his rapturous and reassuring vision of the unchangeable
light is followed almost immediately by a plunge back into currents of temptation that prove to be just as irresistible as they had
been before. No transformation of his life ensues, no conversion
or reorientation of his misbegotten aims and ambitions follows
upon the ecstatic experience that liberates his mind. “I was borne
up to you by your beauty,” he confesses, “but soon I was borne
down from you by my own weight, and with groaning, I plunged
into the midst of lower things” (7.17.23). In other words, the
tyranny of habit reasserts itself immediately, and he succumbs to
old patterns of feeling and acting despite seeing them more
clearly than ever as obstacles in the way of his deepest desire.
The good he approves unreservedly in his mind he fails to pursue
with an undivided heart; unable to do what he wants, he does the
very things he hates.
How depressing! Wouldn’t we like to think that even a pale
approximation of a vision like the one Augustine reports would
have a profound effect on the way we live our lives? Wouldn’t it
be easy to love the truth and to do it if we were only certain what
the truth was? But this is just the sort of comforting illusion that
Augustine indulged in until his ecstatic vision deprived him of
what he calls “that former excuse, in which I used to look upon
myself as unable to despise the world and to serve you because
knowledge of the truth was still uncertain to me” (8.5.11). Now,
approaching thirty years of age, he has attained the certainty he’s
long been seeking, and yet he discovers that he is just as enthralled
to his old, enervating habits as he ever was. Able to see the truth,
he still cannot draw near enough to bask in its radiance.
If we are at all persuaded of the authenticity of his testimony—influenced, perhaps, by an uncomfortable awareness of
our own failures to translate insight into action, to do the truth
we know—we have reason to wonder whether any mere vision,
however dazzling, can set us on the sure path to the good. Understanding alone is perhaps not enough to overturn long-settled
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habits of self-indulgence, indolence, and despair, no matter how
irrefutable the evidence becomes that these are precisely what
keeps us from the happiness we seek. To use one of Augustine’s
favorite images, it’s as if we can become enchained to ways of
life we know to be toxic to our souls. He writes:
For in truth lust is made out of a perverse will, and when
lust is served, it becomes habit, and when habit is not
resisted, it becomes necessity. By such links, joined one
to another, as it were—for this reason I have called it a
chain—a harsh bondage held me fast. A new will, which
had begun within me, to wish freely to worship you and
find joy in you, O God, the sole sure delight, was not
yet able to overcome that prior will, grown strong with
age (8.5.10).
Now, we call “habits” those dispositions to feeling and action
that come to be in us as a result of repetition. What we do habitually we do not because nature compels us or reason convinces
us but simply because we have done likewise in similar situations
time and again in the past. Here’s a trivial example. I’m in the
habit of drinking a cup of coffee first thing every morning. I don’t
remember making a deliberate choice to start doing this, but if
ever I did, it must have been a long time ago: at this point in my
life, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that deliberate choice
of any kind becomes possible for me only after I’ve had that first
cup. I suppose if I were to summon my inner resources I could
manage to break a chain now thousands of links long by choosing
to have tea tomorrow instead. After all, it’s not my nature that
determines me to drink coffee, as it is, say, the stone’s nature that
causes it to fall or the fire’s that makes it rise, but merely my
long-settled habit—a practice become second nature, so to speak.
But might there be situations in which this is a distinction
without any practical difference, occasions when second nature
constrains no less than first and habit takes on the character of
compulsion? For Augustine there were, and we need not have
suffered from any of the conventionally recognized “addictions,”
I think, to identify with his experience of habit as an iron chain
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holding him back from goods he has to come to perceive with
incontestable clarity.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that, unlike
those powers that are in us by nature (e.g., sense perception), the
potencies for which precede our exercise of them, the virtues of
character are like physical or technical abilities in that they come
to be in us only after we have been engaged in the activities associated with them (1103a25f). We become capable of courage,
for example, only by repeatedly doing courageous things, meaning those things the already courageous person does, just as we
become harpists by repeatedly practicing the harp under the tutelage of an accomplished player. As we grow more accustomed
to being at work in them, these activities become easier for us,
more pleasant, we could even say, more “natural” to us.
Unfortunately, though, this is at least as true, and probably
more so, of bad actions as it is of good: as Augustine knew all
too well, a past defined by repeated indulgence in any kind of
excess or deficiency can make a future characterized by strength
of will or self-control, let alone full-fledged virtue, appear entirely out of reach. How I conduct myself today seems largely
determined by what I did yesterday, even when the memory of
this recent past fills me with shame and regret over having acted
otherwise than I knew I should.
I want to turn now to Augustine’s analysis of time to see what
light it might shed on this indebtedness or even enslavement of
the present to the past, and also on the shape that a rehabilitated
future might ultimately take. My hope is that doing this will bring
us a step closer to our goal of understanding the significance of
Augustine’s autobiographical turn in the Confessions.
PART II
Though it would take all night (at least) to do justice to his fascinating and intricate meditation, the basic paradox of time Augustine identifies in Book 11 can be expressed in a few words. It
seems, he observes, that the present is the only time that actually
exists, since whatever the future is, it is not yet, and the past is
no longer. Upon scrutiny, however, the present itself turns out to
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look like nothing more than an extension-less boundary between
those two nonentities, the past and the future. “It flies with such
speed from the future into the past,” Augustine says, “that it cannot
be extended by even a trifling amount” (11.15.20). Hemmed in as
it is on both sides by nonbeing, the reality of the duration-less present itself falls under serious suspicion. Here is Augustine again:
[I]f the present were always present, and would not
pass into the past, it would no longer be time, but eternity. Therefore, if the present, so as to be time, must
be so constituted that it passes into the past, how can
we say that it is, since the cause of its being is the fact
that it will cease to be? (1.14.17, emphasis added.)
Thus it appears that neither the future, nor the past, nor even,
now, the present has a sure hold on being: future and past are not,
and the present is only in so far as it ceases to be. But Augustine
is unwilling to conclude from this that time is mere illusion.
Should we decide that it exists only in a secondary or derivative
sense—a kind of moving image of eternity, as the Timaeus has
it—it nevertheless remains too fundamental to our lived experience, and our ways of talking about that experience, simply to
deny its reality altogether. The task is to try to understand what
time is, if not in itself then at least as it is for us. What we can
say for sure, Augustine thinks, is that the past and future depend
for their being on the present; they “do not exist except as present
things” (11.18.23), he says. It seems no less true, however, that
the present itself cannot be apart from the past and the future, for
what else could provide the present the “space” it needs to extend
beyond the length-less and breadth-less instant that exists, if it
exists at all, only by rushing headlong into non-being?
Characteristically, Augustine looks within himself for a way
beyond the impasse. It’s there, in the soul or the mind, that future
and past things acquire a kind of presence (and therefore being),
as correlates of the mind’s acts of expectation and memory, respectively. It’s also there that present things achieve stability by
being held in attention, an act of the mind that articulates itself
beyond the point-like instant by looking back to a beginning and
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forward to an anticipated end. Whereas on initial reflection time
had seemed to vanish into the nothingness of a not-yet-existent
future, a no-longer-existent past, and a perpetually self-destructing
present, its claim to at least relative being can now be redeemed
so long as we’re willing to pay the price of acknowledging its dependence on the mind’s own activity. The three times, Augustine
says, “are in the soul . . . the present of things past is in memory;
the present of things present is in intuition; the present of things
future is in expectation” (11.20.26). Taken as a whole, time can
thus be described as a “distention of the mind” (distentio animi)
(11.26.33), a stretching or swelling of present consciousness
backward into a remembered past and forward into an anticipated future.
While it’s certainly possible to distinguish memory, expectation, and intuition or attention as three separate acts of the mind,
Augustine’s analysis makes clear that to do this would be to engage in a kind of abstraction. For in our lived experience of
things, memory, expectation, and attention form a single, continuous whole. The mind, he says, “looks forward, it considers, it
remembers, so the reality to which it looks forward passes
through what it considers into what it remembers” (11.28.37). To
illustrate this dynamic, he reflects on the experience of reciting
a psalm he knows by heart. Once he’s formed the intention to recite and is about to carry it out, the psalm, or rather, his recitation
of it, is one of the “things future,” which is to say, it exists for
the mind in the mode of expectation. The ray of consciousness is
pointed forward, so to speak, casting its light over the whole
psalm as something to be brought out into the open as an audible
presence. As the recitation proceeds, the stock of expectation decreases in proportion to memory’s increase, until, having reached
his proposed end, the speaker falls silent and the psalm in its entirety exists by way of its resonance in the recollecting minds of
its hearers.
What happens between the beginning and the end of this
process, namely, the ongoing transferal of expectation’s funds
into the account of memory, corresponds to present time in its
more expansive, non-instantaneous conception. The act of the
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mind responsible for this making present Augustine variously
calls “intuition” (contuitus), “attention” (attentio), and “intention” (intentio). Present consciousness, we come to understand,
doesn’t just passively register a now that arises only to perish (or,
more accurately, arises only by perishing); on the contrary, the
attending or, better, the intending mind plays an active part in the
unfolding of temporal events, as both Augustine’s heavy reliance
on words with tendo—stretch out—at their root, as well as his
pregnant choice of the recitation example powerfully suggest.
About that recitation, Augustine writes:
The life of this action of mine is distended into memory
by reason of the part I have spoken and into forethought
(expectatio) by reason of the part I am about to speak. But
attention (attentio) is actually present and that which was
to be is borne along by it so as to become past (11.28.37,
emphasis added).
It’s worth hearing that again: what was to be is “borne along”
by attention into the past. The Latin verb here is traicitur, a passive
form of traicio, which could also be rendered as “transports” or “conveys.” It combines the preposition trans—“across” or “along”—with
the root verb iacio, meaning “throw,” so we might think of attention as the act of throwing an expected future into a recalled past.
The sense of this would be to emphasize how time for Augustine
is not merely something that we suffer but is also, perhaps even
primarily, something that we ourselves do. It’s hard to know how
to say this: the mind constitutes, enacts, unfolds, or perhaps lives
time, in the transitive sense of an expression like “living one’s
life.” But whatever verb we finally settle on, the crucial thing to
grasp is that the soul itself makes an indispensable contribution
to the experience or even the very being of time in shouldering
an expected future and bearing it along into a recalled past.
If the full significance of this activity does not come entirely
to light in Augustine’s psalm example, what he says toward the
end of Book 11 leaves no doubt about the ultimately moral horizon of his analysis. After describing the temporal process by
which the action of reciting the psalm reaches completion, he as-
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serts that “[t]he same thing holds for a man’s entire life, the parts
of which are all the man’s actions” (11.28.38). (In fact, the scope
can be widened even further to take in all of history, the “whole
age of the sons of men,” though I’ll keep our focus for now on
the life of the individual.) Just as I look ahead in expectation to
the psalm I am about to recite, so too do I project a practical or
moral future for myself, setting about in the present on the task
of converting into a happy memory what is now only an aspiration to act in accordance with my conception of the good. In this
way, “that which was to be is borne along” into the past.
Of course, there are many ways for our moral intentions to
misfire. However completely he comes to rely on God’s grace,
Augustine remains sensitive to the constant vigilance, the intense daily effort required of him if he is to fulfill his divinely
reordered aims. Readers of Book 10 of the Confessions know
that his baptism did not render him immune to the temptation of
taking it easy, of allowing himself to be swept up by the rushing
current of the merely instantaneous now instead of rising to the
challenge of actively living time, that is, of anticipating a virtuous future and then undertaking the arduous task of carrying it
through the present and into the past. “I am a burden to myself”
(10.28.39), he writes, vividly evoking his sense of this labor, the
obligation imposed on us imperfect, temporal creatures not to
while away the time but to strive, with God’s help, to close the
gap between what we are now and what we are called to be.
The difficulty of that task, as our discussion of habit has prepared us to see, seems to be directly proportional to the distance
separating what we will to become from what we have already
been. In other words, the more radically the future we project
for ourselves departs from the past we recall, the harder it is to
bear that future successfully into the present. In the hopes of
deepening our understanding of this phenomenon, let’s return
once more to Augustine’s recitation example. Forming the intention to say the whole psalm from beginning to end involves
calling it up to the forefront of his mind from out of what in
Book 10 he had called “the great cave of memory” (10.8.13).
Only because he has already learned it by heart at some point in
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the past can he now look forward to reciting it in the present.
And this suggests, if the example is as paradigmatic of all temporal experience as I believe Augustine means it to be, that anticipation is itself grounded in recollection, in other words, that
the projected future “borne along” by a present intention is first
assembled by the soul from materials drawn from its past. Augustine makes the point more explicitly in Book 10. Within the
memory, he says,
I encounter myself and recall myself, and what, and
when, and where I did some deed, and how I was affected when I did it. There are all those things which I
remember either as experienced by me or as taken on
trust from others. From that same abundant stock, also,
I combine one and another of the likenesses of things,
whether things actually known by experience or those
believed in from those I have experienced, with things
past, and from them I meditate upon future actions,
events, and hopes, and all these again as though they
were actually present. “I will do this or that,” I say to
myself within that vast recess of my mind, filled with
images, so many and so great, and this deed or that then
follows (10.8.14, emphasis added).
What this passage allows us to see, I think, is that temporal
life, or the activity of living time, is marked by a kind of circularity. In proposing a course of action to myself, I cannot but
rely upon the “abundant stock” of past experiences, either my
own or those attested by others and found credible to the extent
that they are consistent with my own. In other words, before the
anticipated future can be borne along into the remembered past,
the past must first be launched forward into the future as the indispensable material out of which the soul shapes its expectation. Now, this is not to say that in acting in the world we only
ever repeat ourselves, or that the wheel of lived time rotates
around a fixed point. Augustine mentions here that as he deliberates he “combine[s] . . . the likenesses of things” drawn up
from memory, thereby suggesting that the soul enjoys at least
some degree of creative freedom in its activity of conceiving for
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itself a future as something other than an exact replica of its past.
But it’s still no use pretending that a path of total novelty is ever
open to us; the future is inescapably indebted to the past, expectation inevitably takes its stand on the ground of memory.
It’s not hard to grasp that this poses a grave threat to the possibility of the deep and abiding transformation the young Augustine came to recognize as his only hope for happiness. For if
my memory teems with images of a life fundamentally inimical
to the good; if the virtuous examples of others seem too remote
from my experience to be plausible or even attractive models
for me; and if the claims of the philosophers to offer an escape
from time and all its woes have proved too good to be true, then
my desire for the happy life, no matter how firmly rooted in a
clear vision of its reality and goodness, seems fated to go unfulfilled. In their essentially timeless character, transcendent moments of insight, like those Augustine attains by way of
Neoplatonic introspection, are essentially cut off from memory
and expectation, mere interruptions of the circuit of lived temporality. As such, they remain no more than isolated points of
light, like individual stars in a vast night sky—beautiful, to be
sure, but virtually powerless to illuminate the ground beneath
our feet as we stumble along in search of the way that leads not
only to beholding but to dwelling in the land of our desire
(7.20.26; 7.21.27).
Augustine opens a window onto the potentially ruinous dependence of expectation on memory in recounting a conversation he had with himself a few years before his final decision to
seek baptism. Approaching the age of thirty, he looks back with
chagrin at all the time that has passed since his teenage reading
of Cicero’s Hortensius first set him on fire with the love of wisdom. The bitter anxieties and disappointments of those dozen
years have left him more convinced than ever of the futility of a
life given over to worldly ambition. His disillusionment with the
rationalist pretensions of the Manichees and his deepening admiration for the philosophically sophisticated preaching of Ambrose have inclined him, as he puts it, to “fix my feet on that
step where my parents placed me as a child” (6.11.18). He’s
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going to do it, he really means it this time, he’s going to put away
what he calls his “vain and empty concerns” by committing himself fully once and for all to the Catholic Church. Just not yet.
“[T]ime passed,” he says,
and still I delayed to be converted to the Lord . . . I loved
the happy life, but I feared to find it in your abode, and I
fled from it, even as I sought it. I thought that I would be
too wretched, if I were kept from a woman’s arms. I did
not believe that the cure for this disease lay in your
mercy, for I had had no experience with that cure. I believed that continence lay within a man’s own powers,
and such powers I was not conscious of within myself
(6.11.20).
Notice what’s holding him back. Though he has long suspected that the cares imposed by married life are for him incompatible with the spiritual freedom he desperately desires, he also
knows himself well enough to realize that he lacks the strength
to live without the comforts afforded by sexual intimacy. In the
terms of his metaphor, he suffers from a “disease” whose symptoms he knows how to treat but whose cure, he has learned, lies
completely outside his own power to effect. Whether or not we
think it makes sense to diagnose as an illness his inability to commit to celibacy, with a little imagination most of us will be able
relate to Augustine’s predicament here. He knows exactly what
it would take for him to be happy, but bitter experience has convinced him that he’s just not up to the task. Nothing he finds in
the spacious caverns of his memory allows him to envision for
himself a life of genuine health, and without the means to palliate
the symptoms of his disease, he fears that taking up residence in
“God’s abode” would serve only to increase his misery. Thus he
shrinks back from the decisive step, without, however, being able
to resign himself to a future as fatalistically determined by the
past as his own seems certain to be.
Perhaps there is little we can reasonably say about the causes
of Augustine’s ultimate escape from this desperate situation, at
least if we want to keep open the possibility that it was indeed
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God’s grace that finally set him free. I think we can conclude,
though, that whatever it was that finally lifted the terrible burden
from his soul in that Milan garden, the experience he describes
as “a peaceful light streaming into my heart” (8.12.29) would
have been every bit as isolated and ineffectual as his Plotinian
visions of the eternal truth turned out to be had it not become
possible for him to discern the underlying continuity of his past
life of unhappy wandering with the baptized future he was finally
empowered to project for himself. For as his analysis of time has
shown us, to the extent that the present remains divorced from
the past that precedes it, it cannot but have the character of the
instant that is only by ceasing to be, the point-like now that suddenly—exaiphnēs—emerges out of nothingness only to vanish
again just as suddenly. From such an instant, however charged
with divine presence it might be, nothing of lasting, practical significance is likely to follow—nothing more consequential, at any
rate, than the sort of wistful memory and infinite, impotent yearning that threatened to consume Augustine in the wake of his disappointing experiments in Neoplatonic ascent.
In concluding, then, I want to suggest that Augustine’s passionately personal reflection on the events leading up to his final
conversion is intended to recall and thereby reinforce the vital
links between the future opened up to him on that momentous
day in Milan and even the darkest periods of his youthful estrangement from himself and from his God. Though his conversion undoubtedly marks a new beginning, even a kind of rebirth,
it succeeds in doing what impersonal introspection had failed to
do because Augustine is enabled to see it as the culmination of a
process that had begun in him long before. The call he finally answers in deciding to seek baptism is the very same call that had
never ceased resounding in his heart, even when he was desperately trying to drown it out in the frantic pursuit of sensual pleasure, emotional and intellectual titillation, and worldly success. In
looking back on his past, he comes to see that in the anxiety, disappointment, and doubt that marred his life of secular striving,
God himself had been calling him home:
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You were always present to aid me, merciful in your
anger, and charging with the greatest bitterness and disgust all my unlawful pleasures, so that I might seek after
pleasure that was free from disgust, to the end that, when
I could find it, it would be in none but you, Lord, in none
but you. For you fashion sorrow into a lesson to us. You
smite so that you may heal. You slay us, so that we may
not die apart from you (2.2.4).
Augustine meditates on his past in the Confessions to learn
again this lesson of sorrow, which is also, paradoxically, a lesson
of great hope. From out of the caves of his memory he no longer
draws up the despair-inducing confirmation of his own weakness
that had paralyzed him as a young man, but the liberating assurance that God had always been with him, even in the depths of
his sin. Recollections of events in which that divine presence now
seems unmistakable nourish his expectations of future assistance,
giving him the strength to stand firm against present temptation
in the confidence that his conversion will turn out to have been
the decisive event of his life, and not a mere prelude to another
aborted attempt or humiliating failure to change his ways.
But as his unsparing assessment of his present condition
vividly demonstrates, he knows that nothing is guaranteed. To be
sure, conversion to the truth for him comes as a gift, but that
gift—perhaps like all gifts—is profoundly difficult for a creature
with a long history of proud self-assertion to receive. Ever present
is the temptation to refuse or return it in the fatal conviction, born
of pride and despair, that there is no genuine good beyond what
we can obtain for ourselves. The books of the Platonists did nothing to disabuse Augustine of this error. “Strain and see,” they told
him, at once puffing him up by preaching the sufficiency of effort, and casting him down by showing him no more than the way
to behold the blessed country when his heart’s desire was to dwell
therein. The way beyond beholding is a way of humility, and Augustine’s searingly honest examination of his life is his attempt
to walk it.
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“In Want of a Wife”—or a Husband—
in Pride and Prejudice
Susan Paalman
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” (51) This
witty opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is
justly well known. The high minded tone of “a truth universally
acknowledged” at the beginning sets up the reader for the prosaic
punchline “must be in want of a wife.” The wit lies in the author’s
tacit acceptance of the universality of human self interest and the
power of that interest to skew what people see to fit their own
desires. People take an interest in another person’s fortune, the
implication seems to be, and in trying to get a piece of it for themselves, in this case through marriage. But rather than acknowledging openly this universal desire for wealth, the world seems
determined to reinterpret its own greed as the fulfilling of the rich
man’s need. The single man of fortune thus becomes the putative
prey for some unmarried woman and her family under the guise
of supplying him with that which he lacks: a wife.
The general implications of the opening sentence are made
particular in the rest of chapter one, which introduces us to Mr.
and Mrs. Bennet. The business of Mrs. Bennet’s life, we are told,
is to get her five daughters married. (7) She is unrelentingly determined in this goal, in large part, as we later learn, because her
daughters will inherit very little from their father, due to an entailed will. As the Bennets discuss Mr. Bingley, newly arrived in
the neighborhood and the “single man” in question, it becomes
clear that Mrs. Bennet cares little for whether Mr. Bingley feels
Susan Paalman is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
This lecture was first delivered on 17 April 2015.
1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations and page numbers are taken from
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Books, 1996).
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he lacks a wife, and cares much about securing him and his fortune for one of her daughters. She is not the only mother to partake in this type of self interested plotting. We are told that she
and the other mothers in the neighborhood consider Bingley the
“rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” (5)
Bingley, single and possessing a fortune, is seen as someone
else’s property himself, as the means to the end of worldly prosperity for some daughter or other. Bingley’s money is to be in
large part the source of happiness for the prospective wife.
Witty as the first sentence of the novel is, there is another way
to read it. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man
in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” (5) If
we take this sentence at face value, it says that everyone understands that the single man’s life is incomplete, that once he has
met his material needs, he must then be looking to meet some
other kind of need, one that can only be filled by a wife. What
sort of a need this might be is left unsaid. In fact, from one perspective, the rest of the novel is an exploration of what the individual lacks, and what each character is looking for in a mate.
We are offered a parade of couples throughout the novel, each
couple having a different basis for formation. They fare better or
worse depending on the wisdom and affections of the people involved.
Both the witty and the direct reading of the opening sentence
fit with the tone of the novel as a whole. On the one hand, Austen
relishes exposing the small-minded follies that often underlie our
lofty aspirations. The humor and economy of word that begin the
novel reappear on every page, often highlighting the ways in
which characters deceive themselves or try to pretend they are
better than they are. On the other hand, Austen gives us some
deeply moving scenes, from Elizabeth’s horrified response to the
knowledge that she has misjudged Darcy and Wickham both, to
Mr. Bennet’s heartfelt plea to Elizabeth not to repeat his own mistake in marrying without esteem, to Darcy’s pure delight when
Elizabeth finally accepts him. The wit and the seriousness succeed one another effortlessly. Perhaps, addressing the question
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of what the individual lacks and what one may desire or need
from a marriage requires both attitudes: both the skewering of
the conceits and follies of human nature and the sincere acknowledgment of our best instincts and our need for one another.
In the main couple of the story, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr.
Bingley’s friend, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Austen depicts characters
who come to know their own weaknesses and find strength
through each other. They endure misunderstanding, miscommunication, and doubt, before finally marrying at the end of the
novel. We are meant to believe that their marriage will be one of
lasting happiness; one in which the needs of each are met, and
met well. Furthermore, we are meant to take joy and pleasure in
the reading of Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s story. But before examining Elizabeth and Darcy any further, let’s take a quick inventory
of some of the other couples in the novel.
The Bennets
Our first view of marriage comes from the Bennets, parents to
Elizabeth Bennet as well as four other girls, including Jane, Elizabeth’s older sister and confidante. The Bennets came to be married, we are told, because of Mr. Bennet’s love of Mrs. Bennet’s
beauty. His desire to live in the presence of physical beauty was
of the first importance to him, and he made the error as a young
man of assuming that her beauty came with a good nature and a
good temper. He was sadly mistaken. Once he realized his mistake, “all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown.”
(198) He was left in a marriage with a foolish and irritable
woman he could not respect, and she was left with a man who
does not love her. Unlike many, Mr. Bennet is wise enough to
avoid the many vices available to unhappy people, but takes
pleasure in his books, in the countryside, and, as depicted in
many scenes in the novel, by teasing his wife almost without
mercy. The more amusement he derives from her gullibility and
lack of understanding, the sillier she gets, until he eventually
grows tired of the game and retreats to his study. The reader too
is amused by their interactions; Austen writes their dialogue with
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a fine ear for the drily comic. As the novel progresses, though, it
becomes clear that there is something perverse about the pleasure
Mr. Bennet takes in his wife’s weakness of mind, and something
frustrating about Mrs. Bennet’s complete inability to understand
him. As a couple, they bring out the worst in each other. Still,
they have five daughters whom both seem to care for. The Bennets have at least found themselves in a stable home with a family, something neither could have produced alone.
The Collinses
The first new marriage in the novel comes after Elizabeth’s closest friend, Charlotte Lucas, becomes engaged to Elizabeth’s
cousin, Mr. Collins, within three days of his having proposed
marriage to, and been rejected by, Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth’s
shock when she learns of Charlotte’s engagement is only exceeded by her dismay at the match. Mr. Collins is a man of the
cloth with a vicarage that is supported by a weathy noble woman,
Lady Catherine. In some ways, he would be considered a very
eligible man. Elizabeth’s rejection of him is based on his character, which is not vicious, but is marked by self serving foolishness. Mr. Collins is “not a sensible man,” (60) we are told, but a
“mixture of pride and obsequiousness, self importance and humility.” (61) Austen plays up his character, detailing a number of
long, pompous, and silly speeches he makes on various occasions, including during his unsuccessful proposal to Elizabeth.
After suffering through and laughing at Mr. Collins and his
speeches, the reader is tempted to agree with Elizabeth that for
Charlotte to link herself to such a man is disgraceful. Elizabeth
is convinced that Charlotte will not be happy in the marriage.
(109) Charlotte, though, sees it differently. She desires “only a
comfortable home,” (108) she says to Elizabeth. Charlotte is
older and less attractive than Elizabeth; her options for a decent
life are limited, she believes. Marriage is the “only honorable
provision for well educated women of small fortune,” and Charlotte sees it as the “pleasantest preservation from want.” (106)
Mr. Collins, as painfully foolish as he is, will give her sustenance
and power in the world, as a man of consequence.
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For his part, Mr. Collins is responding mostly to duty. As a
clergyman with a wealthy and aristocratic patroness, he wishes
to set a good example for his flock, as well as find happiness in
a mate. His rhapsodes on Lady Catherine’s virtues leave no
doubt, though, that his main motive in marrying is to please his
patroness.
In the Collinses, we have a marriage made on social and
worldly grounds: on Charlotte’s side out of her desire for financial independence and on Collins’ out of his duty to his provider.
After their marriage, Elizabeth is forced to admit that both husband and wife are tolerably happy. Collins has married “one of
the very few sensible women who would have accepted him, or
have made him happy if they had,” (152) she says. Charlotte is
intelligent enough to blush at her husband’s foolishness at times,
but knows how to manage him. We are told, “[Charlotte’s] home
and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their
dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.” (182) Those
are ominous words, perhaps, leading the reader to imagine the
time when the charms have worn off and she is left with such a
husband. We can only hope Charlotte’s children will favor her
more than him, and that she will find whatever companionship
she desires with them.
The Wickhams
The marriage of Mr. George Wickham and Elizabeth’s youngest
sister, Miss Lydia Bennet, comes towards the end of the novel,
after a great deal of suspense. The two had run off together as an
unmarried couple, and taken a lodging together in London. The
crisis of the novel comes when their elopement is discovered and
the Bennets are left to worry while others search out the couple
and persuade them to marry. The persuasion comes in the form
of money and a bought commission in the army for Wickham.
Later, it is revealed that the bribe was financed by Mr. Darcy, out
of several motives, including his own guilt in having covered up
Wickham’s nefarious past. It is interesting that nearly everyone
involved in the matter assumes, on the one hand, that Wickham
and Lydia, once they run off together, must marry; and on the
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other hand, that the marriage will not be a happy one. It was socially unacceptable for a young woman to engage in sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage, and reprehensible for a
young man to seduce such a woman. Once Lydia and Wickham
are assumed to have so engaged, the only course that would retain
their social standing is marriage.
Darcy and Elizabeth, separately, are the only ones to doubt
the wisdom of having Lydia and Wickham marry. Darcy, in fact,
first tries to persuade Lydia not to marry Wickham, and only
works towards their marriage once Lydia convinces him that she
will not leave Wickham. (268) Elizabeth, for her part, expresses
grave misgivings about the match. It is clear to Elizabeth that a
marriage founded upon undisciplined passion will not be a happy
one. Later, the narrator confirms her misgivings by noting the
disarray with which the Wickhams live their lives and the indifference to each other that soon pervades their marriage.
Each of these three marriages was formed with the intention
of addressing some kind of human need or desire: The Bennets’
marriage was formed out of the desire for beauty and fulfilled
the need to procreate; the Collinses looked for financial stability
and social standing and fulfilled social obligations; and the Wickhams married to further Lydia’s desire for importance and to facilitate socially sanctioned sex. With these marriages in mind, let
us turn now to the main drama and involving Mr. Darcy and Miss
Elizabeth Bennet.
Part I: First Encounters and First Impressions
Elizabeth and Darcy do not start off as a likely couple. Their first
encounter is at a neighborhood ball when Darcy, speaking to his
friend Bingley within Elizabeth’s hearing, rejects Elizabeth as a
dance partner, with the stinging and memorable line, “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” (12) Elizabeth
laughs at Darcy to her friends afterwards, repeating the story with
gusto and resolving never to dance with him. Over the next few
weeks, her umbrage at the insult hardens into a profound dislike
based on his proud demeanor. The dislike later turns to something
closer to disgust and hatred when she is told, by the charming
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and attractive Mr. Wickham, that Darcy had denied Wickham his
rightful inheritance from Darcy’s father, out of the ignoble motive
of jealousy.
Darcy, after a brief time of studying Elizabeth for the petty
exercise of emphasizing her imperfections to his friends, soon
begins to find her intriguing. He notices her intelligent expression, graceful and energetic figure, and playful manners. (21-22)
Erotic desire has been ignited: he cannot keep his eyes off her
without an effort. (63) Darcy is not a man to let his passions run
away with him, though. He begins a systematic investigation into
Elizabeth’s character that goes on for several weeks. He starts by
listening in on her conversations with others and continues with
a series of conversations with Elizabeth herself on matters that
range from love poetry, to the duties of friendship, to what it
means for a woman to be accomplished. Darcy, we are told, “had
never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her.” (46)
Nonetheless, Darcy does not entertain seriously the thought of
marrying Elizabeth at first, because of her relatively low family
connections.
In the response of each to the other, we can discover something of their characters. In Elizabeth’s laughter at Darcy’s insult
to her, we see the value she places on a person’s character above
his worldly status, since she is by no means overawed by Darcy’s
wealth and high social standing. We also, though, see her readiness to laugh at the ridiculous in people, a trait she shares with
her father and one that leads her to have a sharp tongue and something of a sarcastic wit. In her concern for Wickham’s claims
against Darcy, we see her spirited allegiance to justice and kindness. On the other hand, her easy willingness to believe Wickham
without evidence comes from her excessive pride in her ability
to read people: her initial dislike of Darcy is confirmed by Wickham’s accusations and Elizabeth never really doubts that they are
true. We learn later, of course, that Wickham is a liar.
In Darcy, we first see his lack of natural amiability. His refusal to dance when attending a ball and his insulting speech
about Elizabeth, made to Bingley, but clearly within her hearing
and just after he had caught her eye, reveal both a clumsy shyness
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and a prideful disdain for the opinions of others. In his investigation into Elizabeth’s character, though, we see the importance
he places on her substance. Her looks attract him only after he
notices her intelligence and liveliness. The manner and content
of her conversation are what bewitch him. He is very willing to
revise his initial disdainful opinion of her upon further observation. We see Darcy’s pride at work also in his refusal to consider
the possibility of marrying Elizabeth because of her lack of high
social connections. Darcy, as we find out later, was orphaned at
the age of twenty three, and left in charge of fulfilling the Darcy
family’s duties, which are substantial indeed. He takes pride in
his role as the provider of livelihoods, order, and moral example
to the people of Derbyshire.
Darcy reveals his commitment to his family pride in a conversation with Elizabeth, early in the novel. When she comments,
with tongue in cheek, that Darcy must be without any of the usual
follies and nonsense that she is used to laughing at in others,
Darcy responds:
“Perhaps that is not possible for anyone. But it has
been the study of my life to avoid those weaknesses
which often expose a strong understanding to ridicule.”
[Elizabeth replied,] “Such as vanity and pride.”
“Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride – where
there is real superiority of mind, pride will be always
under good regulation.”
Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile. (50)
Darcy, as we see, has “made it the study of [his] life” to eradicate any weakness of character that would make him appear
ridiculous in the eyes of others. His statement indicates the seriousness of his commitment to upholding the honor of the family
name. It also reveals his focus on maintaining the appearance of
strength in the eyes of the world. The difference between avoiding weakness of character for the sake of living a good life and
avoiding it in order that one does not appear ridiculous might not
sound substantial, but it is this same mistake in understanding
that leads Darcy to deny that pride might be a weakness. Darcy,
in pursuing strength of character for the sake of his pride, has
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blinded himself to the potential pitfalls of that same pride. In his
blindness, he has allowed his pride free rein, so that it has outgrown the bounds of a healthy regard for self and family and become excessive to the point that, as the narrator tells us, he “was
continually giving offense,” wherever he appeared. (16) Elizabeth, with her clear sight for the folly of others, immediately sees
and smiles at Darcy’s own self deception that has fostered his excessive pride.
Later in that same conversation, Darcy confesses that he tends
to be resentful of the faults of others, saying, “My good opinion,
once lost, is lost forever.” Elizabeth agrees, with perhaps too
much enthusiasm, that, “Implacable resentment is a shade in a
character.” Darcy responds:
“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency
to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even
the best education can overcome.”
“And your defect is a propensity to hate everyone.”
“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is willfully to
misunderstand them.” (51)
Here we have, in a nutshell, Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s analysis
of each others’ faults. Darcy’s self described resentful temper
grates against Elizabeth’s amiability. Her severe irritation at his
complacency about such a fault comes out in her hyperbole: he
has a propensity to hate everyone, she says. Darcy then immediately identifies Elizabeth’s own characteristic fault: that of willfully misunderstanding people.
Darcy and Elizabeth both are under the illusion that their understanding and intellect have led them to lives of rationality and
virtue. Both are deceiving themselves. Darcy is committed to a
path of upholding the family name, but foolishly allows his pride
to bloat into a sense of superiority, telling himself that he has it
under good “regulation”. Elizabeth sees his mistake clearly, but
doesn’t see properly where his pride comes from. She trusts her
ability to analyze people too completely, and comes to believe
her own hyperbolic statement that Darcy is a hateful man, even
while Darcy is falling in love with her. Darcy sees that Elizabeth
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has misunderstood him, but completely misses the extent of her
dislike for him. He seems incapable of seeing the effect his disdainful manners have on others. Their pride and their prejudice
deceive both characters into forming partly true, partly false images of the other that are dependent on their partly true, partly
false images of their own characters.
Neither Elizabeth nor Darcy has the perspective to see clearly
the extent of his or her own faults and mistakes in judgment. Because their own faults are so tied to their image of each other, the
key to knowledge of their defects of character thus lies in each
seeing the truth about the other. But they will never see each other
more clearly without a closer acquaintance than has yet been possible. Darcy’s passion for Elizabeth provides the means for mutual revelation when he finally proposes marriage to Elizabeth.
Part II: The Proposal
By coincidence, on the day Darcy finally proposes, Elizabeth had
just learned from Darcy’s cousin that Darcy had been the primary
force for separating his friend Mr. Bingley, the single man of
good fortune mentioned in the first chapter of the novel, from
Elizabeth’s sister Jane, who loves Bingley. Elizabeth, who has
been in some anguish over Jane’s loss of her beau, is overcome
with anger and distress that Darcy could have had the temerity
to separate the couple, and the coldness of heart to brag about it
to his cousin. Darcy picks this unhappy moment to visit her and
at last tell her plainly what he thinks of her and propose marriage.
In the struggle between his commitment to his family pride and
his attraction to Elizabeth, attraction has won. Pride has not been
completely defeated, though. He proposes with the clear expectation that Elizabeth will accept him, and amid his protestations
of love, Darcy explains also his sense of the degradation it would
be for him to marry someone with such poor connections as Elizabeth. His sense of his superiority is alive and well.
To Darcy’s shock, Elizabeth rejects his proposal. In the following conversation, charged with the barely controlled anger of
both parties, Elizabeth articulates her dislike of Darcy. She levels
two charges at him, her reasons for rejecting his offer. First, he
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has been the means of separating her beloved sister Jane from
the man Jane loves, Mr. Bingley. Second, Elizabeth repeats the
story she had heard from Mr. Wickham, that Darcy had mistreated Wickham by withholding from him the legacy of Darcy’s
father.
Finally, when Darcy continues to press the matter, Elizabeth
articulates her feelings, and in doing so, levels her third charge
at him: “from the first moment, I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for
the feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of
disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I
felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever
be prevailed upon to marry.” (164) Darcy, finally understanding
fully her feelings towards him, can only retreat in haste.
Elizabeth cannot tolerate the sort of pride that would consider another human being degraded, simply because of that
person’s station in life. So far, Elizabeth has heard nothing to
change her opinion that Mr. Darcy suffers from this, the “worst
kind of pride.” (159) She still believes that she is right in her
characterization of him and so is ignorant of her own self deception until Mr. Darcy gives her a letter, the next morning,
containing all the things he could not manage to say to Elizabeth in the moment of her rejection of him the day before. It
provides a defense against the charges that he improperly separated Jane and Bingley and that he mistreated Wickham.
(Darcy makes no mention of the third charge Elizabeth leveled
at him, of his chronic disdain for others that laid the groundwork for her dislike of him.) As Elizabeth reads the sordid truth
about Wickham’s mistreatment of Darcy and his attempted seduction of Darcy’s sister, she cannot at first believe it. Eventually, after weighing the evidence, she must admit that Wickham
has lied to her. “Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror
oppressed her,” (173) we are told. The horror must be from
learning how easily Wickham manipulated her, as well as how
thoroughly she has misjudged Darcy. Her extreme reaction re-
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veals just how wedded she is to living a virtuous life. “Till this
moment I never knew myself,” (176) she cries.
Though we don’t hear from the narrator about Darcy’s response to his encounter with Elizabeth and the disastrous proposal, the letter itself gives us a clue. It starts bitterly enough, but
once he starts to write of Wickham, the love Darcy’s father had
for him, Wickham’s profligacy, and his attempted seduction of
Darcy’s sister Georgiana, the writing changes tone to become
more confiding and at times almost tender. Darcy has never revealed this story to anyone who was not involved in the mess already. He shows his bedrock trust of Elizabeth’s character in
giving her this explosive information, but he also shows his continuing care for her. “Here again I shall give you pain,” he writes,
“to what degree only you can tell. But whatever can be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham has created, a suspicion of their nature
shall not prevent me from unfolding his real character. It adds even
another motive.” (169) Darcy believes that Wickham has won
Elizabeth’s heart, at least to some degree. Aside from any jealousy
he may feel, he really does not want her to be taken in by Wickham, as his beloved sister was, almost to her ruin, and as his father
was, until the day of his death. Towards the end of the letter, he
justifies Elizabeth, writing that as she knew neither he nor Wickham before, and as she has a trusting nature, it is understandable
that she would believe Wickham rather than himself. Finally,
Darcy ends the letter with what Elizabeth later calls “charity itself”
(307): “I will only add, God bless you.” (172) Darcy, less than a
day after being humiliated by Elizabeth, is already moving towards forgiveness of her for her unjust accusations. Whether he
is moving towards better self-knowledge remains to be seen.
For Elizabeth, once she comes to terms with the contents of
the letter, she too has changed in her analysis of Darcy. She still
does not approve of Darcy; he has not at all answered her third
charge of his selfish disdain for others. She thinks that he cannot
answer this charge, that his coldness is ingrained in his temperament, and she cannot have any affection for such a man. Still, she
can no longer hate him, and can feel the compliment he has given
her in his love for her.
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Thus, the proposal scene and the letter that follows contain a
strange kind of antagonistic intimacy, as both characters reveal
themselves to the other and experience the shock of encountering
the truth about the other, and thus the truth about their own weaknesses and mistakes. In the context of the spectacular mismatch
of their feelings for each other, they are presented with the choice
of whether to hold on to their incorrect assumptions or to learn
from the encounter.
Darcy, does not simply discount Elizabeth’s rejection as a
sign of her own smallness of mind (as another character, Mr.
Collins, does earlier in the novel, when rejected by Elizabeth).
Rather, he accepts it as the result of a rational woman’s account
of how his character appears to her. Elizabeth, rather than disbelieve Darcy’s account of the Wickham affair in favor of continuing to believe in her judgment of Wickham and Darcy both,
weighs the evidence rationally and comes to decide that Darcy
must have told her the truth. Both Elizabeth and Darcy are at root
honest people; the truth holds more power for them than their
self-regard. Had this been the end of the novel, they would both
have been better off in the increase of their own self-knowledge.
In other words, the solution to the problem of how to see one’s
own faults clearly, while it may require another human being to
interact with, does not seem to require marriage to that person.
Only, in this case at least, a botched proposal.
One can imagine, under other circumstances perhaps, a philosophical friendship developing between Darcy and Elizabeth,
in the way Socrates describes to Callicles in the Gorgias. As
Socrates says, “the person who intends to put his soul to an adequate test, to see whether it lives rightly or not,” must have
“knowledge, good will, and frankness.”2 Socrates expresses
the luck he feels in having found an interlocutor in Callicles
who exhibits these three qualities, since he, Socrates, thinks
Callicles will help him to discover when he has hit upon something true, specifically regarding the best way of life. Though
it is not clear from the dialogue whether Callicles does, in fact,
2. Donald J. Zeyl, Gorgias (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 58.
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have these attributes, it makes some sense that a couple who did
exhibit knowledge, good will, and frankness towards each other
in the pursuit of a better way of life would be in a position to help
each other. As we have seen, both Elizabeth and Darcy have
shown an interest in living rightly. Both have some knowledge
and have proved themselves to be frank with each other. What
would remain is for each to develop good will towards the other.
Such a friendship could be very productive for them. It would
not require marriage, but one could do worse than to marry such
a friend. One could argue that the Bennets, Collinses, and Wickhams all made worse choices than this in their own marriages.
Elizabeth and Darcy do not go this route, though. In fact, it is not
clear at this point in the story whether it would be possible for
them to have such a relationship of knowledge, good will, and
frankness with each other. In the proposal scene, at least, their
frankness was blunt enough to make good will towards each
other difficult to maintain.
Section III: Pemberly
Both Darcy and Elizabeth leave Darcy’s disastrous proposal assuming they will never see each other again. It is not too many
weeks later, though, that Elizabeth finds herself vacationing with
her aunt and uncle in Derbyshire, and touring Darcy’s estate of
Pemberly. As they tour the house, Elizabeth is surprised to hear
the housekeeper’s enthusiastic account of Darcy as sweet tempered and generous hearted since childhood. (206) Elizabeth’s
firmest opinion of Darcy as cold and disdainful is rocked. “Some
people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw anything of it,”
says the servant. “To my fancy, it is only because he doesn’t rattle
away like other young men.” (207)
Elizabeth finds Mr. Darcy’s portrait in the gallery: “she stood
before the canvas on which he was represented, and fixed his
eyes upon herself.” (208) This moment is a turning point for Elizabeth, as she puts herself under the regard of the painted Darcy
with “earnest contemplation.” As his image on the wall smiles
down at her, a smile she remembers its owner to have bestowed
on her more than once, the housekeeper tells her the painting was
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done at the time when his father was still alive. Elizabeth thinks
more clearly about Darcy’s position as master of Pemberly.
Rather than the wealth, beauty, and elegance, she thinks of the
people. She realizes how much power Darcy has to give pleasure
or pain to the many who are dependent upon him, and therefore
how valuable the praise of one of those dependent people is. Elizabeth, with all of her spirited allegiance to justice and kindness,
cannot help but admire someone who does so much good for
those who depend upon him.
The reminder that he was orphaned and given full responsibility of the estate at such a young age, must also give her another
way to account for his previous insulting behavior. Rather than a
man lacking all feeling for others, he is transformed in her mind
into a young man full of feeling, but who has been given all the
weight of Pemberly and the responsibilities of the family name
to bear. Such a man might well fall into the error of excessive
family pride. But such an error can be forgiven, and Elizabeth finally does begin to forgive Darcy his insults to her: “she thought
of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever
raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression.” (208)
Further surprises come as Elizabeth and her relatives happen
upon Darcy himself, who has returned from town unexpectedly.
Darcy now has his chance to respond, in action, to Elizabeth’s
third charge against him, the charge that he is full of disdain for
others. He responds well, astonishing her again and again with
his civil behavior, his kind attention to her aunt and uncle, some
of the lowly relatives he spoke so insultingly of in his proposal
to her, and most of all, his lack of pretension towards or grievance against her, after her unfair treatment of him and rejection
of his offer.
Thus begins the renewal of Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s acquaintance, with friendly civility on his side, and astonishment on hers.
Each character has transformed in attitude toward the other. Elizabeth’s state of mind is easier to determine, since we have the
benefit of her point of view in the narrative. She has gone from
hating Darcy towards the beginning of the novel to a cold kind
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of respect since receiving his letter after the proposal. His friendliness towards her at Pemberly leads to something new. “But
above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within
her of goodwill that could not be overlooked. It was gratitude.
Gratitude not merely for once having loved her, but for loving
her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of
her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection.” (220)
Elizabeth’s gratitude and esteem are the beginning of affection,
as the narrator tells us. (231) This feeling is explicitly distinguished
from the captivation she felt for Wickham at the beginning of the
novel and is marked both by rational accounts to herself of how
well she and Darcy suit each other and by irrational and confused
feelings of repentance and jealousy. (259)
We are given less information about Darcy’s state of mind at
this point. Certainly he has lost his expectation that Elizabeth will
return his feelings, and much of the pride that went along with that
expectation. Whatever he feels for her at this point, it is no longer
opposed to his family pride, but seems to be rooted, as Elizabeth’s
feelings for him are, in gratitude. Later in the novel, Darcy exclaims to Elizabeth, “What do I not owe you!” (308) referring to
the lesson of humiliation she taught him by rejecting his initial
marriage proposal to her. If nothing else, it seems that rather than
looking down on Elizabeth and suffering the pain of his attraction
to her, as he was at the beginning of the novel, he feels in her debt
and is hoping for some return of his affection. This change in perspective must go along with some kind of change in how his desire
for her is oriented.
Esteem, forgiveness, and gratitude are different qualities than
they were starting to possess before their reacquaintance at Pemberly, when their knowledge of virtue and their frankness towards
each other led me to speculate about philosophical friendship. At
this point in the story, their self knowledge has greatly improved,
as has their good will. Their frankness suffers, however: from the
time Elizabeth leaves Pemberly after news of Lydia’s scandalous
elopement reaches her, until nearly the end of the novel, Elizabeth
and Darcy think of each other and wonder about the other’s feel-
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ings, but they do not speak more than a few polite superficialities
to each other. The transformation that leaves Elizabeth wanting
Darcy and leaves Darcy hoping for Elizabeth somehow leaves
them unable to speak to each other.
Section IV: Beyond Education
Let’s go back to Darcy’s comment on temperament from early
in the novel. “There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency
to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best
education can overcome.” (51) We see evidence of defects that
are not overcome throughout the novel: Mr. Bennet’s lack of
moral energy, Mrs. Bennet’s nervousness, Mr. Collins’s servile
pomposity, Mr. Wickham’s deceitful smarminess, Lydia Bennet’s imprudence. When Darcy and Elizabeth encountered the
truth about their own misjudgments, it looked like an improvement for them. At least two of the characters just mentioned,
however, seem to have a good level of self-knowledge. Mr. Bennet comments explicitly and with self conscious irony on his
own ability to avoid facing his obligations, for instance, (249)
and Mr. Wickham is portrayed as wondering how much Elizabeth has been told of his bad behavior. It looks like self-knowledge may not be sufficient to bring about self-improvement.
Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s typical faults, on the other hand,
are nowhere to be seen in the latter part of the novel. Elizabeth,
who suffered from a too quick judgment of others in the service
of her pride and of her enjoyment of laughing at human folly,
does attempt to judge whether Darcy still loves her or not after
she leaves Pemberly. She cannot believe that Darcy, whatever
his feelings, will overcome his scorn of Lydia and his resentment of Wickham enough to engage himself to Elizabeth and
join such a family. She cannot quite stop hoping that her judgment is wrong, though, especially once she hears of his involvement in Lydia’s marriage. (271-272) Her relationship (or lack
of one) to Darcy has become her focus, rather than her ability
to judge people. Her habits of quick decision in the service of
her own pride recede in the face of her care for Darcy and her
pride in him. (272)
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It turns out that Elizabeth’s judgment is wrong in this case. Mr.
Darcy does overcome his admitted resentful nature to the point that
he still wants to marry Elizabeth, though he will become in the
process brother-in-law to Wickham, a man he despises. Wickham’s
outrageous behavior against Darcy and others is apparently no
longer the central focus of Darcy’s attention. Though his opinion
of Wickham has not changed, his attention is rather on how to manage Wickham’s vice in a way that will cause the least amount of
trouble for Elizabeth and her family. Darcy’s transformation is
complete enough that he goes to much trouble, embarrassment,
and expense to find Lydia and Wickham after they elope and persuade them to marry. In other words, Elizabeth’s welfare becomes
central to Darcy and his personal resentment of Wickham is beside
the point.
If Darcy is correct, that “not even the best education” can
overcome temperamental flaws, then something else is at work
in these two characters, something beyond education and more
effective than self-knowledge alone. Whatever is at work, it gives
them a different perspective on what is important, changing their
focus away from their own concerns and towards the welfare of
each other. Though it is clear to the reader that both Elizabeth
and Darcy are willing to commit to a life together after Elizabeth
leaves Pemberly, they are unable or unwilling speak to each other
until almost the very end of the novel. It appears that even when
each character has identified the person who can help him or her
to live a better life they still cannot come together.
Their silence towards each other regarding any issue of importance lasts for several weeks, through the drama of Lydia Bennet’s elopement and engagement to Wickham and through several
visits Darcy makes to Elizabeth’s house once Lydia and Wickham
are safely married and out of town. It is only broken after Darcy’s
aunt, Lady Catherine, interferes by trying to disrupt an engagement that she had mistakenly believed was about to be formed
between them. In attempting to forbid the engagement, she unwittingly gives the two reason to hope that marriage might be
possible. Once hope is kindled, communication and engagement
to marry soon follow.
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In one of the conversations they have after they are finally
engaged to be married, Elizabeth asks Darcy directly why he did
not speak to her when he visited her before their engagement.
“Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement,” he says. “But I was embarrassed,” she replies. “And so
was I.” (318) At the beginning of the novel, each character suffered from pride to the point that each thought the other was
lower in some way: Elizabeth thought Darcy was devoid of
proper feeling for his fellow man, and Darcy focused on Elizabeth’s socially lower and often foolish family relations. It is one
thing to be playful, angry, or frank with someone who is beneath
you in some way, but quite another to speak plainly to one who
has humbled you, as each does to the other in the proposal scene
and the following letter. The knowledge of their own faults that
they gained from their angry interaction during Darcy’s proposal,
taught them both that they had misjudged and injured the other.
Given the desire each has for the other’s good opinion after their
encounter at Pemberly, neither has the courage to risk the other’s
scorn by speaking openly of his or her feelings. Only once they
have some rational evidence to support their hope for the other’s
regard, via Lady Catherine, do they drum up the courage to speak
plainly to each other.
Once they do reveal their feelings for each other, after Darcy
again asks Elizabeth to marry him and she agrees, their conversation takes an interesting turn. Each of them expresses gratitude
towards the other, confesses having mistreated the other in some
way, and receives forgiveness. Darcy, full of self-recrimination,
declares that he cannot think of his behavior in his first proposal
to Elizabeth “without abhorrence.” “The recollection of . . . my
manners, my expressions during the whole of it is now, and has
been many months, inexpressibly painful to me.” (306) Elizabeth
assures him that she has “long been most heartily ashamed” of
her former words to him. Later, it is Elizabeth’s turn to admit
guilt. “How you must have hated me after that evening?” (308),
that is, after her rejection of his first proposal. The expression is
grammatically worded as an exclamation, but ends with a question mark. Elizabeth is both expressing her conviction of Darcy’s
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justified hatred of her, however short lived, and at the same time
is asking him to reassure her, which he does. In this mutual confession and forgiveness, each accepts the other fully and the past
is oriented and explained in terms of their present relationship.
Once they become engaged to marry, we get a glimpse of
how their relationship will continue to strengthen the virtue of
each. In their final conversation of the novel, Elizabeth playfully
tries to account for why it is that Darcy was ever attracted to her,
and has decided that he loved her for her impertinence, her near
rudeness, to him in their early acquaintance. She says, “Had you
not been really amiable you would have hated me for [my impertinence]; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself,
your feelings were always noble and just.” (317) He made plain
to her in his previous discussions with her that his “abhorrence”
of his own behavior towards Elizabeth weighs on him. In the turn
of one phrase,—“in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself”—Elizabeth has recast Darcy’s pride and disdain as an attempt at camouflage, as if he were too modest to express his true
noble and generous self. In contrast with this gentle, playful manner of helping him to reconcile himself to his own past, recall her
angry frankness in referring, during his first proposal to her, to
his “arrogance, . . . conceit, and . . . selfish disdain.” (164) She
and he both know that he was prideful to the point of offense,
but now, because of their mutual acceptance, she can use her
own playful manner to show him the way to forgive himself,
through humor, as she has already forgiven him. Unlike her father, who teases Mrs. Bennet almost without mercy, Elizabeth
is using her wit not to undercut Darcy, but to help him let go of
his past mistakes.
In that same conversation, their talk turns to Darcy’s aunt,
Lady Catherine, who had so steadfastly opposed their marriage.
“Shall you ever have the courage to announce to Lady Catherine
what is to befall her?” asks Elizabeth. “I am more likely to want
time than courage, Elizabeth. But it ought to be done, and if you
will give me a sheet of paper, it shall be done directly,” he replies.
(318) In this exchange, Darcy gently refuses to laugh either at
the prospect of Lady Catherine’s dismay over the news of their
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marriage or at the possibility of him lacking the courage to give
her the news. He exhibits the kind of straightforward moral goodness that Elizabeth must have seen so little of in her own parents
and he draws her in to help him by asking her to hand him the
paper he needs to begin. Elizabeth, so used to being the amused
observer of others’ folly is now a partner in the exercise of virtue
in the world. This exercise continues after their marriage, when,
as we are told, they provide better society for Elizabeth’s sister
Kitty, relieve some of the habitual debt that Lydia and Wickham
accrue, educate Darcy’s sister in human relationships, and continue the work of improving the lot of those who depend on the
residents of Pemberly. (321-323)
Like the marriages of the Bennets, Collinses, and Wickhams,
Darcy and Elizabeth’s marriage is formed with social and sexual
union in mind. Unlike for the other marriages, though, Darcy and
Elizabeth do not have a primary motivation, such as social standing or financial stability, for joining with each other. Rather, the
Darcys are re-forming themselves to be better human beings
through their marriage. The self-knowledge they gained after
Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth has been joined by the gratitude
and forgiveness felt by each and proclaimed to each other. Within
this relationship of acknowledged acceptance and esteem, they
are able to give each other a new view of how to live well.
What started off bearing some resemblance to a philosophical friendship has turned into something else. As Socrates knew
well, for a relationship of knowledge, good will, and frankness
to exist, each party must be devoted to finding the truth about
the question at hand. As we see depicted in Pride and Prejudice,
though, (and as Socrates doubtless also knew well) people are
rarely if ever fully devoted to finding out the truth on the question of how to live rightly. Pride, passion, and worldly concerns
all get in the way.
In the scene just described, in which Elizabeth playfully recasts Darcy’s former disdainful nature and Darcy invites Elizabeth to help him write to Lady Catherine, each provides the
perspective that the other needs. Rather than frankly declare what
the other ought to be thinking or doing, they demonstrate to each
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other a different way of looking at themselves and the world, simply by being who they are. At the same time, each tacitly invites
the other to join in. In the process, each gains the perspective that
will allow their character defects not to disappear, but to recede
into the background. The gratitude each feels and the forgiveness
each gives make this relationship possible because each values
the perspective of the other more than his or her own pride. Austen
gives us a picture of what marriage can lead to at its best: a transformation of the self into something more and better than what is
possible alone, the result of what “not even the best education”
can give. Elizabeth and Darcy have this sort of marriage.
The Bennets probably could not have reached this kind of intimacy and mutual acceptance, due to the degree of difference in
their temperaments. They might have come closer to it, though,
if Mr. Bennet had not given up on the marriage once he realized
how mistaken he had been in his evaluation of Mrs. Bennet’s
character. The Collinses never desired this kind of relationship:
Mr. Collins is too self important to ever admit anyone else fully
into his thoughts, and Mrs. Collins, Charlotte, is satisfied with
managing him, in return for her social standing as his wife. Their
happiness lies in her ability to manage him without rancor, and
will last as long as Charlotte can continue to tolerate his foolishness with grace. The Wickhams, with their mutual inability
to control their passions, never had a chance at such mutual acceptance, though they were happy for a time with the physical
version of intimacy.
I began this lecture by quoting the sentence that starts the
novel, and considering two interpretations of it: one that rested on
the witty acknowledgement of human greed and self deception
and one that rested on a straightforward recognition of our need
for each other, specifically with respect to marriage. Something
like a synthesis of these two attitudes occurs in the marriage of
Elizabeth and Darcy. Elizabeth, having grown up with Mr. Bennet
as her favorite parent, likes to laugh at human weakness, but has
had little authoritative example in her life of straightforward moral
goodness. Elizabeth benefits from her marriage in having a living
example of steadfast and straightforward goodness in her life.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PAALMAN
55
Darcy doesn’t laugh at human folly: he shuns it. This became a
problem for him when he himself, because of the folly of his overweening pride, treated the woman he loves with contempt, as he
did in his initial proposal to Elizabeth. He cannot forgive himself
for this behavior without Elizabeth’s example of teaching him to
“be laughed at.” (p. 310) Wit comes in handy when a straightforward understanding of our own failings is overwhelming.
Pride and Prejudice is not a pure social critique, nor a romance, nor a morality tale. It has some resemblance to all of these
genres, though. As we have seen, wit and playfulness, passion,
folly, reason, love of virtue, gratitude and forgiveness are all
deftly woven into the story of Elizabeth and Darcy. In the
process, we are given a glimpse of how one might transcend the
universal faults of self interest, greed, pride, and prejudice, not
by banishing or losing them, which is surely impossible, but by
allowing them to lose their hold over us through intimacy with
another human being who suits us; one we can love, work with,
laugh at and laugh with. It is no surprise that such a possibility,
presented with Austen’s consummate skill and grace, leaves the
reader full of pleasure and joy.
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“Please, Don’t Eat the Swans”:
My Revolution in Romania
Louis Petrich
Even from a simple realistic point of view,
the countries we long for occupy a far larger
place in our actual life, at any given moment, than the country in which we happen
to be. . . . And besides, even from this point
of view, of mere quantity, in our lives the
days are not all equal.
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
In late December of 1989, I attended my first Modern Language
Conference in Washington, D.C. I was a graduate student at the
University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, taking my
time trying not to be impertinent in my dissertation on Shakespeare. If I had my doubts of becoming the sort of scholar that
the members of the MLA would want to make an English professor, I had even more doubts that life could be any better than
I knew it as a student. The authors occupying me in Chicago I
thought contained the world. I went to the MLA Conference to
meet the guardians of English letters and to settle my doubts
about my place in their world one way or another.
I spent one free evening not with the literary scholars in the
hosting hotel, but with my good friend, Mark, who possessed no
knowledge of literature. As a journalist, however, he kept himself
well-informed. At that time, the American invasion of Panama
and the bloody revolution in Romania kept Mark busily flipping
the channels of his television set to catch the latest world events.
Meanwhile, during the days, I was performing a similar ritual at
the conference, traversing from room to room to hear the latest
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
57
scholarly developments in my field. That evening, to bring our
two worlds of interest together, I ventured to compare the overthrow of dictatorships happening before his eyes in Panama and
Romania to the overthrow of ethno-phallocentrism taking place
before mine in the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Mark shook his head and
replied that he much preferred to see images of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife shot to death by firing squad than to hear my
reports about the death of the white male author. Then he grew
more serious: “Perhaps you should look for your colleagues and
career where you won’t have to make things like that up.”
Six months later, in June of 1990, I picked up the phone to
hear Mark’s voice triumphantly announce, “You have just gotten
a Fulbright Scholar Award.” This struck me as very strange, since
I had not applied for one. He, however, had just before called the
United States Information Agency to ask if any “Fulbrights” were
presently available for someone with my credentials. The USIA
told him that all positions had been competitively filled months
earlier from applications duly submitted a year in advance—except one, which remained defiantly empty: a lectureship in American literature at the Alexandru I. Cuza University in Iasi,
Romania, supposed to start that autumn.
“But I don’t do American literature,” I protested, “I do
Shakespeare. And where on earth is Iasi, anyway? Did you say
‘Romania’”?
I shuddered to recall that only a week earlier the Romanian
coal miners were reported by the Chicago Tribune to be storming
the streets of Bucharest, chasing down students, journalists, opposition figures, and all those whose trimmed beards made them
look intellectual, to club them into submission or death. Such images were very dreadful and nauseating to consider that summer
as I turned my mind towards Romania and assembled my Fulbright application for quick processing. Quite unprepared for my
destiny—for so this turn became—I would have to learn by trial
and error whether American literature had any power to free Romanian students from the oppression of having lived their lives
pinned under the weight of a rock, mined for that purpose, toppled
only yesterday, but still hard and cruel in its slowly disintegrating
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character. You can be pretty sure, reader, that I am not making
these things up, which were quotidian for millions of people (who
cares to remember them now?), and which, to all my present days
have left a longing and a pattern.
I set foot in Romania one night in September 1990, at the
Otopeni International Airport in Bucharest, where I was greeted
by several fatigued soldiers below our aircraft, their assault rifles
pointing hospitably down at the ground. These “most fierce descendants of Rome” (an epithet still to be heard) had one arm free
to beg for western cigarettes as they conducted me into the dreary
terminal. The first words I spoke in Romania, to the passport control officer, sitting in his compact wooden booth lit by the standard
forty watt bulb, were to inform him that I had come to teach American literature at the University of Iasi. I recoiled slightly at my
own words, realizing that if he knew I possessed no credentials
to teach this subject, he could have me deported as an imposter.
But the controller, not understanding a syllable of English,
stamped my passport perfunctorily and slid it back to me silently.
I had advisedly placed a carton of Kent cigarettes where it would
be the first item encountered upon opening each piece of my luggage to the customs inspectors. They played their parts perfectly,
and I went on, lightened in load, to award myself to that taxi driver
whose face appeared the least unshaven and sooty. He dropped
me at the stately residence of the American Cultural Affairs Officer, Agatha Kuperman, an attractive, red-haired woman of Hungarian descent, whom even the Romanians (long hostile to
Hungarians) considered highly. She embraced me warmly on the
black street, her little white poodle in constant danger of being
trodden by my uncertain feet, and then she chided me for paying
the driver four dollars: “That’s a week’s salary for most Romanians, my boy.” I slept that night in the spare room of her diplomat’s
mansion, listening to the barking of wild dogs that roamed the
dark streets of Bucharest.
Aggie briefed me the following morning at the consulate section of the U.S. Embassy, whose first floor looked like a nursery.
Dozens of Romanian babies were here undergoing the lengthy
process of adoption by their would-be American parents. Some,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
59
darker skinned, probable offspring of gypsies (suspected of selling
them), and others, physically handicapped or distressed by their
own cries, were all on offer to be wrapped in American arms, carried away in love, and saved. Aggie, who had only two minutes
to put me on guard against two especial dangers I would face,
seized me by the arm to describe how the Chairman of the English
Department once grabbed my predecessor to draw his ear close
and whisper, “You know I can crush you, Sam, I can destroy you.”
He would not have the nerve to manhandle me, she explained,
since he could no longer assume the backing of the Securitate (Romanian secret police). More likely, he would now try to engage
me to his daughter. “I must warn you, particularly, to stay away
from Romanian women.” She sensed my hesitation, and added,
“They are all become whores.” Then she let me go, suitably impressed, to Iasi.
Horia Holban, an English professor from the Alexandru I.
Cuza University, spotted my searching flashlight on the dark platform of the train station on that rainy September evening I arrived
in Iasi, a city of 265,000 people within a goodly jogging distance
of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, our better tailored, but still great
enemy. Horia had been sent by the Chairman of the English Department to welcome me, just as he had welcomed my Fulbright
predecessors since 1970, equipped for this purpose by being one
of the ten percent of Romanians who owned a car. His windshield
wipers came unhinged as he drove us to my apartment. “How can
you see the road through all the murk and rain?” I asked, hoping
he would pull over to fix the wipers. “I have driven this way many
times before,” he replied. I made a nervous reference to Bernard
Shaw, whom I had heard from my informants was his specialty.
“Yes, I am the Romanian expert on Shaw,” he stated, as he continued to navigate the darkness. Then he asked me to contribute
an article to a literary quarterly he had just founded, called Ethos.
“This will help you to get recognition in America,” he said, evidently made aware of my unpublished status by his informants.
“Perhaps I can come up with something,” I replied, conscious of
the usefulness of his car. As it turned out, his quarterly went defunct after one issue because the price of printing quadrupled. His
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car, however, he kept on running.
My apartment was located on the eighth floor in a block of
flats that looked, like every other block, orphaned from the earth.
Nothing had changed since Horia escorted the first American lecturer to this apartment twenty years earlier. The elevator still
broke down two or three times a week. “Why repair something
permanently when you can employ a man full-time to fix it regularly?” he commented, as we climbed eight flights of unlit stairs
with luggage. “The people steal the bulbs,” he said, “but you will
memorize your steps everywhere, and then you, too, won’t need
a flashlight.”
My apartment comprised two bedrooms, a living room,
kitchen, bath, and like every apartment in the Workers’ Utopia, a
balcony, where the population retired to smoke and dream. “You
can see for yourself that every article has been stamped and inventoried by the University,” Horia announced, as he began the
tour. The same rusty trash can, missing its lid, stood under the
kitchen sink. The same two plates and cracked pot occupied a cabinet, and the same pair of cutlery lay in a drawer, to serve each
generation of American lecturer. My bedroom—a room with a
double bed—felt forbidden but to drafts. “Most of our lecturers
brought along their wives, who helped them to make this more of
a home,” he said, “but I can ask the Chairman to provide you an
extra blanket.”
The water, he explained, as we entered the bathroom, was supposed to appear for a few hours in the mornings and evenings, hot
only every other day. “But it may not always make it up to the
eighth floor. They give us a bathtub so that we can always have
water.” Thus I kept my bathtub filled, with a bucket nearby for
flushing the toilet, and I boiled water in pots for transfer to the
sink. This gave me the ritual satisfaction of reliving an early triumph of civilization—keeping clean on the outskirts of the
Roman Empire. In February, the hot water did not appear for three
weeks. When it finally came back, like a shooting star, the people
left whatever they were doing to take quick advantage. They
seemed to accept chronic deprivations and momentary windfalls
as among the mysteries of life, whereas I attributed human pur-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
61
poses to them, and I talked to myself a lot in anger, pacing from
room to room, hoping that the listening devices were still in operation for the Securitate to hear my accusations of evil.
“A woman named Luminitsa will clean your apartment once a
week,” Horia said, “paid by the university, but you can pay her
more to do extra chores.” Luminitsa was a sweet and sturdy old
woman, who managed to locate an ancient washing machine, missing several pieces, which she employed to make my clothes clean,
but increasingly misshapen. She proved especially helpful in obtaining milk, sold to lines of people as the sun rose. (I never could
abide the practice of standing in lines as if mortality did not matter,
and I would have paid her to stand forever, for me.) In the winter,
Luminitsa stood before my open lit oven, preferring to hold, rather
than to drink the hot tea I offered her. She happened to be present
the morning that the bombing of Iraq began in January of 1991,
and she kept making the sign of the cross three times and mumbling prayers as she went about her lifelong, inalienable work.
His tour finished, Horia handed me a roll of toilet paper, warning me that I would find this item missing from public places and
only sporadically available in the shops. “So carry some around
with you, eat lightly, and use the paper sparingly.” With these
words and a wan smile to indicate he would have liked to be joking, the Romanian expert on Shaw bid me goodnight. I sat at the
table gone crooked on the concrete floor of the living room. I felt
alone, ignorant, hungry, cold, and I was beginning to sense across
the table the company of failure. I thought about supplicating God,
Orthodox fashion, to help me survive in this dark, backstage world
deprived of props, but the Romanians had been doing that for
years. I felt tired, too, and so I let my body take precedence over
the soul’s fears and carry me clothed to bed, where I discovered,
to my surprise, that I slid quickly into a good, long sleep.
Late next morning, after bread and tea, I took a taxi to the
Alexandru I. Cuza University1 to meet with the redoubtable
1. Founded in 1861, the University offered bachelor degrees and doctorates in the natural sciences, mathematics, history, philosophy, geography,
economics, law, and philology. The schools of engineering, medicine,
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Chairman of my department. He looked tussled in his grey suit
and tie, not formidable, not brutish, as his grey eyes, on the lookout everywhere, probed intermittently into mine. He liked to finish my sentences in perfect British English, as if to show that he
knew my thoughts and how to speak them properly. He conducted me to the American reading room, where I would teach
five classes a week of American literature, lasting two hours
each, to first or second-year students in groups of ten to twelve.
I would also supervise the growing collection of books that the
Americans and British had donated or loaned to the department
over the years. “You must be sure to restrict the use of the reading room to students in our department and the English teachers
of Iasi,” he emphasized several times, as if this were the crux of
my assignment. A cubicle adjacent to the reading room would
become my little office. The Securitate used to keep equipment
there to monitor the foreign teachers and students throughout
the building. He gave me the key to a locked cabinet, where I
would store the precious Norton Anthologies of American Literature, the television and video player, and some British and
American movies on video tape. “I keep the majority of video
tapes at home,” he explained, “so that you will not be tempted
to loan them to people who will copy them illegally to sell.” I
was often to discover that Romanian homes secretly contained
little pieces of public property that made their possessors feel a
little less poor, a little less equal.
The Chairman then invited me to his office, where he poured
us some plum brandy and began to drink. He had a story to tell
me, and it would take some time and some help. He spoke of his
imprisonment in the 1950’s for an anti-Soviet remark, and of the
Romanian prejudice against him for being half-Hungarian. He
overcame these adversities to master the English language by
reading Dickens, whose linguistic varieties he knew as an expert,
and Conrad, whose sociological studies of character helped him
and agronomy had separate locations in the city. 20,000 students were
enrolled overall, making Iasi one of the four centers of higher education
in Romania, along with Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, and Timisoara.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
63
to achieve his present position. He had a twenty-three year old
daughter who studied medicine and loved to speak English. He
felt joy when the revolution finally came, freeing him from the
harassments of the Securitate and bringing hope to everyone for
reconcilement with the West. He wanted me to know that he was
a decent man, whose membership in the Romanian Communist
Party had been a necessary concession to his persecutors, and
whose true self, finding it safe to appear only recently, should be
allowed broad margins of deformity. “The worst thing about
communism,” he confessed, “is that it brings out the evil in people.” He poured me some more brandy, but it spilled over my full
glass, for I had not learned to drink at midday with relish. I knew
to be very firm with this man, so I declared my intent to open the
American reading room to the public. The Chairman straightened
his back, narrowed his grey eyes, and said, “If you do that you
will become my enemy. Don’t you know that even the quality of
paper in there is enough to make the people steal the books!” “I
would prefer not to become your enemy,” I said, “but the books
and videos and magazines will be recalled by the American Embassy if you insist.” This was a bluff, but its tone of conviction
succeeded, and he changed the subject by extending an invitation
to dine with him and his wife and daughter some evening at his
home. I accepted the invitation several months later, curious to
find out if Aggie was right about him and his engaging daughter.
She was, alas, right. Wisely, I was prepared to persuade them that
my loneliness was not so dire as they interpreted.
The American reading room had the misfortune to overlook
an athletic field. The steady thuds of soccer balls and the shouts
of all-weathered players made the English of my students sound
as timid as the communists might have wished from the mouths
of their English enemy. Once in a while, the errant ball came
crashing through a window, causing my students, almost all of
them women, to duck and scream, though only for a second or
two. I insisted that the windows be fixed to keep the temperature
of the room above freezing. Nevertheless, during the winter I had
to teach in my overcoat to students shivering in theirs. They
smiled at my wishful handling of the radiators each morning, like
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a witch doctor trying to summon up a ghost. At various times in
the day, a crew of carpenters operated terrifically roaring power
saws in their workshop directly beneath us, and the millions of
powdery shavings that they generated got sucked up into air ducts
that blew them right outside our apt-to-be-broken windows. Our
classes then came to a halt, as a kind of reminder to everyone of
the rights of real work to fill consciousness with its sound and
fury. “All our priorities thus come to dust,” I thought, indulging
a poetic melancholy that seemed better than this grim reality.
The dimness of light in the reading room, to which I also objected, caused the students to marvel again at my notions of normalcy. “Fluorescent bulbs for the ceilings are not to be found
anywhere in the country,” they said, but still I made an official,
stamped request. Two weeks later, someone knocked on the reading room door, timidly stuck her head in, and seeing the students
beckon, approached my side and silently produced from her
apron pocket an incandescent light bulb of the once maximum
forty watts. “But this is not the type I ordered!” I exclaimed. The
students laughed as the poor woman made her noiseless escape,
and I stared at the economical bulb, ever more grateful for those
windows that let in the light and all the world outside not made
to order by man.
It surprised me to learn later that my remark to the cleaning
woman was adopted by the students as a new motto. Henceforth,
whenever life handed them another revolutionary dose of futility,
they would laughingly say, “But this is not the type I ordered.” I
counted this my first success as a teacher of American values, or
rather, my first achievement in an impossible environment of a
common ground of enlightened foolishness.
I asked a student named Dana to act as my assistant in managing the reading room. Industrious, trustworthy, and book-loving, Dana put the shelves in order and maintained the old pretense
of keeping up-to-date records. She was not good-looking, but I
did not want beauty in a woman whose company I hoped would
keep me from becoming lonely. To that end she possessed irrepressible good spirits, which had earned her the nicknames of
“giggles” and “chatterbox.” She somehow got me to join her in
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
65
frequently singing the refrain from a Bob Marley song: “Woman
no cry—everything’s gonna be all right.” Her colleagues generously approved of our unmusical duet, perhaps thinking that a
professor from a society one hundred years ahead must know
whether everything was going to be all right or not.
Dana helped me to decorate the walls of the reading room
with black and white photographs of British contributions to civilization and color pictures of American getaways suitable for a
travel agency. The impression these created reinforced the common Romanian prejudice that the British have culture while the
Americans have fun. The students all acquired a British accent,
while convinced that the Americans were the ones who would
acquire the world, once the Soviets were finished. Why else did
the American flags that we hung on the door of the reading room
keep disappearing? At first I thought that the Arab students tore
them down in hatred (for this was during the first Gulf War), until
several of my students shyly confessed: “We steal them for home
display, to feel less lonely under the weight of liberty.” And so I
obtained more flags from the U.S. Embassy to present to my
thieving learners of the Queen’s English
Thus did I learn to permit some ridiculous activities to occur.
One man, named Serban, visited the reading room every Thursday
to inspect the magazines that the Embassy saw fit to send me:
Time, Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fair. He had a speech
impediment and wore thick glasses that made him look oafish, yet
he manifested the concentration of a surgeon as he turned the
pages from cover to cover, pausing to copy the addresses he found
for subscriptions, books, merchandise, and especially Caribbean
travel destinations. Some students wanted me to inform Serban
that these advertisements were not meant for someone without
hard currency and a visa. But it struck me that these students were
like this man in being poor and stranded. They, too, visited the
American reading room and turned the pages of books not intended for them in order to find some hope and relief from the
calamity of their birth. He dreamt alone over glossy and scented
photo spreads, and they dreamt with me over the extravagances
of poetry and plays. Besides, among the authors we read there
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were debunkers enough and shipwrecked characters aplenty, but
I shall come to our reading of them soon enough.
Another frequent visitor to the reading room, Nick, age forty,
had somehow earned a black belt in karate in defiance of Ceausescu’s prohibition of the martial arts. He sought books on antiquity. “Your presence here is a sign that Rome has returned to
Romania at last, “ he said, “for America is the one country today
like Rome, the pacifier and lawgiver of nations.” Nick named his
son “Romulus” and chose his middle name to begin with “A,”
so that he would identify himself with the founder of Rome and
the Egyptian sun god, “RA.” By such means he sought to counteract the degrading forces that enslaved people from an early
age by dictating: “You like flowers, don’t you? So dig.”
The American reading room, now supplied with posters of
art and travel, songs and laughter, fragrant fashion magazines,
and impossible dreams, did become an exceptional place. But I
did not realize how original my students must have found it until
I visited a typical Romanian high school, at the invitation of an
English teacher named Nicoleta.
Her pupils rose in unison and saluted me in well-rehearsed
English when I entered their classroom. Then they sat down on
stools beside shared wooden desks whose lowness kept them
hunched over all day, while the blank walls made looking to the
right or left an impertinence. They questioned me about how I
had spent my high school years. “Did you get paid for doing
homework?” a boy asked. I paused at his sincerity, then replied
that I did expect to get paid “in the long run.” They looked at
Nicoleta with satisfaction, as if to say, “We told you so.” “Will
jobs be available for us in America?” another boy asked. Again,
I paused at this candid disclosure of their everyday despair, before answering that jobs of some kind were usually available, but
getting to America would be the difficult part. They nodded their
heads knowingly. They asked me for English books, and I invited
them to the reading room, where they could borrow some. “Our
books are still poisonous,” they said. Nicoleta showed me a textbook of English which included quotations from Hobbes, Locke,
Mill, Dickens, Shaw, and other greats, each followed by Ceaus-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
67
escu’s words of interpretation. “Same ink, same font, same paper,
and therefore,” she said, grimacing, “same genius.” The frontispiece to the book showed Ceausescu’s smiling portrait and his
message to the pupil:
To be a patriot means to spare nothing in order to carry
out the policy of the Communist Party which fully corresponds to the vital interests of the whole nation. This
is amply demonstrated by the economic and social development programme of the Romanian Communist
Party, which derives from a philosophy governed by constant concern for the welfare of man.
His message went on and on in the same pitch—all lies possessing no interest or meaning whatsoever. A physical education instructor cut short my stupefaction by inviting me to a volleyball
exhibition that she had organized on the spur of the moment to
honor my presence in the school. (I felt like a rock star or movie
actor, fawned upon for deeds of nothing.) She put her best boys on
the court, while the rest of the pupils, mostly girls, lined the perimeter of the small gym to watch the match and my reactions to it. The
boys pounded the ball so hard that it flew repeatedly into the girls,
who had no choice but to duck and scream. I recognized, with a
kind of dismay, that my students were once those girls. I clapped
anyway and thanked everyone for a fine performance, at which they
all cheered and looked elated.
As I was about to leave the high school, Nicoleta drew me aside
to an empty room where she unburdened her soul of much worry:
All my pupils know of life is that it gets worse, and all
they have been told of death is that it brings no rewards
or punishments. They will not work for future goods,
since they believe there are none, or for the sake of work
itself, since that would make them the dupes of communism. They want to be happy now, so they dream about
going to America, where they believe happiness is possible. But to get to America they must have dollars, and
the dollar is worth more than our Romanian lei every day.
Where will all this end? Already some of them believe
that they can buy their own souls.
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I tried to recall some brave words that might allay her fears,
yet I was afraid to sound hypocritical, with a pocket full of dollars, backed by God and the United States, in which to trust. I
thought about that Bob Marley song, whose refrain has a distinguished pedigree that includes some lines by a grumpy poet who
knew a lot about souls caught between hope and despair. So I recited them to this sorrowing teacher of English, offering no interpretation, just the citation:
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
For the present, however, my students had many reasons to
duck and scream. They were not the children of glorious Rome,
of whose ruins on the Black Sea they boasted, but of Nicolae
Ceausescu, communist tyrant from before they were born. They
attended thirty-six hours of class per week. (A gap in the schedule
would teach them to skip classes and take to the streets, it was
feared.) The margins had disappeared from their essays (paper
was that precious) as surely as the breadth had gone from their
daily lives. Five of them occupied a dormitory room that would
have housed one or two in America. They put boards across their
laps to serve there as desks. Bread was served them days old.
They slept fitfully to the splattering of bottles tossed from dormitory windows by the disdainful foreign students, and to the
fugitive laughter of Romanian girls who prostituted themselves
to these students to obtain colorful African beads or Arabian
scarves. No residence staff stood on call to help them; no professional counselors guided their development; no student organizations received funding to entertain them. Gypsy fortune tellers
were always on hand for many dubious purposes, but their layers
of colorful dress stank from going unwashed. Students marching
for better conditions on the first anniversary of the revolution
were jeered by envious workers for their “dissipation” and told
to get back to classes. For it was considered a great honor to be
accepted to the Alexandru I. Cuza University. Some students had
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taken the entrance exam for English five years in a row before
passing. They had worked in factories in the meantime.
What could I expect students, suffering these conditions, to
achieve intellectually? When I asked them the meaning of a literary passage, a few whispered to each other in Romanian about
the meaninglessness of so bare a question (devoid of the familiar
theoretical cues that implied the correct theoretical answer), while
most stared down in their laps. Who knows what spiritual
changes gradually occur from looking down all the time? I encouraged them to leap over themselves in boldness of thought,
but they had no practice overcoming themselves, only their conditions. Perhaps I could get them to look up, at least, with the
help of America’s most upward-looking authors, the ones who in
fact had inspired me to study literature for a living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson would provide a logical starting point,
I thought, for the reformation of the neck and spinal posture. But
when I assigned them their first essay on the question, “Why trust
yourself?” I received in writing an apology signed by the whole
class:
We are frightened because it is the first time when an
American teacher hears words spoken by ourselves. This
note is a kind of message we want to send to you, because it has been clearly revealed that we have different
ideas about literature, America, the world, and life. We
should want you to understand our low level of comprehension, concerning various aspects of these things.
Please tell us again, if you don’t mind, what you want us
to write.
I decided at once to read Emerson aloud with them, to manifest the felt meanings of his words, before pressing them again
to write what they felt. I modeled his inspiration vocally, and then
I let them try to partake similarly of it. I heard in their voices,
however, not the tone of empowerment, but alien sounds of discontinuity. These sounds were not, I had to admit, unrelated to
Emerson’s style. Contrary to the spirit of this aphoristic sage, I
condescended to offer them a similar apology about my own low
level of comprehension concerning all aspects of Romanian so-
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ciety, which I found altogether different and a little frightening.
Interpreting my apology in material terms, they offered me their
assistance in performing the ordinary tasks of life, and I gratefully
accepted the offer. Thereafter, I never lacked for help in meeting
the necessities of the body. As for the soul, I made them promise
never to accept in our classes the old pedagogical procedure,
whereby students pretended to learn, professors pretended to
teach, and neither side dared to expose the other as a fraud. “We
shall dare to be true to each other,” we pledged, “taking that as
our way to seek truth.” So once a week, in keeping with the promise, someone in class would summon the courage to ask me,
“What do you think of us, honestly, Mr. Petrich?” And I would
tell them, whatever struck me most at the time. I, in turn, would
ask them what they thought of the American writers I offered
them. And they, in turn, told me what struck them most about
these writers, America, and me.
They told me that Walt Whitman, whom I had hoped would
lengthen their spines with a feeling of democratic power more
pleasingly articulated than Emerson’s, reminded them of their
former communist leaders, who loudly gesticulated on behalf of
the people, listing their accomplishments in fields and factories,
on and on and on.
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the
reading of a book,” I quoted from Henry Thoreau. “I am one such
man,” I professed to them. Perhaps my students, in the aftermath
of their revolution and by my example, would find in Walden additional incentives to loosen their ties to collective dejection. But
the first chapter, “Economy,” did not overwhelm the Romanians
as it once did me. They did not know what to make of an American author who had solved the problem of life by reducing it to
its lowest terms and living very simply, like a Spartan. “Isn’t that
how we live now, meanly and miserably?” They did, however,
find much to admire in a man who lived alone and wrote such
things as this: “Society is commonly too cheap. We live thick and
are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think
that we thus lose some respect for one another.” They expected
the chapter called “Brute Neighbors” to develop this favorite,
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anti-social theme, but were disappointed to discover that in it
Thoreau lauds the heroic self-sacrifices of warring red and black
ants. A writer who cultivates poverty and extols the most communistic of animals made them suspicious of his American credentials and economic wisdom.
Surely, I thought, Thoreau’s great essay, “Civil Disobedience,” would inspire their esteem for the power of a propertyless
individual to take on the slaveholding and war-making collective.
But they were not impressed with Thoreau’s leonine showdown
with the bullying American state. On the contrary, they were impressed by the limits of the American state in punishing him. For
upon his release after one night in jail for not paying his tax,
Thoreau went “giddily to pick huckleberries…and then the State
was nowhere to be seen.” A student named Alina, with silky
blond hair and deep, dark eyes, pointed out that some Romanians
had also spent a short time in prison for political reasons, but after
their release they developed terminal cancer. I learned later that
her brother was among those who thus died, and that only then
was the state nowhere to be seen. “We believe they were irradiated there,” she said. “That way Romania kept fewer political
prisoners in the eyes of the world.” Alina invited me to her home
to meet her father, a poet, and mother, who operated a small bar.
Their son also wrote poetry, which apparently had gotten him in
trouble with the Party. The father read some of their poetry to me
in Romanian and Alina translated, her moist eyes locked to mine
for confirmation of her act of translation in me. They carried their
heavy burden of love with the intoxicating help of verse and
drink. On this occasion, they also had me to help, as I felt my
life’s course dip into their well. How many a man, unburdened
of years or grief, an easy sleeper, has let himself fall into the watery eyes of disconsolate poetry, there to see and embrace an ancient, bitter truth about life. Tragedy, as I now saw it enacted
before me, would have to be given its finest American say to
Alina and her colleagues, in keeping of our promise to be true to
each other.
Among the excerpts from approved American authors that
my students had read in high school were bits of dialogue from
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Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. These excerpts were supposed to demonstrate, of course, the cruelties of capitalism. We
read the whole play. The students were surprised to discover that
the young Willy Loman could have escaped from his unnatural
conditions by following his brother Ben to Alaska in search of
diamonds. “People in America move and start over all the time,”
I told them. “So why doesn’t Willy Loman move to Alaska and
start over?” A serious silence ensued, followed by a few whispers.
Then one of my quietest students from across the hated Soviet
border, a Bessarabian boy of stout physique, deep intonation, and
rudimentary English named Dragos, cited a song then popular in
the Soviet Union. I later witnessed the patrons of a Leningrad
restaurant dance triumphantly to its refrain: “Don’t be foolish
America! Return to us Alaska now!” “Russians believe Alaska
belong to them,” said Dragos, “because true Russians never sell
Motherland.” He asked his colleagues for help with English, who
explained that Alaska cannot be part of the American dream because it is geographically and culturally part of Siberia—rich in
oil and minerals, very beautiful, but awfully hard and far away.
“That why Stalin put Gulag there,” Dragos added. The better part
of the class agreed with him: “Better to die like an American in
an automobile [as Willy does] than like a Russian in the Gulag.”
“So what claims of truth does tragedy have among a mobile
and escapist people?” I asked. “Salesmen and their customers are
mobile and escapist by definition.” I had to explain this because
they did not know what salesmen and customers were. Shopkeepers in Romania, working for the State, did not care whether they
sold anything, and their “customers,” having no choice, had no
care over what to buy. True salesmen, I explained, offer their customers a steady supply of newer and finer objects and projects
as the means to live always better than before. But death will not
find it any more difficult than before to rip from the world people
who secure themselves to more and more new things. So true
peace and happiness are not to be found in the economic activities
of the American nation—at least according to Arthur Miller and
Eugene O’Neill (whose tragedy, The Iceman Cometh, that of a
salesman, we also read)—only a kind of continual distraction
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ending in death of the soul and body. “But do they let you do serious work in America, in the midst of all that buying and selling?” asked a handsome student named Constantine. “They hate
people with brains or talents here. I don’t know how much longer
we can hold out.” He, and others whose ambitions resembled his,
had long been smugglers of their own interdicted souls. (The
black market, as I came to understand, dealt not in cigarettes primarily.) “If only there were real salesmen in Romania,” said Constantine, “to distract us from wanting to jump off a cliff. For forty
years we secretly depended on the West for our vision of the future. And now we are supposed to believe these playwrights that
suicide is better than buying and selling?”
A student named Olivia, whose candid, harmonious face
made me look her way many a time, asked me if I really believed
in the truth of tragedy. I evaded the question, not the face, by saying that the text, whether tragic or comic, creates conviction in
itself. She had long ceased to believe the rhetoric of a professor,
and she knew the power of her face to compel confessions from
a man, so she asked me another question: “Why did you come to
Romania, or was it just a stroke of bad luck?” My grandparents,
I told her and the rest, had come to America from Eastern Europe
at the turn of the twentieth-century. They saw the Statue of Liberty upon arrival, whose picture faced us fixedly in the reading
room. I did not have to explain why they had left their homelands.
But as to why I had come back to live in their country, I said that
the people of Bucharest, in the name of liberty, had recently toppled a seventy foot statue of Lenin, who still exists in storage,
and I wanted to study him there, in safety, and to learn to blow
his mass all to pieces.
The students begged me to suspend the lessons of fine American tragedy. While there was still time to learn from each other,
they wanted me to show them how ordinary Americans, like my
own middle class, mid-western family, experienced the culture
of a proud, free country. Movies, television shows, pop music,
and grocery store magazines would become, apropos of their request, subject to study and discussion in class. This approach felt
like an abomination to a reader of the great books from the Uni-
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versity of Chicago, but I owed it to them to give the most popular
products of American culture a showing and hearing. They were
part of the truth. So to this stage of our learning, I let enter our
presence, comedy—not of the literary kind.
I showed to public audiences in the reading room John
Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in The Blues Brothers. This movie contains the longest car chases on record through the streets of
Chicago and the nine, acne-faced, marching Nazis of the Village
of Skokie (where I grew up). The audience enjoyed the leaps of
dance and musical soul-power, but wondered aloud whether evil
could be laughed and sung away. My first real job, I explained,
was with the traffic engineering department of the Village. It was
my task to help devise a traffic plan that would allow those Nazis
to march on certain public streets, according to their First Amendment right, while minimizing civic disruption and the pain to
Skokie’s many Jews and Holocaust survivors. “My own nextdoor neighbor bore a tattoo on his arm from Auschwitz,” I mentioned. “Did you support their right to march?” they asked.2
“Yes,” I answered, simply. We began a discussion about the comedian’s faith in the power of ridicule, for which exposure is required. “These young men were exposed as idiots by their very
right to public access, and they quickly disappeared afterward,”
I said. “Does that mean that rights and comedy go together?”
someone asked. I had not thought about rights in that way before,
but with premature enthusiasm, I said, “Yes, they do.” Then I
added, more cautiously, “So long as the public audience has the
clear-eyed intelligence to recognize the ridiculous and the strong
hearts to laugh it all the way to scorn.”
I showed the Romanians a “Dirty Harry” detective movie
with introductory remarks by a former American cop. He was
2. Romania had been an enthusiastic ally of Hitler, at first. A serious
pogrom occurred in Iasi in 1941, without German assistance. The Romanian Communist Party always insisted that the persecutions of the
Jews were entirely the responsibility of the previous regime. So my students did not grow up with any kind of Holocaust study beyond the
mere blaming of others.
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75
then a Fulbright Scholar doing research on the fifteenth-century
Wallachian Prince, Vlad II Dracul, heroic impaler of infidel
Turks.3 “Police in America are not like yours in Romania,” he
said, “because we go after the bad guys—like Prince Vlad II did.”
One woman asked me if I could hear the guns firing away in
Chicago. I showed them Dracula in one of the modern film versions, because “this is all most Americans know about Romania.” The women in the audience felt puzzled to find Count
Dracula, a vampire, portrayed as preferable to the normal men
in the film as a mate. (Their puzzlement was a clue to something
that I should have paid more attention to, as we shall see shortly.)
The movie Reds made the audience feel uneasy by its soft treatment of Bolshevism. Corinna, one of my most sarcastic students,
asked: “So is that what intelligent and hearty Americans in 1920
did with their lives—they ran off to Russia to fight for communism?” Rain Man, however, gave them back the typical Hollywood version of their beloved American dream: sexy women,
fast cars, easy money, and to make them feel warm inside, love
for autistic savants.
The movie Glory, with its stirring depiction of the first black
regiment to fight in the American Civil War, made a deep impression on the Romanians. One man thanked me in tears for
showing it, saying, “You are a lucky country to win that war. The
good side does not have to win, you know.” A doctor in the audience found the movie flawed because the black soldiers were
“on the other side already, too much like the white soldiers.” I
prodded her to say more on this subject. “The movie assumes
what it is supposed to prove, that blacks and whites are equal,”
she said. “Maybe they are equal, but I would like more proof.”
Others in the audience agreed with her. “600,000 Americans died
in the American Civil War over the question of equality,” I
replied. “President Lincoln seemed to think that the magnitude
of carnage in our great civil war was proof—and penance—
enough.” I then summoned the courage to ask them something
3. “Dracul” means “Order of the Dragon.” Vlad II has become known
to us as the vampire, “Dracula.”
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that had been nagging me for a long time. “Why do you think
that 1200 dead on behalf of your own liberation is too much?
Maybe, to prove that you deserve freedom, it is not enough. What
does it take for slaves, black or white, to get to the other side?”
Someone replied that the death toll would have been higher in
Romania had the revolution not been stolen by apparatchiks. “It
is a pity,” I said, “that the suspicion that adheres to former slaves
requires extreme measures to be overcome.” I marveled that they
agreed without reluctance to this terrible conclusion.
The selections from current American television that my parents sent me appeared to my students like scenes from a distant
galaxy. We watched Oprah Winfrey interview fat people who
complained they were victims of size discrimination. My students
memorized the patterns in Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair, so they
were very discriminating themselves, and having stood for hours
in milk and egg lines, they were not sympathetic to “size oppression.” I also showed them Joan Rivers interviewing the fourteen
personalities of a schizophrenic, all sitting still in one chair, followed by a man who believed he was a woman but had not yet
undergone the operation to make him one. “How do you feel
when you look at yourself naked in the mirror?” asked Joan.
“Very uneasy and distracted,” said the man. Thus did my students
glimpse what ordinary Americans, my own dear family, watched
on TV or at the movies to fulfill their comic destinies.
Since my students wanted to know all about my native city,
which I felt all too eager to show off, I decided to direct them in
a comedy by David Mamet, a favorite Chicago playwright, called
Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). I chose this play because,
like most people in theatre, I felt tempted to challenge (what I
perceived to be) the unsatisfactory status quo in Romanian society. Though Mamet’s play is physically innocent (not even a kiss
is exchanged), its language admirably fulfills the promise of the
title. I hoped that the racy words, substituting for romantic and
sexual action, would retain their original picturesqueness to a Romanian audience and teach them something about the powers of
language. I wanted to expand for them the possibilities of their
own becoming human under the new dispensation of freedom.
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On such grounds as the above, suitably rendered in academic
jargon, I defended the merits of the play before my up-to-datemongering colleagues. “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” I said,
“is about the construction of society by self-referential language,
the gender-determining parameters of language, and the circulation of diverse social energies through language.” Thus I got the
better portion of my colleagues to overlook the titular theme of
the play, for a while.
One morning the Chairman of the English Department interrupted my class, escorted me into the hall (my students left staring), and began to address me. “Louis, our university is a place
for free inquiry and discussion, and I would support your efforts
to do anything to these purposes, but I read the play and, well,
let me say that we expected something more elevating from a
person as serious as yourself. I can’t agree that this play is worth
doing.” I explained my serious intentions, but he continued to
address me thus: “Between men like us bedroom relations are
normal to discuss, but you have women to think about and your
reputation among the students, who I’m afraid might misconstrue
your purposes.” I admitted that this was a concern of mine, but
that the nature of theatre is self-exposure and risk, and I promised
to conduct myself in a professional manner at all times. Still, he
continued: “I expect that sometime in the future this play could
be done here successfully, for we are not a puritanical people, but
the sexual content is . . . well . . . we’ve only recently had a revolution, and we are not like Americans with sex, we prefer to
keep it private.” I said that my purpose was to show people a certain comic face of America, not to recommend imitation. The
play discourages that. Nonetheless, he continued: “I will not
stand in your way, as you are free to do as you please on your
own time, but I expected you to consult with me as Chairman.
Students are hesitant to offend you, but my position authorizes
me to say that this play is not appropriate for Romania at this
time. Have you thought of other worthy options?” I promised that
I would distribute a program preparing the audience for the content. Then they would be free not to attend or to leave at any time
during the performance—for I was determined to direct the play
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unless my actors proved unable. With that declaration firmly understood, he left me, and I returned to my anxious students to test
whether or not they were ready to undertake Sexual Perversity
in Chicago.
I asked them first what they thought of the pornographic photos that had begun to appear on the front pages of their daily
newspapers. Someone said that as a newly free society, Romania
was obliged to include images of naked women in its newspapers.
Others joked that this phenomena was not pornography, but a
new style of photo-impressionism, since the quality of print was
so poor that the female parts could be discerned only with a
trained eye. The abolition of human distinctions and standards of
taste under communism made me ask them next how the two
sexes in Romania managed to pair off. What were the criteria of
choice? They assured me that although it was very difficult to
conduct a romance without the benefits of leisure and privacy,
the job of mating did get done more romantically than not. The
ugly uniformity of things made female beauty seem a heroic
achievement, all the more alluring and satisfying to possess for
oneself alone. Naturally, I asked them what they thought of the
condoms appearing for the first time in stores. (Ceausescu had
forbidden birth control and abortion, because it was claimed he
wanted more workers.) They replied that a free people should
have condoms available for purchase, but they did not think that
they needed to use them as urgently as the generous donations
from the West implied. Unless referring to gypsies, the students
saw no reason to join the two concepts, “unwed” and “mother.”
Nor did they expect to practice cohabitation before marriage.
There was simply no room for shacking up, and there were no
Romanian role models to exhibit all the smiling ways to sexual
liberation. How, then, would I audition these students to find four
who possessed the colorful vocabularies and wild imaginations
necessary to impersonate sexually liberated, sophisticated, urban
Americans? The Fulbright Scholar who was formerly a cop and
becoming an expert on Romania’s infamous impaler, suggested
that I show a pornographic film to my potential actors: whoever
could provide a voice-over for the action belonged in the play.
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My best female candidate, Sandina, who possessed the kind
of looks appropriate for motorcycles, dropped into a ten second
coma upon reading the title. So I took back the script and handed
it to Carmen. Always a game girl in discussion, she read the first
three short scenes and stated peremptorily: “There are three
scenes I cannot do.” “But there’s no doing involved, just talking,”
I replied. “That’s what I meant,” she said. Roxana, whose tall
boots and angularity made me offer her the part of a brittle feminist, bravely spit out the scripted words—“premature ejaculation”—as an example of the unspeakable. The play was like a
gun filled with blanks to me, but to her the words were real bullets. These women seemed in tacit agreement with Plato’s notion
that the consent to hear or say vulgar words creates an aptitude
to witness or perform vulgar deeds. I began to feel ashamed to
tamper with modesty so deeply felt. I saw that against a background of officially sponsored animality, discrete romantic love
seemed the only civilizing agent left in Romania. To abandon it,
even in play, was to offer universal sway to barbarism, and these
women knew instinctively not to do that. Their innocence appeared a precious achievement in that corrupt and filthy world.
But their unequivocal rejection of the play bothered me all the
same, for what cannot be said also would not be thought, and this
seemed to me a formula for the disappearance of the life of the
mind. To be the virtuous allies of intellectual dullness was to put
themselves in league with my chief enemies.
What finally killed the production was the combination of the
modesty of women with the politics of men. Mihai, my irreplaceable lead actor, withdrew from the play because his father, once
an important figure in the Party, did not want him acting “decadent.” So I decided to direct the students in scenes from Othello
and Romeo and Juliet instead. Shakespeare’s elevated poetry and
aspiring thoughts made even the most prurient and immoral sentiments seem highly delectable to the students, the Chairman, my
colleagues, and the public.
Of all the writers we studied, the students liked Tennessee
Williams the best. Like Shakespeare, he is poetic with his perversities. Moreover, they easily recognized in him their own in-
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herited sense of defeat, along with a perilous attraction to the
victors. I gave them a brief account of Williams’s life, which included the fact of his homosexuality. This caught their attention.
“We were taught that homosexuals sprung up in the decadent
West, like weeds, but that they did not exist in socialist Romania.
Of course we don’t believe much of anything we were taught.”
They were amazed to read Broadway plays written by Williams
forty years earlier that were sympathetic to homosexuality,
fetishism, masturbation, and rape, when only a year ago a Romanian author would have been put in prison for writing one
such play.
We read A Streetcar Named Desire and watched the movie
version starring Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. Some
women let themselves go in appreciation of Brando’s naked,
sweaty torso: “Would that someone with arms like his might
carry us away, sickness and all, master of this thing called ‘life.’”
Most were disgusted by Stanley’s crudeness, for in Romania
men still greeted women with a bow and a kiss on the hand.
“Why couldn’t Stella have married both a true gentleman and a
one-hundred percent American?” they asked. I tried to explain
that these were incompatible categories to Williams. He believed
in the predestined defeat in America of poetry, refinement, and
old world breeding by the forces of prosaic realism, animal
strength, and new world technology. On this belief his tragicomic vision depended.
Still, some of the women thought they had found their ideal
man, a combination of old and new world types, in Jim O’Conner, the Gentleman Caller from The Glass Menagerie. He is the
long awaited “something,” says Williams, which defeated people
must hope for to go on living. At the same time, and in contrast
with his fantastical role, he is “an emissary from the world of
reality” who brings news of modernity to Laura Wingfield, crippled and deeply secluded in her past. Let me remind the reader
of what happens to Jim and Laura, for as my year in Romania
drew to a close, and the students and I drew ever closer to each
other, I saw in the relationship of these characters a true image
of our own.
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Jim approaches Laura carrying a lit candelabrum and wine, superficially romantic but quite unaware of being the “climax of her
secret life.” She has always loved her image of him, and now she
faces the insupportable reality. Jim wonders what Laura has done
over the years, not knowing the depth of forlorn hope that could keep
her occupied waiting for him. Her problem, he concludes, is an “inferiority complex,” and to effect her cure he offers himself as a
model. This believer in self-improvement, determined to find some
way to get everyone looking up and going somewhere up, prepares
Laura for the future of capitalist democracy by teaching her to dance.
In the process they topple and break her favorite ornament, a unicorn,
but for the moment she accepts the loss as a “blessing in disguise,”
a sign of her return to normalcy. Then he kisses her on the lips to
demonstrate that her attractive powers are real. This startles him. He
realizes that to save Laura from her inferiority complex, he would
have to husband her away from her present circumstances. (For the
paranoia surrounding her nostalgic mother has sealed Laura inside
herself.) Luckily, he is already engaged, so he escapes the love he
evoked in her and the new life he promised. She gives him the hornless unicorn as a symbolic souvenir. It is the consequence of his
clumsy efforts—like those of a tourist—to separate her unique attractions from her hobbling infirmity.
Several of my Romanian “Lauras,” after a year of intense conversations about “literature, America, the world, and life,” bravely
took to telling me how exceptional a man I was to prefer their imperfect English to the pleading beauty of their perfectly painted eyes.
I owed them a return for the love they kept for me all those years,
and in final desperation they let me know how much.
Christiana, a woman of half-looks and whispers in class, invited
me to a student party at her sister’s apartment in May. I attended and
danced with her and the other women, felt her cling to me, let myself
enjoy their uplifted hearts differently, and smelt the residue of a thousand cigarettes in the proximity of their lips. The next day I discovered in a letter that I was Christiana’s only hope of happiness:
I feel more and more that I can’t breathe. Anytime a “decree” can appear in order to destroy, to put off my life.
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Sometimes, when I free myself from this asphyxia, I understand that I have the right to live and to experience
the mystery—the first source of superiority—that I can
breathe stealthily a kind of hidden air. You breathed that
air into me. A bird who flies smack into concrete whenever she tries to rise—that is me, I fear, when you leave.
Others are just under vain illusions, for there’s no laughter at the end of our slope, but stupid death, and there’s
no triumph and no understanding. All is weird, but also
dull and senseless here. It is the season of Goths and lunatics, that’s all. I ask you for help as I shout my love
without fear or shame, my soul defeated and caressed.
I gave Christiana some of my books when I left for home that
summer. She was supposed to become a teacher of English, but
I do not know if that came to pass, or if she is doing well, yet.
She has preferred only my books to keep the contact, I may suppose. A book, as we all should say of the good ones, is a fine
thing to keep in the space between two people who are inclining
to be engaged as one. A book makes it possible to cross that space
and that time in which two people diverge along their courses of
life. I always prefer to keep a good book between us.
Stopping in Vienna on my way back to America, I visited the
Schönbrunn Palace, once the summer residence of the Hapsburg
monarchs. While walking among the splendid gardens and fountains, I encountered a bold sign that read: “Please, Don’t Eat the
Swans.” The words were in Romanian. I remembered the previous summer, as I prepared my Fulbright application while reading
news reports about the Romanian miners sacking the capital.
“Yes,” I thought, “I did have to drag a cane behind me on the
streets at night to puzzle the abandoned dogs who were forming
packs again, learning to act like wolves.” But that is not the main
thing I felt as I beheld those swans and the sign. That year I spent
in Iasi felt even then like an oasis in my mind, and I have often
gone there since to refresh myself. There, in my mind’s eye, I
wonder long at how strangely happy I was to be teaching so awkwardly, freely, bravely even, with the wolves still close at heel
and all my familiar props far distant, to students just learning to
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fly, who let me see into the beauty of their fledgling souls, and
who made me see into mine. My old friend, Mark, the newsman
to whom, in a way, I owe my oasis, is trying to get me to go
abroad again—this time without leaving America—to teach the
poor masses by internet technology all at once, filling their empty
heads with information, entertaining and useful items, and getting
for my pains multitudinous fees. Something in me wants to erect
for us a sign. For the sake of the wonder at living human faces,
composed of the love of the infinite, the profound, beheld in those
faces, I would raise a sign in bold English, the language of America and nearly all the world on the make, to say: “Please, Let Us
Not Eat the Swans Again.”
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Dante’s Beatrice: Between Idolatry
and Iconoclasm
Gabriel Pihas
1. A Response to Two Objections to Beatrice1
Some readers have taken issue with Dante’s bringing together
eros and agape in the character of Beatrice. I will try to show
how concern about the erotic element in his poetry is connected
to other worries about iconoclasm that take shape in the centuries
after Dante. I will first outline the connection between these issues, and then try to defend Dante on both points.
Famously, the protestant theologian Anders Nygren attacked
Medieval Catholicism and formulated a deep separation between
eros and Christian love.2 His reservation about eros has to do with
its self-interested character. That is, his separation of eros from
agape is motivated by a desire to separate our self-love from
agape, and our human nature from God’s nature. According to
Nygren, the new, unique love that Christ taught had nothing to
do with any other love that lets human beings ascend to God; it
had nothing to do, for example with Socrates’s eros in the Symposium. For Nygren, the uniqueness of Christianity lies in the insight that we are not justified by the law and deserve nothing for
Gabriel Pihas teaches at St. Mary’s College of California. This essay
was first given as a lecture at St. John’s College in Annapolis on 2
December 2011.
1. I want to express my gratitude for what this article owes to an NEH
study group on agape and philia in which I participated in 2009 at St.
John’s College, Annapolis. I am indebted both to the group’s discussions
and to the lecture “Agape” that Paul Ludwig delivered at Annapolis
after leading that group, on 9 April 2010.
2. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip Watson (London:
SPCK, 1953). The word agape is commonly translated as “charity” and
I will use the words charity and agape interchangeably.
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our own virtue. 3 We are wretched sinners infinitely distant from
God, and no effort of our own can explain God’s condescension
to us. On our side there is only selfish eros, while agape is an incomprehensible miracle. For Nygren, this unmotivated condescension is the whole of Christian love.4 Some have raised
reasonable difficulties with this position. First, its excessive
harshness makes election too irrational. It leaves an enormous
gap between an unbelievably unmotivated agape and what we
clearly and fundamentally are, namely, desiring beings seeking
happiness.5 His view makes it difficult to understand the many
passages in the bible that seem to suggest our involvement in salvation, like “as many as received him, He gave them power”
(John 1:12). And second, equally importantly, one might add that
this doctrine leaves us swallowed up by God.6 We clearly lose
the dignity of our person at least in this condescension, and perhaps lose our person altogether.
I would like to draw a parallel to this separation of our eros
and agape in what at first might seem a distant sphere, namely,
iconoclasm, or the rejection of sacred art as idolatry. From the
idolatry issue arises a second, and related, objection to Beatrice.
Let me first explain what iconoclasm is, and then come back to
drawing the parallel with eros and agape. Fundamentally, there
are two very reasonable theological concerns behind iconoclasm.7
3. Nygren, 67-9.
4. Ibid., 75-6.
5. In “Agape,” Paul Ludwig argued that over-emphasis on the purely
miraculous nature of agape is one of the major problems with postLutheran accounts of it. Through a reading of New Testament uses of
agape, he argues that Nygren’s claim of a radical divide between classical philosophical strands in medieval caritas and New Testament
agape is exaggerated.
6. For some of these objections see D’Arcy, M.C. The Mind and the
Heart of Love (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 352-5.
7. There are, of course, also political motivations in iconoclasm. For
example, destruction of religious art can express opposition to the political institution of the Church through the objects it claims to safeguard and which are understood to maintain its power and its special
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First, it implies an intention to protect God from our theoretical
misconstruals of his ineffable nature and his unity, and to enhance
our inward respect for God by keeping him above anything down
here that might represent him. Second, it implies a desire to defend popular religion from superstitious religious practice. Interest in images is often connected to popular belief in magic
powers, even those latent in the very materials of the image, the
wood, paint, and stone. So there is something very thoughtful
and pious in iconoclasm. Also, there are certainly many scriptural
authorities for iconoclasm, above all, the second commandment
against graven images. But there is often also a risk of incoherence in iconoclasm. It suggests separating religion from any particular religious practice or institution. This is emphatically the
case for Christian iconoclasm, which is what I want to focus on
in this essay. For Christians, there is more latitude with images
than in other forms of monotheism. The Incarnation itself—the
idea that God became a particular human being in the womb of
a particular human woman, that He suffered and died and is
risen—almost naturally suggests making images of God. The
continual retelling of Christ’s story in pictures for the illiterate is
fundamental to the possibility of transmitting the story. This, in
fact, was part of the very earliest Christian defense of images.
But there is even more than such practical necessity to recommend images. The theology around the Incarnation suggests
a terrestrial reality preserved in transcendence. In the Incarnation
God became flesh, visible flesh. We can draw pictures of the God
who became flesh even if we can’t draw the invisible God. Part
of what is at stake in Christian iconoclastic debates is a concern
stature. The holiness of the icon is a kind of symbol for the holiness of
the Church itself, hence doubts about the sacred nature of the one takes
away political power from the other. This thesis was explored by David
Freeberg in Iconoclasts and their Motives (Montclair, N.J.: A. Schram,
1985). Similar claims about the political significance of iconoclasm in
ancient Israel were made by Joseph Guttman, “Deuteronomy: Religious
Reformation or Iconoclastic Revolution?” in The Image and the Word:
Confrontations in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Scholars
Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1977), 5-10.
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about representing human nature in the image of God. A picture
of Christ presents our humanity to us. It places God’s uncircumscribed nature in the visible, circumscribed human image. Most
importantly, the image is essential to Christianity because it is an
image in the depths of God himself, since Christ is an image of
God the Father.
Some Christians, like John of Damascus, who defended art
during the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth century, saw the artistic image as a sacramentally valuable, low-level
emanation from God. He suggested a chain or ladder of images
of God. On this ladder of emanations we find, at the top, Christ
the image of the Father; then the image of Christ in the Virgin
Mary, then in the saints, and then in man, who is made in the
image of God. Finally, at the bottom are painted images.8 He argued that we should revere the image of Christ as if it were Christ
himself because we mean by the word “image” not the physical
materials of which an art object is made, but rather the original
that the image depicts and participates in—namely, in this case,
Christ’s humanity, something worthy of the highest kind of worship.9 This argument was used many times the Middle Ages, as,
for example, by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica.
Images were an important element in the early Christian debates about Christ’s human nature. With the very first Christians,
Christ was only ever represented symbolically (for example, as
a fish or a lamb), and never in sculptures, but only in paintings.
These early Christians had reservations about images, even
though objects like the Eucharist and the relic already suggest
8. John Damascene, Apologia of St. John Damascene Against Those
Who Decry Holy Images, trans. Mary H. Allies (London: Thomas
Baker, 1898). This ladder of images is described at length in the final
chapter of the trestise, “How Many Kinds of Images There Are.”
9. John compares the question about the image of God to the ordinary
use of images of the king, and to the importance accorded a king’s representatives. The representatives and the images get the same respect
the king gets. This argument was frequently reused in later debates to
defend the “iconodule,” or anti-iconoclast, position.
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Incarnational alternatives to the magic powers of pagan idols that
pave the way for later defenses of Christian art.10 I suggest that
the initial reservations about images might derive from a hostile
social context, and were not expressions of the mature faith: some
of its reservations derived from inherited Jewish practices, some
from a desire to distinguish Christianity from the pagan practice
surrounding them in Rome. Many reservations about images of
Christ derived merely from a need to maintain secrecy so as to
avoid persecution.11 Slightly later, when the persecution of Christians was no longer an issue, images of Christ most often appeared in group scenes telling stories from the New Testament
for the illiterate. But images of Christ appearing by himself, and
not symbolically, begin to become more common after paganism
vanished in Rome in the middle of the fifth century. These images
were often produced to affirm the doctrinal importance of the Incarnation against other heretical understandings of Christ’s nature. At that time a number of heresies circulated, such as the
claim that Christ’s human nature was erased in his divine nature,
or the opposed claim that Christ was merely a human instrument
of God. According to such views, it would not make any sense
to venerate the human image. In contrast, the act of veneration
10. I take this point from Marc Fumaroli, “The Christian Critique of
Idolatry” in Idol Anxiety, ed. Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft,
trans. Benjamin Storey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 3241. As he points out, in the Eucharist and the relic we find the real presence, not just reminders of God. These new objects will oppose the
pagan demons previously thought to be present within statues and
amulets.
11. My suggestion implies that the way the apostles worshipped was
not always the best way. The iconoclastic Calvin took offense at such a
suggestion (Institutes 1.2.13) . But we see such limitations attributed to
the apostles explicitly in the gospels themselves, especially with regard
to this issue of seeing the image of the invisible God. For example,
when Phillip asks Christ to show him the Father (John 14:8), he is still
in the mode of waiting for the fulfillment of the prophets, and unaware
of what he has before him. (I owe this point to a private conversation
with Marsaura Shukla.)
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of the images of Christ as a man emphasizes that all of his divinity is present along with his visible humanity. Such veneration of
images is thus a way of affirming both natures. This non-symbolic human image was thought to be so important that the symbolic presentation of Christ as a lamb was even expressly banned
in the 600s, and the representation of Christ as a man became not
a possibility but a requirement.12 Opposition to the images was
never simply about the limits of art, or even about religious practice. It involved much more fundamental questions about the nature of the divine. Hence iconoclasm in all of its historical
appearances always involved opposition not merely to the depiction of Christ, but to the adoration of Mary and the saints, in or
out of pictures. Just as Byzantine and Protestant iconoclasts were
suspicious of images, they were also suspicious, for similar reasons, of the adoration of the saints and Mary. This broader context of communion with Mary and the saints is, as we shall see,
directly relevant to Beatrice.
Now I can finally establish the parallel I want to draw with
eros and agape. Unease about an image of Christ’s humanity
and Christ’s humanity itself is similar to the unease felt by the
separators of eros and agape, who don’t want to find self-regard
mixed up with agape. The fear of contaminating agape with eros
is another form of the fear of contaminating the infinite God with
our finite humanity in the images we make. The fear that our
own ascent through eros diminishes God’s condescension in
agape is similar to the fear that any work of our hands diminishes the honor we give to God. Both fears are understandable,
but are generally problematic attempts to eliminate our self-regard in finding our good. Both imply an idea of the supernatural
12. See Edward James Martin, A History of the Iconoclast Controversy
(London: Church Historical Society, 1930; reprinted 1978), 20-21. The
prohibition on the image of the lamb appears in the Quinsext Council,
Canon #82. The claim in that canon is that the human image reminded
us better than the lamb image of the “humiliation of the word of God”
and “his conversation in the flesh, passion…death…and redemption.”
This document is from 692 A.D.
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that wholly effaces our human nature. Both can verge on hatred
of our humanity. Dante offers an alternative Christian view that
does not eliminate self-regard, but attempts to include it, and
that does not simply efface our human nature. According to Nygren’s view, Dante is one of the most representative of all offenders in confusing eros and agape.13 For Dante, the ascent of
eros can complement the descent of agape. Both movements
may even be united in the same soul at the same time, and transformed eros can proportionately reflect agape. So, I will try to
show how different Dante’s literary works are from the more
modern view in respect to the way he brings eros and agape together.
Dante’s writing is also provocative in the context of the
idolatry issue. Like the seventh-century prohibition on the
merely symbolic images of Christ, his work demands a new
level of realism and historical detail. His inclusion of Virgil and
the classical world in combination with his rehabilitation of the
city of man suggest a new dignity in our humanity, unthinkable
in many earlier Christian writers. In fact, one of Dante’s central
aims in writing the Commedia is to take temporal power away
from the Church and establish the dignity of worldly government. But this political innovation is merely the flip side of
Dante’s theological-erotic innovation. The great novelty of
Dante’s political doctrines went hand in hand with the novelty
of making the beloved lady of courtly love poetry into a figure
of religious awe. The beautiful image of Beatrice pointed Dante
toward God, both during her life and after her death. Remarkably, her earthly reality is always preserved in her transcen13. For Nygren’s attack on Dante, see Agape and Eros, 616-620. His
claim is simply that Dante has too many Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian
philosophical elements for him to be Christian. Nygren tries to make
his argument against Dante merely by identifying such elements in
Dante’s thought. Here is not the place to discuss in detail the parts of
Nygren’s book unrelated to Dante, but the radical and problematic contention that Christianity cannot involve any such classical philosophical
elements is central to his broader argument.
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dence, as Christ’s is in the Incarnation.14 This paradox distinguishes Dante’s ideal woman from much more common symbolic or allegorical ideal women. As he himself said, by placing
Beatrice in heaven gazing upon God, he praised her in a way that
no poet had ever praised any woman.15
In fact, no one had ever done it before because it is a very
odd thing to do. With what right could Dante make a beautiful
woman a mediatrix to God? Is he worshipping her as an idol?
Some have said Yes. In the wake of Reformation, Protestant
iconoclasm, and the Index of Forbidden Books, we find a
Catholic editor in Italy, Bartolomeo Sermartelli, who worried
that Dante’s love was simply theologically offensive. In 1576,
about two hundred and fifty years after Dante’s death, in the
first printed edition of his early book, the Vita Nuova, the love
theology was heavily censored.16 All Dante’s scriptural citations
were removed. Passages attributing divine qualities to Beatrice
were deleted or cleaned up. For example, where the text said
that Beatrice offers him salute (salvation), we find instead the
more banal word saluto (salutation). And where Dante says she
generates beatitudine (blessedness), we find the word changed
to felicitá (happiness). The chapter where she is most explicitly
identified with Christ (Chapter 24) was simply deleted. This
censorship was founded on the separation between eros and
agape. This separation underlies the whole history of the ideal
woman in Renaissance literature in this period, from Ariosto’s
14. This well-worn point is familiar to most through Erich Auerbach’s
writings on Dante. See Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular
World, trans.,Ralph Manheim (New York: New York Review of
Books, 2007 and Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (Princeton: Princton University Press, 2003). The idea originated, for Auerbach and his generation at least, with Hegel. See Auerbach, Mimesis, 191.
15. Dante, Vita Nuova, chap. 42.
16. See Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20040, 173.
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Angelica, to Cervantes’s Dulcinea, and later to Milton’s Eve.
Although some of these authors would not see themselves as
fundamentally motivated by theological concerns, nonetheless
they were all impressed by the idea that the beloved of the
chivalric tradition was idolatrous. Just as the iconoclast reformers sought to destroy the sacred images, so also certain poets
and novelists at the same time attacked the chivalric view of
love. But they did not limit themselves to this renunciation of
erotic idolatry. They attacked the chivalric view of both love
and arms, that is, they attacked both the ideal women and the
ideals of worldly honor. While we have become used to thinking of such attacks as obvious, Dante opposed them. He affirmed both the transcendence of the ideal woman as well as
the integrity of honor and the worldly political order, when part
of a Christian life. Hence Dante’s adapatation of literary realism
was not a reaction against theology, but an extension of his theological bent.
Unlike Dante’s literary realism, the new literary realism that
some of these later authors pursued, and which became the
foundation for modern realism, was founded on the incompatibility of our terrestrial reality and the manifestation of God.17
These authors begin from the hiddenness of God and of his
providence, rather than with the sacramental idea of nature.
Hence the theological issues that are involved in my defense of
Dante and his challenge to iconoclasm have a relevance that extends to modern literature as well as political and aesthetic theory. I will now present Beatrice as an alternative to this early
modern theology.
2. Beatrice as Christ in Vita Nuova
In the thirteenth century, poets explored the conflict between
17. The other element that distinguishes the two camps is their differing
attitude to pagan poetry. The new realism attempts to end the ancient
epic, which it regards as an ongoing tradition, while Dante is attempting
to revive an epic tradition that per lunga silenzio parea fioco (from long
silence seemed hoarse. (Inferno 1.63.)
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courtly love and religion from a few different angles.18 Guittone
d’Arezzo renounced love poetry and became a monk, writing religious poems against the courtly tradition. He stressed the moral opposition between divine love and the poet’s human lust. Two other
poets who were extremely close to Dante, Guido Cavalcanti and
Guido Guinizelli, although less ascetic and less pious than Guittone,
expressed similar concerns. Cavalcanti worried about the excessive
focus on one’s own, and on the private possession of the beloved,
which were obstacles to the universality of philosophical truth, and
to our good according to reason. He thought that being overwhelmed
by the passion of love divides the soul and implies forgetting that at
which reason aims. Guido Guinizelli’s poetry playfully suggested
that the earthly lady who was object of love and praise was more
than metaphorically divine, and hence was in sinful competition with
God. He saw that the implicit religious elements in the courtly love
tradition, and in poetry itself, were clearly idolatrous. But he never
took the problem very seriously and never sought a resolution to this
problem. In the story of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5, Dante
gives his own account of Guinizelli’s problem. But long before writing that canto, the young Dante already writes the Vita Nuova, a book
dedicated to Guido Cavalcanti that addresses all these various objections. As we will see, the Vita Nuova is a miniature of the major
action of the Divine Comedy.
Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova is unusual in that it
is not at all libidinal. Beatrice’s beauty is inseparably bound up with
her moral virtue, and beyond any lust that might make Dante forget
about his highest aims.
“It happened that her image, which was always with me,
gave boldness to Love to rule over [me], but was of such noble
virtue that it never let Love rule me without the faithful counsel
of reason.”19
18. For a thoughtful account of the tradition of vernacular love poetry and
the question of heresy, see Pamela Williams Through Human Love to God
(Leicester: Troubadour Publishing, 2007), especially 9-11, and 76-77.
19. Vita Nuova, chapter 2. E avvenga che la sua imagine, la quale continuatamente meco stave, fosse baldanza d’Amore a segnoreggiare me,
tuttavia era di sì nobilissima vertù, che nulla volta sofferse che Amore
mi reggesse sanza lo fedele consiglio de la ragione.
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So, contrary to Cavalcanti’s objection, Dante is never
blinded or even distracted by physical passion, and never ceases
thinking about God when looking on Beatrice. Dante’s experience of eros begins from the already religiously-infused courtly
love tradition. It is this tradition that explains part of Dante’s simultaneous interest in Beatrice as a beautiful woman and the
non-libidinal character of that interest. From the beginning Beatrice is the courtly domina, his “lady” in the sense of the feminine
form of “lord.” But as we will see, Dante goes further. Exactly
insofar as her image causes Love to overcome his faculties, he
becomes free of libido. Dante addresses Guinizelli’s concerns
by taking the religious element in the courtly tradition and radicalizing it in a most daring way.20 Beatrice is introduced as the
“glorious lady of my mind” (gloriosa donna de la mia mente)
and a young angel. The title of the book, New Life, recalls Paul’s
phrase (Romans 6:3-4) about giving up the old life of sin and
entering into the new life of grace. His meeting with Beatrice is
nothing less than the experience of God’s grace, now in the intimate world of his memory that the book records. Her beauty
is miraculous, and is rooted in the Trinity. The Vita Nuova is frequently compared to contemporary accounts of saint’s lives.
That is the genre to which it belongs. Beatrice’s appearance on
earth is a unique and miraculous event that Dante claims to have
witnessed, and he transcribes it from the book of his memory to
share with those who never saw her.
At the opening of the Vita Nuova, Dante describes his vision
of Beatrice as a beatific vision: “As she passed through a street,
she turned her eyes to where I stood very fearful, and with her
ineffable courtesy, which is today rewarded in eternal life, she
greeted me with great virtue, so much that I seemed to see all the
limits of blessedness.”21
20. For the uniqueness of Dante’s gesture, see John A. Scott, Understanding Dante (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2004) 16-17.
21. Vita Nuova, chapter 3. [P]assando per una via, volse li occhi verso
quella parte ov’io era molto pauroso, e per la sua ineffabile cortesia, la
quale è oggi meritata nel grande secolo, mi salutoe molto virtuosamente,
tanto che me parve allora vedere tutti li termini de la beatitudine.
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It is difficult to imagine passing a woman in the street and
taking it for beatitude. Dante must have seen the inner meaning
of her beauty as an effect of the Creator, not merely as the beauty
of the creature for its own sake. The beauty appears as an emanation of God much as Neo-Platonic thinkers like Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus might have suggested. Scholars have
focused on a number of more historically proximate potential
sources who followed exactly such theological theories about the
vision of beauty, including Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of St.
Victor, and Bonaventure.22
Beatrice makes others who see her more like herself, just as
in greeting Dante she will transform him into Love itself. Beatrice has this effect on all who are noble enough to be able to see
her. This is the most unusual thing about Dante’s love for Beatrice. It is the aspect of courtly love that is most obvious from its
name, but least often taken seriously because it is so distant from
us: Dante’s love is shared, public erotic love, not private love.
Dante is the beloved for all Florentine gentlemen. His act of charity lies in his sharing of Beatrice through his poetry with those
non-Florentines, and non-contemporaries, who never saw her
when she was alive. Love of Beatrice becomes universal.
Dante’s love blends eros and charity. In one passage he focuses on the effect on himself of Beatrice’s greeting in the street.
Much of the experience of love in the Vita Nuova is condensed
in this rightly famous passage. In this greeting she presumably
22. See Francesco Mazzoni, Il canto XXXI del Purgatorio (Florence: F.
Le Monnier, 1965). Of course, Aquinas, among many others, also took
up the widespread Neoplatonic doctrines that described creatures as
preexisting in a higher form in God. Other traditional theological avenues for explaining the role of Beatrice might be analogy (see Warren
Ginsberg, Dante’s Aesthetics of Being [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999] 8-13), deificatio (Rosetta Migliorini-Fissi, “La nozione
di ‘deificatio’ nel Paradiso.” Letture classensi. 9-10 [1982]: 39-72), or
we might simply see her as a special revelation, like the phantasms and
sensibles offered to prophets. (See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, q. 12,
a.13: “sometimes phantasms in the imagination . . . and sometimes sensible things are divinely formed.”)
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said salve, which in Italian is the same as the now outmoded English phrase, “save you,” short for “May God save you.” It is a
blessing, it “makes blessed,” just as Beatrice’s name means “she
who makes blessed.” Here is Dante’s description in Chapter 11
of the Vita Nuova of the effect on himself of this greeting or
blessing:
Whenever she appeared anywhere, because of the hope
of her miraculous greeting [mirabile salute] I had no
enemy in the world, instead a flame of charity came to
me that made me pardon whoever had offended me. If
anyone had asked me anything, my answer would be
only, “Love,” with a face dressed in humility. And whenever she was about to greet me, a spirit of love, destroying all the other sensitive spirits, drove out the feeble
spirits of vision, telling them “Go and honor your lady,”
and it remained in their place. And anyone who wanted
to know love could have done so by looking at the trembling of my eyes. And when this most gentle one greeted
me with this greeting, not only was Love not a mediator
that could obscure from me the overwhelming blessedness, but through an excess of sweetness, he became such
that my body which was wholly under Love’s control,
moved like an inanimate mass. So that it appears manifestly that in her greeting dwelt my beatitude, which
greatly exceeded and surpassed my capacities.23
In this important passage, Beatrice’s beauty promises beatitude for Dante in her miraculous greeting. But the charity he
feels is not for her, but for anyone. This is mysterious. In this
23. Vita Nuova, Chapter 11: Dico che quando ella apparia da parte alcuna, per la speranza de la mirabile salute nullo nemico mi rimanea,
anzi mi giugnea una fiamma di caritade, la quale mi facea perdonare
a chiunque m’avesse offeso; e chi allora m’avesse domandato di cosa
alcuna, la mia risponsione sarebbe stata solamente —Amore—, con
viso vestito d’umilitade. E quando ella fosse alquanto propinqua al salutare, uno spirito d’amore, distruggendo tutti li altri spririti sensitive,
pingea fuori li deboletti spiriti del viso, e dicea loro: “Andate a onorare
la donna vostra”; ed elli si rimanea nel luogo loro. E chi avesse voluto
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way Dante makes an implicit distinction between eros for
Beatrice and charity for others. The key to the passage is to understand the relation between hope and charity in the first sentence. The promise of the salute (“greeting”/”salvation”) from
the beautiful creates a hope that is so strong it generates charity. To understand it we have to think that Beatrice’s greeting,
in which she said “be saved,” is so overwhelmingly pleasant
that Dante focuses completely on her and forgets himself. The
self-forgetting is represented as love destroying and expelling
his spirits, here understood as the Galenic spirits that make his
body function. The confidence of this hope elicits generosity
for others. When his hope is this great, he exists beyond himself and can afford to become all charity and humility. He runs
no risk of loss in his charity, because it grows naturally from
his desire for his own good. As Aquinas puts it, charity, or love
of God for His own sake, is the perfection of the imperfect love
that begins in hope for one’s own good.24 This imperfect love
that becomes charity we would call eros. We might also make
this point theologically rather than psychologically, by recalling Virgil’s comment in Purgatorio that love is a good that one
has more of when one shares it (Purgatorio 15.55-7). Dante
wishes to give to others, while also getting for himself. Both
occur when he is taken over by love, becoming more than himself, even at the level of his eyes and his body. It makes his
body and libido wholly inactive, with all his activity focused
in the eyes.
conoscere Amore, fare lo potea, mirando lo tremare de li occhi miei. E
quando questa gentilissima salute salutava, non che Amore fosse tal
mezzo che potesse obumbrare a me la intollerabile beatitudine, ma elli
quasi per soverchio di dolcezza divenia tale, che lo mio corpo, lo quale
era tutto allora sotto lo suo reggimento, molte volte si movea come cosa
grave inanimata. Sì che appare manifestamente che ne le sue salute
abitava la mia beatitudine, la quale molte volte passava e redundava
la mia capacitade.
24. Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II q. 17, a.8: “[Charity] adheres to
God for His own sake; . . . he that hopes [on the other hand], intends to
obtain possession of something for himself.”
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Note in this passage that he becomes charitable toward others
in a way that repeats or extends Beatrice’s charity for him. She
blesses him with this greeting not out of eros, but out of charity.
In contrast, he erotically and selfishly desires her greeting, while
loving others charitably. The charity and the eros operate together
in him without conflict. They have different objects. Eros is for
something he yearns after and contemplates that is above him.
Charity is an effect of his hope for that same object of contemplation, but it is aimed at people at his level or below.25 At this
point we have given an incomplete description of Dante’s account of eros and agape. So far we only have the two loves in
the same soul, provoked by one object, but aimed at different
people. We still have to come to see how the two loves are not
merely non-contradictory, but also more closely intertwined. I
will complete this articulation of eros and agape at the end of
this essay, in connection with Dante’s definition of agape in Paradiso.
Dante’s great discovery in the middle of the Vita Nuova,
which he arrives at with the help of Guido Gunizelli, is that he
must praise Beatrice, not merely describe her effect on him. His
poetry must be about her, not about himself. His blessedness is
no longer in her greeting as it was in the previous passage. His
poetic apprenticeship takes him beyond this. Instead his salvation
is now in his own charitable poetry, in praise of his lady. This
new direction generates the middle section of the Vita Nuova,
which contains many of the greatest poems of the collection. And
yet, it is important that Dante himself saw this apparently selfeffacing attitude of praise as actually self-regarding in a positive
sense. Dante says elsewhere that praising someone who is far
25. Compare Gregory the Great’s account of Jacob’s ladder in the Pastoral Rule, Book 2, Chapter 5. We both ascend and descend on this ladder, ascending in contemplation, and descending to those we minister
to through charity. This division between upward and downward loves
is implicit in the Vita Nuova passage, and frames the treatment of the
contemplative ladder in Paradiso 21-22. Canto 21 deals with upward
movement on the ladder, Canto 22, with downward movement on the
ladder.
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greater than yourself is always a self-interested act, since praise
implies friendship, and friendship implies likeness. Hence to
praise the great is to assert that you are like the great in some
way. (Convivio 3.1.4) The same goes, he suggests, for friendship
with God.
After Beatrice dies, years pass, and he begins to forget her
for a new noblewoman, whom he identifies in the Convivio as a
symbol for philosophy. At the end of the Vita Nuova he repents
this philosophical betrayal, and turns again to the memory of
Beatrice in the final chapters, rising up to heaven where Beatrice
dwells. The sequence in the final few paragraphs of the Vita
Nuova about repenting his abandonment of Beatrice, followed
by ascent to God—this is a tiny draft to be rewritten and expanded in the Commedia. At the end of the Vita Nuova, Beatrice
is described as the object of his soul’s pilgrimage, like the shroud
on which Christ left his features, which pilgrims visit in Rome,
known as the Veronica or True Icon. Dante suggests that the pilgrimage to Rome and his local pilgrimage to Beatrice are ultimately the same. The famous shroud in Rome has power, but,
actually, the local miracle of Beatrice, a woman who is a mirror
of God for the Florentines, is just as good as the shroud. “Christ
comes alive for Dante in Beatrice.”26 Her image transports him
to the good that can fulfill him. As a creature gone to her Creator,
her beauty is an exemplar that is more perfect in God, just as the
features in the shroud are more perfect in the seemingly absent
original face that they let us see. But further, Dante’s poetry itself
has the power to make others feel Beatrice’s beauty without ever
seeing her. His words are as good as sacred relics, like the shroud
with Christ’s features. His poem, like Beatrice, is mediator to
God, not a competitor. At the same time, his writings about her
are in fact even better than the historical Beatrice and even better
than the famous shroud at Rome, in that the writings can be
shared with all who read them anywhere and forever.
26. Christopher Ryan, “The Theology of Dante” in The Cambridge
Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jackoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 146.
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3. Beatrice as Mirror of God in Purgatorio
In the Commedia, Dante gives an account of how all of
human life should be understood in the light of eternal reality and
revelation. How could so much have come out of a vision of
Beatrice? Again, why isn’t this idolatry? On a number of occasions, Dante distinguishes what he is doing from idolatry. I will
mention only one.27 In Purgatorio 19, Dante has a dream of the
Siren, who Virgil will later tell him is the symbol for excessive
desire for earthly pleasures:
When geomancers see their Fortuna Major rise in the east
before dawn, rising by a way that stays dark for little
time, a stuttering woman came to me in a dream, crosseyed, and crooked on her feet, with her hands deformed
and pallid in color. I gazed at her; and as the sun comforts
the cold members that the night weighs down, so my
glance made ready her speech, and quickly straightened
her, and the distorted face it colored as love would want
it. Then with her speaking unshackled, she began to sing,
so that with difficulty might I turn my attention away
from her. “I am” she sang, “I am the sweet siren that misleads sailors in the middle of the sea, so pleasant is it to
hear me! I turned Ulysses, eager for his road, to my song.
And whoever gets used to staying with me rarely departs;
so completely do I fulfill him!” 28
The time is indicated by reference to a gnostic astrological
tradition called geomancy. This practice involved connecting pat27. Other prominent treatments of idolatry in the Commedia are Paolo
and Francesca’s idolatry of Amor (Inferno 5), the idolatry of Federick
II by the poet Pier delle Vigne (Inferno 13), and the idolatry of the simoniac popes (Inferno 19). Canto 19 in all three canticles is dedicated
to the idolatry issue in connection with the Church and the pope.
28. Purgatorio 19.1-24. [Q]uando i geomanti lor Maggior Fortuna /
veggiono in orïente, innanzi all’ alba, / surger per via che poco le sta
bruna: / mi venne in sogno una femmina balba, / ne li occhi guercia, e
sovra i piè distorta, / con le man monche, e di colore scialba. / Io la
mirava; e come ’l sol confortale / fredde membra che la notte aggrava,
/ così lo sguardo mio le facea scorta / la lingua, e poscia tutta la driz-
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terns drawn on the earth to constellations in the heavens. So the
setting suggests a kind of superstitious mistaking of earthly and
heavenly. At first the siren is ugly and stuttering, but then Dante’s
gaze makes her articulate and beautiful. We are invited to hear
her initial stuttering in line 19, as well as the balanced fluidity he
projects on her by line 21 (Io son . . . io son, dolce serena / che
marinari in mezzo mar dismago/ tanto son di piacer’ a sentir
piena!). As others have suggested, the power of his gaze to reshape her is an allegory for the power of his imagination to reshape the earthly and make it heavenly, that is, it is an allegory
for the act of idol-making.29 The parallel with Inferno 19 suggests
that the Siren is another development of the whore with seven
heads (lines 108-109), a conflation of images in Revelations that
suggests Rome. Here, as in Inferno 19, the idolatry of the pope
is of special interest. Later in Purgatorio 19, we encounter a concrete historical example of the damage the allegorical Siren can
do in pope Adrian V, who is now purging his own avarice. He
tells Dante that he had at first made the earthly political power
of Church offices the aim of his ascent (19.103-108). Then, when
he rose to its peak and became pope, he finally came to recognize
that no earthly position, no ambition, would satisfy him (109-11).
zava / in poco d’ora, e lo smarrito volto, / com’ amor vuol, così le colorava. / Poi ch’ell’ avea ’l parlar così disciolto, / cominciava a cantar
sì, che con pena / da lei avrei mio intento rivolto. / “Io son”, cantava,
“io son dolce serena, / che i marinari in mezzo mar dismago; / tanto
son di piacere a sentir piena! / Io volsi Ulisse del suo cammin vago / al
canto mio; e qual meco s’ausa, / rado sen parte; sì tutto l’appago!
29. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 140-41. The allegory is
a precise response to Virgil’s account of the soul’s perception of and inclination to desirable objects in the previous canto (18. 43ff.). In his account, the imagination takes in outer experience and presents it to us.
Our role in the imaginative presentation of objects in the soul is what
Dante has allegorized with the Siren in Canto 19. The doctrine on counsel and consent that Dante is following here is that of Summa Theologica I-II, qq. 14-15. Aquinas in turn takes it from Augustine’s account of
the imagination in On the Trinity, Books 11-12.
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His mistaken attempt to ascend to the earthly, as if the earth were
above him rather than below, resembles the geomancer’s identification of his earthly image with the heavenly reality at the beginning of the canto. Realizing his error, he quits his post. He is
finally saved, though he must spend time in purgatory weeping
over his attachment to the earth. With his face and body stuck in
earthly mire, he suffers while longing for heaven. Adrian’s tears,
which “mature” his soul in preparation for ascent, atone for his
fascination with the earth, which prevented him from ascending.
His fascination with the earth parallels the hypnosis of the Siren’s
song, which paralyzes sailors in the sea. The hymn Adrian sings
together with the others in this part of purgatory also expresses
this hypnosis as being stuck or adhering, but now with a new
sense: Adhaesit pavimento anima mea! I will suggest at the end
of this essay that, although Dante’s poetry often brings into relief
the transcendent possibilities for terrestrial beauty, Adrian’s tears
for heaven and his hatred for the stasis of purely earthly pursuits
are intended by Dante as emblems of how we should live on earth.
Although in passages like Canto 19 Dante reflects on the dangers of idolatry, in the Purgatorio, rather than backing away from
the Vita Nuova, he explicitly reaffirms it. Dante’s encounter with
Beatrice at the top of purgatory is a clear parallel with the idolatry
of the Siren and raises all of Nygren’s questions about Dante’s
mix of eros and agape. The preparation for Beatrice’s arrival is
perhaps the most daring of all of Dante’s gestures of praise. When
Dante arrives at the Garden of Eden in Purgatorio 28 he sees a
variety of mystical symbols paraded before his eyes. Seven candlesticks lead a procession (the seven gifts of the spirit that illuminate human life). Following these are the books of the Old
Testament, represented by twenty-four elders. Then comes a
Chariot (the Church) pulled by Christ as the Griffin.30 On either
30. I follow the traditional reading of the Griffin, against recent attempts
to interpret it otherwise. For such attempts see Peter Armour, “Dante’s
Processional Vision” in Lectura Dantis: Purgatorio, A Canto-by-Canto
Commentary, ed. Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles
Ross. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 336-340.
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side of the chariot are virtues represented as nymphs, while behind the chariot are various men representing the books of the
New Testament. More concisely then, the procession means that
the spirit of God illuminates revelation and the history of scripture, all of which centers on the transcendent moment of Christ’s
coming to earth and leading his Church, uniting the books in the
epochs before and after him. The whole procession is in the form
of a cross, with the two-natured symbol of Christ at the center.
This elaborate procession contains a set of images mostly from
Revelation, which refers the whole scene to the last judgment.
As Charles Singleton emphasized, Dante is witnessing a last
judgment. Even fairly uneducated medieval readers would be immediately aware of this.31
Singleton argued that what makes Dante’s procession different
from the ordinary medieval understanding of the last judgment is
the person who appears in the chariot when the procession stops.
Dante introduces this person as Christ, but it will be someone else.
One of the representatives of the Old Testament sings the phrase
Veni sponsa de Libano (Come, bride of Lebanon), from the Song
of Songs, three times. Then everyone in the procession sings in
31. Many medieval churches decorated with exactly such images of the
last judgment, would have taught Dante’s ordinary readers about the last
judgment in terms of these symbols, and perhaps inspired Dante’s canto.
Most iconographically similar of all to Dante’s procession are the mosaics
in the churches of Santi Cosma e Damiano and the identical ones in the
church of Santa Prassede, both in Rome, where in each case a series of successive arches in the church contain these symbols (the heavenly Jerusalem,
the twenty four elders, the seven candlesticks, the evangelists, etc.). To one
who traverses the space, even merely with one’s glance, the succession of
arches creates the visual effect of a procession in motion towards the end
of the church, where Christ appears in the vault descending to the judgment
seat. Coincidentally, the mosaics of S. Prassede are of particular relevance
for the question of iconoclasm in medieval art. They were done at the end
of the 700s by artists fleeing iconoclast persecution in Byzantium and commemorate the relocation of the remains of martyrs and saints from the catacombs. Byzantine iconoclasts were opposed to the devotion to martyrs as
well as to images. Like Dante’s Purgatorio, the mosaics stress the value of
human beings as mediators.
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response Benedictus qui venit! (Blessed is He who comes!). In its
original context, this phrase “Blessed is He who comes” describes
Christ entering Jerusalem. The Old Testament erotic longing for
the Bride of Lebanon is now to be satisfied with the phrase announcing Christ from the New Testament. Since his readers know
this New Testament verse, and know the iconography of the procession, then it is very clear that these angels are welcoming the
returning Christ, who is arriving at his judgment seat so as to decide who can be received into the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of
God. If we attune ourselves to the force of the scriptural citations
as the last century of scholarship has helped us to do, then we recognize that nothing could have prepared a Medieval reader for
what happened next. The angels quote a verse from Virgil’s
Aeneid, Manibus o date lilia plenis (Give hands full of lilies).32
Anchises voices this phrase at one of the most melancholy moments of Vergil’s poem, “even though it is of no use, let me throw
these lilies over the shade of the dead soul.” All this is overturned
in Purgatorio 30 when angels shower the chariot with lilies, and
in the midst of a delicate rain of flowers, Beatrice appears. Of
course Christ, the “He” in “Blessed is He who comes,” it turns
out, is a she.
Now, including a line from Virgil as a part of the last Judgment is already stretching the bounds of theological propriety,
and it embraces the pagan world in a new way. It transforms and
completes our worldly dignity and our wholly natural desires
rather than effacing them in the moment of revelation. But surprising as it is, this is not the most striking thing about the scene.
If we accept the idea that the ancient inability to redeem death
has been overcome by Christ’s sacrifice, and that it is natural for
Dante to use a bit of pagan poetry to express this thought, then
Virgil’s melancholy has itself been uplifted and transformed into
a moment of grace. His conversation with Statius about his role
in the conversion in Purgatorio 22 might have already prepared
us for that. Rather, it is the appearance of Beatrice that makes
this passage so complicated.
32. Aeneid 6.883-86; Purgatorio 30.21.
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As I said, the procession suggests that the figure who emerges
should be Christ coming down to the judgment seat. Dante has
done everything to make us think this. And of course, only
Christ’s grace could surpass the ancient melancholy and redeem
us from death. But in Singleton’s words, we witness here the Advent of Beatrice.33 In Dante’s case, the person who pronounces
the decision about whether he is received in the heavenly city is
Beatrice. She is at the center of this heavenly procession; she is
the representative of the Judge in this personal last judgment. She
will make Dante confess his sin, and she will be an instrument
of his forgiveness. She appears to him in Christ’s place.34 While
Purgatory was structured by three-part examples from an ancient
source, from the Old Testament, and from the New Testament,
Beatrice’s appearance takes us into a realm beyond the three citations that announce her. She is the revelation at the center of
history.
The Griffin that pulls the chariot is a symbolic presentation
of Christ that leaves Christ a mystery. A similar tactic is found in
33. See Singleton, “The Advent of Beatrice” in Journey to Beatrice.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 72-85. In the preceding couple of pages I have been trying to re-enact Singleton’s understanding of Beatrice as a Christ figure in such a way as to
represent the theological boldness of the gesture.
34. There is a traditional model for the procession that Dante may
have had in mind. The translator John Sinclair saw Beatrice of the
chariot in purgatory as an image of the Eucharist (for which see the
commentary accompanying his translation of Purgatorio 30 in
Dante: The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio [New York: Oxford University Press, 1939]). In the middle ages, the Eucharist was paraded
through the streets in a chariot in the feast of Corpus Christi at Modena, and Dante might be expecting his readers to think of that. If
Sinclair was right, the poem can be seen as a public procession of
his private vision with a Eucharistic value. The living Beatrice, as I
said earlier, was a public love, a miracle for all the Florentines. And
the Beatrice of Dante’s writings is less private still. The aim of
Dante’s work is to make Beatrice a universal figure available to all
his readers.
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iconoclastic Hebrew illuminated manuscripts in Germany in the
1200s. By making holy people into mythical animals or giving
them animal heads, artists avoided giving a false impression with
a non-fictional, non-arbitrary representation.35 So the use of the
Griffin can be understood as a careful, humble avoidance of idolatry here. But unfortunately Dante doesn’t leave it at that, but
looks at the Griffin in Beatrice’s eyes. Again, Christ appears to
Dante, comes to life for Dante, in the beautiful eyes of Beatrice.
The two natures of the Griffin are mysteriously fused, but in her
eyes he sees alternately one or the other. He says:
Mille disiri piú che fiamma caldi
strinsermi li occhi alli occhi rilucenti,
che pur sopra ’l grifone stavan saldi.
Come in lo specchio il sol, non altrimenti
la doppia fiera dentro vi raggiava,
or con altri, or con altri reggimenti.
Pensa, lettor, s’io mi maravigliava,
quando vedea la cosa in sé star queta,
e ne l’idolo suo si trasmutava.36
In the soul of Beatrice, Dante can see an image either of
Christ’s humanity or of his divinity, but never both at once. Why
does Dante see the Griffin through the eyes of a woman at all?
We might try to evade the problem—as many critics do—and
make Beatrice herself a mere symbol. But our knowledge of the
details of Beatrice’s real existence as a contemporary of Dante
in the Vita Nuova (for instance, her life and death, her family relations) makes such a reading inadequate. Even when she is dead,
35. See Bezalel Narkiss and Evelyn Cohen, “Illuminated Manuscripts,
Hebrew” in Encyclopedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred
Skolnik, 2nd ed., Vol. 9. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 726-735.
36. Purgatorio 31.124-6, “A thousand desires hotter than flame bound
my eyes to the eyes reflecting, that upon the Griffin stayed firm. As in a
mirror the sun, not otherwise the double beast within rayed out, now with
one now with the other nature. Think, reader, if I marveled when I saw
that the thing in itself remained unchanged but in its image changed.”
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her eyes have the flash that distinguishes living, conscious human
beings from dead ones and from statues. In Beatrice the eternal
meaning is reflected in the eyes of a contemporary human being.
She is not just a beautiful object or a symbol, because she is a
subject who loves the Beautiful Itself, just as Dante does. He falls
in love with God through his beloved, who is herself in love with
God. In fact, he falls in love with her precisely insofar as she is
a lover. In being moved by love she reflects the love that moves
her. The reflection of Christ in her loving eyes makes others, like
Dante, into lovers of Christ. (Compare Plato’s Phaedrus, especially 255c-d, where the beloved is seduced by his own deified
reflection in the eyes of the lover.) Beatrice’s role as a lover removes the idolatry from Dante’s love of her. And the reader is
supposed to participate in this same reflection between lover and
beloved by looking at Dante’s love for Beatrice.
To understand why the mirroring of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes
is not idolatrous, we must recall the tradition of the speculum
Dei, the mirror of God. To see God in a mirror is to see God in
an imperfect and limited way, not as he is. The alternation between the two natures of Christ in the appearance of Beatrice emphasizes her limited ability to reflect him. It is all we on earth
can do, as the King James translation of St. Paul puts it, to “see
through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). This passage from
Paul was cited as an explanation for the vision of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes by the earliest commentators.37 This idea had been
previously deployed in a number of debates. This phrase “mirror
of God” was sometimes applied to the martyrs and saints. Saint
Francis, for example, visibly reflected Christ in the stigmata, and
mirrored his suffering in the sorrow within his soul as well.38
Beatrice’s soul is in the same category with such saints. Her
beauty, but also her charity and her humility, reflects God’s, al37. For example, Dante’s son Pietro Alighieri cites it in his commentary
(1359-64) on these lines.
38. See Bonaventure’s “Life of Saint Francis” in Bonaventure: The
Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis, trans.
Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 305-306.
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though she cannot perfectly express the paradox of the two natures. More generally, any reformed soul is a mirror of God, even
beyond the way in which any human being is made in God’s
image. The importance for Dante’s Commedia of the tradition of
the mirror of God cannot be overstated. As the opening tercet of
the Paradiso puts it, the entire universe is a mirror reflecting
God’s light.
La gloria di colui che tutto move
per l’universo penetra, e risplende
in una parte piú, e meno altrove.39
Moreover, the idea of seeing God through a mirror was part
of the defense of art in the early iconoclastic debates.40 As mentioned earlier, those who staked out positions against images implied opposition to the adoration of saints and martyrs as well as
the Virgin Mary. The idea of the mirror of God that was used to
defend images in the eighth century iconoclastic dispute supplies
a traditional account that explains Beatrice’s role as a saint, and
clarifies how her beauty points to its own pre-existence in God.
And although her reflection of the Divine essence must be qualified, it is nevertheless surpassingly glorious—so much so that
Dante cannot end this canto with a description of her unveiled
reflection of God, but ends instead with the claim that her image
is indescribable (Purgatorio 31.139-145). Beatrice is at the same
time both a defense of images, and a limit to images.
Something similar to Dante’s treatment of Beatrice can be
understood to explain the style of his book as a whole, and it undergirds its literary realism. The eternal meaning of the characters
is presented through attention to personal and historical details,
especially, but not exclusively, in the presentation of Dante’s contemporaries. Rather than provide sterile lexical or philosophical
39. Paradiso 1.1-3: “The glory of him who moves everything penetrates
through all the universe, and reflects in one part more, and less in another.”
40. For the medieval artistic tradition and the speculum Dei, see Emile
Male, “One Hundred Years of Iconoclasm” in Early Churches of Rome,
trans. David Buxton (London: Ernest Bendt, 1960).
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definitions of the sins or virtues of each group of souls, he presents the living stories of souls in their places.41 The concreteness
of such stories challenges the reader with the ambiguities of experience, but they are fruitful ambiguities. The stories suggest
that readers take what is valid in ordinary experience and purify
it, rather than simplifying or disregarding it. We start from where
we are, and ascend dialectically, just as Aristotle does in his
Ethics, arguing his points starting from common opinions and
from experience.
4. Beatrice as Prophet in Paradiso
I will now focus on the limits Dante sets to the vision of God he
can produce through the image of Beatrice and through his poem.
The Paradiso opens with a disclaimer about the limits of Dante’s
poetic powers. Dante says that he cannot express or even recall
much of what he saw in heaven. He alerts the reader that he must
end his journey with a concession to some aspects of the iconoclast’s demands. Although Beatrice’s beauty pre-exists in God,
as an individual she is ultimately merely one part of the Incarnate
God. Only Christ is perfectly “the image of the unseen God”.42
Similarly, Dante’s poem could never perfectly mirror the Incarnation or the Trinity. The sobering distance between Dante and
God in the Paradiso gives the canticle a prophetic character. By
41. It is worth comparing Brunetto Latini’s encyclopedia, the Livres
dou tresor, and his poem, the Tesoretto. Both are extremely similar to
Dante’s work in that they separate out vices and virtues and define them.
Both are works of exile, and both involve narrative accounts of Aristotelian morality and metaphysics. The profound difference is that
Brunetto’s works are purely abstract and allegorical. Their narrative
form is superfluous. They merely offer a lively version of a bird’s eye
view. Nor does Brunetto’s account suffer a genuine transcendent element. The abstract and mundane aspects of Brunetto’s works prompt
Dante to relegate Brunetto to the stale and unfruitful atmosphere surrounding the sodomites of Inferno 15. The key to interpreting most of
the images in that canto is the biblical injunction not to store up one’s
“treasure” on earth, but in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21).
42. Colossians 1:15.
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prophetic I mean looking forward to the fulfillment of justice,
and living in anticipation of contact with a God who is not yet
fully present on earth—that is to say, living in exile.
In order to take on the role of the prophet, Dante must put on
a severity that comports very oddly with love poetry. A prophet
has to live in the desert with nothing more than hope. As Emmanuel Levinas argued, prophecy does not coincide with feminine gentleness in the Old Testament.43 But in the Commedia
Beatrice, a woman, is the source of Dante’s prophecies, beginning in Purgatorio 33 with the chilling condemnation of ecclesiastical corruption in their times. Beatrice is stern and harsh
throughout the Paradiso. Such moments suggest that Beatrice is
not simply an emblem of gentle, generous beauty. Rather, she is
also a figure of anger. She is loved in and for her anger, and her
anger is a sign of her love. For Dante at least, she is, paradoxically, both Church Triumphant and Church Militant at the same
time.
The Paradiso emphasizes the prophetic vein more explicitly
than the other cantiche, and presents us with a number of austere
figures as role models for human life. So, for example, the
paragons of human virtue in Paradiso are monastics like Francis,
whose erotic love of poverty is itself a form of vision.44 Others
are the ascetic contemplatives Peter Damien, Benedict, and the
white-haired Bernard. The non-monastic figures of greatest importance in heaven are either soldiers or kings who sacrificed
themselves for heavenly justice. It may be easy to miss it while
reading the Paradiso, which is filled with beautiful images of
light, refined talk of love, and angelic harmonies, but two of the
highest values in heaven are poverty and spiritual war. Though
the Paradiso rises through the ethereal reaches of heaven, the
Church Militant and the expression of hostility to the earth receive continually greater emphasis. The contemplatives at the
43. See Emmanual Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism.
trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997),
30-38.
44. I take this account of Francis from Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision, 240.
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very top of Dante’s celestial hierarchy are defined as those who
love and minister to their fellow men, and, at the same time,
those who least esteemed the earth. From their height they can
look down on earth, as Benedict did from the dizzying heights
of his monastery atop Monte Cassino. So the starkness of the
Paradiso might not seem in accord with the choice of a beautiful
woman as a guide. But, mysteriously, Dante sees the erotic attraction to God in Beatrice’s eyes as implying a severe and unbending focus on the ugly and bad in the world, and on the need
for correction. As Dante’s vision becomes clearer, he and Beatrice ascend farther and farther above the world, and become angrier and angrier about its corruption. Why should erotic desire
be so at one with the austerity and anger of the prophet? Isn’t
anger thumos, not eros?
The answers to these questions lie in recalling Dante’s situation on earth after Beatrice died. In the Vita Nuova, following
Beatrice’s death, Dante initially reacted properly. He began to
despise the earthly life because it had lost its salute (chs. 32-34).
Beatrice, from heaven, offered him consolation. But a year or so
after she died, Dante turned to the Siren. As Beatrice expresses
it in her description of this episode in Purgatorio (31.44-54), love
should have generated anger against the earthly Siren, against
self-induced hypnosis that creates indifference to ascent. Recall
the image of Pope Adrian V with his face in the dirt in Purgatorio
19, tearfully longing for what is beyond the earth. Dante, like
Adrian, should have recognized all earthly things as lesser pleasures than Beatrice’s grace. He should have risen up to heaven in
pursuit of her after her death, when she had become a purer heavenly creature. Like Adrian, Dante must yearn for what has left
him in permanent mourning. Unworldliness is the proper way of
seeking consolation in the more distant but truly higher good,
rather than finding substitutes in the sirens of the here and now.
Anger at the corruption of the earth, and even indignant disgust
with the earth, becomes then a way of maintaining eros for what
is now absent. Eros and thumos work together. They are not two
separate parts of the soul, but two aspects of a single activity of
the soul. Adrian’s face is pressed into the dirt not only as punish-
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ment, but as therapy. Anger and sorrow imply a love of something
toward which earthly things cannot point him. While Beatrice,
before her death, was an earthly beauty pointing beyond the earth,
after her death she is a creature who has reached her Creator. Although she leaves Dante in mourning, she becomes an even more
effective mediatrix for him. Of course, she does not renounce her
earlier function as the earthly miracle who greeted him. But in
heaven she can complete that work.
The other aspect of the role of the prophet that can only with
difficulty be connected to love of a woman is its public nature.
The prophet is a leader of men and a master of rhetoric, as the
Ulysses canto in the Inferno suggests.45 This issue of public
prophecy and private love complete the picture of agape and eros
in the Paradiso, the true finale of the Vita Nuova. In his meeting
with John the Evangelist, Dante presents the paradox of a private
love for something public and universal that can help us understand his love for Beatrice as a young man.
John, like Beatrice, is a complex case. In his gospel, John’s
status as private friend of Christ is contrasted with the universality
of Christ’s relation to humanity. His gospel portrays a number of
scenes that emphasize how, as a particular human being, even
Christ had a special love for certain people, like his mother, and
like his close friend John.46 But the gospel writer suggests that this
in no way interfered with or reduced Christ’s universal charity.
Because of the complexity of this portrayal, a myth arose that John
had special immortality and was taken to heaven bodily. In Par45. Inferno 26 is structured around the division between the true and
the false prophet. Dante suggests that he mistakes Ulysses for Elijah
initially, and verges on becoming a sort of false prophet himself. From
Ulysses’s story he must learn Paul’s well-known dictum in Corinthians
13 that the power of prophecy without love is nothing. See Giuseppe
Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine
Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 66-106.
46. Above all, the comments about John’s special status in relation to
Christ, and the play with Peter about philia (personal love) and agape
(impersonal love) at the end of the gospel (John 21:15-23) raise questions about the role of the ordinary private individual.
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adiso 25, Dante looks for this body and goes blind. In Canto 26,
John questions the blind Dante about love, asking him why he
loves. Dante replies first with a universal argument. He loves because of the authority of scripture and because of philosophical
arguments. But the apostle seems to ask him the same question
again: Are there other cords that pull you to God, or other teeth of
love that bite you? And Dante replies:
Tutti quei morsi
che posson far lo cor volgere a Dio,
a la mia caritate son concorsi:
ché l’essere del mondo e l’esser mio,
la morte ch’el sostenne perch’ io viva,
e quel che spera ogne fedel com’ io,
con la predetta coscenza viva,
tratto m’hanno del mar de l’amor torto,
e del diritto m’han posto a la riva.
Le fronde onde s’infronda tutto l’orto
de l’ortolano etterno, am’ io cotanto
quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.47
Immediately after receiving this answer, Dante regains his
sight, now made even stronger. Dante has brought the universal
love of God (agape) into harmony with his own individual love
(eros), transforming his love into the universal one. He is moved
by God’s gift of creation as a whole, by God’s gift of salvation,
and forgiveness, as well as by the hope that these imply for him.
He is erotically concerned with his own good, and with the entire
story of his that he presents in the Commedia, as this passage
47. Paradiso 26.55-66, “All those bites that can make the heart turn to
God are in concord in my love. That the being of the world, and my
being, the death that he underwent so that I might live, and that which
every faithful person hopes, as I, together with the aforementioned living knowledge, they have drawn me from the sea of perverse love and
has put me on the shore of the right [love]. The leaves with which are
leafed all the garden of the eternal Gardener, I love as much as the good
given to them by Him.”
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suggests by returning to the beginning, when he was shipwrecked
like Ulysses on the shoals of the mar de l’amor torto in Inferno
1, and then bringing us right up to the present, when he finds himself on the shore of right love in purgatory. The reference to
leaves is an allusion to a passage in John’s gospel in which Christ
describes himself as an eternal vine:
Abide in me, and I in you. . . . I am the vine, you are
the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it
is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do
nothing. . . . If you abide in me, and my words abide in
you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for
you.48
As part of the vine, Dante is now able to love the garden of
the whole creation and all the leaves, that is, all creatures to
which God has granted the gift of the good. This gift from God
is agape. Dante’s individual love is now perfected in becoming
agape for the other parts of the vine, and his love is now proportionate to the agape that comes down into all the leaves from
God. Dante’s love for himself has now somehow cast a wider net
of love around all creatures that partake in God’s grace. He loves
all the blessed he will meet in the celestial rose, and all those who
are yet to arrive there. Christ’s two commands—love God and
love your neihbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-31)—are now one act
for Dante, an act that springs from what was initially his selflove. For the source of all other loves is rightly directed self-love,
as Dante remarked in the Convivio: lo proprio amore di me medesimo . . . è principio di tutti li altri, sì come vede ciascuno.49
We can now see how the public and universal qualities of
Dante’s love in fact have room for his private and erotic love of
Beatrice. Note how very similar this passage is to Dante’s description of the effect of Beatrice’s greeting on him in Chapter 11 of the
Vita Nuova. In both cases, universal charity comes from hope. Dante
48. John 15.4-7.
49. Convivio 3.5. “[P]roper love of myself . . . is the root of all other loves,
as everyone knows”.
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is exhilarated by promise of God’s creation and God’s sacrifice,
which offers him great expectations. This confident private hope
for his own happiness is transformed into charity for all of God’s
garden. And the more secure he feels in his expectation of happiness, the more he is able to give of himself. The same is true of
Dante’s relation with the beauty of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova. His
self-regarding hope for the promise of her greeting brought the
flame of charity to him, and he became Love. Her beauty humbled
him and effaced his self, even if at the same time, on another level,
his self was actively at work achieving the goal of its own self-love.
In this humility before the Good, the human soul transcends the
merely private.
Dante turns to find Beatrice in Paradiso 31, and is surprised to
see her replaced by the third and final guide, a white-haired old
man. The anti-sensual element is emphatic. St. Bernard might be
beautiful, but he could never be called pretty. And yet, Dante emphasizes the continuity: the severity of Beatrice’s prophetic character is succeeded by the austerity of Bernard. Dante will compare
his vision of the old monk to the Veronica, the same shroud bearing
Christ’s features that he once compared to Beatrice at the end of the
Vita Nuova. This reference also recalls the “idolo” of Christ in the
eyes of Beatrice from Purgatorio 31, which was discussed earlier.
In Dante’s final speech to Beatrice (Paradiso 31.79-90) she has
fully transcended herself; she has become a universal figure for the
blessed. In the Vita Nuova, he made an attempt to love the innermost
meaning of her beauty, that is, the meaning of her beauty in God.
This transcendent element in her beauty now reveals itself to be her
place in the celestial rose as a mere part of a larger divine order. Her
innermost individual meaning becomes transcendent when it is not
separate from anything else in God.
At the outset of Canto 33, Bernard asks Mary to help Dante see
God. He tells her that all those who have been saved throughout
history up to the present day, including Beatrice, now pray for
Dante. This is universal agape, akin to Dante’s newfound love for
all the leaves of the garden—only here it is made explicit that it
works in reverse as well. In this moment of communion which
seamlessly combines agape and eros, not only does he love the
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whole garden, but the whole garden loves him in return. Mary, the
more traditional universal symbol of love, does not compete with
Beatrice as the mirror of God; she is now revealed as the completion
of Beatrice, the more perfect mirror. She resembles Christ more
than any other. Mary initiated Beatrice’s rescue of Dante in Inferno,
and now she finishes her task, turning Dante toward the Original
for which she is merely the image. But even this turn to the Original
in the final lines of the poem is not the end of these mirrors of God.
Christ himself is an image of the Father.
And there is a further image of God implicit in the closing lines.
Although Dante cannot misurar lo cerchio (“measure the circle,”
Paradiso 33.134), he finds himself moved by love sí come rota
ch’igualmente é mossa (“like a wheel that is moved in equal measure,” Paradiso 33.144). The attribution of mathematical equality in
the motion with the word igualmente implies that his motion does
in fact precisely measure the Love that moves him. This equality is
the most perfect correspondence of Dante’s desio and velle to God’s
self-understanding and self-love. In this sense, Dante himself becomes an image of God.50
50. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica I-I q. 93, a.4) enumerates three
forms of the image of God in man: first, that which all have by nature;
second, that which the just have by grace; and, third, that which the
blessed have by glory, the so-called “image of likeness.” In all three
cases, man is in the image of God in that he loves and understands God,
imitating the way in which God’s intellectual nature loves and understands itself. But in the third way, in glory, the blessed have the image
of God in the highest degree, because they love and understand God
more perfectly. Dante’s pair disio and velle achieve this third kind of understanding and love appropriate to those blessed by glory. Thomas’s
reference to God’s self-love and understanding are echoed in Paradiso
33.124-126. This suggests that the three circles of the Trinity are circles
because they represent the self-relation of God’s intellectual nature.
When Dante grasps how the human effigy fits within the circle, he sees
how the human soul can come to resemble God’s self-understanding and
self-love.
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THE EXTINCTION of SPECIES
Marlene Benjamin
To Din
In Memoriam
This is no abstract exercise.
There will be names and places
To tether you, to make you hear and note,
To make you listen and mark.
So mark this:
We live amongst the extinction of species. “Passenger pigeon,
great auk,
Stellar’s sea cow, Schomburgk’s deer, sea mink, antarctic wolf,
Carolina parakeet: all gone.”
I learn this from Quammen’s exhilarating book, which is yet depressingly full of incontrovertible facts,
Called The Song of The Dodo, a great bird also gone extinct.
Quammen was at Oxford with Saul, who was at Brasenose some
15 or so years before you, and who
Recently told me that he had long harbored a desire to meet you
there for High Table fare, a desire
He never satisfied. As for me,
My desire to sit at table with you was satisfied over and over
again across 43 years,
Giving me the singular joy of watching you
Grow from a child to the man you became, whose traits and
habits
Could be traced back to early childish behaviors.
At five, you were insistent on being right, but with a sense of humor
That made your rightness palatable to those who were faced with
Hearing it forcefully directed at their pale and insignificant positions.
“What,” you used to say, “is the point of that?” in mock horror at the
Emptiness of my claims concocted to counter yours.
Marlene Benjamin is Associate Professor Emerita at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. Her book, The Catastrophic Self: Essays in Philosophy,
Memoir, and Medical Trauma, will be released in late 2015 or early 2016.
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At six, you kindly said to me, using my own phrasing to illustrate
the foolishness
Of my arguments, “Now Marlene, we don’t want to hear any
more about bloody California.”
You knew this would kill me with laughter, and it did.
At twenty-five, you gently queried my political explanations to
end the conversation by saying
“Now that sounds like an extremely intelligent position.” Long
pause. “Or does it?”
And what, I ask you now, am I to do without your challenges?
Without your presence?
It is as if an entire species has gone extinct with your death,
Leaving a hole in the natural world that cannot be woven closed.
There are too many frayed edges.
And that is only me. For the damage done to the intimate family
is far worse,
Far more savage an attack on the fabric of the world.
How shall they carry on?
Perhaps they have a memory of your last moments to lean on,
A way to conjure up the finality of your departure and thus, paradoxically,
A way to hold you closer than is given to me.
I don’t know; I wasn’t there.
But I have this: I have what the camera captured in the photograph
On the cover of the Order of Service at your funeral, the picture
I have standing on my dresser
Facing me each morning, showing you (in Wales, is it?) surrounded by your girls – Lily and Molly and Bea;
Smiling at what I believe is Sue behind the camera – or perhaps
it is Mag or Jim or Vinny or Simon –
All of whom stand, for me, invisibly behind you, all of you together
In the shadow of the astonishingly full and lovely life you had, it
seemed, so effortlessly, made.
Looking at you like this is to repopulate the world,
My way to argue against the extinction of species.
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119
However tenuous the argument, for a few moments every day, it
works – even as I know,
And love, that you would challenge my saying so. And knowing
this, the hole,
For some few tremulous moments – as if the air is being beaten
by the concerted breathing
Of all the creatures gone from our world – is somewhat, though
evanescently,
Woven closed.
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Education and the Art of Writing:
Christopher Bruell’s Aristotle as Teacher—
His Introduction to a Philosophic Science.
South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014.
268 pages, $37.50
Book Review by James Carey
In Aristotle as Teacher—His Introduction to a Philosophic Science,
Christopher Bruell advances an interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics
that pays closer attention to the wording of the actual text than does, as
far as I know, any other study of that work since the imposing commentaries of the Middle Ages. It is also much the most original interpretation
of the Metaphysics that I have ever read.
Bruell has written impressive essays on Leo Strauss, and his fine
study of Plato’s shorter dialogues, On the Socratic Education, shows
the influence of Strauss. So one can call him, with some justification, a
Straussian.1 This is not to say that he necessarily agrees with Strauss
about everything, only that he takes seriously certain themes that were
of great importance to Strauss, such as the rival claims of Greek philosophy and the Bible regarding the possibility of revelation, the root
of morality, and, more generally, what constitutes the best human life.
Strauss is well known for having called attention to the fact—and it is
a fact—that the ancient philosophers, their medieval followers, and even
their early modern opponents often wrote in such a way as to disclose
their deepest thoughts only to their most careful readers while at the
same time presenting on the surface of their texts a teaching that was
more in accord with common opinions, especially opinions concerning
James Carey is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa Fe,
New Mexico.
1. Straussians take the intellectual tradition of the West seriously, read the great
books with exemplary care, and think hard about the things that are most worthy
of thinking hard about. Those of us who are not Straussians can profit greatly
by attending to what they have to say, whether or not we are ultimately persuaded by what they have to say.
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the sanctity of law and the existence and nature of the divine. Philosophers wrote this way because they could not forget the example of
Socrates, who in spite of his civic virtue and the caution with which he
conversed was put to death for being a philosopher by the citizens of a
regime that was democratic and, by ancient standards, generally liberal
and tolerant as well. This art of writing is properly called “exoteric”—
not “esoteric”—for the author realized that it would be available to be
read by anyone who was able to read, whatever his ability and whatever
his degree of sympathy or antipathy toward free inquiry.
Though it becomes obvious on close inspection, especially under
the guidance of Strauss, that many books of the philosophers have an
exoteric character, it is not so obvious that Aristotle’s Metaphysics is
one of these books. In fact, it is not so obvious that the Metaphysics
is a book at all, not in the way that, say, the Nicomachean Ethics is.2
Bruell is aware that the Metaphysics looks at first glance, and for most
readers at last glance as well, like a patchwork; and he does not rule
out the possibility that someone other than Aristotle may have been
responsible for the final form of the work (30).3 But he takes it as
heuristic principle that whoever was responsible for the Metaphysics
as it has come down to us from antiquity, whether it was Aristotle
himself or one (or more) of his followers, had sound reasons for organizing it as he did, and that we cannot begin to understand the teaching of the book, much less evaluate it, without paying the closest
possible attention to the stages in which it is presented. If the Metaphysics looks more like an assemblage of notes for lectures delivered
at different times than a through-composed book like Plato’s Laws,
Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, or Machiavelli’s Prince,4 that
very appearance should be regarded as contributing to the exoteric
character of the work. On Bruell’s interpretation, every chapter, and
virtually every sentence, of the Metaphysics is in its proper place. Bruell slows the reader of the Metaphysics down, way down, and he requires
2. See W. D. Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarion Press, 1970),
Vol. 1, xiii-xxxiii.
3. Pagination for citations from Aristotle as Teacher will be given within parentheses. The same practice will be followed for citations from the Metaphysics
and other works by Aristotle. When only the Bekker number is given, it should
be read as referring to the Metaphysics, except when a different work is specified in the text.
4. See Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, xxviii, on the formulations at 1069b35
and 1070a4.
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the reader to pay the closest possible attention to the exact working of
the text. That by itself is one of the many merits of Bruell’s book.
The layout of Aristotle as Teacher is unusual. It does not contain
chapter headings of the kind that one typically finds in an extended
study. Bruell frequently refers to what modern editors of the Greek
text of the Metaphysics say about their editorial decisions, and he explains why he is or is not persuaded by them. But aside from these
references, and a few references to Thomas Aquinas’s commentary,
there is virtually no mention of the secondary literature (see 135).
There are no footnotes or endnotes in Aristotle as Teacher. There is
no bibliography, there is no index of persons, and there is no index of
subjects. In the course of his treatment of the individual chapters of
the fourteen books of the Metaphysics, Bruell makes many references
to passages from other chapters. These references are always interesting. But the reader longs for an index of Aristotelian passages dealt
with in the book, so that he can quickly find out what Bruell says
about a given passage, and what he does not say about it.
Straussians have occasionally suggested that the Metaphysics is
an exoteric work. Those who, like the present reviewer, have found
this claim implausible have wondered what in the world an intelligent
and thorough interpretation of the Metaphysics as an exoteric book
could possibly look like. Bruell’s book, written with a magisterial
command of the text, and in lucid and unaffected prose of a high stylistic order, is that interpretation. It behooves anyone who wants to
know, or who thinks that he already knows, what Aristotle is doing in the
Metaphysics to come to terms with what Bruell has to say about it.5
Before proceeding further, I need to say something about the
translation of some key Aristotelian expressions. One of these is
ousia, which Bruell translates sometimes as “thing” and “sometimes
as “essence,” in keeping with the fact that for Aristotle this word can
signify both an ordinary individual and the intelligible character that
the individual shares with other individuals like it. For the former
signification I prefer “entity,” since this word is broad enough to
cover both things and persons, sub-rational animals in between, and
gods too if they exist. For the latter signification, and often for the
former too, I shall leave ousia untranslated, as Bruell frequently does
5. The reserve with which Bruell communicates his interpretation could lead
one to infer that Aristotle as Teacher is itself an exoteric work. This inference
would be an error. There is no surface to Aristotle as Teacher. It is all depth.
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as well.6 Another expression is to ti ēn einai, which Bruell translates
as “the what it was to be.” Clearly, this expression names something
of capital importance for Aristotle.7 Early in the Metaphysics, in his
restatement of the four causes (983a27-32) that were presented in the
Physics (194b23-195a3), Aristotle names ousia and to ti ēn einai first.
He does not mention eidos here as one of the causes, as he did in the
parallel passage in Physics, where it is the second cause mentioned.8
In Book Lambda, the unmoved mover is said to be to ti ēn einai, indeed the “first” ti ēn einai (1074a35-36), but never “form” (eidos),
not even “pure form.”9 In what follows I shall also leave this expression untranslated.
6. “Beingness” is not unthinkable as a translation for the second signification
of ousia, but it is unthinkable as a translation for the first signification. Aristotle
calls such entities as individual men, horses, and plants, ousiai. It makes no
sense to speak of these entities as “beingnesses.”
7. Since the imperfect ēn can function as durative, I prefer translating it as “is”
rather than “was.” The formulation, “the what it was to be,” has an odd sound to
my ears, as though implying “what it was to be, but no longer is,” or “what it
was meant to be, but didn’t quite turn out to be.” Since the ti is interrogative,
one might translate the expression as “the what is it to be.” But that translation
is not entirely satisfactory either. Something of what Aristotle means by the expression can be gathered from the contexts in which he uses it. When he launches
his inquiry into to ti ēn einai in Book Zeta, ch. 4, of the Metaphysics he uses the
expressions to soi einai, to musikōi einai, to epiphaineiāi einai, to leukōi einai,
etc. (See 994b27: to apeirōi einai; and De Anima 429b11 ff: to megathōi einai
vs. to megathos, to hydati einai vs. to hydōr, to sarki einai vs. to sarks, to euthei
einai vs. to euthy.) These dative of possessors are stronger than genitives and
could be translated respectively as “the being proper to you,” “the being proper
to musical,” “the being proper to surface,” “the being proper to white,” etc. Such
expressions are presented as exemplifications of to ti ēn einai in the sphere of
what is sensible. (See also 1029b21: ho logos tou ti ēn einai; and De Anima
429b20.) When Aristotle is not speaking of this or that particular individual, he
tends to use the longer expression, to ti ēn einai. In the course of his treatment
of sensible ousia, Aristotle often uses to ti ēn einai interchangeably with eidos.
But the former is not a synonym for the latter. Furthermore, though in certain
contexts Aristotle will speak of hylē as ousia, he never to my knowledge speaks
hylē as to ti ēn einai (cf. Metaphysics 1032b14).
8. The presentation of the causes in Book Delta of the Metaphysics (1013b1627) follows the order of the Physics.
9. Eugene Ryan, “Pure Form in Aristotle,” Phronesis, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 1973,
209-224.
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Bruell says of the formal cause, or the form, that it is “the perceptible or intelligible character of a being, nothing more” (20). The “nothing more” is intriguing, since Aristotle treats the form not only as what
is intelligible about a sensible (or perceptible—aisthētē) entity (ousia)
but, along with matter (or material—hylē), as an actual constituent of a
sensible, and composite, entity (Physics 193b6). It is not only one of
the causes, it is nature (physis) to a higher degree than is matter (ibid.,
193b7; 193b19—taking morphē here as equivalent to eidos: 193b3-5).
Indeed, it is activity, or being at work (energeia—Metaphysics 1050b2;
see 1043a28). If the eidos were not somehow a constituent of an entity,
then it is hard to see how it could be the perceptible or intelligible character of that very entity, or of its nature (Physics, 193b7). Bruell is
hardly unaware of the passages I have just cited. But he has reasons for
not placing as much weight on them as I and others do.
One of the pervasive themes of the Metaphysics is the criticism of
the “Platonic” account of the eidē as what is intelligible regarding sensible entities and, at the same time, as actual causes of these entities,
though separate from them. Bruell detects in the Metaphysics a roughly
parallel, but obliquely communicated, criticism of the “Aristotelian” account of eidē as well, and of the “Aristotelian” account of ousia more
generally (140). Aristotle’s account is certainly not problem-free, one
indication being his employment of the single word eidos to name both
a constituent within, hence bound to, a particular sensible entity, and the
species to which it and entities closely resembling it belong. Aristotle’s
explicit teaching is that the eidos is present in a sensible entity, causing
it to be the very being that it is, and yet also apprehensible, through the
joint operation of sensation, imagination, and the intellect (nous), and
explicable, in terms of genus and specific difference, as the intelligible
character of that entity.10 (See De Anima 431a16; 431b3). This is a demanding construal of the eidos indeed. But it is not nonsensical.
10. Bruell writes, “In concluding this portion of the argument [in Book Zeta
ch. 4], Aristotle does not speak of the form (eidos) but of species (eidē)” (138).
Bruell speaks here as though eidos (singular) does not mean species (singular)
and that when Aristotle wishes to speak of species (singular or plural) he uses
eidē rather than eidos. But Aristotle will use eidos with speaking of species in
the singular. See, for example, Categories 5, 2b7-23, Topics 4, 122b18-123a19.
Nor is his usage of eidos (singular) for species (singular) confined to the logical
writings. See, for example, Metaphysics 1038a25-26. Consider 1023b2. The
hylē of the eidos is intelligible hylē, rather than sensible hylē. It is the genus:
1024b4-10, 1038a3-9, and 1045a33-35.
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When Bruell comes to Aristotle’s treatment of the Platonic understanding of the forms, he writes, “Not even the considerable latitude
that Aristotle avails himself of in speaking of his teacher is sufficient
to permit the mention of Plato in connection with an imperfect grasp of
the formal cause (compare A 7 988a34-b6)” (29). The passage that Bruell refers to here could seem to undermine the point it is supposed to
support. For Aristotle writes there that “concerning to ti ēn einai [which,
in the case of sensible entities, Aristotle closely associates with eidos—
e.g., Physics194b26; Metaphysics 1032b1-2] and the ousia, no one [so,
not even Plato] has clearly introduced (apodedōke) them, though those
posting the forms do speak of them.” With his pointed reference to
988a34-b6, Bruell implies that Plato himself, as distinct from his followers, did not intend to introduce the formal cause clearly, inviting us
to infer that Plato was as aware as was Aristotle of the problematic character of the formal cause.
In his treatment of Book alpha (“little alpha”), Bruell correctly
notes that, for Aristotle “truth is being, as knowable” (31). Since “we
do not know ‘the true’ without the cause” (993b23-24), Bruell is led to
infer, “Truth, then, or nature is being, as caused or in so far as it is
caused.” But he immediately expresses a doubt about this inference,
and rightly so. For the inference can be sustained only by ruling out the
possibility that there could be an instance of truth that is being, not just
as caused, but as cause, that is, that there could be a first uncaused cause
and a first truth. For unless there is a cause that does not depend on a
yet more fundamental cause, and unless there is a truth that does not
owe its intelligibility to a yet more manifest truth, then we are caught
in an infinite regress, both in causes and in truths, with no cause sufficient of itself, nor any number of causes in the series sufficient taken
together, to account for what is caused and no truth evident of itself to
ground other truths (994b16-23; see 1005b5-1006a12). But Aristotle
says that what is most true (alēthestaton) is the cause of subsequent
things’ (tois hysterois) being true (993b26-27).11 He expands his point
11. Thomas Aquinas and others have detected the outline of an argument, from
gradations of being, for the existence of God right here in Book alpha (993b23994a2), an argument quite distinct from the argument from motion in Book
Lambda. This argument is not fleshed out. But if not only to on, but also ousia
as the premier instance of to on, has a pros hen character, which I think is Aristotle’s view (see, for example, 1004a3-5), then the ground has been laid in
Book alpha for an argument that there is an ousia that is in the highest degree
(malista) and is, moreover, the cause, or at least a cause, of other ousiai.
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immediately afterwards by saying that the first principles (archai), not
just of truths, but of eternal beings (to the extent that they have principles distinct from themselves—he likely has in mind the stars here), are
always the most true. Nothing else is the cause of their being. And, he
adds, just as each thing has being so it has truth (993b28-34). If Aristotle
is serious in making these claims, then he cannot mean that truth is
being as caused, period. Being as caused presupposes, in his account,
being as uncaused. Aristotle says that it is clear (dēlon) there is some
first principle (singular), and he expressly rules out an infinite regression of causes, either in a direct line or in type (994a1-2). Bruell does
not deny that there is some first principle or principles, but he asks
whether they are knowable (32). Whether or not they are knowable to
us, however, they would be knowable by nature if they knew themselves, a possibility that Aristotle has already mentioned (983a6; see
also 993b11; 1029b3-5; Posterior Analytics 71b34-35; Physics
1084a19; Nicomachean Ethics 1095b2) and will argue for explicitly in
chapter nine of Book Lambda (1074b15-35). Bruell presumably regards
these passages as exoteric.12
Aristotle begins chapter 2 of Book alpha by arguing that there can
be neither an infinite regress with respect to the hou heneka (the “for the
sake of which,” i.e., the final cause) nor with respect to to ti ēn einai. If
so, then there must be both a first hou heneka that is not for the sake of
anything else (994a8-10; 994b9-16; cf. 1072b1-3) and a first to ti ēn
einai that is not bound up with hylē and is not the einai of anything else
(1074a35-36), but is non-composite or simple (1072a31-34; 1075a5-10;
cf. Physics 266a10-267b20), fully actual and in no sense potential
12. Regarding latter chapters of Book Lambda, Bruell chooses “to depart so
far from [Aristotle’s] injunction (L6 1071b3-5) as to refrain from adding to
them, elliptical though they are” (251). Apparently, Bruell understands these
chapters, and earlier passages in the Metaphysics (e.g., 988b25-26; 1009a3638; 1012b30-31; 1037a10-17; 1037a33-b6; 1040b34-1041a3; 1041a7-9;
1045b23; 1064a33-1064b3: hoper peirasometha deiknunai) that anticipate
them by making mention of entities that are immaterial and separate—separate,
that is, from the perceptible entities with which we are familiar—to be accommodations to readers who would rather be moved (250) than see the truth for
what it is. Prior to the latter chapters of Book Lambda, Aristotle will use locutions such as “immaterial and separate ousiai . . . if they exist.” One can say
that Aristotle is hinting in such passages that immaterial ousiai, in fact, do not
exist. But one can also say, instead, that he is reluctant to positively affirm the
existence of such ousiai prior to advancing a complete argument for their existence, which he does not do until Book Lambda.
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(1071b13-14, 19-22; 1074a36), necessary (1072b10), necessarily eternal
(1071b4), an unmoved mover (1072a25-26: cf. Physics, 260a18-19), and
the principle on which heaven and nature depend (1072b13-14).
Aristotle argues that there are only four species of cause, and that
within none of these species is there procession, or ascent, into infinity.
Bruell is struck by the fact that Aristotle says, without elaboration, that
even in the case of to ti ēn einai, the formal cause, there cannot be a
procession into infinity (33). He speculates that this might be because
the other three causes presuppose the formal cause, and that it is only
on the basis of this presupposition that each of them, too, must have a
first causes—from which we are invited to infer that if there is no first
formal cause, then there is no first final, moving, or material cause either. Aristotle’s point, I think, is simpler. He is not committing himself
here to the existence of an actual sequence or series of formal causes,
but only noting that if one formal cause were the effect of another formal cause, then in this case too there could be no procession into infinity—and, again, he does argue for a first to ti ēn einai later on.13 Bruell
writes “[Aristotle] assumes that there is a beginning to the series [that
he is considering at present in terms of their downward direction], a
first cause, as if the necessity that there be such a beginning had been
shown also for causes in this way, as one might have been led to believe
that it had been shown for causes coincident with their effects in time”
(34). It is not clear that Aristotle is speaking at this point exclusively of
causes antecedent in time to their effects, rather than of causes more
generally (cf. 994b6-9). He does argue elsewhere that temporally antecedent causes—for example, fathers as causes of sons—can regress
backwards in time indefinitely, the world having no beginning in time
and the human species being eternal (Physics 206a24-206b27 cf.
258b10; 266a7.). But, as for causes coincident with their effects, Aristotle does not just lead us to believe that they cannot proceed to infinity
13. 1074a36. In Book Zeta, Aristotle will speak of the specific differences that
are present in the definitions of various species (eidē) as having a formal character that limits the genus, which is in turn the intelligible material (hylē
noetikē) that is also present in the definition (cf. 1023b2; cf. 1036a9-11); see
the passages referred to in footnote 10, supra. At the end of his interpretation
of Book alpha, ch. 2, Bruell notes that an infinite ascent in formal causes would
give rise to a problem for the possibility of science or knowledge (35-36). Such
a thing, however, would not be problem for knowledge alone. It would be a
problem for being itself: there would be no ousiai that are without qualification
(consider 1086b16-19).
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in the ascending direction. As Bruell noted earlier, “[Aristotle] explains
more generally why there must be a first cause, if there is to be any
cause at all” (33). Bruell does not elaborate on this general explanation.
He speaks as though he finds it unpersuasive; and he may think that Aristotle found it unpersuasive as well. Aristotle’s explanation or, rather,
argument is that there cannot be an actual infinite number of anything
(Physics 207b11-12.). Least of all, then, can there be, in a series of
causes coincident with a given effect, an infinite number of them efficacious at an instant. For if, per impossible, there were an infinite number of such causes, each the effect of another cause, then there would
be no cause, or number of causes, higher up in the series capable of producing any other cause or effect further down in the series. And so, “if
there were no first (cause), there would be no cause (properly so called)
at all” (994a18-19). One cannot avoid this conclusion by asserting that
“the whole infinity of causes” produces the given effect, for an infinity
of causes is not a whole. In the case of a series of causes coincident
with their effects, then, there simply must be a cause that is not itself
an effect within the series. Aristotle’s medieval followers, on both sides
of the philosophical-religious divide, held this to be a necessary truth.
Bruell seems to think that Aristotle’s shifting between speaking of
causes that temporally precede their effects and speaking of causes that
are coincident with their effects, and his sometimes treating both together in general statements, are hints that he may not have been altogether serious about his argument for the necessity of a first cause in
the case of causes that are coincident with their effects (see 32-36). It
would have been helpful if Bruell had spelled out exactly what he thinks
Aristotle might have found defective in this argument, which he makes
in his own name. Quite a lot turns on it.
As for causes that temporally precede their effects, it is here that
an infinity of formal causes in particular is ruled out. For though, to return to Aristotle’s example, in natural generation the series of fathers
and sons regresses backwards indefinitely into time past, the formal
cause, to ti ēn einai, in this case to anthropōi einai, is present throughout
the series. If this formal cause itself has a formal cause, which as such
would be temporally coincident with it, then the same argument applies:
there can be no ascent into infinity.
Aristotle announces at the beginning of Book Gamma that there is
a science that considers being qua being (to on hēi on). He says that
being (to on) is said in many ways, though always in relation to one
(pros hen) nature or principle (1003a33-34; 1003b5-6; cf. Categories
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1a12-15). That one nature or principle is ousia (1003b6-10; cf.
1003b17-19; 1028b2-7). Being, then, is not a universal like horse, in
which all the members of the class are equally horses. It is not a genus,
and it cannot be divided into subordinate genera (998b22-26; cf.
1070b1). To be subdivided, specific differences would have to be introduced; and yet these differences, too, are, in some sense of that word.
Aristotle gives two examples of what he means by the special kind of
“universal” that being is. Many things are called “healthy,” but always
with reference to health. Bruell sees a problem with this example:
though we call lots of things “healthy,” we do not call health “healthy”
(65). However, the second example that Aristotle gives is more apt,
namely, “the medical” (or “that which is medical”– to iatrikon –1003b12; cf. 1030b2-3.) A medical knife, a medical procedure, a medical building, a medical degree, etc., are all called “medical” with reference to
some one instance of medical that is medical in the preeminent sense,
and that is the medical art (hē iatrikē). The medical art is rightly called
“medical.” In the same way, ousia is rightly called a being (on), and
ousiai are rightly called beings (onta).14 Bruell, however, has misgivings
about calling Aristotle’s ousiai “beings” (65). For being is always said
in relation to some one nature or principle (1003b6; cf. 1028a 14-15),
and that turns out to be ousia. But ousia is not itself said in relation to
ousia. So it seems that ousia cannot be a being, after all. This, I take it,
is the reasoning behind Bruell’s misgivings. Aristotle, however, says at
once that ousiai are beings: “Some [things] are called beings because
[they are] ousiai,” (1003b6; cf. 1028a 14-15) others because they are
qualities of ousia, and so forth. The color of a horse is a quality of an
ousia; but the horse itself is an ousia. It is, then, in a quite special sense
that a horse is said in relation to ousia: the relation is one of identity,
where something that is really one is thought of as two (1018a4-9; cf.
1021b6-8). Aristotle frequently speaks of ousiai as beings later in the
Metaphysics (e.g., 1071b5), as he does here, and Bruell of course acknowledges this. But he regards this way of speaking as loose (100;
126), for reasons that become clearer later on (e.g., 230-231; 238).
Bruell distinguishes between two models of a philosophical science: “philosophy as originally conceived, on the one hand, and a divine
14. Cf. Physics 192b8-13. Among the onta that Aristotle lists here are animals
and plants, which are incontestably ousiai, if not exactly ousiai in the fullest
sense of the word. Only the separate ousiai of Book Lambda, chs. 6-10—if
they exist—would count for Aristotle as ousiai in the fullest sense of the word,
as I shall argue below.
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science (A2 983a4-11), on the other” (38). By the former, Bruell means
the various attempts at physics that were advanced by the preSocratics.15 He speaks of a need that Aristotle found himself under to
revise these two models. Regarding the model of “a divine science,”
Bruell says that Aristotle “cannot point to the needed revisions so visibly and unambiguously as to jeopardize the survival of a ‘metaphysics’ [Bruell reminds us that ‘metaphysics’ is not Aristotle’s term]
whose attractiveness offers the broad back on which the skeletal form
of a philosophic science might have the prospect of riding into and
through ages even less hospitable to philosophy than his own” (39).
The task that Bruell sets himself in his interpretation is to bring this
skeletal form gradually and cautiously into view, though only for those
who have eyes to see.
Not all readers of the Metaphysics have eyes to see. But Aristotle,
as Bruell interprets him, offers something of value to virtually everyone
who reads through it. When Bruell comes to speak about Book Kappa,
which makes something of a new beginning in the Metaphysics, he distinguishes between, by my count, four different groups of readers. These
readers can be grouped as follows (using numbers in brackets, so as to
reserve numbers in parentheses for Bruell’s pagination): [1] In the first
place are those who have not been “disappointed in the result, or at the
lack of result, of the investigation of ousia in Zeta and Eta, at its failure
to reach its announced goal (Z2 1028b27-31, Z17 1041a6-9).” That failure is “redeemed for them” by “the treatment of potentiality and truth
in Theta [and/or] of ‘the one’ in Iota” (225). For these, the most careful
readers of the Metaphysics, i.e., the readers who are equipped both intellectually and emotionally to apprehend and accept the austere teaching of this work, the inquiry into the science of being qua being is
substantively finished, that is, finished to the extent that it can be finished (1028b3), by the end of Book Iota. The express theology of the
latter chapters of Book Lambda, in particular, is not for them. However,
15. Aristotle does not make a sharp a distinction between these two endeavors.
Cf. infra, footnote 34. Regarding “philosophy as originally conceived,” Bruell
refers us to Book Alpha ch. 3-6, 8-9, and to Book alpha ch. 1-2 (38). Book Alpha
ch. 3-5, 8 (and 7 too) treat physical theories, though not exclusively. But physical
theories per se are not obviously the chief concern of ch. 6 and 9, nor of Book
alpha ch. 1, though they return for consideration in ch. 2 of that book. With his
references, Bruell suggests that “philosophy as originally conceived,” in distinction from “a divine science,” is physics properly understood, i.e., the study
of nature in the deepest sense of the word physis.
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another group of readers have been disappointed by the failure of the
investigation of ousia in Zeta and Eta, and this failure has not been redeemed for them by anything that was said in Books Theta and Iota.
Among these are [2] readers for whom Book Kappa, with its repetitions
of portions of Books Beta, Gamma, and Epsilon, is able to remind of
points already made and thereby to sharpen “their awareness of a problem which they will already have felt and which the sequel will, somehow or other, have to solve” (225).16 Some of these readers are
educable, psychologically as well as intellectually, and there is a
chance that by the end of Book Kappa, or by the end of the first five
chapters of Book Lamba at the latest, they will have come to understand what the first group of readers understood without reading beyond Book Iota. But also among the readers of Kappa are [3] a third
group to whom “the cold light of the intervening books [between
Books Alpha and Kappa] . . . will have proved no avail” (225). Nothing
they will have read prior to Book Lambda will have led them to doubt
that a philosophical science is able to demonstrate the existence of separate, incorporeal, eternal ousiai, and they continue to hope that the argument of the Metaphysics will culminate in this demonstration. However,
even within this group there are [4] some who are “unable to accept
Lambda’s result (its silence [i.e., Book Mu’s silence about Book Lambda’s
result] constituting a tacit acknowledgement of their good judgment in
that regard)” (254). It is largely, though not exclusively, for this fourth
group that Books Mu and Nu are written. For though they were unable
to accept Lambda’s result, “they have retained, whether for good reasons
or bad, an interest in the ideas and the mathematicals.” The good reasons
add up to a genuine theoretical interest in the greater intelligibility of the
ideas and the mathematicals in comparison with the sensible, composite
individuals with which we are familiar (999b1-4). The bad reasons add
up, it is not difficult to surmise, to baseless hopes and a deluded attachment to the idea of eternity (see 264 on “we wish,” and compare De
Anima 432b5-6), from which Aristotle has gently tried to pry his most
mature readers loose. In either case, Books Mu and Nu will hammer the
remaining nails that Aristotle has at his disposal into the coffins of
Pythagoreanism and Platonism. As for those readers who were able to
accept Book Lambda’s result, if they bother to read Books Mu and Nu at
all they will likely regard them only as superfluous and annoying appendices that detract from the comforting theology of Book Lambda.
16. Bruell does not spell out what this problem is here.
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To repeat, this is my count of the different groups of readers that
Bruell indicates. If I have enumerated and distinguished them more or
less correctly, there is surely overlap, and there may be other groups
quite different from these.17 At any event, at this point we have to ask
what it is that the first group of readers, the fully adult readers, have
come to see by the end of Book Iota at the latest. That is to say, what
does Bruell think is the deepest stratum of the teaching in the Metaphysics? It is not easy to be sure about this. If Aristotle expressed his
deepest thoughts in the Metaphysics with such circumspection that only
a very small number of readers, perhaps no more than a handful of them,
have ever read this book adequately, and if they in turn have refrained
from writing down exactly what they have discerned in it, then Bruell
must realize that Aristotle and his most competent readers had good
reasons for their reticence. Times have changed however. The attitude
of the public to philosophy today is less likely to be one of suspicion
and hatred than of indifference and contempt. Contemporary readers of
the Metaphysics underestimate the daring of Aristotle’s thought, and
hence fail to learn from it, because they find the express theology of
17. Working with Bruell’s guiding premise that in the Metaphysics Aristotle
tailors his teaching to different groups of readers, I venture to suggest a fifth
group, distinct from the four noted above. Near the beginning of Book Mu Aristotle says—I quote Bruell’s paraphrase—“‘first’ to be considered are what
the others have said about these questions,” i.e., the questions about the possibility of “some ousia that is without motion and everlasting” (254). Bruell
emphasizes the word “first” (1076a12) because this passage “conveys the impression or suggestion” that the investigation into this possibility “is about to
begin in earnest.” This impression or suggestion would then be an understated
repudiation of the results of Book Lambda. The alternative is that Aristotle is
only announcing a fresh beginning, of which there have already been several
in the Metaphysics: the “first” points to a “second.” That is, Aristotle leads us
to think that, after first treating what others have said about separate ousia, he
will add something further of his own about it. Whether it would depart significantly from Book Lambda or not, there is no way telling since the Metaphysics does not contain a further account of separate ousia or of anything else
after the critical treatment, in Books Mu and Nu, of what others have said.
This fifth group of readers, of whom I am one, infers that Aristotle simply
never got around to writing the sequel to Books Mu and Nu. To this group
Bruell might respond that the absence of the expected sequel should not be explained away so conveniently when it can be interpreted as the tacit response
to an expectation deliberately raised at the beginning of Book Mu only to be
deflated when the reader in this fifth group turns over the last page of Book
Nu and sees nothing there.
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Book Lambda preposterous. Bruell, for all his caution, discloses what
he takes to be the deepest stratum of Aristotle’s teaching in the Metaphysics more candidly than did any previous readers, if there were any,
who interpreted the book along the lines that he does. And so, I do not
think it inappropriate to attempt to state just what Bruell understands
this deepest stratum to be. As far as I can tell, it consists of several interrelated theses, which are not expressed unequivocally but are indicated here and there (again using numbers in brackets).
[1]There are no separate ousiai, which is to say, there is no God
and there are no gods. [2] The harmoniously ordered cosmos is not eternal. It is a transient phase, destined to pass away eventually. [3] The
heavenly bodies are not moved by an unmoved mover (or movers).
Their apparent, circular motion is caused by what they are, including
especially what they are made of, rather than by any mover apart from
them. [4] The articulation of the given world and the distinctions between things is largely the effect of the human intellect, so much so that
one is tempted to infer that the human intellect is the deepest root of
things. But that inference would be problematic since the human intellect is mortal. It is hardly the deepest root of itself. [5] The deepest root
of things is, in fact, matter, not just the “materiality” of the four elements, but something coursing beneath these, eternal, moving, not accessible to perception, and not really accessible to the intellect either.
The existence of this ultimate matter can be much more plausibly inferred than can the existence of separate ousiai, but only as a kind of
limit case of what the human intellect can infer. We know nothing about
it other than that it exists, and that it is some kind of cause. We cannot
even be sure that the claims we venture to make about it are governed
by the principle of non-contradiction.18 Since this eternal, moving, and
imperceptible matter is the deepest root of things, it is the deepest root
of the human intellect too. The human intellect is no more than a possibility, so to speak, that was always latent in this matter. [6]. On the
18. Aristotle claims that the so-called principle of non-contradiction is indemonstrable (1006a5-10). It is known, however, as self-evident, and is
thereby a first principle (archē) for the demonstration of other things (cf. Posterior Analytics 99b15-100b17). It is the most certain of all principles. It is a
principle about which one cannot be mistaken (Metaphysics 1005b8-25),
though one individual might not understand the articulation of this principle,
while another might feign ignorance about it because it cannot be demonstrated
(1011a3-b17) or just prevaricate about it (cf. 1005b 25-26). Bruell is not convinced that Aristotle was as confident of this principle and of its logical equivalent, the principle of excluded middle, as he lets on (67-83; see the full
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other hand, the human intellect, as tossed up by this matter and then
impinged upon by it, constitutes, somehow, a world, an ordered whole
that is more or less knowable, by physics in particular. Physics, and
not metaphysics, is the philosophical science—though only if physics
is properly conducted, that is to say, modestly conducted, without any
pretense of being able to draw the deepest root of things into the sunlight. The given world is the home of man, and it is the region to which
science, including philosophical science, is limited. It is given, not by
God or the gods, but by primordial matter acting upon one of its own
potentialities.
If Bruell’s interpretation is that the Metaphysics is intended to communicate the above theses, or theses resembling them, to its most careful readers, then it must be said at once that this interpretation is, strictly
speaking, irrefutable. Any passages in the Metaphysics that can be marshalled as evidence against it can be consistently interpreted by Bruell
as exoteric accommodations. And there is no way he can be proven
wrong. Still one can raise a few questions about these theses.
[1] The thesis that there are no separate ousiai is not argued for,
much less demonstrated, by Aristotle or by Bruell. It is what certain
passages in the Metaphysics “meant perhaps to suggest” (233). Since
there is no way of actually demonstrating that there are no separate ousiai, a less strident version of this thesis would be simply that there is
nothing in our experience of, and thoughtful reflection on, the given
world that enables us to reasonably infer that separate ousiai exist. This
version may be closer to what Bruell discerns in the Metaphysics.
[2] The thesis that the harmoniously ordered cosmos is not eternal
may be intimated (1074b10-13; see 252, bottom: “many times”), but it
is not argued for either. For this thesis to be taken seriously, some kind
of account needs to be given of how a well-ordered and, especially, intelligible cosmos could emerge out of chaos by chance, rather than
through the agency of something like a divine intellect or a demiurge
(994b8-22; 1060a26-27; 1075b24-27).
paragraph on 83). One thing is clear, however: if this principle, or one logically
equivalent to it, is not self-evidently known, then there can be no demonstration,
hence no genuine science (Posterior Analytics 71b20-34; cf. Republic 533b5c6), philosophical or otherwise, of anything in this world, to say nothing of whatever is above or beneath it. (Compare Strauss, “Freud on Moses and
Monotheism,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, edited by Kenneth Hart Grene, [Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1997], 285.) And
that would count as a point in favor of belief in revelation, which does not need
to validate its fundamental claims in the same way that philosophy does.
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[3] The thesis that the heavenly bodies move themselves and are
not moved by anything else is at odds with Aristotle’s theory, even his
very definition, of motion (Physics 201a10; a29). It is possible that he
did not intend his theory of motion seriously. But there is no alternative
theory of motion argued for in the Physics. And, as we shall see shortly,
the denial of Aristotle’s theory of motion undercuts a criticism of one
of the moral presuppositions of religious belief.
[4] The thesis that the human intellect is crucially responsible for
the world as we experience it (Anaxagoras’s audacious thought? [26])
cannot be simply dismissed. Among other things, there is textual support for the claim that Aristotle seriously entertained this view.19 But to
argue for it, while at the same time arguing for the possibility of science
as a communicable endeavor, one has to make a distinction between
what is idiosyncratic about this or that human intellect and what is common or pertains to the human intellect as such. Kant and Husserl, in different ways, made this distinction, which is the distinction between
empirical and transcendental subjectivity. And it is not unthinkable that
this distinction was anticipated in Aristotle’s distinction “in the [human]
soul” (en tēi psychēi) between an intellect that “becomes all things,”
the potential (or passive) intellect, and an intellect that “makes [!] all
things” (De Anima 430a13-16), the active intellect. Though the distinction between active and passive intellect would support this particular
thesis, Bruell does not speak to it, whether because he thinks that the
active intellect sounds too much like something divine, which Aristotle
as a philosopher could not take seriously, or because, if it is not divine,
it cannot plausibly be claimed to be deathless and eternal (cf. 250), as
Aristotle says it is (De Anima, 430a22-24), or for some other reason, I
do not know.
[5] The thesis that matter is the deepest root of things is, in my
opinion, much the least plausible of these theses, both on the merits and
as an interpretation of Aristotle. The most interesting textual support
that Bruell adduces for it is a rather obscure sentence near the beginning
of Book Lambda (1069a30-36; Bruell, 246). But, however one interprets this sentence, there are problems with claiming that matter is the
root of all things. For one cannot make good sense of the claim that the
mind is produced by, or is ultimately a property of, matter, given the
intentionality peculiar to the former. In fact, it is difficult to rescue the
claim that matter is the root of all things from the charge of ultimate
19. See Physics 223a22-27; De Anima 426a20-26; Metaphysics, 1036a1-8.
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self-contradiction.20 And even if one could show that something like
Aristotle’s passive intellect can be construed as physically produced by
matter, or as a mysterious and superfluous epiphenomenon of matter,
or as itself just a complex mass of matter—and I think that one cannot
show any of these things—one would be left only with an intellect that
(wondrously) corresponds to the things it apprehends. But on that basis
one would not be able to make a meaningful distinction between true
opinion and knowledge strictly so called. For this distinction one would
need, again, to introduce something like the active intellect, something
that knows it is knowing. Aristotle presents the intellect—the active
and/or divine intellect surely—and matter as radically diverse principles. Neither is reducible to or derivable from the other. One can claim
for whatever combination of reasons that the intellect and the truths that
it knows are occult properties latent in an aboriginal hylē. This claim
is, after all, one of the reigning dogmas of our time. But one cannot
make sense of it without transforming hylē from mere materiality (or
potentiality—dynamis), as we encounter it in the given world, into an
uncaused cause, primordial but also permanently present in its actualizing activity (energeia), and essentially elusive.
[6] Bruell aims in Aristotle as Teacher at showing that the pursuit
of a science of being qua being in the Metaphysics is as much concerned with the possibility of science or knowledge (epistēmē) as it
is with illuminating being. The Metaphysics aims at introducing its
readers to a philosophical science, which precisely as philosophic, requires exposing the problematic character of science, which is in fact
the problem of philosophy itself, to the extent that philosophy aspires
to validate, unequivocally, its claim to be the most choiceworthy way
of life for those who have what it takes to live it. That aspiration is
obviously compromised if philosophy cannot get at the deepest root
of things. For then it cannot know beyond the shadow of a doubt that
the deepest root of things is not much more akin to what its greatest
rival holds as a matter of faith than anything that natural reason can
penetrate to on its own. In that case, “does not science or philosophy
come into fatal contradiction with itself?” (28). If philosophy cannot
know more about the root of all things than that some such root exists,
then it cannot know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this root really
is a blind, deaf, and mute necessity rather than the God who dwells in
20. See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), 127-134.
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a thick cloud and reveals himself out of the freedom of his own inscrutable will, to those of his own choice, at a time and place of his
own choosing.
We encounter several of the above theses in Kant. For he, too, holds
that the human mind, stimulated by something essentially hidden from
it, constitutes the world, and that there can be a scientific investigation,
a physics, of the world, so constituted, even a metaphysics of nature,
but no metaphysics of whatever it is that lies beneath nature and outside
the constitutive activity of the human intellect. The conspicuous difference between Kant and Aristotle, as I take Bruell to interpret Aristotle,
is that Kant expends enormous effort in arguing for his theses, and he
does so openly and directly, for pages on end. Bruell’s Aristotle does
not clearly advance arguments for any of the theses suggested above.
The arguments may exist, disassembled, their premises partially concealed here and there in the thickets of Books Zeta through Iota. But
Bruell has not reassembled them. Or if he has, I have not been able to
discern them. Bruell’s Aristotle teaches by and large indirectly, by way
of intimations (e.g., 38), divergences from earlier intimations (39),
pointers (83), indications (100), thoughts that he allows himself to express only in conditional form (163), suggestions (101), tacit admissions
(118), tacitly withdrawn suggestions (125), and silence (128).
The preceding paragraph could lead one who knows nothing of
Bruell as a thinker and teacher to infer that his interpretation of the
Metaphysics is just too idiosyncratic to be worth the effort required to
grasp it. That inference would be seriously mistaken. The progressive
deepening of one’s understanding that results from following Bruell
as he thinks his way slowly, patiently, sentence by sentence and word
by word, looking behind and to the side as well as ahead, through the
maze that is the Metaphysics is worth incomparably more than the effort it takes to keep up with him. That Aristotle chose to teach indirectly, with a view to the diverse abilities and needs of his readers,
cannot be ruled out, if only because we know that he had before him
the examples of his teacher and of his teacher’s teacher. And we know
how indirectly they taught.
Though Bruell speaks of the “attractiveness” of “the broad back
on which the skeletal form of a philosophic science might have the
prospect of riding,” he does not describe it. For this reason, it is necessary to restate, if only briefly, the traditional interpretation of the Metaphysics so that it can be compared with the teaching that Bruell finds
indicated beneath the surface. The traditional interpretation takes sev-
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eral forms, and in restating it I can only sketch what I understand to be
its most coherent form. Others would surely sketch the traditional interpretation differently than I do. But all variations of the traditional interpretation have more in common with my sketch of it than they do
with Bruell’s interpretation.
According to the traditional interpretation, the concern of the Metaphysics is being, not the being of any particular entity, but being as such,
or being qua being (1003a20). But, as noted earlier, being is not a genus.
Ousia is the primary instance of being (1028a 14-15), and it is that in
relation to which everything else, such as color, size, position, and so
forth is said, in a derivative sense, to be. The inquiry into being qua being
is then primarily an inquiry into ousia. There is, however, a range of
opinion about what most deserves to be called ousia (1028b8-1029a5).
But since virtually everyone agrees that a sensible entity, which Aristotle
calls a whole (synolon) of eidos (or morphē) and hylē (1029a5-6) or a
composite entity (synthetē ousia—1070a14), is an ousia, and since we
cannot at the early stage of our inquiry be sure that there are any ousiai
that are separate from sensible ousiai, Aristotle begins with a consideration of sensible ousia, with how it is related to to ti ēn einai and how it
is known. Now ousia as the primary instance of being would seem to be
being least mixed with non-being.21 So, if there are imperishable ousiai,
i.e., ousiai that do not come to be and pass away, they would be ousiai
more fully than perishable ousiai are (cf. 1059b12-14; 1060b1-3).22 As
imperishable, and hence not bound up with hylē, which is not itself fully
intelligible, separate ousiai would also be more intelligible than sensible
ousiai, if not initially so to us, still more intelligible by nature, or intrinsically intelligible, or intelligible to themselves. Similarly ousia, as the
primary instance of being would seem to be that which is most actual
and least potential. So if there are unmoved ousiai, they would be more
fully ousiai than are moved ousiai (since what is moved is, to some extent, potential and not entirely actual: Physics 201a11; a30; b33; Metaphysics 1026a15-16 ). Finally, if there are ousiai that are altogether
separate from, and in no way depend on, other ousiai, either as features
21. See Plato, Republic 476e7-478e7.
22. Consider the full implication of 1026a27-32. Even if there are separate ousiai, why wouldn’t physics still be the first science, unless sensible ousiai are
found wanting in something that should pertain to them as ousiai, namely immobility and imperishability? I read the aporia noted at 1086b16-20 as resolvable through an account of separate ousiai that would recapitulate, in its
essentials, the chief claims of Book Lambda, chs. 6-10.
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of those ousiai or predicated of them, then they are ousiai more fully
than dependent ousiai are (1017b23-26; 1029a27-28). In sum, the primary instance of ousia, ousia in the unqualified sense, would be characterized by imperishability, intrinsic intelligibility, complete actuality,
and unqualified independence.
Among the sensible ousiai that inhabit the sublunar sphere, we find
something that, if not actually eternal, is imperishable at least as long
as we can attend to it in thought. And this is the form (eidos) of the sensible, perishable, composite entity, to the extent that its form is identical
to, or inextricable from, the species (also eidos) to which the perishable,
sensible composite “belongs,” as their common name suggests and
which is there for thought long after the composite itself perishes. But
for Aristotle, unlike the Platonists, the form is not separate, except in
logos, from that of which it is the form.23 It does not, so to speak, stand
on its own, as does the perishable, sensible, composite entity of which
the eidos is predicated. The hylē of the sensible composite does not, as
matter, stand on its own either. Matter, taken by itself, is merely potential being (1060a20-21); in this way it exists only in relation to actual
being, to something that, as such, is, not potentially but actually. Moreover, matter as such is not knowable (1036a8-9); we can know a perishable, sensible composite only to the extent that we can apprehend its
eidos (De Anima 429a27-28; 431b3, 27-432a1), apart from its matter
(ibid, 429b22). As potential being, matter can neither actually be nor
be knowable or even perceptible (De Anima 424a18-19). The perishable, sensible composite entity, then, has relative to its eidos the advantage of standing on its own, of being an individual and not something
that is only as predicated of something else. On the other hand, the eidos
has relative to that of which it is the eidos, the advantage of being imperishable to the extent that it continues to be intelligible, as species,
after the composite entity perishes.
The inquiry into sensible ousiai leads to the problematic result that
the features of separability, individuality, and independence, on the one
23. Bruell puts repeated, and wholly justifiable, emphasis on Aristotle’s criticism of the notion of subsistent universals, including any attempt to interpret
his own species and genera as subsistent. There is, however, nothing particularly controversial about this. The criticism is recognized in the traditional interpretation of the Metaphysics, and generally concurred in as well. It has no
adverse bearing at all on—in fact, it reinforces—Aristotle’s account of separate
ousiai in Book Lambda. For these ousiai are not universals. (And the Biblical
God is not a universal either.)
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hand, and immobility and imperishablility on the other, both of which
are characteristic of ousia (see, e.g., 1017b22-28; 1026a10-16), are bifurcated in the sublunar sphere. We cannot find any ousia in this sphere
that bears the features of both sets of characteristics, which is to say
that nothing here is without qualification. As for the superlunar sphere,
the stars are indeed separate individuals (as eidē are not) and they seem
to be imperishable too, for they have been up in the heavens, participating in ceaseless circular motion for as long as people have recorded
what they have seen in the heavens. But motion, including circular motion, requires a mover distinct from and causative of what is moved.
The stars, then, can be inferred to be moved without cessation by something distinct from them, which is itself unmoved (Physics 265a13 ff.;
Metaphysics 1072a19-26).
In Book Zeta, well in advance of the theology he advances in the
second half of Book Lambda, Aristotle makes the following statement.
Even if we had never seen the stars, nonetheless, I suppose, there would be eternal ousiai besides those [ousiai]
we knew; so that also now [i.e., when we have seen the
stars] even if we are not able to know what [these eternal
ousiai] are, still it is equally necessary for there to be some
[eternal ousiai]” (1040b34-1041a2).
I note at once that Aristotle’s statement here is not only elliptical, but
guarded as well. He uses oimai (“I suppose”) in the first main clause;
and in the second main clause he uses isōs, which I have translated as
“equally,” but which one could also translate as “probably” or even
“perhaps,” though doing so would produce something of a clash with
the word anagkaion (“it is necessary”), with which the second main
clause, and the sentence as a whole, concludes. In any case, my point
is not that Aristotle is advancing an actual argument here for the existence of separate ousiai, separate from all sensible ousiai, the stars included. His argument in Book Lambda for the existence of separate
ousiai is a cosmological one. What Aristotle is advancing in the above
quoted passage is, I would say, only an ontological consideration. That
is, if ousia is the premier instance of to on, if there are only sensible
ousiai, and if no sensible ousia is both imperishable and independent,
then there is nothing that is without qualification. And that may well
be exactly how it stands with being: “the nothing” is always present
with and within it. But Aristotle does not leave it at this Heideggerian
conclusion. The inquiry into sensible ousiai has led to the conclusion
that if there is anything that is without qualification, then it is both in-
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dependent and individual, on the one hand, and imperishable on the
other. The stars coming closest to fitting the bill, but their movement
leads Aristotle to think beyond them to the unmoved source of their
movement.
The trajectory of the enquiry into being qua being, which begins
with an inquiry into sensible ousia, leads to the latter chapters of Book
Lambda where Aristotle concludes that there must be an eternal unmoved mover of the fixed stars, a mover that moves by being the object
of desire or imitation, a mover that engages in an eternal act of intellection (noēsis). This unmoved mover is that on which, again, he says
heaven and nature depend. This mover is responsible for the movement
of the sphere of fixed stars. But Aristotle has to invoke a number of
other unmoved movers similar to it in order to account for the circular
motions of other heavenly bodies. Not only are the unmoved movers
intelligent beings, but the heavenly bodies that are moved by them are
intelligent as well. They move because the “sight” they have of the unmoved movers gives rise to an eros, to a desire to imitate, to the extent
possible for a sensible entity, the changeless activity of the unmoved
mover’s self-knowledge.24 This imitation takes the form of perfect circular motion, the motion that is most like immobility: what moves in a
perfect circle is always on its way to where it already is.
The account of the unmoved mover in Book Lambda, and especially the need to invoke a number of them, along with the necessary
presupposition that the heavenly bodies are themselves luminous intelligences, is so foreign to our way of thinking that not only is it hard for
us take it seriously, it is also hard for us to believe that Aristotle could
have taken it seriously. However, the heavenly bodies, the fixed stars
especially so, surely appear to move in circular motion, not just in Aristotle’s time but according to astronomical observations predating those
of the Greeks by centuries. Given the astronomical records available to
Aristotle, together with his own account of what motion is, the cosmological argument he advances in Book Lambda for separate, imperishable, and individual ousiai, is as reasonable an account as anyone at the
time could have come up with to explain the phenomena.25
24. Aristotle is aware that nous was eros were claimed, by Anaxagoras and
Empedocles respectively, to be principles of the whole. Such claims did not
keep him from grouping them among the physicists as distinct from the
mythologists.
25. The problem that Aristotle’s account Lambda gives rise to, and which he
does not address, is how there can be a multiplicity of unmoved movers, given
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Hoping that the above summary, inadequate in more ways than one,
provides something of a depiction of the “broad back” on which “the
skeletal form of a philosophic science” has ridden, all but unnoticed,
across more than two millennia, I turn to a comparison of the latter with
the former. There is a problem with the traditional interpretation of the
Metaphysics, for there are passages that appear to undercut it. I interpret
them, not so much as lapses or “nodding” on Aristotle’s part, but as the
raising and re-raising of aporiai that do not get resolved until the latter
chapters of Book Lambda, or as provisional formulations, or as formulations that are qualified by the context in which they occur—especially
when Aristotle makes certain statements about “all ousiai” in passages
where only sensible ousiai are under consideration.26
The difference between what I have called, with some misgivings,
the “traditional interpretation” of the Metaphysics and the interpretation—if I have it in focus—that Bruell suggests turns on the question
of which is the more plausible. One criterion for the plausibility of an
interpretation of an ancient author is whether it does justice to the boldness of the author’s teaching. If we are to evaluate these two interpretations in terms of which one brings the bolder teaching into view, we
would do well to attend to the following, insufficiently appreciated passage from Strauss’s lecture, “Progress or Return.”
There is a fundamental conflict or disagreement between
the Bible and Greek philosophy. This fundamental conflict
is blurred to a certain extent by the close similarity in
points. There are, for example, certain philosophies which
come seemingly close to the biblical teaching—think of
philosophic [!] teachings which are monotheistic, which
speak of the love of God and man, which even admit
prayer, etc. And so the difference becomes sometimes althat they are not differentiated by matter and that they all seem to be engaged
in the same intellectual act.
26. The following passages are, in my opinion, problematic for the traditional
interpretation, but they are not devastating: 999a4-5; 1030a11-13; 1032a18-19;
1043b21-22; 1059a38-b2; 1060b18-19; 1075a23-24; 1088a29-33. All these passages can be taken as hints by Aristotle (though read as hints, they are not particularly subtle) that there is no separate, individual, imperishable ousia or ti
ēn einai. The traditional interpretation has to regard these passages as not intended to be taken without qualification. But there are passages that Bruell, too,
has to regard as not intended to be taken without qualification. See, supra, footnote 12.
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most invisible. But we recognize the difference immediately if we make this observation. For a philosopher or philosophy there can never be an absolute sacredness of a
particular or contingent event.27
According to Strauss, the existence of God (or of gods), simply as a
first principle, even as an intelligent first principle, of the whole would
not by itself be a problem for philosophy. What would be a problem for
philosophy is an intelligent first principle that could freely reveal itself,
or himself, to man. For revelation, at the initiative of God, in his own
good time, to human beings of his own choosing who may not be
philosophers, would surely be a particular and contingent event, and an
event of absolute sacredness.28 Such a thing would be a problem for
philosophy because the full truth about this first principle would not be
accessible to man as man. That is, it would not be accessible to reason,
since reason can only work with the necessary as distinct from the contingent or accidental.29 And so, Strauss says quite consistently, philosophy must attempt to refute, not the existence of God, but the possibility
of revelation.30
Two divergent ways in which philosophy might refute the possibility of revelation suggest themselves here. One way, of course, would
be by refuting the existence of God. Strauss thought that every argument
purporting to do such a thing either begs the question outright or leads
to a dead end. A quite different way would be by arguing for the existence God but, in so doing, demonstrate that, contrary to what believers
believe, God is not the kind of being who is able to reveal himself to
man. This is the way followed by a kind of rational theology that consists in no small measure of a theological critique of the possibility of
revelation. Strauss is well aware of this kind of rational theology.31 In
27. “Progress and Return” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity,
117. Cf. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken, 1956—
translation of the 1930 German original), 149.
28. Creation would be a contingent event also: hence the effort of philosophers
to demonstrate, not the non-existence of God, but the eternity of the world.
29. Metaphysics 1027a19-21. Posterior Analytics 73a21. See Bruell, 123-125;
193-195.
30. “Reason and Revelation,” (Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological
Political Problem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 150, 174.
See Bruell, 8-9; 28.
31. See Strauss’s references to “natural theology” in “Reason and Revelation,”
154, and “Progress or Return,” 131. And consider his perhaps surprising state-
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his lecture “Reason and Revelation,” he writes, “Plato’s and Aristotle’s
attempts to demonstrate the existence of God far from proving the religious character of their teachings, actually disprove it.”32
To limit ourselves to Aristotle,33 in the first book of the Metaphysics
Aristotle describes the science being sought as divine science.34 It would
be a divine science on two conditions: if God, most of all, possessed it,
and if it were about divine matters (983a5-8). These formulations are,
to be sure, conditional, for Aristotle has not yet advanced an argument
for the existence of a god, or a separate ousia of any sort, though he
does say that God is believed by all (dokei . . . pasin)—when he could
easily have said, “believed,” simply, if he had wished to quietly disassociate himself from this belief—to be among the causes and a principle
(archē tis). What is most remarkable about this passage, however, is the
ment in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, that the “Arab philosophers . . . actually
were believers in revelation” (151; cf. 155) in light of the curious expressions,
“selective revelation” and “particular revelation,” which he uses shortly afterwards (155; 157). By these latter two expressions, I understand Strauss to mean
revelation accomplished through God’s free choice, that is, revelation strictly so
called, as distinct from a non-selective and more general “revelation”—though
“disclosure” would be a better name for it—accomplished by philosophers, i.e.,
a “theology” established “on the basis of Aristotelian natural science” and culminating in the setting of “three fundamental theologems beyond all doubt”
(149). Spinoza’s Critique of Religion is an early book by Strauss. But The City
and Man is not (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964). Note the phrase, “in the ordinary [!] sense of the divine,” in the penultimate sentence of the latter work.
32. “Reason and Revelation,” 146. By “religious” in this sentence I understand
Strauss to mean “revealed.” Rational theology is not religion. It does not rely
on the claims of revelation, and it may attempt to demonstrate the impossibility
of revelation strictly so called —as the demonstrations of the existence of God
in Plato, Aristotle, and the great Muslim philosophers, to say nothing of Spinoza, can be interpreted as doing.
33. Though consider Republic 380d1-6; 381c5-9; 383e6.
34. The expression autēs hē ktēsis at 982b29, the beginning of the passage about
divine science, refers back to hautē (epistēmē) in the preceding sentence, and
thereby further back to the epistēmēn 982b8, including to epistasthai in between
at 982b21. And tēn ktēsin autēs at 983a11-12 refers back to tautēs (epistēmēs)
in the preceding sentence, the conclusion of the passage about divine science.
Book Alpha, ch. 2, could hardly be more explicit in stating that the science we
are seeking (982a3; 983a21) is divine science, which in this chapter is identified
with wisdom (sophia—982a6-19; cf. 981b25-982a2). Bruell speaks only briefly
to this passage. See 10-11, 38.
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conjunction of these two conditions. Aristotle acknowledges the possibility that someone—a human being, given the context—other than God
could come to possess the very knowledge, or science, of divine matters
that God himself possesses (983a9-10).35 God, if he exists, does not
dwell in a thick cloud that is utterly impenetrable by man; nor is he jealous of man’s attempt to know him. Indeed, Aristotle goes so far to say
that it is not possible for God to be jealous (983a2-3). How can Aristotle
be so confident on this point, unless he is already looking toward the argument he will make in Book Lambda? For according to that argument
God does not think, and perhaps because of his very excellence cannot
think, of what is beneath him (1074b18-1075a10). And so he can hardly
be jealous of what is going on beneath him, including the speculative
activity of philosophers. If God exists, according to what Aristotle says
close to the very beginning of the Metaphysics, then he is surely not the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And he is not one of the gods of
Cephalus, Ion, and Euthyphro either. If God cannot even think of man,
then he cannot freely reveal himself to this man. Moreover, if as Aristotle
argues in Book Lambda, God causes as final cause, as object of desire
and imitation, alone, then he is not a free cause.36 Though he is the cause
on which nature and the heavens depend, he does not create the world
(which is also eternal), freely or otherwise. Whatever access man has to
God is through man’s (speculative) initiative alone, not the reverse. Because God does not even think of what is beneath him, not only does he
not reveal himself, he does not reward and punish human beings for their
moral and immoral choices. And if this were not enough to rule out divine freedom, and thereby the “absolute sacredness of a particular or
contingent event,” Aristotle argues that God is simple and not composed,
pure actuality devoid of potentiality, and necessary. How then can he
freely choose to do anything (cf. 1071b13-22; 1072b7-10)?37
35. Thomas Aquinas, who in his commentaries on Aristotle’s works typically
limits himself to stating only what he thinks Aristotle is saying, softens in his
own name Aristotle’s suggestion that man can come to possess knowledge of
God: this knowledge, he says, is something “borrowed” (mutuatum) from God.
(Sententia Metaphysicae, lib. 1 l. 3 n. 13). That is, for Thomas but not for Aristotle, if we can come to know not just that God exists, but something of what
he is essentially, in himself and to himself, revelation is needed. Note the distinction between preambles to the articles of faith and the articles of faith themselves in Summa Theologiae 1, q. 2, art. 2, ad 1.
36. Compare Summa Theologiae 1 q. 19, art. 3 ad 5; art. 10, corpus.
37. One of the great tasks that the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages set
themselves, arguably their greatest task, was to answer this very question.
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However persuasive or unpersuasive one finds the theology that
Aristotle presents in Book Lambda, it is a rational theology that gives
every appearance of trying to refute the possibility of revelation, of trying to rule out the “absolute sacredness of a particular or contingent
event.” If there is any reason to believe that God exists, then, according
to this book, there is every reason to believe that he is incapable of revealing himself. Aristotle’s Metaphysics throws a challenge into the
face of revealed religion; and it makes no secret about this. Even the
casual reader has to be struck by places where Aristotle dissociates himself from the religious beliefs of the multitude and from the poets who
have, after a fashion, educated them. Sometimes he does this implicitly
and gently (983b33-984a2; 989a9-12; 1023a19-21; 1091b4-8), but
sometimes quite explicitly as well (997b8-12; 1074b3-8), even caustically (983a3-4; 1000a9-19; and, above all, 995a3-8).38
One can object that Aristotle’s argument for the existence of God
depends not only on a whole cosmology but also on an account of how
motion occurs that modern science does not accept. For Aristotle, something in motion depends on a mover distinct from it, sustaining it in motion for as long as it is in motion (which in the case of the stars is
forever), and ultimately on a mover that is not itself in motion. But if,
contrary to what Aristotle teaches, a thing in motion can move itself
without depending on a mover distinct from it, then it sounds as though
something that is potential can actualize itself, or, better, that something
that is actual can actualize one or more of its own potentialities, all by
itself. If that is so, then the argument against radically free choice is
compromised. For radically free choice, whether in the case of God or
in the case of man, means self-determination.39 And though the claim
that things can move themselves without being moved by another is
hardly identical to the claim that a being can freely determine itself to
do this rather than that, the former claim is a giant step in the direction
38. The last passage cited is interesting because it does not occur in the middle
of the Metaphysics, nor in the middle chapter of the book (alpha) in which it
occurs, nor in the middle of that chapter. It is, one might say, “exposed.” The
existence and placement of this passage, and of others cited above, could lead
one to infer that the Metaphysics was never intended to be a book, i.e., a written
work composed for public distribution. If the Metaphysics has an exoteric
teaching, it is hardly a teaching designed to throw theological-political persecutors off track. Bruell acknowledges this (253). In his view, Aristotle’s art of
writing in this book serves a pedagogical function.
39. Consider 1072a26-30.
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of the latter. If man can freely determine himself to do this rather than
that, then a vital component of the critique of the moral presuppositions
of belief in revelation has to be abandoned. Aristotle’s view that whatever is in motion is moved by another, and more generally that whatever
is potential can be actualized only by something already actual, precludes, absent significant qualifications, man from acting freely, hence
from deserving reward or punishment for his actions, in this world or
in another. And to repeat, God, as Aristotle presents him in Book
Lambda, neither rewards nor punishes.
If, as Bruell suggests, Aristotle does not intend his rational theology
seriously, then there is nothing in the Metaphysics that seriously meets
the challenge that the possibility of revelation poses to philosophy. If
the deep teaching of the Metaphysics is that there is no divine being, it
is a teaching that is only intimated. There is no argument advanced by
Aristotle, or by Bruell on Aristotle’s behalf, for this teaching such that
one can confidently identify its premises and assess its logical cogency.
So the question of boldness boils down to which of two interpretations
of the Metaphysics causes more problems for the religious believer: (1)
an implicit teaching that merely denies, without so much as the appearance of a demonstration, that God exists, or (2) an explicit teaching that
attempts to demonstrate that God does exist, but exists in a way that is
incompatible with how religion, whether the religion of the Greeks or
that of the Bible, understands him to exist. Different readers of the
Metaphysics may give different answers to this question.
Nothing I have said about the explicit teaching of the Metaphysics
simply rules out there being a parallel but only implicit teaching, exactly as Bruell interprets it. But if the explicit teaching is as I have described it, and if the implicit teaching is as I understand Bruell to have
interpreted it, then we are left with an oddity. Aristotle would be arguing on the very surface of the book that philosophy in its inquiry into
being qua being can win a decisive victory against its perennial rival,
revealed religion, while effectively indicating beneath the surface of
the book that it cannot do any such thing.40 Would Aristotle not be leaving himself open to the accusation that he is corrupting, not necessarily
the young, but any reader of the Metaphysics who naively takes its surface teaching seriously? What does philosophy gain by promising more
40. One would expect the reverse: a surface teaching understating the challenge
that philosophy poses to revealed religion, and a deep teaching that does not
understate it.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to the uninitiated than it knows it can deliver? Different readers of the
Metaphysics may give different answers to these questions too.
The incontestable merit of Aristotle as Teacher is that it leads anyone who reads it carefully back to the Metaphysics with an enhanced
appreciation of the problems it explores and open to the possibility that
Aristotle’s thoughts about these problems and how they might be resolved are much more profound than has hitherto been recognized and
stated. Aristotle as Teacher should be read as long as the Metaphysics
is read. If I have given excessive weight to the traditional interpretation
of the Metaphysics in this review, it is not because I find it more congenial to revealed religion than Bruell’s interpretation. The opposite is
true: the rational theology expressly advanced by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and developed further by the great Muslim philosophers of
the Middle-Ages, constitutes a formidable challenge to the claims of
revelation. If one does not appreciate the magnitude of this challenge,
one is unlikely to appreciate the alternative rational theology developed, without appeal to the claims of revelation, by the great Christian
theologians of the Middle-Ages when they rose to meet it.
�149
Eva Brann, Un-Willing: An Inquiry into
the Rise of the Will’s Power and an Attempt
to Undo It. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books,
2014, xi + 367 pages. $35.00
Book Review by Matthew Linck
“Does it add up? Not on your life.” Thus begins the penultimate section
of the concluding chapter of Eva Brann’s book on the will. It is in this
chapter that Brann lays out what she calls the “un-willed life.” Brann has
her reasons for keeping her picture of the un-willed life reserved for the
end of the book. And even though one could skip right to the end, I would
like to try to say why that would be a mistake. In other words, I want to
say how the book makes a whole. Some questions will then be raised.
The book does not, I think, make the kind of whole one might expect. The table of contents is deceptive. Reading the names of the chapters and the section headings, one would think the book to be a study of
the will as understood by many great thinkers in the Western tradition.
One would also think the book to show the will in a variety of modes,
from ego-centered to cosmic in scale, from grand conception to narrow
academic topic. One will expect to learn a lot from reading the book.
And these things are all true. Brann approaches her subject mostly by
careful explication of the texts and arguments of individual thinkers. (A
glance at the table of contents will indicate the principal players, although there are many not-to-be-missed mini-essays on will-conceptions
by others in the endnotes. These are listed at the front of the book following the table of contents.) Furthermore, these expositions are grouped
thematically, although those themes do not always admit of easy summary. And, indeed, one can learn a lot, especially where the subjects are
unfamiliar. For me, this was true especially of the sections on Sartre,
compatibilism and neuroscience.
But one cannot make a whole out of things that do not add up just
by putting them between the same covers. The wholeness of Brann’s
book comes from two other sources. The first is the rhetorical force of
the not-adding-up. This, to me, makes good sense of what might look
like a lopsided book: 243 pages on something that turns out not to be
Matthew Linck is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
coherent, 21 pages on the alternative. The power of Brann’s concluding
pages comes not so much from an accumulated argument as from the
experience of being bandied about by all these competing conceptions
of the will. One is made receptive to the hope that there is some way out
of this mess. Let me say something about the mess before turning to the
second source of wholeness.
Since Brann herself supplies summaries of the main conceptions of
and approaches to the will at the beginning of her concluding chapter, I
think I can be pretty brief. I will give a rundown of some of the book’s
main thrusts, indicating some corresponding proper names parenthetically.
There was a time in the West when a human being and a human
life were understood without recourse to the idea of a will (Socrates,
Aristotle). And even for those thinkers where a kind of proto-will can
be glimpsed (Lucretius, the Stoics), it does not rise to the level of a fullfledged faculty. This all changes with Augustine. For Augustine, a
human life—his life—cannot be made sense of without a faculty of
willing. As Brann emphasizes, Augustine’s framing of the will is deeply
embedded in his Christianity and the question of sin. Correlatively,
since man is made in the image of God, God too must now be understood as having a will. From here we’re off. Chapters III-V offer visions
of the will from Scholastics, early-moderns and German Idealists
(Thomas, Scotus, Ockham, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant,
Fichte). The range of conceptions run through in these chapters defies
summary (but see the block quotation below). The recent queries and
debates concerning free will and determinism, whether from philosophers or scientists, are already prefigured in these early chapters. Brann
covers these topics in chapters IX-XI. Despite the faint echoes of prior
thinking, these chapters seem to me essential since they speak the language of our own everyday thoughts about the will. Even if one has
never read a philosophical defense of compatibilism or leafed through
the purported findings of neuroscience pertaining to the will, the cast
of mind, the questions asked, and the unexamined prejudices are deeply
familiar. In between these chapters are Brann’s “linguistic interlude”
(chapter VI, a delightful and important aside), conceptions of the will
that exceed the individual person (Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche)
and what Brann calls the “will’s last ontologies” (Hegel, Bergson,
Peirce, Heidegger, Sartre). It is all of this that Brann contends doesn’t
add up. The following gives a good sense of the range and likely incompatibility of the notions surveyed.
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[T]he will can be conceived as having the nature of a passion,
a power, a capacity, a faculty, an agency, a decision—or an illusion. It can be conceived as an operation that is an extended
process, a final impulse, a long deliberation, or a momentary
choice. It can be conceived as having its termination in seamless execution or in aborted realization. It can be conceived in
terms of its causality, as rationally connected or radically contingent. It can be conceived as having its finality in an external
end or in itself. It can be conceived with respect to its standing
as the highest human good in its obedience to duty or as a nugatory epiphenomenon in its subjugation to nature. It can be
conceived in scope as a hyper-human force causing universal
suffering, as bestowing individual potency, as a general determination overriding individual choice, or as the very principle
of individuality. It can be conceived, looking to the soul’s salvation, as vulnerable to perversion and sin or as analogous to
binding love. But above all, it can be conceived with regard to
human selfhood as being to some degree free from nature’s determinism, as self-activating and deliberately deciding—or as
altogether determined by natural law working on conditions
fixed from way back. It’s a notional miscellany. (243-4)
For every item on the list above, there is a text, an author, a movement,
or a research program considered by Brann. So, it is a lot of work to
follow her down all of these paths, but one might be ready for something else by the end. Hence the closing pages of the book are fitting
given what comes before.
There is, though, that other source of wholeness in the book,
namely, Brann herself. The mind, voice, and good sense that carry the
book along are not incidental to its substance. Issues that might at first
seem to be to one side—how to read a book, professionalism versus
amateurism, the role of self-examination in sifting philosophical arguments, regard for everyday speech—turn out to be essential. They are
essential because they both argue for and exemplify key features of
the life Brann advocates at the end of the book. Hence the book does
not just argue for this or that, but is an example of the very thing it
means to bring forth.1 Let me mention here the special place that
1. Here is an example (the context is Heidegger’s conception[s] of the will and
his propensity to rely on neologisms [under the guise of the retrieval of original
meanings]): “There is the perfectly sensible Socratic inquiry into the one being,
the eidos, intended by words in common use that have multifarious instantia-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Thomas Aquinas holds in Brann’s thinking and in the book. Brann is
convinced that Thomas’s account of the will (notwithstanding whether
there is a will) is the best we have. Her conviction is grounded largely
in believing that Thomas’s account is most in accord with experience.
Well, whose experience? Brann is upfront—principally her own experience, but not just. Despite the central place that Brann accords self-examination (and she invites us to do it), she also, carefully, looks for
whatever common ground she can obtain. (Nevertheless, the question
whether there just are different human types is raised more than once in
the book.) So, with a view both introspectively anchored and looking
widely, Brann sees in Thomas’s account a picture of human willing that
is wide enough in scope (many fail by being too narrow) and rightly ordered (others fail in wrong emphasis). Her reliance on Thomas throughout the book, then, is neither an appeal to authority, nor is it a claim that
Thomas simply has the best rational argument. Rather the reliance on
Thomas is a shorthand for reliance on her own criteria, themselves not
narrowly rational. (This would be the place to mention the centrality of
feeling for Brann.) But, one more twist to this: Brann relies on Thomas
for having laid out his picture of the will. Brann recognizes in Thomas’s
account something she can assent to, but she does not say she could have
seen it all without him. Hence she needs the books (and so do we). These
remarks about Thomas were meant to make good on the general claim
above, that Brann’s own thinking is a source of wholeness in the book,
but now with this addition: her manner of thinking is not independent
from the sources she is considering.
Hence the end of the book is also the heart of the book. My task
now is to say what Brann thinks the alternative to willing is and why
we should revoke the will’s license. It is important to note that these
are not the same thing. Brann could have presented us will an alternative
to willing as one possible mode of living among others. Instead, she
has endeavored to persuade us that it is better to be un-willing than willing (or worse, willful). So, first the alternative, then the revoking.
Brann presents Socrates as a model (not the model, not someone
to slavishly imitate) of un-willing. Brann highlights some key features
tions in the world—even in our world—for example the virtues and vices. But
what does it mean to search arduously for the meaning of a word-conceit used
in now-archaic language and then in different significations, words like
Galassenheit and Seyn, entirely without use-context, without living exemplars?” (162) Brann, it seems to me, tries to ground her thinking in “living exemplars” wherever possible.
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of his person. As a man, Socrates obeys above all his inner daimonion
which only stops him from doing this or that—he has no principle of
willful assertion; he is an “ontological optimist,” that is, he believes (or
at least proceeds as if) there is order and intelligibility in the world
grounded in the forms; he calls not on courage, but on his goodness,
thoughtfulness and justice throughout his life. As a thinker, Socrates is
always at the beginning of things and opens his thinking beyond the
tight logic of “rationality.” He has a vision of the human soul without
will, but one in which desire operates throughout. Socrates is committed,
perhaps, to only one maxim, “Virtue is knowledge.” Brann thinks virtue
here should be understood “not [as] a good will enclosed in its subjective
self-sufficiency,” but as “an on-the-brink power, a readiness to pass to
thoughtful doing without intermediate exertion of an executive will.” Finally, she contends that “this unhesitating passage to action . . . comes
from . . . doing deep, affirmative thinking.” (All of the above comes from
pages 248-51.)
With Socrates as a model, we might then ask, as moderns, where
our freedom resides. Brann wants to “relocat[e] freedom away from the
will” (253), to focus our attention not on “freedom of the will but freedom from the will,” and to suggest that “collectedness,” of a person or
a life, is not to be attained by “strenuous inward-drawing,” but by “other
means” (255). The key terms of these other means seem to me loving
attachment, desire as receptivity, the contemplation of beings, and imaginative living. How a life thus constituted issues in freedom, even Brann
is hesitant to say decisively—it remains, in a way, a “mystery” (262).
As for why this un-willed life should be preferred to the willful
one, is it enough to say that Brann thinks the latter is just plain bad for
us? That it diminishes our powers instead of enhancing them? That it
distracts us from what is important, truly worthy of desire and interest?
That it distorts our vision of the whole of things and leads, at its worst,
to genuine horrors? I hope it is not unfair to Brann to leave it at that.
The questions I would like to pose to Un-Willing were elicited
strongly by the book and, I think, are related. The first is whether instead
of endeavoring to revoke the will’s license we should rather think of
our task as overcoming the will. The second question is about how we
should read.
One way to take Brann’s global view is that with Augustine the
West goes astray, and that by thinking in terms of a will-faculty our selfunderstanding becomes perverted. Some subtlety is required here, since
Brann acknowledges that much of what falls under the name “will” is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
not without sense. There are ways of making sense of all the talk on the
will, as Brann attempts to do throughout Un-Willing. Nevertheless, for
her these ways are neither necessary nor felicitous. But what if our errancy vis-à-vis the will was in some way necessary? What if we both
need the will and need to show its deficiency? Or, in other words, what
if Hegel is right? It would be foolhardy to insert here a lengthy discourse
on Hegel (although maybe necessary), but I want to try to sketch out
the Hegelian picture in which my questions are grounded.
While there are metaphysical aspects to my question springing
from Hegel’s logical writings2 and questions about the need to revise
our understanding of nature occasioned by his Philosophy of Nature,3
it might be enough to limit myself to “spiritual” issues. I could perhaps
locate my concerns with respect to Brann’s discussion of the self/subject in chapter of XI of Un-Willing. Brann seems to me correct to suggest that the ancients did not have a notion of self and that their
understanding of soul is not simply its equivalent. She is also correct,
I think, that questions of will and agency go hand in hand with questions of selfhood. But if this is the case, then it would seem to follow
that Brann might want to jettison talk of the self with that of the will.
It does not seem to me altogether that she does. Maybe there is room
to insert a wedge here. The Hegelian account, I believe, holds that the
2. For instance, there seem to me to be far-reaching implications of Hegel’s
treating of being in the way he does. Much of this could be spun out from the
fact that a doctrine of being is included in a Logic, and one particularly pertinent feature of that doctrine (under the heading of Essence) is that being exhausts itself in appearances. The “ontological optimism” that Brann attributes
to Socrates by means of the forms seems off the table for Hegel. This metaphysical point is, I think, of direct consequence for Hegel’s approach to human
action.
3. At least two prominent elements of Brann’s account are ripe for consideration via Hegel’s understanding of nature. The first would be the cogency of
the debates surrounding determinism and free will. Speaking for myself, the
implicit metaphysics which grounds the mechanical view of nature is long
overdue for a systematic and thorough demolishing. To continue engaging such
debates on those terms is to throw good effort after bad. Whether a new metaphysics of nature will get a hearing is hard to say. The second issue would be
that of feeling. This feature of the human soul is important for Brann, and it is
for Hegel, too. But I think one would have to take up Hegel’s account of animal
feeling in the Philosophy of Nature, especially as the mark of inwardness and
proto-subjectivity, in order to see what might be radical in his understanding
of human feeling.
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notion of self must be developed (and, perhaps, purified) because the
telos of human history is freedom and freedom is centered on how
things count or don’t count, are justified or not justified, for me. Here
a whole can of worms is opened, not the least of which would be
Hegel’s contention that Christianity is—was—necessary for us. At the
very least we might see that the infinite relationship of the individual
to the divine is a “picture-thought” of the modern subject’s relationship
to absolute spirit. Talk of a will would be one feature of this necessary
passage through Christianity. But the real burden of the Hegelian account falls on its insistence that the realization of human flourishing
is a historical achievement. It is in working out this claim that an account of overcoming the will would be located. One version of such
an overcoming can be found, I think, in the closing section of the fifth
chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, for there we are given a picture
of human action in which willful self-assertion must be replaced by
action grounded in mutual confession and forgiveness.4 But, of course,
for Hegel replacement will not mean simply canceling; the passage
through willfulness must in some way remain at work in its overcoming. None of this can count as an argument against Brann, but only as
an indication of the space in which to pursue a certain kind of
question.5 Another way to ask this question would be to query whether
Brann is right that Socrates’s thoughts “could be anyone’s thoughts,
anytime” (248). I suppose, in a way, I am raising the old question about
4. A perspicacious reading of these paragraphs can be found in J. M. Bernstein,
“Confession and forgiveness: Hegel’s poetics of action” in Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, ed. Richard Thomas Eldridge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 34-65.
5. One full-fledged example of the kind of argument I have in mind can be
found in Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as
Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Hegel’s treatment
of nature cuts deeply into many aspects of debates about the will, but one place
to look is Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends
of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). There is some direct overlap
between Un-Willing and Kenneth R. Westphal, “Autonomy, Freedom & Embodiment: Hegel’s Critique of Contemporary Biologism,” Hegel Bulletin 35
(2014): 56-83. An attempt to make good on Hegel’s account of freedom in terms
of the condition of modern institutions is undertaken in Alex Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014). A more Kantian flavored approach to these questions
can be found in Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Indentity,
and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ancients and moderns, whether there is a genuine quarrel and, if so,
with whom to side.
Also at issue here would be whether Brann has done justice to
Hegel—can have done so—by analyzing his treatments of willing in
isolation. The question is not whether Brann interprets her chosen texts
correctly; the question is whether such interpretations can be adequate
if done (too much) in isolation from Hegel’s thinking more broadly.
This, as always, is a particularly vexed issue in dealing with Hegel, but
I wonder if Brann’s other readings don’t suffer similarly. For instance,
is it so clear that Thomas’s Aritotelianism can be easily separated from
its Christianizing (47)?
I also wonder if Brann’s treatment of the major thinkers in her book
is not too much one-at-a-time. After the strenuous effort of her surveying of so many conceptions of the will, Brann concludes that it does
not add up. Is this way of asking the question too static? What if instead
of asking if it adds up we were to see what these thinkers have to say to
each other? In some cases, such engagement is explicit: Kant dwells
with Rousseau in the development of his moral theory; Hegel has an
eye on Kant at every turn in working out his own positions. But even
where this is not so explicit, we can attempt to construct for ourselves
an imagined conversation between thinkers. I think, though, that this
act of the imagination cannot be just a comparing of arguments; we
must, again, endeavor to take up as much of a thinker’s thought as possible. On the one hand, this would require us to keep in mind how a
thinker sees, in some fundamental way, how things hang together; on
the other hand, it would ask us to keep an eye—if I can put it this way—
on the style of thinking involved.
The figure I most worry is slighted along these lines in Un-Willing
is Kant. My reservations are not about any particular assertions that
Brann makes about Kant’s thinking (she is illuminating here as well),
but about the spirit of the engagement. Here perhaps my own prejudices
and inclinations are at work, but it seems to me that both in spite of and
because of his excesses, Kant allows me to see something that I would
not have otherwise, that there is some element of human willing and
action that is excavated through his stark formulations. But not simply.
That is, I cannot just pluck out some insight from Kant to be combined
with insights from other thinkers. Somehow, I have to let Kant’s vision
of things as a whole set to work my own thinking. And then by putting
Kant into conversation with others, letting them, through my thinking,
contend with each other, I can think things I would not have otherwise.
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I fear that the structure and tone of Brann’s book could too quickly invite us to be over and done with a figure like Kant.6
Even as these questions were triggered by Brann’s book, and even
as I cultivated them, the book itself made me suspicious of them. Is the
Hegelian undertaking too sophisticated, too theoretical, too systembound, and, most of all, too remote from the immediacy of lived experience? Is the question of historicism itself too bound up with the will?
Is there a too-generous way of reading philosophical texts, a way that
slips into indulgence? At its best, Brann’s book shows us what it is like
to be comfortable dwelling at the beginnings of things, locating our concerns and principles nearby and within ourselves.
6. When consulting an essay on Kant that Brann’s book called to mind I found
there, and in two companion essays, these formulations: “Kant’s greatness,
like that of other great philosophers, lies in the simplicity of the fundamental
innovations on which his systematic edifice rests. . . The unavoidable dogmatism hidden behind the Kantian concept of ‘freedom’ (i.e., ‘will’ or ‘pure practical reason’) that has been pointed out so frequently, is irrelevant once we
address the problem of the modus operandi of the Kantian innovation.” “The
greatness of Kant’s practical philosophy is based on the fact that it is developed
within the framework of a critique of reason and that it is closely interwoven
with his theoretical philosophy, his philosophy of religion, and his philosophy
of history. In contrast, most contemporary ethical thought consists of ungrounded assertions, unprincipled casuistry and reflections lacking any organic
unity with the rest of our knowledge.” “Kant’s texts are not historical artifacts,
but still-contemporary deeds, erga: our age is, philosophically, the energeia
of Kant’s texts.” These quotations are from, respectively, Agnes Heller, “Freedom and Happiness in Kant’s Political Philosophy,” Vittorio Hösle, “The
Greatness and Limits of Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” David R. Lachterman,
“Kant: The Faculty of Desire,” all found in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 13.2 (1990). I offer these quotations only as examples of the cast of mind
I have in view.
�
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Trentina, Allison
Sachs, Joe
Brogan, Michael
Paalman, Susan R.
Petrich, Louis
Pihas, Garbriel
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 56.2 (Spring 2015)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Momentary Morality and Extended Ethics ..................................1
Eva Brann
Reinventing Love: An Introduction to Plato’s Phaedrus..................14
John F. Cornell
In the Heaven of Knowing: Dante’s Paradiso..................................36
Peter Kalkavage
Knowing and Ground:
A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ...............................57
Matthew Linck
Poem
Tercet ................................................................................................75
Elliott Zuckerman
Review
Liberalism and Tragedy
A Review of Jonathan N. Badger’s Sophocles and
the Politics of Tragedy: Cities and Transcendence....................76
Paul Ludwig
��Momentary Morality
and Extended Ethics
Eva Brann
You have been reading and talking about virtue for quite a while
now; therefore, that is what your teachers asked me to talk about
to you. So I drew a hot bath (since the mind is freest when the body
is floating) and thought what might be most to the point, most helpful to you.
Should I review some theories about virtue, perhaps give you
my interpretation of Socrates’s or Aristotle's notions of virtue, perhaps dwell on whether from reading Platonic dialogues we can tell
if Socrates and Plato thought the same and if Aristotle responds to
either of them? Or should I introduce you to Kantian morality, a
world apart from the ancients? Should I distinguish for you a vision
of virtue that looks to an ideal heaven beyond and longs for perfection from one that pays regard to the world right here and goes
for moderation? Should I explain to you that the Greek philosophers tends toward ethics, toward developing personal qualities of
excellence, while the Judeo-Christian tradition tends toward morality, willingness to obey the laws of God and nature? Should I list
for you different doctrines of doing right, such as eudaemonism,
the teaching that happiness is the aim of virtue, or deontology, the
account of virtue as duty and the obligation to obey commands, of
which Kant is the most extreme representative? For while Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, whatever their differences, think that ethics
involves some sort of rightness in our feelings, emotions, and passions, Kant is clear that morality at its purest is a matter of reason
alone. Reason is in its essence universal: to think rationally is to
think unexceptionably, comprehensively. So to obey the commands
of reason is to suppress all merely natural inclinations, all purely
Eva Brann is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was delivered at the “Windows on the Good Life”
Course at Carlton College on 16 April 2014.
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idiosyncratic desires, and to intend only such actions as we would
want to be intended by everyone—or even to be seen as commanded by a law of nature. This is the notorious “categorical imperative”: “imperative” means “command” and “categorical”
means “without ifs and buts” (as when someone says to you “that's
a categorical no!”). You'll see in a moment why I've brought Kantian morality into this talk.
One last thing I might be speaking about, and which in fact I
will talk of in a moment, is the word “virtue.” I'll argue that this
translation of the word the Greeks use, aretē, has its virtues, but
we should probably give it up, or at least use it with raised eyebrows.
I now want to say why none of the above, except the last, appealed to me. I will tell you what seems to me the biggest trouble
with academic study, and so with most of our eduction. I call it
the problem of lost immediacy. This is what I mean: There are
books—and if your teachers chose well, they will be great ones—
that are full of substance. Then there are books and articles and
lectures about books. The great books (or texts of any sort) contain
opinions. The next level of books and articles also contain opinions, but they are opinions about the original opinions, because
whoever interprets a primary text adds a perspective to it. Then
here we are, your teachers, and we’ve absorbed some of these
original opinions, as well as some of the opinions about them—
and we’ve acquired some opinions of our own on top of that. All
those levels of learning on our part can smother, drown out, your
immediate relation to the book. But even a powerful, first-rate
book—perhaps especially such a book—can also stand between
you and yourself. It intervenes in your thinking and can capture
it, so that you are content to think its thoughts and co-feel its feelings, rather than being immediately present to yourself. Or worse,
it can put you off its possibly life-changing content because you
see no direct entrance to it.
Now I hasten to say that I pity people who have never been
taken over by a book or even by a teacher in that way—if, that is,
the being-taken-over is the beginning of an effort, a struggle, that
issues in a gradual emergence or a tumultuous bursting out of a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
discovery that is truly your own. And I pity even more students
who have been turned off by a life-enhancing text because no one
helped them to make a direct connection with it.
A witty outside observer of my college used to tell the world
that our students arrive knowing nothing and leave knowing that
they know nothing. I hope it’s true, provided you keep in mind that
to know that you know nothing is knowing a lot. What he meant,
though, was that they had absorbed so many contradictory opinions
from reading so many deep books that they were in a state of ultimate and utterconfusion. But in that he was surely mistaken. Such
riches may be oppressive and discombobulating for a while, but
that’s a state you work yourself out of into some clarity—clarity
about “who you are,” which is a formulaic way of saying “what
your thinking can accept and your feelings can embrace.”
Therefore I think that the second-best thing we teachers can
do for our students is to show how books can be, in a fancy term,
“appropriated,” made one’s own—and not just a few books of the
same sort, but many books of different sorts, different in genre,
different in opinion. The very best thing we can do, of course, is
to get students to read them well and talk about them to each other.
Doesn’t that broad appropriation, you might ask, imply eclecticism, which is a sort of intellectual cherry-picking that disregards
the generality of a well thought-out theory, and—especially if it’s
an ethical or moral theory—its integration into a comprehensive
view of the ways things are? Well, yes, if ecleticism means indiscriminately collecting low-hanging fruit from here and there, it will
be cherry-picking, extracting now contextless bits and pieces. But
no, if eclecticism has a basis in the very nature of things. In a moment I’ll explain this oracular pronouncement.
But first, there’s the word “virtue,” the supposed subject of my
talk. Let everyone talk as they wish, as long as they know what
they’re saying; but I wish we wouldn't use “virtue” as a translation
of that Greek word aretē—or at least that we would use it mostly
with raised eyebrows. To be sure, it has a nice argument in its
favor: “virtue” is related both to the Latin vis, force, and vir, man.
Virtue is the energy of a being that holds it together, and gives it
power, as when they say in stories: “All the virtue went out of
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him.” Now as it happens, aretē is related to a Greek prefix ari-,
meaning “very much, forcefully so”; thus aretē is the potency in a
person or thing to be what it is supposed to be. (Some Greeks seem
to have seen a relation between aretē and Ares, the powerful warrior-god.) Moreover, the moral virtue most highly regarded by Aristotle, courage, is literally called “manliness” (andreia) in Greek.
So it all fits together. On the other hand, “virtue,” in a use that goes
back to Shakespearean times and into the nineteenth century, was
a woman’s particular kind of manliness, namely, well-girded
chastity, her bodily and psychic inviolability. We have nothing left
but a smile for such passionless purity. More recently, the adjective
“virtual,” in its meaning of “inactual,” has come front-and-center
as an attribute of cyberspace: “virtual reality,” that is to say, “unreal
reality.” We ought to have a background awareness of the sphere
of connotations of our words, including their history. But, as far as
the contemporary connotations of the adjectival form of “virtue”
is concerned, I don’t think we want to go there.
This means, however, that for the moment I’m left without a
word for my subject. And this lack raises two really interesting
questions: Can we have a thought without a name? and Can we
think without words? Powerful contemporary writers claim that it
is impossible for two reasons: There can be no external proof that
thinking is going on without someone saying something thoughtful: a furrowed brow is no evidence. In fact even our claim to be
thinking doesn’t prove that we are thinking. And more important,
to think is really to marshall meanings, and meanings are drifting
vapours unless they are attached to a word or given structure in a
sentence.
Here I beg to differ with these contemporary writers. I think
we all experience that sense of a disembodied meaning, of pre-verbal thinking, that moves in our mind, sometimes like a gentle aromatic breeze over the mental plain, sometimes like a powerful push
of air pressure against a mental wall, rousing us to seek the right
term to catch it, the accurate language to describe it, the suitable
words to embody it.
So then, what is this mental presence that is called virtue, effectiveness, excellence, dutifulness, goodness? I am supposing
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
here that to have too many words is equivalent to having no cogent
idea. But that may be a mistake. The reason why there are numerous translations for the Greek word you’ve thought about under
the term “virtue” may be that in fact it encompasses a number of
ways of being what is called broadly, and so a little bluntly, “good”;
there are many terms because there really are different ways of
being humanly good. This possibility of earthly variety kicks the
meaning they share, “goodness,” way upstairs, so to speak—up
into the highest reaches of thought. In the Republic, Socrates says
to the two very intelligent young men he is speaking with that he
can’t explain this Good to them in the brief space of one evening.
So I feel excused from even trying in this short hour.
On the other hand, I do want to make use of the notion that
there might be more than one way of being good—an idea that will
probably underwhelm you. It would not even have shocked people
who lived before the First World War, like your great-great-grand
parents—though for different reasons. Nowadays many people,
certainly among them the most articulate ones, believe that as long
as we are socially right-minded and we don’t discriminate among
our fellow humans for being what nature made them, we can be
fairly forgiving of a loose personal morality. So there is public and
private morality, one rigorous, the other relaxed. (Of course, these
are generalizations, which are never true of those in whose hearing
they are made.) Your ancestors, on the other hand, would have
tended to believe what Socrates sets out in the Republic, namely,
that members of different castes or classes belonging to one political community have different characteristic excellences. Moreover, they knew quite well that, even within their class,
people—especially well-off men—lived quite comfortably within
a double moral framework. For example, men could maintain a respectable but loveless marriage to one woman whom they publicly
honored, while at the same time engaging in a passionate but disreputable attachment to a mistress who had only private privileges.
My own uncle lived that way. When he and his wife fled Germany
from the Nazis in 1939, his mistress was on the same train in a separate compartment.
Here is what I want to do now, killing two birds with one stone
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(though I’m not so much for killing birds, especially not en masse).
My first aim is to take off on my own, so that my primary point
will not be so much to explain a theory found in a book—though,
as you’ll see, I’ll have to do that too in order to achieve my second
purpose. And that second purpose is to show how one might be
eclectic without being incoherent, how we might engage in picking-out parts of theories of goodness without producing a mere
self-pleasing miscellany, a tasty thought-goulash.
This second purpose might be of real use to you if you’re feeling a little snowed by all the deep and sometimes difficult theories
you’ve studied this year. I mean to show that you can fashion an
opinion to live by through combining the most disparate conceptions. My first aim, however, is to think out something for myself
and articulate it before a sympathetic audience.
So now to it. One human being may indeed live with two
moralities, one public, one private, and this duplicity is not always
hypocritical; it may simply make life livable and prevent it from
becoming worse. Or, looking at it another way, there is a saying
that hypocrisy is the respect vice pays to virtue: I think it’s better
all around that there should be such respect, once humanly understandable and inevitable wrong-doing is on the scene. Again, coming to our day, some people quite comfortably cheat on their taxes
and tell you that it’s a form of civic virtue to short-change a wasteful government, but they observe strict correctness when it comes
to matters of social justice. They too live in a dual moral frame.
But I want to introduce another, I think more fundamental, duality: the pacing of time, or, more accurately, of psychic motion. If
you watch the stream of cars coming toward you on the opposite
side of a highway, and there is a good deal of traffic, you’ll notice
that the cars bunch up; they practically tailgate each other until the
density dissolves into long stretches of lighter flow. The world is
like that, and so are our lives; it and we are in sync. There’s an
earthquake, a tsunami, a storm, an eruption all at once after years
of nothing. A dreary winter has lasted for ever, suddenly it’s spring,
the forsythia is in bloom, the trees are bursting into leaf, and it’s
time for outdoor-idling, but there are summer jobs to be lined up,
final exams, parties, last-moment bonding, packing, all at once.
That’s outside, but it’s similar inside: There are undistinguished
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
times marked, very unremarkably, by routine and repetition; life
flows away and is canceled, collapses into one-and-any-day’s
schedule. Then suddenly time develops densities; all the momentous moments happen together, for better or for worse. When it
rains, it pours, as the saying goes.
I should remind you here that the exhilarating heights and tearful depths of time, or rather of eventfulness, separated by expanses
of flat dailiness—these closings-up and drawings-apart of happenings—are a Western way of seeing the world and living in it. There
are teachings of the East that make a virtue of unbunching time, of
letting life flow evenly—every moment as charged with presence
as any other. Thus when I called this talk “Momentary Morality
and Extended Ethics,” I was thinking only of our half of the world.
So now I’ll explain what I mean by momentary morality. I’ve
been describing an experience of time and events that includes moments of crisis, either imposed on us by nature or manufactured
by us from sheer cussed, willful Westernness. Although krisis is a
Greek word meaning “separation” or “decision,” and so might just
betoken any branching in the flow of events, we generally don’t
mean something good by it. A crisis, as we use the word, is not so
much a branching as a stanching of the flow of events that makes
its elements pile up and then burst out, often in a kind of relieving
demolition of the status quo. Certainly the living pace we share,
consisting of stretches of eventless, quiet desperation or contentment, as the case may be, which are interspersed with somewhat
frantic eventfulness, practically guarantees that every high will be
at the expense of a low, as a hill is paid for by a hollow. I think that
I’ve told things the way they really are, but that I’ve left two questions (at least) quite unanswered: Are the highs higher than the
lows are low, that is, are there more great moments than sorry
ones? and What is the logic, or better, the ontology of these eventpairings of high and low? Why is natural and human life subject
to these oppositions? By “ontology,” which signifies an “account
of being,” I mean the most fundamental explanation we can find
for the way things are, including psychology in the non-medical
sense: an account of the human soul.
But I want to use this notion of bunched time, of high moments
we may hope for and low ones we can expect, of events shaped in
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time like wave packets connected by a flat line—unexamined
though the image be—to speak about the type of morality which I
call “momentary morality.” I mean those critical moments when
you’re up against the wall, when it’s too late to think things out,
when you need to be ready with an inner command to tell you what
to do—what you must do—at that very moment. The human condition being what it is, what you must do will tend to be something
you don’t want to do, or rather, something you will want with every
fiber of your feelings not to do. If at that moment you waffle about
what you ought to do, or if you fail to do as you ought, you’ll never
forget that you were unprepared in a moral emergency or unsteadfast in doing your duty. You will be diminished in your self-respect.
I’ve seen it written and heard it said that such moments of extremity reveal who a person really is. I don’t believe it. I think what
you do day-by-blessedly-ordinary-day is more apt to reveal, even
while it is shaping, who you are. But I do know that moral failure
in a crisis sticks with you: I know it from myself, I know it from a
tale one day told me, almost in passing, by a man I admired, and I
know it from fiction, especially Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim
and Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
There is a theory of morality that seems to me tailored for moments of crisis and, consequently, inept in daily use. It is the Kantian theory of the categorical imperative I mentioned earlier on. It
is, in the compass of my reading, the most powerful, coherent, ingenious and, not incidentally, the most earnestly extremist theory
of human goodness ever devised. Like all great specific theory it
is embedded in a grand grounding of human consciousness. Kant
would turn, nay, whirl in his grave to hear me assign it to so particular a use, so momentary an occasion. But since I am convinced
that it is not possible to live well through the flats of life on Kantian
morality (though I lack time in this talk to explain why) and find
that even his own applications sometimes have repellent results, I
feel less abashed at saving the pieces, so to speak. Let me explain
as simply and briefly as I can how this morality might work in an
emergency, and that explanation itself will go a little ways toward
showing why one can’t live that way through extended time.
We have, Kant says, a faculty for freedom, namely, our will,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
our free will. To be free means to take orders from no one but oneself. Thus the free will commands itself. It gives itself its own law.
There must be law, Kant thinks, because if the will were lawless it
would be the opposite of free—call it capricious, wanton. Now the
will, Kant also thinks, is an aspect of reason, which has two sides.
One side is theoretical reason. This reason gives nature its laws
and then recognizes them as necessary. I will set this activity of
reason aside here—it’s what I mean by ripping his moral theory
out of the grand whole. The other side is practical reason; it gives
itself its laws and so knows itself as free. You can see that it is identical with the free will. The will—really myself as a free person—
should, of course, obey the command of its self-given law, its
imperative. As I said earlier, this imperative permits no ifs and buts,
admits no special cases, allows no individual exceptions, because
it is addressed to reason, and reason does not contradict its own
universal judgment, for then it would be self-contradictory. Above
all, it avoids the necessities, the unfree determinism, of lawful nature. We human beings are in part natural, namely, in our inclinations and desires. Our free will, our practical reason, has no truck
with the emotions and feelings that drive us. It chooses a course
entirely because it is right and not in the least because we feel good
about it; in fact, the more it hurts the better we know we are doing
our duty, doing purely as we ought. And we have a test to tell us
whether our decision is right, a test that expresses the essence of
reason: If I can universalize my particular motive for choosing an
action so as to turn it into a general law of human action or a conceivable law of nature, then I am choosing as I ought. I am preserving the purity of reason, namely its universality and its
avoidance of self-contradiction by exception-making.
Let me give a famous example by Kant himself. Suppose a
persecutor comes to my door and asks if his intended victim is
within. All my inclination is to deny it, to protect the fugitive. But
if I generalize my motive it assumes this form: Under humanitarian
pressure anyone may tell a lie. And then all trust in anyone’s declarations collapses, for anyone can construe an exception. So you
must tell the truth, and you will have done your duty, come hell or
highwater or the murder of a fugitive. I’ve told this example be-
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cause it seems to me to show how Kantian purity can turn into
moral catastrophe when life is fraught with daily danger. Just imagine that you’re harboring a fugitive dissident in some totalitarian
state, and, as you well know they might, the secret police come
knocking at your door. Will you tell them the truth for the sake of
the self-consistency of reason? No, you will have recourse—if you
think you need it—to the very paralogical, paradoxical principle of
the white lie. And, in general, I think that this absolutist morality is
not only too inhumane, but also too joyless to be livable day by day.
But let there be that one life-changing moment when, torn from
the usually peaceful flux of ordinary life, you suddenly must decide. The occasion might be a temptation to commit a minor transgression in the world’s eyes, but one weighing heavily on your
conscience. Or it could be an unexpected call on your courage, unwelcome but unavoidable, perhaps never patent to the world but
well enough known to yourself.
These are, I think, Kantian moments, spots of time when a
morality is wanted that disparages our inclinations and prompts us
to duty, that provides an effective on-the-spot test of what ought
to be done, to wit: What if everyone did what it has just crossed
my mind to do? That decisive moment’s morality is the kind which
commands without hedging.
But for most of us in this country these excruciating moments
that, when they do come, tend, to be sure, to come in multiples,
are blessedly sparse. The rational points on a mathematical line are
said to be dense, meaning that they leave no empty interval and
yet do not form a continuum (since the irrational points are missing). Such is the incident-line, the event-time of our ordinary daily
life, in which every little station has its happening; but though they
are all discrete, they are so closely packed together that they are
scarcely discernible. Our day has 86,400 seconds and our week
604,800 seconds, and we can calculate the number of seconds in
our month, our year, our decade, our lifetime. This flattish life-line
of instants, with the peaks and troughs it occasionally develops,
surely requires a different notion of goodness from the one that is
marked by excruciating, disruptive moments. As I called the latter
“momentary morality,” so I will call the former “extended ethics.”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
Morality, remember, requires command-issuing universal law;
ethics, on the other hand, demands natural and acquired personal
qualities. Of the possible English alternatives to the term “virtue,”
I think that “excellence” best expresses the connotations the ancient users of the word aretē seem to have had in mind, even before
the philosophers got to discerning a comprehensive meaning.
Let me list those connotations of aretē, understood as excellence, that I can think of: 1. effectiveness; 2. competition; 3. happiness; 4. enumerability; 5. habituation. They all have to do with
the long runs of life, the flat stretches that may buckle into peaks
and valleys of glory and misery; they have little or nothing to do
with the up-against-the-wall decisions of a life fractured by a moral
emergency.
I’ve spoken of the notion of aretē as an effective, potent way
of being that betokens a soul honed to a fine edge, just as a wellsharpened pruning knife is an efficient and perhaps somewhat dangerous object. There is a competitive tone to aretē, just as to be
excellent means literally “to rise above,” as we say, “to be outstanding.” The possessor of aretē glories in it, vaunts and flaunts
it, as do the Homeric heroes. A hero is high in self-esteem, in current language. Furthermore, the aretai, the excellences that everyone recognizes, can be counted off. Socrates regularly refers to
four cardinal ones: wisdom, justice, courage, and sound-mindedness. These excellences require the right sort of body and soul—
physical and psychic talent as we would say—but also practice,
habituation. It is in this last element that the difference between
Kantian morality and ethics, as I have delineated it, shows up most.
Personal qualities are confirmed in habituation, in being habitually
practiced, but the free will, the self-legislation of morality is essentially at odds with habituation. For habit puts the natural laws
of psychology to work, and these are deterministic mechanisms.
In fact, habit as a mechanism is an inhibition on spontaneousness,
on freedom. What’s more, for Kant the will’s intention trumps
practical execution.
Indeed, all the points of the ethics of individual qualities are
contrasted with law-morality. The categorical imperative has, to
be sure, several forms, but it is basically one, a super-command-
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ment that the free will issues and obeys, while the human excellences are enumerably multiple. For although excellence as excellence may be one super-quality, it needs to assume various
specifications, and these may even be at odds with each other. For
instance, courage and sound-mindedness (whose Greek term,
sophrosyne, is often translated as “moderation”) may pull in opposite directions. Certainly the competitive glorying of excellence
is unthinkable in a dutiful moralist, and the sharp-set potency and
effectiveness which goes with any excellence is absolutely out of
play for the moral mode. Once more, in Kant’s great works of
moral philosophy, the issue of execution, of how the passage from
decision to effective action is accomplished, which is so crucial a
juncture in ethics, is almost completely suppressed. Ethics is a way
of being objectively good in the world; the doing is almost everything. Kantian morality is primarily concerned with being right
with oneself, subjectively good; the intention is everything, though
hard actions may, indeed should, follow. As Kant famously says:
There is nothing unqualifiedly good except a good will. Note that
he does not say “a good deed.”
It is with respect to my middle point, happiness, that the difference is greatest and that ethics seems to me a far more livable,
day-by-day useful theory. It is essential to moral intention that no
hint of nature-bound desire should taint the purity of duty done for
its own sake, meaning for the sake of self-rule; no psychic pleasure-seeking mechanism should confuse the clarity of a command
obeyed for the sake of one's rational integrity, one’s rational consistency. Ethics, on the other hand, cooperates with nature; although it distinguishes between sound and corrupt pleasure,
between excess and moderation, it nevertheless regards pleasure,
in Aristotle’s words, as the bloom on our activity, and considers
happiness, whatever its definition, as the proper, indeed self-evident, human aim.
Recall that I have spoken about “extended ethics” as opposed
to “momentary morality” and distinguished the two theories of
human goodness by their relation to time, or rather, to eventuation.
Morality was for intense, abrupt, exigent, emergent moments of
up-against-the-wall decision making; ethics was for a looser,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
13
smoother, less urgent, more subdued tenor of life. And indeed,
everything I’ve observed about ethics seems to me to fit this latter
temporal mode better: our natural longing for accessible daily
pleasure and sustainable long-term happiness in the world; our innocent, or not-so-innocent, human-all-too-human eagerness for
admiration; our comfort in a being buoyed up by a tradition of
recognizably articulated excellencies; our time-consuming growth
into profitable habits and productive routines.
Above I calculated our line of life in myriads of instants almost too brief for detection (as distinct from discernible moments). Yet each had to be occupied and vacated, lived in and
through, for better or for worse. It seemed to me that this analogy
of life to a line, at once dense and pointillistic, recommended to
us a theory of goodness which allowed us to be all there as natural
beings, driven at every point of temporal existence by desire, fastening on some moments for fulfillment, developing excellence
and glorying in it, engaging with the world in action and with ourselves in thinking. But it also seemed that there were moments of
heightened urgency when we must oppose our pleasure-seeking
and happiness-enjoying nature and forget all the flourishing excellence promotes in order to obey the harsh self-command of
“you ought”—no ifs and buts.
My overarching purpose, however, was to persuade you that
your studies of ways to be humanly good can be appropriated
by you to fashion a way of your own, that they need not add up
to mutual canceling-out of theories and all-round confusion of
soul. In fact, I’m paying you a major compliment: I’m supposing
that you’re taking your learning seriously, not just, as the phrase
goes, “academically”—that you take your studies to heart as lifeshaping.
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Reinventing Love:
An Introduction to Plato’s Phaedrus
John F. Cornell
The English playwright Tom Stoppard has a dazzlingly erudite
play called “The Invention of Love.” It is not one of his more
popular works for the stage, partly because of its arcane references to classical philology, including substantial quotations from
the ancient poets in Greek and Latin and some stunning observations on the critical role of the comma. The play centers on the
nineteenth-century Oxford classicist and poet A. E. Housman as
he dramatically reviews his life in the Underworld among the
ghosts from his past. The title “Invention of Love” seems to derive from the debate, recalled in passing, about which Roman
poet invented the love elegy: Housman wittily decides it in favor
of Gallus, on the basis of his one surviving line. Yet the title turns
out to be less academic when the drama takes up the hero’s alleged homosexuality. Housman invokes the shade of his contemporary, the flamboyant Oscar Wilde, who enters reading – or
rather mocking – Housman’s poem about a youth who took his
life for sexual shame.
Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?
Oh, that was right, lad, that was brave:
Yours was not an ill for mending,
T’was best to take it to the grave.
To Wilde, Housman had tried to make art out of a newspaper
stereotype, a cliché. But art – like love – is always personal,
imaginative, and drastically original. Referring to his notorious
John F. Cornell is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
where an earlier version of this essay was delivered as a lecture on April
2011. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Maryanne HoeffnerCornell, Keven Schnadig, and Joshua Renfro for the responses and discussions that contributed to the development of the present essay.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | CORNELL
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affair with Lord Alfred Douglas (nicknamed Bosie), Wilde declares:
Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to
be invented. We would never love anyone if we could
see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem.
In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.
By which he seems to mean that all love is a species of art, and
that neither love nor love poetry would exist if people inquired
too critically into these ferments of imagination. Thus Stoppard
presents Housman the ascetic and Wilde the aesthete: the emotionally conflicted scholar, whose life was “not short enough for
[him] not to do the things [he] wanted not to do”; and the creator
of modern gay identity, whose “blaze of immolation threw its light
into every corner where uncounted young men sat each in his own
darkness”1 – now freed, presumably, from thoughts of suicide.
I cite this provocative drama because its two themes, homoeroticism and the invention of love, would certainly have intrigued Plato. For to “describe love” (Wilde’s understatement) Plato
places Socrates in a similar theatrical dialogue and shows him, like
Housman, curious about the poets’ innovation. Though neither
Wilde nor Housman seem aware of it, in the Phaedrus Socrates identifies the poets as the cultural promulgators of pederasty – Greek
man-boy love – and he undertakes to reinvent it. He reinvents it as
initiation into the love of wisdom. Perpendicular to the modern
polarity that Stoppard stages, of dejected self-repression versus
exuberant self-assertion, Plato stages the polarity of common versus philosophic love of the beautiful. His hypothesis sounds at
least as preposterous in our time as it must have sounded in his:
the higher meaning of homoeroticism is companionship in the
quest for being.
Plato’s reinvention of love turns on a central question in his writings, namely, how philosophy is erotic. Philosophy is erotic not just
in the sense that wisdom is someone’s all-consuming passion. It is
1. Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (New York: Grove Press, 1997),
92-96.
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erotic in that the pursuit of wisdom draws on the excess of sexual
desire felt in the intimate relation between lover and beloved,
which in the Greek polis centers on the courtship of a youth by
an adult citizen. The philosopher is master of his desire for his
beloved because he understands their attachment as a joint path
of enlightenment. His love of wisdom puts his physical desire at
the disposal of a dialogical friendship, reversing the usual tendency of love to subjugate the soul to the body. From this lover’s
abstention derives the popular term “Platonic love,” used nowadays to describe any friendship that is sexless and might have
been otherwise. But this popular idea of Platonic love misrepresents Plato’s idea insofar as its original source – the Phaedrus –
is concerned with a particular, sexually charged bond, that of an
older guide and his follower.
No one can deny that there is a great deal to learn about romantic love from Plato’s great dialogue. However, the modern reader’s
impression that Plato must disapprove of physical relations between all couples confuses the issue.2 For Plato there is indeed in
love a theme that overreaches bodily passion; eros is a broader
and more powerful force than the sexual drive. But the original
aporia concerned how this overreach expressed itself in pederasty.
Though it may appear to moderns as a settled institution,3 the
Greek sexual relationship between men and boys was actually
controversial in the polis because of its asymmetry. If we take sexual pederasty simply to be an ancient norm, and then universalize
Plato’s sublimation of this desire, we run the risk of missing his
2. E.g., Glenn W. Most, “Six Remarks on Platonic Eros,” in Erotikon:
Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, ed. Shadi Bartsch and Thomas
Bartscherer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 42. “Plato
does not downplay, neglect, or minimize the bodily erotic drive but instead evokes, intensifies, and even demonizes it – only to then explain
it away as a misunderstanding or as a metaphor and to turn it against
the body itself. In all this one is struck by a kind of Puritanism.”
3. Cf. James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love (New York: Random House, 2007), xxvi,; and Andrew Lear and Eva Cantarella, Images
of Ancient Greek Pederasty (New York: Routledge, 2008), 18.
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point. It is the questionable naturalness of pederasty, the transgressive character of this relationship that is at issue in the Phaedrus (251a). If we ignore the possibility that this sexual liaison is
existential pedagogy manqué, we obscure the dialogue’s insight
into the connection between eros and philosophy. For Socrates the
same-sex eros that sidelines procreation points dramatically to
philosophy.4 He would bring this immoderate desire to its proper
climax. It is as if there is a hidden purpose in the havoc it wreaks,
as if it is only deceptively about friction of flesh. This explains
the peculiar intensity in the original Platonic relationship, which
the philosopher further intensifies through restraint – quite the opposite of repression. Mistrusting this drive toward his sexual like,
the philosophic lover heightens his conscious urge toward being.
How he does so is what the Phaedrus is about.
I shall attempt here to look at how the dialogue prepares us to
appreciate the new, philosophical pederasty (249a). I shall focus
on the exchanges and speeches that come before Socrates’s famous speech, the great palinode where he describes the divine
madness and the soul as charioteer driving mismatched steeds
with broken wings. Now for many readers the parts of the dialogue that precede the palinode have two strikes against them.
First, they are confusing. Second, they are not the palinode. That
is, we tend to take them as “preliminary material,” not worth much
trouble compared to Socrates’s spectacular discourse on love.
After all, doesn’t Socrates himself repudiate the speeches that precede the palinode? While we may find the first parts of the dialogue hard to take seriously, we should be surprised if every joke
and gesture of Socrates does not conceal some deeper meaning. I
propose that the first sections of the Phaedrus dramatize an essential part of Socrates’s wisdom about eros and that the only way
to glean this wisdom is to interrogate his dialogical tactics.
To start with the question I have already raised about invention:
invention is a topic in rhetoric. The Greek term euresis refers to
4. Cf. Leo Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, ed. Seth Benardete (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 50.
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the originality of the argument or rhetorical strategy in a speech.
It can also mean “discovery.” (My quotation of Stoppard’s Wilde
also invoked this duality.) Socrates uses the term when discussing
his approach in his first speech, building on Lysias’s thesis of the
superiority of the non-lover to the lover. As usual, Socrates is
ironic: in discussing “invention” he leads us to believe that he
could say nothing very original, except perhaps on inessential
points. (236a). Thus under the cover of a rhetorical contest he
conceals his bold innovation in Greek love.
Socrates’s radical views are – as is to be expected in Plato –
set in contrast to the teaching of the poets who had long shaped
the Greek experience of love. Indeed the English term “invention” (as a translation of euresis) may apply more to the poets,
while the term “discovery” may better suit the philosopher who
inquires into the nature of things. The poets (according to the
term poiēsis) are makers and creators. They are not primarily interested in the truth about human affairs, nor about the cosmic
order on which Socrates, by contrast, would ground the subject
of eros. The poets, he says, have not sung nor will they ever sing
adequately about the place beyond the heavens. They may presume to mediate between gods and men; but the philosopher gets
nearer to the “essence of being itself.” (247c).5 The poets could
therefore only give us love as an artifice – they helped and help
us invent it. The philosopher tries to reveal love as it is by nature,
as it might be discovered by the reflective mind.
Now this difference comes up near the beginning of the dialogue in a striking way. Before beginning his speech in the match
with Lysias, Socrates makes a point of saying how shallow the
rhetorician is on the topic of love (235b). He prefers the original
writers, like the poets Sappho and Anacreon, who at least knew
5. Translations from Greek are adapted, literally and sometimes loosely,
from Plato in Twelve Volumes, Greek text of Phaedrus, Harold N.
Fowler translation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982),
vol. 1; and Plato’s Phaedrus, translation, notes, appendices, introduction, and interpretive essay by Stephen Scully (Newburyport, Mass.:
Focus Publishing, 2003).
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what needed to be said on the subject. He does not mean that the
poets spoke or knew the whole truth; he brings them into this
conversation because of their cultural influence. He says he could
never have invented the original talk about love (ouden autōn ennenoēka, 235c). The poets poured it into his ears like a foreign
stream – “foreign” (allotriōn) implying that this current was not
native to him or perhaps to anybody else. Lysias may be the occasion of this impromptu contest of speeches, but for Socrates the
real challengers are the poets.
Notice Phaedrus’s reaction to Socrates’s genealogy of Greek
love. “Don’t tell me, Socrates, even if I beg you, how or from
whom you heard such talk” (235d). I suspect that here Plato is
underscoring the antipathy between a shallow type of aesthetic
experience and philosophy. Phaedrus is expressing resistance to
having knowledge about the psychology of his pleasure. Pleasure
is immediacy and knowledge would interfere with his passive
enjoyment, supplanting it with the beginnings of self-consciousness about his response. Just as Oscar Wilde argues in Stoppard’s
play, a certain self-deception facilitates both erotic attachment and
poetic invention. So the question of origins carries a disturbing
potential from which Phaedrus protects himself. It might force
upon his attention the arbitrariness of cultural forms, and the
power poets have over us beyond our own immediate experience.
Subjection to love may be one with subjection to the rhetoric of
its poetry insofar as our feelings may have capricious causes.
Obviously in our interpersonal experience, love and rhetoric
are intertwined. The passions that engage us intimately also induce us to wear masks or play rhetorical games in order to give
safe expression to our feelings. At the beginning of the dialogue
both Socrates and Phaedrus profess to be lovers of speeches, susceptible to the beauties of language. But they don’t mean quite
the same thing by this pleasure, and they engage in a good deal
of horsing around before they settle on their shared business.
Each conceals his desire in a different way. Phaedrus hides his
need to recite Lysias’s speech, to impersonate him before another,
as if he could make Lysias’s powers his own (228a). He is even
concealing the scroll of Lysias’s discourse, which he has with
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him. Socrates will quickly expose the deception. By contrast,
Socrates pretends weakness. He pretends to be sick with the love
of hearing discourses, when (as we shall see) he is angling for a
chance to expound his own views. So the difference is that Phaedrus is deceiving himself when he tries to hide his desire, whereas
Socrates hides his desire with full awareness by pretending to be
susceptible to a more common appetite. He pretends to be dependent on Phaedrus to hear any speeches, such that Phaedrus
could easily lead him all around Attica. Though Phaedrus senses
that Socrates is teasing him on this score, he does not appreciate
how the quest for wisdom motivates Socrates. Thus Plato introduces us immediately to the difference that self-knowledge
makes in desire’s need to be concealed and sustained. Ordinary
desire conceals itself out of emotional self-interest. Philosophical
desire, the interest in philosophy, conceals itself by imitating ordinary desire (cf. 227c-d). This is the irony of Socrates’s seduction in the Phaedrus. He has his own Lysian strategy but in
reverse: the philosophical non-lover posing as common lover.
Keenly aware of the role-playing, Socrates calls attention to
it. He hopes that they might drop their masks and that Phaedrus
might just recite or read Lysias’s speech. To shatter the fiction,
he describes their encounter as third persons.
O Phaedrus! If I don’t know Phaedrus, I have forgotten myself. But since neither of these things is true, I know very
well that when listening to Lysias he did not hear once only,
but often urged him to repeat; and he gladly obeyed. Yet even
that was not enough for Phaedrus, but at last he borrowed
the book and read what he especially wished. Then . . . he
went for a walk with the speech, as I believe, . . . learned [it]
by heart. . . . And he was going outside the wall to practice
it. And meeting the man who is sick with the love of discourse, he was glad when he saw him, because he would
have someone to share his revel, and told him to lead on. But
when the lover of discourse asked him to speak, he feigned
coyness, as if he did not yearn to speak; at last, however,
even if no one would listen willingly, he was bound to speak
whether or no. So, Phaedrus, ask him to do now what he will
presently do anyway (228a-c).
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Unfortunately, it is not so easy to dispense with the disguises.
When Phaedrus proves excessively enamored of Lysias’s speech,
Socrates dons a mask even more ironic than that of the speechlover: he covers himself with his cloak. Expected to denounce
the lover in behalf of the non-lover (according to Lysias’s model),
he lets Phaedrus believe that he hides out of embarrassment for
seeking Phaedrus’s admiration (237a). This misleads not only
Phaedrus but also many readers. In fact, Socrates is speaking for
himself as a philosopher, but is concealing it while he performs
as Lysias’s rival. His concern for Phaedrus requires him to give
counsel under cover, philosophical advice (237b-c). Now philosophical advice presupposes inquiry into the nature of things. He
will define the nature of love, based on the inner workings of the
soul, as clarification of these principles fosters unanimity of mind
and whole-hearted decision. Similarly, his speech will denounce
the bad lover for keeping his beloved from “divine philosophy,”
lest the beloved become wise to him (239b). In short, Socrates is
not representing a lecherous non-lover unfettered by love in the
manner of Lysias. He is performing his own species of dispassion, the non-love of the philosopher who is nonetheless interested in his listener’s welfare. In his view, the irrational lovers
are Lysias and all his kind, whatever they may pretend. A complex irony: while Socrates prevented Phaedrus from speaking as
Lysias, with “Lysias” concealed in the scroll under his cloak
(228e), Socrates contrives to speak as if he were a new Lysias,
except under his cloak he has concealed himself and philosophy.
In scripting Lysias and Socrates as protrusions under cloaks,
Plato suggests the symbolism of the talking phallus – each man’s
desire determining his speech. In this contest of rhetoric we witness not Socrates’s shame but his satyr play mocking Phaedrus’s
infatuation.
In keeping with his exposé of Lysias, Socrates’s account reduces eros to force. Eros tops a sequence of exorbitant desires.
First he mentions the overmastering passion for food called gluttony, then the tyrannizing passion for wine; we seek a name for
the amorous desire akin to these.
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It’s relatively clear already, I suppose, why all this has
been said, but things are altogether clearer if the reason
is spelled out rather than left unstated: when passion
without reason [overcomes] straight-minded opinion and
is itself driven toward the pleasure of beauty, and further,
when this passion is violently moved by kindred desires
toward the beauty of the body and is victorious, it takes
its name from that very force (rhōmē) and is called love
(erōs). (238b-c; italics added.)
Socrates’s definition of eros here is a picture of transgression
and excess. Passion overcomes opinion concerning what is correct, epi to orthon, or (as Scully’s translation has it) it overcomes
“straight-minded” opinion. The joke about pederasty seems to
work in Greek as it does in English. In any event it underscores
the rupture of conventional boundaries. But what are we to make
of eros concluding a list of nutritional excesses? Gluttony, drunkenness, and . . . love! The implication is that what most people
call “love” comes down to sexual appetite, the desire, as they say,
to devour or snack on somebody. (Socrates would probably see
the modern literature of vampires as suggesting our ambivalence
about a sexuality enacted on the nutritional model.) All this seems
a comic way of depicting an eros whose “naturalness” consists
mainly of predation. He brings his whole speech to a close with
the ditty: “Just as the wolf loves the lamb, so the lover adores his
beloved!” (241d.)
But the talk of erotic rapacity conceals a psychological theme,
the theme of master and slave. We saw earlier how the passions
Socrates and Phaedrus have for speeches made them vulnerable
to each other’s manipulations; it is so much more the case with
the desire to possess the idealized beloved, especially outside
marriage or the friendship of equals. Here is where force
emerges, in the disordered soul as well as between the lovers who
vie for control. How does one get what one wants from another
who is himself a free center of desire? The paradoxes of this
struggle, which Hegel’s analysis of Spirit described as the master-slave dialectics, are hardly foreign to Plato. In fact, I would
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propose that the struggle to be the master is what makes Lysias’s
speech of genuine interest. What draws Phaedrus to this speech,
whereby a man recommends himself as a non-lover in order to
seduce a youth? Readers of the dialogue often take the speaker
of Lysias’s speech (whom I call Lysias for short) for a clever
scoundrel – a seducer whose only distinction is a weird strategy
that touts his lack of passion. This cannot be the whole story. If
Lysias has merely devised a new way to secure some recreational
sex, then Phaedrus is a fool and Plato is giving Socrates a slight
pretext for expounding his thinking about eros. The problem is
to understand what makes Lysias’s position significant both for
Phaedrus as candidate of his solicitations and, in a different way,
for Socrates.
First of all, one should note how Lysias has attempted to create
legitimacy and respectability for a controversial liaison. He has
made the love of boys into something sensible that will pass
under public gaze without criticism. Thanks to his professed lack
of passion, the older friend will provide the youth with reliable
social benefits and meanwhile not be tempted to make any careless disclosures. The flaw in this solution to the problem of illicit
love is not simply its deceitfulness or even its self-deception. The
flaw is that, while Lysias has removed one of the obstacles to this
passion, he has simultaneously removed one of its hidden motivations. He cannot remove the defiance of respectability – the
pose of superiority to decent opinion – without removing some
of the allure of the liaison.
Thus Lysias has to inject it with a new power, the unconventional idea of the attraction of non-love. What Lysias’s novel seduction brings to the fore is the power of indifference and
impassivity. The obstacles to Greek love that he removed in a social sense he recreates in a more seductive psychological one.
Anyone who has ever played or watched the game of “hard-toget” might wonder if it doesn’t touch on something paradoxical
in desire itself. In Lysias’s case, it is easy to see how the older
person might capitalize on the youth’s attraction to him. As nonlover, he makes the youth into the lover and himself the prize.
He is no slave of love; he need not surrender any ego-pride. He
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simply denies love, denies his capacity to be captivated in that
way. We are speaking, after all, about the orator whose interest
is his superior ability to move others – someone whose erotic victory is inseparable from the rhetorical one. Meanwhile, Lysias’s
listener, the younger person like Phaedrus, will have an idol to
worship. For there can be little doubt about Phaedrus’s need for
a hero. Why else would he insist three times on the definitiveness
of Lysias’s speech? (236b.) And why offer, even in jest, to erect
a statue of the winner of the speech competition? (236b.) It is
Lysias’s turning of the tables on the beloved that supplies the special element of fascination. For Phaedrus, Lysias functions as the
erotic unmoved mover.
Socrates cannot fail to be struck by the distorted semblance
of the philosopher in Lysias’s idea, the sublime aloofness of one
who keeps his head in love. Even his criticism of the orator’s
harping on this theme might indicate his interest (235a). And
notice: when Phaedrus asks Socrates to give his own speech, a
better and “quite different” one (mē elattō hetera, 235d),
Socrates craftily avoids doing so. Let me make this clear:
Socrates could easily now give, after Phaedrus’s recitation and
at his request, what many take to be the “true” speech about
eros as Divine Madness, the renowned palinode. But at this
point he resists the invitation. To paraphrase, he tells Phaedrus:
We needn’t go there. Lysias has not failed in every respect. Plus,
you mustn’t imagine that feeble-minded Socrates could compose a discourse with brand new arguments! (235e.) Socrates
pretends that he is required to adopt Lysias’s topic of non-love,
and he distracts attention from this pretense with a questionbegging maneuver. “Take the subject of Lysias’s speech,” he
says. “What person arguing that the non-lover ought to be more
favored than the lover, could omit praise of the non-lover’s calm
sense and blame of the lover’s unreason? These are necessary
points.” (235e-236a.) Thus, while indicating what might be attractive about non-love, and using Lysias’s thesis as his alibi,
Socrates submits to a non-existent rule of adopting the anti-love
theme for his first speech. For his own reasons, the philosopher
is intent on delivering a discourse against Greek love. He sim-
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ply wants it to appear as if he adopts the topic from Lysias at
Phaedrus’s behest (236bB).
Of course, Socrates has to unpack what’s going on in Lysias’s
head to bring out the fraud in his rhetorical game. Lysias wants
the beloved’s sexual favors as much as any lover; he only manifests in an exceptional way the lover’s desire to keep control.
Thus, one of the things that Socrates’s counter-speech will do is
to make explicit how an older lover (like Lysias) feels compelled
to master the beloved, master his soul quite as much as his body.
The bad lover seeks a boy who will bear witness to the lover’s
superiority, who can be kept dependent and will never surpass
him. This master denies the beloved’s needs as he excels in pursuing his own. His denial of the beloved’s individual humanity –
Lysias’s speech purports to cover all cases – ensures that the
beloved will pay all the psychological costs. Socrates, speaking
as the true and wise non-lover, would protect his youthful addressee from such abuse. In fact, the wisdom in his speech is
aimed at the real-life Phaedrus. There is a moment when he interrupts himself, “seeming” (so he says) to have lost control of
his mind to the nymphs or Muses; he wishes to avert the attack
(238d). But the immediate context gives Socrates’s wish another
sense, too; for he insists that Phaedrus, the object of his enthusiasm, pay special attention. One attack that Socrates means to
avert is that of an orator like Lysias.
Thus Socrates continues his speech, pursuing his counter-attack not only on the bad lover, the “slave to pleasure” (238e) who
preys on youth, but also on any professed non-lover (again like
Lysias) with sexual designs. He proposes to describe the “advantage or harm coming from the lover or the non-lover to the youth
who grants him his favors” (238e). Phaedrus misses the innuendo. When Socrates has finished his speech retailing the repulsive features of such seducers, Phaedrus expects to hear the other
half of the declamation, the praise of the non-lover. Socrates pretends such an elaboration is superfluous: one could simply reverse the situation and attribute to the non-lover the advantages
that parallel the disadvantages of the lover. But he hints that such
a positive speech would be grand. He is already speaking in hexa-
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meter! “If I begin to praise the non-lover, what kind of hymn do
you suppose I shall raise?” (241e.) If we suspect that Socrates
has his second speech up his sleeve, the palinode praising the divine madness, we might wonder if it might not be the very praise
of the non-lover that Phaedrus is missing. It is significant (though
it is rarely noticed) that, to introduce his second speech, Socrates
continues to speak as the chaste critic of Greek love. He continues his stance as the advisor of the unwary youth. “Where’s the
boy with whom I was just speaking?” he begins. “He must hear
this speech, too, and not be in a rush to grant favors to the nonlover before he has heard me out” (243e;, italics added). In other
words, Phaedrus must hear Socrates’s second speech, the palinode, in order to learn not to grant favors even to a non-lover. For
the palinode will celebrate the true non-lover, who resists Greek
love as a sexual practice; but it will also celebrate the true lover,
who reinvents this love as an art of higher inspiration. The contraries love / non-love are reconciled in the superior idea of
courtship expressed in philosophy.
What I am proposing – as the upshot of these machinations –
is that Socrates is committed to the first speech no less than to
the second, and that the two are artfully connected. They have
striking internal consistencies. Socrates is always Socrates. He
says what he thinks is true, but his irony both hides and hints at
his meaning. It is up to the reader to work out the implications
and resolve the ambiguities. Such interpretive demands make the
Phaedrus a confusing experience for the inexperienced reader,
who runs for shelter in the palinode. But the idea that only the
palinode represents Socrates’s essential teaching – an error made
even by scholarly interpreters – is not compatible with his maneuvering both speeches into place. Socrates himself suggests
the idea that the two speeches are intended to form a whole in
the analytical discussion that follows them. (265a-266a). He proposes, for instance, that they are like right and left in an object
with mirror-symmetry. Love and non-love harmonize in the two
speeches because they are two sides of one thing. It would not
be hard to show that the ideas of madness (265a), the accounts
of the desire for beauty (238a), the sense of the mind’s rightful
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rule (237e-238a), even the design to “capture” a boy (253c) – all
agree in the two speeches as well. It is as if Socrates describes a
single, expansive and indifferent force – called eros – only from
two opposite points of view (cf. 263d). The difficulty is to understand why he dramatizes the movement from one perspective
to the other as a personal religious crisis.
Let us see how Socrates has plotted his rhetorical performance.
If his two speeches are intended to form a whole (265c), then we
have to entertain the notion that he planned them from some point
early on in the dialogue – perhaps when he heard Phaedrus’s vehement defense of Lysias. If Socrates has taken up the guidance
of his young friend from the start (cf. 261c, 265c), then certain
confusing moments in his behavior are clarified. A couple of examples will suffice.
First, is Socrates’s resistance to entering into competition with
Lysias at all convincing? It is not just that Socrates wants to
speak; he wants to make Phaedrus make him speak (cf. 237a10).
Socrates has baited Phaedrus with the idea that he, Socrates,
could give a better speech than Lysias, but then turns around and
acts surprised when Phaedrus takes his jest in earnest and presses
him to make good on his boast. How could anyone compete with
the ingenious Lysias? (236b-c.) Phaedrus rises to the bait. He
imagines that he now has a “fair hold” on Socrates and can also
get him back for exposing his (Phaedrus’s) wish to impersonate
Lysias. Phaedrus will use the tactic Socrates used on him: “if I
don’t know Socrates I have forgotten myself,” “he yearned to
speak, but feigned coyness,” and so on (236b). Phaedrus is enjoying his game of one-upmanship over Socrates. The real joke
is that Socrates provoked Phaedrus’s entreaty so that he can
blame him later for the first speech criticizing lovers and love.
This, as we’ll see, allows him to include Phaedrus in the theological drama of its recantation.
He sets up his second speech, the palinode, in an even more
elaborate way.
Phaedrus has bought Socrates’s excuse that there is no need
for him to praise the non-lover; he also buys Socrates’s threat to
go away before Phaedrus can exert any more power over him.
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Phaedrus, however, wants him to stay, specifically to talk over
what’s already been said. In other words, once again Phaedrus
would have accepted skipping the next part of the actual conversation, the palinode in this case, in favor of pursuing the dialogue
that follows the speeches. It is Phaedrus, not Socrates, who uses
the verb dialegō here (242a). What? Engage Socrates in dialogue? No way! To prevent his oratorical plan from going off
course, Socrates pretends to misunderstand Phaedrus’s request:
“Phaedrus, you are something divine when it comes to speeches.
Who has been the source of more discourses than you, either
speaking them yourself or compelling others to do so? There you
go again, twisting my arm! Now another speech is coming upon
me, all because of you!” (242a-b, paraphrased.) Notice that Phaedrus is surprised at this unasked-for event. He says, using a Greek
idiom, that “this is good news” (ou polemon ge angelleis).
That’s just the beginning of the intrigue. For Socrates’s announcement of the new discourse that Phaedrus is extorting from
him precedes his declaration of another motivation for it.
Socrates now declares that his daimonion prevented him from
going away in order to correct his sin against the god of love. A
sin against Eros? Socrates has now given Phaedrus one too many
justifications for the palinode to come. We know the one justification is suspect, why should the other be legitimate? Phaedrus’s
interest in more talk might have been enough of a “sign” for
Socrates to conclude that he now has his attention.6 Of course,
that does not explain Socrates’s confession and need to atone.
How are we to take Socrates’s guilt over a sin (the critique of
love) that we observed him commit with malice aforethought?
We observed him cleverly preserve the impious topic in his first
speech. No daimonion troubled him then! Now Socrates has a
scapegoat for his sin, too. At the same time that he beats his
breast, he moans how it was all Phaedrus’s fault (the move we
saw him prepare earlier). “That was a dreadful speech you made
me give, Phaedrus! That first speech was your speech. You spoke
6. Catherine Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 311, n. 65.
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it through my mouth, as you bewitched me!” (242e.) More
Socrates theatre. Where Phaedrus had wanted to deliver Lysias’s
speech as if it were his own, now he is made the speaker behind
Socrates’s speech! Again Plato piles up the ironies; for Socrates’s
first speech was Phaedrus’s in the sense that it was perfectly
adapted to the younger man’s frame of mind. But why does
Socrates assign it to his friend as a sort of accusation? Is he mimicking the dishonest recriminations found in the unsatisfying love
that that speech just described? Socrates knows how to make
Phaedrus’s identification with the boldest orator work to his advantage. Phaedrus is now both implicated in and fascinated by
Socrates’s dramatic religious turn.
But what is his conversion driving at? Surely Plato intends that
we the readers see through Socrates’s ruse of repentance. I count
six references to sin when he describes the crime of his first
speech. These, however, fall into two distinct classes: a rhetorical
error on the one hand, and an offense to the god Eros on the other.
He will correct his rhetorical error by recanting the speech, as he
admits to having “sinned with respect to mythology” (243a), i.e.,
speech about the god. But though he dwells on the personal offense to Eros (242c, d, e), he never exactly acknowledges committing it. So to repeat: why the theological melodrama? Why
does Socrates put on a redemption play starring himself, a play
within the play – let us call it “Appeasing the God Eros” – to discredit the first speech and distract us from the contrivance that
makes him responsible for it? Why sever his first speech from
the palinode in such an artificial way?
As mentioned earlier, Socrates hints in the conversation following the oratory that his two speeches are linked in his mind
(262d, 263d, 265c, 266a). These hints come purposely too late.
From the point of view of Phaedrus, and of most readers,7 the
two speeches are to appear incompatible. One speech argued that
eros is harmful to both the lover and the beloved, and the other
showed that eros is the greatest of good things. This is how Phaedrus describes them in retrospect, likening Socrates to a sophist
7. Cf. Scully, Plato’s Phaedrus, 95.
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who has demonstrated contradictory theses (263c). From a philosophical point of view, however, the contradiction represented
by the two speeches may lie deeper. It may lie at the heart of
erotic existence, in every soul’s conflict with itself, which comes
to light especially in the passion for youths. Such conflict can be
finally resolved only by philosophy in its direct confrontation
with eros.
Remember, part of the fascination of Lysias’s speech was its
hypocritical motive: the experienced adult might dissemble his
own love and thus intensify a youth’s devotion to him. It is as if
in every lover the non-lover is always lurking and in desire a desire for something beyond itself. When Socrates thus gives his
“Lysian” (first) speech, he exploits the conflict hidden in sexual
pederasty. He plays up the potential repulsiveness of the sexual
lover in order to elicit not the youth’s preference for the non-lover
(that was Lysias’s strategy) but his mistrust of sexual advances
from older men altogether. But further, he plays up the adult
lover’s alienation from his own passion too. In Lysias’s speech
the inevitable decline in the lover’s interest was merely incidental, an eventual disappointment to the boy. Socrates makes a long
excursus on the lover’s discomfort, describing his emotional turn
away from his beloved when, sooner or later, the lover finds himself a “different person” (241b). Beyond warning the boys against
licentious lovers, Socrates is reminding the amorous men of their
own internal division. The argument of his first speech, its critique of the pursuit of bodies, thus prepares for the vision to come
in the palinode. Ordinarily, lovers ascribe their eventual turn
against their love to the inadequacy of a particular partner.
Socrates is showing that the inadequacy inheres in the desire for
what only apparently extinguishes it. The dissatisfactions of boy
loving, when it is reduced to a merely sexual condition, point to
a realization that this passion is groping beyond sexual pleasure,
groping for something ungraspable in the experience of beauty.
So my explanation of Socrates’s theatrical conversion is that
it prepares Phaedrus for a possible spiritual revolution in terms
that he can comprehend now – the terms of pious reform.
Socrates’s first speech and his dramatic repulsion from bad love
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actually represent an essential phase in erotic self-knowledge.
That is why he only pretends to reject it. This love’s moral “badness” is not the problem. The real problem with the sexual conduct of pederasty is that it constitutes a human aspiration
unfulfilled (cf. 250e-251a). Similarly, if we only heard the edifying palinode, we might entertain a moral opinion about the
goodness of its object, the “spiritual” lovers that who shun mutual
sexual use. But only when the perspectives of both speeches are
held together, like two horses in a double harness, held together
under the rule of mind, can there be erotic self-knowledge. Only
when the psychic energy of repulsion from the “bad” carries one
toward the “good” love does the lover come to know his soul’s
order as a whole, that is, attain the inner certainty of its comingto-be in freedom. This psychic self-generation is advanced, according to the last pages of the dialogue, when the lover-turnedphilosopher learns the practice of “writing on his soul” (276a,
278a).
But Phaedrus is in no position to understand this mystery, how
the good might be the beneficiary of the bad. The transformation
of the negative into the positive eros – of the Lysian will-topower into the Socratic power of self-motion (245c) – is an interior development incomprehensible to the novice. Socrates can
denounce his first speech as expressing “nothing sound or true”
(mēden hugies legonte mēde alēthes, 242e); but even that judgment is grounded in experience beyond Phaedrus’s ken. For the
time being, Socrates has to appeal to Phaedrus’s passions and
imagination to advance his learning in erotics to the next stage.
Socrates receives rhetorical assistance from the imagery of theology. If Love is a god, he says, then he cannot be evil. But that
is what his first speech and Lysias’s supposed (242d-e). Is the
god to authorize the un-health and un-truth of common lust? No,
the god should serve to overcome this error of the mind and ailment of the body. The first two speeches took no account of how
the lover’s banal thinking was determining his erotic experience.
Such discourses are really only good to impress “manikins” – undeveloped and thoughtless people, anthrōpiskoi (243a). Thus,
while the Lysian speeches tell us something about the dark side
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of eros, which Socrates manages by the reins of awareness, he
knows that most people never attain the defining experience of
love, where care for the genuinely beautiful reigns in the soul. If
we are not to remain undeveloped people (anthrōpiskoi), education has to make the difference. Recall the case of Stesichorus,
who slandered Helen, attributing responsibility for the Trojan
War to her rather than to men’s self-deception. He was “inspired
by the Muses” (243a). That is, he was educated 8 so that even
blinded he could see that recanting would retrieve his sight.
Socrates follows suit with a recantation for the sake of Phaedrus’s
instruction.
Earlier in the dialogue Socrates admitted the dividedness of his
own soul. He wondered about whether he was “a monster more
complicated and more furious than Typhon, or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine lot is given as our share in nature”
(230a). Notice that he did not refer to two lots or two fates, between which a soul might choose. Rather he called only the gentle
and simple condition of the soul a destiny, moira. It is ours, potentially, as “our share in nature (phusei metechon).” Ultimately,
the Socratic type of lover does not choose the good over the evil
in his soul as an act of will. Neither is dialectics, the examination
of the truth about souls in general, effective on its own, not as a
first approach. (This is symbolically reserved for the last part of
the Phaedrus.) It is rather a matter of this lover’s being educated
into his contemplative part in the whole, which means engaging
his radical desire, his desire of body and soul as a unity. The passion for youths is an unruly, even mad expression of mind in an
animal that seeks a free relationship with the beautiful. The inner
principle of this freedom and unity is typically submerged in a
confusion of feelings. Socrates’s initial definition of love in fact
described the youth-lover’s typical, if unwitting, mistake. “When
passion without reason . . . is driven toward the pleasure of
beauty, and further, when it is violently moved by kindred desires
toward the beauty of the body . . . , this is called love” (italics
added.). Only an education “inspired by the Muses” (243a) might
8. The Greek term here, mousikos, designates anyone cultured or educated.
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reverse the effects of this error and liberate the passion for beauty
as such from the instinct for sexual pleasure. The art of love in
the palinode can be understood as the method of this reversal.
Phaedrus’s sentimental education will have to liberate his desire from an aestheticism that enflames his fantasies. Only a poetry or rhetoric directed to self-knowledge will serve this end.
Unlike Socrates, Phaedrus cannot rationally manage the tension
between a tyrannical and a liberating eros; at this point he is
barely acquainted with the power of his own mind. His imagination must first be set upon the path to his mind’s realization. This
is the reason for Socrates’s pious performance. He must first free
Phaedrus’s erotic excess from the irrational sexual plane, where
it will never be satisfied, by enlisting his belief in a higher life
yet unknown to him and by associating his eros with some kind
of divine goodness. “My first speech,” Socrates declares, “was
foolish and somewhat impious. What could be more dreadful than
that? . . . Do you not believe that Love is the son of Aphrodite and
is a god? . . . If Love is, as indeed he is, a god or something divine,
he can be nothing evil. . . . I will try to atone by recantation.”
(242d-e, 243b; italics added.)
Socrates would also avoid the fate of being blinded by the god
Eros, who punishes those who speak ill of him (243b). Phaedrus
might take this threat of divine retribution at face value, but
surely Socrates interprets the oracle in a non-physical way: whoever thinks the god simply evil forfeits their capacity for higher
sight (cf. 257a).
But the god has positive sanctions too. By imagining the god’s
benevolence Phaedrus might imagine himself as a finer lover,
happier in love.
If any man of noble and gentle character,9 one who was himself
in love with another of the same sort . . . had happened to hear us
saying that lovers take up violent enmity because of small matters
and are jealously disposed and harmful to the beloved, don’t you
think he would imagine he was listening to people brought up
9. Like Socrates, for example? Notice the kinship of this expression to
that in his earlier puzzle about what kind of creature he was (230a).
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among low sailors, who had never seen a generous love? Would
he not refuse utterly to assent to our censure of the god Love?
(243cC-d; italics added.)
Socrates lets Phaedrus draw his own conclusion. He declines
to specify which way the causal influence might go, between
showing respect for the god and finding a satisfying relationship.
Perhaps it goes both ways: pursuing a noble love may reinforce
belief in the philanthropy of Eros and vice versa. In any case, the
lover of youth will have to make an uncommon effort to partake
in this heavenward dialectic. The god’s help is essential.
The god, of course, is the sublime but still latent power in
Phaedrus’s own psyche. The soul of the lover of youths does not
acquire its higher faculties of perception and guidance without
first participating imaginatively in their development. Participation, metechō, is the word Socrates uses for realizing one’s true
nature, becoming part of the whole (230a). If the passion for
youths is not educated in a way that carries it “up” toward being
as a whole,10 then it is deprived of its raison d’être – the teleological or vital significance that enables such a lover to come into
his own. Socrates knows the instinctual (emphytos, 237d) force
of the drive for pleasure, the impulse that threatens to overwhelm
what’s best in a person’s mind. In behalf of Phaedrus’s development he discourages squandering this force in routines of compulsive gratification by revealing its propulsive potential. To
picture the pederast according to his commonplace appearance
(as in the first speeches), to reduce him to the vulgar images of a
licentious animal: that would be the “sin against mythology”
(243a). As philosopher and teacher, as rhetorician and true poet,
indeed as the lead and “leader of souls” in his own psychagogic
play (261a, 271d), Socrates tips the balance in favor of his pupil’s
highest possibilities.
The new mythos, the palinode preparatory for philosophy, attempts a revolution in Phaedrus’s sensibility. It attempts to initiate
10. Thus the “proof” mounted in the palinode that true love-madness is
divine must be grounded in a myth about soul and self-motion in the
cosmos at large (245c).
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him, first imaginatively, into a liberating experience of love.
Should this effort meet with success, should Phaedrus take up the
practice of philosophic pederasty, he may someday find himself
questioning the myth that commends the god Eros without qualification. Yet even if he comes to regard the god as less gracious
than he once imagined, he will look back upon the erotic path to
self-knowledge as a substantiated good.
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In the Heaven of Knowing:
Dante’s Paradiso
Peter Kalkavage
“For we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:2
The focus of my talk this evening is the Paradiso, the culminating and most beautiful part of Dante’s Comedy. The Paradiso has
much to tell us about happiness, the perfection of the intellect,
the nature of true freedom, the flourishing of community, the role
of love in education, and the profound connection that the good
and the true have to beauty.
The Comedy is one of the greatest works on education. It is
the story of Dante’s awakening to the highest and deepest things.
The story begins in a dark wood and ends with a vision of God.
Dante makes a journey to the three regions of the spiritual world:
Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each region is defined in terms of
the intellect, the part of us that most reveals what it means to be
made in God’s image. Hell is the place of those “who have lost
the good of intellect” (Inf. 3.18).1 They have distorted God’s
image beyond repair. Purgatory is the mountain “where reason
searches us” (Purg. 3.3). It is the place where repentant souls –
through purifying torment, reflection, and prayer – undo the distortions of sin. In Paradise souls rejoice in the intellectual vision
of God. They see with their most God-like part the Original
whose image they are.
Dante’s poem has special relevance for those who have devoted their lives to teaching. Throughout the poem Dante stresses
the importance of teachers and guides. Indeed, the Comedy may
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
This lecture was first delivered as the O’Donovan Humanities Lecture
at Oakcrest School in McClean, Virginia on 25 April 2014.
1. All translations of the Comedy are from the edition by John D. Sinclair
(Oxford, 1939).
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be regarded as an extended song of gratitude on Dante’s part – a
tribute to all his guides and to guidance itself as the work of
grace. The poem invites us to commemorate those who have
played a guiding role in our own lives: our teachers, friends, and
family members, and in addition the authors, poets, philosophers,
founders, and heroes who hold a special place in our hearts and
nourish us with their wisdom, their beauty, and their example.
Dante gives these personal guides theological meaning. As St.
Augustine knew better than anyone, grace – the central theme of
his Confessions – does not work in a merely general way. It
works at particular times in particular ways through particular
people and events. This is the miraculous particularity that Dante
too confesses.
When we first meet the pilgrim Dante, he is lost in a dark
wood. This no doubt refers to the turbulent period in Dante’s life
shortly before his exile from his native Florence. But it refers
more deeply to his having fallen away from Beatrice, whom he
meets again at the top of Mount Purgatory and who becomes his
guide through Paradise. Beatrice was Dante’s childhood beloved
and personal angel, his link to God. In his first great work, the
New Life, Dante recalls how he fell in love with Beatrice when
she was nine and he was almost ten. After Beatrice died, Dante
came to lose sight of everything she represented. He allowed his
love for her to be eclipsed by other, lesser loves. Beatrice is the
central figure of the Comedy. She is both a real person and a symbol. She is the beautiful appearance of the Good and the True,
and the embodiment of God’s grace. As symbol, she embodies
the City of God or the community of the blessed, the providential
plan of world-history, the perfection of poetry and rhetoric (beautiful speech that moves the soul from darkness to light), theological wisdom, especially as we find it in the writings of St. Thomas
Aquinas, and intellectual perfection as the vision of God. All this
is what the pilgrim Dante has lost sight of by the time we see him
at the beginning of the Comedy.
Heaven responds to Dante’s dark wood. Moved by compassion
for the lost poet, Mary turns to Lucy, the figure of Lux, Light.
Lucy in turn implores Beatrice to take pity on her former lover
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and save him from his impending death. Beatrice responds. She
descends into Hell – into Limbo, the place of virtuous pagans –
to plead with Vergil, the poet of the Aeneid, to serve as Dante’s
teacher and guide (Inf. 2.58 ff.). Thanks to this chain of feminine
mediators, grace reaches down to Hell itself in order to turn the
pilgrim back to the “straight way,” as Dante calls it, the way of
Beatrice.
The journey begins. We follow Dante as he descends into
Hell, climbs Mount Purgatory, and ascends through the heavenly
spheres. And yet the poem is more than the story of an individual’s redemption. Dante is saved from his personal dark wood.
But he also rises to become the author of the Comedy, which he
boldly calls “the sacred poem” (Par. 23.62, 25.1). He is commissioned by Heaven to reveal the whole of Time and Eternity.
Hence the note of Roman triumph that resounds throughout the
poem, especially in its third and most glorious part. Under the
guidance of Vergil and Beatrice, both vehicles of grace, Dante
himself becomes a vehicle, a means of transport for humanity
as a whole. In being saved as a man, he finds his true vocation
as a poet. He becomes – Dante, Poet of the Kingdom.
The hero, or rather heroine, of my talk is the first soul Dante
meets on his entrance into Paradise. It is the soul of Piccarda
Donati, whose family Dante knew very well. One of her brothers, Forese Donati, appears in the Comedy—among the gluttons in Puragtory (23). Piccarda had taken vows as a Poor
Clare but was forced by her brother, Corso, to leave the convent and enter into a marriage that would advance her family’s
political prospects. She died soon after the wedding. For her
broken vows she is relegated to the least degree of Heaven,
symbolized, as we shall see, by the Moon. As we inquire into
Piccarda and her heavenly rank, we must bear in mind that she
is as much a part of Paradise as any other soul there. When
Dante meets Forese in Purgatory and asks him where Piccarda
is, the brother responds with glowing words fit for a goddess:
“My sister, of whom I know not if she was more fair or good,
already triumphs in high Olympus, rejoicing in her crown”
(Purg. 24.13-15).
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I have chosen to focus on Piccarda for several reasons. One is
that she is Dante’s first example of a soul in glory and therefore
functions as the herald of Heaven. Another is that from the wisdom of her relatively low condition she introduces us to the fact
of levels in Paradise. This is a stumbling block for readers who
believe that here in the fullness of bliss we should be beyond all
levels and that God’s grace should shine upon all in equal measure. What would it mean, after all, for souls in Paradise to experience more or less of perfect happiness or, to use one of Dante’s
invented words, for some souls to be more “imparadised” than
others? Finally, I have chosen Piccarda because I stand in her
debt and am fond of her. For many years she has been one of the
most helpful guides in my effort to understand the Paradiso. She
will give us an opportunity to address several key questions. Why
does Paradise have levels? Why does Piccarda merit the lowest
degree of bliss? And what does this level of Paradise reveal about
the condition of the blessed and the community they form?
Let us begin at the beginning, with the opening lines of the
Paradiso. They are appropriately grand and set the tone for
everything that follows:
The glory of Him who moves all things penetrates the
universe and shines in one part more and in another less.
I was in the heaven that most receives His light and I saw
things which he that descends from it has not the knowledge or the power to tell again; for our intellect, drawing
near to its desire, sinks so deep that memory cannot follow. Nevertheless, so much of the holy kingdom as I was
able to treasure in my mind shall now be matter of my
song (1.1-12).
The opening image is that of God as the prime mover of the
universe, an idea Dante gets from Aristotle. God’s glory, symbolized by light, permeates the whole though not in equal measure. Glory shines forth as hierarchy, an order of higher and lower.
This is the first indication in the Paradiso that Heaven, like Hell
and Purgatory, has levels.
Hierarchy has a basis in the New Testament. In a passage perfectly suited to Dante’s fusion of Christian teaching and pagan
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cosmology, St. Paul writes in reference to our resurrected bodies:
“There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon,
and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory”
(1 Corinthians 15:41). Aquinas cites this very passage to support
the view that among the blessed, who see the essence of God, “one
sees more perfectly than another” (Summa Theologiae 1, Q. 12,
art. 6). Jesus too signals the presence of heavenly degrees when
he tells the disciples: “Whoever humbles himself like this child,
he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4).
To follow the Paradiso we must know a little about Dante’s
scheme of the visible universe. For Dante, the world is not an infinite expanse but an ordered whole in the shape of a sphere –
what the ancient Greeks called a kosmos or adornment. Dante
follows the Ptolemaic astronomy of his day. For Ptolemy, the
Earth sits motionless at the center of a rotating celestial sphere
that makes a complete turn on its axis every twenty-four hours.
The Moon, Sun, and planets move in their respective orbits in
the opposite direction at much lesser speeds. The Moon is the
lowest sphere because it is closest to Earth. Beyond it are Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in orbits of increasing circumference. Next there is the sphere of the Fixed
Stars, and finally the outer shell of the visible whole. This is the
so-called Crystalline, the first bodily sphere to be touched and
moved by God’s love. Beyond it is the Empyrean or true Heaven.
This is the home of spirits, the non-extended “place” of God, the
angels, and all the blessed. It is the ultimate point to which
Dante ascends and the heaven that most receives God’s light
(28.40-45).
Dante aligns these nine levels of the visible heavens with the
nine grades of bliss contained in the Empyrean. As we discover
along with Dante, the souls among the blessed appear in the visible bodies suited to their rank within the invisible Heaven. The
souls do not live there, as Beatrice hastens to point out, but rather
condescend for Dante’s sake and accommodate themselves to his
as yet imperfect faculties (4.37-60). As Dante rises from sphere
to sphere, Beatrice reveals herself with increasing intensity; she
becomes more and more resplendent, that is, more and more who
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she really is. With every step upward Dante too is changed: he
comes to shed his human imperfections, as his mind is increasingly
imparadised. He approaches the divine and comes to be divine
himself, as all souls do who love God with all their might. Dante
invents a word to capture his transition from earthly to heavenly
experience: trasumanar, to pass beyond the human (1.70). This
passing beyond the human is what we witness, and are invited to
share in through imagination, as we read the Paradiso.
Having sketched the astronomical image of Paradise, I now
proceed to “who goes where,” which spiritual ranks appear at
which corporeal levels. Throughout the Comedy, Dante may be
said to spiritualize place. Place functions as an index and sign of
what a thing is. Where a soul is, is the sign of what it is, the sign
of that soul’s condition or quality. Dante’s spiritualization of place
fits with how we speak. “I’m in a good place right now,” we sometimes say, or “I just don’t know where he is these days,” meaning
“I don’t know what condition his mind or his soul is in.”
As Dante rises from sphere to sphere, he comes to realize more
clearly why Heaven is a hierarchy, why it is a kingdom and not
a commune. The first three spheres – the Moon, Mercury, and
Venus – form a group. They represent three forms of qualified
blessedness. The Moon is the image of faithfulness marred by inconstancy, Mercury of service marred by ambition, and Venus of
love marred by wantonness. How Heaven, the place of perfection, can have any imperfection at all is a problem we shall return
to later.
The next four spheres represent the four cardinal virtues: the
Sun stands for Wisdom, Mars for Courage, Jupiter for Justice,
and Saturn for Temperance. The Sun divides the lower from the
upper spheres. It is the home, in image form, of theologians,
prominent among whom is Aquinas. Mars is the realm of the warrior saints who fought on behalf of their faith, especially in the
Crusades. Dante calls this level “higher blessedness” (14.84) because the warrior saint sacrifices his very life and blood. Here
Dante meets his ancestor, Cacciaguida, who tells Dante of his
coming exile from his beloved Florence. Jupiter is the imagerealm of just rulers. It contains, among other souls, that of King
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David, whose sins of adultery and murder have not apparently
kept him from occupying this exalted place. Saturn is the realm
of contemplatives and mystics. They appear momentarily in this
outermost planet in sign of their “cold” distance from all earthly
attachment and their burning desire to focus their minds exclusively on God. The sphere of the fixed stars comes next. Here
Dante experiences a ravishing image of the Church Triumphant.
He sees Mary, the Archangel Gabriel, and the glorified person of
Christ. He also undergoes an examination of his faith by St. Peter,
his hope by St. James, and his love by St. John. In the next higher
sphere, the Crystalline, Dante sees the angels arranged in a hierarchy consisting of nine levels – three sets of three, in imitation
of the Trinity. Finally, Dante rises to the Empyrean. Here he sees
the company of the blessed gathered into one glorious image –
the Celestial Rose. Ultimately, he sees God as the unity of the
human and the divine.
Order is everywhere in the Comedy. It is the permeation of the
universe by divine intelligence and love. It is why the poem is a
comedy. In the tragic view of life, we are not placed in the world
but “thrown.” There is no order, no divine guidance, no proper
place of things, no hope. There is only happening, suffering, and
death. Dante’s poem seeks to defeat this tragic view by fiercely
championing world-order grounded in divine goodness and wisdom. His term for this order is monarchia – monarchy or rule of
the One. Order is precise. It must be so in order to be order. This
precision is a source of joy. World-order, for Dante, is like a beautiful piece of music, a work by Palestrina or Bach, in which everything has been so perfectly adjusted that it is impossible to change
a single note without ruining the whole. The comic victory over
the tragic view of life – the triumph, one might say, of music – is
signaled in all sorts of ways as we reach higher regions of Paradise. At one point the universe itself appears to smile (27.4-5).
Dante’s faith in world-order is not blind to the disasters that
would tempt anyone to doubt the workings of divine providence.
At crucial moments in his ascent, Dante hears from heavenly
souls how the realms of Church and State have gone horribly
astray. He hears from St. Peter, for example, how the Church on
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earth suffers under a corrupt Pope, Boniface VIII, who meddled
in the politics of Florence to the neglect of his spiritual obligations. In the face of many discouragements, notably his own
exile, Dante continues to hope for a deliverer, a guide who will
bring the Kingdom on Earth into greater alignment with the
Kingdom of Heaven.
Let us now return to the opening cantos and Dante’s entrance
into Paradise. Dante is disoriented in the extreme as he leaves the
earth (the top of Mount Purgatory, to be exact) and flies off into
the sky with Beatrice. His confusion is understandable since
everything is now inverted. Effort is now non-effort, natural tendency to go down has become natural tendency to go up, and
opaque body has become diaphanous. Another reason for Dante’s
confusion is that the Moon, Sun, and planets are not solid earthlike masses but a refined, heavenly matter that is receptive rather
than resistant. Dante does not set foot on the Moon but rather enters its permeable substance. The Moon, like all the other spheres,
receives and incorporates Dante. This is a playful imitation of the
joyous receptivity of Heaven to newcomers. Dante marvels at his
extraordinary entrance into the Moon, which he calls l’etterna
margarita, “the eternal pearl” (2.34). His wonder at the interpenetration of substance with substance fills him with the desire to
see “how our nature was joined to God.” His desire will be gratified at the end of the poem.
Vergil is Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, Beatrice
through Heaven. How, then, does Beatrice guide? Clearly she
guides, as Vergil did, by her enlightened speech. But she also
guides because Dante is in love with her. She guides by her
adorable aspect. This aspect has its focal point in Beatrice’s eyes.
Throughout the Paradiso Dante lays special emphasis on the eyes
of Beatrice. Her eyes are an image of the intellect in its highest
capacity. They represent insight or the immediate apprehension
of truth. This is the intuitive knowledge that angels have. We are
not told what the eyes physically look like – their color, shape,
and so forth. What is important is that they are firmly fixed, like
the eye of an eagle, on God and on that point of the highest
Heaven from which Beatrice has descended. Her gaze leads her
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lover not by a return gaze but by directing his gaze upward and
beyond Beatrice herself. The ray of his vision must coalesce with
hers. As Beatrice at one point tells Dante: “Not only in my eyes
is Paradise” (18.21). The eyes of Beatrice are a corrective to the
potentially obsessive character of romantic love. Such love can
lead its devotees to seek Heaven in themselves, to make a heaven
of their private passion. The sad fruit of this kind of love is evident in the second circle of Hell, the circle of lust, where the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca are whipped around in an
eternal storm. The eyes of Beatrice lead Dante away from this
fate. They give his mind its proper focus and open him up to the
whole of things and to the good of that whole. The eyes of Beatrice are the image of love as education. The image teaches us that
to be “in love” is to be aroused by the presence of God in another
human being, and that the whole point of love is to see more
clearly the source and principle that is the cause of that love.
As we come to discover, Piccarda dwells in the least degree of
Heaven for her broken religious vows. The Moon fits this lowest
degree because it is the heavenly body with the slowest speed
and smallest orbit. Moreover, the Moon is not pure light but has
dark spots or blemishes – a feature well suited to faithfulness
marred by inconstancy. When Dante first enters the Moon, he is
perplexed at the faces that meet his gaze. They appear so pure
and ghostly that “a pearl on a white brow does not come less
quickly to our eyes” (3.14-15). Dante mistakenly thinks that these
are images or mere reflections and turns to see who is casting
them. Beatrice smiles at his “childish thought” and tells him:
“these are real beings that thou seest, assigned here for failure in
their vows” (29-30). Eager to speak with Dante, the souls long
to share their personal stories, condition, and knowledge of Paradise. Dante sees this eagerness and is aroused by it. He is bursting to know the identity of the soul that appears “most desirous
of speech” and addresses her in the most gracious terms: “O spirit
made for bliss, who in the beams of eternal life knowest the
sweetness which, not tasted, never is conceived, it will be a kindness to me if thou satisfy me with thy name and with your lot”
(37-41) – where “your” refers to all who occupy this level.
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Piccarda, “with smiling eyes,” tells Dante that in the world
she was “a virgin sister” and that if he searched his memory he
would remember who she was. She then takes up the second part
of his question:
Our affections, which are kindled only in the pleasure of
the Holy Spirit, rejoice in being conformed to His order,
and this lot which seems so low is given us because our
vows were neglected and in some part void (52-7).
The language of being conformed to an order fits Piccarda’s
vocation as a nun. But it also points out the larger theme of
human affetti, which have been altered in this conformity and in
the ascent to Paradise. So long as we are in mortal bodies and in
a mortal condition, there is a tension between our will and God’s.
In Paradise this tension is gone, not because souls no longer have
a will of their own but because their will is perfectly attuned to
the will of God. Conformity here is not submission to a tyrant or
a matter of mere duty. It is more like the sympathetic vibration
between two plucked strings, or better, like letting God lead while
one is dancing with him. Conformity in Heaven is the joyous
yielding of one’s will to the Being who wills only what is good
and who, to continue my comic simile, knows how to dance with
impeccable grace. In this joyous conformity, the will finds its
freedom of movement. It learns at last how to be eternally unerring and never trip over its own feet.
Dante is at first unable to identify Piccarda because she is suffused by divine light and no longer resembles her former self.
This too has a more general meaning. Dante is learning by direct
experience that Paradise does not preserve us just as we are, or
rather were. On the contrary, to be imparadised is to be transfigured. Heaven preserves but at the same time heightens our personality. In Heaven Piccarda is most herself, and one must learn
to see her as she really is.
Dante then poses a question most of us would no doubt ask if
we were in his place: “But tell me, do you who are happy here
desire a higher place, that you may see more and become more
dear?” (64-6.) The question is a logical one. If a soul loves God,
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shouldn’t that soul desire to see God and be loved in return as
much as possible? But the question also betrays Dante’s all-toohuman perspective and comes close to being an implied criticism
of God’s order. If Piccarda and the other souls in this region did
in fact desire more, they would be unhappy, and Paradise would
be Heaven for some but not for others. Souls lower down in the
hierarchy might even envy the souls in higher ranks who see
more and are closer to God. If that were the case, Paradise would
be like a corrupt city or nation, where those who have less honor
and privilege resent and hate those who deservedly have more,
and where the lust for an equally high place regardless of merit
displaces the love of justice and the common good.
Here we touch on one of the main functions of Dante’s Paradise for us who still live on earth. Paradise is the place of individuals who had faith in Christ and are purged of sin. But it is
also the model of an ideal city, a community that has been purged
of covetousness, envy, partisan strife, and the indiscriminate desire for more. As Dante rises through the heavenly ranks, he experiences that ideal of perfected fellowship so dismally absent in
his native Italy and in the world at large. Later in his journey, he
remarks, not without a touch of bitterness, that he has come “to
the divine from the human, to the eternal from time, and from
Florence to a people sane and just” (31.37-9).
In response to Dante’s question about the desire for more, Piccarda and the other souls “smiled a little.” The phrase “a little,”
un po, highlights Dante’s concision, humor, and lightness of
touch. It points not so much to the degree of the smile as to its
affect. The little smile is a knowing, cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.
Piccarda and company must surely find Dante’s question so unthreatening as to be amusing. They smile no doubt at his touching
innocence when it comes to the heavenly things they know so
well. Piccarda answers the question “with such gladness that she
seemed to burn in the first fire of love.” Dante’s question, in other
words, gives her an occasion to recollect the earthly beginning
of her eternal bliss, the moment she fell in love with God.
Piccarda’s answer is one of the most beautiful moments in the
Comedy. I shall cite it in full:
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Brother, the power of charity quiets our will and makes
us will only what we have and thirst for nothing else. Did
we desire to be more exalted, our desire would be in discord with His will who appoints us here, which thou wilt
see cannot hold in these circles if to be in charity is here
necesse [necessary] and if thou consider well its nature.
Nay, it is the very quality of this blessed state that we keep
ourselves within the divine will, so that our wills are
themselves made one; therefore our rank from height to
height through this kingdom is pleasing to the whole kingdom, as to our King who wills us to His will. And in His
will is our peace. It is that sea to which all things move,
both what it creates and what nature makes (70-87).
The opening “Frate,” “Brother,” is a gesture both affectionate
and gracious. It makes Dante one of the blessed, at least for the
moment. Piccarda’s great theme is will, as we hear in her litany
of will-related words. The repetition is like a musical refrain that
runs through her speech. Charity, she tells Dante, “quiets” the
will of all here by resolving the human dissonance between wanting and having. It is the power (virtù) that by conforming all wills
to the will of the one God also unites them with one another. Piccarda here articulates the very basis of order as monarchia, where
all created wills are united by a common desire and love of the
whole. Dante invents a word to describe this harmonization of
souls: invoglia, “in-wills.” The King “in-wills us to His will.”
The neologism fits what Piccarda is trying to convey to Dante –
that the mixed or tainted submission to God’s will that these souls
experienced in their earthly lives is now gone. Past weakness has
been remedied by an infusion of divine power that purges the will
of all wavering. Piccarda’s reflection on how charity produces a
One-in-Many leads her to the most fondly remembered sentence
in the whole Comedy: “In His will is our peace.” It is a variation
on what Augustine wrote at the beginning of his Confessions:
“Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”
Piccarda’s speech combines ardor and intellectual clarity, heat
and light. Piccarda stresses, somewhat comically, the rational aspect of her answer to Dante by using the scholastic Latin term
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necesse, which means logically necessary. Beatrice too often assumes this professorial tone with Dante, when for example she
gives a scientific explanation for the dark spots on the Moon
(2.64 ff.). The marriage of ardor and clarity is characteristic of
the souls in Paradise. Without clarity, ardor would be mere feeling with no anchor in the truth. It would be blind, or at least confused, with respect to the intellectual vision that gives the soul
its reason for being on fire. Without ardor, clarity would be joyless – mind without heart. It would also falsify the truth that is
seen by the mind, since what is seen is in its nature something
meant to arouse love. Clarity without ardor would be like getting
the point of a really good joke but not finding it funny.
Piccarda is suffused with heavenly light, the light of knowledge. We must observe that the knowledge she possesses is not
confined to her level but extends to all of Paradise. This is made
evident when she says that the hierarchical scheme of Heaven “is
pleasing to the whole kingdom.” Piccarda speaks on behalf of
the entire heavenly community, which is made one and harmonious by the will of the one God. Some souls may be limited in
their degree of bliss, but they all have access to God, one another,
and the whole of Paradise. Souls at every level, even the lowest,
enjoy the unity and happiness of the entire kingdom. They are
not spatially confined to their own levels but spiritually connected to all of them. God wills each soul into its proper place,
and each rejoices in being where it is because it sees that where
it is is pleasing to the whole community and to God. This knowledge sweetened by charity lifts the burden of selfish desire and
makes the soul free to love the good of another and of the whole
as one’s own good. Piccarda not only rejoices to be where she is;
she also rejoices that souls higher up are where they are. For this
reason she is not almost but fully imparadised.
Dante gets the point. “It was clear to me then,” he says, “that
everywhere in heaven is Paradise, although the grace of the
Supreme Good does not rain there in one measure” (88-90). Satisfied by one food, as Dante puts it, he is hungry for another. He has
already been told that this level is reserved for those who were
inconstant in their vows and now wants to know how this applies
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to Piccarda. She replies with a reference to St. Clare, founder of
the Franciscan order that Piccarda had entered:
Perfect life and high desert . . . place in a higher heaven a
lady by whose rule in your world below they take the robe
and veil, so that till death they may wake and sleep with
that Bridegroom who accepts every vow that charity conforms to His pleasure. To follow her I fled, a young girl,
from the world and wrapped me in her habit and promised
myself to the way of her order. Then men more used to
evil than to good snatched me away from the sweet cloister. God knows what my life was then (97-108).
The reference to Christ as Bridegroom makes Piccarda’s story
all the more poignant. She had every intention of leaving the
world for the sake of “waking” and “sleeping” with Christ but
was forced to break her vow and enter into an ordinary worldly
marriage. Piccarda discretely covers over the details of her subsequent misery and early death. As if to draw Dante’s attention
back to the high note of eternal bliss she points to “this other
splendor that appears to thee on my right and is kindled with all
the light of our sphere” (3.109-111). It is the imparadised soul of
“the great Constance,” mother of Frederick II – the last head of
the Holy Roman Empire who is punished in Hell for his promulgation of the heretical view that the souls dies with the body (Inferno 10). Like Piccarda, Constance was taken from the convent
against her will, although “she was never loosed from the veil on
the heart” – a fact engraved, as it were, in her very name. With
this deference to the glory of another, a gesture repeated throughout Paradise, Piccarda vanishes while singing the Ave Maria. She
is said to sink rather than ascend, “like a weight through deep
water.” She returns to the source of her joy and her being. The
striking image reminds us that Heaven is a depth as well as a
height, and that souls here are not so much soberly placed as passionately immersed. They are eternally drunk on the wine of their
happiness.
Dante eventually loses sight of Piccarda and turns his gaze
back to Beatrice, “the mark of its greater desire” (126). He is baffled by the story he has just heard, and so are we. If Piccarda was
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forced to leave the convent, how can she be held responsible for
her broken vow? How can she justly appear, in Dante’s poetic
analogy, at the level of the Moon? Beatrice gives Dante a complex, scholastic explanation that has to do with the nature of the
will. According to Beatrice, Piccarda went with the flow of forceful circumstance. Her will, though not sinful, seconded the violence that was being done against her will. She did not freely will
to leave the convent after having taken a vow. But she did nothing
to oppose the violence against her good will. She remained passive.
Beatrice takes a tough stance on this point and argues that Piccarda
and those like her “might have fled back to the holy place” (4.81):
If their will had been unbroken, like that which kept
Lawrence on the grid and made Mucius stern to his own
hand, then, as soon as they were free, it would have
driven them back on the path from which they had been
dragged; but will so firm is rare indeed (4.82-7).
Lawrence suffered on behalf of the Christian Church and Mucius for the sake of pagan Rome. Lawrence famously mocked his
tormentors (“Turn me over, I’m done on this side!”), and Mucius,
in defiance, thrust his own right hand into the fire that his enemies
had prepared for him. As Beatrice poetically observes, an unwavering will is itself like fire, which, no matter how much a strong
wind may wrench this way and that, always affirms its natural
tendency to go up toward the heavens. That is what those who
succumbed to external force failed to do: they failed to fight the
buffeting winds of life with the heavenly fire that was their faith.
It is not sinful under these circumstances to fail in one’s vows. It
is, however, a lack of spiritual strength, a weakness of will.
Weakness of will in the Paradiso is related to the broader
theme of spiritual capacity. Souls were not made equal with respect to any of their capacities. No one human being excels at all
things. Excellence itself in any one thing varies among its possessors in both degree and kind. Among the greatest composers,
for example, one stands out for his beautiful counterpoint, the
musical interweaving of individual vocal lines, another for his
divinely inspired melodies. Creation is fine-tuned: “star differs
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from star in glory.” To insist on egalitarian leveling is to wish
that Creation be undone. Deficiency in the lowest three degrees
of Paradise is therefore different from the deficiency caused by
sin. Sin is a distortion of our nature, whereas grades in Heaven
manifest nature, that is, the specific nature of each individual
among the blessed. Piccarda had only so much lungpower. She
could take in only so much of the Holy Spirit – God’s spiritus or
breath. So it is with each of us. If you offered Piccarda the chance
to be higher up, she would be the first to tell you that this would
destroy rather than increase her happiness. In Heaven she has
perfect self-knowledge. Her very humility is a form of knowledge. She does not merely believe that she is limited but rather
knows and celebrates her limit. She knows, furthermore, that this
limit is bound up with the person God made Piccarda to be. If
there were no limits, there would be no individual natures, no
personality. To want Piccarda to want more is to wish that she
did not exist.
The limits of spiritual lungpower lead us to Beatrice’s disquisition on vows. Her main point is that taking vows is perilous.
The danger is rooted in our tendency to overestimate what we
are capable of. We tend, in the words of Jesus, not to count the
cost before building the tower. Another danger is that of unforeseen consequences. In the heat of the moment we vow to do
something and learn only later that to be true to this vow results
in great evil. Beatrice cites as examples Jephtha and Agamemnon
(5.65-72). In the Book of Judges Jephtha vowed to sacrifice to
the Lord the first person that walked through his doors. This person turned out to be his daughter. Agamemnon was true to his
vow to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia so that the Greek ships
could sail against Troy. Piccarda is imperfect in her faith because
she was passive and inconsistent. Jephtha shows the opposite
problem, that of being stubbornly faithful to a foolish vow. According to Beatrice, he “ought rather to have said ‘I did ill’ than,
keeping faith, to do worse” (5.67-68).
The problem of vows is rooted in the nature of free will. To
take a vow is freely to sacrifice one’s free will, which Beatrice
calls “the greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation,
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the most conformable to His goodness and the one He accounts
the most precious . . . with which the creatures with intelligence,
and only these, were and are endowed” (5.19-24). Once a vow is
made, this greatest of gifts is given away and cannot be taken
back. Beatrice’s lesson is clear: “Let not mortals take vows
lightly” (64). The lesson is aimed especially at those of Christian
faith: “Be graver, Christians, in your undertakings. Be not like
feathers in every wind, and think not that every water will wash
you clean” (73-75).
Having learned from Piccarda that Paradise is the perfected
community of wills under a good King, Dante moves up to the
next two levels. Here he meets more souls who occupy the lower
triad of Heaven. At the level of service marred by ambition –
symbolized by the planet Mercury – he meets Justinian, the
Roman emperor who codified Roman law and made it simpler
and more unified. It is something of a shock to move from the
gentle unassuming Piccarda to this exalted world-historical figure, although the soul of Constance serves as a sort of transition
and a reminder of the realm of political history. Justinian recapitulates the wisdom of Piccarda regarding the whole in which
all souls rejoice. He uses a musical image to convey why Heaven
needs souls of every level and every kind: “Diverse voices make
sweet music” (6.124). The line itself is music: Diverse voci fanno
dolci note, literally “Diverse voices make sweet notes.” At the
next higher level, that of love marred by wantonness, Dante
meets various souls, among them Folco, the famous Provençal
troubadour and poet who later in life became a Cistercian monk,
and Rahab, the harlot in the Book of Joshua who concealed and
gave aid to the two men Joshua had sent into Jericho as spies.
Folco’s enraptured soul is described as “a fine ruby on which the
sun is striking” (9.69), and Rahab’s as “a sunbeam in clear water”
(114). The wantonness to which these souls yielded in life is of
course no longer present in Paradise. But surely we are meant to
imagine that something of their former temperament remains.
This temperament adds a certain intensity of feeling, an ardor,
which, though certainly different in character from that of Piccarda, is equally necessary to the ensemble of diverse voices in
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Paradise. Heaven welcomes the hot-blooded, just as it shuns the
lukewarm.
Earlier I observed that the three spiritual regions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise are defined with respect to the intellect. I
also emphasized in my discussion of Piccarda that her being in
accord with God’s will and her contentment with her “place” in
Paradise are firmly grounded in her intellectual vision of the
whole and her clear self-knowledge. The eyes of Beatrice, the
image of love as education, further support the primacy of intellect in the Paradiso and in the entire Comedy. As Dante moves
higher up the heavenly hierarchy and closer to God, the role of
intellect and vision becomes increasingly intense. It is especially
prominent when Dante enters the Crystalline and sees the hierarchy of angels. It is fitting that he begins this canto on angelic
intelligence by calling Beatrice, his personal angel, “she who imparadises my mind” (28.1).
Later in the canto Beatrice utters one of the central teachings
of the whole poem:
And thou must know that all have delight in the measure
of the depth to which their sight penetrates the truth in
which every intellect finds rest; from which it may be
seen that the state of blessedness rests on the act of vision, not on that of love, which follows after, and the
measure of their vision is merit, which grace begets and
right will (109-113).
The immediate context has to do with the angels, who are identified with their keenness of intellectual vision, but the teaching
applies to all the blessed. The “truth in which every intellect finds
rest” is God himself as the First Truth, and it is our highest end
to know this Truth. Beatrice emphasizes that love follows rather
than leads. The reason is that love is both aroused and directed
by the thing seen, the Beloved. If love were primary, it would be
cut off from the truth. It would degenerate into mere feeling and
cease to be educative. The primacy of intellect came home to
Dante in the moment when, a mere boy, he fell in love with a girl
on the streets of Florence. He loved her because he caught sight
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of her and was struck by the light that shone in her person. Even
then, as Dante reports in the New Life, Beatrice was “the Lady
of my mind” (2).
The Comedy ends with Dante’s vision of God, the source of
all Light. As he ascends to the Empyrean, Dante leaves behind
the astronomical image of Heaven and sees Heaven anew in a
River of Light and the Celestial Rose. Dante’s salvation began
with a chain of heavenly women who interceded for him. The
links in this chain now appear in reverse order. Beatrice returns
to her heavenly seat and to her true self. And though she is at this
point far beyond Dante’s mortal gaze, her image reaches her lover
with undiminished clarity (31.70-8). Now under the guidance of
St. Bernard, who replaces Beatrice as Dante’s guide, Dante sees
Lucy, “who sent thy Lady when thou didst bend thy brow downward to destruction” (32.137-8). Then he sees Mary, the ray of
whose eyes leads him to the threshold of his final vision. Bernard
of Clairvaux was the great medieval saint known for his devotion
to Mary. His presence serves to enhance rather than qualify the
distinctly feminine operation of grace. Bernard prays fervently
to Mary that Dante be allowed to see God: “I, who never burned
for my own vision more than do I for his, offer to thee all my
prayers.” He adds: “This too I pray of thee, Queen, who canst
what thou wilt, that thou keep his affections pure after so great a
vision” (33.28-36). Bernard’s reference to affetti recalls Piccarda’s use of the word in answer to Dante’s question about contentment with one’s heavenly lot.
The twofold aspect of Bernard’s prayer is worth noting.
Bernard prays that Dante be granted the highest bliss, the vision
of God. This vision is “the end of all desires” (46). But Bernard
also acknowledges that Dante will not be out of danger when he
returns to his mortal life. He must remain true to the unity of
which Mary is the figure, the unity of clear vision and purity of
heart, which is the precondition for the vision of God (Matthew
5:8). Dante sees the effect of Bernard’s prayer in Mary’s eyes,
which are “beloved and reverenced by God” (40). Her eyes, like
those of Beatrice before her, provide the ray that will direct the
eye of Dante’s mind to the ultimate vision. As the eyes of Mary
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turn to God, Dante’s eyes follow. The poet is now lifted into the
region where sight outstrips speech. Nevertheless he soldiers on,
praying that the power of his tongue “may leave but a gleam of
thy glory to the people yet to come” (71-2).
The final moments of the Comedy are rich in images, as Dante
describes the transformation of his sight and his very being – the
final stage of his “passing beyond the human.” He sees “three
circles of three colors,” a geometric symbol of the Trinity (115
ff.). Each circle, each divine Person, reflects the others, “as rainbow by rainbow.” Dante focuses on the circle that appears to be
“painted with our likeness.” He is drawn to the second Person of
the Trinity, to the human face of God. He strains to see more
clearly how this human aspect is united to the divine and compares himself to a geometer who is trying with all his might to
square the circle. This famous problem, which has haunted
mankind for ages, is that of constructing a square with the same
area as a given circle. It is in effect the problem of grasping the
unity of the straight and the curved – two opposed geometric natures that defy unification. Squaring the circle is more than a geometric problem. It is the symbol and summation of all intellectual
desire. According to Aristotle, all human beings by nature desire
to know. This is true for each individual. But as Dante affirms in
his Monarchia, it is also true of the human species, which in the
course of history seeks the full realization of its intellectual potential (1.3). In comparing himself to one who wants to square
the circle, Dante personifies the whole human race in its relentless desire to know – ultimately to know and experience the nature of God.
In the end Dante’s longing to know is satisfied, but not through
his own efforts. His wings “were not sufficient for that.” Grace
intervenes, this time violently, as Dante’s mind is struck (percossa), as if by a lightning bolt: “Here power failed the high
phantasy, but now my desire and will, like a wheel that spins with
even motion, were revolved by the Love that moves the sun and
the other stars” (142-5). With these lines the Paradiso, and with
it the “sacred poem” as a whole, reaches its end.
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Dante’s vision of God is a flash of insight that cannot be put
into words. But there is something the poet can tell us. He can
report that he reached his longed-for end, and that the fruit of
his vision was a desire and will that were conformed to the
graceful movements of Love. These movements find their image
in the visible heavens, whose quick circular motion resembles
rest. Through the conformity of desire and will, Dante experiences first-hand the truth of what someone told him when he
first entered Paradise: “In His will is our peace.”
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Knowing and Ground: A Reading of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Matthew Linck
For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.
- John Ashbery, from “Soonest Mended”
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a difficult book. Sometimes
this seems true in the way that we might say that someone is a
difficult person – unaccommodating, needlessly obscure. Many
aspects of Hegel’s book give the appearance of this kind of difficulty – the unusual structure, the strangeness of the method, the
alien vocabulary, and the sheer density of the writing. While I do
not think reading the Phenomenology can simply be made easy,
I do think that one can make sense of some of these difficulties.
In what follows I will endeavor to show that the structure, method
and principal vocabulary of the book all spring from a single aim,
namely, to understand what it means for us to claim to know
something. As the title of my lecture suggests, this effort will concern itself principally with the grounds of knowing as such. For
Hegel, there is no claim to knowing that does not, at least implicitly, have certain grounds in view.
While it is my goal to give a synoptic view of the Phenomenology, both in terms of its structure and the nature of its parts,
it turns out that doing so from the front of the book to the back is
hard to do in a short space. Instead, we will orient ourselves from
somewhere in the middle, specifically, the section from the chapter on Spirit called “Absolute Freedom and Terror.” Why I have
chosen this as the vantage point to look out over the Phenomenology as a whole can only become clear as we move through
the lecture. But a few questions could be raised already. These
Matthew Linck is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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questions will serve as the guiding threads for what follows. The
questions are: (1) Why is there an analysis concerning the French
Revolution and Terror in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at all?
(2) Why is this analysis placed at the end of the second of three
main sections in a chapter called Spirit? (3) Why is the chapter
on Spirit preceded by chapters on Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason and followed by chapters on Religion
and Absolute Knowing? These questions might be generalized
in the following way: why does the Phenomenology contain the
kind of content that it does; why does the book have the structure
it has; how do the content and structure go together? By answering these questions, I hope to provide a sense of the whole of the
Phenomenology and how it attempts to fulfill its principal goal
as an account of knowing. But before attending to these questions
more needs to be said about what this goal is.
The principal goal of the Phenomenology of Spirit as an inquiry about knowing is to find the grounds that will grant truth
to the certainty of our claims of knowing. This goal takes its starting point from what seems to be a rather ordinary human experience. Claiming to know something is always accompanied by
a conviction of certainty about what we are claiming. For if not,
we would not call it knowing. But being certain and having good
grounds for our certainty are two different matters. Hegel’s project is to see which claims of certainty are in fact well grounded.
As an inquiry into knowing, the aim of the Phenomenology is a
traditional one; Hegel’s book stands in a long line of philosophical accounts of knowledge. We can obtain a better initial understanding of the aim of the book by contrasting it with two other
texts about knowledge: Plato’s Theaetetus and Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason. I will briefly consider some questions and conclusions from these texts and compare them to Hegel’s.
In the Theaetetus, Socrates and Theaetetus endeavor to answer
the question “What is knowledge?” The way in which they do
this is to propose various answers to the question and then scrutinize those answers. In the course of the dialogue, Theaetetus
ventures a few definitions of knowledge and then he and Socrates
think through the implications and coherence of these definitions.
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Two aspects of their conversation are worth noting for our purposes. The first is that, while it is not articulated as such, the investigation carried out by Theaetetus and Socrates cannot help
but ask about the grounds of knowing in asking what knowledge
is. For instance, in testing the idea that knowledge is perception,
perception is tested as a sufficient ground for knowing. In this
way, their search has something in common with the Phenomenology. However, I want to suggest that the way the principal
questions are articulated makes a difference. By asking what the
sufficient grounds for knowing are rather than asking what
knowledge is, Hegel is able to frame a different method for asking about knowledge. This is related to the other notable feature
of Socrates’ conversation with Theaetetus. At a certain point in
the dialogue, Theaetetus remarks upon a troubling feature of the
discussion. In the course of testing the various possible answers
to what knowledge is, he and Socrates have attested to knowing
certain things along the way. In the midst of their inquiry about
the very thing knowledge is, they have availed themselves of
claims of knowing. It seems to Theaetetus that something is out
of place here, but he cannot see how to set it right, for how might
one investigate the what-it-is of something in conversation without laying down some things as known along the way? This problem indicates that there is something uniquely difficult in the
inquiry into what knowledge is. The method of Hegel’s book is
meant to address this difficulty.
Kant attempts to answer fundamental questions about knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason, and he, too, provides answers to what knowledge is and what the grounds of knowing
are. But here again the specific articulation of the principal question is different. Kant’s question is neither that of the Theaetetus
nor that of the Phenomenology, but is “What can I know?” Kant’s
main goal is to trace out the proper limits of human knowledge.
The method here is not the dialogical testing of answers, but an
inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of experience. Kant
creates a new form of philosophical inquiry with his notion of
the transcendental, and through this inquiry he claims to find
grounds for limiting our knowledge to knowledge of appear-
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ances. Hence, Kant, too, discerns the proper grounds of knowing,
but not directly. His concern with grounds is subordinated to the
critical task of tracing boundaries. One way in which the Kantian
project might be seen as insufficient with respect to the investigation of grounds is the bundle of problems concerning the thingin-itself. In a fundamental but unknowable way, the thing-in-itself
lays at the ground of what is known in experience.
Putting these considerations about the Theaetetus and the Critique of Pure Reason together we can see something important
about Hegel’s book. By focusing directly on the grounds of
knowing Hegel is able to avoid the problem of making knowledge claims in advance of answering the question about its
grounds, and he is also able to avoid having to construct a complex apparatus as Kant has done. How does he avoid these
things? The answer to this question tells us something about why
the book is called a phenomenology. For instead of trying directly
to frame and test answers about the grounds of knowing, Hegel
displays for us a gallery of various knowledge claims and the
(often implicit) grounds that underlie those claims. Hegel’s wager
is this: such claims have been made, and hence have made their
appearance in the world; our work is to discern the internal structure of these claims. We do not have to venture answers to the
question about the grounds of knowing but only observe and
think about the answers that have already been given. In this way,
Hegel proposes to discern the ultimate grounds of knowing without making an argument in the typical sense. The Phenomenology
is not a book that argues on the basis of principles, transcendental
or otherwise; instead, it is a book that orchestrates a certain kind
of experience. The success of the book hinges on whether we are
able to undergo the experience Hegel intends. We will return later
to these issues. Let us now begin to consider the first question
from earlier: Why does Hegel write about the French Revolution
at the close of the middle section of the chapter on Spirit?
The smaller section we will take up is called “Absolute Freedom and Terror,” and it comes at the end of a larger section called
“Spirit alienated from itself: [or] culture.” The larger section presents views onto the late Roman Empire, the courtly world of the
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French monarchies, and the Enlightenment as a struggle with religious faith. “Absolute Freedom and Terror” is the last of these
views onto a historical scene and the form of thought which it
embodies. In one sense, this section of the book can be read as a
description of a historical event. We read here about the political
assertion of the people and their insistence upon recognition as
equals. We also read about the political vacuum created by the
Revolution and its inability to establish a stable locus of authority,
a failure which leads to the actions of the Terror. But there is nothing essentially important about this section of the text as a description of factual events. The focus of Hegel’s writing here is
not on a historical narrative but rather on the cognitive and normative aspects of these events. The most compact way of expressing what Hegel has in view is to say that he is displaying a
particular shape of Spirit. This phrasing, however, is not helpful
for us since it is only by understanding more about the Phenomenology itself that we can understand what “shape” and “Spirit”
mean here.
“Shape of Spirit” is a more particular version of the phrase
“shape of consciousness.” The majority of the text of the Phenomenology of Spirit is devoted to laying bare the structure of
these shapes of consciousness. The smallest subsections of the
book each contain such a presentation. A very general way of
characterizing a shape of consciousness is to say that it is a way
of thinking. If we connect this to what was said earlier about the
aim of Hegel’s book, we can add to this and say that a shape of
consciousness is a way of thinking that is committed to certain
grounds to justify its knowledge claims. Still speaking generally,
we could say that as one reads the Phenomenology one encounters a series of paired commitments: on the one hand each shape
of consciousness attests to knowing something, and on the other
hand it is, at least implicitly, committed to certain reasons for
claiming to know that thing.
The first shape of consciousness encountered in the Phenomenology of Spirit is called Sense-Certainty. Why is this shape
called Sense-Certainty and why does it fall under the heading of
Consciousness? Consciousness as used here has a particular
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meaning for Hegel. He means by it any mode of cognition which
is fully directed at an object other than itself. To be conscious on
these terms is to have some kind regard for things “out there”
while not at the same time regarding one’s own activity of thinking. Furthermore, since Hegel thinks such regard is never a passive awareness but always entails the formation of judgments,
consciousness is always in the business of claiming to know that
there are things out there. Indeed, all knowing for Consciousness
just is knowledge of what is out there.
Sense-Certainty claims to know something because there are
things present to it, right here, right now. Knowing is not complicated for Sense-Certainty: look around, it says, if nothing else
you know that what’s here right now is here right now. SenseCertainty sees every moment of its life in this way, and thinks
that the apparent richness of its sensory experience is made possible by the great variety of the things present to it. No one lives
a life of Sense-Certainty exclusively. But it is an intelligible,
maybe even common, ground upon which to plant one’s feet
when saying, “I know this because …” It is common, perhaps,
because what it appeals to is common, the sense that the spatial
and temporal arrangement of objects in the world is the touchstone for what is true. Is it true that it is raining? Look outside
and live the life of Sense-Certainty.
If this is the case, then what is wrong with such a stance for
justifying knowledge claims? Here we encounter a powerful
force at work in Hegel’s book, one which perhaps looks strange
at first. This force is language and the implicit demand that each
shape of consciousness articulate from its own standpoint why it
is justified in claiming to know something. Sense-Certainty will
fail this test. Sense-Certainty is certain of what is present in the
here and now. It might even feel that the immediate sensuous
richness of the present world is the fullest kind of experience possible. Hegel thinks otherwise, and he thinks so because SenseCertainty is limited to saying, “This, here, now.” And this
restriction on the vocabulary available to Sense-Certainty seems
appropriate since it is because of the thises here and now that
Sense-Certainty thinks it can know. It should not have to say
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more. The ground of its knowing is out there. It is not what it
says that makes the things known. There is a mismatch between
what Sense-Certainty intends to say about its experience and
what it is able to say about it. Sense-Certainty thinks it can account for a particular experience by saying “This here now”; but
what it says is true of any experience and hence cannot be an account of the grounds of what is known in this one.
Absolute Freedom is in some respects just like Sense-Certainty. It is a particular shape of consciousness with its unique
claim of knowing and the text devoted to it is meant to both trace
the contours of this way of thinking as well as expose the contradictions inherent in it.
The initial knowledge claim made by Absolute Freedom is that
the will of every particular self-conscious agent is identical with
the universal will of all like-minded self-conscious agents. That
is to say, the cognitive stance of universal human freedom is one
in which all particular members of the political community see
the truth of their own selves through the mutual recognition of
the equality of all. Furthermore, this cognitive stance is not principally a theoretical view of politics but is a practical stance; willing is a form of cognition. This moment is a high-point of sorts
in the Phenomenology and seeing why will get us some way toward grasping the Phenomenology as a whole. The reason this is
a high-point is because consciousness has, after many other attempts, found a shape in which it has achieved a genuine identity
between the particular and the universal, and does so self-consciously, that is, it knows it has achieved this, and, furthermore,
it does so in a way where its communal life is an essential component of this achievement. Taking these three features in turn
we can get a view of what falls between Sense-Certainty and Absolute Freedom and Terror in the Phenomenology.
We saw already that the relationship between the particular
and the universal was what undid the knowledge claims made by
Sense-Certainty. Sense-Certainty wanted to point to the vast array
of particulars in the world as the solid ground upon which it
would make its knowledge claims. But it was unable in speech
to place those particulars under universal categories without ef-
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facing their particularity. And in so doing Sense-Certainty erased
the very thing that was meant to serve as the index of truth for its
claims. This announces a general problem encountered by the
shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit: the challenge of universalizing particulars without having the particulars
dissolve into the universal. One principal lesson of the sections
on Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason is that most
particulars simply cannot withstand the dissolving force of the
universal. Any attempt to assert such particulars as themselves
the ground of knowing leads to contradictions and hence to failure. What kinds of particulars are these and why do they fail to
hold together when brought together with the universal? There
are three basic types of such particulars: external things, self-conscious things, and rational individuals. These types of particulars
coincide with the sections on Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason.
We noted when looking at Sense-Certainty that it based its
knowledge claims on the fact that there are things “out there.”
This continues with the other shapes of Consciousness: Perception and Understanding. Both of these shapes fall under the heading of Consciousness because they too point to something “out
there” to justify their claims of knowing. Perception points to the
properties possessed by ordinary objects and Understanding
points to forces underlying physical phenomena. We cannot retrace here the increasingly intricate contours of these shapes of
consciousness, but might dwell briefly with Understanding to see
what we learn about Consciousness as a whole.
It might strike your ear already as odd to speak of forces as
things that are simply out there in the external world. Rather than
being simply out there, forces are posited by us as being out there,
and then we go about testing whether the forces as posited match
up with the measurable features of observable phenomena. So
while it is important in this process of thought and experiment to
maintain that there is really something out there – that the forces
are not just fictions we have invented – their being out there is
not a simple, immediate presence but is mediated by our own
mindful activity. In a rather elaborate teasing out of the various
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aspects of this mindful relationship to the external world, Hegel
shows how Understanding cannot account for its claims about
force on its own terms. Consciousness is committed to the
grounds of knowing being completely independent of its own activity. It turns out that this is not the case – the grounds of knowing are not simply out there in the world. Understanding pushes
this demand so far that eventually the situation inverts itself and,
as Hegel says at the end of “Force and the Understanding,” when
Consciousness finally tears away the veil separating appearances
from essence, it sees only itself.
The next main section of the book explores the position opposite to Consciousness, namely, Self-Consciousness. Self-Consciousness is opposite in that its basic stance is that it itself is the
whole and sufficient ground of truth. Self-Consciousness is desirous, and what Self-Consciousness desires is to affirm that it is
independent of the things around it. Only through affirming its
total independence can Self-Consciousness make good on its assertion that it is the sole and sufficient ground of knowing. Each
shape of Self-Consciousness fails to be the sole ground of its own
certainty, and we the readers see again and again that Self-Consciousness is dependent on its interactions with the external world
to affirm itself. As with Consciousness, we come to see that SelfConsciousness cannot account for itself on its own terms. We the
readers come to see that only Consciousness and Self-Consciousness together make a whole. To be self-conscious a thing must
be engaged with a world outside of itself; and to be conscious of
an outside world is to be a thing whose own activity is involved
in the conscious presence of that world. Hence there is both identity and difference between the moments of Consciousness and
Self-Consciousness.
So, it turns out that neither external objects nor self-conscious
beings are things that have a universally abiding character. That
is, whatever standing they have in the world is shown to be partial
and dependent. But since there does seem to be some abiding
character to the whole movement of Consciousness and SelfConsciousness taken together, perhaps this whole movement is
the universal ground we have been searching for. This brings us
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to the third type of particular, the rational individual.
What does Hegel mean by a rational individual? Each shape
of consciousness explored in the chapter on Reason shares a basic
stance, one which implicitly takes into itself what the reader
comes to understand about Consciousness and Self-Consciousness, namely that there is an identity between the self and its
world. The shapes of Reason have, Hegel says, an instinct for affirming this identity through some kind of engagement with the
world. These modes of engagement range from observationbased science to the making and testing of laws. And while there
is a gradual emergence of self-awareness on the part of the rational individual in the progression of these shapes, a common
feature throughout is the implicit assertion that the rational individual is able, on its own, to carry through the explicit revelation
of the identity of self and world. In what strikes me as the most
despairing stretch of the book, Reason is seen to fail repeatedly
in this project. While Reason is successful in finding reasonableness in many features of the world, some of its own making, it is
never quite able to achieve a complete identity between itself as
rational and the world as a whole. The complete rationality of the
world turns out to be an ever-vanishing fantasy for the rational
individual. In a moment we will see the meaning of this as it pertains to particulars and universals.
But first let’s note that we are now in a position to understand
why there is a chapter called “Spirit” in the Phenomenology and
why Absolute Freedom and Terror is located in this chapter. In
one respect we can see that if there are no other shapes of consciousness, then the project of finding adequate grounds for our
knowledge must be a failure since none of the shapes observed
thus far have been up to the challenge. Hegel’s implicit assertion
is that there are more shapes of consciousness and that their general character is different from those of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason. The shapes of Spirit are those that
address the principal failings of Reason. A few remarks about the
final shapes of Reason will help make sense of what emerges at
the beginning of the chapter on Spirit.
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After failing to directly observe the reasonableness of the
world in nature or the human mind and body, Reason attempts to
make its own activity in the world the source of rationality in the
world. In various ways, these shapes of Reason find that the presence of other rational individuals in the world gets in the way of
their own projects of establishing a reasonable world. Each of
these failures in some way gets parsed out as a failure to reconcile
particularity and universality. The final two shapes of Reason
turn to law as a possible means for establishing a rational world.
It turns out, however, that while Reason can make rational laws
and test the rationality of laws, it cannot through these endeavors
establish a definitive set of laws that adequately ground and guide
the particular actions of individuals. That is, the need of individuals to act cannot be sufficiently determined by any set of rational
ordinances.
Nevertheless, we do act and we do so aware that we are subjected to norms of some kind or another. An initial stab at defining what Hegel means by Spirit might be just this, that rational
human life always finds itself within some set of shared, communal norms and that these norms provide both the structure and
coherence of the community and the principal self-understanding
of the members of the community. In this sense, the realm of
Spirit is prior to that of Reason. Or, as Hegel puts it, Spirit is the
substantial ground that is the real being of human consciousness.
The modes of cognition that fall under the headings of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason are abstractions
from this ground. I take this to be the most important claim of
Hegel’s book.
The first shape of Spirit that Hegel presents he calls the “Ethical World,” a vision of the Greek polis seen through the lens of
Sophocles’ Antigone. This vision of the polis depicts a community in which each member has a place and a communal role, and
these places and roles are essentially and immediately identified
with certain normative injunctions. The two fundamental axes
around which the city and its members are organized are the
human and divine laws and the corresponding domains of the
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state and the family. As Hegel sees it, the characters in Sophocles’
play exemplify this immediate identity with the norms that define
their places and roles, Antigone most of all. The Antigone we see
portrayed in the Phenomenology has no reflective distance on her
role as sister and keeper of the unwritten laws. It is simply who
she is. The immediacy that marks Antigone’s ethical stance does
not prevent her from being a conscious, self-conscious, and rational individual; but those modes are not the definitive ones in
her case. In this way we can see how the shapes of Spirit follow
upon those of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason
in the dialectical unfolding of the book, even if they possess this
other kind of priority. Antigone exemplifies the fact that there are
shapes of consciousness that do not attempt to ground ethical life
in the rational capacities of the individual, but simply live primarily from within some set of ethical norms.
As is always the case in the Phenomenology, however, the immediacy of Antigone’s selfhood shows itself as unstable, contradictory, and unsustainable. Indeed, I think the force of Hegel’s
presentation is that the apparent repose of the polis as presented
in the first section on the Ethical World is a fiction. The truth of
the beautiful distribution of norms between the gods and man,
and between the home and state, is that it cannot but result in a
conflict that tears the city apart. This is unavoidable because of
action. The initial static view of the city shows everyone parceled
out into their respective domains. But as essentially normative
domains, the individuals that fall within them must be agents.
Ethical life is a life of actions, not of contemplation. The problem
is that as soon as one acts in Antigone’s city, one must transgress
the boundaries that were supposed to define and confine one’s
actions. Antigone’s burial of her brother is at once an upholding
of the divine law and a transgression of the human law. Likewise,
her action, which finds its justification in the duty to family, is a
violation of a state decree.
The instability of this first shape of ethical life announces the
singular challenge for Consciousness in the realm of Spirit: Consciousness must inhabit a way of life in which the normative
structure of self and community can sustain both simultaneously.
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We will have to forgo looking at any of the shapes of Spirit which
fall between Ethical Action and Absolute Freedom, but it should
be roughly apparent how the stance of Absolute Freedom addresses this challenge. The ethical stance taken by the revolutionary consciousness of Absolute Freedom is one that immediately
identifies its own will with the will of all. The division of the
spiritual world into particular and partial domains has been obliterated and replaced with one in which the selfhood of all individuals is to be realized in the common project of a universal
will. We are almost ready to see the dark side of the this shape of
Spirit, but let’s pause to pull together some threads of what we
have seen so far.
The twin goals of grounding knowledge and reconciling the
universal and the particular, and the failures of the attempts at
reconciliation, have been present in all of the shapes of consciousness we have considered. For Sense-Certainty, the possibility of knowing is grounded in the immediate presence of an
external world, but Sense-Certainty fails to find universals that
allow for the preservation of particulars. The shapes of Self-Consciousness all posit the self as the universal ground of knowledge
but are not able to recognize the role of external particularity in
its own self-regard. The rational individual at the end of the chapter on Reason sees its own rational capacities as sufficient
grounds for determining the normative structure of communal
life, but produces nothing but empty tautologies or equally rational but contradictory laws. The individuals who populate the
Ethical World know what their duties are, their selves are
grounded in an immediate identification with these duties, and
in this way their particularity is identical to a universal; but the
need to act on those duties brings them into conflict with the dutiful actions of others and thus the identity of particular and universal is only partial.
We might now want to consider what it means that these individual, largely self-contained shapes of consciousness make up
some kind of whole, come in a particular order, and are grouped
under different headings. In one sense, the phenomenological observer adds nothing to the progression of shapes of conscious-
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ness. The internal shifting, unrest, and development within each
shape always results in a form of consciousness that is in itself
what the next shape of consciousness is for itself. In this way,
there are no gaps between the various shapes of consciousness.
However, each new shape of consciousness takes itself to be immediately what it is. It has no knowledge of being related to prior
shapes. We might say that each new shape is a new start. But this
means that the phenomenologist is not just an observer, but also
an arranger. The putting-in-order of the shapes is done by the
philosopher and is not the work of natural consciousness. Hence
part of our work as readers is to discern not only that the shapes
come in this order, but also to decide whether we agree that they
are properly ordered. This returns us to the first moment, however. Deciding whether the shapes are properly ordered amounts
to deciding whether there are any gaps between the shapes. These
considerations are true not only with respect to the individual
shapes of consciousness, but also to the various kinds that they fall
under: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, and so on.
Finally it is time to see what comes after Absolute Freedom.
What comes right on the heels of Absolute Freedom is Terror.
I would be tempted to say that the “and” in “Absolute Freedom
and Terror” should be read as an “is.” Absolute Freedom is Terror. I believe Hegel offers here, in his typically obscure fashion, both a historical/political interpretation and a cognitive/
philosophical one. The historical interpretation, in short, is that
the project of instituting universal human freedom and equality
cannot be achieved simply at the level of the universal will.
That is, if one makes the universal will of the people the immediate ground upon which political freedom rests one must
regard all institutional and procedural aspects of governance
as inessential and distortive. The reality is that institutions and
procedures must be in place for actual governance, but when
viewed from the perspective of Absolute Freedom they cannot
but take on the look of something sinister, retrograde, and evil.
The terminus of this suspicion, the very logic of the Revolution, Hegel suggests, is the pure negating force of the Terror.
Only through the continual erasure of partial and contingent
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actions and positions can the purity of Absolute Freedom be
maintained.
But since the shapes of Spirit are not just collective frames of
mind but always also those of individuals, the Terror lurking in
Absolute Freedom can be viewed at the level of the individual
mind as well. Hegel here seems to suggest that for the individual
Absolute Freedom is terrifying because, for the first time in the
Phenomenology, consciousness has taken on a shape that sees itself explicitly and exclusively as a space of pure negativity. To
be absolutely free is to be determined by nothing outside of oneself. And while this independence of determination was true of
the shapes of Self-Consciousness, only Absolute Freedom sees
itself in the world, with others, in this way. Absolute Freedom
sees itself as radically self-determining without seeing itself as
independent.
The implicit political injunction of these considerations is that
the spiritual community must move past revolution and stake out
some determining and limiting boundaries that will make actual
and sustainable the universal freedom aimed at in the Revolution.
Hegel, however, does not pursue the political side of the story
within the Phenomenology. The fittingness of what comes in the
final section of Spirit is, nevertheless, explicable within the
framework of what I have sketched out so far.
If the dead end reached both by the revolutionary community
and the cognitive shape of Absolute Freedom is that self-determination is without content, then somehow self-determination
must be shown to implicitly contain within itself some kind of
determinate content. From this perspective it makes sense that
the final section of Spirit begins with a shape of consciousness
that resembles Kant’s moral subject. The positioning of this
shape after Absolute Freedom and Terror suggests that the key
to overcoming the terrifying negativity of Absolute Freedom (or
autonomy) is to see that this freedom is also, at the same time,
subjection to a law. If revolutionary consciousness is the first to
posit its own freedom with others as the essential content of itself,
then the Kantian moral subject carries out the recognition that that
freedom is identical to a certain self-legislation. We can perhaps
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make sense of the retreat from the political realm inasmuch as the
moral subject need go no further than himself to find the contours
of this self-legislation.
The advance from Absolute Freedom is clear: the pure negativity of that freedom finds a determining limitation in itself. The
universal moral law is identical with who I essentially am. The
remainder of the chapter on Spirit plays out in the usual way. The
identity of the self and the moral law is too immediate, and once
again the need to act in the world is the grit that irritates what at
first appears to be a beautiful achievement: the universal self
within each of us providing the determining ground for all human
action. In Hegel’s hands, the moral subject is exposed as finite,
partial, and always acting on insufficient grounds. To be a genuine member of a human community, and hence to be a genuine
self, one must risk the inevitable transgression of action. One
must act from within oneself without having all the information
one needs and without knowing all of the ramifications of one’s
action. More crucially, one must act in one’s own interest. Action
is irredeemably selfish. The final pages of the chapter on Spirit
are meant to address this bind that we find ourselves in. Hegel
suggests that only through the mutual recognition of this bind, of
our finitude, and of the inevitably transgressive character of
human action can we finally plant our feet in the world and orient
our minds in such a way that we can both be certain of what we
know and also be justified of this certainty. For only here is the
particular both reconciled with and preserved within the universal. The universal recognition of the necessary partiality of
human existence makes possible the free flourishing of human
action and also makes possible genuine and sustainable human
community. This is the I that is We and the We that is I that was
announced in the chapter on Self-Consciousness.
We might also see that the distinction between thought and action, mind and world, is overcome here. Both are only moments
of a fluid whole. No moment of the field of human action –
whether the deed itself, the conviction of duty that accompanies
the deed, the determination of means to fulfill our ends, or the
judgment of either our own actions or those of others in their par-
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ticularity – what Hegel calls “evil” – none of these has ultimacy.
Only the whole movement is truly actual. I think this is what
Hegel must mean when he says that “The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it . . . straightaway vanishes (§669).”
To borrow a phrase from the American philosopher Wilfred
Sellars, we might say that the ultimate ground of our knowledge
is just the “space of reasons” itself. There are no criteria for
knowledge – moral or otherwise – outside of the space in which
we hold each other and ourselves to account. But this also means
that this is a ground that is self-grounding. Only we ourselves
can constitute this ground by making fully actual the space of
reasons. Hence, the final moments of the chapter on Spirit cannot
be construed as something that has simply come to pass. Rather,
the mutual confession of finitude is the self-given ground of the
ongoing, living present, a present for which we are perpetually
and inescapably responsible. Only in this sense is Spirit Absolute.
The main goal of the Phenomenology as an account of knowing has thus almost been achieved with the appearance of forgiveness and reconciliation. But only almost. The agents of
mutual recognition that end the chapter on Spirit do what they
do knowingly, but they do not know the philosophical significance of their mutual regard. Only we see it, and complete comprehension of its significance requires two more steps. The first
is taken in the chapter on Religion. Two aspects of the role of the
chapter on Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit seem clear
to me. First, Hegel seems to suggest that the shapes of Spirit as
ways of being in the world are always supplemented by a common and shared discourse. The highest level of this shared discourse, and one that is crucial in knitting the community together,
is the way in which the community talks about the highest things,
or what is absolute. The religion chapter provides a taxonomy of
the historical variants on such discourses regarding the absolute.
Secondly, we phenomenologists need to trace the logical ordering
of these ways of understanding the absolute so as to see that the
terminus of that logical sequence coincides with the relationship
of self and other at the end of Spirit. Only by tracing this out and
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seeing this coincidence are we positioned to take the stance of
Absolute Knowing.
What then is this grand-sounding thing called Absolute Knowing? I think it can best be captured in past participle constructions. Absolute Knowing is having traversed and despaired of the
knowledge claims of all of the shapes of consciousness; it is having worked up to a comprehension of the proper fit between these
shapes and the way in which they make a whole; it is having
come to recognize that only such a traversal and comprehension
is adequate to the philosophical question about what the grounds
of our knowing are. There is no Absolute Knowing outside of the
experience of struggling to and achieving an adequate vision of
the book as a whole. If there is a present tense formulation of Absolute Knowing it seems that is must be progressive. We must
hold the movement of despair of the book in mind in order to
enjoy the satisfaction of the redemption of that despair. But this
means that there is no thing called the Absolute that we can walk
away from the book with. The Absolute is not a thing at all but a
way of knowing and this way of knowing just is the full experience of reading the Phenomenology of Spirit.
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Tercet
Elliott Zuckerman
No one is going anywhere,
this is a pure farewell. The men
are due to return within the hour,
expecting never to be surprised.
Sooner or later the women will
surprise themselves.
That is why this ghostly embarcation
this hush and stir of zephyrs
repudiates all kinship
with the enthralled Addios
sung with a catch in the throat
by ardent diva and exalted tenor.
Nor is this death-in-love
for this is not the sound
of real water.
No drowning in these undulating waves
no more than in the regular ebbing
of a Hiroshige print.
The rare rococo masters knew
that fare thee well are words
and music of arrival.
Elliott Zuckerman is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland.
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Liberalism and Tragedy
A Review of Jonathan N. Badger’s Sophocles and the
Politics of Tragedy: Cities and Transcendence. New
York: Routledge, 2013. 252 pages, $140; paper, $42.95.
Paul Ludwig
Jonathan Badger’s Sophocles and the Politics of Tragedy begins
a dialogue between Greek tragedy and modern political thought.
Sophocles best diagnosed a predicament that continues to haunt
us today: human nature has two drives, one that aims at bodily
security and another that aims at transcendence. The two are forever in tension. Tragic protagonists often attempt to realize one
of the two aims, to the detriment of the other. For example, Creon
in the Antigone attempts to base politics on one of the two drives,
bodily security. Badger finds comparably one-sided attempts in
the history of political thought. Christian medieval thought attempted to create a politics of transcendence. Francis Bacon’s
modern project based its new politics on bodily security. Both
were attempts to move beyond, and thus to deny, tragedy. A truly
tragic consciousness lives with the tension rather than trying to
negate one of the poles. In a surprise, John Locke emerges as the
hero of the book for inaugurating liberalism, a politics that holds
these two drives in tension, and thus qualifies as tragic politics
in the best sense.
Tragedy begins with an insight into the transitory nature of all
things, including politics and human relations. Time and change
rule all (8). Unpredictably and unaccountably, everything dissolves (cf. Ajax 646-92). Two opposed responses to this tragic
insight attempt to fix or remedy the situation. One response is the
drive for transcendence. A hero looks beyond the living world to
a world of divine beauty. The other response is the drive for bodily security. Statesmen, especially, use institutions and laws to
Paul Ludwig is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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ensure safety and survival, hoping to shield us from death and
decay. Since perfect justice is one vision of transcendent beauty,
heroes are on a collision course with existing political institutions.
Security entails stability, which is threatened by heroic visions.
This conception of tragedy draws on and subsumes parts of
Aristotle’s, Hegel’s, and Nietzsche’s understandings, among others. Hegel’s clash of right actions, for example, fits together with
the tragic insight that the two drives are equally right (and wrong).
Hegel would like to see the two theses sublate into a higher synthesis. But such a solution, insofar as it disarms the tragic tension,
denies that our predicament is really tragic. According to Badger,
Aristotle’s Poetics places mimesis at the heart of ethical action.
To act ethically is to play a role—an interpretation that sounds
surprisingly postmodern. Philosophy itself emerges from creating
narratives, poetry (26-31). The poeticizing capacity of soul renders our experiences to us as a world of wholes. In place of the
usual “purgation of pity and fear” as a translation of Aristotle’s
account of the effect of tragedy, Badger makes a case for “purification of ruth and horror.” Whereas pity has been overtaken by
democratization, “pure ruth should hold us spellbound, transfixed
in utter sorrow on behalf of another” (28). Whereas fear is overly
broad, dread unspecific, and terror too urgent, horror best captures the threat of destroying the story of one’s life, not merely
ending one’s life. “[O]ne’s life work is destroyed or useless.”
Rather than getting rid of these passions because they cloud
thought, catharsis purifies them into versions serviceable for
learning and understanding. The meaning of this purification
seems to slide from purified passions to pure exemplars of the
characters who feel them, like Antigone and Creon—incarnations
of the drives for transcendence and security, respectively (30-31).
The understandings of tragedy proposed by the major thinkers
fit together only uneasily, as Badger is quick to point out. Solon’s
homely wisdom of the Greeks seems to agree with Nietzsche’s.
To “show how much better it is for a human being to die than to
live” (Herodotus 1) sounds a lot like “best . . . not to be born, not
to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon”
(Birth of Tragedy 17-18, 31). And yet, the Solon story emphasizes
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successes and failures at the end of life: the sons who hitched
themselves to their mother’s cart and Croesus’s ruin. Going out
on top or at one’s peak (perhaps even hastening the end to coincide with the peak) is different from finding individuation itself
to be an illusion, as Nietzsche does. To have a peak, it is necessary to be an individual, and Herodotus does not say that the
sons’ triumph was illusory; he surely knew of despots more fortunate than Croesus. The still greater distance between Nietzsche
and Aristotle does not render the comparison useless; the two are
“compatible” (34; cf. 37-38, Hegel “entirely compatible”), if we
abstract sufficiently. Nietzsche gives us a “vocabulary” for talking about tragedy, though he and Aristotle are using “different
terms.” “Antigone and Creon are in a ‘Hegelian’ collision over
how to respond to the ‘Nietszchean’ insight” (38). But again, if
individuation is an illusion, then the Ajax’s “all things change”
is necessarily a consequence. But if “all things change,” that does
not necessarily mean individuation is an illusion. At any rate,
there is an assumption here that would have to be made evident—
namely, that only eternal things really exist. Does Philoctetes really turn to savagery because the “falseness of the Apollonian
(rational, expedient) community is intolerable” (35)?
Crucial to interpreting both the Philoctetes and the Ajax is the
ambiguous role (or roles) of Odysseus. For Badger, Odysseus is
the Lockean before Locke, the one man at Troy who can fully
appreciate the tragic insight (into the mutability of all things)
without succumbing to either of the two drives—security or transcendence—that attempt to solve it. Instead, Odysseus is strong
and humane enough to hold the two drives in tension. Contrary
to appearances, Odysseus’s role is civic-minded, even self-sacrificing, in the two plays. Friendship is the theme of the Philoctetes,
and Odysseus is instrumental in drawing the exiled hero into a
friendship with young Neoptolemus, a friendship based on their
shared heroic morality. Only their newfound friendship can bring
Philoctetes back to Troy to save the Greek cause. Friendship is
the middle term between the community and the individual;
friendship moderates heroic individualism and provides a reason
to help the community. Odysseus orchestrates this friendship, in
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part by presenting himself as worse than he is, in order to provide
an unheroic contrast (cf. Philoctetes 64-67). “A foiled and hapless
Odysseus in ignoble flight . . . is a queer image. It is not consistent
with the Homeric presentation or with Sophocles’ presentation
of him in the Ajax” (118). Hence the interpretation that Odysseus
probably expected or counted on Neoptolemus’s rebellion against
his plan (120). This is a parting of the ways for interpreters: few
classicists would assume that Odysseus is consistently the same
character in two plays not performed together, nor that Sophocles
felt bound to make either Odysseus consistent with Homer’s. For
instance, Sophocles’s Odysseus would have been more likely to
kill the suitors and serving maids out of cold expedience rather
than suffering the anger and resentment that Homer’s undergoes.
Badger’s Sophocles by contrast provides in each play a further
meditation on the Homeric protagonist. In part, the heroic friendship could only be manipulated into existence because it is not
fully rational (117). Reason and experience do not naturally reveal this “whole” that binds the heroes to the community; to see
it requires a divine perspective or poeticizing. This perspective
is provided by the deus ex machina—the voice or appearance of
Heracles at the end. Badger flirts with but ultimately does not
embrace the thesis that Heracles is Odysseus in disguise (because
the same actor probably played both roles) or that Heracles is in
some other way a final, fiendishly clever piece of the plan
Odysseus was hatching all along.
More telling than being chased off-stage is the scene that reverses Odysseus’s and Neoptolemus’s tutor-student relationship.
When the young man is about to return the bow, Odysseus threatens that the whole host of Greeks, and himself among them, will
stop Neoptolemus. But this claim is laughable since the Greeks
are far away, and the restitution of the bow is imminent. A
spokesman for an army is not the same as an army. Where are
his divisions? In brushing the suggestion aside, Neoptolemus
says: “You were born wise, but what you’re saying is not wise”
(1244). When Odysseus retorts that neither Neoptolemus’s
speech nor his deeds are wise, the issue come to a head. Neoptolemus addresses it forthrightly: “No, but if my [speeches and
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deeds] are just, they are better than wise” (1246). The hero
chooses justice over wisdom, heart over mind. He does so selfconsciously. When Odysseus threatens him with retribution from
the Greek host, Neoptolemus moves to a further claim. With justice on his side, he has nothing to fear from Odysseus (1251). A
just man has nothing to fear. For once, Odysseus resorts to force,
beginning to draw his sword—but he puts it back with farcical
speed when Neoptolemus begins to respond in kind. Neoptolemus now delivers the cutting line that reverses their earlier tutorial relationship. “You have done the prudent thing. And if you
remain thoughtful this way in the future, perhaps you will keep
out of trouble” (1259-60). He is now speaking like an older man
admonishing a younger. Odysseus’s wisdom now looks like immaturity, while Neoptolemus’s justice has conferred upon him a
certain augustness ordinarily reserved for age.
If real (as opposed to feigned) friendship was part of Odysseus’
plan, he apparently failed to anticipate that friendship could draw
the pair away from the community. Philoctetes originally persuades Neoptolemus that the two of them should retire into private
life; he is willing to live with his wound if it spites the Atreidai,
preferring to harm his enemies rather than help himself (cf. 139197). A cure, a new life, the highest fame: his new friend is a crutch
that enables him to avoid all of these goods. Similarly, Neoptolemus is willing to give up his glorious future in order to remain
true to a friend. Back home, Neoptolemus will take care of
Philoctetes and his wound, looking out for him especially during
his seizures. Philoctetes and his invincible bow will prevent
reprisals against the disgraced young man and his land (1404-7).
It is important to note that friendship is now standing in the way
of either friend’s achieving his highest good. All they have is each
other. Intriguingly, the same friendship that contributes to this vicious spiral downwards into privacy also contributes—after a
boost from the gods—to a virtuous spiral upwards. Badger is eloquent on the excellence of friendship and its political use: friendship “has a portion of the intimacy and warmth of family without
the concomitant murkiness and stultification, and it can partake
of worldly action and incentive without the crassness and imper-
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sonality of the larger, public community” (116). It is their friendship which decisively draws the two heroes back to the community where their ambitions may be fulfilled. But the divine
intervention does not change the truth about friendship as revealed in the play up to that point. Friendship can be an aid to
public endeavor, but it can also be a hindrance. Perhaps generally,
or more commonly, it is a hindrance. The play shows that true
friendships have a privatizing propensity as well as a public, civic
propensity. One might be tempted go further: the potentially civic
character of the heroes’ friendship is due more to the ground of
their friendship—admiration of heroic virtue—than to the friendship itself. Only in the larger society can heroic virtue receive the
honors it is due. One can imagine other grounds of friendship
(and other virtues) in which the privatizing propensity predominates. Can the privatized friendship of today contribute to liberal
societies?
The reading of the Ajax delves deeper into Odysseus’s ambiguity, and the reading of the Antigone shows the polarization he
avoids. By permitting the burial of the disgraced hero Ajax,
Odysseus in a sense corrects Creon’s refusal to permit Antigone
to bury her traitorous brother. Odysseus pities his enemy’s insanity because Odysseus sees in Ajax both “himself and the rest of
us” (64, on lines 122-26 of Ajax). Odysseus responds to the tragic
insight that all things are mutable in a way that neither remedies
the fact nor simply resigns itself to it. Instead, he finds a way the
community might abide within the tension (65). Friendship and
civic piety are his ways of abiding: he uses his friendship with
Agamemnon to secure burial and to incorporate the dead hero
(and his drive for transcendence) into the community. Odysseus
consistently claims to act not altruistically but for himself (Ajax
123-24, 1363-67). Badger believes that he overcomes his natural
self, substituting for it a universal self. “Odysseus’s ‘self’ is an
expanded self: the individual and the community are inside
Odysseus” (68). Self-interest and civic responsibility merge.
Odysseus is conscious of tragedy, and his action points toward a
political order that could also be conscious of tragedy—a worldly
life that could nevertheless hold in mind the excellence of the
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hero, whose unrestrained activity would threaten to overturn that
order. He beautifies the city by cultifying the hero (69). One wonders if anything similar to a hero cult, in which transcendence
can be both recognized and tamed, exists in liberal society.
Antigone is heroic because she desires an other-worldly
beauty, a desire that can achieve its aim only in Hades (73). Only
in the underworld can she achieve her perfect love. Hers is a
philia that becomes an eros. This is nicely observed. She seeks
to impose her transcendence on the community by burying
Polyneices. But the latter hardly seems an imposition: here the
modern, civil-disobedience readings would seem in line with
Badger’s. In Lockean liberalism, Antigone would of course have
been allowed to bury her brother. So is her “imposition” of transcendence dependent on the assumptions of the regime in Sophocles’s Thebes? Badger prefers to see Antigone as a danger
analogous to later Christian impositions of transcendent longings.
Antigone is like a philosopher in the way she finds meaning by
poeticizing: she beautifies the contingent parts around her into
wholes, thereby making them meaningful (75). Beauty orders experience. But the philosophical analogy is debatable: philosophers like Epicurus denied the existence of a beautiful cosmos.
Would not philosophers want to know the truth about anything
“naturally ambiguous and imperfect” (76)? Philosophy relies on
poetry only for its first principles (89). But does this ‘first’ mean
‘first’ in the sense of beginnings that govern the conclusions, or
‘first’ in the sense of opinions from which to ascend? Creon, for
his part, reduces philia to civic friendship (86; cf. Antigone 18290). His and her mistakes are equal and opposite: “In looking to
a poeticized Hades, Antigone fails to see any viable wholeness
in bodily life. In seeking bodily security and failing to see the
universal power of erōs and chance, Creon fails to imagine the
human soul” (93). But this makes the desire for transcendence
sound like a mad pursuit we would be better off without—which
can hardly be said of the desire for security. On this view, what
would be wrong with Creon’s position, other than the fact that
he did not provide for anaesthetizing or otherwise dealing with
Antigone’s psychological problem? To say the drive or desire for
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transcendence is innate is not yet to say that it is a good thing.
Until yesterday, it was possible to say that human nature cannot
be changed. Badger confronts the problem in a section entitled
“Life beyond the Human.” Our striving for medical technology
that would ensure immortality (defeating the tragic through fixing
the transitory) raises questions such as “What would it mean to
be a daughter to a living father forever (a father, moreover, who
was in the same stage of life with the daughter?)” (145). He concludes modestly that if Sophocles is correct, the tension between
transcendence and material security will never be eliminated
from human life (147). But will it never be eliminated because
doing so is impossible, or will it never be eliminated from humanity because, when it is eliminated, we will be inhuman, “beyond the human”? The answer seems to be the latter, as the
tension now becomes constitutive: “human beings qua human
beings are what they are owing to this tension.” The tension is at
least required for “soulful life” (195). This opens up the possibility of a post-human future—provided by the technology that
flourishes in liberal polities that, as we have seen, were created
by Locke.
The Christian visions, in which Augustine, Aquinas, and Giles
of Rome impose transcendence on politics, are dealt with somewhat scantily. In four paragraphs, Badger treats these authors and
others, adducing citations in which some of them subordinate
secular power to ecclesiastical power. None of the passages is
explicated. Perhaps their imposition of transcendence is simply
a well known fact? To place Dante in this company, because he
was allegedly Thomas’s student and saw the world as a divine
comedy instead of a tragedy (132-33), is a step too far. Dante’s
Monarchia, for example, argues against subordinating the secular
power to the ecclesiastical.
If the book is uninformative about the Christians, it is wonderfully informative about Bacon’s New Atlantis and a selection of
Bacon’s essays. Bacon explicitly demotes friendship, which
Badger places in the company of transcendence (140). Bacon’s
project is ultimately Creonic because it denies the soul in favor
of the body, which is no different from other non-human “bodies
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in motion” (143-44). Especially noteworthy are “the more violent
instruments that Bacon views as necessary for his humanitarian
goal,” including imperialism and militarism backed by technology (141). The persecution of heretics under Church rule is
reprised in the rational-authoritarian state, this time as the persecution of all transcendence.
“The Tragic Politics of John Locke” serves as a “basis for a
rejuvenated discussion of the status and aims of contemporary
liberalism” (148). Does John Locke’s liberalism permit enough
transcendence to satisfy this polarity of the soul’s craving? As a
supreme court justice vacuously but accurately put it, “At the
heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human
life.” Doing so is protected, so long as it does not prevent anyone
else from doing so, too, and causes no bodily harm to another.
(The continuing debate over abortion tests the limits of the latter
clause.) Increasingly in our times, one’s view of the universe cannot be protected if it causes anyone mental pain, either. This
could seem like no transcendence at all. Badger contributes to
contemporary discussions of liberalism by proposing a reason
why liberalism should not progress too far from of its Lockean
roots. While trying to twist free of the fundamental tension, recent liberalism actually pivots back and forth within a formal
arrangement designed to maintain the tension (172). Dissatisfied
with this formal arrangement, recent liberalism pushes for
“equality as a norm (as opposed to equality as an observation or
postulate)” (171-73). Another of its goals, the eradication of suffering, cannot be the highest human good. Striving to eliminate
suffering that comes from tyranny is fine, but “to strive to eliminate the suffering that comes from erōs and the gods is a symptom of a lack of understanding” (165, 191). Such goals begin to
overwhelm the transcendence side of the polarity in favor of the
material security side.
In Lockean liberalism, the drive for transcendence is privatized: do it yourself. Freedom of religion contrasts with both
Christian imposition and with the institutionalized civil religions
of Bacon and Hobbes. Lockean liberalism does not even promise
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justice but rather the pursuit of and struggle for justice (157, 160).
Badger appears to believe there is something naturally private
about transcendence anyway: heroic principles “have their source
in merely private relations” (99). The hero (or budding hero)
Neoptolemus, for example, has a nature “unalloyed with politics,” and it is this nature that hates the deceit in Odysseus’s plan
(105). “Patriotism is an effect of conditioning,” whereas “heroic
honor may be natural” (111). This seems odd, because if honor
is natural, it comes into its own only in community. Badger relegates saving the Greek “city” besieging Troy to the bodily-security side of the polarity. But surely the Greeks are there for
glory, not security. And glory is a transcendent goal, isn’t it? The
Greeks could always have given up that goal and sailed away, if
they wished to spare their bodies. Perhaps Badger would say
glory is possible only, or mainly, for those who “fight in the front
ranks” to ensure bodily security for weaker members of a community (Iliad, 12.310-328). Certainly the Trojan War begins due
to considerations of honor that are ultimately traceable to household integrity and security. Liberalism offers some real protections for the latter while walking everyone back from, or talking
everyone down from, our high dudgeon about the former.
Badger wrestles with Locke’s notion of self-ownership, but
finds firmer grounding in Locke’s Hobbesian right to life, which
he extends to the right to pursue happiness (154). If we cannot
do otherwise than strive for life and pursue happiness, then we
must have natural rights to do both. The right to practice religion
freely follows from the natural right to pursue happiness (155).
Hence transcendence is built in. A regime that sets itself against
this natural right is irrational and will be unstable. Badger concedes that the liberal regime is morally and spiritually empty—
this is its strength. Lockean liberalism must limit itself to the
procedural; it can never make a judgment about what is good.
When it comes to the most intriguing comparison between
Sophocles’s Odysseus and Locke, Badger recurs to his reading
of Locke’s transcendent “I” that owns its “me.” The “I” is the
same for all men, whereas the “me” is “the contents of consciousness,” the embedded, social, cultural, and bodily self (162, 149-
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54). Odysseus, too, unites the two drives on the basis of a recognition of a transcendent self—a self that includes all men (162;
cf. 182). Sometimes this view of the self seems an ethical direction in which liberalism could go, elsewhere it seems constitutive
for liberalism (194, 198).
Perhaps the biggest difficulty with this vision of liberalism is
that proponents of “transcendence” see it as more than just transcendence. They think their own version not only transcends everyone else’s, but is also true. Does not Locke or Odysseus have to
disagree? Could they ever recognize, or could a society built on
their assumptions recognize, the one true transcendence when it
arrives? Or would it, too, have to join the cacophony of competing
visions? The implication that all transcendences are created equal
is unsatisfying. Asserting transcendent values is difficult to do in
a vacuum. A community is required. The erotic and the divine “are
protected and revered to the degree that they do not become public” (167). Could this lockbox not be a kind of slow strangulation,
placing the erotic and the religious in the path to eventual extinction? Religion in the United States indeed flourishes compared to
the established churches of European nations. But individualism
trickles down from the larger society to the smaller communities.
One pressing problem is that, increasingly, the larger society believes it has an interest in and a right to impose congruence between itself and each club or bowling league: the Jaycees have to
accept women members. Badger gives liberals a reason to think
twice about enforcing this congruence, at least through legal channels: many smaller groups within the liberal state have their own
views of the transcendent. Even when their views seem ugly, forcing them into congruence effectually reduces Locke to Bacon, or
reduces liberal democracy to the rational-authoritarian state. One
might add that the new breed of laws that delve too deeply into
what people think (thought-crime) are equally illiberal. Making
hate a crime, as though it added anything to the murder or harm
to body or property intended in its name, interferes with the transcendent side of the polarity.
Badger’s fear is that tragedy may go the way of the gargoyle,
may be relegated to a status no higher than that of a lawn orna-
�REVIEW | LUDWIG
87
ment. To evaluate post-tragic visions that he regards as post-liberal too, Badger closely examines the thought of Karl Jaspers.
The loss of tragedy would ultimately be the loss of humanity. In
the shorter term, tragedy can help our politics both abroad and
domestically. Recognizing the degree to which China or Iran is
Creonic or Antigonean might enable us to reject their alternatives
with less righteous indignation (195). At home, a similar humanity might inform our visions of our own, and the opposite, political party. Badger says little about the market basis of liberalism,
or about the shocking triumph of capitalism over all other economic alternatives. All progressives now espouse market mechanisms even in their recommendations for developing countries.
Since Locke’s notion of property is so all-inclusive, one wonders
whether the drive for transcendence might not also find expression in some forms of acquisition.
Jonathan Badger has opened up a window on Sophocles
through which we can see the tragedies as both deep and relevant.
The book is full of wonderful insights and new ways of viewing
our politics and ourselves.
�
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Trentina, Allison
Sachs, Joe
Cornell, John F.
Kalkavage, Peter
Linck, Matthew
Ludwig, Paul
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 56.1 (Fall 2014)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Allison Tretina
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
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Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401-1687.
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ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Momentary Morality and Extended Ethics ..................................1
Eva Brann
Enriching Liberal Education’s Defense in Universities
and Colleges: Liberal Arts, Innovation, and Technē ......................14
J. Scott Lee
Definition and Diairesis in Plato and Aristotle .................................47
Jon Lenkowski
The Stranger as a Socratic Philosopher: The Socratic Nature
of the Stranger’s Investigation of the Sophist................................65
Corinne Painter
The Concept of Measure and the Criterion of Sustainability ...........74
John D. Pappas
Platonic Theōria................................................................................95
Mark Shiffman
Poems
Two Villanelles ...............................................................................124
Kemmer Anderson
Two Poems......................................................................................126
Elliott Zuckerman
��Momentary Morality
and Extended Ethics
Eva Brann
You have been reading and talking about virtue for quite a while
now; therefore, that is what your teachers asked me to talk about
to you. So I drew a hot bath (since the mind is freest when the body
is floating) and thought what might be most to the point, most helpful to you.
Should I review some theories about virtue, perhaps give you
my interpretation of Socrates’s or Aristotle's notions of virtue, perhaps dwell on whether from reading Platonic dialogues we can tell
if Socrates and Plato thought the same and if Aristotle responds to
either of them? Or should I introduce you to Kantian morality, a
world apart from the ancients? Should I distinguish for you a vision
of virtue that looks to an ideal heaven beyond and longs for perfection from one that pays regard to the world right here and goes
for moderation? Should I explain to you that the Greek philosophers tends toward ethics, toward developing personal qualities of
excellence, while the Judeo-Christian tradition tends toward morality, willingness to obey the laws of God and nature? Should I list
for you different doctrines of doing right, such as eudaemonism,
the teaching that happiness is the aim of virtue, or deontology, the
account of virtue as duty and the obligation to obey commands, of
which Kant is the most extreme representative? For while Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, whatever their differences, think that ethics
involves some sort of rightness in our feelings, emotions, and passions, Kant is clear that morality at its purest is a matter of reason
alone. Reason is in its essence universal: to think rationally is to
think unexceptionably, comprehensively. So to obey the commands
of reason is to suppress all merely natural inclinations, all purely
Eva Brann is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was delivered at the “Windows on the Good Life”
Course at Carlton College on 16 April 2014.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
idiosyncratic desires, and to intend only such actions as we would
want to be intended by everyone—or even to be seen as commanded by a law of nature. This is the notorious “categorical imperative”: “imperative” means “command” and “categorical”
means “without ifs and buts” (as when someone says to you “that's
a categorical no!”). You'll see in a moment why I've brought Kantian morality into this talk.
One last thing I might be speaking about, and which in fact I
will talk of in a moment, is the word “virtue.” I'll argue that this
translation of the word the Greeks use, aretē, has its virtues, but
we should probably give it up, or at least use it with raised eyebrows.
I now want to say why none of the above, except the last, appealed to me. I will tell you what seems to me the biggest trouble
with academic study, and so with most of our eduction. I call it
the problem of lost immediacy. This is what I mean: There are
books—and if your teachers chose well, they will be great ones—
that are full of substance. Then there are books and articles and
lectures about books. The great books (or texts of any sort) contain
opinions. The next level of books and articles also contain opinions, but they are opinions about the original opinions, because
whoever interprets a primary text adds a perspective to it. Then
here we are, your teachers, and we’ve absorbed some of these
original opinions, as well as some of the opinions about them—
and we’ve acquired some opinions of our own on top of that. All
those levels of learning on our part can smother, drown out, your
immediate relation to the book. But even a powerful, first-rate
book—perhaps especially such a book—can also stand between
you and yourself. It intervenes in your thinking and can capture
it, so that you are content to think its thoughts and co-feel its feelings, rather than being immediately present to yourself. Or worse,
it can put you off its possibly life-changing content because you
see no direct entrance to it.
Now I hasten to say that I pity people who have never been
taken over by a book or even by a teacher in that way—if, that is,
the being-taken-over is the beginning of an effort, a struggle, that
issues in a gradual emergence or a tumultuous bursting out of a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
discovery that is truly your own. And I pity even more students
who have been turned off by a life-enhancing text because no one
helped them to make a direct connection with it.
A witty outside observer of my college used to tell the world
that our students arrive knowing nothing and leave knowing that
they know nothing. I hope it’s true, provided you keep in mind that
to know that you know nothing is knowing a lot. What he meant,
though, was that they had absorbed so many contradictory opinions
from reading so many deep books that they were in a state of ultimate and utterconfusion. But in that he was surely mistaken. Such
riches may be oppressive and discombobulating for a while, but
that’s a state you work yourself out of into some clarity—clarity
about “who you are,” which is a formulaic way of saying “what
your thinking can accept and your feelings can embrace.”
Therefore I think that the second-best thing we teachers can
do for our students is to show how books can be, in a fancy term,
“appropriated,” made one’s own—and not just a few books of the
same sort, but many books of different sorts, different in genre,
different in opinion. The very best thing we can do, of course, is
to get students to read them well and talk about them to each other.
Doesn’t that broad appropriation, you might ask, imply eclecticism, which is a sort of intellectual cherry-picking that disregards
the generality of a well thought-out theory, and—especially if it’s
an ethical or moral theory—its integration into a comprehensive
view of the ways things are? Well, yes, if ecleticism means indiscriminately collecting low-hanging fruit from here and there, it will
be cherry-picking, extracting now contextless bits and pieces. But
no, if eclecticism has a basis in the very nature of things. In a moment I’ll explain this oracular pronouncement.
But first, there’s the word “virtue,” the supposed subject of my
talk. Let everyone talk as they wish, as long as they know what
they’re saying; but I wish we wouldn't use “virtue” as a translation
of that Greek word aretē—or at least that we would use it mostly
with raised eyebrows. To be sure, it has a nice argument in its
favor: “virtue” is related both to the Latin vis, force, and vir, man.
Virtue is the energy of a being that holds it together, and gives it
power, as when they say in stories: “All the virtue went out of
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
him.” Now as it happens, aretē is related to a Greek prefix ari-,
meaning “very much, forcefully so”; thus aretē is the potency in a
person or thing to be what it is supposed to be. (Some Greeks seem
to have seen a relation between aretē and Ares, the powerful warrior-god.) Moreover, the moral virtue most highly regarded by Aristotle, courage, is literally called “manliness” (andreia) in Greek.
So it all fits together. On the other hand, “virtue,” in a use that goes
back to Shakespearean times and into the nineteenth century, was
a woman’s particular kind of manliness, namely, well-girded
chastity, her bodily and psychic inviolability. We have nothing left
but a smile for such passionless purity. More recently, the adjective
“virtual,” in its meaning of “inactual,” has come front-and-center
as an attribute of cyberspace: “virtual reality,” that is to say, “unreal
reality.” We ought to have a background awareness of the sphere
of connotations of our words, including their history. But, as far as
the contemporary connotations of the adjectival form of “virtue”
is concerned, I don’t think we want to go there.
This means, however, that for the moment I’m left without a
word for my subject. And this lack raises two really interesting
questions: Can we have a thought without a name? and Can we
think without words? Powerful contemporary writers claim that it
is impossible for two reasons: There can be no external proof that
thinking is going on without someone saying something thoughtful: a furrowed brow is no evidence. In fact even our claim to be
thinking doesn’t prove that we are thinking. And more important,
to think is really to marshall meanings, and meanings are drifting
vapours unless they are attached to a word or given structure in a
sentence.
Here I beg to differ with these contemporary writers. I think
we all experience that sense of a disembodied meaning, of pre-verbal thinking, that moves in our mind, sometimes like a gentle aromatic breeze over the mental plain, sometimes like a powerful push
of air pressure against a mental wall, rousing us to seek the right
term to catch it, the accurate language to describe it, the suitable
words to embody it.
So then, what is this mental presence that is called virtue, effectiveness, excellence, dutifulness, goodness? I am supposing
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
here that to have too many words is equivalent to having no cogent
idea. But that may be a mistake. The reason why there are numerous translations for the Greek word you’ve thought about under
the term “virtue” may be that in fact it encompasses a number of
ways of being what is called broadly, and so a little bluntly, “good”;
there are many terms because there really are different ways of
being humanly good. This possibility of earthly variety kicks the
meaning they share, “goodness,” way upstairs, so to speak—up
into the highest reaches of thought. In the Republic, Socrates says
to the two very intelligent young men he is speaking with that he
can’t explain this Good to them in the brief space of one evening.
So I feel excused from even trying in this short hour.
On the other hand, I do want to make use of the notion that
there might be more than one way of being good—an idea that will
probably underwhelm you. It would not even have shocked people
who lived before the First World War, like your great-great-grand
parents—though for different reasons. Nowadays many people,
certainly among them the most articulate ones, believe that as long
as we are socially right-minded and we don’t discriminate among
our fellow humans for being what nature made them, we can be
fairly forgiving of a loose personal morality. So there is public and
private morality, one rigorous, the other relaxed. (Of course, these
are generalizations, which are never true of those in whose hearing
they are made.) Your ancestors, on the other hand, would have
tended to believe what Socrates sets out in the Republic, namely,
that members of different castes or classes belonging to one political community have different characteristic excellences. Moreover, they knew quite well that, even within their class,
people—especially well-off men—lived quite comfortably within
a double moral framework. For example, men could maintain a respectable but loveless marriage to one woman whom they publicly
honored, while at the same time engaging in a passionate but disreputable attachment to a mistress who had only private privileges.
My own uncle lived that way. When he and his wife fled Germany
from the Nazis in 1939, his mistress was on the same train in a separate compartment.
Here is what I want to do now, killing two birds with one stone
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
(though I’m not so much for killing birds, especially not en masse).
My first aim is to take off on my own, so that my primary point
will not be so much to explain a theory found in a book—though,
as you’ll see, I’ll have to do that too in order to achieve my second
purpose. And that second purpose is to show how one might be
eclectic without being incoherent, how we might engage in picking-out parts of theories of goodness without producing a mere
self-pleasing miscellany, a tasty thought-goulash.
This second purpose might be of real use to you if you’re feeling a little snowed by all the deep and sometimes difficult theories
you’ve studied this year. I mean to show that you can fashion an
opinion to live by through combining the most disparate conceptions. My first aim, however, is to think out something for myself
and articulate it before a sympathetic audience.
So now to it. One human being may indeed live with two
moralities, one public, one private, and this duplicity is not always
hypocritical; it may simply make life livable and prevent it from
becoming worse. Or, looking at it another way, there is a saying
that hypocrisy is the respect vice pays to virtue: I think it’s better
all around that there should be such respect, once humanly understandable and inevitable wrong-doing is on the scene. Again, coming to our day, some people quite comfortably cheat on their taxes
and tell you that it’s a form of civic virtue to short-change a wasteful government, but they observe strict correctness when it comes
to matters of social justice. They too live in a dual moral frame.
But I want to introduce another, I think more fundamental, duality: the pacing of time, or, more accurately, of psychic motion. If
you watch the stream of cars coming toward you on the opposite
side of a highway, and there is a good deal of traffic, you’ll notice
that the cars bunch up; they practically tailgate each other until the
density dissolves into long stretches of lighter flow. The world is
like that, and so are our lives; it and we are in sync. There’s an
earthquake, a tsunami, a storm, an eruption all at once after years
of nothing. A dreary winter has lasted for ever, suddenly it’s spring,
the forsythia is in bloom, the trees are bursting into leaf, and it’s
time for outdoor-idling, but there are summer jobs to be lined up,
final exams, parties, last-moment bonding, packing, all at once.
That’s outside, but it’s similar inside: There are undistinguished
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
times marked, very unremarkably, by routine and repetition; life
flows away and is canceled, collapses into one-and-any-day’s
schedule. Then suddenly time develops densities; all the momentous moments happen together, for better or for worse. When it
rains, it pours, as the saying goes.
I should remind you here that the exhilarating heights and tearful depths of time, or rather of eventfulness, separated by expanses
of flat dailiness—these closings-up and drawings-apart of happenings—are a Western way of seeing the world and living in it. There
are teachings of the East that make a virtue of unbunching time, of
letting life flow evenly—every moment as charged with presence
as any other. Thus when I called this talk “Momentary Morality
and Extended Ethics,” I was thinking only of our half of the world.
So now I’ll explain what I mean by momentary morality. I’ve
been describing an experience of time and events that includes moments of crisis, either imposed on us by nature or manufactured
by us from sheer cussed, willful Westernness. Although krisis is a
Greek word meaning “separation” or “decision,” and so might just
betoken any branching in the flow of events, we generally don’t
mean something good by it. A crisis, as we use the word, is not so
much a branching as a stanching of the flow of events that makes
its elements pile up and then burst out, often in a kind of relieving
demolition of the status quo. Certainly the living pace we share,
consisting of stretches of eventless, quiet desperation or contentment, as the case may be, which are interspersed with somewhat
frantic eventfulness, practically guarantees that every high will be
at the expense of a low, as a hill is paid for by a hollow. I think that
I’ve told things the way they really are, but that I’ve left two questions (at least) quite unanswered: Are the highs higher than the
lows are low, that is, are there more great moments than sorry
ones? and What is the logic, or better, the ontology of these eventpairings of high and low? Why is natural and human life subject
to these oppositions? By “ontology,” which signifies an “account
of being,” I mean the most fundamental explanation we can find
for the way things are, including psychology in the non-medical
sense: an account of the human soul.
But I want to use this notion of bunched time, of high moments
we may hope for and low ones we can expect, of events shaped in
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
time like wave packets connected by a flat line—unexamined
though the image be—to speak about the type of morality which I
call “momentary morality.” I mean those critical moments when
you’re up against the wall, when it’s too late to think things out,
when you need to be ready with an inner command to tell you what
to do—what you must do—at that very moment. The human condition being what it is, what you must do will tend to be something
you don’t want to do, or rather, something you will want with every
fiber of your feelings not to do. If at that moment you waffle about
what you ought to do, or if you fail to do as you ought, you’ll never
forget that you were unprepared in a moral emergency or unsteadfast in doing your duty. You will be diminished in your self-respect.
I’ve seen it written and heard it said that such moments of extremity reveal who a person really is. I don’t believe it. I think what
you do day-by-blessedly-ordinary-day is more apt to reveal, even
while it is shaping, who you are. But I do know that moral failure
in a crisis sticks with you: I know it from myself, I know it from a
tale one day told me, almost in passing, by a man I admired, and I
know it from fiction, especially Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim
and Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
There is a theory of morality that seems to me tailored for moments of crisis and, consequently, inept in daily use. It is the Kantian theory of the categorical imperative I mentioned earlier on. It
is, in the compass of my reading, the most powerful, coherent, ingenious and, not incidentally, the most earnestly extremist theory
of human goodness ever devised. Like all great specific theory it
is embedded in a grand grounding of human consciousness. Kant
would turn, nay, whirl in his grave to hear me assign it to so particular a use, so momentary an occasion. But since I am convinced
that it is not possible to live well through the flats of life on Kantian
morality (though I lack time in this talk to explain why) and find
that even his own applications sometimes have repellent results, I
feel less abashed at saving the pieces, so to speak. Let me explain
as simply and briefly as I can how this morality might work in an
emergency, and that explanation itself will go a little ways toward
showing why one can’t live that way through extended time.
We have, Kant says, a faculty for freedom, namely, our will,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
our free will. To be free means to take orders from no one but oneself. Thus the free will commands itself. It gives itself its own law.
There must be law, Kant thinks, because if the will were lawless it
would be the opposite of free—call it capricious, wanton. Now the
will, Kant also thinks, is an aspect of reason, which has two sides.
One side is theoretical reason. This reason gives nature its laws
and then recognizes them as necessary. I will set this activity of
reason aside here—it’s what I mean by ripping his moral theory
out of the grand whole. The other side is practical reason; it gives
itself its laws and so knows itself as free. You can see that it is identical with the free will. The will—really myself as a free person—
should, of course, obey the command of its self-given law, its
imperative. As I said earlier, this imperative permits no ifs and buts,
admits no special cases, allows no individual exceptions, because
it is addressed to reason, and reason does not contradict its own
universal judgment, for then it would be self-contradictory. Above
all, it avoids the necessities, the unfree determinism, of lawful nature. We human beings are in part natural, namely, in our inclinations and desires. Our free will, our practical reason, has no truck
with the emotions and feelings that drive us. It chooses a course
entirely because it is right and not in the least because we feel good
about it; in fact, the more it hurts the better we know we are doing
our duty, doing purely as we ought. And we have a test to tell us
whether our decision is right, a test that expresses the essence of
reason: If I can universalize my particular motive for choosing an
action so as to turn it into a general law of human action or a conceivable law of nature, then I am choosing as I ought. I am preserving the purity of reason, namely its universality and its
avoidance of self-contradiction by exception-making.
Let me give a famous example by Kant himself. Suppose a
persecutor comes to my door and asks if his intended victim is
within. All my inclination is to deny it, to protect the fugitive. But
if I generalize my motive it assumes this form: Under humanitarian
pressure anyone may tell a lie. And then all trust in anyone’s declarations collapses, for anyone can construe an exception. So you
must tell the truth, and you will have done your duty, come hell or
highwater or the murder of a fugitive. I’ve told this example be-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
cause it seems to me to show how Kantian purity can turn into
moral catastrophe when life is fraught with daily danger. Just imagine that you’re harboring a fugitive dissident in some totalitarian
state, and, as you well know they might, the secret police come
knocking at your door. Will you tell them the truth for the sake of
the self-consistency of reason? No, you will have recourse—if you
think you need it—to the very paralogical, paradoxical principle of
the white lie. And, in general, I think that this absolutist morality is
not only too inhumane, but also too joyless to be livable day by day.
But let there be that one life-changing moment when, torn from
the usually peaceful flux of ordinary life, you suddenly must decide. The occasion might be a temptation to commit a minor transgression in the world’s eyes, but one weighing heavily on your
conscience. Or it could be an unexpected call on your courage, unwelcome but unavoidable, perhaps never patent to the world but
well enough known to yourself.
These are, I think, Kantian moments, spots of time when a
morality is wanted that disparages our inclinations and prompts us
to duty, that provides an effective on-the-spot test of what ought
to be done, to wit: What if everyone did what it has just crossed
my mind to do? That decisive moment’s morality is the kind which
commands without hedging.
But for most of us in this country these excruciating moments
that, when they do come, tend, to be sure, to come in multiples,
are blessedly sparse. The rational points on a mathematical line are
said to be dense, meaning that they leave no empty interval and
yet do not form a continuum (since the irrational points are missing). Such is the incident-line, the event-time of our ordinary daily
life, in which every little station has its happening; but though they
are all discrete, they are so closely packed together that they are
scarcely discernible. Our day has 86,400 seconds and our week
604,800 seconds, and we can calculate the number of seconds in
our month, our year, our decade, our lifetime. This flattish life-line
of instants, with the peaks and troughs it occasionally develops,
surely requires a different notion of goodness from the one that is
marked by excruciating, disruptive moments. As I called the latter
“momentary morality,” so I will call the former “extended ethics.”
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Morality, remember, requires command-issuing universal law;
ethics, on the other hand, demands natural and acquired personal
qualities. Of the possible English alternatives to the term “virtue,”
I think that “excellence” best expresses the connotations the ancient users of the word aretē seem to have had in mind, even before
the philosophers got to discerning a comprehensive meaning.
Let me list those connotations of aretē, understood as excellence, that I can think of: 1. effectiveness; 2. competition; 3. happiness; 4. enumerability; 5. habituation. They all have to do with
the long runs of life, the flat stretches that may buckle into peaks
and valleys of glory and misery; they have little or nothing to do
with the up-against-the-wall decisions of a life fractured by a moral
emergency.
I’ve spoken of the notion of aretē as an effective, potent way
of being that betokens a soul honed to a fine edge, just as a wellsharpened pruning knife is an efficient and perhaps somewhat dangerous object. There is a competitive tone to aretē, just as to be
excellent means literally “to rise above,” as we say, “to be outstanding.” The possessor of aretē glories in it, vaunts and flaunts
it, as do the Homeric heroes. A hero is high in self-esteem, in current language. Furthermore, the aretai, the excellences that everyone recognizes, can be counted off. Socrates regularly refers to
four cardinal ones: wisdom, justice, courage, and sound-mindedness. These excellences require the right sort of body and soul—
physical and psychic talent as we would say—but also practice,
habituation. It is in this last element that the difference between
Kantian morality and ethics, as I have delineated it, shows up most.
Personal qualities are confirmed in habituation, in being habitually
practiced, but the free will, the self-legislation of morality is essentially at odds with habituation. For habit puts the natural laws
of psychology to work, and these are deterministic mechanisms.
In fact, habit as a mechanism is an inhibition on spontaneousness,
on freedom. What’s more, for Kant the will’s intention trumps
practical execution.
Indeed, all the points of the ethics of individual qualities are
contrasted with law-morality. The categorical imperative has, to
be sure, several forms, but it is basically one, a super-command-
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ment that the free will issues and obeys, while the human excellences are enumerably multiple. For although excellence as excellence may be one super-quality, it needs to assume various
specifications, and these may even be at odds with each other. For
instance, courage and sound-mindedness (whose Greek term,
sophrosyne, is often translated as “moderation”) may pull in opposite directions. Certainly the competitive glorying of excellence
is unthinkable in a dutiful moralist, and the sharp-set potency and
effectiveness which goes with any excellence is absolutely out of
play for the moral mode. Once more, in Kant’s great works of
moral philosophy, the issue of execution, of how the passage from
decision to effective action is accomplished, which is so crucial a
juncture in ethics, is almost completely suppressed. Ethics is a way
of being objectively good in the world; the doing is almost everything. Kantian morality is primarily concerned with being right
with oneself, subjectively good; the intention is everything, though
hard actions may, indeed should, follow. As Kant famously says:
There is nothing unqualifiedly good except a good will. Note that
he does not say “a good deed.”
It is with respect to my middle point, happiness, that the difference is greatest and that ethics seems to me a far more livable,
day-by-day useful theory. It is essential to moral intention that no
hint of nature-bound desire should taint the purity of duty done for
its own sake, meaning for the sake of self-rule; no psychic pleasure-seeking mechanism should confuse the clarity of a command
obeyed for the sake of one's rational integrity, one’s rational consistency. Ethics, on the other hand, cooperates with nature; although it distinguishes between sound and corrupt pleasure,
between excess and moderation, it nevertheless regards pleasure,
in Aristotle’s words, as the bloom on our activity, and considers
happiness, whatever its definition, as the proper, indeed self-evident, human aim.
Recall that I have spoken about “extended ethics” as opposed
to “momentary morality” and distinguished the two theories of
human goodness by their relation to time, or rather, to eventuation.
Morality was for intense, abrupt, exigent, emergent moments of
up-against-the-wall decision making; ethics was for a looser,
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smoother, less urgent, more subdued tenor of life. And indeed,
everything I’ve observed about ethics seems to me to fit this latter
temporal mode better: our natural longing for accessible daily
pleasure and sustainable long-term happiness in the world; our innocent, or not-so-innocent, human-all-too-human eagerness for
admiration; our comfort in a being buoyed up by a tradition of
recognizably articulated excellencies; our time-consuming growth
into profitable habits and productive routines.
Above I calculated our line of life in myriads of instants almost too brief for detection (as distinct from discernible moments). Yet each had to be occupied and vacated, lived in and
through, for better or for worse. It seemed to me that this analogy
of life to a line, at once dense and pointillistic, recommended to
us a theory of goodness which allowed us to be all there as natural
beings, driven at every point of temporal existence by desire, fastening on some moments for fulfillment, developing excellence
and glorying in it, engaging with the world in action and with ourselves in thinking. But it also seemed that there were moments of
heightened urgency when we must oppose our pleasure-seeking
and happiness-enjoying nature and forget all the flourishing excellence promotes in order to obey the harsh self-command of
“you ought”—no ifs and buts.
My overarching purpose, however, was to persuade you that
your studies of ways to be humanly good can be appropriated
by you to fashion a way of your own, that they need not add up
to mutual canceling-out of theories and all-round confusion of
soul. In fact, I’m paying you a major compliment: I’m supposing
that you’re taking your learning seriously, not just, as the phrase
goes, “academically”—that you take your studies to heart as lifeshaping.
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Enriching Liberal Education’s
Defense in Universities and Colleges:
Liberal Arts, Innovation, and Technē
J. Scott Lee
For a number of years, it has struck me that people who write
about a “liberal-arts education” rarely write directly about the
arts. They write about political, religious, and moral dispositions;
they write about the rise of the sciences; they write about cultures; and recently, they write about the conditions of education.
Sometimes, they write about books and core texts within the tradition of the liberal arts, but these books and their associated arts
are written about as exemplars of politics, morals, science, and
culture—rarely as exemplars of arts.
A recent spate of writings defending the humanities and humanism, the college and the purpose of education—by Martha
Nussbaum, Tony Kronman, Andrew Delbanco, and Patrick Deneen—all mention liberal-arts education. They defend the fine
or liberal arts, but none of these authors ground their defenses
of liberal-arts education in art per se.1 All these writers sense an
J. Scott Lee is the Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts
and Courses. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Research University and Liberal Arts College Conference, held at Notre
Dame University in Notre Dame, Indiana, 9-11 June 2013.
1. Andrew Delbanco hardily approves of Anthony Kronman’s greatbooks curriculum for the ideas it raises, and he cites the artes liberales
ideal of education that Bruce Kimball has extensively documented as a
tradition of aristocratic European liberal learning that opens the mind.
But it is America’s “attempt to democratize” this tradition through its
collegiate educations that really interests him (College: What It Was,
Is, and Should Be [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012], 33.)
“Working to keep the ideal of democratic education alive,” Delbanco,
in an extensive analysis of the past and present social conditions of col-
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ebbing of liberal education correlated with the economic, scientific, and technological conditions under which we live. Nearly
leges as institutions, ultimately locates the “universal value of a liberal
education” in the belief, derived from the nineteenth-century religious
college, that “no outward mark—wealth or poverty, high or low social
position, credentials or lack thereof—tells anything about the inward
condition of the soul” (171). He transmutes this belief, today, into a
liberal education whose “saving power” (171) that allows students to
“ignite in one another a sense of the possibilities of democratic community” through “the intellectual and imaginative enlargement [college]
makes possible” (172). He concludes, “we owe it to posterity to preserve and protect this institution. Democracy depends on it.” (177).
Martha Nussbaum begins her “manifesto” in defense of the humanities
and arts with a crisis in which “the humanities and the arts are being
cut away in both primary/secondary and college/university education,
in virtually every nation in the world.” This entails “discarding of skills
that are needed to keep democracies alive.” In the survival of the humanities and arts within educational institutions “the future of the
world’s democracies” is said to “hang in the balance” (Not for Profit:
Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010], 1-2).
Notwithstanding a very serious concern with “ideals of freedom,”
Anthony Kronman is less focused on the links between democracy and
liberal education than on the links between the humanities and our culture (Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given
Up on the Meaning of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
He stresses particularly the humanities’ abandonment, within colleges
and universities, of the search for meaning in our individual lives, and
he warns against our scientific culture’s way of aggrandizing our technical powers without setting them within the limitations of human finitude. The combination, he believes, yields a kind of spiritual desiccation.
Oddly similar to Kronman notwithstanding their published differences,
Patrick Deneen argues that since the Enlightenment, greatness seems
to rest in transformation, whereas before the rise of the New Sciences,
whose authors often belittled ancient books, greatness rested in a “predominant understanding” of cultivated endurance, and an acceptance
of the limits of human power, knowledge, and ambition. The modern
great books program contains many scientific, political and economic
works which support the idea of transformation. So Deneen asks, might
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all find that the present responses of our institutions to these conditions impede rather than aid the robust maintenance or development of something like a liberal education. Most of their
arguments rely on research, though their positions on whether research—scientific, bibliographic or otherwise—within a university favors or harms undergraduate liberal education tends to
range Nussbaum on one side and Delbanco, Kronman, and Deneen on the other. In contrast, each author attempts to revive traditions of the liberal arts by linking them to current conditions
of democracy, spiritual needs of cultures, or ethical understandings of faith. All believe that the souls of our students and our
citizens are at stake, though of course they disagree about the
constitution of the soul and the education designed to nurture it.
A common concern among these authors is whether our cultural assumption that we can transform almost anything, particularly through the technology of science, is good for our souls and
good for liberal education. For Nussbaum, technology appears as
the attractive image of students in a lab—instead of pictures of
students “thinking”—that administrators use to lure students to
universities.2 Delbanco notes the advantage that the sciences have
over the humanities in public evaluations: technological landmarks of progress, accompanied by an occasional historical or
philosophic “breakthrough.”3 For Kronman and Deneen, technology is the differential gear which imparts varying force to science,
culture, and education. Further, Kronman and Deneen come very
close to each other in noting the meretricious effects upon our
character and our sense of limits that technological achievement
unleashes in the form of pleonexia. The humanities currently fail
to oppose it (Kronman), or worse, education encourages it through
there be an alternative way to think about the core texts of the ancient
to medieval Western tradition, ultimately as a way of restraining our
scientifically released pleonexia for mastering and transforming our
world? He suggests great books might be justified by recovering this
earlier understanding’s humility (“Against Great Books,” in First
Things [January 2013], 35.)
2. Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 133.
3. Delbanco, College, 95. Apparently, literature does not rise to “breakthroughs.”
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a philosophy of transformation, of creating original knowledge
and innovations through research (Deneen).4
4. At one point, Kronman and Deneen come very close to saying—and
meaning—the same thing. Kronman’s case for the humanities in large
part rests on controlling technology through a recognition of human limits: “We have a desire for control that can never be satisfied by any degree of control we actually achieve. We always want more. . . . This is
the human condition, which is characterized by our subjection to fateful
limits that we can neither tolerate nor do without. . . . The most important
thing about technology is not what it does but what it aspires to do. . . .
Technology encourages us to believe that the abolition of fate should be
our goal. . . . Technology discourages the thought that our finitude is a
condition of the meaningfulness of our lives. . . . It makes the effort to
recall our limits and to reflect upon them seem less valuable and important” (Kronman, Education’s End, 230-233). For Kronman, the research
ideal is, of course, partly justified in the sciences by the “fruit”—both in
discovery and in technology—that it produces: “The research ideal is
today the organizing principle of work in every academic discipline. . . .
In the natural sciences, the research ideal has proved remarkably fruitful.
The new discoveries that pour from our college and university laboratories every year and the clear sense of progressive movement toward an
objective understanding of the structure and mechanisms of the natural
world testify to the productive fit between the natural sciences and the
modern research ideal.” Whereas in the humanities “understanding,” but
not a productive technology characterizes research results: “In the humanities . . . the benefits of research are less uniform or certain” (ibid.,
130-133). Nevertheless “research in the humanities has produced results
of lasting value. It has added importantly to our understanding of the
historical, literary, artistic, and philosophical subjects with which the humanities deal.” The demands for specialization and for teaching to that
specialization ought to be less insistently felt in the humanities: “What
must be resisted is the imperial sprawl of the research ideal, its expansive
tendency to fill every corner of each discipline in which it takes hold
and to color the expectations and judgments of teachers in these disciplines regarding what they do. Admittedly this is asking a lot. . . . But . . .
it is merely asking for a somewhat greater degree of humility on the
part of those in the humanities who first allegiance is to this ideal” (ibid.,
248-249).
For Deneen, the (current) point of a philosophy of education is not
to admire the world, or suffer its limits, but to change it, to transform it.
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Finally, while all these authors seem to be convinced that the
products of arts are essential to any revival, and while they are
skilled fashioners of argument in areas where no single discipline
can claim precedence, the discussion of fine or liberal arts and
their products is not in terms of art, but in the terms of the political, cultural, or religious end sought. For example, Nussbaum
devotes large portions of her book exploring arts and a whole
chapter to “Cultivating the Imagination: Literature and the Arts.”
To Deneen, it seems that since the Enlightenment, greatness seems to
rest in transformation. So he asks, might there be an alternative way to
think about and assign terms to the core texts of the Western tradition,
ultimately as a way of restraining our excesses in transforming our
world? He begins by accepting a stasis in the political, moral, religious,
and poetic inheritance of books that extends from the ancients through
the first stirrings of modernity: “Great books such as Paradise Lost
sought to inculcate a sense of limits, . . . we could look at a dominant
understanding of a long succession of great books from antiquity to the
Middle Ages . . . to conform human behavior and aspirations to the natural or created order” (“Against Great Books,” 35). By way of Baconian,
Cartesian, and Hobbesian repudiation of books, Deneen elaborates the argument the he feels undermines the “human limits” understanding by trying to discriminate two kinds of liberty. The first, associated with great
books, is a “liberty . . . of hard-won self-control through the discipline of
virtue,” which often animates defenses of great books as materials in
preparing for citizenship. The second is a liberty with “the stress . . .
upon the research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development of new knowledge” (ibid., 37). The former constrains our desires,
the latter endlessly satisfies them through “the human project of mastery.” The latter pursuits were justified by the arguments of Bacon,
Descartes, and Hobbes, reinforced by Dewey, which depended on the
idea “that a larger number of natural forces and objects [could be or]
have been transformed into instrumentalities of action” in the West than
in cultures which did not exploit the natural resources available through
scientific technology (ibid., 36). Deneen concludes that we do need to
teach these two competing notions of liberty through the great books,
but defenders should exchange the notion of “greatness” for a notion
of “humility” derived from the earlier works of the intellectual tradition
represented in the West (ibid., 38). Humility might, then, restrain our
excesses in regard to transformation.
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In the latter, we learn that “in order to be stably linked to democratic values, [both the artistic cultivation of capacities for play
and empathy in a general way, and the treatment of particular cultural blind spots] require a normative view of how human beings
ought to relate to one another . . . and, both therefore require selectivity regarding the artworks used.”5 A catalog follows of the
failures of artworks, of “defective forms of ‘literature,” to cultivate the sympathy that Nussbaum desires. Undoubtedly, Kronman’s understanding of the search for meaning and his discussion
of civilizational “conversation” depends on art; Delbanco’s distinction between research and reading instances canonical works
from ancient to modern times; and Deneen’s argument is concerned with a residuum of teachings that earlier great books leave
us. Yet, in these social-moral defenses, an entire line of argument
concerning the arts is, for the most part, relegated to an instrumental, supporting, or ancillary role in a discussion that might be
titled: “Social Conditions, Educational Institutions, and Individual
Capacities: Wither Liberal Education?”
I wish to suggest now that the ecology of liberal education
defense could be enriched by also focusing on the arts of liberalarts education. Then we will see what liberal education’s relation
to research, democracy, or culture might be when looked at
through the lens of the arts. Please note that my preceding remarks are not meant to imply the absence of artistic works in liberal-arts programs, nor that some parts of those programs are not
structured by the arts. For example Yale’s Directed Studies program has courses explicitly divided into three groups: Literature,
Philosophy, and Historical and Political Thought. Clearly literature is art. Columbia’s Core’s program has the Literature/Humanities and the Contemporary Civilization sequences, not to
mention the Music offerings. Again, no one doubts that this program involves art. What I am interested in are the rationales and
justifications for programs using core texts that can be grounded
in the liberal arts.
Why is it important to develop a line of argument about arts
5. Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 108.
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to the point where we might see them in the guise of an end, not
just a means, to liberal-arts education? Do you remember, about
forty or fifty years ago, if you aspired to a bachelor degree, you
chose either a bachelor of science or a bachelor of arts? No one
today questions whether a student possesses a science if she or he
earns a B.S. What art or arts, however, do our students possess if
they have earned a B.A.? So, if we claim to offer a liberal-arts education in undergraduate bachelor programs, it might not be amiss
to ask what arts are our students learning and we are teaching.
And asking such a question can enrich our view of liberal-arts education using core texts—whether of the Western tradition or not.
When educators of any stripe are seeking renewal, they often
resort to an examination of the past, so I thought the best place
to begin a search for a renewal of liberal-arts education might be
in a book by Bruce Kimball first published in 1986: Orators and
Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education.6 The
book’s scholarship and judicious consideration of a vast number
of core texts, curricular materials, and the scholarly production
surrounding liberal education make this work a seminal contribution to the history of liberal education. Kimball has paid much
more explicit attention to the artes liberales educational ideal,
especially in relation to the research ideal—or, as he styles it, the
liberal-free ideal—than any current author we have examined.
For our purposes he also reaches more thoroughly into the past.
With the important exception of an unstable accommodation in
a very few universities and colleges between these two ideals—
Chicago, Columbia, St. John’s College being the primary examples—his extended history gives little comfort to the conviction
that liberal-arts education, particularly in relation to democracy,
has much of a chance of revival in most of today’s universities
or colleges, precisely because of the success of the ideal of research throughout academe, and its allied notion of freedom.
Kimball’s history, which extends from ancient Greece to late
6. Bruce Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of
Liberal Education (New York: Teachers College, 1986; rev. ed., New
York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995).
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twentieth-century America, reflects a two-fold tradition in education. A rhetorical liberal tradition complains about disarray and
divisions of undergraduate education, while an epistemic, research quarrel among the fields of science, social science, and
the humanities over “definitions of knowledge and culture” influences undergraduate education.7 These two educational traditions—the artes liberales ideal for citizenship and the liberal-free
ideal for specialization—compete in public, graduate, and undergraduate contexts. To bring this competition down to earth at the
undergraduate level: Kimball finds “it is supremely difficult for
an undergraduate major . . . to coexist with a thorough [curricular]
commitment to citizenship, virtues, the republic, and the appropriation of the textual tradition of a community.”8 The reason is
that these two polarities, or ideals, are systematic: they entail different ends, characteristic qualities, and, ultimately, curricular expressions. Syntheses, accommodations, or blends of the two have
limited appeal and, typically, short lives. The artes liberales accommodation is unstable partly because it cannot readily convince
academics that classics are necessary to a critical intellect, and partly
because its insistence upon exploring ancient texts “conflicts with
the liberal-free mind” in its desire to range where it will.9
To varying degrees, then, Kimball anticipates the ambivalence that Kronman and Delbanco feel about reading great texts
at the undergraduate level with modern research in mind. Kimball
also anticipates Kronman and Deneen’s concern with the way in
which the rise of science has shaped our educational institutions
toward a research ideal and away from a reflective, characterbuilding liberal-arts education. And, in a strange twist of fate,
Kimball also recognizes the role of the liberal-free ideal in harnessing science and research to the democratic and market-based
national project of the United States. And in this he anticipates
Nussbaum’s and Delbanco’s attempts to have our educational institutions, committed as they are to the research ideal, serve the
7. Ibid., 286.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 223, 225, 226.
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national or international life of democracies—a role formerly reserved for the artes liberales ideal.
In sum, historically and philosophically, with research and
disciplines firmly entrenched by the rise of science in the modern
university, all of these authors find themselves in a very difficult
position. They sense a pervasive cultural and ethical emptiness
related to the very institution of education to which their lives
are committed. They resist this emptiness by offering an alternative end to liberal education—call it democracy, humanity, or
faith—something other than research. Yet all supporters of liberal
education are faced with an institutional history that is well documented and that holds out little hope (but let us not say no hope)
of successfully wooing the disciplines and departments that mark
universities and colleges to the ends of liberal education.
Since all of these authors are interested in liberal education
and in renewing its institutional life, it is not a fault that they
should closely examine institutional histories of liberal education.
But the origins of liberal-arts education were not entirely institutional. As I will argue shortly, before and even after the innovative congregating of lecturers into medieval universities,
education in the liberal arts was often done outside an institutional context. This “outside” development matters because in
one way or another almost all of our authors acknowledge institutional atrophy at various points in the history of liberal education. And if, today, liberal-arts education is institutionally
“strangled” rather than atrophied, that is all the more reason to
examine sources outside academe, or sources within academe
that are not currently predominant in models of education, for inspiration in renewing liberal-arts education. In particular, the
transition from Aquinas to Bacon has as its backdrop the rise of
universities—but the actual stage was filled with liberal artists
outside of academia who were actively developing new educations, arts, and sciences. The work of these liberal artists may
provide us with generative—perhaps even transformative—models, grounded in the classics, that can contribute appreciably to
institutional revival of the liberal arts.
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Through tracing the specific use of the words “liberal education” and “liberal arts,” Kimball concludes that, as a historical
fact, liberal education based in a normative curriculum of the
seven liberal arts simply didn’t exist until the late Roman
Empire.10 Thus, the seven liberal arts, which eventually became
the trivium and quadrivium, circumscribe what Kimball takes
historically to be the instantiation of a liberal-arts curriculum.
Under Roman development, the general artes liberales educational ideal becomes firmly tied to “the goal of training the good
citizen to lead society,” as well as to the “prescription of values
and standards for character and conduct,” through this normative
curriculum.11 To cut a very complicated story short: this ideal and
its primus-inter-pares art was rhetorical, and the situation remained so until the rise of the medieval university.12 That rise is
accompanied by the rise of philosophy as the organizing discipline of university education. Kimball finds that when medieval
universities began to concentrate on theoretical matters or systematic matters of philosophy, a “philosophic” curriculum replaced an oratorical one.
This “revolution” and “transformation” is traced to “the
rediscovery and translation of the lost philosophical learning
of Greek antiquity, especially the corpus of Aristotle . . . [as
well as] Arabic, Jewish and other Greek writings on mathematics and natural science.”13 But in Kimball’s analysis, the
philosophic takeover of the liberal-arts curriculum does not
give rise to a philosophic ideal associated with it that can be
described as a systematic ideal for liberal education. One
might have expected the liberal arts to have been strengthened
by four developments that occurred during this time: the new
relative importance of logic; the rise of “technical and
schematized artes”; the formation of “a curriculum of liberal
education dedicated to scientiae speculativae” within medieval universities; and the innovation of grammatica specu10. Ibid., 3, 25, 29.
11. Ibid., 37.
12. Ibid., 31-33.
13. Ibid., 58, and 61.
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lativa as an investigation of the universal grammar that “underlies the different grammars of all languages.” On the contrary, the septem artes diminished in importance, largely
owing to Aquinas’s dictum that “the seven liberal arts do not
sufficiently divide theoretical philosophy” and the emergence
of new studies in graduate programs. All of this led to a distinct separation of the seven arts from philosophy within the
curriculum of new medieval universities.14 All of this leads
Kimball’s argument to an unstated conclusion: the liberal arts
were not being led by philosophy; they were slowly being trivialized or supplanted by it. To push the unstated conclusion a
step further: despite many innovations in logic and grammar,
as well as in mathematics, the scientiae speculativae that supplanted the liberal arts were not really sciences in our modern
sense. So, to read backwards from Kimball’s Enlightenment
identification of the liberal-free ideal’s characteristics, the medieval rediscovery of the ancients seems not to have been an
exercise in “freedom from a-priori strictures and standards”
nor “a critical skepticism” linked to “scientific method.”15
On the other hand, the humanists’ interest in oratorical
skills allowed the liberal arts to flourish successfully outside
the universities during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Kimball finds, that beginning with Petrarch’s interest in Cicero and Quintilian, the artes liberales ideal leads to a revival
and spread of enthusiasm for literature among the general public, but a widespread revival of studying literary classics in
the curricula of universities did not take hold until the middle
of the fifteenth century.16
A similar historical development occurred in the emergence of modern science, notwithstanding Newton’s appointment at Cambridge, the pursuit of philosophy in the name of
the New Science of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza
led to a blockade of natural philosophy from the curricula of
14. Ibid., 66 and 71.
15. Ibid., 120-121.
16. Ibid., 80.
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universities. The philosophically based liberal-free ideal
emerges outside of the universities, relying for its support on
widespread Enlightenment attachment to freedom and rationality. The ideal does not shape curricula until it combines with
the re-organization of German universities under the research
program in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
That re-organization, in turn, leads to the destruction, in the
U.S., of the more or less uniform liberal-arts curricula by the
nineteenth century’s end.17 These historical threads, Kimball
shows, are the roots of the two ideals that lay claim to the title
of liberal education. Infrequent and mostly unstable accommodations between these two ideals, Kimball says, with a few
precedents in the nineteenth century, only happened in the
twentieth.18
Since the rhetorical ideal and its foundational art, rhetoric,
was excluded from universities in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, while the philosophical, liberal-free ideal and its
new sciences were excluded from the sixteenth to nearly the
end of the eighteenth centuries, the faculties shaping university curricula for long periods in the West have excluded one
or another version—or, at least, significant portion—of what
could be termed “liberal education.” So then, we might ask, in
these periods where did liberal arts and liberal education go?
Kimball recognizes that humanists outside the universities
were concerned, beyond politics, with the “development of
personality.” 19 In Bruni’s fourteenth-century letter to Lady
Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro on “the Study of Literature,”
this shift has importance to the ideal, the curriculum, and the
goal of education. Bruni is addressing a woman who must, of
course, “leave the rough-and-tumble of the forum entirely to
men.” What, then, is she studying for? This turns out to be
“human excellence,” which transcends the historical circumstances of political life: “There is, indeed, no lack of examples
of women renowned for literary study and eloquence that I
17. Ibid., 146.
18. Ibid., 151, 153, 186, 221.
19. Ibid., 78.
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could mention to exhort you to excellence.” Here Bruni cites
Cornelia, Sappho, and Aspasia.20
The point of Bruni’s urging is to form a liberal education outside the university and the common expectations of men.21 In
consequence, Bruni does not recommend a technical study of
rhetoric, but rather a grammatical and broad “knowledge of sacred letters” (54), philosophy, and poetry. What Bruni is doing is
explicitly substituting for the Ciceronian, highly developed, technical elaboration of rhetorical distinctions and artifices (no “practice of the commonplaces” nor study of “knotty quaestiones to
be untied”) the broader literatures of history, philosophy, and poetry, which are exercised in writing.22 While his treatise’s intellectual roots lie in grammatical considerations of such authors as
Augustine and Isadore, Bruni is accomplishing a re-ordering of
liberal education that is new and innovative. It is neither directed
toward philosophy in the medieval sense, nor directed toward salvation in the Christian sense, nor directed toward statecraft and
citizenship in the Roman sense. The character one achieves is that
of a fine artist.
Invention is the principal organizing part of Ciceronian, and
indeed Roman, rhetoric. Invention is the discovery or devising
of things, arguments or signs, to render a case probable or true
(De Inventione, I, vi, 9). As such, invention is embedded in the
artes liberales ideal. Commonplaces or topoi are central to invention and (De Topica, I, ii 7; De Partitione Oratoria I, ii, 9;
xx, 68) one of principal technical features which dialectic shares
with rhetoric is the use of commonplaces or topoi.
These features of invention, discovery, and commonplaces,
ultimately, suggest ground of accommodation between Kimball’s two ideals. Three works beyond Bruni may serve as examples. Machiavelli’s Prince, in its operational concerns, its
20. Leonardo Bruni. “The Student of Literature To Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, trans. Craig W.
Kallendorf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 47-63.
21. Ibid., 47-48.
22. Ibid., 53, 55.
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focus on the problem of new states, and its topical organization
of how to analyze a state or ruler’s situation falls well within the
traditions of expedience and invention characteristic of the
rhetorical tradition. Galileo’s Starry Messenger is the application
of dialectical commonplaces derived from observation of nature.
The moon is examined first as whole, which is light, and then as
a whole which is dark; its parts are, then, divided into light and
dark, and its boundaries into continuous and discrete.23 The entire
treatise continues in similar fashion as it produces its four major
discoveries. Finally, Bacon, readily acknowledging in the New
Organon that current philosophy and arts are “use[ful] for supplying matters for disputations or ornaments for discourse,” distinguishes between “methods [of] cultivation” of those matters
and “invention of knowledge” which he is engaged in developing.24 The sciences should be “methods for invention or directions
for new works.”25 Yet, much of his analysis is directed less toward
the experimental manipulation of phenomena, than the re-ordering of the mind, or “intellectual operations” by frameworks properly adapted to nature.26 The analysis of the blocks to scientific
progress, occupying the first book of the New Organon, is presented as a series of “aphorisms,” a dialectical term indicating
definitions or important distinctions. These aphorisms either
move toward properly orienting the mind or showing that current
systems of disputation, philosophy, and experience distract the
mind. Indeed, Bacon sounds something like Bruni, for he says
that, “my purpose [is not to ‘found a new sect of philosophy’ but]
to try whether I cannot . . . extend more widely the limits, of the
power and greatness of man.”27
By converting the principal part of rhetoric, invention, into its
23. Galileo Galilei. “The Starry Messenger,” in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. and ed. by Stillman Drake (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 21-58, esp. 31.
24. Francis Bacon, “New Organon,” in Selected Philosophical Works,
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 63-206; 88, aphorism 8; 90.)
25. Ibid., 90, aphorism 8.
26. Ibid., 92, aphorism 18.
27. Ibid., 138, aphorism 118.
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end, the aphorisms take on the character, not of persuasion or eloquence, but discovery. The “Interpretation of Nature” in Book II,
which is either to increase man’s powers over natures or to discover
the form of a nature, is carried on in aphorisms. And, in illustrating
discovery which is subsumed under the invention of knowledge,
Bacon outlines a procedure of collecting physical instances, instead
of opinions, forming tables of instances (of the presence or absence
of the nature in question), and, then, applying “induction”—that
is, separation, inclusions, and exclusions of the sought for nature
from other natures—based on the table of instances.28
Bacon criticized the arts and philosophies of his day as useless
in the production of knowledge. Galileo tired of “long and windy
debates.” Machiavelli pitted imaginary constructions of polities
and ideal descriptions of human behavior against the usefulness of
his treatise based in “realities.” Bruni not only found scholastic
subjects to be useless, but also clearly tried to provide a liberal education for a woman while wondering whether the standard rhetorical arts educated men at all. I want to stress here that in the hands
of these authors the liberal arts were essential in challenging and
criticizing the learning that came before. Yet, however much all
these authors argued their separation from the past or their differences with current versions of education, none of their protests can
obscure the continuity of art that tied the past to the present. So the
transition from Aquinas to Bacon was actually a roadway paved
by innovation as individuals attempted to extend the liberal arts
into many different areas—including, apparently, areas universities
simply wouldn’t touch.
Now, Kimball acknowledges that the artes liberales ideal incorporates a critical skepticism, yet, in the end, he concludes that
this skepticism “misses the point of the scientific method: any conclusions inferred become new hypotheses and are always subject
to challenge and criticism.”29 So, let us ask: While the hypothesis
28. Ibid., 178, aphorism 21.
29. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 121, 172; see also 225-26. This
same objection is reformulated in Kimball’s characterization of the mutual misunderstanding of each other’s position over the phrase “criticism of life” that Huxley and Arnold both employed.
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may well be essential to the science of a liberal-free ideal, is it the
hypothesis or, on the contrary, the continuous growth of knowledge
that is essential to the liberal-free ideal as a whole? Kimball was
not the first to conclude that the German research university
changed American institutions toward something like the liberalfree ideal. And research—not hypotheses or laboratories per se—
is what changed higher education from within:
Visiting American graduate students and professors returned from German universities enamored of the specialized scholarship, the commitment to speculative
research, and, above all, the atmosphere of freedom
they had seen in their host institutions. Particularly this
latter aspect—Lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach what one
wishes) and Lernfreiheit (freedom to study what one
wishes)—impressed the Americans. [The atmosphere
of freedom] was seen “to follow from the searching
function, the presumption that knowledge was not
fixed or final,” a presumption underlying all aspects of
the idealized German university that the Americans
took to be “dedicated to a search to widen the bounds
of knowledge rather than merely to preserve the store
of knowledge undiminished.”30
Thus, the question of whether hypotheses or the growth of
knowledge is essential to the liberal-free ideal is not without significance. The former, representing science, tends to draw a firm
distinction between the humanities and the sciences; the latter,
representing the humanities, tends to admit that instances of significant mutual influence shape education. The former tends to
restrict criticism to specialists. The latter tends to make criticism
and critical thought dependent on broad views of knowledge.
If in their artistic inventions Bruni, Machiavelli, Galileo, and
Bacon were using the liberal arts, then, they were “proving opposites.” But they were not simply constructing arguments opposed to works of the past. They were constructing extensions of
30. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 161, quoting Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship: 1770-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
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the arts they knew, the liberal arts. They thought that they were
breaking with a past of instruction and knowledge in the liberal
arts; yet, because arts proceed by invention, not hypothesis, these
artists refashioned liberal-arts ends, principal parts, techniques,
and devices, and made them suitable for new discoveries of
knowledge, new feats of action, new methods of production, new
formations of character, and new explorations for expanding the
bounds of human inquiry. In other words, invention is the characteristic response of the liberal arts to the project of continuing
the quest for knowledge. In our context, invention provided the
bridge between old and new knowledge, while it simultaneously
constructed both the distinction between past and future, and also
the distinction between the sciences and the humanities. Thus, in
the transition between Aquinas and Bacon, liberal-arts invention
provided as much continuity as discontinuity. The foundation for
an accommodation between the liberal-free ideal and the artes
liberales ideal appears, therefore, to be inherent in the development of the New Philosophy or New Science, and, more deeply,
inherent in the liberal arts themselves.31
The complex interrelations among the liberal-arts projects
of Bruni, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Bacon suggest that the places
to look for liberal education not only include institutional curricula, but individual instances that evidence liberal learning or
31. In 2003, the Association of Core Texts and Courses began a threeyear NEH grant, “Bridging the Gap Between the Humanities and Sciences.” The grant had three summer syllabi on “Motion and Natural
Law in the Physical and Political World,” “Life, Origins, Purposivenesss, and Transformations,” and “Technology, Art, Values, and the
Problems of Technoscience.” All three syllabi began with ancient Greek
texts; the first ended with texts of the seventeenth century; the others
ended with later texts. Teams from ten institutions—each composed of
one humanist, one scientist, and one administrator drawn from any discipline—attended the sessions and to their home institutions to devise
curricula and even teaching teams that “bridged the gap.” The whole
effort was inconceivable without a liberal-arts orientation. See
http://www.coretexts.org/projects-and-grants/neh-grant-bridging-thegap-between-the-humanities-and-sciences.
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education. All of these authors were learning via the liberal arts;
only one of them was doing it in a university, and he found few
who embraced his extension of dialectical methods. No curriculum for women existed until Bruni devised one for Lady Battista.
No widespread method of science existed until Bacon articulated
one. These examples of individuals practicing and acquiring liberal education outside of an academic institution show that an
“artes liberales accommodation”—a synthesis of the artes liberales and liberal-free ideals of education— not only might have
occurred earlier than we usually think, but also might have been
more persistent and coherent in educational history than seems
apparent.
All of our authors demonstrate an acute awareness of the
work of predecessors. Galileo is, of course, the patron saint of
scientists; and though Bacon may or may not capture the essence
of science, no one doubts he was advocating for what is recognized as modern science by first reviewing works and knowledge from the past. Thus, it was the liberal arts that first brought
us research in its nascent form, before it reached the universities.
Is there, then, an illustration of humanities research requiring
liberal education by an individual after research reaches the universities? An example is depicted by Henry Adams in his book,
The Education of Henry Adams.32 Adams was a man groomed
by lineage and by a stale antebellum, Harvard liberal-arts education to become, later, one of America’s foremost specialized
historians of the nineteenth century at his alma mater, during the
very time that Harvard made the transition from a college to a
research university.33 Yet, the book’s first person narrative
shows that in the opening of his specialized historical study to
any source of knowledge or human achievement, an opening
which begins in the 1890’s well after his undergraduate education and his life as a professor had ended, Adams exhibits some
of the finer uses of liberal-arts, core-text study. His service in
32. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams in Adams: Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of Henry
Adams (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 715-1181.
33. Ibid., 777 and 993-997.
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Great Britain during the American Civil War, followed by
comic revelations, some thirty years after the fact, by principals of the British government about their real motives in considering entering the war on behalf of the South in 1862,
convinced Adams that private experience, or even, a research
career devoted to historical analysis of American Presidencies,
was too small a scale for adequate judgment of the motives of
men—or, what was the same, “a chart of history.”34 This conviction was augmented, in part, by his friendship with John
Hay, the Secretary of State, who quickened Adams’s interest
in the international scale of human relations—the true locus,
Adams ultimately decides, that determines the motives of
human beings. Only as Adams moved from the local to the remote, only as he took an interest in symbols, only as he began
to study seriously not only politics, but science, art, religious
thought, and their core monuments—at Chartres, in the theology of Aquinas, in the dynamo, in the discoveries of Curie, in
the art of LaFarge—and added these to his store of diplomatic
and governmental knowledge—only then did he discover the
Education of Henry Adams.35
The education Adams garnered at the end of his life was a
preparation for a new theory, a new art, a new science—in this
case a theory of history. But let us make a quick induction using
all of the authors we have discussed. The proper use of education, and particularly the liberal arts, is to render students capable of making available to themselves the world’s cultural
resources in order to construct a future. Adams’s employment
of cultural history as the means for his re-education suggests, as
do the works of our other authors, that no one should presuppose
education begins with firm, well-grounded disciplinary assumptions and then proceeds to the mastery of the discipline’s tools.
Actually, it seems to be quite the opposite: if we are to offer students real education, then we are obliged to abandon the presumption of given disciplines and construct a curriculum in
34. Ibid., 1105.
35. Ibid., 1066ff and 1109ff.
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which students may explore and conceive the foundations of disciplines for themselves.36
In constructing such curricula, there is an obvious need for liberal-arts education to select core texts. This brings us back to several arguments mentioned earlier: namely, that ancient, medieval,
and early modern moral teachings can be reduced to restraint; or
that a proper selection of texts can promote the correct democratic
values and skills; or that the limitlessness of technology is destroying our culture and character. Each of these serious arguments may
be true, but they simply don’t come close to expressing the fullness
that a liberal-arts education can offer. The liberal arts have never
been merely moral, ethical, political, and cultural. They are fundamentally inventive and transformative. We remember that Aeschylus disapproved so much of the blood-bath at the end of the
Odyssey that he devised a tragic trilogy, the Oresteia, to celebrate
the creation of the jury trial, in which justice, and not merely revenge, could be felt by all. I recall the attempt in Plato’s Republic
to replace Homer with philosophy, and rhetoric with dialectic as
the basis of education—and, perhaps, of society. We remember Aristotle writing—in a society that seemed unaware of human rights
in general, and of the right of expression in particular—a treatise
on art which defended its own governing principles. We recall that
the Aeneid not only artfully incorporates the two Homeric epics,
but also incorporates art into Aeneas’s education. In having Aeneas
gaze upon the artfully wrought wall of Carthage, and upon Vulcan’s artfully wrought shield, and upon the artfully wrought belt
of Turnus, Virgil incorporates art into the education of his hero—
36. I mean to suggest that by continuously returning to the principal parts
of liberal arts—poetic and rhetorical invention, as well as dialectical discovery—the liberal arts and their associated core texts played a significant
artistic role in developing the new philosophy or new science. In the same
way, they may continue to develop human innovation today. This argument
can be extended across civilizations backward in time, and forward toward
the present-day sciences, particularly in their use of the humanities and
liberal arts to explain themselves. Examples are: Darwin’s Origin of
Species; portions of Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity; Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity; Feynman’s QED; Wilson’s Consilience.
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an education into a vast enterprise beyond his ken—in a way that
neither Homer nor most of the Biblical writers employ. We recall
the importance of books—scriptures—to ancient Jews and Christians, not only in the canon that became the Bible, but in the remarkable synthesis of writers and texts that Ezra seems to have
read to the people of Jerusalem as he united them after their second
exile. We remember from the opening “archaeology” of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War the kind of works one
reads matters. And we recall the sharp contrast between the Athenian virtues of Pericles’s “Funeral Oration” and the Judeo-Christian
virtues of Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount”—the importance of the
soul in each, together with the enormous differences of those souls
and their purposes. And we remember Augustine’s struggle with
the uses of the liberal arts and the wealth of pagan works his society
possessed as he came to be not only one of the greatest expositors
of the Bible, but also one of the chief agents who synthesized
Athens and Jerusalem into a single educated culture.
And so I think we arrive at a justification for great books or
core texts which is, perhaps, essential if our moral, cultural, political, or religious perceptions of the past’s resources are to be made
available to us in a way that is promising and fruitful. Often we
read core texts from many disciplines to explore ideas as a way to
enlarge student experience. This is laudable, but in exploring great
ideas, it seems to me that we don’t want to lose the thread of our
own story—I mean the story of making books. This is the story
about writing books, about reading and contemplating them, and
about building educations around them. As I have suggested above,
the production of books is part of the larger story of made things,
the story of art, technē. Technē has been a chief source of change
in civilization almost since its inception, and if you want to learn
how and why culture, religion, literature, philosophy, morals, and
science change, you must read books of great depth and invention
across genres, disciplines, cultures, and eras.37 When we do present
37. By a book I mean any written work that comes down to us, and which,
of course, may be found in many different media—scrolls, velum, hypertext, and someday, I suspect, something like holographic-imaging ipods.
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the story of making books—and, more broadly, the story of developing arts—and when we build an education around them, it is not
only our students who gain a powerful resource for building the
future. We, the educators, do so as well.
Specific liberal arts are instantiations of technē, that intellectual
virtue concerned with making something out of the world of the
variable, bringing something into existence that otherwise might
not be. And the essence of a liberal-arts education is the development of artistry in relation to making—technē in relation to poiēsis.
Here we approach, at first, what are collectively known as the fine
arts. In a discussion of liberal education, literature has something
of a pride of place in any list of fine arts because of the early development of the education fashioned by Isocrates and Cicero. Yet neither Isocrates nor Cicero best capture what freedom of artistry is
about, as Aristotle did in the final chapters of the Poetics. Throughout the Poetics an argument builds that poetry is something more
philosophic—more general—than history, and that, indeed, its function is not to narrate or dramatize “the thing that has happened, but
a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible” [italics
mine] (1451a 36). The argument continues to the end with a defense
of poets and poetry against the challenges of philosophers, politicians, and technical disciplinarians who in their systems and educational plans always tie art to the truth. Aristotle reminds us that
the standard of correctness “is not the same . . . in poetry (poiētikēs)
as in politics or, indeed, in any other art (technē).” Indeed, if, an
“error” in any art object was useful, if the poet meant to “describe
[a thing] in some incorrect way . . . [so that] it serves the end of poetry itself,” then objections by other disciplines about the product
or the artistry are really to no avail. This is even the case in moral
questions, for in the Poetics Aristotle’s interest in poetry is not
whether an action or character conforms to a specific ethical or political system, or models or cultivates a specific character in the audience; his interest is in what to consider when answering whether
“something said or done in a poem is morally right or not.” That is,
he is concerned with “intrinsic qualities of the actual word or deed,”
as well as the agent, the purpose, the patient, the means, the time,
and the relations of the actions to greater or lesser goods or evils.
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More generally, then, Aristotle’s Poetics is far less concerned with
constructions that use rhythm, language, and harmony as matters
of truth, than as matters of what might be: “If the poet’s description
be criticized as not true to fact, one may urge perhaps that the object
ought to be as described—an answer like that of Sophocles, who
said that he drew men as they ought to be” (1460b33-35).
In the Poetics, Aristotle takes poetry’s side by constructing a
dialectical defense. The defense depends on a criticism which investigates poetry in its own terms, that is, in the internal functioning
of its products. In this sense, when we come to consider the construction of curricula of books, the Poetics, notwithstanding Aristotle’s statements about liberal education in his Politics, structures
a liberal-arts education and promotes the free character that it produces, for such an education is less a study of the truth, than of the
possibilities humans have invented and made for themselves.
The point is extendable to all books, as well as to literature and
artistry from any discipline. Thus, a similar point about the object
of a liberal education is suggested by Aristotle for “literary” constructions such as Bruni’s, Machiavelli’s, Galileo’s, and Bacon’s.
Aristotle makes a distinction in his Parts of Animals between “two
distinct kinds of proficiency”: “scientific knowledge” and “educational acquaintance” with any subject. Indeed, the mark of a “universal [i.e, general] education” is for the holder of such an education
to “to be able to form a fair offhand judgment as to the goodness or
badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition.” And
this acquired ability applies to “all or nearly all branches of knowledge” (639a1-10). Subsequently, Aristotle constructs a dialectical
set of questions pertaining to characteristics of animals and the
processes which lead to the formation of those characteristics, as
well as a review of how earlier authors had treated both characteristics and processes. And, indeed, he analogizes this treatment arising out of general education to analyses of art (640a25-33). In sum,
tracing the invention of fine arts or sciences or the characteristics
and foundations of such arts and sciences relies on a process of
“criticism” (kritikon) “quite independent of the question whether
the statements [in a work] be true or false” (639a14-15). What is at
stake educationally is knowledge of the available and variable
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means of construction for any given art or science. This is what
freedom in artistry is. Education needs institutions and curricula in
which students can acquire the arts that make such constructions
available.
I have used Bruce Kimball’s distinctions between the artes liberales and liberal-free ideals and traditions of education to suggest
that the accommodations in higher education during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have stronger, longer, more continuous historical foundations than seem apparent from educational
documents and curricula created during the same period.
So far we have seen that the principal parts of the liberal arts—
rhetorical invention and dialectical discovery—played a significant
artistic role in developing the new philosophy or new science ideal.
Furthermore, we have seen that the long tradition of the liberal arts
is concerned with transformative arts, ideas, and culture. And, finally, we have seen that the free character of a liberal artist is not
only a propaedeutic for research, but also a source of invention and
imagination for the future.
Each of these considerations seems to have implications for the
future of the liberal arts in research universities and colleges. If it is
plausible that the liberal-arts accommodation—that is, recognizable
liberal-arts curricula, innovation, and a productive, but not stifling,
link to research—has stronger, systematic ties to education than
might be suspected, then we should see these ties in histories of institutions, as well as in analyses of the place of liberal-arts education
up to the current time.38 Kimball focuses on the liberal-arts influ38. Certainly, Kimball’s analysis that a artes liberales accommodation
had real intellectual impetus and some institutional steam by the end of
the nineteenth century is right. Indeed, I think Adams is an individual
instance. But because faculties in the early modern era used to exclude
either the artes liberales ideal or the research ideal, educational historians should not expect to find many instantiations of institutional artes
liberales accommodations until sufficient “steam” develops. Nonetheless, there was some inherent intellectual “inertia” for an accommodation much further back in history than the nineteenth century, and that
inertia, while not a driving force, is still significant for institutions even
at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
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ences of a complex of three related universities and colleges—Columbia, Chicago, and St. John’s. Although he analyzes them quite
sympathetically and sensitively, he nevertheless regards them as
unsuccessful accommodations—not because their programs
foundered, but because their models failed to spread widely, and
when they did spread, they tended not to persist.
Let me take Chicago as my example in this regard, and discuss
the opinions of two key figures in its relation to core texts and liberal arts: Richard McKeon and Leo Strauss.
Strauss first. To cut very short his very complex analysis of
liberal education: the history of Western culture is the history of
solving the problems of governance in a democracy, ultimately
by creating a democratic aristocracy of citizens educated in their
country’s and culture’s intellectual traditions of political science
and freedom. The current problems of governance involve providing wisdom to guide the technological and dehumanizing influences of modern science and systematic tyranny. The great
books stand as a bulwark in this fight: through them, citizens can
discuss what they should value. For researchers like Strauss, the
historical investigation he outlines is education: “education is in
a sense the subject matter of my teaching and research.” Political
science is the science of liberal education.39
For McKeon, the Chicago approach to general eduction—
which is to say, the university approach—is grounded in disciplines and relates them through broadening and widening arts,
methods, ideas, and even sciences. The innovation at Chicago
was not that professors were to survey ever wider swaths of subjects. Nor was it that a professor was to give courses in highly
developed specialized methods that were then to be applied to
previously unsuspected areas of study. Rather, the innovation was
that, to broaden the context in faculty discussions of the so-called
humanities, “the methods employed and developed were the lib39. This admittedly truncated summary is derived from “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9-25, and “What Is Liberal Education?”, ibid., 1-8.
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eral arts.” Those discussions, using different liberal arts, were
necessarily interdisciplinary. In other words, they related one liberal art to another, or one formulation of a discipline to another,
via the liberal arts. For McKeon, general education implied purposeful interdisciplinary attempt to unify the fractured humanistic
subjects and departments through methodical (which is to say,
artful) inquiry—even when disciplines disagreed on what was
said about their subjects.40 The point of McKeon’s discussion of
the Chicago new college was that the design of the college, implied by Hutchins’s stated design of the general education he outlined in the Higher Education in America, was to transform
graduate schools and the organization of their disciplines, even
their research, through general education.41 In these ways, McKeon’s education orders a free character, but the ordering is to
knowledge, not to wisdom, or prudence, or even citizenship. In
both cases, the liberal-free ideal was accommodated to the artes
liberales ideal in that the liberal arts were being used to invigorate research and curricula, not the other way around.
The varieties of Chicago curricula and programs, the conceptions of liberal education that arose out of the different divisions, and the faculty who met there and migrated elsewhere
created a pluralism of ideas about liberal-arts education through
great books or core texts. These different visions have generated
a plethora of liberal-arts developments in institutions around
the world. To point to just a few: Shimer College, Saint Mary’s
College of California, the University of Notre Dame’s Program
of Liberal Studies, Thomas Aquinas College, the University of
Dallas, the Erasmus Institute, the Liberal Arts College of Concordia University in Montreal, the Chinese University of Hong
40. Richard McKeon, “Criticism and the Liberal Arts: The Chicago
School of Criticism” in Profession 1982, ed. Phyllis P. Franklin and
Richard I. Brod, (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982), 2-4.
41. I have argued this more thoroughly, both in a speech given at Marroquín University (see note 44 below), and in a speech delivered in the Public Lecture Series at Shimer College: “Re-thinking Universities and
Hutchins: Faculty and Student Resistance to Core Text Curricula,” which
can be found on the web at http://j.mp/j-scott-lee-at-schimer-college.
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Kong, and Boya College of Sun-Yatsen University are all of
them in some way closely or distantly intellectually, educationally, and personally related to the three institutions mentioned
above. All of these institutions have had self-reflective faculty
who have published materials on some aspect of liberal-arts education. One of them, The University of Dallas, developed a
great books program in literature unrelated to Chicago/Columbia/St. John’s, and then welcomed Straussians to teach in their
core. All of them have different configurations of curricula, different internal organizations, different purposes for a baccalaureate, and different relations between general education and
research.42 The accommodationist ideal has, in fact, stimulated
42. Prior to arriving at Chicago, McKeon and Mortimer Adler were involved together at Columbia with the professors who developed the Contemporary Civilization core sequence and, later, the Literature-Humanities
core sequence. Ultimately, each of these sequences replaced the departmental offerings of general education courses that, in the early twentieth
century, had preceded the requirements for graduation from Columbia.
To this day, Columbia offers a bachelor’s degree without a major. Scott
Buchanan was involved in adult education spin-offs of Columbia in New
York City before he and Hutchins came to Chicago to develop liberal
education programs. Saint John’s College developed, partly, out of this
complex of institutions and personalities. St. John’s curriculum entirely
eschewed the departmental-disciplinary basis of the Chicago program,
while it retained the liberal arts, and it explicitly identified its program
with the great books and authors of the Western world. In 1953, Notre
Dame, in large part through the work of Otto Byrd, whose teachers included Adler, McKeon, and Etienne Gilson (Otto Byrd, My Life as A
Great Bookie, [San Francisco : Ignatius Press, 1991], 46 ff. and 66ff.)
organized a three-year major called the Program of Liberal Studies on
the basis of disciplinary courses that stretch across all the fields found
at Chicago; but Notre Dame retained the idea of interdisciplinary reading
seminars that characterized St. John’s program. A 1941 article by Adler,
delivered to the American Catholic Philosophical Association’s Western
Division, on “The Order of Learning” (in The Moraga Quarterly [Autumn 1941]: 3-25) sparked at first a short-lived attempt (1943-44) and
then the enduring establishment of classics-based liberal-arts education
programs at Saint Mary’s College of California; this ultimately resulted
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LEE
41
the invention of institutions and innovative programs that are
enormously different. Rhodes College’s “Search” courses (formerly “Man” courses) and Yale University’s Directed Studies
Program illustrate innovations not depending on personal conin a St. John’s-like program for a major, alongside a four-semester great
books program taken by those who majored in a discipline. (See What
Is It To Educate Liberally? Essays by Faculty and Friends of St. Mary’s
College [St. Mary’s College: Office of the President, 1996], 1-28).
Though modified, both programs are still running. Shimer College
adopted one version of the Chicago-Hutchins, or “new college,” curriculum, but it has no departments and, for the baccalaureate, only four general concentrations, including one in science; it has carefully staged
integrative courses and requirements in every year of its curriculum.
Straussians graduated from Chicago and went, in particular, to the
University of Dallas. There, in conjunction with literary specialists who
formed a core sequence of genre studies unrelated to political science
that was conceived by Louise and Donald Cowan (who were in turn influenced by southern critics at Vanderbilt), the university faculty formed
a disciplinary core leading to majors that had no interdisciplinary courses
but was founded on great books. This new curriculum transformed the
education at that institution. The University of Dallas founded the only
graduate program explicitly using the Western Great Books, which offers
three PhDs in political science, philosophy, and literature. Its graduates
not only have staffed institutions across America, but also have helped
to re-organize the New England Political Association so that there is a
“core text/political philosophy” section of the Association’s annual meeting that contributes more than a third of the papers at the meeting.
Meanwhile, at Columbia, William Theodore deBary rejected Adler’s
and Hutchin’s contention that great books education had to consist only
of books from the Western tradition. For over fifty years, and continuing
to this day, deBary has translated or collaborated in the translation of
Chinese texts, and has argued for the inclusion of these texts in some
courses of the Columbia core. Although his work took place during the
period when China has risen to threaten the U.S. while at the same time
destroying its own cultural traditions in the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution, deBary’s work has no tinge of cultural superiority
about it, for it is not rooted in Greek education or Enlightenment political
philosophy as is Strauss’s. In so far as he is concerned with the core program at Columbia, deBary wishes to “liberate the powers of the indi-
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tact with the complex of institutions above, but emerging rather
from an awareness of problems and solutions in general education.43
vidual by disciplining them” (Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 4).
His work is part of a larger effort by the University Committee on Asia
and the Middle East to incorporate Chinese, Indian, and Islamic texts
into the core, as well as to develop sophisticated research programs. St.
John’s, motivated by its own experience in teaching great works, has
also developed at its Santa Fe campus a masters degree in Eastern Classics, reading and discussing Indian and Chinese texts. In 1978, Frederick
Kranz, a graduate of Columbia, along with Harvey Shulman and Geoff
Fidler, establish a three-year liberal-arts baccalaureate college founded
on the Western great books tradition at Concordia University in Montreal. In the Far East, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, under the
direction of Cheung Chan Fai and Mei Yee Leung, recently developed
a two-course sequence in the humanities and sciences based on great
texts of the West and East, which owes part of its development both to
Chicago and to Columbia. This program provides a selection of general
education courses to fulfill the Chinese government’s mandate that
higher education institutions convert from the European, specialist,
three-year baccalaureate to the American, mixed, four-year baccalaureate. This list of institutions shows almost all the related forms and affiliations of the accommodated liberal-arts ideal as it is beginning to spread
from North America into the wider world. And yet this list hardly enumerates the whole network of core text programs found worldwide, nor does
it describe the role of the liberal arts in actually shaping that network.
43.Michael Nelson, ed., Celebrating the Humanities: A Half-Century of
the Search Course at Rhodes College (Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press, 1996), 3-31, begins with a post-World War I narrative of Charles
Diehl’s attempts to bring liberal education to Southwestern (now Rhodes)
College between the 1920s and 1950s. This program was based in Christian traditions, but with an awareness of the educational innovations at
Columbia, Chicago, and Vanderbilt. Justin Zaremby’s Directed Studies
and the Evolution of American General Education (New Haven: The
Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University, 2006), 32ff., says that
Maynard Mack, educated entirely at Yale, helped to devise and found the
program with Dean William Clyde DeVane. Mack was seeking to solve
the problems of “choice” that had arisen in general education, which were
the cause of the differences between Hutchins and Dewey.
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To a large extent, the Association of Core Texts and Courses
(ACTC) is a result of these accommodations and innovations.44
There have been two chief vehicles for ACTC’s growth, both related to the liberal arts. The annual Conference is the first vehicle,
the Liberal Arts Institute, the second. As a pluralist, my goal as
director of ACTC has been to maintain cross-disciplinary, general-education discussions notwithstanding higher education’s
habits of narrow disciplinarity. Part of what is at stake in having
such discussions is fairly obvious: faculty members get exposed
to ways of thought about their own disciplines that they will
44. A precursor to this paper was delivered as a speech entitled “Accommodating the Core Texts Tradition of Liberal Arts in Today’s Universities: History, ACTC, and Marroquín—An International Phenomenon,”
to the faculty of Marroquín University in Guatemala, in September of
2012. At this point in the text, the speech noted that “the Association
for Core Texts and Courses was co-founded by Stephen Zelnick and
myself in 1995 in order to bring together programs that used common
readings, taught in common courses, by shared faculty. The idea was
originally Zelnick’s, who was Director of Temple University’s Intellectual Heritage Program—a two course sequence of texts from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities stretching from ancient to
modern times required of every Temple undergraduate. He had discovered that the wide variety of professional associations at the time did
not really address educational issues of these kinds of programs. As the
organization grew, it encouraged faculty and institutions to develop and
use their own core text programs in their own fashion for their own institutional missions. . . .
After the first organizing conference, under my direction, ACTC
conferences took on the following structure: originally, paper proposals
were organized into panels over two days with each session exclusively
devoted to one of four categories: Interdisciplinary Questions, Science,
Social Science, or the Arts & Humanities, accordingly characterized by
texts, problems, or disciplines discussed—but not by faculty presenters.
That is, if you were a humanist and wished to address Newton’s Principia, that was fine. After about seven years, the membership voiced a
desire to have panels of the four categories appear in each session. Generally, this movement by the membership was an effort to allow conferees to attend the fields, perhaps the disciplines, which they were most
comfortable with.”
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rarely encounter at disciplinary conferences. Another part of what
is at stake is a little more subtle, though it can be found in almost
all the works I have discussed. Many core texts serve a dual role
in intellectual history: on the one hand, they help to found or articulate a discipline; on the other hand, their ideas, deep-seated
attitudes, or basic techniques migrate across disciplines. This is
true in regard both to Eastern and Western texts. So, for both of
these reasons, the determination to keep discussing great texts at
ACTC conferences plays an essential role in maintaining the liberal-arts orientation of the organization.
ACTC does not have a list of canonical texts that must be addressed in papers read at its conferences, though the “usual suspects” among ancient and modern authors frequently appear on
its panel sessions. There is an insistence that every paper address
a core text for at least three quarters of a page in a five-page
paper.45 The treatment of the text is up to the conferee. But what
is most important is whether a given text within a proposal, or a
set of texts within a collection of proposals, will spark an exchange of ideas about the ideas themselves, and about the programs, the texts, the teaching, or other matters of liberal-arts
concern. This is a matter of perception, not a matter of doctrine,
established argument, or disciplinary governance. It is frankly remarkable how many panels actually cohere quite well using texts
as the starting point for potential inquiry and discussion—
whether the panels are disciplinary or interdisciplinary in focus.
ACTC is filled with accomplished scholars and teachers, but
it exists to promote conversations about texts among faculty
members across institutions, programs, and disciplines. Here we
enter a fertile field deeply furrowed by a distinction Bruce Kimball discusses at the beginning of Orators and Philosophers: the
distinction between ratio and oratio. Disciplinary conferences
45. ACTC has published to date ten selected, peer-reviewed proceedings. Seven more are in various states of pre-publication. It also helped
to support the publication of Bruce Kimball’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Documentary History (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of
America, 2010), which made selections of core texts in the tradition
available to a wider public.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LEE
45
exist to offer extended versions of the ratio of a discipline—long
papers and complex panel sessions marked by highly specialized
arguments, and offering little actual time for serious questioning
and discussion. ACTC’s conferences exist for a quite different
reason. The first sentence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is, “Rhetoric is
the counterpart of dialectic.” The Greek word translated here as
“counterpart” is antistrophē—as in the return dance of the chorus
that leads to their exit from the stage. This, of course, makes dialectic into the strophe, and this has important implications for
the relation of these two verbal arts. First, one needs to know
which direction one is headed in. This is not always easy to figure
out, given the nature of language and the closeness of the two
arts. Because the intention of the conferences is to produce serious discussion around the seminar table, the brevity of the papers
leaves the direction of the conversation open. Second, even if a
presenter’s argument is either mainly rhetorical or mainly dialectical, the ensuing conversation will likely lead, at least, to reflections on what the argument would look like from the viewpoint
of the other art. Since there is no list of canonical works and no
standard set of disciplinary preconceptions that contain conversations within pre-set boundaries, ACTC presenters are asked at
least to consider a rationale for why their text should be considered a world classic or a text of major cultural significance. If
this defense were being made to a disciplinary audience, it might
well be entirely dialectical, since the audience already agrees on
the basic outlines of what belongs within the discipline’s boundaries. But because the audience at ACTC’s conferences are interdisciplinary, such defenses must be at least partly rhetorical,
insofar as it is aimed at persuading listeners from many disciplines to consider a text for inclusion in a liberal-arts program.
Even here, however, such a defense would become dialectical if
it focuses on what the liberal arts, a discipline, a text, or an idea
contributes to our understanding of education.
At the close of Orators and Philosophers, Kimball makes a
well pointed observation: In the academy “there is rarely a recognition that the means to accomplish the resuscitation of the community of learning lie in elevating and emphasizing the study of
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expression, rhetoric, and the textual tradition of the community.
Yet the means are self-evident. A community is, after all, a group
of people who talk to each other and do it well. This view of community was dear to Socrates, no less than to Cicero.”46 This is
what ACTC promotes: the opportunity for faculty members,
through the liberal arts and its traditions across all disciplines, to
co-operate in discussing, planning, and implementing general-education curricula. It is very much interested in oratio, in the expression of thought, communicated to others, that concerns itself
with the available resources of intellectual traditions across disciplines and cultures, and with the invention of educational programs that transmit the arts of absorbing and using those
resources. Its continuing mission is to join with all those who share
these aims to promote the invention, enrichment, and development
of more core text, liberal-arts programs in universities and colleges
of the future.
46. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 240.
�47
Definition and Diairesis
in Plato and Aristotle
Jon Lenkowski
The understanding of the essential definition that has come down
to us in modern times is traceable to Aristotle’s account of horismos in Book II of the Posterior Analytics. That is, we understand,
as Aristotle did, that by defining something, we “capture” it in
such a way that the definition completely “encloses” what is defined and delimits it from other things.
But common opinion—everyday understanding—makes a
much bolder claim, namely, that we only know something when
we have defined it and that, correspondingly, to define something
is to specify its nature, its essence, its whatness—to say, in other
words, what it is. Is this claim legitimate?
We know this question, “What is something?” to be peculiar
to Socrates; in fact we call it the Socratic question. To ask my
question about the legitimacy of common opinion’s claim, then,
in a somewhat different way: Was Socrates, in asking just this
very specific question, looking for a definition? Does the question “What is something?” seek a definition? And, conversely,
does definition give us the “what is” of something, the “what is”
of the thing defined?
In Book II of the Posterior Analytics Aristotle says, “definition is thought to be [italics mine] of the ‘what is’.” (“Horismos
tou ti estin einai dokei.” [90b4]). And again: “Since definition is
said to be an account of the ‘what is’. . . .” (“Horismos d’epeidē
Jon Lenkowski is a tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
This essay was presented as a lecture at St. John’s College and elsewhere. The author is especially indebted to Seth Benardete, Stewart
Umphrey, Peter Widulski, and Robert Williamson who were kind
enough to read one or another version of the essay over the years and
offer helpful advice.
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legetai einai logos tou ti esti. . . ” [93b29]. Italics in translation
from the Greek are the author’s.) But if definition is not only
thought to give the “what is” of something, but also really does
give it, then there ought to be no difficulty at all in answering the
“what is” question. Yet finding an adequate answer to this question
particularly is just what the dialogues present as the most difficult
of tasks. And this may indicate that a “definition” is not, after all,
what the question is asking for.
What exactly is it that definition attempts and what does it
actually accomplish? What exactly is it that definition gains for
us? What exactly is it that we do when we “define” something?
Precisely what is it that we know (or think we know) when we
possess the definition of something? An examination of this cluster of questions ought to show that “definition” must fail to meet
whatever demand the “what is” question is making upon us.
A horismos is the result of a horizein, a “bounding” or limiting. A horismos is thus that within which the defined is contained;
it is the outline of the thing. But in so limiting, the horismos “delimits,” or sets off, the defined from other things. Thus it is that
horismos is translated by “definition” (Latin definitio): a “de-fining” is literally a de-limiting. Does delimiting give us the “what
is”? To answer this question we must first turn from Aristotle to
Plato; for horismos understood as a delimiting derives directly
from the Platonic “division” (diairesis). Diairesis is a dividing
with begins with some rather comprehensive class (genos) and
ends in a horismos, which is also a class, though a very limited
one. Sophist 219a-221c provides an example of such a division:
Here Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger are preparing to hunt
down the sophist, to discover what the sophist is. The Stranger
has a “method” for the hunt (namely, division), but he thinks that,
before hunting something as difficult as the sophist (they have
him only in name at the outset [218c]), they ought to practice this
method by first hunting something “easier”; and he proposes “the
angler” as their practice quarry. Fig. 1 is a schematic presentation
of the steps that hunt and capture the angler by division.
As the scheme shows, it takes nine divisions to capture the
quarry. It should also be noticed that in the fourth division there is
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49
Art (Techne)
1
Productive
Acquisitive
2
By Exchange
By Capture or
Coercion
3
(Openly)
Disputation/Fighting
(In secret)
Hunting
4
Of Lifeless
Things
Of Living Things
(specifically
animals)
5
Of Land
Animals
Of Fluid
Animals
6
Of Winged Animals
(Fowling)
Of Water-bound
Animals (Fishing)
7
By Enclosures
By Striking
8
At Night
(Fire-hunting)
Daytime
(Barbhunting)
9
With Spears: Proceeding
Downward from Above
(Tridentry)
Fig. 1: Division of the Angler
With Hooks: Proceeding
Upward from Below
(Angling)
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an abrupt shift from procedure to object sought, and that in the
seventh division there is an abrupt shift back to procedure.
Should we be troubled by the fact that no justification at all is
given for these two shifts? There may indeed be other peculiarities about this and the other examples of presented by the dialogues. We will return to some of these peculiarities in a short
while.
It is the diairesis that progressively tightens the enclosure;
the horismos is the final enclosure, the enclosure brought to its
tightest possible state—this being determined both by the starting
point and by the manner in which the division was executed.
Four dialogues give accounts of diairesis: 1. Phaedrus 264e266b; 2. Sophist 219a-221c (id. 221d, ff. and 264c ff.); 3. Statesman 258b, ff.; 4. Philebus 16c-17a. Sophist and Statesman
provide by far the lengthiest illustrations, but Phaedrus and
Philebus give the most succinct generalized accounts.1 There are,
in the dialogues, two prescriptions for division: 1. to divide according to eide, according to the “natural joints” (kat’arthra), try1. There are numerous studies of diaresis. The following have been consulted in writing this essay: A.C.Lloyd, “Plato’s Description of Division” in Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics, ed. R.E.Allen (New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 219-230. Seth Benardete, “Plato
Sophist 223bl-7” in Phronesis 5 (1960): 129-139. Seth Benardete,
“Eidos and Diaeresis in Plato’s Statesman” in Philologus 107: 3/4
(1963) 193-226. Jakob Klein, “On Precision” in Lectures and Essays,
ed. Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis: St. John’s
College Press, 1985), 289-308. Jakob Klein, Plato’s Trilogy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977), Parts 2 and 4. Julius Stenzel, Studien zur Entwicklung der platonischen Dialektik (Leipzig: Teubner,
1931), especially ch. 4-8. Julius Stenzel, Zahl und Gestalt bei Platon
und Aristoteles (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959),
especially ch. 2-4, 6. J. B. Skemp, Plato’s Statesman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 66-82. G.E.R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 148-161. Francis M.
Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1957), 184-187. Reginald Hackforth, Plato’s Phaedrus (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, n.d.), 131-137. Reginald Hackforth, Plato’s Examination
of Pleasure (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970, repr.) 20-24.
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51
ing not to break any part (Phaedrus 265e1-3); 2. to cut “through
the middle” (dia meson), which is the safest way, and the way
more likely to find ideai (Statesman 262b6-7, e3; 265a4-5).
In the Prior Analytics (46a-b) and in the Posterior Analytics
(91b ff.), Aristotle presents an objection to the use of diairesis in
demonstration, on the grounds that diairesis does not give the ti
ēn einai of something, but really gives two exclusive alternatives
(that is, an exclusive disjunction); those who use it as a method
of proof, however, do not treat this as a disjunction but, discarding one side of the division, they really assume already what they
think they are in the process of proving. But, though he criticizes
diairesis as a method of proof or demonstration, he nevertheless
allows that it can be useful in reaching a horismos—as long as
the division is made, at each stage, into opposites which have no
intermediates (an ēi antikeimena hōn mē esti metaxu [Posterior
Analytics 97a21-22]), for this would be the only way to assure
the exhaustion of the genus. The divisions as actually carried out
by example in the dialogues, however, do not remain true to these
prescriptions. This not only suggests a disparity between the prescriptions as “ideals” and the concrete application of this
“method,” but, even more important, it calls into question the
prescriptions themselves.2
As for Phaedrus’s prescriptions, where are the “natural
joints”? Would it be possible to determine these with any certainty? Or would such a determination of these “natural joints”
be itself already a dividing? Would it be itself already having performed the division? And then what would be the prescription
for this division? To begin with some genus and divide it into its
“natural joints” would, moreover, seem to presuppose a prior
knowledge of the genus and of its internal differentiation. But
then what would the division itself accomplish?
2. See Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy, 149-150. On the impreciseness of
the divisions in the Statesman, see Skemp, Plato’s Statesman, 71-72
and Benardete, “Eidos and Diaeresis in Plato’s Statesman,” 196 ff. On
the impreciseness of the division in the Sophist, see Benardete, “Plato
Sophist 223bl-7.” On the impreciseness of diairesis in general, see
Klein, “On precision,” 295-302.
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As for Statesman’s prescription, how could you ever be certain that you had “cut through the middle”? At Sophist 220a6-8,
for example, is the division of animal into land-animal and fluidanimal (neustikon) made “through the middle” of animal? How
indeed could we be sure that we had cut through the middle? Can
we be certain that such a cut would not be into a “greater” and a
“lesser”? How could we know where the “middle” is? There are
innumerable ways of dividing the class animal into two. What
bearings do we have for determining which—if any—of these
cuts through the middle? Of all the possible ways of dividing animal into two, what tells us to divide according to the particular
division between land-animal and fluid-animal? Would this division even be possible, unless we were directed to do so by the
very object of our search—that is, unless our procedure were
guided already from the outset by the object we are seeking? But
if we already know this, then what does the division accomplish?
Furthermore—supposing one could do it—why should division
cut through the middle in the first place? Is it so certain that this
is the most advisable and the safest procedure?
As for Aristotle’s prescription, how could we be certain that
we had made an exhaustive and exclusive dichotomy at each step
in the division? In order to do this, wouldn’t we have to know already the genus and its inner differentiation? And then what
would the division accomplish?
In the Sophist something curious happens. In hunting down
the sophist, the initial division had been made in terms of hunting—and yet this category comes to be abandoned completely,
for the sophist comes to be understood ultimately in terms of
image-making (eikastikē), and not at all in terms of hunting. In
the Statesman too, one of the divisions is made in terms of nurturing herds—yet this is abandoned, and the statesman comes to
be understood in terms of weaving. But why doesn’t where we
end up reflect where we began? What has happened to the rigor
of method here? Why are we being led so unambiguously to see
3. Skemp, Plato’s Statesman, 67 ff., claims (correctly, I believe) that
Statesman’s account of diairesis is really the Platonic criticism of it as
a “method.” Klein, “On Precision,” 301-302, suggests that the excesses
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LENKOWSKI
53
the defects in this “method” called diairesis?3
All of these questions remain unanswered, both in the prescriptive and in the illustrative accounts of diairesis. This makes
the procedure questionable, even suspect. And it makes us ask
exactly what it is that diairesis does do. And if this “ procedure”
starts to look like a spurious one, then we have to ask why it is
put forth in the dialogues at all.
In an attempt to answer this question, let me rehearse what
happens in the early divisions made by the Stranger and Theaetetus in the Sophist.
In tracking the sophist-as-salesman (223b9-224e5), the
sophist suddenly shows up as a “maker of soul-goods” (224d7),
thereby collapsing the original distinction (219a8-c9) between
acquisition and making—between those arts which gather and
those which make.4 Earlier, in tracking the sophist-as-hunter
(221c5-223b7), the sophist suddenly shows up as a “hunter-forpay” (222d7), whereby he has slid over into the class of salesman,
from which hunting had been originally distinguished. Thus the
sophist constantly switches classes, indicating that the divisions
made by this so-called “method” were not precisely made.
In thus sliding over into the class of salesman, moreover, he
is not forced completely out of the class of hunting; he is now in
two classes previously distinguished as exclusive of one another,
but is not completely either of them. The Stranger says that the
sophist’s art is a “many-sided” one (223cl-2). And within the selling art itself, he turns up in three distinct classes: 1. as a merchandiser of soul-goods; 2. as a retailer of soul-goods made by
others; and 3. as a retailer of soul-goods made by himself
(224d11-e3). The sophist subsequently shows up in three more
divisions, in terms of 1. the art of contesting or disputing (agōnistikē [225a-226a]), 2. the art of discriminating or distinguishing
(diakritikē [226c-231b]), and 3. the art of image-making (eikastikē
and deficiencies of diairesis in Statesman are possibly correctible by
appeal to and reliance on paradeigmata, “examples.” Cf. Benardete,
“Eidos and Diaeresis,” 194 ff.
4. Cf. the schematic presentation in Fig. 1 above.
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[235b ff.]), and he is accordingly given three more definitions,
none of which encloses him fully.
From the outset, the Stranger and Theaetetus are in search of
the sophist, though they don’t even know what kind of being he is.
It turns out, of course, that he is many kinds—but this they only
come to learn during their search. At the very beginning (218b8
ff.) they had the sophist in name only—that is, he was contentless.
This would suggest that the “what” of the sophist is the product of
the method used in pursuing him. Is it possible that what he is is
generated by the Stranger’s procedure?5 Thus at 221c4-5 the
Stranger is fully confident that the very same procedure used in
defining the angler is applicable to the pursuit of the sophist as
well.6 But how can he be so sure of this in advance—unless he
holds the grand belief that his method is an absolutely comprehensive and universal one, applicable to, and yet completely independent of, every possible subject matter?
Such a claim is a rather extraordinary one. It is also a claim to
which we are all too easily drawn. The immediate attraction it holds
for us is natural enough, for it is a claim that appears to us to rescue
us from our own finitude—a claim that holds out to us the promise
of omniscience. Everything is knowable; we have only to take
whatever happens to come along and plug it into our “method,”
our “operation,” our “machine.” To possess this method is to possess a magical shortcut that relieves us of the tiresome task of having to make judgments, in each instance, about what mode of
investigation is most suitable to the object in question. It is the denial that differences among objects matter at all; and it is, correlatively, the claim that knowledge is utterly uniform, that all things
whatsoever are knowable in exactly the same way. It is a magical
shortcut that allows us to forget such troublesome questions and
5. See Philebus 16d1 ff. Socrates begins his account of diairesis by saying: “aei mian idean peri pantos hekastotē themenous zētein—heurēsein gar enousan” (“we must always suppose that there is for
everything one idea and must look for it—for we will find it”). What
guarantees its being there? Does the procedure itself guarantee this?
6. See Benardete’s account of this in “Plato Sophist 223bl-7,” passim.
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gives us a certain command over anything and everything—a sort
of technologization of knowledge. It appeals to a certain hubris
within us. In a rather different context of speaking, it might be said
that it is the temptation to sin—that it appeals to a lust of the spirit,
a lust for knowledge which is at once a lust for power.
To the extent, then, that diairesis is being put forward as such
a claim to universal method, its presentation in the dialogues could
be viewed as an attempt to exhibit the defects of any such pretension to a “method” that is independent of, and yet applicable to,
every possible subject matter. This would go some distance toward
explaining why our attention is being continually drawn to ways
in which the diairesis fails.
But this is only one side of the story. It has to be true to say
that it is the Stranger’s procedure that generates the “what” of the
sophist, for the particular classes he shows up in—the particular
designations he takes on—are the results of the ways in which the
Stranger carries out the divisions. But this can’t be the whole truth,
because the sophist is continually collapsing the class-distinctions
they make, and he is constantly defying their attempt to enclose
him in a single horismos. So, in some important sense, what the
sophist is, is independent of their activity upon him. From this point
of view it could still be said that the procedure produces the “what,”
but only in the sense that, as a result of it, the sophist now for the
first time explicitly acquires determinations he has always had implicitly. Correlatively, it would mean that we are now for the first
time making explicit, as a series of articulate determinations of the
object, our own pre-thematic familiarity with that object. And this
pre-thematic familiarity is something we must have—else we could
never have made this an object of our interest and investigation in
the first place. If we continue to think in this direction, we might
be inclined to revise somewhat our view of what diairesis is supposed to accomplish: Perhaps it’s not (or not completely) the grand
pretension to a universal method that generates its own objects, but
rather a procedure of explication that articulates explicitly what we
already—however dimly—“know.” It might be called a procedure
of “unfolding”—an explicit unfolding of what we already “know”
about the object in a quite pre-thematic way.
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This view of diairesis is supported by a further consideration:
The first division in the Sophist begins with the entire class of art
(technē [219a]). The first division in the Statesman starts one step
higher than that, namely, with the entire class of knowledge (epistemē [258e]). Why, in each case, does the dividing begin just
here? That is, what determines the initial comprehensive class
from which the dividing will take its start—unless it is that we
already know in some sense the object of our search, and unless
this object itself guides the division which is supposed to discover
it? Why, in the pursuit of the sophist, is the sophist placed at the
outset into the limited—albeit large—class of technē—unless this
were so? If diairesis were to be genuinely a process of discovery,
wouldn’t it be necessary for it to begin, not with technē, but with
the most comprehensive class—“the All” (to pan) or “Being” (to
on)? But, after all, no diairesis begins in that way; it is in fact
doubtful that from such a beginning any dividing could ever
begin.7 How could one begin to divide to on or to pan? But even
if it could be done, the very first step one would take from that
beginning would surely betray the guidance given already beforehand by the object sought.
Does diairesis, understood in this way, give us the “what is”
of the sophist? Certainly not in the sense of acquiring for us
something we didn’t have before. Here the procedure called “division” does not produce the “what is”; rather it is thoroughly
guided and directed, both at the very outset and at every single
step of the way, by a knowledge of the “what is” that we already
do—and must—possess. But then the activity of dividing until
one reaches a “definition” can no longer have any significance
as a more or less technical “method” of inquiry designed to give
us new information, to make us knowers where we were not
knowers before. But isn’t this why we always held definition in
such high regard?
7. On the impossibility of doing this, see Klein, “On Precision,” 297298. Aristotle gives the reason in Posterior Analytics II, 92b14: “ou gar
genos to on” (“for being is not a genus.”) Helpful on this point is Martin
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1963), 3.
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There is something more. At 241b9-c4 the Stranger and
Theaetetus are wondering why they’re having such difficulty capturing their quarry and are now facing up to the possibility that
the “what” of the sophist might be infinite (aperantōn [241c1]).
If the sophist is infinite, then he is indifferently anything. But this
is at odds with how the activity of dividing operates upon him:
the diairesis cannot help but articulate him into specific, de-limited classes; the determinations he takes on are de-limitations,
de-finitions. In other words, the division is imposing limits on a
being whose own nature is to be unlimited. This explains why
the Stranger and Theaetetus are baffled at 241b9-c4: whatever
they say about the sophist can never be wholly false, and yet it
must always fail to enclose him completely. So the “what is” of
something and the procedure that is supposed to reveal it look
incommensurate. And wouldn’t this be the case with any object
one sets out to define? That is, any such object first comes to
sight as some unity—though with certain determinations, a certain number of them. But to speak of the object in terms of just
one or another of these determinations—as diairesis does—limits
the object to just that—delimiting it from those other determinations. It also fails to tell us precisely how the various determinations are related to one another in the object—and really related
in the very being of the object itself, rather than related by our
logical scheme. Even an exhaustive list of these determinations,
by the way, does the very same thing: it must remain forever
merely a list, merely a piecemeal representation of what first
came to sight as a unitary “what.”
So here we seem to be left with the possibility that even if
diairesis were a means of articulation, guided beforehand by the
object sought, even then it would always be essentially defective;
for its piecemeal, limited result would always be disproportionate
with its object.
Can we not, then, rehabilitate diairesis? We can, but only by
moving away from the view that it is intended to be a formal technique which must be learned and practiced according to a set of
rules, a formal technique (not unlike a logical organon) that we
ought to employ in order to actually acquire knowledge. Indeed
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such “rules”—the “prescriptions” given in the dialogues and by
Aristotle—look inexact, spurious, unlearnable, impossible to follow with any sort of precision. Could this be why our attention
is being constantly drawn to arbitrary moves, to gaps, breakdowns and failures in the actual practice of diairesis? That the
dialogues lead us in this way, then, could very well mean that
they are actually attempting to warn us, to show us that if diairesis is understood to be such a formal technique that is both learnable and teachable, that in and of itself transforms us into
knowers, then it is fools’ gold.
What, then, is diairesis? Here it seems to me that, of the four
accounts provided by the dialogues, that given at Phaedrus 265d266 b is the most helpful.8 Socrates speaks there of a pair of activities, “bringing together” and “dividing” (sunagōgē and
diairesis [266b5]), characterized in the following way: 1. “Bringing a scattered many into a single idea, seeing it all together [italics mine], that, defining, one might make clear each thing he
wishes to teach about” (eis mian te idean sunorōnta agein ta pollachē diesparmena, hin hekaston horizomenos dēlon poiēi, peri
hou anaei didaskein ethelēi); 2. “Dividing [these ‘ones’] once
again, according to eidē, according to natural joints” (to palin
kat’ eidē dunasthai temnein, kat’ arthra [265el-2]).
What, then, are these two related procedures? There is a passage in Book VII of the Republic which, I believe, suggests an
answer to this question:
In the context of a discussion of that higher education which
would produce philosopher-kings, calculation (logistikē, logis8. To center on the Phaedrus as the key account depends, of course, on
the interpretation that follows. It is not a position taken by all commentators. I have no quarrel with those whose particular interests lead them
to emphasize one of the other accounts. A.C. Lloyd, for instance, in
“Plato’s Description of Division”, centers on the Philebus because he
thinks he can explain, by appealing to the geometrical practice of dividing a continuous line, why the account in the Philebus is given in
terms of the opposition between the One and the Infinite. I would only
quarrel with those who view diairesis as a bona fide logical-zetetic
organon along the lines indicated above.
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mos)—that art which ostensibly operates on number—is introduced as something that leads directly to intellection and—since
it would be the art of “turning the soul around” (psuchēs periagōgē [521c6])—as something that prepares one for philosophy. But calculation is said not to appear at first as an “art” at all,
but rather as a “trivial” or “lowly” thing (phaulon [522c4]) that
simply distinguishes the “one” and the “two” (522c5 and 524b5).
More particularly it is said that calculation is originally “summoned” (parakalein), called into operation, along with noēsis
and dianoia, by the presence of contradictory sensations (524ab). This explains why calculation is called something “trivial” or
“lowly”: it is the original, most rudimentary, appearance of
human thinking. In other words, what shows up at a higher level
as an “art” is really present already as a most rudimentary feature
of human thought, viz., the activity of bringing together, comparing and distinguishing. Calculation brings together and distinguishes, brings together and separates; the logistical “arts” of
addition and subtraction are higher-level expressions of these utterly natural activities of thought and have their origins in them.9
I would I suggest, then, that the two related “procedures” of
sunagōgē and diairesis are originarily “summoned” in just the
same way, and that the presentation of them in the Phaedrus is
essentially and primarily an account of this originary summoning.
Sunagōgē and diairesis are, I suggest, the account of what we in
fact do—what thinking does—in thematizing something, in isolating it and making it thematic. That is, these “procedures” are
simply ways of talking about what we’ve already done—what
our understanding does—automatically, simply by nature, to get
its bearings, namely, 1. recognize the “sameness” of a many, and
2. recognize the differences inherent in that sameness. The first
moment is a “seeing all together”(the word is sunorōnta)—that
9. This relationship between theoretical acts and conceptual objects, on
the one hand, and certain features of pre-theoretical, pre-conceptual experience, on the other hand, has been studied and worked out extensively by Edmund Husserl. See especially his Erfahrung und Urteil
(Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1972) and Formale und Transzendentale Logik (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1929).
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is, the recognizing of a single “looks” (idea); the second moment
is a “dividing according to eidē, according to the ‘natural
joints’”—that is, the recognizing of essential differences within
that single “looks.” The first moment is said to “bring a many
into a one”, to “see it all together”, to “make it clear”, to “define”
it. Here the “defining” has to mean “de-fining” it from other such
single “looks.” It de-fines it, isolates it, constitutes it as a single
determinate “whole.” The second moment differentiates this single whole internally. The sunagōge is probably not simply reversed in the diairesis. The differences ignored or sublated in
bringing together the many into a one are probably not those “natural joints” at which the diairetic divisions are subsequently
made—which would mean that the two activities do not correspond exactly. That is, the sunagōge might very well be understood to bring the infinitely many particulars into a unitary whole;
but the diairesis must be understood as the differentiation of this
unitary whole into finite eidetic parts. At Phaedrus 238a3 ff., for
instance, it is said of hubris that it is “many-membered and manysorted” (polumeles kai polueides), and that the name of any particular hubris is taken from whatever (sub-)idea predominates.
And wouldn’t this also be true, for example, of virtue as a whole?
The horismos, then, must be understood as a “de-fining,” a
“de-limiting,” an isolating. In the mere recognition of what is to
be defined, moreover, the thing is already isolated. Thus the explicit activity of defining simply duplicates our initial recognition; it doesn’t essentially add anything, but only shows us what
we’ve already done in recognizing the thing. The explicit activity
of defining does not, in any essential way, give us a “what is” as
an answer that we didn’t have before; it only makes our pre-thematic familiarity with the thing for the first time explicit for us.
Furthermore, insofar as a definition only de-limits, it only isolates
something from other things. And that means: it does not tell us
what the thing is “by itself” (kath’auto), in its own innerness—
but isn’t that precisely what the “what is” question asks for?10
10. As Sophist 248-255 shows, the “what is” of any being is, of course,
both kath’ auto and pros heteron at the same time, and is perhaps both
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In still another way “definition” shows itself to fall short of
giving us the “what is” of what is being defined. At Statesman
267c the Stranger states the result of the first division: Statesmanship is said to be the “art of herding human beings” (anthrōponomikē [cf. 266e]). This definition might be said to be a
fine example of further dividing a genus by the addition of a specific difference: here the genus would be nomeutikē—the art of
herding; and the specific difference would be anthrōpōn—of humans specifically. But—apart from the word—is there really such
an art? This “art” has come about (or has been conjured up) simply by combining the two words anthrōpos and nomeutikē—an
easy enough task. But we shouldn’t be fooled by the word. To
make verbal “wholes” by just putting words together does not affect by one jot whether or not there are such wholes really. Actual
wholes cannot be generated by simply combining words to form
verbal “wholes.”
The flip-side of this problem would be the problem of
whether, and to what extent, it is possible to reflect accurately in
an account of a whole, the “wholeness” of that whole. This problem is mentioned very briefly by Aristotle in Metaphysics Z
(1037b12-14; 25-28). Some being (a “this,” a tode ti ) first appears to us as a unity, a whole, and yet its formulation in speech
has parts. The difficulty then is to determine whether the formulational parts correspond to the real parts in the being itself. While
Aristotle seems to treat this matter merely aporetically, and thus
to leave it an open question, the rhetoric of the passage suggests
otherwise.
The “what is” question, as it comes up in the dialogues, always asks about wholes such as virtue, knowledge, and so forth.
And at first glance it may look as though definition in terms of
genus and specific difference solves the problem of grasping a
whole. But it does not reflect the “wholeness” of a whole, for it
only adds the specific difference to the genus. That is, it might
look like an attempt to integrate the comprehensive character of
inseparably, even in thought; it does seem a formidable difficulty to
isolate the kath’auto aspect in speech.
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the genus with its precise manifestation (namely, the specific difference). But the relation of Part to Whole is not one of addition.
Aristotle’s understanding of definition in terms of genus-plusspecific difference (Posterior Analytics B 96b27-97b13) exhibits
unambiguously its roots in diairesis. And even if we were to construe this in a somewhat softer way as an articulation or explication rather than an addition in the literal sense, there would still
remain the problem of exactly how this articulation is related to
the unity, the wholeness, of what is being defined. Definition in
terms of genus plus specific difference does not adequately address this problem of how to reflect the wholeness of a whole in
speech (and perhaps in thought as well); it does, however, reveal
this problem to us in a quite vivid way.
Throughout the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle’s treatment of
horismos is always addressed to particulars: 1. to events and attributes (92a33-96a19); and 2. to beings (96a24 ff.). And to focus
on these as the primary objects of definition accords with common sense: we encounter something for the first time and, because we don’t have a precise understanding of it, we ask what it
is. But to define such a particular would be simply to specify the
class to which it belongs—and this must already presuppose our
understanding of those class-concepts. This would not, in any
case, give us the “what is” of that particular, not in the sense of
giving us that precise understanding that we didn’t previously
have. If we begin by asking it what it is, and then go on to define
it in the way I’ve just described, we have not answered the “what
is” question, but have simply pushed the question back a step;
for, in referring it to a certain class, we’d then have to pose the
very same question to that class-concept.
But what about these class-concepts themselves, as eidetic
wholes? Couldn’t we just as easily give definitions of these?
These are, after all, the “whatnesses” of things—and so the
thought of defining them might seem to hold out the promise of
finally being able to unify definition and the “what is” question.
But what would such a definition look like? Wouldn’t it too have
to refer this eidetic whole to yet others? The definition of eidē
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then, would seem to presuppose yet other eidē as “tools” or “principles” in the procedure of defining. And this means that, through
definition alone, we’d never get the “what is”—not even of these
eidetic wholes.
At the end of the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle addresses
himself to the question of how we know first principles (archai
or prōtai archai), and he shows that knowledge of these comes,
not through definition or demonstration, but only—and in an
originary way—through intellection (nous). The reason, of
course, is that both demonstration and definition have to start
somewhere, need starting points (archai). Or, stated otherwise,
all discursive, dianoetic activity of thought presupposes and rests
on nous, on an original noēsis, since thinking discourses from
something and about something. At 93b23 he had established that
the “ what is”—the ti esti—is itself an archē; and at 92b37-40
he had established that knowledge of the “what is” cannot be acquired through definition. In other words, to define something is
not to answer the “what is” question; rather, the “what is” must
itself be presupposed as an archē by any act of defining. The ability to define as such presupposes these whatnesses, these eidetic
wholes, as its archai—its starting points or first principles.
There is something further. To have defined is to have de-limited and enclosed something in such a way that it is now presented
to us in marked relief. What we are presented with as the result of
definition is what, from the point of view of a “properly” executed
process of division, came to be called the infima species, or, to
use a more Greek expression, the atomic eidos, the “indivisible
looks.” This would be the horismos, the definition, the enclosure
brought to its tightest possible state. Would this be the ti esti, the
“what is”? No. But it would be that of which we could now for
the first time ask this question: What is its “what is”?
This requires some elaboration: Definition does indeed give
us the “what is,” but not in the sense we had anticipated: to arrive,
through definition, at to ti esti—the “what is”—is to arrive, not
at an answer, but at a question. The substantivized form of that
question—to ti esti—should not for an instant lead us to think
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that it has ceased to be a question: to treat the “what is” as a substantive—to ti esti11—means that the question as a question is
being substantivized. The implication of this is far-reaching, for
it means that the “what is” of something is a question, is a problem; and therefore to know the “what is” of something—to know
an eidetic whole—is to know aporetically, to be in possession,
not of an answer, but of a problem.
The result of definition is the ti esti—not as an answer, but
as a question. More forcefully stated: The “what is” question, as
a question, is what stands at the end of the entire activity of defining. It is the proper telos of definition. The ti esti is the archē of
definition in the most profound sense: it is the archē-archōn; it
stands at the beginning of definition as its necessary startingpoint; it shows up as the end-result of definition; and it rules over
and guides the activity of defining throughout, from beginning
to end. This means that to have defined something is not itself an
end, is not to have reached one’s natural goal. To have defined is
to be brought face to face with the “what is” question and, as
such, has been barely a start. Rather than being an end, definition
is merely the condition for a new and quite different beginning:
To define is to provide oneself with the possibility of philosophy.
11. Cf. inter alia Posterior Analytics II, 92a35, 92b39.
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The Stranger as a Socratic Philosopher:
The Socratic Nature of the Stranger’s
Investigation of the Sophist1
Corinne Painter
Much of the secondary literature on Plato’s Sophist considers the
Stranger to be a non-Socratic philosopher, and regards his appearance in the dialogues as a sign that Plato had moved on from his
fascination with Socrates to develop a more “mature” way of philosophizing.2 This essay will argue, on the contrary, that the investigation led by the Stranger in the Sophist demonstrates an
essentially Socratic philosophical stance. In order to do this, I will
consider carefully some dramatic evidence in the Sophist that allows us to notice a philosophical “transformation” in the Stranger.
My consideration focuses upon the Stranger’s rejection of the Parmenidean way of philosophizing followed by his acceptance of the
Socratic way of practicing philosophy. This is revealed most decisively by the Stranger’s willingness to pursue truth and justice at
the expense of overturning the practices of his philosophical training, and, secondarily, by his genuine concern with showing that
Socrates is not guilty of sophistry.
Corinne Painter is a Professor in the Humanities Department at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
1. I would like to thank Joe Sachs for his generous communications with
me about Plato’s Sophist and other Platonic works. His insights have
added greatly to my interpretation and understanding of Plato’s thought.
2. There are far too many accounts to list here; but see, for example, Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of the Original and Image (South
Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999). Just as Rosen argues in his
text, most of the accounts in the literature that treat this issue view the
Stranger as non-Socratic and advance the position that he represents at
least a change, or perhaps even a progression, in Plato’s thinking away
from, for instance, emphasis on the Socratic elenchus, to a more developed, mature philosophical practice that emphasizes dialectic.
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Surprisingly, although there has been almost no discussion
in the literature about the Stranger’s philosophical development
in the course of his examination of the Sophist, it is neither difficult to notice nor unimportant to acknowledge the Stranger’s
philosophical “movement” away from Parmenides’s way of philosophy towards a different way. Indeed, on several occasions,
the Stranger doffs his Parmenidean cloak and dons Socratic clothing, a transformation that converts him into a “true” philosopher,
understood as one who attempts to make images in speech of that
which is authentically compelling—that is, the good—which is
therefore of ethical significance.
It is not incidental to the dialogue that Socrates instigates the
discussion by asking the Stranger to “do the favor” (217c) of accounting for the sophist, nor that the Stranger agrees only at
Socrates’s request, after having previously turned down a similar
request made by Theodorus. This shows that the Stranger is more
concerned with satisfying Socrates’s desire to account for the
sophist than Theodorus’s. And this suggests, in turn, that something
about Socrates’s request is more compelling than Theodorus’s.
What is urgent about Socrates’s request would seem to be his present circumstance, namely, his having been accused of crimes
against the polis that include practicing sophistry. Socrates’s own
life situation gives rise to his concern to account properly for
sophistry and distinguish it from philosophy; it is almost certain
that this personal involvement confers on his request an urgency
that simply is not present in Theodorus’s merely theoretical interest. Importantly, the urgency is an ethical one, inasmuch as it is
one that is “related to what truly and ultimately matters,”3 which
in this case arises from Socrates’s “specific human predicament.”4
Since Parmenides’s “style” of philosophizing “requires a stud3. Adriaan Peperzak, System and History in Philosophy: On the Unity of
Thought and Time, Text and Explanation, Solitude and Dialogue, Rhetoric
and Truth in the Practice of Philosophy and its History, (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1986), 13.
4. Drew Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 176.
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ied indifference to its topics,”5 there are hints to be found as early
as the dialogue’s beginning that the Stranger might be willing to
reject his Parmenidean training in order to do the favor of accounting properly for the sophist. Indeed, if we believe that “indifference
seems to be the only reaction one cannot have to a philosophic
question, if one is aware of it at all,”6 then the Stranger’s willingness to undergo the difficult and complicated investigation of the
sophist only at Socrates’s request indicates that he takes Socrates’s
question to be one that is asked philosophically. For, because
Socrates’s question originates in a desire to know about something
that is at stake in his life, it therefore deserves serious and sustained
philosophical attention and energy.
Nevertheless, the Stranger does not begin his investigation as
Socrates usually does, namely, with an elenchus. This is probably
why very few scholars see a close connection between the Stranger’s
way of philosophizing and Socrates’s way. Except for the emphasis
that the Stranger places on agreement among the interlocutors—
which mirrors Socrates’s insistence on mutual agreement in the
course of dialectical investigations—he initially conducts his investigation after the fashion of his philosophical father, Parmenides, who claims, in marked contrast to Socrates, that the
“philosophic discipline requires purging ourselves of any motive
to care about any one thing more than another.”7 Before he gets to
his sixth attempt to account for the sophist, the Stranger tries to
track the sophist by employing the method of division by kinds,
according to which a given hunting ground must be cut always into
two and only two opposing divisions, until, at last, a long and logically descriptive title of the intended prey results. Prior to his sixth
division, then, the Stranger proceeds as Parmenides taught him: by
proposing further and further opposing, and thus exhaustive, divisions that allow him eventually to uncover the sophist in as many
different guises as there are different starting points. As the
5. Joe Sachs, “What is a What-is Question?” The St. John’s Review 44.1
(1993): 46.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 43.
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Stranger explicitly states, in practicing this logical method there is
no room for caring any more or less for the divisions that are made,
since the method “honors all equally” (227b2), nor is there room
for evaluating the divisions in any “extra-logical sense”—for instance, by an appeal to one’s sense of justice or honor. For, as long
as the divisions are made properly—exhaustively and beginning
from appropriate starting points—the accounts ultimately obtained
will be logically infallible.
With his sixth attempt at finding the sophist, however, the
Stranger employs the method of division in a significantly modified manner, namely, by no longer insisting on pure logic that does
not “care” for its results and does not “trust” the desire to do justice
to the matter under examination. The point of departure for the
sixth division is peculiar in that it begins with what might be called
an “unauthorized division” of expertise into a third subclass, which
goes beyond the authorized two divisions of division by kinds.
Since the sixth account of the sophist is spurred by the Stranger’s
assessment that the first five accounts failed to capture adequately
the sophist’s essence, and since it is impossible to judge the differing accounts critically on the basis of logic alone, the Stranger’s
unauthorized beginning seems to be grounded in his extra-logical
sense that, even though the various accounts hold up to logical
scrutiny, they fail to do true justice to the sophist’s complex nature.
This indicates that the Stranger genuinely cares about keeping the
philosopher and the sophist distinct; for “someone who does not
care about the thing in question cannot see the point of suspending
his prejudices.”8 In this case, the prejudices that need to be suspended are the Stranger’s initial commitment to proceed purely
logically, without any special concern for his divisions, and his
Parmenidean philosophical training.
The Stranger’s decision to go against the rule of his own
method arises from two causes. First, his efforts so far have made
him think that the sophist is so complex and slippery a character
that he evaded the first five attempts to capture him—a judgment,
as we can see, that can be attained only after appealing to an extralogical standard. Second, he genuinely desires to understand how
8. Sachs, 46.
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the philosopher can be misperceived as a sophist, and thus, more
specifically, how it is possible for Socrates to be falsely accused
of being a sophist. Once the Stranger sees that the first five guises
of the sophist do not present engaging images of the philosopher,
and consequently, that they do not address the possibility of confusing the sophist and the philosopher, he is compelled to divide
expertise into an unorthodox third part, so that he can construct an
account that may be sufficient to deal with the apparent proximity
between philosopher and sophist. Put very simply, insofar as the
division of expertise introduced in the sixth account of sophistry,
namely, soul-cleansing refutation (230d-e),9 turns out to be an account of what Socrates does, it provides the necessary link between
Socrates and sophistry that accounts for his being falsely accused
of sophistry. In this way, it provides the Stranger with the opportunity to scrutinize the proposed association between Socrates and
sophistry that seems to be responsible for driving the discussion.
It is at this point in the dialogue that the Stranger gives a critical evaluation of the sixth account that goes beyond revealing his
motivations and intentions, and tells us about the role he plays in
the dialogue. As the three translators of a fine edition of the Sophist
say in the introduction to their translation, the sixth account “curiously reveals the sophist as a cross-examiner of empty sham wisdom and therefore as entangled with the philosophic nature.
Sophist and philosopher appear to be interwoven.”10 This, I think,
compels us to think of Socrates rather than of a sophist, especially
since the Stranger says “he’s afraid to say” that the men he’s described in this way are “sophists” since he does not want “to confer
on them too great an honor” (231a1-3). So I believe, unlike many,
perhaps even most, scholarly commentators, including Rosen, that
the Stranger’s critical assessment of the sixth account points ultimately to his likely desire to want to defend Socrates from the
9. The sixth account of the sophist, like all the others, contains much more
detail than needs to be addressed here. For a helpful discussion see:
Corinne Painter, “In Defense of Socrates,” Epoche 9.2 (2005): 317-333.
10. Plato’s Sophist: The Professor of Wisdom, translated, with introduction and glossary, by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 1996), 10.
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charges of sophistry that have been brought against him. I admit
that this remark only explicitly states that the sixth account does
not accurately describe sophists because the activity it elucidates
is too honorable to be one in which sophists engage. But at the
same time, it at least implicitly points us in the direction of
Socrates, since the activity it describes is characteristic of him.
Hence, the Stranger’s implicit association of Socrates with an
honorable activity, together with his willingness to investigate the
sophist only at Socrates’s request appear to point in the direction
of a desire to defend Socrates against the charges leveled at him.
If we add to this the Stranger’s agreement with Socrates that the
philosopher often appears to be something he is not, including a
sophist (216c4-d5), the inference is even stronger. Moreover, if the
contrary motive were to be put forth—that the Stranger really
wants to prosecute Socrates on behalf of the youth of Athens,
whom he supposedly corrupted—this motive too would reflect a
concern with a matter of great political and ethical import. Thus,
even in this case, the Stranger turns out to be a philosopher in the
following Socratic sense: he understands his philosophical inquiry
into the nature of the sophist to be intimately bound up with a matter of practical, ethical significance.
This conviction can be reinforced in several ways. First, the
Stranger eventually rejects his earlier claim that the interlocutors
are not allowed to pass judgment on their accounts by assessing
any of the arts they describe as more honorable or worthy than any
others (227a10-b8). The evidence for this is his willingness to go
against this “rule” of his own method and his related willingness
to discard the wholly “neutral,” Parmenidean attitude. For when
he admits his distaste for describing the sophist as one who engages
in soul-cleansing refutation (231a1-3), the Stranger gives up his
commitment to honor the generals’ art of hunting and the art of
louse-catching equally (227b8-11). In this way, he abandons his
Parmenidean neutrality and recognizes that he will have to take a
new path: if he is to keep sophistry and philosophy distinct, he
must let his genuine, ethical concern over the sixth account of the
sophist guide the rest of his investigation. Indeed, at this point in
the discussion the Stranger realizes that his “technical” procedure
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for hunting down the sophist will not allow him to fulfill his promise of accounting for the sophist in such a way that the philosopher
can no longer be mistaken for him, and the Stranger’s expression
of dismay at having discovered five different accounts of the
sophist shows this:
[I]sn’t it clear that when a person experiences this with
respect to some expertise, he’s not able to see what all
these studies have in view—and that’s why he calls
their possessor by many names instead of one? . . . So
let us avoid experiencing this in our own search because of laziness (232a1-b2).
Accordingly, we have reason to believe that the Stranger no longer
trusts his initially preferred method of division by kinds to complete the investigation. Moreover, this strengthens the impression
that he is prepared to proceed differently, which, again, suggests
that he genuinely cares about the matter at issue—namely, keeping
the philosopher and the sophist distinct.
In fact, the Stranger seems to care so much about distinguishing the philosopher and the sophist that he is willing to suspend all
of his “safe opinions,” all of his “previous prejudices,”11 in order
to do the favor that he promised. Indeed, the Stranger’s worry, particularly over the sixth definition, indicates his recognition that division by kinds, although it may be well suited to mapping out
relationships of subordination between genera and species, is not
well suited for the task of distinguishing the sophist from the
philosopher. In acknowledging that this task cannot be completed
on the basis of division by kinds alone, the Stranger lets his “outrage . . . as a human being”12 compel him to conduct the remainder
of his search for the sophist in another way. This new way, while
still rigorous and careful, seems to the Stranger to be more compatible with the important political and ethical nature of the task,
and at the same time, it allows him to “trust his own desire to do
justice.”13 In allowing the investigation to follow another path, as
11. Sachs, 46.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
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Joe Sachs claims, the Stranger abandons the safe and familiar Parmenidean philosophizing, with its indifferent, dispassionate, and
entirely logical modus operandi,14 and “crosses over from the safe
domain of logic to something called philosophy.”15
Later in the dialogue, the Stranger even makes an explicitly
critical remark about the technique of division by kinds that is quite
scornful: “to attempt to separate off everything from everything is
in other respects discordant, and what’s more, it belongs to a man
who is altogether unmusical and unphilosophical” (259d8-e1, emphasis mine). If we add to this his claim that the one who knows
how to practice the art of division and collection properly is the
one “who philosophizes purely and justly” (253e4-5, emphases
mine), as well as his rather Socratic words of encouragement to
Theaetetus, asking him, for example, to be brave and not to lose
heart (261b5-6), it is quite clear that the Stranger now comports
himself Socratically. All in all, this not only strengthens the notion
that the Stranger’s motivation in the Sophist is more likely connected to a desire to defend Socrates than to a desire to prosecute
him, but it also suggests that he has become “like”—perhaps even
a good image of—a Socratic philosopher.
Finally, there is yet another way in which the Stranger shows
the mark of a Socratic—which is to say, genuine—philosopher,
namely, his eagerness not to assume that he knows what he does
not know. Indeed, the Stranger seems to appreciate very well that
while all of his accounts of the sophist, including the seventh and
final one, capture some significant aspects of the sophist’s deceptive nature, none of them can say the final word about this slippery
creature (268d5). Like Socrates, the Stranger is very careful not to
conflate the images he makes in speech with the originals to which
they point. In other words, the Stranger’s humble acknowledgment
that his logos about the sophist necessarily points beyond itself towards an eidos that it cannot articulate adequately seems to mirror
Socrates’s repeated admonitions that all our words are at once both
themselves and not themselves, insofar as they always point be14. Sachs, 41.
15. Sachs, 43.
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yond themselves to the eide, that is, to the invisible looks that make
them intelligible.
In sum, the investigation led by the Stranger in the Sophist
demonstrates a specifically Socratic philosophical character, and
in the course of attempting to define the sophist, the Stranger shows
that Socrates is not guilty of sophistry. The philosophical conversion undergone by the Stranger—from Parmenides’s way of philosophizing to Socrates’s way—indicates that he recognizes the
superiority of “extra-logical” philosophizing that is rooted in a
sense of ethics. This is revealed by the Stranger’s admission that
the sixth definition of sophistry as “soul cleansing refutation” is
disturbing because it describes an activity that is too honorable to
be connected with sophistry. Since this definition was arrived at
by a non-Parmenidean, Socratic way of philosophizing, it identifies
the Socratic way with virtue, and defends Socrates against the dishonorable charges associated with sophistry. In this way, the
Stranger vindicates Socrates while at the same time he becomes
very much “like” him.
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The Concept of Measure and the
Criterion of Sustainability
John D. Pappas
The classical concept of measure, which is akin to moderation
and balance, has been specified arithmetically in architecture and
the arts. But in law, politics, the social sciences, and the behavioral sciences, measure is a fuzzy concept. A rational definition
of measure in human behavior would curb the impulsive human
tendency to excess, and might thus hedge humanity against the
effects of hubris, which has historically led societies, states, and
even empires to disaster.
When people lose a sense of measure, they also lose touch
with reality. And because there is no settled definition of measure
in practical matters, it is difficult for leaders and policymakers to
see limits begin transgressed in time to avert danger.
The purpose of this essay is to suggest that, in the absence
of a definition of measure, we may instead apply the criterion of
sustainability to detect hubristic aberrations from measure early
enough to curb their ill effects.
1. The universal concept of measure
The concept of measure or mean was the cornerstone of classical
civilization. Measure (metron in Greek1) is akin to the Confucian
Middle Way (zhōng yōng) and the Buddhist Middle Path (majjhimā
paṭipadā). It pertains to aesthetic symmetry and functional harmony
in human interaction with the social and natural environment.
John D. Pappas is legal and economic adviser at AGM Law Firm. He
studied law at Athens University and economics at Columbia University.
1. The English word measure derives from the Latin mensura, which in
turn derives from verb metiri, which is related to the Greek word metron.
This is the etymological root of meter, metro–, –metric, etc., and a component of symmetry and its derivatives (symmetric, asymmetry, and so on.)
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In the arts and particularly in architecture, measure has been
expressed in particular mathematical forms. For example, the
golden ratio, φ (=1.6180339…),2 which Euclid called extreme
and mean ratio, is a well-known mathematical definition of geometric measure:
A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme
and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the
greater segment, so is the greater to the less. (Akron
kai meson logon eutheia tetmēsthai legetai, hotan
ēi hōs hē holē pros to meizon tmēma, houtōs to
meizon pros to helatton.) (Euclid, Elements, Book
6, Definition 3.)
Even before Euclid showed how to calculate the φ-ratio,
Phidias (c. 480–430 BC) had created a diachronic manifestation
of aesthetic measure in geometry and architecture by “curving”
Fig.1: The Golden Section in the Facade of the Parthenon
2. φ, the asymptotic limit of the Fibonacci sequence Fn+1 / Fn , “has inspired
thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics.” Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most
Astonishing Number (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 6.
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that ratio into marble (Fig. 1).3 The Parthenon seems to be circumscribed conceptually by a Fibonacci-type sequence of golden
rectangles: each rectangle has a length that is the product of its
width and φ, while its width is the length of its predecessor rectangle. The aesthetic effect of the golden rectangle is summarized
by Joe Sachs in this way:
What are the right proportions for the entrance to a temple? . . . The rectangle formed by the columns is wider
than it is high. How much wider? Enough so that it will
not look squashed together, but not so much that it would
become stringy looking. Let your imagination squeeze
and stretch it to see what goes wrong, and then notice
that to get it right again you have to bring it back to a
certain very definite shape. This is the golden rectangle.
It has been produced spontaneously by artists, architects,
and carpenters of any and every time and place.4
But long before Phidias and Euclid, the concept of measure
had been a focal theme in ancient Greek civilization, as is shown
by the frequent recurrence of that concept in Homer’s Odyssey
(for instance, in Bk. 2, l. 230, Bk. 5, l. 9, Bk. 7, l. 310, Bk. 14, l.
434, Bk. 15, l. 68, Bk. 17, l. 321, Bk. 21, l. 294, and Bk. 22, l.
46)—although Homer uses the word aisima rather than metron.
For example, in Bk. 7, l. 310, Alcinous addresses Odysseus with
the same phrase that Menelaus uses in Bk. 15, l. 71 when speaking to Telemachus: “measure is always optimal” (ameinō d’
aisima panta).
In Homeric vocabulary, aisima is related to Aisa, the Greek
3. In 1909, the American mathematician Mark Barr gave the golden
ratio the lower-case Greek letter phi (φ), the first letter in Phidias’s
name, to honor the classical sculptor and architect. (Theodore Andrea
Cook, The Curves of Life [London: Constable, 1914; reprinted inNew
York: Dover Publications, 1979], 420). The capital letter Φ is often used
to symbolize the inverse of φ, i.e. Φ = 1 / φ = Ο.6180339. . . .
4. Joe Sachs, “Measure, Moderation, and the Mean,” The St. John’s Review 46.2 (2002): 7. This article is available on the web here:
http://www.sjc.edu/files/1713/9657/8097/sjc_review_vol46_no2.pdf
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goddess who personifies human destiny. So Homer’s idea of
measure implicitly includes the notions of allotted share, portion,
lot, or term of life, in accordance with the subject’s destiny—that
is, in line with his idiosyncrasies, social constraints, and natural
limits. Moreover, Homer was probably the first to try to describe
measure in human social interaction. In 15.68-74, he suggested
a subjectivist view of social measure by metaphorically depicting
social relations among people as interactions between hosts and
their guests:
Telemachus, I will not keep you here for long when you
are eager to depart:I would even blame another man who,
as host, is either too fond of his guest or too rude to him:
measure is always optimal. Being too quick to send a
guest on his way when he doesn’t want to leave is just as
bad as holding him back when he wants to depart. One
must treat a guest well as long as he is in the house and
let him go promptly when he wants to leave.
(Tēlemach’, ou ti s’ egō ge polun chronon enthad’ eruxō
iemenon nostoio: nemessōmai de kai allōi
andri xeinodokōi, hos k’ exocha men phileēisin,
exocha d’ echthairēisin· ameinō d’ aisima panta.
Ison toi kakon esth’, hos t’ ouk ehtelonta neesthai
xeinon epotrunei kai hos essumenon katerukei.
chrē xeinon paeonta philein, ethelonta de pempein.)
To a considerable degree, Homer’s masterpiece is a poetic
account of four intertwined concepts: 1. human measure; 2.
hubris, that is, extreme aberration away from measure, like the
Massacre at Troy, or like Odysseus’s defiance of nature in the
form of his defiance of the gods, or like the abusive behavior of
Penelope’s suitors during Odysseus’s absence; 3. atē, the goddess
that personifies mischief, delusion and folly, which are states of
mind that accelerate the decline of a hubristic subject; and 4.
nemesis, the goddess that personifies justice and reinstitutes the
balance of social order.
Long before Homer, these concepts were symbolized in the
myth of Icarus. Icarus attempted to escape Minoan Crete by flying in the air on waxed and feathered wings, but he overrated his
capabilities and underrated the forces of nature. He ignored the
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advice of his father Daedalus to “fly the middle course” between
the foam of the sea and the heat of the sun, so that his wings
would neither be soaked nor burned. Icarus soared hubristically
upward toward the sun, which soon melted the wax off his wings,
so that he fell into the sea to his death.
But Homer was the true philosophical pioneer in regard to
the notion of measure. Through his poetic imagery, he laid out a
solid philosophical base concerning the delicate relations between measure, hubris, folly, and justice. This became the foundation for the elaborate work of the philosophers and the
tragedians of the pre-classical and classical periods. For instance,
Homer’s concept of measure was later picked up by Cleobulus
of Rhodes (died ca. 560 BC), one of the Seven Sages of ancient
Greece, in his most celebrated maxim “measure is best” (metron
ariston). And a later philosopher, Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420
BC), understood measure in Homer’s subjectivist terms, as is shown
by a quotation that appears in Plato’s Theaetetus (170d–e):
Man [is] the measure of all useful things.
(Pantōn chrēmatōn metron anthrōpos.)
This statement was later quoted, almost ipsissima verba, by
Sextus Empiricus in his Adversus Mathematicos (7.60)]:
[Protagoras said that] man is the measure of all useful
things, that is, in regard to things that exist, how they are,
and in regard to things that do not exist, how they are not.
([Protagoras eipe] pantōn chrēmatōn metron anthrōpon
einai, tōn men ontōn hōs estin, tōn de ouk ontōn hōs ouk
estin.)
Protagoras’s statement is gender-neutral because he refers
to human beings in general rather than men in particular (anthrōpos means “human being” in Greek). Moreover the exact
meaning of the statement (which is as much utilitarian as it is
subjectivist) has been lost in both English and Modern Greek
translations. In all translations I am aware of, chrēmatōn has
been erroneously translated as things (in English) or pragmatōn (in Modern Greek). As result, an overly anthropocentric
sense has been imputed to Protagoras’s statement, as though it
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meant “man is the measure of everything in the universe.” But
in ancient Greek, chrēmata did not signify everything in the
universe, but only things needed or used by humans on earth:
the noun is related to the verb chrēsthai, meaning “to need” or
“to use.” As an example of the sense, Aristotle gives the following definition in his Nichomachean Ethics (1119b26): “By
chrēmata we mean all things whose value is measured by
money.” (Chrēmata legomen panta hosōn hē axia nomismati
metreitai.)
So in the Protagorean subjectivist context, measure is understood as a concept related to human attributes. But somewhat earlier, Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC) had proceeded a step further.
He understood measure as a natural phenomenon, or even as the
foundational principle of the universe.
Heraclitus theorized that hubris5 entails inexorable divine
retribution, which is personified by the remorseless goddess
Nemesis. The name of that goddess is related to the Greek verb
nemein, meaning “to distribute appropriately,” which also gives
us the Greek word nomos, meaning “custom” or “law” (as in the
words economy and astronomy). Infractions by mortals against
other mortals (that is, hubris) disturb the “naturally right” proportion that is due to them according to each one’s destiny or
moira. In this context, hubris is either a human activity or a natural phenomenon that takes place beyond or without measure (as
5. The concept of hubris or hybris was introduced into academic literature by Friedrich Nietzsche in his incomplete treatise Philosophy in
the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873). He explicitly connects it with Heraclitus. “That dangerous word hybris is indeed the touchstone for every
Heraclitan. Here he must show whether he has understood or failed to
recognize his master.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic
Age of the Greeks, trans. Mariann Cowan (Washington, D.C.: Regnery
Publishing, 1962), 61. In English, the term hubris means excessive
pride, or insolent self-confidence, or haughtiness. However few modern
English speakers are aware that authors of the Greek classical period
apply the term in a much more restrictive way. The popular English
saying “the sky is the limit” would seem quite hubristic to classical
Greek authors.
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in hybrid, hybridize, hybridization). Such events thus divergefrom the primary or teleological course of nature; then vengeful
Nemesis intervenes as the just balancer who reinstitutes the natural order. establishing a new state of equilibrium. Consequently,
from a Heraclitian perspective of the world, nature tends toward
biodiverse harmony through a dynamic equilibrium process that
hinders any single creature or species from growing to such an
extent that it eventually crowds out all other creatures or species
in nature.
[Heraclitus’s] unified, ordered world of balanced change
is also a world in which the “laws” or norms of justice
prevail. . . . “Justice [Nemesis] will catch up with fabricators of falsehoods and those who bear witness to them”
(fragment 28b). More generally, such norms can be described as “divine law” in nature, a law that is “common”
or universal in its accessibility and applicability: “those
who [would] speak with insight must base themselves
firmly on that which is common to all, as city does upon
its law—and much more firmly! For all human laws are
nourished by one [law], the divine [law]” fragment 114).
But the justice that is cosmic law is the justice of disruption and revolution, of war and violence, not that of balm
and healing. “One must realize,” he says, “that war is
common and justice strife, and that all things come to be
through strife and are [so] ordained.” . . . [A]ll change,
however violent, be it the macrochanges of nature and
the outer cosmos or war among states, or civic strife, or
the battles that rage in the human heart, can be seen as
integral parts of the law or [divine] “plan” that “steers all
things” producing, through change, that higher unity
which is the cosmos.6
Such a cosmic perspective of measure is a recurring theme
in the Koran, where measure is presented as the prime attribute
6. T. M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments, trans. and ed. T. M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 185. Note also that
in fragment 43 Heraclitus says, “there is a greater need to extinguish
hybris than there is a blazing fire” (ibid., 33).
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of God’s wisdom and omnipotence:7
HE to Whom belongs the Kingdom of the heavens and
the earth. And HE has taken unto Himself no son, and
has no partner in the Kingdom, and HE has created
everything, and has ordained for it its proper measure
(Al-Furqan, 25:3).
And Who sent down out of heaven water in measure; and
We revived thereby a land that was dead; even so you
shall be brought forth (Az-Zukhruf, 43:11).
And whosoever puts his trust in God, He shall suffice
him. God attains his purpose. God has appointed a measure for everything (At-Talaq, 65:3).
Obviously, the Koran’s reference to rainfall as a manifestation of divine measure is in line with the diachronic Heraclitian
concept of cosmic measure: Rainfall may vary in space-time, as
regards to intensity and duration, but is neither too much (to the
extent that all life on earth is flooded off to total extinction) nor
too little (to the extent that no life on earth can be sustained).
Nevertheless, local floods or droughts may occasionally “steer
things” in a local natural environment toward a new dynamic balance of “that higher unity which is the cosmos.”
A historical example of the applicability of the Heraclitian
perspective of measure is the attempt of Artabanus to avert the
Persians from expanding their empire to Europe. Specifically, he
gave the following strategic advice to Xerxes, who was preparing
to invade Greece:8
Do you see how God does not allow the bigger animals
to become insolently visible, as it is them that He strikes
7. In the following translations, italics are mine. The first example is
from The Holy Qur’an: Arabic Text and English Translation, ed. and
trans. Maulawi Sher Ali (Islamabad: Islam International, 2004), 412.
The second and third examples are from A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted: A Translation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 199
and 284.
8. Herodotus, Histories, 7.10e.
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with his lightning rather than the smaller ones that never
insult Him? Do you also see how He throws his bolts always against the tallest buildings and the tallest trees?
Because God likes to draw back anything that stands out.
Likewise even a mighty army may be discomfited by a
small army, whenever God in His wrath exposes the former to fear[feelings of terror] or storm [natural disasters]
through which they perish in a way unworthy of them.
Because God allows no one to consider himself great,
except Himself.
(Horais ta huperechonta zōia hōs keraunoi ho theos oude
eai phantazesthai, ta de smikra ouden min knizei· horais
de hōs es oikēmata ta megista aiei kai dendrea ta toiauta
aposkēptei ta belea· phileei gar ho theos ta huperechonta
panta kolouein. houtō de kai stratos pollos hypo oligou
diaphtheiretai kata toionde· epean sphi ho theos phthonēsas phobon embalēi ē brontēn, di’ ōn ephtharēsan
anaxiōs heōutōn. ou gar eai phroneein mega ho theos
allon ē heōuton.)
Xerxes made the devastating hubristic mistake of ignoring
Artabanus’s Heraclitean advice, because he was under the spell
of Atē. The typical pairing of hubris and nemesis, which appears
in many tragedies such as Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon, and Euripides’s Hippolytus, is almost always associated with the Homeric goddess Atē, as epitomized in Sophocles’s choral passage from Antigone, 621–625):
Evil seems good, sooner than later, to him whose mind
God leads on to [mischief under the control of] Atē. And
so he manages only for the briefest time without Atē.
(To kakon dokein pot’ esthlon
tōid’ emmen hotōi phrenas
theos agei pros atan.
prassei d’ oligiston chronon ektos atas.)
In sum, Atē instills confusion in the mind of every subject
of hubristic behavior, and she thus personifies self-destructive
syndromes like defensive avoidance, overvigilance, reactivity,
and denial. These are ruinous states of mind that have led many
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economies, armies, states, and empires to disaster or even to collapse.
2. The Aristotelian mean
In light of the grave consequences of hubris, the critical importance
of defining measure comes to the fore. If measure is not defined
conclusively, then humans may not be able to detect and avoid catastrophic hubristic aberrations from it. The future of every state
would then be precarious, because its leaders would be ignorant
of, or confused about, effective and sustainable policies, which are
conditional on measured behavior and balanced organization.
These considerations haunted Aristotle, who lived during the
decline of classical Greece and the rise of Macedonian hegemony.
Plato, the teacher of Aristotle, had witnessed the collapse of Athenian democracy in the hubristic Peloponnesian war (431–404 BC).
This war among Greek city-states demonstrated that, although the
Greeks had prevailed militarily during the Persian invasions of
490-479BC, the Persians prevailed culturally. During the Persian
wars, the Greeks had been exposed to, and became well acquainted
with, Asian materialistic values and hegemonic aspirations. To the
extent that these values infected Greek society, they ultimately ruined most of Greece. To a great extent, the Persians made up for
their losses on the battlefield by defeating Homer, Heraclitus, and
the tragedians in the political arena of vanity and ambition. After
the Persian wars, victorious Athenians lost their post-Homeric
sense of measure, and consequently lost their touch with reality.
One indication of this is that the Athenians considered their massacre of the inhabitants of Melos in 416 BC as a justifiable act of
strategic pragmatism;9 they had become incapable of viewing their
horrendous, hubristic crime as the act of genocidal barbarism it
was—for which crime they would ultimately suffer the retribution
required by cosmic Justice (Nemesis), as prescribed by Heraclitus.
9. Thucydides, Histories, 5.84–111, which recounts the dialogue between the Athenians and the besieged Melians. The Athenians asserted
the so-called right of the strongest, which they associated with pragmatism as follows (5.89):
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At the time, it must have been obvious to Aristotle that Greece
started its self-destructive decline of going beyond measure as soon
as the independent city-states formed interdependentt confederations and expansionary alliances that battled one another over a
hubristic and unrealistic prize—politico-economic dominance over
all of Greece and even beyond. This was clearly an emulation of
the Asian paradigm. It is quite characteristic of the classical period
that the Parthenon was built with the worst of intentions: Pericles
wanted to project the cultural and material power of a hegemonic
Athens. It was only through the artistic genius of Phidias that
Athens erected a wonderous, diachronic manifestation of measure
(that is, of beauty, balance and harmony) instead of a monstrous
monument to vanity and ambition.
In an attempt to check the demise of classical Greek civilzation, Aristotle tried to make clear philosophically the basic attributes, the moral qualities, and the political principles that are
symbolized by the architecture and sculpture of the Parthenon. He
was actually trying to revive the Apollonian spirit of the Battle of
Marathon, where two opposite value systems collided for the first
time in history—the materialistic value system of Asia and the idealistic value system of pre-classical Greece, the former aiming at
power, the latter at virtue. This conflict of values is in the epigram
at the battlefield of Marathon, said to be by Simonides of Ceos (ca.
556–468 BC):10
The Athenians, fighting as the vanguard of all Greece,
deprived the gold-bearing Persians of their power.
(Hellēnōn promachountes Athēnaioi Marathōni, chrusophorōn Mēdōn estoresan dunamin.)
Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in
power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer
what they must.
(Dikaia men en to anthrōpeiōi logōi apo tēs isēs anankēs krinetai, dunata de hoi prouchontes prassousi kai hoi astheneis
xunchōrousin.)
10. John H. Molyneux, Simonides: A Historical Study (Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy–Caducci, 1992), 150.
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Aristotle’s difficulty pertained to the materialism of his time.
The Greeks, corrupted by Asian influences, had lost their sense
of measure, and were carried away by the desire for affluence
and power. The loss of an intuitive sense cannot be easily restituted. So Aristotle attempted to call the Greeks back to measure
and hubris by appealing to the mind rather than the soul, through
reasoning rather than intuition—that is, through logic rather than
aesthetics. More specifically, Aristotle did not approach measure
merely as a self-evident condition that presents itself openly in
natural beauty. For example, he did not argue that the massacre
at Melos was a hubristic act because it was savagely messy and
unnaturally ugly. Instead he tried to define measure and hubris
explicitly and thus demonstrate to the Greeks that every act of
barbarism is hubristic because it is extremely beyond measure.
To Aristotle, extreme actions are temporary and self-destructive,
while measured activities are sustainable and constructive. In that
context, Aristotle’s rational approach to measure tried to appeal
to the Greeks’ instinct of self-preservation, rather than to their
degraded sense of aesthetics.
Aristotle’s logical approach to measure was ingenious and
realistic in the post-Socratic era of cultural decline, when Greeks
were increasingly flirting with extremes like ostentatious consumption, abusive power, and the persecution—or even execution—of men of virtue. But Aristotle faced a conceptual problem.
A non-controversial, logically defined concept of measure in
human affairs may well be an impossibility. One indication of
this is the fact that the golden ratio φ is an irrational number that
defies mathematical precision:
What is the ratio of [the temple’s] width to its height? I
can tell you exactly what it is, but not in numbers. I can
also tell it to you in numbers, but not exactly. It is approximately 61.8 units wide and 38.2 units high. That
will get you in the ballpark and your eye will then adjust
it to make the ratio exact, but it can be proven that no
pair of numbers, to any finite precision, can accurately
express this ratio, which is that formed by cutting a line
so that the whole has to its larger part the same ratio that
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the larger part has to the smaller. We know many things
by measuring, and our usual way of measuring is with
numbers, but in this case numbers are too crude an instrument by which to know something our eyes know at
a glance.11
And if measure in quantitative geometric dimensions defies
mathematical precision, then how much more difficult is the task
of devising an accurate definition of measure in qualitative
human affairs?
Aristotle wisely did not conceive of a comprehensive definition of measure, nor did he attempt to define measured behavior
in human affairs, because an imprecise definition would be controversial, and thus of limited practical use in policy making. In
contrast to Plato’s idealistic quest for an absolute value system, Aristotle formulated a pragmatic and relative definition of measure.
He approached the concept of measure through successive logical
approximations that involved real-life examples, metaphors, and
implicit analogies.
Aristotle conceived of measure as a subjective mean between
two opposite extremes, one of deficiency (elleipsis) and the other
of excess (hyperbolē) with respect to a desired goal. For example,
courage (andreia) holds a mean position between one’s own feelings of fear (phobos) and overconfidence (tharsos). Such a mean
is usually closer to one extreme than the other, depending on internal trend (idiosyncrasy) and external circumstances (environment), and consequently is not one and the same for everyone:12
Therefore of everything that is continuous and divisible,
it is possible to take the larger part, or the smaller part,
or an equal part, and these parts may be larger, smaller,
and equal either with respect to the object itself or relative to us; the equal part being a mean between excess
and deficiency. By the mean of the object I denote a point
11. Sachs, “Measure, Moderation, and the Mean,” 7-8.
12. Nicomachean Ethics 1106a25–35. Translations of the Ethics are by
W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908) and H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934) and edited by the author.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PAPPAS
87
equally distant from either extreme, which is one and the
same for everybody; by the mean relative to us, that
amount which is neither too much nor too little, and this
is not one and the same for everybody. For example, if
10 is considered many and 2 few, then 6 is considered
the mean with respect to the object, because it exceeds
and is exceeded by an equal amount and is the intermediate according to arithmetical proportion. But we cannot
derive the mean relative to us by this [arithmetical]
method.
(En panti dē sunechei kai diairetōi esti labein to men
pleion to d’ elatton to d’ ison, kai tauta ē kat’ auto to
pragma ē pros hēmas:to d’ ison meson ti huperbolēs kai
elleipseōs. Legō de tou men pragmatos meson to ison
apechon aph’ hekaterou tōn akrōn, hoper estin hen kai
to auto pasin, pros hēmas de ho mēte pleonaei mēte
elleipei: touto d’ ouch hen, oude tauton pasin. Hoion ei
ta deka polla ta de duo oliga, ta hex mesa lambanousi
kata to pragma: isōi gar huperechei te kai huperchetai:
touto de meson esti kata tēn arithmētikēn analogian. To
de pros hēmas ouch houtō lēpteon.)
Aristotle here sets out two distinct types of mean, a lesser
and a greater. The lesser type, the mean with respect to the object,
is like a mere arithmetic average, static and objective. The greater
type, the mean relative to us, which is really the sort of measure
that applies to human thought and action, is dynamic and fluctuating. It is rarely midway between opposing extremes. Nor is it
the same for different people, because it is perceived subjectively.
Nor does it remain the same, because it can evolve with changes
of interal states and external conditions.
One example of this fluctuation might be the changing measure of courage required by the Greeks in the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. The Greeks needed an exceptionally high degree
of courage—that is, extreme fearlessness—when they were fighting for their very existence against the Persian invaders. In the
Peloponnesian War, however, a less intense degree of courage—
much closer to fearfulness—might have served them better, because it might have prevented them from waging that civil war
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in the first place, or, at least, might have induced them to put an
end to the madness of that war earlier than they finally did. This
shows that an adequate definition of measure in human affairs
must be subjective at an individual level, cultural at a macro-social level, and always relative to changing external circumstances. Such a definition would have to be dynamic rather than
static, as Aristotle himself hinted by the reference to continuity
and divisibility at the opening of the above passage.
3. Sustainability
According to Aristotle, policies that are effective at present,
and thus seem to be implemented according to measure, should
still be considered hubristic if their desired effects are unsustainable in the foreseeable future. In this context, Aristotle uses the
metaphor of the lifetime of a single individual, as shown in the
following passages from the Ethics:
For [happiness] requires, as we said, not only complete
virtue but also a complete lifetime. Indeed, many
changes and vicissitudes of all sorts occur in one’s lifetime, and the most prosperous man may fall into great
misfortunes in old age, as is told of Priam in the Trojan
epic; and no one calls happy a man who has experienced
such misfortunes and has passed away miserably
(1100a4-9).
(Dei gar, hōsper eipomen, kai aretēs teleias kai biou
teleiou. Pollai gar metabolai ginontai kai pantoiai tuchai
kata ton bion, kai endechetai ton malist’ euthēnounta
megalais sumphorais peripesein epi gērōs, kathaper en
tois Trōikois peri Priamou mutheuetai: ton de toiautais
chrēsamenon tuchais kai teleutēsanta athliōs oudeis eudaimonizei.)
Therefore what would prohibit us from saying that he is
happy who is active in accordance with complete virtue
and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for
some chance period but throughout his complete lifetime? Or must we add “and who is destined to live thus
and die accordingly”? Because the future is hidden from
us, and we consider happiness as a teleological goal,
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89
something utterly and absolutely complete. And if this is
so, we shall pronounce happy those among the living in
whom these conditions are, and are to be, fulfilled—and
[we’ll call them] happy human beings (1101a14-20).
(Ti oun kōluei legein eudaimona ton kat’ aretēn teleian
energounta kai tois ektos agathois hikanōs kechorēgēmenon mē ton tuchonta chronon alla teleion bion; ē prostheteon kai biōsomenon houtō kai teleutēsonta kata
logon; epeidē to mellon aphanes hēmis estin, tēn eudaimonian de telos kai teleion tithemen pantēi pantōs. ei d’
houtō, makarious eroumen tōn zōntōn hios huparchei kai
huparxei ta lechthenta, makarious d’ anthrōpous.)
The implied analogy is obvious: The lifetime of an individual
may span three to four generations (say, 60–80 years), while the
historical course of a city-state normally spans many more generations (say, several centuries). A man should be considered
happy only if he lives a measured life during his entire lifetime,
away from the pitfalls of extreme misfortune and misery. Likewise a city-state should be considered successful only if it applies
measured policies with effects that are sustainable in an intergenerational historical period.
On the basis of this analogy, a definition of measure in individual behavior and political organization must satisfy the axiom
of sustainability, which is the criterion for discerning between
actual measure, which is sustainable, and illusory measure,
which is unsustainable. For example, the shared confusion of
Fig. 2: Unsustainable Aesthetic Mess in Contemporary Athens
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contemporary Greeks about the difference between real development and illusory development is manifested by the city they
have built all around the Parthenon in the post-WWII era: Athens
is one of the ugliest and most polluted capital cities in Europe
(Fig. 2). Of course, there are many terribly polluted cities in the
world, but Athens is unique. The city surrounds the Parthenon
chaotically, as if the surrealistic pandemonium of the former
threatens to engulf the Apollonian harmony of the latter. For six
consecutive decades (1949–2009), while the contemporary
Greeks were building their grotesque city, they thought they were
developing their economy in accordance with measure. After all,
they did provide work and housing for millions of Greek peasants
who emigrated from their villages to the new, “modern” Athens.
During that period, under the spell of Atē, most Greeks were incapable of seeing what was obvious to sight—namely, the visual
actuality that their city is a heap of aesthetic hubris lying all
around the Parthenon. As a consequence, they were unable to
take corrective action in time. Only recently, under the specter
of Nemesis, did the Greeks start to re-evaluate their perception
of progress. Now at last, Athenians can see that their city, and the
hubristic model of economic development that underlies it, have
been unsustainable all along.13
This manifestation of Athenian hubris around the Parthenon
is symptomatic of the world’s industrial hubris in regard to planet
earth. Contemporary Athens was built as a gargantuan labor city
that would allegedly provide an ample supply of cheap labor to
heavy industry nearby, at Eleusis, the former site of the Eleusinian Mysteries. At a global level, unbounded materialistic expansion has crowded out the Apollonian tradition. The echo of the
idealistic values of the victors in the Battle of Marathon is becoming increasingly attenuated in the era of so-called globalization. Unlimited economic growth on a planet with limited
13. Nicos Souliotis, “Cultural Economy, Sovereign Debt Crisis and the Importance of Local Contexts: The Case of Athens,” CITIES: The International
Journal of Urban Policy and Planning 33 (2013): 61–68.
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91
resources is not merely unsustainable. It is irrational.
It is too late for the Athenians, because their aesthetic blindness has already brought upon them the current retribution of
socio-economic Nemesis. The pressing question now is whether
it is too late for humanity as well, in view of the climatic Nemesis
that seems is appearing on the horizon. Aberrations from measure
cannot survive the forces of nature for long. Nemesis always intervenes, sooner or later, to restore beauty, harmony and balance,
which are all associated with sustainability.14
Even in judicial practice and strategic analysis, the concepts
of measure and justice are sometimes associated with the notion
of sustainability.15 For example, akin to the concept of measure
is the legal principle of reciprocity or lex talionis (legal equivalence, as in “equivalent retaliation”), as well as the popular saying “tit for tat.” They trace their origins to the Biblical scripture
“an eye for an eye”16 and the Babylonian legal code, enacted in
1772 BC by Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon. Hammurabi’s code included no provision for extenuating circumstances to modify a prescribed punishment. According to
Aristotle though, proportionate reciprocity with qualification that
takes account of circumstances, that is, retribution with measure,
14. Patricia Grant, “An Aristotelian Approach to Sustainable Business,”
Corporate Governance 11.1 (2008): 4–14.
15. Stefan Baumgärtner and Martin Quaas, “What is Sustainability Economics?” University of Lüneburg Working Paper Series in Economics,
138 (2009): 3, available at http://hdl.handle.net/10419/30222: “The vision of sustainability aims at justice in the domain of human-nature relationships and in view of the long-term and inherently uncertain future.
This includes three specific relationships . . . : (i) justice between humans of different generations (intergenerational justice), (ii) justice between different humans of the present generation (intragenerational”
justice), and (iii) justice between humans and nature (physiocentric
ethics).”
16. The Biblical commandment “an eye for an eye” is literally “an eye
under an eye” (Leviticus 24:19–21; Exodus 21:22–25; Deuteronomy
19:16–21).
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is the sort of justice that safeguards the sustainability of the citystate (Ethics, 1132b33-35):
this sort of justice does hold men together: reciprocity in
accordance with a proportion and not on the basis of precisely equal return. For it is by proportionate requital that
the city-state holds together.
(Sunechei to toiouton dikaion, to antipeponthos kat’
analogian kai mē kat’ hisotēta. Tōi antipoiein gar analogon summenei hē polis.)
The principle of just retribution is the conceptual basis of
measured response, which is a highly effective strategy in game
theory in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.17 But under extraordinary circumstances, a policy of reciprocity may be too rigid and
ineffective if it does not satisfy the axiom of sustainability. For
instance, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 imposed war reparations
beyond measure upon Germany after World War I. Those retributive payments were unsustainable. As consequence, the German
economy was soon ruined, and ultimately its political system collapsed in 1933. After the war, during the military occupation of
Germany (1945-1949), retaliative justice was of little use to the
Allies when they had to decide how to respond sustainably to the
Holocaust. The proper response could not be to visit another
Holocaust on the Germans. Instead, sustainability took center
stage in shaping U.S. policies with respect to Germany, as shown
in the fifth paragraph of the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1067,
issued to General Eisenhower in April 1945: “The principal Allied objective is to prevent Germany from ever again becoming
a threat to the peace of the world [italics mine].”
In particular, German reparations to the Allies were rather
moderate and non-monetary, such as technology transfers from
Germany to the U.S. and Russia,18 or capital equipment transfers
17. Anatol Rappoport and Albert M. Chammah, Prisoner’s Dilemma
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965).
18. John Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation
and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990), 171.
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93
to France and Russia—primarily from dismantled German military factories and heavy industry.19 Aiming at sustainability, the
Western Allies implemented an imaginative mix of policies, including: immediate apprehension of war criminals for punishment, control over German education, disarmament and
demilitarization, a federal form of government for post-WWII
Germany, now to be called the Federal Republic of Germany
(FRG), participation of the FRG in supranational organizations,
like OEEC and later OECD, integration of the German economy
into an orderly and prosperous Europe, generous restructuring of
the foreign debt of the FRG by about 50% in 1953,20 a reparations
agreement between the FRG and Israel with respect to the Holocaust, internationalization of the FRG’s entire Armed Forces
under NATO command, and ever-continuing stationing of units
of the U.S. Armed Forces in Germany as forward enablers.
With respect to sustainability, the treatment of defeated Germany by the Allies was a measured policy, and because of this it
has endured and has served the cause of peace in Europe for
many decades. In the wake of the tragedy of World War II, the
greatest war in human history, moderation and sustainability
were the two principles that guided Europe safely, in measure,
on the path of Aristotelian catharsis.21
4. Conclusion
For millennia, from the age of Homer to the present, philosophy
has failed to provide a comprehensive definition of measure with
19. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A history of the
Soviet Zone of occupation 1945-1949. (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1995), 206.
20. Timothy W. Guinnane, “Financial Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: The
1953 London Debt Agreement,” Yale University Economic Growth
Center Research Paper Series 880 (New Haven: Yale University, 2004),
22 and 24–25. Available at http://ssrn.com/ abstract=493802
21. As first noted by Aristotle (Poetics, 1449b28), the characteristic attribute of tragedy in the theater is that “through pity and fear it effects
relief (catharsis) to these and similar emotions” (di’ eleou kai phobou
perainousa tēn tōn toioutōn pathēmatōn katharsin).
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respect to human behavior. If measure is “due proportion,” then
what exactly is “due”? And if it is a “subjective mean” between
two extremes, one of deficiency and the other of excess, closer
to one extreme than the other, then how much closer? So far, no
magic number (like φ) or undisputed formula has been conceived
for defining measure in human behavior and economics .
This indeterminacy in the concept of measure, coupled with
the human impulsive tendency to excess, has made many individuals, societies, and states prone to hubristic aberrations from
measure. And as soon as people lose their sense of measure, they
also lose their touch with reality.22 But even if they lose that
sense, they might still be able to detect such aberrations by using
the criterion of sustainability.
In this respect, rational analysis of sustainability is a secondbest and time-consuming methodological tool when compared to
instantaneous aesthetic appraisal of human activity with respect
to beauty, balance, and harmony. The Nazis would not have
needed a rational analysis of their genocidal hubris if they only
could have seen the ugliness, the monstrosity, and the barbarity
of their concentration camps. They might then have returned to
their senses by themselves, in time. Similarly, open-minded residents of Athens, Detroit, or Shanghai, might not have needed an
elaborate analysis of sustainability if they could have seen for
themselves what is instantly clear to the eye, namely, the dead
end of hubristic economic development.
But for those who are short-sighted or blind with regard to
measure, the Aristotelian criterion of sustainability might well be
enlightening.23
22. Do humans really have a sense of measure? The answer to this question is a part of a discussion that includes the question of the best human
life. This inquiry demands philosophic reflection, but such reflection
would not be possible if one could not, in the first place, simply see its
form (Sachs, “Measure, Moderation, and the Mean,” 22).
23. Indicators and measures of sustainability derived from the Canadian
Report of the Alberta Round Table on Environment and Economy (1993)
are listed at www.iisd.org/educate/learn/measures.htm.
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Platonic Theōria
Mark Shiffman
Plato’s dialogues incite us to think about both the words we use
and the phenomena we are trying to understand by means of
those words. In some cases the relationship between word and
phenomena provides the explicit theme of the dialogue, as in the
case of justice (dikaiosunē) in the Republic or knowledge
(epistēmē) in the Theaetetus. There are other themes, however,
that remain implicit and revolve around words that require us to
think more generally about the relationship of words and phenomena—for example, speech (logos) or wonder (thaumazein).
The latter class would include theōria, which we tend to translate
as “contemplation” and which seems to suggest a more direct,
less word-bound relationship to the phenomena, a kind of insight
the dialogues seek to foster but cannot encapsulate in words.
But of course theōria is a word, and a peculiar one. Do we
understand this word, and do we understand the phenomena it
bespeaks? Let us ask a question the dialogues never directly raise:
What is theōria? To what does the word refer, or toward what
does it gesture? To reflect on this question, we must reflect on
how the word theōria is used in the dialogues. When we do, we
will notice several things: 1) the language of theōria (including
the related verb theōrein and noun theōros) has meanings in
Greek before Plato, and the dialogues use these words in ways
related to but departing from their previous uses; 2) there is no
simply identifiable single meaning of theōria in the dialogues;
3) outside of the Laws, in which Socrates does not appear, the
only character who uses “theoric” language in these innovatively
varied ways is (with a single exception) Socrates; and 4) his use
of this language varies in relation to the demands of the particular
Mark Shiffman is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities
at Villanova University.
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interlocutor and conversation. The question then becomes: How
should we understand what Plato depicts Socrates as doing by
means of the language of theōria?
I: The Range of “Theoric” Terms
In a century in which the meanings of theōria and theōrein become quite flexible, they reach their maximum flexibility in the
Platonic dialogues. In the attested uses we have from the 540’s
to the 420’s (from Theognis, Aeschylus, and Herodotus to Aristophanes, Euripides, and Lysias) we find a group of meanings for
words of the theōr- root which we may call “traditional,” in the
sense that they are clearly distinguishable in the early authors and
continue in a relatively ossified use through later ones:
1. theōros: a delegate to consult the Oracle
(later: theōria as a delegation and theōrein as
participating in a delegation)
2. theōria: a sacred festival involving games or performances
theōrein: attending or being a spectator at such festivals
(later: theōros as festival-delegate, theōria as festival-delegation)
3. theōros: observer of an unusual spectacle
theōria: the spectacle or its observation (usually as “sightseeing”)
theōrein: observing such a spectacle
These ordinary denotations of the words share certain characteristics: the viewer travels away from his customary setting and
enters into an attentiveness that differs from his everyday attitude
toward familiar beings.
From the 420s to the 320s, in Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato,
Isocrates, and Aristotle, these words receive metaphorical extensions of meaning that differ with each author, but share a common
character.1 By evoking physical and psychic displacement and
1. Thucydides 3.23.4.4 and 4.93.1.5. Xenophon, Anabasis 1.2.16 and
2.4.25–6; Hellenica 4.5.6; Cyropaideia 4.3.3; Memorabilia 4.8.7; Symposium 7.3. Isocrates Busiris 46, To Nicocles 35.6, Antidosis 277.1–4, Evagoras
29.3, 73.9, 76.5, and Epistle 6.12.10, On the Peace 74.5, Nicocles or the
Cyprians 17.5–7, and Panathenaicus 21.7, 39.2–40.4 and 222.6.
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97
the absorbing spectacles constitutive of traditional theōria, each
author highlights experiences in which we are drawn out of our
everyday mode of attentiveness into the presence of something
exceptional. The story of Aristotle’s innovations in theoric language (besides requiring a prior account of Plato’s) is vast and
complex. Whereas the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae gives roughly
125 instances up to the fourth century of words with the theōrroot in authors other than Aristotle (54 of which occur in Plato),
in the Aristotelian corpus it locates nearly 700, only a handful of
which bear traditional senses. What we can say is that theōria in
the sense of attention to noetic objects and Aristotle’s coinage of
the adjective theōrētikos (especially as used to describe a way of
life) achieved remarkable success in subsequent philosophical
usage and became new ossified terms. After Aristotle, innovation
in theoric language effectively comes to an end.2
Plato exhibits the greatest variety of innovative denotations
of theoric terms. 22 instances bear traditional senses. In the other
32 cases we find extensions beyond the traditional circle of meanings that we may classify according to the following benchmarks:
1. Adaptation of traditional sense to imagined social/political
context (Laws 12, 950d–952d)
2. Traditional theoric settings, nontraditional acts of attention
(Laws 650a7, 815b4; Lysis 206e9)
3. Observation of other persons for the sake of judging them (Laws
772a1, 781c4; Gorgias 523e4)
4. Observation of nonhuman entities for the sake of judging them
(Laws 663c4; Philebus 42b3; Theaetetus 177e2)
5. Observation of particulars for the sake of recognizing a general
pattern (Laws 695c6; Philebus 53d9; Phaedo 99d6)
6. Beholding beautiful/noble things without (apparent) ulterior end
(Symposium 210d4; Gorgias 474d8–9; Phaedrus 276b4, 276d5;
2. Subtle and interesting changes take place in the Greek Church
Fathers’ writings about the relationship between prayer and knowledge, but these are best understood as modifications of the specifically Aristotelian sense of the words.
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Republic 529b3, 601a2 and a7, 606b1, 607d1)
7. Beholding transcendent beings or forms
(Phaedrus 247c1, d4; Republic 486a8, 511c6, 517d5;
Phaedo 65e2, 109e8 [ambiguously])
All these varied extensions of the range of theoric language in
Plato involve attention to particular beings, whether identified as
specifically as certain individual persons or as generically as “just
things,” “beautiful/noble things,” or “pleasures and pains.” The
beholding of transcendent beings that comes to be associated with
the philosophic sense of the words constitutes a quite deliberate
extension of meaning, always used in relation to other senses of
the words theōria and theōrein in the same dialogues.
This “contemplative” sense, then, is only one of a broad
spectrum of senses in Plato, by no means more common than others (6 or 7 instances out of 54), and not the only distinctly Platonic extension of the meaning of these words (since headings 4
through 6 above are distinctly Platonic innovations as well). With
this in mind, let us examine the three dialogues–Phaedrus,
Phaedo, and Republic–in which these words seem to denote or
suggest transcendent vision of eternal truth, which is both the
maximum metaphorical extension of their traditional sense and
the sense of the word most distinctively associated with Plato and
his characterization of the philosophic experience.
II: The Phaedrus
In Phaedrus, a dialogue which concerns artful composition, innovative senses of the verb theōrein appear in two nearly symmetric pairs (247c1, d4 and 276b4, d5). The first two cases occur
within the Palinode’s description of the soul’s journey to the outer
cosmos and the region of the true beings. The word theōrein is
not, however, predicated of human souls, but only of those of the
gods. Since the horses of their chariots are well-behaved, the gods
(or their souls) can stand erect at the edge of the heavens and
gaze untroubled at the truth beyond (247b6–d4). The soul of the
man capable of following the gods to the limit is troubled by its
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horses and at best only able to scarcely have a look (248a4).3 This
whole festive procession of the gods going to a remarkable spectacle with their clients in train recalls the festival-going type of
traditional theōrein.4 Socrates appropriately applies this word to
the gods in contradistinction to the human souls because of their
focused attention given to the thing seen, a dimension of traditional theōrein carried over into all the innovative uses. The gods
gaze steadily, while the human souls look only with a divided attention, most of it elsewhere.5 Transcendent theōrein is beyond
the power of the human soul even in the proximity to eternal beings imagined in the Palinode, and thus a fortiori to the embodied
soul in this life.
The other two instances of theōrein in this dialogue, by contrast, have as their objects beautiful but ephemeral products of
human artifice. In discussing the appropriate way to engage in
writing, Socrates likens the author to a farmer. The latter is serious about the crop from which he derives sustenance and profit;
he would not plant these seeds in a forcing garden for the pleasure
of ephemeral gazing, but would only engage in such planting in
play or for the sake of a festival (276b1–5). So too, the writer
who is serious about the just, beautiful, and good will write only
as a recreation, delightedly gazing on his delicate productions
without expecting anything else to come of them, unless a spur
to memory in old age, and perhaps an aid to those pursuing the
same paths of inquiry (276d1–5).
3. While 247d2-4 seems to leave open the possibility that a human soul,
“insofar as it has a care for receiving what befits it,” can also experience
theōria, the strong contrast of gods and humans at 248a1 appears to minimize if not eliminate this possibility.
4. At the City Dionysia, for example, Athenians were divided into tribes
while proceeding to and sitting in the theater, and each tribe was represented by one general pouring libations and one judge of the competitions (see Sara Monoson Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian
Politics and the Practice of Philosophy [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000], 92–96).
5. Accordingly, at 278c Socrates insists that only a god could be wise,
while men can at best be lovers of wisdom.
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The key to understanding the relationship between these two
pairs of instances lies in the character of Phaedrus, whose world
is bounded by his love of speeches. At the outset of the dialogue,
Socrates finds Phaedrus on his way out of the city to commit to
memory a speech of Lysias that has particularly impressed him.
The lewd insinuation of Socrates’s reference to the scroll of
Lysias’s speech Phaedrus clutches in his left hand under his cloak
(228d6–7) suggests the fruitlessness of his love of the written
word. This suggestion associates him both with the farmer who
puts his efforts into non-nourishing hothouse plants and with the
intemperate lovers of the Palinode, whose bodily gratification of
eros prevents the nourishing stream of beauty from flowing to
the wings of the soul that, if grown, would lift them up to their
true heavenly nourishment (251a–b).
The implicit critique of Phaedrus as one distracted from true
nourishment by love of speeches receives its most pointed expression immediately after the Palinode. In the face of Socrates’s
lyrical account of true beauty and its benefits to the soul, Phaedrus distinctly manifests his fixation on artificial beauty by professing his admiration for the beauty of the speech only insofar
as it raises a formidable challenge to the skills of Lysias (257c2);
he is impervious to the inspiration of its imaginative content as
it applies to his own soul. Socrates responds to Phaedrus’s impassibility by implicitly comparing him to the cicadas, who were
once men who became so mad for music that they ceased to care
about food and drink. Plato has Socrates warn Phaedrus (and the
reader) not to be bewitched by literary artistry into a self-oblivious aestheticism that would distract us from caring about our own
souls in relation to the truth–or in Socrates’s words, about where
we are coming from and where we are going (227a1) and whether
our soul is monstrous or not (230a).6
Socrates, by contrast, professes himself a lover of the living
speech of dialectic (266b3–4). Thus, in the agricultural analogy,
6. The initial indication of Phaedrus’ self–oblivion is that, entranced by
the prospect of conning Lysias’s speech, he in fact does not know where
he is coming from or going to. He claims to be coming from Lysias, when
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he stands parallel to the farmer who plants a serious crop. In the
same breath, he claims that when he finds a man naturally able
to make dialectical divisions and groupings, he follows him like
a god (266b5–7). Thus, in the realm of speeches, he is the equivalent of the Palinode’s true lover, whose reverence for the godlike
beloved enables him to follow in the train of the god in the circuits of the heavens (251a1–7) and thus to attain in small measure
the true nourishment of the soul. Like the vision of the beautiful
beloved chastely endured, the practice of dialectic helps the soul
regain something of the nourishing vision of the intelligibles.
It seems then that in each half of the dialogue Socrates uses
theōrein to denote the highest kind of delight: in the cosmos of
the Palinode, this is the delight of unperturbed gazing on the fullness of truth and being; in Phaedrus’s world, the same place is
occupied by the undisturbed delight in masterful speeches. The
reversal of its valence from the first pair of instances to the second–from lyrically celebrated height of the soul’s destiny to critically exposed squandering of the soul’s best labors–emphasizes
the opposite tendencies of Phaedrus’s hedonistic and effete love
of speeches and Socrates’s love of dialectic. Socrates first uses
theōrein to express the ideal, however unreachable by humans,
that may be imagined as polestar and spur to the philosophic enterprise. He then uses it to express the idle and fruitless delight
in beautiful speeches that makes an idol of man’s power to produce beauty, and so obscures the natural connection between
beauty and truth.
At the same time, Plato also dramatizes the problematic character of dialectic, which occupies an ambiguous status between
these two poles of theōrein. If dialectic is a process of grouping
and dividing according to classes, and these classes are necessarily delineated by man, what can guarantee that they bring us in
the direction of the divine theōrein, if the reference point of that
divine experience itself, as a steady vision of all truth, is beyond
he is in fact being spiritually drawn to him by his love for his speechwriting prowess; and the countryside walk he is heading toward on the advice
of his physician friend is in fact a flight from the threat of ill health (227a).
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the sure reach of man? May these delineations not turn into bewitching and calcified products of our speech? That is a phenomenon dialectic must continually confront and seek to overcome,
supported by partial intuitions of the natural and intelligible
whole but without sure and final knowledge of it.
III: The Phaedo
In Plato’s Phaedo, we find theoric language again associated with
the aims and practice of dialectic and the problem of self-oblivion. The words theōria and theōrein occur in the dialogue three
times each: theōria thrice in the traditional sense of an official
delegation to Delos (in the conversation between Phaedo and
Echecrates that frames the narrated dialogue), and theōrein in untraditional senses within the dialogue itself, in response to the
unfolding of the philosophical drama.
Socrates’s interlocutors, Simmias and Cebes, are associates
of the Pythagorean Philolaus (61d), who prioritizes the mathematical, musical and cosmological aspects of Pythagorean teaching over its “religious” (cultic and ritual) aspects.7 Accordingly,
Simmias and Cebes are devoted to investigation of nature, and
treat the question of the soul’s immortality with skepticism, professing uncertainty regarding the rationale for the Pythagorean
prohibition of suicide.
Socrates develops his explanation of philosophy as preparation for death by conversing with the two Pythagoreans in the
cultic idiom underemphasized in their branch of the tradition. He
speaks of philosophy as a kind of purification of the soul from
the influence of the body, thus suggesting a strong dualism of the
kind necessarily implied by the Pythagorean claim that bodies
and souls are two different things that can be sundered and rejoined in reincarnation.
In the context of this explanation the verb theōrein first occurs, when Socrates introduces the question of the “just itself,”
7. See Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp.176–208, 277,
298, 480.
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(along with the beautiful and good, greatness, health and
strength). He asks:
Is that which is truest in them seen [theōreitai]
through the body, or is it like this: whoever of us best
and most precisely prepares himself to think about
each thing he investigates will come closest to knowing each thing? (65e1-4)
At first reading, the question might seem to be, “Do we theōrein
these things through the body, or rather through thinking?”
Strictly speaking, however, the verb theōrein applies only (and
interrogatively) to the hypothetical sense-activity of the body.
The weight of Pythagorean doctrine might however lead one to
construe it as applying also to the activity of the intellect in which
the purifying preparation culminates–especially as Socrates invokes the language of purification characteristic of the Orphic
mysteries, with their revelations of extraordinary knowledge to
the initiates (65e6, 69d).8 Socrates’s grammatical ellipsis thus
suggests (without itself necessarily reproducing) the Pythagorean
tendency to understand soul and its phenomena by analogy to
body, as a body-like, localizable and separable thing. It is left for
the reader to wonder whether the proper cognition of what is
truest is best characterized as theōrein.
The Pythagorean and Orphic cultic mysteries explicitly profess that the purification of the soul is accompanied by a privileged and salvific knowledge. Soul is understood above all as
pure intellect, while passions, which perturb the purity of the intellect, are understood as bodily. This perspective governs the entire first half of the dialogue; the first three “proofs” of
immortality depend upon the identification of soul with pure intellect. Only in the second half of the dialogue does the soul as
principle of life enter into the reasoning.
This implicit cultic-Pythagorean identification of soul as pure
intellect, unrelated to but entangled with body, is reproduced in
an obscured form in rationalist Pythagoreanism, insofar as the
latter is wholly devoted to pure intellectual attainments. Thus
while the older Pythagorean tradition occupies its adherents with
8. “Orphism and Pythagoreanism were almost inextricably intertwined
in the fifth century” (Burkert 1972, 39).
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transformation of the soul in a self-attentive discipline of life, the
newer strand, devoted to scientific knowledge, leaves in obscurity
the concrete interplay of soul and body in the passions, engendering forgetfulness of the soul and lack of self-knowledge.
Socrates’s turn to the discussion of misology that occupies
the second half of the dialogue seems incited (at least in part) by
his recognition that Cebes is afflicted by this self-oblivion. When
Socrates addresses the relationship between types of soul and the
lives and destinies belonging to them (81e–84b), Cebes, hitherto
so quick to follow Socrates’s meaning, has difficulty understanding at almost every turn. His hesitations suggest the following
deficiencies of awareness: he has not thought about the variety
of kinds of soul (81e); he has no sense of the relative happiness
of virtuous, nonintellectual citizens (82b); he has no definite conception of that from which philosophy offers the soul liberation
(82d); he has paid little attention to the drama of the soul’s passions in response to the freedom offered by philosophy, especially
the influence passions have on the intellect (83c); and he has no
concrete notion of the dynamics by which the soul becomes riveted to the influence of the body (83d). In short, he understands
soul only in schematic terms of the opposition of body and intellect, and not through firsthand attentiveness to the complexity of
its real possibilities for order and disorder.
After some silent reflections (perhaps on these shortcomings
of Cebes), Socrates brings into the foreground the influence of
passions on thought, in three ways.
First, in rejecting the common interpretation of the swan’s
song as a lament, Socrates appeals to the regularity of natural
phenomena–observing that no other bird sings when it is anxious
or fearful–in a way that is surely welcome to his hearers. But he
also points out that the intellectual failure of humans to note this
regularity and apply it to the swan is due to a passion, namely
fear of death, which they mistakenly project onto the swan (84e–
85a).
Second, sensing the depressing effect on the hearers of the
objections by Simmias and Cebes to the immortality thesis,
Socrates warns against misology (89d–90d). Misology arises
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when one has the repeated experience of accepting the truth of
arguments uncritically and then seeing them fall prey to criticism—probably an experience familiar to these rationalist
Pythagoreans, especially with regard to the school’s doctrines regarding the soul, and especially to Cebes, the more obstinate
critic.9 Socrates warns that we are prone to grow disillusioned
with argument as such, rather than blame our own weakness as
arguers. He shows himself a keen observer of souls, one who understands their aspirations and disappointments and how these
influence their interpretation of reason itself.
Third, Socrates offers himself as an example of the influence
of passion on the soul’s engagement in reasoning (91a). He
claims to be worried that, under the influence of fear of death, he
is approaching the argument about immortality in the spirit of
those who merely want to win a case. He confesses to pleonexia
and philonikia, grasping after more than his due and infatuation
with victory, and thus exhibits the critical self-knowledge he
seeks to engender.
By articulating these pitfalls of the intellect brought about by
passions, Socrates makes manifest a middle ground upon which
the two influence one another, the true ground on which purification of the soul must take place. What he exemplifies is not an
objectivity of pure intellection insulating itself from all that is
foreign to its purity, but rather a self-critical awareness of the mutual influence of reason and passion that will allow a proper vigilance of the soul’s activity in pursuit of understanding, both in
oneself and in others. In this understanding, passion does not belong entirely to the body or to the soul; but the understanding of
passion and its relationship to thought belongs integrally to the
soul’s self-understanding. Soul is not a being like other beings of
9. Simmias shows himself willing to be convinced of doctrines he already
believes by the first argument that offers itself, though he is always happy to
hear more (73b). The suicide prohibition, which is connected with the whole
complex of Pythagorean doctrines about the soul, had been communicated
to Simmias and Cebes by Philolaus and others (presumably Pythagoreans),
but apparently without sufficient supporting argumentation (61e).
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which we render account, first because it is the soul that must
render that account, and second because we can only render account of soul itself by means of self-knowledge. This difference
is not dualistic, like that between two comparable beings we
might account for in the world known by soul, but is a difference
that keeps the relationship between such different modes of being
as puzzling as it ought to be.
As a result of his inattention to the phenomena of soul, Cebes
fails both to attain self-knowledge and to distinguish the soul
from other kinds of being. His last argument against immortality
compares body and soul to a man and a cloak (88a-b). Even if a
soul outlasts a body, might it not eventually wear down through
successive incarnations? Thus soul appears as something affected
the way bodies are in its dealings with bodies. Beings are all on
one level; what appears as a body-soul dualism is really a kind
of monism of the ontological imagination. The attempt to account
for all beings in the same terms (in the case of Pythagoreans,
through number) leads to the overzealous hopes that end in misology.
Thus, in his attempt to counter the threat of misology,
Socrates proposes what he calls his “second sailing,” a discipline
of conversation that allows the eidetic determination of a thing
to appear in its distinctness.10 As eidetic, it is distinct in status
from its embodiments; as a determination, it is distinct from other
eidetic determinations. In this context Socrates uses the verb
theōrein (99d6) once again in relation to those things he “never
stops saying, both at other times and in the earlier speech”
10. To be precise, the second sailing seems to refer to one or more of several things. The first, on the procedural level, is the so–called “method of
hypothesis.” The second is the result of Socrates’s applying that procedure
to the problem of the aitios, namely the resort to “participation in forms”
as the best explanation for why things are as they are. Cebes and Simmias
assent to this result (102a1), and it, rather than the procedural principle,
informs the subsequent discussion. It may also refer to the implied turn to
“the human things,” to the soul’s self–understanding as the necessary starting point for all philosophizing. It is beyond the scope of this essay to attempt to clarify the relationship among these three meanings.
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(100b1–2), namely that the beautiful and good and great themselves with respect to themselves “are something.”11 That is, he
refers explicitly back to the very discussion in which he previously used the verb theōrein.
In that earlier discussion, it seemed that, in keeping with the
mystery-structure, the process of purification by “looking at each
thing with thought alone” served as preparation for seeing the
“itself with respect to itself” as a culmination. Here, however, the
reverse is clearly the case. Socrates finds it safest to begin from
these things (100b5) if he is to think properly about them so as
to make progress toward the truth. It is the identification of what
belongs to the thing discussed wholly with respect to its own determination that provides Socrates and his interlocutor with an
initial clarity of communication, upon which basis they can proceed to further clarification of the question at hand.12 They are
not likely to arrive at a grand cosmic vision as Socrates had once
hoped, and as the earlier discussion of the “in-itself,” also pursued in the spirit of the “first sailing,” may have suggested.
Accordingly, Socrates here uses theōrein to refer, not to the
culmination of the soul’s journey of inquiry, but rather to a wholly
natural, though out of the ordinary, kind of seeing. He speaks of
those “looking at (theōrountes) and investigating (skopoumenoi)
the eclipsing sun,” which he compares to investigating the causes
of natural things by looking at the natural things themselves. The
result of both is a kind of blindness. By contrast, when he speaks
of seeking the truth of beings in speeches, he talks only of “investigating” (skopein, 99e5–6); and to reinforce this implicit con11. Ti einai, here as also at 65d5.
12. This, for Gadamer, is the crucial difference between the Socratic approach to philosophizing and what is typically desired by the interlocutors
(including the readers): “In the final analysis, our wanting to think of the
participation of existent things in being as a relationship of existent things
to each other always involves us in a false concretion. Instead we would
do better to acknowledge from the start that this participation is the point
of departure for all meaningful talk of the idea and of the universal” (“The
Proofs of Immortality in Plato’s Phaedo,” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight
hermeneutical Studies of Plato, tr. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986), pp.124-5 (emphasis mine).
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trast, he immediately and emphatically rejects a too strict analogy
between his visual image and the phenomena of investigation in
speeches (99e6–100a3). Theōrein here names an activity of the
bodily senses that quite clearly should not serve as a model for
the activity of the inquiring mind.
Socrates delivers this account, which rejects understanding
natural things in terms of generation, in response to Cebes’s naturalistic notion of the dissolution of soul—a problem which, according to Socrates, would require “a thorough examination of
the cause of generation and destruction” (95e9). Socrates implicitly warns Cebes that his mode of inquiry will produce only blindness and disappointment. By means of the second sailing,
Socrates and Cebes make some progress in clarifying the question starting out from agreement about what is strictly proper to
soul. Ultimately, however, Cebes fails to adhere to this discipline.
He makes the mistake, which Socrates does not explicitly correct,
of deducing the soul’s inability to suffer corruption from its
deathlessness (106d).
As Socrates implies in his somewhat evasive response to
Cebes’s confident assertion, one might properly say that soul is
deathless by virtue of its eidetic determination, since the presence
of soul in a thing necessarily entails the presence of life. Soul as
an object of the intellect can also be strictly considered not liable
to corruption by virtue of its eidetic status as such, to which the
question of corruption would be simply irrelevant. Neither premise enables us to conclude anything about the perdurance of actual living souls.
In applying a determination of the eidos of soul as such to
the level of instantiation (i.e. equating deathlessness of soul as
soul with incorruptibility of any given soul), Cebes exhibits what
Aristotle will later identify as a characteristic flaw of Pythagorean
metaphysics: By making number the being of things, Pythagoreanism fails to distinguish numbers, as intelligibles without qualities, from the sensible entities they are supposed to compose.13
13. Metaphysics 1090a31–b2. Compare Gadamer, p.112: “Plato . . . is not
simply Pythagorean. On the contrary, he explicitly distinguishes the noetic
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Thus, even within the structure of the cosmos apprehended by
soul, Pythagoreanism fails to discern the eidetic determinations
through which alone the soul can attempt an adequate grasp of
beings.14
In the face of the recalcitrance of this basic Pythagorean principle, Socrates turns to a myth, in which he uses theōrein for the
last time. He acknowledges the argument’s inconclusiveness and
encourages Simmias and Cebes to push the dialectical inquiry
further back, to examine more clearly the primary hypotheses in
spite of their inclination to trust in them. Only if they do this sufficiently will they follow the logos as much as humanly possible
(107b). The myth, that is to say, enters on the heels of an acknowledgment that the dialectic has been inadequately achieved
because of the ultimate hypotheses from which Simmias and
Cebes seem unable to break free, and it seems intended to address
this state of affairs.
In this most thoroughly corporeal of Socrates’s eschatological myths, the “higher world” is not an eidetic world or a place
of souls, but a literally higher and more perfect region of the
earth, whose stones are less liable to corruption and whose people
live longer (by both of which Cebes has characterized soul).15
These purer and higher regions are imaginable precisely through
world of numbers and mathematical relationships from what is given in the
reality of concrete appearances.” (Thus also Burkert, pp. 31 and 480.) Moreover, the Pythagoreans load numbers with all sorts of noetic determinations, without recognizing that the noetic forms must provide the
ontological ground for these distinctions, such that number cannot be
the most fundamental determination of beings (unless they are seen as
more fundamental determinants of the ideas themselves, as may be the
case in the Platonic “unwritten doctrines”). Thus the Pythagoreans occlude the distinction between the aesthetic and the noetic.
14. If the question remains open whether the soul’s requirement of eidetic determinations for understanding the world is to be attributed to
the soul or to the world, this is only to say that the Socratic approach
keeps the relationship of soul to world as puzzling as it ought to be as
well.
15. Stones: 110e2–5. People: 111b1–3.
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proportionality: as air is to water in visual clarity and purity, so
the ether in the upper regions is to air (if not more so), and the
senses and wisdom of the inhabitants exceed ours in the same
ratio (111b). There the geometrically structured beauties of nature, the precious stones, are in plain sight, not hidden under the
rough ground as here (11a1–2). This higher world seems to body
forth the main features of the Pythagorean ontological imagination of reality.
In this context Socrates speaks of the hypothetical case of
someone from our impure part of the earth rising up to catch sight
of the outer, purer surface. If his nature were up to the task of
holding himself aloft gazing (theōrousa), he would see the true
heaven and light and earth (109e5–8). Here theōrein (in a fairly
traditional sense of traveling afar to see extraordinary sights) does
express an image of the goal of Pythagorean inquiry, namely the
vision of the purified natural and visible things. The suggestion
that one might achieve this by growing wings (109e3) reminds
us of the Palinode of the Phaedrus, but thereby reinforces the
contrast that here we are speaking emphatically of an imagined
bodily journey. That the geographical context of the image suggests flight above the Mediterranean (especially in light of the
pervasive imagery of the Theseus story in the dialogue16) also
calls to mind Icarus, a fitting image of the calamitous misology
attendant upon the excessive hopes of Pythagorean rationalism.
The crucial detail for understanding the role of the myth in
relation to the underlying concerns of the dialogue would seem
to be the remark that among those dead vouchsafed transport to
the higher regions (who seem to meet their fates in their bodily
condition), only the ones purified by philosophy go on to live
without bodies in even higher dwelling places whose beauty it is
“not easy to make manifest” (114c5). The true philosophical purification, the art of dialectic conducted in light of the soul’s pursuit of self-knowledge, is not visible or discernible through
proportion; it can only be distinctly known from the inside. The
intermediately higher world seems to translate the dangers of the
Pythagorean aspiration into spatial terms and to put it into perspective in relation to the indescribable fate of the philosopher.
16. Cf. Jacob Klein, “Plato’s Phaedo,” in Lectures and Essays (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 375-393
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It is not those who make their dwelling in the land of mathematical purity who ascend to fundamental philosophical insight, but
rather the dialectical philosopher who starts out on the rough
ground of our world and aims beyond the vision of a mathematized nature to the eidetic principles of being.
The three instances of theōrein are thus associated with three
kinds of purification. The dualistic approach to philosophy seeks
to purify the mind by ignoring the body, thinking it will culminate
in theōrein of the true beings; but this hypothetical theōrein is
conceived as belonging to a body-like soul on the analogy of bodily perception. The second sailing seeks to purify the logos by
means of fidelity to the eidos in the light of the pursuit of selfknowledge; it distinguishes itself from the blindness-inducing
theōrein of natural phenomena. The monistic myth imagines a
purification of the visible things themselves by placing them in
higher, purer physical conditions, and depicts theōrein of these
perfected natural beings as the inevitably frustrating, misologyinducing goal of Pythagorean thought.
This consistent emphasis on purification harks back to the
uses of theōria in the initial conversation that frames the dialogue.17 In three consecutive sentences (58b2, b5, c1), Phaedo
says the following about the theōria to Delos that delays
Socrates’s execution:
1. It has been performed annually by the Athenians since they
vowed it to Apollo if he should save Theseus.
2. They must remain pure from executions while it is gone, and uncooperative winds sometimes considerably delay its sailing.
3. It begins when the priest of Apollo lays the wreath on the prow
of the ship.
Perhaps the mentions of Apollo in the first and third sentences
about the theōria to Delos provide a key to the parallel. Apollo
is a god of ritual purification and of vision, which correspond re17. As Burkert (p.474) notes, the “significance of 3 in purification ritual
was emphasized by Aristotle” in On the Heavens 268a14.
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spectively to the dualistic and monistic aspects of Pythagoreanism. Moreover, Pythagoras himself seems to have been identified by his early followers with the “Hyperborean Apollo.”18
Whatever we make of these two instances, the central use
here presents a clearer parallel to the central use of theōrein: the
theōria to Delos is delayed by the sort of conditions that might
(but in this case apparently do not) lead one to resort to a “second
sailing.” We learn at the beginning of the narrated conversation
that Socrates, during the period of his confinement that corresponds to this lag, practices his own different kind of devotion
to Apollo, one that combines the soul’s self-knowledge with the
pursuit of communication through eidetic precision: He is not
sure he clearly understood the injunction in his dreams to make
music, fearing that his own passion for philosophy may have led
him to construe the class of “music” too narrowly (60e–61b).
Though superficially an abandonment of philosophy, the purification he carries out through poetry reflects the purification of
the second sailing and of Socratic self-knowledge: it too is chosen
as the “safer” course (61a8, 100d8).
IV: The Republic
In the Phaedrus, theōrein denotes, first, a steady attention to the
vision of complete and eternal truth available to gods alone and,
second, a non-serious delight in products of man’s art. In the
Phaedo, it flirts with expressing a human vision of eternal truth,
but then suggests that this excessive expectation is characteristic
of a false philosophy. It becomes all the more striking, then, to
find theōria used twice in the Republic to refer explicitly to a
kind of intellectual vision of eternal and divine truth available to
human beings. In Book VI, Socrates describes the philosopher
as enjoying theōria “of all time and all being” (486a8).19 In the
allegory of ascent from the cave to the sunlit regions, he remarks
that it should be no surprise if the philosopher, coming into the
darkness from “divine contemplations” (apo theiōn theōriōn,
517d4–5), cuts a ridiculous figure when forced to deal with shad18. Alternatively, he was thought to be the son of Apollo (Burkert,
pp.141–146, 149, 168).
19. Quotations are from Allan Bloom’s translation of The Republic
(New York: Basic Books, 1968), unless otherwise noted.
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owy human affairs.
If we look to Socrates’s relationship to his interlocutors to
explain this anomaly, we note that, of the twelve instances of theoric language in the Republic, all but one appear in conversation
with Glaucon, even though he is Socrates’s explicit interlocutor
in only a little over half the conversation.20 We note as well that
Glaucon exhibits the single use of theōrein in the whole corpus
by any character other than Socrates or the Athenian Stranger
(517d5).
The association of theoric language with Glaucon begins, in
fact, in the opening scene: he and Socrates go together to the Piraeus to see the festival of Bendis, and when they have attended
and watched (theōrēsantes), they start back to town (327b1). Although Socrates applies the participle to both himself and Glaucon, the motives he identifies are only his own: he wanted to see
how they would conduct the novel festival (327a2–3). Socrates’s
judgment, that both Athenians and Thracians conducted themselves with equal propriety (a4–5), reveals a philosophic motivation of his theōrein that will be a central facet of his discussion
of the best city: a desire to see how different peoples with different laws and educations conduct themselves, especially toward
the gods. The motives of Glaucon remain a question for us. Plato
thus invites us to pay attention to two phenomena in relation to
one another: the motives of theōrein and the psychology of Glaucon.
The dramatic intervention of Glaucon also provokes the first
instance of theōrein within the conversation. Mocking the city of
rustic simplicity Socrates has described to Adeimantus as a city
fit only for pigs, Glaucon insists that a city fit for men requires
refinements, adornments and relishes. Socrates responds: “Now
the true city is in my opinion the one we just described–a healthy
city, as it were. But, if you want to, let’s look at [theōrēsōmen] a
feverish city, too” (372e8). The feverish city becomes an object
20. The exception is in the discussion of regimes in Book Eight
(556c10), where Socrates speaks of rich and poor citizens of an oligarchy mixing together at festivals (kata theōrias) or on campaigns.
This sole use of theoric language in speech addressed to Adeimantus is
a strictly traditional use, which underscores the nontraditional uses in
Socrates’s exchanges with Glaucon.
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of attention when Glaucon’s unexamined passions introduce a
new dimension of motivation into the inquiry. The question of
justice began with Socrates’s perplexity about what exactly it is,
a perplexity arising from a specific contradiction: according to
Cephalus’s conception of justice, certain actions appear to be
both just and not just (331c). With the intervention of Thrasymachus, the focus shifts from the resolution of perplexity to controversy over the choiceworthiness of justice and of different
ways of life. The theōrein of the feverish city must satisfy not
only the practical need to choose a way of life and the intellectual
need to resolve perplexity, but also the demands of certain unquestioned appetites.
The subsequent instances of theoric language fall into three
types, corresponding to these intertwined dimensions of the motivation of the inquiry. In the discussion of the auxiliaries’ early
education, theōrein is used within the framework of pursuing a
chosen way of life. In the discussion of the philosophical nature
and its education, Socrates gradually disentangles the philosopher’s motive to resolve perplexity from the ruler’s motive to
maintain a certain way of life for himself and his city. In the discussion of imitation and dramatic poetry in Book Ten, Socrates
reveals the hidden action of unacknowledged appetites in the
theōrein of the spectator of dramatic poetry. This gradual process
of disentanglement reveals both the advantages and limitations
of Glaucon as an interlocutor in this inquiry.
1. Practical/Productive Theōrein. The next two instances of
theōrein occur within the discussion of whether the children of
the city destined for the warrior class should watch the older warriors conducting battle. Socrates, arguing that they should, speaks
of an analogous need of potters’ apprenticed sons to learn the art
by watching their fathers at work (467a4, c2).
This kind of theōrein has four moments: 1) the projection of
a possibility for oneself of being and doing; 2) the desire to appropriate a characteristic (power, skill, virtue) needed to fulfill
that possibility; 3) observation of that characteristic in action in
order to grasp its archē; 4) the emergence into view of the archē.
The watching for and seeing the emergence of the archē that is
theōrein proper is guided by a projection of one’s potential self
toward which one’s aspirations are directed, which is to say by
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the desirability of a way of life. The paradigm to which one’s attention is directed is an acting human being.21
2. Theōria and Philosophical Perplexity. When the noun theōria
appears for the first time (486a8), in the context of the fitness of
the philosopher for rule, it too, like practical/productive theōrein,
results in a principle that informs action. Because of the philosopher’s contemplation of all time and being, he will think little of
human life and not fear death: he will be neither petty nor cowardly. Again, an activity of attention leads to the attainment of a
virtue.
In the philosopher’s case, however, the principle of action is
not the thing looked for in the contemplation, but an incidental
result of it. His theōria leads to virtue not as a result of emulating
another philosopher, but because all his love is directed to the
objects of his attention rather than to objects that incite vice (cf.
500b-c). The education of the philosopher-king requires such absence of emulation, since he will only be fit to rule if he does not
aspire to rule. The more detailed discussion of this education,
however, brings to light a divergence between the motivational
structure of the philosopher as king and of the philosopher as
philosopher.
The philosopher’s desire to know is initially aroused by a
perplexity arising from contradictory appearances (523a–524d).
He is drawn toward theōria for the sake of resolving this perplexity. As the allegory of the cave dramatizes, however, the prisoner
released from the power of opinion does not know where he is
going; only as he progresses stage by stage can he have any notion of the condition into which he is being drawn (515c–516b).
Perplexity comes upon us, and we do not know where it will lead
us, or whether its resolution will provide us with anything of instrumental or edifying use. Perplexity of the sort that motivated
Socrates’s initial question about justice in Book One is brought
to light in Book Seven as a motivation internally distinct from
that of practical/productive appropriation, and as distinctly philosophical.
The city attempts to bring it about, by means of planned perplexity, that the philosopher approaches the “true forms” as an
21. This, incidentally, is the case for every use of theōrein by Isocrates.
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appropriating artist, so as to return to the city to reproduce images
of them. The preference for “divine theōria” over human affairs,
however, initially the philosopher’s qualification for office, soon
appears as a source of his awkwardness in dealing with the phantoms of the shadowy world to which other men’s attention is confined (517d5). This shift of theōria from a source of harmony
between the philosopher-king’s two roles to a source of conflict
is highlighted by Glaucon’s dramatic objection to the requirement
that the philosophers, for whom “a better life is possible” (519d),
leave their divine theōria and return to the cave to rule. A closer
look at his understanding of why this contemplative life is better
(and his singular use of the verb theōrein) reveals his promise
and limitations as interlocutor.
3. The Ascent and Peripeteia of Glaucon. The course of the discussion of poetic censorship reveals that Glaucon is much more
sensitive than Adeimantus to the subtle effects on the soul of the
productions of the Muses. Adeimantus treats poetry as a source
of overt lessons and maxims, questioning what effect the opinions about justice enunciated by characters or narrators will have
on the opinions of those who hear them and are persuaded of their
truth; he is thus a fitting interlocutor while Socrates focuses on
explicit opinions communicated about gods (377e–383c). When
the focus shifts to effects of the less conscious process of imitation, Adeimantus is out of his depth (392d), and even more when
it comes to the influence of music on the soul. At this point Glaucon, who has had a musical education (398e) and shows a clear
understanding of how different musical modes communicate different dispositions of soul (399a–b) and can insinuate grace into
it (401b–d), takes over as interlocutor.22
Theōrein, in both its earlier practical/productive and its later
dramatic/poetic uses in the dialogue, expresses just the sort of
aesthetic internalization to which Glaucon is especially attuned.
One observes attractive features of another soul or its artful products, so as to incorporate them into one’s own soul and make it
similarly fine. Accordingly, Glaucon understands all lovers of
spectacles—that is, all who engage in theōrein in the traditional
sense in which it is used in the opening scene of the dialogue—
22. As Socrates remarks, Glaucon remembers this discussion quite precisely much later in the dialogue (522a).
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to be lovers of learning (475d). If he expresses some contempt
for those who show themselves especially eager for such learning, it is not because of their understanding of what learning is,
but because of their lack of discrimination in the objects of their
attention and internalization. It is in response to this understanding of observing-as-learning that Socrates first introduces the visual characterization of philosophical learning (475e), and not
long after that he begins to speak of philosophical theōria (486a).
Socrates thus begins where Glaucon begins: with a conception of learning as internalization of the finest things through observation, so as to produce a soul as fine as a fine statue.23 By
supposing that the philosopher actually achieves theōria of things
finer than any Glaucon had imagined in his feverish city, Socrates
is able to use theoric language as a stepping stone from aesthetic
education to the understanding of philosophy as knowledge of
ignorance. By presenting the motivational structure of philosophical theōria as different from that of the theōrein of appropriation,
Socrates opens a path toward a distinctly philosophical understanding of education as dialectical questioning, determined by
the relationship of perplexity between the philosopher and the
thing to be known, and modest about the possibility of attaining
definitive knowledge. In the course of following that path, Glaucon the lover of dramatic poetry is caught in a classic plot of illusion of good fortune followed by reversal of fortune.
Glaucon’s recapitulation of the Divided Line at the end of
Book Six (511c–d), which Socrates pronounces “most adequate”
(511d), appears to represent one of the great successes of Socratic
teaching in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates has apparently succeeded
in communicating to a non-philosopher the structure of being and
intelligibility that orients the philosophical pursuit of knowledge.
Following in the footsteps of Socrates’s use of theōria to describe
the philosopher’s apprehension of the objects of his attention,
Glaucon sums up:
23. Glaucon imagines the fine soul on the analogy of a finely sculpted
statue (540c). When Socrates wants him to imagine the superior excellence of the philosophic soul, he claims that the soul as we experience it is as disfigured by foreign accretions as Glaucus–statues
(611d–612a). To “see” it in its purity requires engaging in philosophy
and experiencing in oneself the soul’s attempt to liken itself to the
knowable (611e).
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I understand . . . that you wish to distinguish that part of
what is and is intelligible contemplated by the knowledge
of dialectic [tēs tou dialegesthai epistēmēs . . . theōroumenon] as being clearer than that part contemplated by
what are called the arts. (511c)
In the educational drama, Glaucon here and in the Allegory of
the Cave seems to have reached the high point of his fortunes. In
Book Seven, however, Glaucon and the language of theōrein suffer a revealing fall.
After the explanation of the Cave allegory and the recognition by Glaucon that the life of the liberated philosopher is a better one than the political life, the remainder of Book Seven is
devoted to the discussion between Socrates and Glaucon about
how such philosophers “will come into being and how one will
lead them up to the light” (521c). The would-be philosopher must
be assigned studies that “summon the intellect to the activity of
investigation” (523b). Since, however, these philosophers are
also warriors, their studies must also be useful for the conduct of
war (521d). The mathematical disciplines are chosen to fulfill
this double imperative of practical utility and intellectual awakening; but as the argument progresses, the tension within this duality brings to light an impediment to Glaucon’s grasp of the
activity of the philosopher.
Through the discussion of several branches of mathematics,
Glaucon remains intent on detailing their practical benefits for
the warrior (526d). After Socrates several times insists on their
importance for turning the soul toward “what is always” (526d–
527b), Glaucon tries to make amends:
And on the basis of the reproach you just made me
for my vulgar praise of astronomy, Socrates, now I
shall praise it in the way that you approach it. In my
opinion it’s plain to everyone that astronomy compels
the soul to see [horān] what’s above and leads it there
away from the things here. (528e6–529a2)
This time, Socrates responds with obvious sarcasm:
In my opinion . . . it’s no ignoble [ouk agennōs] conception you have for yourself of what the study of the things
above is. Even if a man were to learn something by tilting
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his head back and looking [theōmenos] at decorations on
a ceiling, you would probably believe he contemplates
[theōrein] with his intellect and not his eyes. . . . I, for
my part, am unable to hold that any study makes a soul
look upward other than the one that concerns what is and
is invisible. (529a9–b5)
The implication that Glaucon fails to distinguish properly between visual and intellectual attentiveness seems odd given that
Glaucon admitted and followed the initial distinction in the divided line between visible and intelligible objects (507b11), and
affirmed Socrates’s inclusion of the heavens in the visible
(509d5), and thus casts doubt on how well he understood what
he was saying. Socrates’s response suggests further that Glaucon
mistakenly thinks that his standard of praise is the same as that
of Socrates. For Socrates, the contrast between higher and lower
is one between what unchangingly and invisibly is and what partakes of change and is sensible; this corresponds to the difference
between perfect and imperfect intelligibility. The dignity of the
object of attention (and hence the act of contemplation corresponding to it) depends on how intelligible it is.
For Glaucon, on the other hand, the dignity of the object of
attention seems to depend on the magnificence it imparts to the
soul. Glaucon seems to want above all to hold Socrates to his
original promise that the philosophic preoccupation will produce
virtues. The consideration of the stars, like Socrates’s “theōria
of all time and being,” may suggest to him a noble unconcern
for the petty cares that consume men, revealing an aristocratic
dimension of Glaucon’s understanding of paideia as the cultivation of a soul superior to vulgar and frivolous concerns. He
can only appreciate from the outside the excellent soul of the
virtuous philosopher-king, or the superior existence of the
philosopher freed from vulgar opinion and ignorance because
he has taken possession of the most exalted objects of sight.
Thus the irony in Socrates’s rebuke is complex: when he says
Glaucon’s conception is “not ignoble” (ouk agennōs, literally
“not non-wellborn” [529a9]), he is backhandedly pointing to its
aristocratic weakness. The aristocrat may have contempt for the
ethics of the marketplace, but he still expects a payoff from his
leisurely pursuits in some acquisition recognizable by and valuable to others of his kind.
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Glaucon accepts the justice of Socrates’s rebuke, but now
finds himself somewhat at a loss to specify what their study aims
at; he asks vaguely how astronomy should be studied “in a way
that’s helpful for what we are talking about” (ōphelimōs pros ha
legomen) (529c). He has to acknowledge that he needs to be led
by Socrates to alter his understanding of education to encompass
what Socrates means by “the invisible and intelligible” (530b).
He is no longer the passionate hero fulfilling his ambition to encompass all the best and highest things in his theōrein. Emblematic of this change in fortune is the immediately ensuing
discussion of music, in which the study so dear to Glaucon,
whose highest task had been engendering the graceful soul, now
serves to lead the student up to problems and inquiry into causes
(531c). The pursuit of the perfectly formed soul has unobtrusively
given way to the cultivation of a dialectical way of being; but at
the end of the discussion of dialectic, when Socrates lays down
the need for a synoptic integration of earlier studies, to Glaucon’s
mind the benefit of this is still that they will stick fast as an acquisition, whereas Socrates is primarily concerned with revealing
who is dialectical (537c).
Having revealed the impediments in Glaucon’s soul to the
achievement of this philosophical transformation, and after an
extensive elucidation of the varieties of disordered souls in Books
Eight and Nine, Socrates returns to the dangers of poetry in Book
Ten. There he brings to light certain harmful effects of poetic internalization that Glaucon needs to understand if he is to attend
adequately to his own soul.
4. Dramatic/Poetic Theōrein. While the practical/productive
theōrein in Book Five involves a conscious self-projection, in
Book Ten the theōrein that belongs to the enjoyment of poetry
seems at first to be something engaged in simply for its own sake.
Socrates, however, reveals that it involves an unconscious selfprojection, one that may be at odds with one’s conscious choice
of proper objects of imitation and aspiration.
In this discussion, Socrates uses theōrein four times. In each
case it refers to an attentiveness to works of art that constitutes a
distraction from true knowledge. Socrates first assaults the traditional aura of grandeur belonging to the poet by arguing his impotence to lead men to truth, and then argues that the poet tends
to corrupt the soul precisely through his power to fascinate us.
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The poet claims to be an interpreter of the divine, but
Socrates places a middleman between the poet and the god,
namely, the craftsman who makes imitations of the god-made
form, which are in turn imitated by the poet. If we look to the
idea that governed the craftsman’s production, we can look in the
direction of the idea produced by the god. The poet, on the other
hand, enchants us with words. Just as absorption (theōrein) in
colors and shapes leads to being easily fooled by paintings
(601a1–2), so an analogous absorption (theōrein) in words and
speech leads to taking the poet’s falsehoods for truth (601a7–9).
The contemplation the poet offers us is not a theophany but a
screen between us and the divine.
Next, Socrates exposes the danger of a seemingly innocent
absorption in the passions of others that poetry represents:
What is by nature best in us . . . relaxes its guard over
this mournful part because it sees [theōroun] another’s
sufferings, and it isn’t shameful for it, if some other
man who claims to be good laments out of season, to
praise and pity him; rather it believes that it gains the
pleasure and wouldn’t permit itself to be deprived of
it by despising the whole poem. (606a7–b5)
The theōrein encouraged by the poets is not merely deceptive; it
generates disorder in the soul, along with a deceptive self-oblivion on the part of the one disordered by them. Insofar as it leads
to this unrecognized dissonance, poetry is the foe of philosophy,
which seeks self-knowledge and preservation of the right order
in oneself.
In the final instance of theōrein in the dialogue, Socrates invites Glaucon to admit that he himself is subject to the witchcraft
of the poets:
“Aren’t you too, my friend, charmed by [poetry], especially when you contemplate [theōrēs] it through
the medium of Homer?”
“Very much so.”(607c8–d2)
Glaucon depends on images for understanding.24 His unnecessary
desires for fine living are responsible for introducing the poets
24. 533a; cf. 440d, 506d.
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into the city in speech (372a–373c). His narrative of Gyges
(359d–360d), his tragic description of the terrible fate of the just
man who seems unjust (361e–362a), and his epic threat of the attack Socrates will be liable to for insisting on the rule of philosophers (473e–474a) all reveal a dramatic imagination, and suggest
that the poets have insinuated their magic into his soul—a magic
that smuggles into the soul a subconscious proto-tyrannical selfprojection by reinforcing and legitimating the unlawful desires
normally repressed in pursuit of one’s conscious self-projection.
Socrates reveals that the contest between the tyrant and the
philosopher, which Glaucon judged as an external question in
Book Nine, exists within Glaucon’s own soul, and the souls of
all who enjoy poetry. He has revealed hidden motives in Glaucon’s love of poetry and spectacle, culminating a process that
began with the first use of theōrein in the dialogue’s opening
scene, and may thereby have opened for Glaucon a much-needed
path to self-knowledge.
In the Republic, then, theōrein in its “nonphilosophical” uses
refers primarily to two ways in which we form our souls through
observation of others and imitation of them. While we consciously imitate the conduct of those who exhibit characteristics
we would like to possess, we often unconsciously allow poets to
lodge within our souls the desire to imitate the figures presented
to us in poetry. In both cases we internalize models of conduct
and understandings of what it is to be human that shape our souls.
In order to make the “examined life” available and attractive
as an alternative, Socrates has to compete with the images of man
fostered by the city and the poets by presenting a fictional image
of man, the philosopher king, who fulfills the dearest ambitions
of both civic action and education in the finest things. He is, as
it were, the theoric conduit that channels civic and aesthetic aspirations into the philosophic desire to understand. But he and
his theōria are only capable of engendering the more humble activity of dialectical inquiry if they are recognized as an exaggerated version of it.
V: Theōria, Self-knowledge, and Dialectic
In each of these three dialogues, Socrates at some point uses theoric
language to put forward a fantasy version of the telos of philosophy
tailored to the shortcomings of his interlocutors with respect to their
capacity to practice philosophy as Socrates understands it. This prac-
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tice involves: 1) a sense of dissatisfaction with ignorance, 2) a desire
to transcend it and reach for truth, and 3) a moderation of one’s expectations of success. Phaedrus, absorbed in the beauty of human
verbal artifice, requires a vision that, while promising benefits to the
practice of rhetoric, points him beyond his satisfaction with beautiful
speeches to a need for truth. Glaucon, in his quest for beauty and
grace of soul, already harbors potential seeds of dissatisfaction, but
the objects with which he seeks to furnish his soul do not lead him
to adequate knowledge of his ignorance; Socrates has to offer him
higher objects for internalization and deeper self-knowledge in order
to direct his longings toward philosophy. Simmias and Cebes already
long for wisdom of a mathematical-naturalistic sort, but their excessive hopes for attaining it lead to despair and misology, and must be
moderated by the “second sailing” and the exposure of their erroneous notion of knowledge.
Finally, though it is unclear to what extent Socrates succeeds
in moving any of these characters in the direction of philosophy as
he understands it, the more important thing is that the reader see the
direction he is trying to go. When we compare the three dialogues,
we see that the direction is substantially the same. Dialectical inquiry presupposes a certain background trust in a natural eidetic
distinctness of things that it can neither demonstrate nor definitively
grasp. The ambition for such a definitive grasp in theōria is quite
human, but its complete fulfillment is beyond human power. At the
same time, it would be rash to reject the intimation that there is some
natural eidetic structure to things which orients our efforts to understand, draw proper distinctions, come to agreement, and uncover
first principles. Dialectic, whether understood as classing and distinguishing, as examining the cogency of ideas and hypotheses, or
as penetrating to more fundamental levels of hypothesis, is always
incomplete and on the way, but also always (and ever anew) making
headway. The closer Socrates comes in the dialogue to forthrightly
presenting his philosophical practice in this modest way, the less
heavily he relies on the language of theōria to express the achievement of philosophy.
Theōria and theōrein, then, are not technical, precise or static
terms for Plato, but words addressed to the various conditions of
specific interlocutors. If they offer a key to his understanding of the
philosophical experience and the fruits of philosophy, it is only by
marking moments in a dialectical transcendence of false starts in that
direction.
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Two Villanelles
Kemmer Anderson
The Socratic Dilemma
What is the news? Has the ship come from Delos,
at the arrival of which I am to die?—Socrates to Crito
The ship from Delos will always arrive
with news from the gods that juggle your fate.
Who decides if you are dead or alive?
When the sailors land, how can you survive
the execution prepared on this date?
Cargo ships from Delos sometimes arrive
with prophecies from Apollo to drive
away the judgment of a court’s mandate
whose law decides who is dead or alive.
From what source do politicians derive
their hate to turn the truth that guides our state?
You think the ship from Delos will arrive
on time? But let us through reason revive
your legal case and find a delegate
to sway the city to leave you alive
for now and permit our learning to thrive,
though your words make some citizens irate.
The ship from Delos will always arrive
With that grave choice to be dead or alive.
R. Kemmer Anderson has taught at the McCallie School in Chattenooga, Tennesee for over three decades.
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Palamedes’s Ghost
Then I suppose that you have only heard of the rhetoric of Nestor and
Odysseus, which they composed in their leisure hours when at Troy,
and never of the rhetoric of Palamedes?—Socrates to Phaedrus
I would teach Andromache how to write
Her flesh, a record of her eyes and ears
To leave behind a mirror of this sight.
The alphabet of blood seen in signs might
Cut a path through the mind stained by her tears
After Andromache learns how to write.
The vowel screams from these war wounds would bite
Like flames and burn the heart with countless biers
Of piled dead through mirrors from this sight.
Consonants of bruised sounds, broken bones right
In front of a reader’s eyes print our fears
When I teach Andromache how to write
Lettered memories of her city’s fright.
When armies rip through lines of sons with spears
Leaving mirrors of grief strewn on site,
Words remain, picked clean from decaying light
That casts nations into long rotting years
Of death when women have not learned to write
A breathing mirror loomed and thread from sight.
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Two Poems
Elliott Zuckerman
Not Twins
We’ll never have enough rehearsal time.
Someone who looks a little bit like me
and I are playing twins. We’re asked to shout
some words, one to the other, but
no one will tell us which one shouts which words.
No doubt the overseer, who seems distracted,
is thinking of something else, perhaps
another pair of twins.
We sit at matching windows while the players,
tolerably in time, proceed from door
to door. Nearby the Playhouse is
already showing posters of the play.
People are lining up.
The stagehands are preparing.
I’m glad it isn’t to be called
The Shouting Twins.
I wish they’d chosen someone else
to play my counterpart. It’s hard for him
to look like me, for me to look
like him. His ears lack lobes.
Nor is there kinship in our eyes
or in our souls. We hardly
think alike. Perhaps we could succeed
if there were more rehearsal time.
Elliott Zuckerman is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
�POEMS | ZUCKERMAN
Carrying Cordelia
I am assigned to carry in Cordelia.
The old and mobled king
is weakened by the recent incidents.
I have the arms and gravitas for what they call
a gracious act.
Right now we’re covered in heavy sheets
of thunder, wind and rain.
There’s ranting and expostulation.
The lightning doesn’t seem to work, but it is
silent anyway. A lactic hiss
now drowns out any other sound.
Hey, ho.
I still have time, but I must rush
to dip my paddle in the flood
and get to the king in my hurra-canoe.
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Pastille, William
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Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Trentina, Allison
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 55.2 (Spring 2014)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
The Mutuality of Imagining and Thinking: On Dennis Sepper’s
Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images ..................1
Eva Brann
Similarity and Equality in Euclid and Apollonius ............................17
Michael N. Fried
The Soul’s Choice of Life.................................................................41
Greg Recco
Artistic Expression in Animals .........................................................61
Linda Wiener
Poems
Troy...................................................................................................82
Hannah Eagleson
Three Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal
by Charles Baudelaire...................................................................84
Peter Kalkavage
The Second Sense .............................................................................88
Elliott Zuckerman
Review
To Save the Ideas
Book Review of Daniel Sherman’s Soul, World, and Idea:
An Interpretation of Plato’s Republic and Phaedo ...................89
Eva Brann
��The Mutuality of
Imagining and Thinking:
On Dennis Sepper’s
Understanding Imagination:
The Reason of Images1
Eva Brann
When Professor Rosemann invited me to this colloquium—small
in scale, but to my mind great in significance—I told him that I
conceived my talk on Dennis Sepper’s newly published Understanding Imagination as a sort of book review, which earned me a
wonderful possession, a copy of this magnum opus, as he called
it, rightly.
There cannot be even the hint of a wink in this appellation. It is
indeed a magnum opus, magnificent, powerful, and copious. I want
to address this last feature first, since it colors the reading of the
book.
This work takes its time. Since, to describe its thesis in a first
approximation, there is no activity homo sapiens sapiens engages
in as such that is not imaginative, Sepper ventures into all sorts of
intellectual territory and calls on a variety of theories and concepts.
The point is that instead of dropping names allusively and naming
notions abbreviatedly he takes his time in explaining what he uses,
and he does it so that a reader can follow. He needs the idea of a
field. Do we all know off-hand what a field, formally speaking, is?
1. New York: Springer, 2013. This review-lecture was written for a colloquium held on October 30, 2013 in honor of the book by the Department
of Philosophy at the University of Dallas, Irving, Texas, where Professor
Sepper teaches. Eva Brann, tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis, was invited to be the main speaker because Professor Sepper has had close relations to St. John’s, and because her book The World of the Imagination
(Savage, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1991), is cited in Understanding
Imagination as a sort of predecessor in the attempt to treat the imagination
somewhat comprehensively and with due regard to the reflective tradition.
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Well, now we know. Is everyone interested in the imagination familiar with Saussurian linguistic theory? Well, a lucid exposition
is given. Does that sane remainder among us who is convinced that
opining without some grounding in the tradition of thought is like
Chanticleer standing on top of a middenheap crowing, know exactly why, and how, to study texts of the past? Well, though I come
from a school that deliberately resorts to that tradition as a treasury
of texts, yet on reading Dennis Sepper’s first introductory chapter
I felt better armed in what looks at the moment like a rear-guard
action in its defense. Let me quickly inject here that I think this is
a sufficiently winnable battle, that the last shall soon enough be
first, and that books like this one will belong to the special forces
of this fight. One element in its effectiveness is precisely that its
generalities are highly and acutely specified. What I mean by that
I’ll say before long, and I’ll even express some misgivings. But
they are the queries and doubts of a reader who has been made to
think hard.
So let me begin my review of the content of Understanding
Imagination by saying that the plenitude of notions introduced is
lucidly organized. This book knows exactly where it’s going. The
title announces the comprehensive topic of the book. (Topic, topos,
topology, topography, I should say, are not casual but carefully expounded terms of the work.) This overarching topic is the imagination and its two aspects: the activity of imagining, and its
product, images. First, the imagination is to be understood, that is,
subjected to thinking. And anyone who has ever developed an interest in this topic will know that this endeavor opens a can of
worms—particularly the problematic idea that one mental function
can be applied to another, and the implied pseudo-traditional notion that the imagination is in fact a separable faculty. (I’ll explain
“pseudo-traditional” in a moment.) The subtitle, then, implies that
this understanding will yield the “reason of images.” Now believe
it or not, the book itself contains an explication, applicable to this
phrase, of genitives, objective and subjective. Thus “the reason of
images” means both “what is the reason we have images, how and
for what purpose they come about” (objective) and “the rationality
belonging to images themselves, how images and logoi (reasons
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
and ratios) are identical” (subjective). The main title has a similar
double meaning. The book will make good on both parts of the
promise, to elucidate both the activity and the product of images—
and, of course, these expositions will raise questions.
The organization of so large a number of mental motions must,
as I said, be lucid, and it is. I’ll first set it out summarily, then permit myself to pick out the particular aspects that got to me, and finally formulate some of the aforesaid queries. That’s as much as
to say that this is a personal take on the book, but that way of proceeding needs no excuse in respect to this work. For the author
himself has some keen observations bearing on the strenuous selfdenial of the impersonal approach, with which I have my own experience: Academic treatments of the inner life, driven by some
misguided notion of objectivity (I don’t want to say, individual inadequacy) quite often read as if the scholar had mislaid his soul
and excised his personal experience while writing on, say, the passions, the will, or the imagination. In these matters, our author
might agree, taking it personally gains something even more valuable than objectivity—call it verity.
I must say at this point what “taking it personally” shouldn’t
mean. Dennis gives the most generous praise and acknowledgment
to my own book, The World of the Imagination, which he clearly
regards as a worthy predecessor to be worthily superseded. There’s
no cause for grief in that. What better chance for an afterlife than
to find a delimited place in the next, more global treatment? At the
end, I’ll indicate briefly how the picture-making view of the imagination preferred in my book both accommodates itself and is recalcitrant to Dennis’s topology.
Chapter 1 begins by giving shape to the questions that matter
about the imagination: How do we come by the idea? Why is it
important? And it promises answers. It then goes on to a critique
of what Sepper calls “the occluded-occulted tradition” of sapient
imagining. He mounts a fair attack on what one might call the
canned version of the tradition, the “pseudo-tradition,” which is
divorced from the subtleties of the actual texts and thus set up to
miss the meaning. Here he produces a pointed answer to two questions: One, what killed the tradition? Answer: survey-type, textless
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
textbook accounts. And two, what have the original texts to give
us? Answer: fresh, unstereotyped approaches to truth.
Chapter 2 offers a five-line definition of the imagination, which
is deliberately comprehensive and incidentally shows that good
books are written back to front. My students tend to think, wrongly,
I believe, that philosophy is about and ends in definitions. Yet it is
a part of the intelligent plan of this book that it begins by focusing
the mind on the topic by means of this definition. It is a risky and
arresting strategy: risky because, unlike the Socratic initiation of a
search by means of a definition that is at once popular and self-refuting, Sepper’s definition is at once demanding and conclusive;
arresting because you can tell that it is new-old, not one of the
going formulas, yet rooted in the intellectual tradition.
His ultimate aim is, as I said, comprehensiveness, initiated by
actually practicing imagining, by attending to the act. There are
guided exercises asking you to determine such aspects as how
much of imaginative remembering is reproduction, how much
detail is present, etc. There is a first engagement with various approaches, such as psychologism, which regards knowledge as
“what people in fact think” rather than “what objects actually
are,” and works on the supposition that we have similar, naturally
given, minds which have before them mental objects, and also
posits that both the mind’s thinking and its objects are accessible
to introspection. One can see that “having images”—pictures
held in or before the mind—goes well with this school of thought.
It is, however, afflicted with many quandaries. Its opponent, antipsychologism, argues that it is not from mental, thus subjective,
objects that knowledge comes but from objective public objects,
from logic, mathematics, the world. Internal objects are denied
in favor of overt behavior; mental images, at least the claim that
there are well-formed, stable mental pictures, are obvious targets
of anti-psychologism. It, too, has its difficulties.
Sepper gives notice that he will sail between these Clashing
Rocks: A mental image must be somehow based both in its situation and its forming activity—must be both public and private.
To escape falsifying fixations, we must reradicalize imagination,
recover its roots, its ontology. Sepper proposes a guiding idea
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
that will avoid getting caught in the conventional commonplaces:
a “topology” of the imagination.
Chapter 3 could be said to set out the methodology of the book,
but that would be falsifying Sepper’s enterprise, which is premethodological. I might describe it as putting to work, for all it’s
worth, a well-found metaphor. Topos, the Greek word for “place,”
has many spaces—physical territories supporting settled locales;
reversely, mathematical fields constituted from the relations among
its elements, its sites; topological space in which expansible shapes
undergo transformations without tearing; and the index in which
rhetorical “common-places,” in Greek, topoi, can be looked up.
These are all versions of a “conceptual topology.” This rich notion
is the notable discovery, or I should say, rediscovery of the book.
Sepper finds that certain philosophers’ writings about imagination,
when directly approached, in fact employed a conceptual topology
all along.
Here is a very preliminary description of the topological approach, as exercised by people who have some preparation:
They have not acquired just a greater quantity of discrete
ideas and their associations. They have cultivated new
fields of imagination as such, as whole fields; they have
learned to mark out special positions in the field; they
have come to isolate (or section out) subfields and sometimes they learn how to relate the various fields to one
another in a new entity or a new field (94).
This much is already evident about a topological understanding
of the imagination: It will see imagining as holistic, fluid, multilevelled—and all that to the second degree. I mean that the above
is not only a description of the imagination but also of the understanding of imagination. For if the imagination is a “topography,”
a placing-in-fields activity, so much the more must its understanding
be a “topology,” an account of a topography. And conversely, if the
approach is adequate in its metaphoricity—for “place” as primarily
used and defined by Aristotle, is a phenomenon of extension—then
so must the imagination be a power of metaphorical placing. But
this is not Sepper’s explicit vocabulary; it is perhaps more an expression of my misgivings, which I’ll articulate at the end.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Chapters 4 through 7 then do what is obviously next: give a
reradicalized reading of the deepest philosophical texts bearing on
the subject—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant.
Chapter 8, on post-Kantian treatments, displays what happens
sooner or later to anyone who tries to trace the tradition of a topic
chronologically. Eventually things fall apart into multifariousness;
one is obliged to choose a few authors out of a multitude. Sepper
concentrates on those, namely Wittgenstein (in his Tractatus) and
Saussure, who exemplify an important consequence of his own
heuristic, his topological device: that logos, far from being the antithesis of an image, is an image.
To explain the assertion that the overlapping of language with
imaging is implied in the topological approach, I must return to
Chapter 3 to introduce Sepper’s notion of “biplanarity.” It refers
to a sort of double sight by which one imaginative plane is simultaneously present with another, and the imaginer sees one in terms
of the other. It is first mentioned as a sort of dissociation, such as
happens when one distances oneself from the sense-filled experience of the world in order to see it as reason-resistant appearance,
opposed to intelligible being, if one is Socratically inclined. Or reversely, if one tends to Husserlian phenomenology, then it is real
existence that is “bracketed,” so that one may see the world as an
analyzable phenomenon. Later this relation between the planes is
called a projection. “Seeing-as” has in fact become a topos.
So logos or reason and image or picture can live simultaneously
on two planes while being, moreover, somehow projectible—that
is, in some aspect isomorphic. I have some misgivings about this
rather broad application of the notion of projection that I will offer
later on.
Now before going to those central chapters that revive the tradition and reradicalize the problem, let me just complete the sketch
of the book’s organization.
Chapter 9, the last chapter, presents the initial definition, now
endowed with enough mental material to shed the term definition
and to become a delimitation—a kinder, gentler, more inclusivesounding term. Like any thoughtful philosopher (there is, after all,
the other kind), Sepper does not in fact highly value definitions,
because they are too bare, and he says that they never deliver an
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
unpackable essence. Nonetheless his now much amplified delimitation does invite an analytic reading. I will sketch out what this
reading yields, since that is the crux of the book, yet I know full
well that I’m reversing Sepper’s deliberate expansion. But what
else to do? Let me call it whetting your appetites.
So: the imagination is an activity; one might say that the imagination is nothing but imagining. This identification does an end
run around the “mental modularity” debate, which is concerned
with the problem hinted at before: whether the mind has a multiplicity of distinct faculties or is a global activity. The imagination
is neither a separate faculty nor an undiscriminable activity. This
imagining is a third something, quite positive, quite specific. It acts
evocatively, calls something forth, and that in a dual way: “abstractional” and “concretional.” Its evocative work produces on the one
hand something drawn away from, abstracted from, detached from
the original. But on the other hand, the emergent imaginative phenomenon has—this is my term now, (Sepper avoids it)—quasi-sensory characteristics, reminiscent of the embodied original insofar
as that it is a concretion, a thickening, of features. The definition
then goes on to specify this activity of imagining. First, it envisions
imaginative fields of concern with a basically potential nature, in
which the fixities of the sensory world become fluid. Second, it
exploits this potentiality to allow the projection of field upon field,
that is, of biplanarity. I have, of course, truncated this concluding
exposition and so robbed it of its subtlety.
The chapter then gathers in the topics that give the potential features form, actualize them, as it were, and so shape the field into a
topography, an expression of the field’s potentials. Recall that these
topoi or topics are figurative places, mental foci.
Here are some examples: Imagining begins with “the emergence
of appearance as appearance,” a formulation that implies “not as
appearance of a stably real thing,” and which is, by reason of this
divorce from reality, both initially placeable in the imaginative
field and essentially evanescent. Fixing this appearance, giving it
firmer shape is a further work of the imagination.
A second topic is the image as inchoate, labile, and contextual.
Contextuality in particular is a recurrent and crucial topic, since in
its shiftiness it partly explains the mobile character of images, but
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
even more because context is placing, and placement is the necessary correlative of place. Further on, a topic zeroes in on imagining
as abstracting from perception. One might say “abstraction from
perception” is the preliminary activity that yields appearances as
appearances, since perception is the sensing of things as things.
But one can regard this abstraction from perception also in an opposite way: When the imagination strips the thing of its perceptual
accidents it produces a rationalized image, one having the lucidity
of reason—reason in image-shape. I think of diagrams and blueprints in connection with this.
Nine such topoi are mentioned, features both of and in the field
that have now become topics, subject-areas for future study and
theorizing, and with these “areas” the book concludes. One stems
from Sepper’s unapologetic acknowledgment that he has “cognitivized” the imagination and omitted the human depths of affectivity. He regards the future incorporation of these factors as
plausible and predicts a complex inquiry.
Another concern is the anthropological positioning of the imagination: How does the imagination fit into our humanity? Sepper
suggests that Heidegger’s Being and Time might be translated into
a more conventional philosophical anthropology, in which terms
like attunement (Stimmung) might be put to use. Here I am driven
to an aside: I would applaud this outcome, because if such a normalized derivation had been plausibly accomplished, that would
imply what some of us suspect—that Heidegger’s original existential analytic is, after all, an ordinary ontic anthropology ratcheted
up by fiat into an extraordinary ontology.
Ontology is indeed another concern. Sepper’s envisions ontological explanations that are imaginative in the sense of being fieldto-field projections, one field being the explanatory, the other the
explained field. A bonus is that this duality avoids destructive reductionism, since in the imaginative mode the field elucidated is
not collapsed into the explaining field. Simultaneity of levels is
maintained, and the object explained survives in its plane, unreduced to its explanatory elements in the underlying parallel plane.
Finally an ethics of imagination is adumbrated. Sepper speaks
of an ethos of imagination as the “inhabitable place of imagina-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
tion”—how we live in its fields. Such a way of life will develop
an ethics that requires this way of life to be good. His book has
shown that thinking and imagining are inseparable. The obsession
with formal and procedural rationality and the relegation of imagination to the arts is disastrous in children’s education and, by implication, to adult practice:
The only adequate way of developing rationality is to develop our ability to imagine comprehensively; we must
start with ourselves, or we will inevitably fail our children and the future world (524).
In leaping from the first three chapters to the last, I have hollowed out the nourishing marrow of Understanding Imagination,
the “reradicalized” readings of imagination’s great philosophical
texts. I would keep you here past lunch, dinner, and nightcap, if I
attempted to fill the gap. Those interpretations are based on close
and acute textual analyses, and they take their time.
Instead I will try to say, briefly, in gist, what in each of the four
philosophers to which Sepper gives a chapter is particularly germane to the delineation of the imagination just outlined. In this
sketchy review I shall have to omit entirely the history-of-ideas
glue that holds these philosophers steady in the context of a—putatively—coherent development.
It is, incidentally, not clear to me what the actual order of discovery was: Did Sepper formulate his understanding of the imagination first and then discover previously occulted corroboration
in the textual tradition, or was it the other way around, or both simultaneously? Maybe he will tell us later.
I’m not sure whether this attempt to pinpoint the intention of an
extended exposition, to find the crux of a highly textured lay-out,
amounts to a subversion or a highlighting of Sepper’s work. Anyhow, I mean it for the latter and will try not to miss the point, but
if Dennis says I did, I will gladly yield to correction. So, then:
Chapter 4: Plato. The chapter intends a major correction of standard interpretations that downplay images in the dialogues. In fact,
“for Plato reality is mimetic,” meaning that the levels of being are
seen as a cascade of images along which the viewer rises and descends in inquiry. Moreover the image-beings produced by what I
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might call “ontological imaging” are analogically connected, that
is, by proportions constituted of logoi, ratios—as in the Divided
Line of the Republic. So they can be said to be logos-involved
(though I’m not sure that ratio-logos so readily translates into reason-logos). I also want to add that Plato calls the lowest human
thought capacity eikasia, “image-recognition,” but then puts it to
work throughout the realm of knowing, for the ascent of knowing
is through recognizing images as images.
Chapter 5: Aristotle. Next, the imagination is retrieved from a
truncated conventional account of Aristotle’s On the Soul which
suppresses two aspects—that imagination seems to be a sort of motion and that it is one aspect of intellection. The imagination’s motion is that of abstracting from the matter of the sensory object and
locating the resulting appearance in the thinking, noetic part of the
soul. There, as “intellectualized imagination” (Sepper’s term), it
functions freely over a field of shifting conformations and contexts,
over a topography. Here I want to add that Aristotle calls even the
Divine Intellect a topos eidōn, a “place of forms,” and the very fact
that this description is figurative (since the Intellect is beyond all
place) may strengthen Sepper’s claim: thoughts and images are
“concreted” in the highest reaches.
Chapter 6: Descartes. Now the topological view of the imagination is refounded in modernity, though again conventional imagination-suppressing selectivity has obscured this fact. Descartes is
a persistent practitioner of the imagination, particularly in the
mathematization of physical nature. Imagination, however, is identified as an activity of the intellect, which is capable of “remotion,”
of stepping back from its imagined figures to rethink them as
purely intellectual existences. Thus intellect exceeds imagination
so as to become, from beyond it, the source of its directed mobility,
that is, the source of its biplanarity and field-topography.
Chapter 7: Kant. Sepper precedes his exposition with an account
of the post-Cartesian occultation of the imagination by rationalism
and its revival within a new science of sensibility, aesthetics. To
these developments Kant responds with a radical epistemology—
an account, called “transcendental,” as yielding knowledge going
beyond the only conscious material knowledge possible, an account
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
that traces experience to its root. This root is dual, a passively receptive sensibility “looked at” by intuition, and an actively constructive conceptuality “functioning” by understanding. The
sensibility is again dual, consisting of transcendental, that is, hypersensory space and time. Spatiality and temporality are thus with
us from the first, a priori. Into these notional receptacles flows—
from somewhere—a sensory manifold, an unstructured matter. The
imagination is a synthesizing power, a power of “placing together”
disparate elements, both at the very origin and on several higher
knowledge-producing levels of the soul. Thus imagination is, for
the first time in philosophy, productive before it is reproductive. It
is now knowledge-shaping rather than knowledge-aiding, as it was
for Aristotle, for whom it presented to thought the sensible world
without its matter. The first work of Kant’s transcendental imagination is that of informing the sense-manifold spatially and temporally, so that all sensation of the world comes to our
consciousness “in” space and “in” time, extendedly and sequentially. Mathematics, then, is a product of another imaginative synthesis, which directs thinking to invoke, to inscribe, in space
particular geometric figures, and also calls on time to develop them
progressively. Of the several syntheses, the highest and deepest,
most original, hence most mysterious, work of the imagination is
done by a procedure that is called a schematism. It “puts together,”
or rather infuses, the functions of the understanding, which is a rational power, with the space and time, the pure intuitions of the
sensibility, which is a receptive mode. On the face of it, their disparateness would seem to preclude this miracle of involvement.
But the imagination provides the ground of their union. One example: “Substance,” as a mere rational notion, is an empty concept.
When time-informed it becomes the more concrete category of that
which persists in time, a locus of underlying stability.
There are further syntheses, those that produce the ascending
ways consciousness deals with the representations before it: first,
an “apprehension,” a mere awareness of a representation as an
item; then, a “reproduction” of the representation as a memoryimage; finally, a “recognition” that by coming under concepts the
representation is now stably settled in consciousness and fully ac-
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quired by self-consciousness.
So the Kantian imagination is an activity responsible for the togetherness of analytically disparate factors. It works at the roots of
consciousness, to give it its basic constitution, and then over multiple and layered fields of knowing, by projections from the level
of mere awareness to full self-consciousness. Sepper says that
Kant, as the most consequential representative of the eclipsed tradition, “brought the . . . intelligible dynamism of imagining to a
high point that was not exceeded even by the romantics”—which
is saying a lot, and rightly.
To summarize my summary: Plato introduces an ontological
imagination, whose places are held together in a bond of logoi, ratios. Aristotle adds a psychological activity working at the crux of
human knowing, between thing and soul. Descartes conceives an
intellect that contains and directs the imagination; hence the dynamism of images—their mobility, responsiveness to context, and
biplanarity—is not intrinsic to images but is the inspiriting work
of the intellect. And Kant discovers a synthetic power merging sensibility and understanding, the two aspects of cognitive consciousness; this power originates at its unknowable root of the human
subject and works at all its levels.
These four philosophers anticipate in various degrees of prominence the two chief elements of Sepper’s analysis: the close linkage of reason with imagination and the shifting field-topography
notion of mobile imagining. And they corroborate his respect for
the tradition as a source of illumination.
Now, to do my job as reviewer, I should subjoin some misgivings—and I do mean misgivings and queries, not criticisms and
condemnations.
First, then, I’ll articulate a sort of global unease about explanatory delineations like Sepper’s efforts that make the—surely
heroic—attempt to capture the mobile multifariousness and closeup complexity of embodied beings, and particularly, of their mental
life. In one of his many helpful footnotes he explains the mental
motions of “abstracting” and “prescinding” (drawing off and cutting away), both of which are a kind of simplifying fixative; the
imagination itself, as a cooperating power of understanding works
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with these devices. If the project is to understand understanding
imagination through a descriptive analysis that preserves the flexible richness of a participating power, a certain swampy doubletalk is the penalty. So for example, a key word, topos, carries,
as I pointed out, the dual meaning of a given subject of inquiry
fitted into a topology and of a placing function of the imagination
producing a topography. And the imagination itself appears—indeed early Descartes is the predecessor here—in two forms. On
the one hand, it is a general power of figurative reconception—
whence its relation to human “creativity.” This human power is,
of course, nothing like the divine creation of the Bible that makes
a world out of chaos; it is rather a new perspective on an old situation or its reconfiguration. This general imagination is a Protean
power. On the other hand, there is also the narrower power of producing and manipulating images; it is a rather specialized capability. I wonder if prescinding, cutting away, containing, would
not be an authorial virtue here. But then again, if something, the
imagination par excellence, is by nature duplicitous, perhaps its
account must display intentional ambiguities and homonymous
doublings—never mind Occam’s Razor and its injunction not to
multiply explanatory entities.
The second item is only a specification of the first. Certain notions don’t seem to lend themselves to clarity—for example, contextualization and fusion. A context, as Sepper fully appreciates, is
logically definable by what is sometimes called an infinite judgment, as the indefinitely large negativity surrounding a place. So
“contextualization” means putting a small island in a large ocean
and calling that a placement. This misgiving, incidentally, reaches
to all those unhelpful politico-socio-economico-psychological explanations: You can’t zero in on an apprehended “this” by means
of too-big-to-know “that.” Something analogous goes for fusion,
the togetherness of word and thought or thing and image. It doesn’t,
incidentally, matter whether the cognitive union is to be of thought
with a material object or with its matter-stripped image; their mutuality is, by the very reason of being a fact, a mystery, and it might
be most incisive to call it that.
Third, this mutuality or reciprocity of intellect and imagination
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seems to me the mystery of mysteries, one attested to by the very
variety of grappling devices proposed for their union, precisely because of their structural dissimilarity. All of Sepper’s four philosophers, however they may assimilate the intellect to its object—as,
for example, when Aristotle analogizes sensing and intellection—
at the end of their ruminations admit, either explicitly or implicitly,
the existence of a non-sensing, imageless power of intellect. This
shows, I think, that in those high reaches the intellect itself is an
imageless power. How does a power which at its purest is placeless
come to govern placements?
These considerations make me wonder about the biplanar, fieldto-field-projecting imagination. It is, to begin with, a very congenial notion to me, this double-sight (for which Dennis kindly gives
me credit), in which an image over- or underlies worldly events,
lending them a resonance from other world-venues. Such are the
Homeric similes of the Iliad that alleviate the excruciating concentration of the battlefield by overlaying it with a bonding analogy
to the rest of the world, from the heavens to the household.
But that template notion presupposes some articulated similarity,
some isomorphism, and I have not quite understood on what basis
Sepper’s fields are actually projectible onto one another, how they
are homologous. For example, he says that there is something perverse in the claim that geometry is left behind in analytic, that is
algebraic, geometry. And yet there is a powerful notion, set out recently in Burt Hopkins’s extended commentary on Jacob Klein’s
work on the origin of algebra,2 that just this is the case. Symbolic
mathematics casts loose from image-mathematics and thereby
founds the very modernity Sepper is trying to reform, the world of
abstract reckoning that has suppressed concrete imagining and has
no structural relation to it and is simply not homologous with it.
Another example is word-painting, the power of language to
arouse mental images. No one knows just how words intend toward
and reach the world, nor, therefore, how they instigate its images.
So, it seems to me, the field of thinking and its articulation in words,
2. Burt Hopkins, The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2011). Jacob Klein was the third Dean of the New Program at St. John’s.
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this field of logos, is not, at least not obviously, in the field-to-field
relation to the imagination that the notion of a reasoning image requires—and yet I know that language often delineates pictures and
passion usually infuses words.
That brings me to a fourth and final query. Sepper quite intentionally barely touches the relation of imagining to phantasy, to
painting, and to the passions. Might it not be that in relation to
these the understanding of imagination requires different rubrics
and emphases from those in Understanding Imagination? I’ll post
brief surmises.
Cognitively useful imaging is fed from the outside face, so to
speak, of consciousness by the sensed world. Phantasy, by which
I mean fiction, presents what-is-not, and so offers a re-presentation
of no worldly original. No receptive taker-in of a fiction thinks of
it as a re-arranged reality, a reality-collage. Should one not consider
that there might be a conduit from the inside, for which the term
“unconscious” is just an evasive makeshift? Although I am here in
the company of soberly sane thinkers, I am nevertheless suggesting
that one might seriously consider what the practitioners of poetry
meant by the Muses, who live on Olympus and not in neuronal networks. The question here is, Whence comes imagining in its most
life-enhancing aspect?
When the visual arts are drawn into the inquiry, painting is apt
to come front and center, because, if a painting is (as we pre-postmoderns tend to think) an externalization of a mental image (of
course modified in its passage from quasi- to real space), then the
embodied product might in turn throw light on that immaterial
image. It might be that we are drawn to flat-medium imagery because it reminds us of our soul’s imagining—in its plane dimension
(that is, lacking volume), in its immobility (or virtual mobility),
and in what I’ll call its momentousness (its excerpting from the
banal spatial and temporal context a moment of intensified significance). The question here is, Whence issues the imagination’s
most poignant work? Even to ask that question is, to be sure, a surreptitious bit of special pleading on my part, since the answers I’ve
just suggested are the ones given in my book.
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And finally, when the imagination is properly related to the passions, from the devastating storms of erotic desire to the delicate
atmospheres of esthetic feeling, might the imagination not appear
in yet another capacity than that of abstracting from the round reality outside, or of receiving influxes from a ghostly source beyond?
I mean the capacity to transmogrify the blind shapelessness of our
most intimate psychic condition, our affectivity, into formed feeling—a phrase that surely describes some of our internal imagery.
The question here would be whether the image as an effluvium of
feeling is the same as or different from the cognitive, the art-producing, the Muse-inspired image. Thus the question of questions:
Is the imagination—be it activity, capacity, power, faculty—one or
many? Almost two and a half millennia, and we are still in medias
res. Well, I seem to have talked myself into acknowledging that
Dennis’s multiplication of entities may mirror the way things are.
Thus Understanding Imagination is a wonderfully anticipatory
waystation. So here, in conclusion, are my wishes for the book:
First, that it gain influence enough to encourage a new round of
broadly conceived image-inquiries aided by fresh, close attention
to the great predecessors and perhaps some new, ingeniously devised, imagination-informed image-research. And then, that its call
be heeded for a reform which I’ll put in my own words: There is
in our world a strong strain of relentless reductionism and blind
rationalism whose inevitable complements are mechanical creativity-mongering and thoughtless image-proliferation. One antidote,
perhaps only topically applicable—but then positive good usually
is local—would be a revivified attention to the reason of images.
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Similarity and Equality in
Euclid and Apollonius
Michael N. Fried
By Way of Introduction
My subject today is the meaning of similarity and equality in Euclid and Apollonius—and, by implication, in Greek mathematics
generally during its climax in Hellenistic times. But before I actually begin, I want to say just a few words about history of mathematics and St. John’s College, and I would like to do so by telling
a little story. I told this story the last time I spoke at St. John’s,1
but I would like to tell it again, for I still think about it and am
still unsettled by it.
Not long after I finished my doctorate, I was invited to Delphi
for a meeting of historians of ancient mathematics—a small intimate group, only slightly larger than a St. John’s seminar. During
one of the morning coffee breaks, Alexander Jones, the classicist
and historian of Greek mathematics, casually asked how I felt having made the transition from a St. John’s way of thinking to a historian’s. Like a good seminar question, I was stunned by this, and
I was not sure how to answer. This was mainly because I could not
decide whether there really was a difference between a St. John’s
way of thinking and the way of thinking of a historian of ideas,
that is, whether it really was true I had made any kind of transition
at all.
With a kind of dullness until that moment, I had no trouble, on
the one hand, claiming that in the work I was doing as a historian of
Greek mathematics I was continuing what I had learned at St. John’s,
and, on the other hand, feeling frustration, sometimes bordering on
Michael N. Fried is Professor of Science and Technology Education at
Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. This lecture
was delivered on July 31, 2013 at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
1. At the conference Classical Mathematics and Its Transformation, held
at the Annapolis campus in 2004.
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resentment, at having to explain yet again how, despite its centering
on texts mostly written long ago, the St. John’s approach was not
historical. Jones’s question made me face the possibility that there
might be a real contradiction here. Of course the reason it still preoccupies me is not because I am overly concerned about my identity
as a Johnny, but because it raises the question of history altogether.
Let me say just a word about this.
When Alexander Jones contrasted the study of history with the St.
John’s program he had in mind, I believe, a view of history, particularly the history of ideas, in which the thought of thinkers in the past
is assumed to be conditioned by times and contexts; understanding
Euclid or Apollonius must, in that view, always be mediated. The contrast with St. John’s may have been based on a mere caricature of the
College where students deal with “eternal ideas” able to be grasped in
an unmediated way. But there is another non-historical view of Euclid
and Apollonius that involves assuming such authors can be read with
no mediation beyond a good Greek lexicon, one that is related to that
caricature version of St. John’s, while not, I hasten to add, the St.
John’s way. It is that in which one comes to mathematics of the past
through modern mathematical concepts and methods, as if the mathematicians of the past were merely writing about the same ideas in a
different language—as John Edensor Littlewood famously said, like
“fellows of another college.”2 Modern mathematical ideas, for those
who approach ancient texts in this way, do not mediate a reading of
the past, but only clarify what those older mathematicians were actually saying. Modern mathematical insight, on that view, becomes the
key to historical insight. A historian like Jones could well see that same
modern insight as obscuring what the mathematicians of the past understood.
For Jones, what the older mathematicians were actually saying is
what they did say in the body of texts they left behind. In order to recover the original meaning of those texts, if we can, one must read
them attentively and with the thought that they were meant to be read.
This unmediated reading of texts, I think, is not far from what one
tries to do at St. John’s. The difficulty here is that having read the texts
2. Quoted in G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 81.
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one must nevertheless interpret them—and what it means to interpret
can be interpreted in many ways! Here there can be deep divisions in
outlook.
It may be that Alexander Jones, as a historian of mathematics, is a
historicist, that is, that he truly believes mathematics to be entirely a
product of historical forces so that Greek mathematics, say, belongs
immovably to its own time. In that case he would certainly see a divide
between the way he relates to the past and the way one does at St.
John’s. But whether he really is a historicist I do not know; I never
asked him. Whatever the case, in approaching the history of mathematics, he must, as I must as well, begin at least with a working assumption that the mathematics of the past is different from that of the
present.
The subject of this lecture is not the idea of history, to use the title
of R. G. Collingwood’s famous book,3 and so I shall have to risk your
being left with the impression that this working assumption is only a
kind of maxim. However, I do want to stress that it is in fact fundamental to the way a historian must come to the past. For example, in
the chapter on historical experience in Michael Oakeshott’s Experience and Its Modes, the author distinguishes different kinds of past,
of which one is the historical past, or, we might say, the historians’
past:
The differentia [emphasis in the original] of the historical past
lies in its very disparity from what is contemporary. The historian does not set out to discover a past where the same beliefs, the same actions, the same intentions obtain as those
which occupy his own world. His business is to elucidate a
past independent of the present, and he is never (as an historian) tempted to subsume past events under general rules. He
is concerned with a particular past. It is true, of course, that
the historian postulates a general similarity between the historical past and the present, because he assumes the possibility
of understanding what belongs to the historical past. But his
particular business lies, not with this bare and general similarity, but with the detailed dissimilarity of past and present.
3. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1946), which collects together the author’s works on his philosophy
of history.
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He is concerned with the past as past, and with each moment
of the past in so far as it is unlike any other moment.4
As a position regarding the way one should come to the past rather
than a position about how the past really is, this is not very different
from a good rule for listening or reading well, as we try to do at St.
John’s: you will listen better to what authors are trying to say if you
do not assume you already know what they are saying—if you assume, rather, that they are saying something different from anything
you have ever heard before.
That said, we are creatures of the present; we cannot pretend the
present does not affect us in any way. For this reason, it is at least useful, if not essential, to be cognizant of the present even while we are
trying to find a very different past. So, while my purpose today is to
try to clarify the notions of similarity and equality in Euclid and Apollonius, I want to begin with a certain aspect of how we moderns tend
to think about similarity and equality: I hope it will help to bring out
the tremendous difference and even strangeness in the ways these notions were understood in classical times.
Similarity and Equality in a Modern Context
Let me begin with a problem someone gave to me sometime before
my flight from Israel to Santa Fe (it is a long flight so it is always
good to have a mathematics problem to work on in transit). The
solution I will present is a modern one.
Let A and B be given points and let C lie on a given
circle. Let P be the centroid of triangle ABC. Find
the locus of point P.
Let E be the midpoint of AB. Then if EC is any line from E to a
point C on the circle, EP:EC=1:3, since P is the centroid of triangle
ACB. Hence, we may think of E as a center of similitude—a point
from which the plane is dilated or contracted uniformly, that is,
that the distance between points is enlarged or diminished by a
fixed ratio (3:1 in this case). The locus PP′P″ is then the image of
4. Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1933), 106.
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circle CC′C″ via a contraction relative to E. Therefore, the locus
PP′P″ is a circle having a radius 1/3 that of the given circle CC′C″.
By the same argument, we can see that if C moved on any other
shape, say, an ellipse or a square, the locus of P would also be an
ellipse or a square 1/3 the dimensions of the original ellipse or
square.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In fact, it can be a completely arbitrary shape.
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In every case, the locus required is a shape similar to the original
shape and 1/3 its dimensions.
For our purposes, there are two things we should observe. The
first is the form of the problem, the mere question of locus. What
does it mean to “Find the locus of P”? The idea of locus, or in
Greek, topos, is not an easy one. It would require a lecture of its
own. Yet, it is related, I think, to my main subject, similarity and
equality. I shall say a word about this later.
The second thing to observe, putting the difficulties of locus
aside, is my own way of answering the question, namely, “The
locus required is a shape similar to the original shape” What allows me to speak so generally? Why is it that I need to know nothing about the original shape, none of its special properties? What
allows me, a post-nineteenth century person, to speak of the similarity of a shape I know nothing about?
The answer to this is that in solving the problem I only referred
to a relation between EC, wherever C happens to be, and EP. More
precisely, I took P as an image of C when the entire plane was
contracted by a factor of 1/3 with respect to the point E. That ABC
happened to be a triangle and that P was the centroid of ABC was
really incidental. More importantly, in the original problem, the
fact that the point C moved along a circle was incidental. I did
not, even once, refer to a property of circles!
The modern turn here is precisely to ignore any particular shape
and give all of one’s attention to the space in which it is found.
The contraction by 1/3 is of the space itself, the entire plane:
everything in it will be contracted, shrunk, by a factor of 1/3, so
whatever the shape, it will be the same, only smaller (and in another instance of course it could also be larger)—it is as if we
make a change of scale. This kind of transformation of the plane
is called a “dilation,” and, in general, we can speak about similarity in terms of a dilation combined with other transformations
of the plane that preserve distances between points, translations,
reflections, rotations (these are known as “isometries”).5 This centering on the space is crucial in almost every aspect of modern
5. In fact, it turns out to be enough to speak about reflections: translations
and rotations can be defined in terms of combinations of reflections.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
mathematics.6 And it is what links similarity and equality, or congruence. For since a dilation is determined by the factor of contraction or enlargement, one can speak of a unit dilation where the
factor is 1. Congruence—and we shall have to confront the problem of congruence versus equality later—is only a special case of
similarity, so that if two figures are congruent they are automatically similar as well.
I want drive home the point that modern geometry is colored by
its emphasis on space by quoting a nineteenth century geometer
who is thought of as a classical geometer, that is, one whose work
is not governed by algebraic ideas—and, indeed, he is considered
one of the greatest geometers of nineteenth century. This is Jakob
Steiner. One of the ideas Steiner developed (though he may not
have invented it) was called the “center of similitude.” In the problem above, this is the point E, the point with respect to which we
dilate the plane. Steiner speaks of this in more than one work; here
is how he describes it in “Geometrical Constructions with a Ruler
Given a Fixed Circle with its Center”:
If in a plane through any point E we draw rays (lines) in
all directions EA1, EB1, EC1, . . . and by means of these
rays, so connect with one another all points of the plane
that to every point A1 on such a ray as EA1 corresponds another point A2 on the same ray; and indeed, under the condition that the distance of every two corresponding points
from the point E, and EA1 and EA2, have throughout one
and the same given ratio, as n1:n2, then such a system of
correspondence is thereby brought about that the plane is
6. I think Jacob Klein put his finger on the same tendency when he wrote,
“Descartes’s concept of extensio identifies the extendedness of extension
with extension itself. Our present-day concept of space can be traced directly back to this. Present-day Mathematics and Physics designate as
‘Euclidean Space’ the domain of symbolic exhibition by means of linesegments, a domain which is defined by a coordinate system, a rational
system, as we say nowadays. ‘Euclidean Space’ is by no means the domain of the figures and structures studied by Euclid and the rest of Greek
mathematics. It is rather only the symbolic illustration of the general
character of the extendedness of those structures.” Jacob Klein, “The
World of Physics and the ‘Natural’ World,” The St. John’s Review 28.1
(1981): 29.
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traversed twice. Or, we can also imagine that two planes,
which may be called α and α′, lie one upon the other, while
every point may be considered as belonging as well in one
as in the other plane.7
Although Steiner will use the center of similitude specifically for
circles, lines, and angles, his way of presenting it in terms of a
transformation of the entire plane—or, as we would say, a mapping
of one plane onto another—shows the generality of his conception.
So, to reiterate the main point above, similarity can be a general
notion for us since in our modern mathematics similarity refers to
such an operation on the entire plane in which geometric figures
live. And because we focus on the entire plane rather than the objects themselves, the particularity of the objects deemed similar becomes unimportant, as we have seen. It is in this way that the
conception of similarity in Euclid and Apollonius (and, I would
add, Archimedes as well) is profoundly different from that in modern, post-nineteenth-century mathematics.8
7. Jakob Steiner, “Geometrical Constructions with a Ruler Given a Fixed Circle with its Center,” trans. M. E. Stark, ed. R. C. Archibald, Scripta Mathematica 4 (1948): 222. Steiner’s diagram is slightly different from the one
included above, for there are a few more points he wants to emphasize beyond
the mere definition.
8. For this reason, comments such as this from Jeremy Gray seem to me completely wrongheaded: “The Greek geometrical proofs worked because of assumptions made about the underlying space, which are reflected in the ideas
of congruence, similarity, and parallelism.” (Jeremy Gray, Ideas of Space
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], 29.)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Similarity in Euclid and Apollonius
In some ways, the radical departure of the modern conception of similarity from the classical Greek conception has everything do with
how mathematicians like Euclid and Apollonius treated the plane itself. The plane, epipedon, in Greek geometry has, one might say, two
expressions, 1) as an object, and 2) as a place. As an object, it can be
considered in relation to other objects, for example, it may be inclined
to another plane, or a line may be inclined to it. It may cut another
figure, a parallelepiped as in Euclid, Elements XI.25 (“If a parallelepipedal solid be cut by a plane which is parallel to the opposite
planes, then, as the base is to the base so will the solid be to the solid”),
or as in Apollonius, Conics I.11-14 where the conic sections are produced by cutting a cone by a plane. Sometimes a plane is nearly identified with part of itself, as in the face of a solid figure (see for
example, Elements XI, Definitions 9 and 10), in which case it becomes an object in a sense not much different from the way a triangle
is an object.
As a place, it is not something manipulated: it is there, and there
are things in it—they can be manipulated, but it cannot.9 Thus in Elements I, Definition 8, “A plane angle is the inclination to one another
of two lines in a plane (en epipedōi) which meet one another and do
not lie in a straight line.” Again in Book XI, Proposition 1, “A part of
a straight line cannot be in the plane of reference (en tōi hupokeimenōi
epipedōi) and a part in a plane more elevated,” the plane is an immovable place. This phrase “the plane of reference,” or “the plane
placed under,” as a place on which things may be situated, also appears in Apollonius’s Conics I.5210 where Apollonius constructs a
parabola in a plane. Even though the plane is not the exclusive field
of action here, as it is in Book I of the Elements, and may have a relation to other objects or be constructed, it is, nevertheless, unmanipulated in these contexts, a that-with-respect-to-which other things may
be manipulated. It is also the place in which the similarity of figures
9. This idea is important in connection to Book IV of the Conics. See Michael
Fried, Apollonius of Perga’s Conics, Book IV: Translation, Introduction, and
Diagrams (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2002).
10. See, for example, Apollonii Pergaei quae Graece exstant cum commentariis antiquis, ed. I. L. Heiberg, Vol. 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1891), 160, line 15.
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is explored. Of course the plane is a place in which the similarity of
figures is explored for the moderns as well; however, they do so by
treating the plane as a place that is able to be manipulated, as if the
place were an object. As such, it can also be compared to other planes,
as we saw in the example from Jakob Steiner.11
To return to the main point, however, the upshot of the ancient
view is that the similarity of figures must be a comparison of the figures themselves within a plane. One’s attention, therefore, must be
sharply focused on the figures and their properties. The foundation
of similarity rests in the look of geometrical figures. I use the word
“look” intentionally; it is a fair translation of the Greek word eidos,
which besides its well-known Platonic context has a mathematical
meaning of “shape,” or “form” in the sense of “shape.” For example,
in Euclid’s Data, Definition 3, we find the following explanation:
“Rectilineal figures are said to be given in form (tōi eidei), if the angles are given one by one and the ratios of the sides to one another
are given.”12 This definition is notable not only because of its resemblance to the definition of similarity in the Elements (see below), but
also because it makes clear that “similar” is related to something the
figures themselves possess,13 namely, their own look or form: for
one figure to be similar (homoios) to another means that they are in
possession of the same shape, the same form, the same look.
The shape of a person may be different from the person, but the
shape of a triangle is impossible to separate from what it is to be
a triangle. In geometry, the shape of something depends on what
that something is. There are, for this reason, as many criteria for
similar figures as there are different kinds of shapes: this is why
for the Greek mathematician there is no single governing rule for
11. See pp. 24-25 above.
12. Translation from Christian Marinus Taisbak, Euclid’s Data: The Importance of Being Given (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003), 115.
Taisbak’s book contains a deep discussion of the idea of “givenness in form”
and of Euclid’s Data generally.
13. In this connection, Taisbak points out, “The Elements compare triangles.
The Data deals with individuals [emphasis in the original], and with the
‘knowledge’ we may have of such individual triangles, within the language
of Givens.” (Taisbak, Euclid’s Data, 126-127.)
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determining similarity. In the Elements, for example, we have the
following different criteria for similarity:
Elements III, Def. 11, Similar circular segments: “Similar
segments of circles are those which contain equal angles
or in which there are angles equal to one another.”
Elements VI, Def. 1, Similar rectilineal figures: “Similar
rectilineal figures are such that they have each of their angles equal and sides about the equal angles proportional.”
Elements IX, Def. 9, Similar solid figures: “Similar solid
figures are those contained by similar plane areas
(epipedōn) equal in number.”
Elements IX, Def. 24, Similar cones and cylinders: “Similar cones and cylinders are those of which the axes and
diameters of the bases are proportional.”
Add to these other definitions from Apollonius and Archimedes:
Apollonius, Conics VI, Def. 2, Similar conic sections: “[S]imilar [conic sections] are such that, when ordinates are drawn
in them to fall on the axes, the ratios of the ordinates to the
lengths they cut off from the axes from the vertex of the section are equal to one another, while the ratios to each other of
the portions which the ordinates cut off from the axes are
equal ratios.”14
Archimedes, Conoids and Spheroids, Introduction, Similar obtuse-angled conoids (i.e. hyperbolas of revolution): “Obtuse-angled conoids are called similar when
the cones containing the conoids are similar.”
Each of these definitions demands prior knowledge of the object
to which the word “similar” is being applied; for example, one
must know that the angles contained in a segment of a circle are
all equal so that one can speak of the angle of the segment. The
necessity of such prerequisite knowledge precludes a general definition of similarity: “similar” always awaits the particular geometrical entities which are to be similar—even ratio and
14. All translations of Books V-VII are from G. J. Toomer, Apollonius Conics
Books V to VII: The Arabic Translation of the Lost Greek Original in the Version of the Banu Musa, 2 vols., (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
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proportion is not fundamental, as the case of similar circular segments shows. And since “similar” for triangles is one thing and
“similar” for conic sections something else, one could not ask
whether some shape is similar to some other shape without first
assuming that they are of the same type—a polygon, for example,
or, again, a conic section.15
Thus, while Apollonius can ask whether or not a parabola is similar to a hyperbola or even an ellipse in Conics VI.14, the question
remains strictly within the context of the similarity of conic sections for which there is a general definition. And when we look at
that general definition, we see how deeply it is rooted in the foundations of conic sections developed in Book I of the Conics. Let
us restate it:
Similar [conic sections] are such that, when ordinates are
drawn in them to fall on the axes, the ratios of the ordinates to the lengths they cut off from the axes from the
vertex of the section are equal to one another, while the
ratios to each other of the portions which the ordinates
cut off from the axes are equal ratios.
15. I am referring of course to “similarity” in its strict mathematical sense, as
opposed to the use of “similar,” in a non-mathematical context, even within
a mathematical work. For example, in the preface to his Phenomena, Euclid
writes that “if a cone or cylinder be cut by a plane not parallel to the base, the
resulting section is a section of an acute-angled cone which is similar to a
shield (homoia thureōi).” (Euclidis Phaenomena et Scripta Musica, ed. Heinrich Menge and I. L. Heiberg [Leipzig: Teubner, 1916], 6.)
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So, suppose ACD and PMN are two conic sections. Let AB and
PQ be their respective axes, and let CEC′, DFD′, MRM′, NSN′
be drawn ordinatewise.
Then ACD and PMN are similar if CC′:EA::MM′:RP and
DD′:FA::NN′:SP whenever AE:PR::AF:PS.
In order to follow this definition one must understand what
an axis is and what lines drawn ordinatewise means—and, naturally, one must understand that every conic section has an axis,
or, more generally, a diameter with respect to which lines may
be drawn ordinatewise.16 Unlike the little problem with which
I began the discussion, a proposition about similarity in Apollonius’s Conics must concern conic sections and their particular properties: Conics VI, the book which treats similarity (and
equality) is, after all, a book about conic sections!
As an easy example of how Apollonius uses the definition
and how not only its formulation but also its use depends on the
properties of conic sections, consider Conics VI.11, which
proves that every parabola is similar to every other parabola.
Here is a paraphrase of the proof.
Suppose AB and GD are two parabolas, AK, GO are their
axes, and AP, GR are their respective latera recta.
16. There are other definitions, notably one implied by Archimedes for
the ellipse and hyperbola. If PQ and pq are the axes of, say, the two ellipses and AR is an arbitrary ordinate in the one while bs is an arbitrary
ordinate in the other, Archimedes says that the two ellipses will be similar if it is true that:
sq.AR:rectPR,RQ = sq.bs:rect.ps,sq
Note that nothing is said about where R and s are on the respective axes.
The condition is equivalent to Conics, VI.12, for this ratio is always that
of the latus rectum to the transverse diameter, by Conics, I. 21. I might
add that although Toomer calls this a definition, Archimedes does not:
he simply states the fact that the conics will be similar if this is so—and
that at the end of a proposition! (See Conoids and Spheroids, Proposition
14 ad fin., in T. L. Heath, The Works of Archimedes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897], 125.) In any case, like Apollonius’s definition of similarity, this condition of Archimedes is also tied closely to
conic sections as opposed to any other kind of shape.
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Let AK:AP::GO:GR, and suppose Z and Q are arbitrary points on
AK.
Choose M and C so that they cut GO into segments having the same
ratios as the corresponding segments defined by Z and Q.
In parabola AB, draw EZI, HQS, BKT ordinatewise, that is perpendicular to AK since AK is an axis. Similarly, in GD, draw LMU, NCF,
DOX ordinatewise.
Now, by Conics I.11, BK and DO are mean proportionals between
AP and AK and GR and GO, respectively (i.e., AP:BK::BK:AK and
GR:DO::DO:GO)
Therefore, BK:AK::DO:GO, so that BT:AK::DX:GO [since
BT=2BK and DX=2DO].
Since AP:AK::GR:GO, AK:AQ::GO:GC, therefore, AP:AQ::GR:GC.
Thus, repeating the argument used to prove BT:AK::DX:GO above,
we can show also HS:AQ::NF:GC and, again, EI:AZ::LU:GM.
And so Apollonius concludes:
Therefore, the ratio of each of the lines BT, HS, EI,
which are perpendiculars to the axis [AK], to the
amounts which they cut off from the axis, namely, to
AK, AQ AZ is equal, respectively, to the ratio of the
lines DX, NF, LU, which are perpendiculars to the axis
[GO], to the amounts which they cut off from the axis,
namely OG, CG, MG.
And the ratios of the segments cut off from one of
the axes to the segments cut off from the other are
equal.
So section AB is similar to section GD.
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Again, what I wish to stress about this proof is not the details of
the argument, but the mere fact of its appealing at every step to the
specific properties of the parabola demonstrated in Conics I.
Perhaps the most striking reflection of how the similarity of
conic sections completely depends on the definition of conic sections, their geometric identity as the section of a cone, is the fact
that book ends with a set of eight constructions involving the cone
and locating conic sections within the cone, for example, “Given
a cone and given a parabola, find a cone containing the parabola
that is similar to the given cone” (Conics VI.31). Significantly,
Book VI is the only book in the Conics, besides Book I, in which
the cone appears explicitly.
We need now to move on to the question of equality. For, remember, Conics VI is not just about similarity, but also about
equality.
Equality in Euclid and Apollonius
As we noted above, with the modern view of similarity in which
similarity relates to a transformation of the space in which objects
are found, congruence becomes a completely derivative notion. And
here I should say that moderns speak about congruence and not
equality—and I think there is much to say about that—but more
often than not the use of one or the other is a matter of convention.
For example, when Hilbert comes to the axioms of congruence in
his Foundations of Geometry he more than once uses the expression
“kongruent oder gleich,” that is, “congruent or equal.” That it can
be a matter of convention is an important aspect of the modern perspective. Greek mathematicians do have a special designation,
“equal and similar” (isos te kai homoios); nevertheless, they do not
have a separate term for the relation of “congruence.” We shall have
to confront this combination “equal and similar” later, but for now
suffice it to say that there are only two basic terms “equal” and “similar.” The difficulty of their relationship cannot be swept away.
Thomas Heath’s treatment of this, for example, is quite unsatisfying.
When Euclid uses the word “equal,” isos, in a manner corresponding
to our notion of congruence, Heath just takes that to be the sense of
the word, and when Euclid then uses it in a manner corresponding
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to our notion of equal areas (Elements I.35), Heath says this is
“equality in a new sense.”17 Nevertheless, Euclid does use the same
word, isos. One cannot escape that.
For Euclid at least, equality is a very general notion, and it is certainly one of principal themes of Book I of the Elements, if not the
principal theme. As such, it is an idea that undergoes development
in the book; one might say the book develops a kind of theory of
equality. Let us consider briefly the overall direction of that development.
The theory of equality is contained in the five Common Notions
(koinai ennoiai) at the start of Book I of the Elements.18 These Common Notions are the following:
1. Things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.
2. And if equal things be adjoined (prostethēi) to the
same thing, the wholes are equal.
3. And if equals be removed from the same thing, the remainders are equal.
4. And things fitting (epharmozonta) on one another are
equal to one another.
5. And the whole is greater than the part.19
Of these, the fourth provides the basic criterion, the basic test for
equality: if one figure can be fitted exactly on top of another, then
the figures are equal (isos). It makes its first appearance in proposition I.4, which states that two triangles will be equal if they have
17. T. L. Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, Vol. 1 (New
York: Dover, 1956), 327.
18. Heiberg mentions other common notions appearing in some manuscripts; for example, “If unequals be adjoined to unequals, the whole is
unequal” and “Doubles of the same thing are equal to one another,” as
well as, “Two lines do not contain a space.” Except for the last about two
lines not containing a space—which, as Proclus himself seems to suggest,
is odd fish among the others—all of these common notions, therefore,
concern equality—and even that last common notion may be connected
to the nature of coinciding.
19. My translation.
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equal sides surrounding an equal angle. The entire demonstration,
problematic though it may be, plays on Common Notion 4: equal
lines are fitted on equal lines; the equal angle is fitted on the equal
angle; this forces the one triangle to fit on the other, so that the two
are equal.
In fact, that equal lines can be fitted on equal lines and equal angles on equal angles is not truly an application of Common Notion
4, but its converse; however, with simple undivided objects like
lines and angles, being equal and fitting on one another are treated
as identical relations.20 And in this connection we must return to
Book VI of the Conics for a moment. For Apollonius takes the criterion for equality provided by Common Notion 4 as the very definition of equality of conic sections:
Conic sections which are called equal are those which
can be fitted, one on another, so that the one does not exceed the other. Those which are said to be unequal are
those for which that is not so.
In the Elements, however, Euclid shows that the converse of
Common Notion 4 cannot be assumed in all generality. It is here
that the other Common Notions clarify why the criterion of “fitting on one another” is sufficient but not necessary for equality:
in Elements I.35, Euclid shows that things can be equal without
having the same shape, that is, without being able to fit on one on
the other.
Proposition I.35 states that “Parallelograms on the same base
and in the same parallels are equal to one another.” Thus the
proposition tells us that parallelograms such as ABCD and EBCF,
which are clearly not the same shape, may, nevertheless be equal.
It is instructive to look at Euclid’s proof of the proposition (in
paraphrase):
Since ABCD is a parallelogram, AD is equal to BC.
For the same reason, EF is equal to BC. Whence also
AD is equal EZ (by Common Notion 1); and DE is
common; therefore, the whole AE is equal to the whole
20. See Michael N. Fried and Sabetai Unguru, Apollonius of Perga’s
Conica: Text, Context, Subtext (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 228.
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DF (by Common Notion 2).21 But also AB is equal to
DC. So the two lines EA, AB are equal to the two lines
DF, DC, each to each. Also the angle contained by FDC
is equal to the angle contained by EAB, the exterior to
the interior. Therefore, the base EB is equal to the base
FC and the triangle EAB is equal to the triangle FDC
(by I.4 and, derivatively therefore, Common Notion 4];
let the common part DGE have been removed; therefore, the remaining trapezoid ABGD is equal to the remaining trapezoid EGCF (by Common Notion 3); let
the common triangle BGC have been adjoined; the
whole parallelogram ABCD is therefore equal to the
whole parallelogram EBCF (by Common Notion 2).
The parallelograms being on the same base and in the
same parallels are, therefore, equal to one another.
What we see in this proposition is no “new conception of equality,”
as Heath says; on the contrary, what we see is that the Common Notions—which comprise, as I said, the theory of equality—begin from
the basic notion of “fitting on one another” to show how equality applies also to shapes that do not fit on one another. It is an elaboration
of equality, a spelling out of the theory, not a new kind of equality. Even
Elements I.47, the “Pythagorean Theorem,” can be seen in this light,
since it shows not only how one figure can equal another of a different
shape, but also how one figure can equal two others of the same shape.
21. It is typical that Common Notions 2 and 3 are used when a single thing
is removed from two equals. This assumes that anything that can be equal
to something is always at least equal to itself. It is curious—and perhaps significant—that this fundamental fact is missing from the Common Notions.
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And, I would argue, Book II continues this inquiry with its attention to
how one or several rectangles may equal other rectangles.
This elaboration of the idea of equality demonstrates how things
can be equal even though they have far from the same shape. Conversely, things can be of the same shape and yet not be equal. Aristotle points this out, tellingly enough, in the section on motion
and alteration in the Categories (15a, 30-33): “there are things that
increase and are not thereby altered as well. For example, if a gnomon is added, a square is increased in its size but does not undergo
alteration (ēuxētai men, alloioteron de ouden gegenētai).
Thus, in both directions, equality of figures is not identical with
sameness of shape. Equality cannot be subsumed under similarity
and similarity under equality. Yet, equality has to do with shape in
some way. It is rooted in shape inasmuch as superimposition is its
basic test; and it can be used to probe shape, for example, in showing that a line through the center of an ellipse divides an ellipse
into two equal halves (Conics VI.4 and 5). But, again, because
equality does not necessarily mean sameness of shape, shape itself
cannot be its main object. That main object of equality is similarity.
Thus it is a kind of counterpoint between similarity and equality,
rather than a logical dependence one way or another, that characterizes how these ideas appear in Apollonius and Euclid.
Equal and similar
The logical disconnection between equal and similar is particularly
clear in the Conics, where propositions for similarity are kept separate from those on equality: one proposition will show when two
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sections are equal and a different proposition later in the book will
show when they are similar. Now we must return to the idea of
“equal and similar” (isos te kai homoios) in Apollonius and Euclid,
for here the two notions do come together. But it is a peculiar coming-together—not a logical joining, but only slightly more than a
mere conjunction. This has the effect of forming a new term while
leaving the independence of the original terms. There is “equal,”
there is “similar,” and there is “equal and similar.”
As a unit of meaning, Charles Mugler, in his dictionary of Greek
mathematical terminology, notes a non-mathematical use of isos te
kai homoios: he cites Thucydides’s account of the battle between
Corinth and Corcyra over the fate of Epidamnus, in which Corinth
at one point advertised Epidamnus as a colony where citizens would
be “in perfect equality” (epi tēi isēi kai homoiai).22 The two words
isos and homoios come together almost as mutual intensifiers. Greek
mathematics does not use intensifiers—“really round,” “really
straight,” “really parallel,” “really similar” don’t appear! Yet “equal
and similar” does seem to have the sense of “equal in every way.”
And this puts objects into a new class. Thus, in the Elements, “equal
and similar” solid figures makes its appearance in Book XI, Definition 10 as an independent definition after the definition of similar
solid figures quoted above: “Equal and similar solid figures are those
contained by similar plane areas equal in number and in magnitude.”
Euclid might have defined equal and similar solid figures as similar
solid figures whose faces are not only similar but equal as well—
that is, he might have subordinated “equal and similar solids” to
“similar solids,” and, therefore, also have eliminated any need for a
separate definition. Obviously there is a relationship between “similar solids” and “equal and similar solids,” but in Euclidean discourse
it is a relationship between inhabitants of distinct categories.
This understanding of “equal and similar” can also be seen in
Book VI of Apollonius’s Conics. Proposition VI.16, for example,
tells us that “Opposite sections are similar and equal.” The proof
runs as follows: in Conics I.14, Apollonius proved that the latera
recta of the opposite sections are equal; therefore, the figures of the
22. Charles Mugler, Dictionaire historique de la terminologie géométrique
des Grecs (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1958).
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two opposite sections (the rectangle whose sides are the latus rectum
and the transverse axis) are equal and also similar; therefore, by VI.2,
the hyperbolas are equal (this is unmentioned in the text), and, by
VI.12, they are similar. The proof is simple, but there is a subtlety.
In proposition VI.2, Apollonius proved that “If the figures that are
constructed on the transverse axes of hyperbolas or ellipses are equal
and similar, then the sections [themselves] will be equal.” From this,
as I said, it follows that the opposite sections are equal, which, by
Appolonius’s definition (in contrast to Euclid’s Common Notion 4),
means they may be fitted one on the other. It would seem then an
immediate inference that they are also similar, that they have the
same shape. But Apollonius says this only after VI.12, which shows
that if the figures of hyperbolas (or ellipses) are similar then the hyperbolas (or ellipses) are similar, and what is more, he cites only
VI.12 as his justification.
Therefore, for Apollonius, to be equal—even when this means
“able to be fit one on another,”—and to be similar are different relations: the assertion that the opposite sections are “equal and similar”
demands proving that the distinction can be made. For us moderns,
who see a logical connection between “equal” and similar,” saying
“similar and equal” is understandable but redundant—like saying
“rectangular and square.”
Conclusion
Let us then go over the ground again and see where we have arrived.
The modern notion of a transformation of a plane ignores the particularity of a given object and acts only on the space within which it is
placed. Such transformations can be chosen in many ways, but, for
similarity, one can be chosen so that all distances between points in
the original space can be dilated or contracted by a fixed ratio; the
ratio, treated as a number, can be greater than 1, less than 1, or equal
to 1. In this way, similarity and equality can be taken as concepts that
are not fundamentally different, equality being the case when the fixed
ratio happens to be 1.
This way of approaching the subject of similarity and equality is
foreign to the mathematics of Euclid and Apollonius because of its
roots in specific geometric figures and their specific properties. Similarity in Greek geometry begins and ends in the sameness of shape.
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Equality begins with the sameness of shape, with superimposition, but
its special character, as seen explicitly in Euclid, is its ability to depart
from the sameness of shape. In this way, similarity and equality are
independent, so that recognizing a similarity, a sameness of shape, is
a different process from recognizing an identity, even though the
processes are tantalizingly close—should I say similar? Still, the two
processes can meet, and when they do, they create a third notion,
“equal and similar.” But, as I argued above, they create a third notion
precisely because they are not joined in logical way—they are simply
brought together.
But this presents us with a difficulty. If similarity and equality are
indeed independent notions, what then is Book VI of the Conics really
about? It cannot be exclusively about shape, as I have thought in the
past, because that, as I have argued, is the province of similarity, not
of equality. So when Apollonius describes Book VI as a book about
similarity and equality in the letter introducing the entire Conics, does
he mean to say that it is simply about two unrelated or vaguely related
topics? Perhaps.
But I think there is more to it than that, chiefly for two reasons. The
first is, as we have noted above, the reappearance of the cone in Book
VI, drawing us back to conic sections as whole, definable objects. The
second is the form of the definition of equality, which is, I believe,
more problematic than similarity, as I have implied throughout this
lecture. The difference between this definition and Euclid’s Common
Notion 4 is found in its second phrase, “Those [conic sections] which
are said to be unequal are those for which that is not so”—making superimposition the exclusive test of equality for conic sections. Thus,
when Apollonius wants to show that sections, or segments of sections,
are equal, he assumes typically that there is some point that does not
coincide with a point on the section presumed equal, and then demonstrates that contradiction follows. What I would like to bring out is
that equality has something to do with every point on the conic section.
In this way, what links similarity23 and equality is their way of looking
at a conic section, or a segment of a conic section, all at once.
23. In the Protagoras (331e), Plato has Protagoras make the remark, concerning justice and holiness, that we should not call things dissimilar just
because there is one point of dissimilarity between them. Socrates replies,
“I was surprised at this.”
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This is the connection, I believe, in which the problem of similarity and equality is related to the idea of locus, which I mentioned
in regard to the little problem with which I started. It too concerns
not an arbitrary place, but a definite identifiable place, all of whose
points have a certain property. It too, in other words, concerns in
some way the whole of conic sections, but in a less direct way.
There is no time, of course, to go into this in detail here, but I do
want to make clear that as we approach an understanding of similarity and equality, it is likely we shall also approach an understanding of other fundamental notions in Greek mathematics.
This, I might add as a final word, was the not the view of older
historians of mathematics, such as H. G. Zeuthen (1839-1920).
Zeuthen had no doubt that the modern point of view was Apollonius’s point of view, and on that basis wrote his expansive and deep
work on the ancient theory of conic sections (Zeuthen, 1886), which
set the tone of Apollonius scholarship for almost a century.24 He
could brush Conics VI aside, saying that it was “of no great significance” in the attempt to understand the Greek theory of conic sections.25 I hope that the discussion here makes that statement moot,
to the say the least.
24. H. G. Zeuthen, Die Lehre von den Kegelschnitten im Altertum (Kopenhagen: Höst und Sohn, 1886).
25. Zeuthen, 384.
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The Soul’s Choice of Life
Greg Recco
Most dreams are forgotten, perhaps even before the night has
passed. Others obtrude into daytime thought, even as their meaning
remains obscure. They haunt us, and seem to promise a rare and
precious revelation. Their coming insistently to mind implies a
faint undertone of reproach, like hearing your name repeated on
waking, before you are quite sure who you are. Such dreams seem
to call from afar, and from where we stand, they can only seem
alien. But we also suspect that we are the ones who are out of place,
and that the dream is calling us back from our wandering. In this
recollection of the unfamiliar, we sense dimly that we are tied to
what is familiar by only a specious kinship, and that our true home
lies elsewhere.
This sort of strange appeal that calls us back from estrangement
can occur not only in dreams or visions, but also in deliberately
produced works of art such as poems, paintings, and stories. In refusing to make any ordinary sort of sense, they contradict our
everyday understanding and invite us to speak along with them in
something like a foreign tongue. The dialogues of Plato, in particular, contain many examples of images or tales of this sort, beguiling works of imagination that linger in memory on the far horizon
of intelligibility. For those of us who read and talk together about
Plato with some frequency, such tales or images have become part
of the vocabulary of our thought—perhaps even a large part, just
as loan-words can come to outnumber a language’s own stock of
true-born names. Before moving on to our main theme, it will be
worthwhile to reflect briefly on a familiar example—the image of
the cave in the Republic—so that we can begin to meditate on how
such images work and what they accomplish.
Socrates asks his interlocutor Glaucon to imagine a cave in
which people are chained in such a way as to be able to see only
what is directly before them, the cave wall on which shadows are
Greg Recco is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. This
lecture was delivered in Annapolis on 12 November 2012.
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projected by a fire above and behind them. Glaucon exclaims that
these are “strange prisoners” (515a).1 “Like us,” Socrates replies.
But then something odd happens. At the very moment when we
might expect Socrates to offer the key by which to decipher these
unfamiliar letters, he instead continues to speak in the language
of the image. The prisoners are “like us,” he continues, “for do
you suppose such men would have seen anything of themselves
or one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the wall
facing them?” Now, this is not so strange a move as to pose an
impossible task of interpretation, especially to someone who has
thought about the image for some time. We might start with the
idea that our ordinary efforts to know are wrongly oriented and
thus largely unsuccessful, and from there move on to the idea that
this concerns not only our attempts to know the world but even
our self-knowledge and knowledge of others. That sounds about
right. But we should try to imagine what Socrates’s reply would
sound like to someone who had never heard the rest, to someone
who has not had the time to think about it, to someone who does
not know where Socrates is going. To this person, Socrates’s response must seem pretty nearly the opposite of the explanation
that Glaucon’s remark implicitly requested. After hearing it, Glaucon would probably still say that the prisoners are strange, perhaps
as a sort of polite way of saying that the man telling him about
the prisoners is strange—and it would be hard to disagree.
But whether or not Glaucon meant his remark as a reproach, and
however strange Socrates’s speech is, its strangeness does not stem
from some madness of his, some disordered state of his powers of
thought or imagination. What is truly strange here is not the image
to which he gives voice, but the situation it is intended to portray,
namely, the fact that creatures destined for knowledge should
spend their lives so unaware of, and so unwittingly cooperative
with, the powerful impediments to knowing that characterize their
situation. The proper way to hear Socrates’s response to Glaucon’s
remark about the prisoners’ strangeness is thus affirmatively—not
“the prisoners are not strange; they are like us,” but, “they are like
1. Translations throughout are lightly adapted from Allan Bloom’s The
Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
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us, strange.” And his explanation is an explanation not of the prisoners’ likeness to us but of their strangeness; again, “do you suppose such men”—those described in the image—“would have seen
anything of themselves or of each other than the shadows?” Given
what Socrates is trying to accomplish, deflecting the question of
likeness and going farther into the image may be the only way to
make it work. The image presents important features of our epistemic situation that are normally difficult to discern, but that we
can come to perceive if we take up an initially unfamiliar and awkward perspective, make it our own, and then turn this view back
on what had previously gone unquestioned. In order to know, we
must learn to speak strangely.
With a few small, though significant, differences, this kind of
change in understanding is what is aimed at by the final pages of
the Republic, the so-called Myth of Er (614b-621b). It, too, is a
fantastical story that represents in figurative form an important but
overlooked dimension of our actual situation. Its fantastical character is not a product of wild genius, but arises from Plato’s rigorous attention to both the nature of human freedom and the
difficulty of discerning it from within our ordinary perspective.
In the case of the cave image our learned familiarity with it
makes it relatively easy to put a name to what it is about; unlike
Glaucon, we have read the Republic. And we get some more help
from the fact that Socrates tells us outright what the image is meant
to be an image of. “Make an image,” he says, “of our nature in its
education and want of education” (514a). The Myth of Er, by contrast, is not presented as an image of anything at all. It is ostensibly
the report of a man who returned from the dead to tell of what
awaits souls after life. Socrates presents it as the completion of the
dialogue’s investigation of justice, inasmuch as it gives an account
of the good and bad that come from being just or unjust, not in this
life, but after death.
In this connection, the story is a fitting end for the dialogue, in
that it recapitulates a theme first sounded very near the beginning.
Cephalus reports that as a young man he scoffed at the stories of
punishment in the afterlife, but old age has found him and his agemates more fearful of what is to come. They are looking back over
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lives that contain perhaps no small measure of wrongdoing.
Cephalus is thankful for his wealth, above all for the ability it gives
him to conduct the costly private rituals of expiation that his fear
has made seem prudent. Socrates’s return to this theme at the end
of the dialogue, then, seems to endorse Cephalus’s anxious piety,
at least in confirming that there is something to fear for those who
have done wrong. But the story contains much more than is necessary for this purpose and, indeed, much that does not directly or
obviously further it. Also, it is just very strange. Even with some
degree of paraphrase, it will take a short while to recount it. So
here it is.
Upon his death, the soul of Er traveled along with other souls of
the dead and came to a place where there were two openings in the
earth and two in the sky, above and across from them. Between the
pairs of openings sat judges, who directed the just to continue to
the right and upward through the opening in the sky, and the unjust
to go to the left and downward into the earth. Er himself they instructed to remain, observe, and report what he saw on his return
to the world of the living. What he saw first was this: as some souls
were going into the two openings indicated by the judges, other
souls were coming out of the others, some up from earth, others
down from the heavens. All those who had returned went off with
delight to a nearby meadow, where they made camp and engaged
in conversation. Those who had known each other in life greeted
each other and asked what it was like in the other place. So they
all told their stories, some lamenting and crying as they recalled
all they had seen and undergone in the thousand-year journey beneath the earth, the others telling of the beauty of the sights and
experiences above. In general, those who came from below the
earth said they had received a tenfold punishment for each of their
acts of injustice, once each hundred years, on the grounds that a
human life was about a hundred years long. For acts of impiety towards the gods, the penalty was yet worse. Of one particularly terrible tyrant named Ardiaeus it was related that when his thousand
years had passed and it was his turn to go up, he and other perpetrators of unholy deeds were rejected by the opening. Men standing
nearby seized them, then bound them, flayed them, and dragged
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them along the rough ground in the sight of the others, finally casting them into the pit of Tartarus, from which none return. Fear of
being rejected by the opening and subjected to this torment was
thus the last of the punishments for souls who had lived an unjust
life. The rewards for justice were said to be the counterparts of
these.
On the eighth day, the souls who had returned were made to
leave the meadow and continue their journey. In four days’ time,
they came to a place from which they could see a sort of pillar of
light stretched from above through all of heaven and earth, like a
rainbow. This light was said to bind the earth and the heavens and
be connected to a complex, interlocking arrangement of whorls
forming a sort of spindle, which belongs to the goddess Ananke or
Necessity. Her daughters, the Fates Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis,
put their hands to the turning of these otherworldly whorls and
were associated with the three dimensions of time: Atropos, she
who cannot be turned, with the future, Clotho, the weaver, with the
present, and Lachesis, the dispenser of lots, with the past.
The souls were then brought before Lachesis. Her spokesman
gathered up the lots and patterns of lives that lay in her lap, and
then delivered the goddess’s message to the souls arrayed before
him. He said: “This is the speech of Ananke’s maiden daughter,
Lachesis: ‘Ephemeral souls, this is the beginning of another deathbringing cycle for the mortal race. A spirit shall not be allotted to
you, but you shall choose a spirit. Let the holder of the first lot
make the first choice of a life to which it shall be bound by Ananke.
Virtue is without a master; as each honors her, it shall have more
or less of her. The blame belongs to the chooser; the god is blameless.’”
Then the lots were distributed to the souls and the patterns of
lives were laid out on the ground before them, lives of all sorts—
lives of animals and tyrants, lives of the famous and the obscure—
and these lives far outnumbered the souls present.
The spokesman continued: “Even for the one who comes forward last, if he chooses intelligently and lives earnestly, a life to
be happy with has been laid out, and not a bad one. Let the first
not be careless in his choice, nor the last disheartened.”
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Since the soul’s choice of life is my theme, let me quote without
paraphrase the section that follows, which deals most directly with
that choice.
“And the first to choose came forward and immediately chose
the greatest tyranny, and, because of folly and gluttony, chose without having considered everything adequately; and it escaped his
notice that eating his own children and other evils were fated to be
a part of that life. When he considered it at his leisure, he beat his
breast and lamented the choice, not abiding by the spokesman’s
forewarning. For he didn’t blame himself for the evils but chance,
demons, and anything rather than himself. He was one of those
who had come from heaven, having lived under an orderly constitution in his former life, partaking of virtue by habit, without philosophy. And, it may be said, not the least number of those who
were caught in such circumstances came from heaven, because
they were unpracticed in labors. But most of those who came from
the earth, because they themselves had labored and had seen the
labors of others, weren’t in a rush to make their choices. For just
this reason, and because of the chance of the lot, there was an exchange of evils and goods for most of the souls.”
“He said that this was a sight surely worth seeing: how each of
the several souls chose a life. For it was pitiable, laughable, and
wonderful to see. For the most part the choice was made according
to the habit of their former life. He said he saw a soul that once belonged to Orpheus choosing the life of a swan, out of hatred for
womankind; because he died at their hands, he refused to be generated in and born of a woman. He saw Thamyras’s soul choosing
the life of a nightingale. And he also saw a swan changing to the
choice of a human life; other musical animals did the same thing.
The soul that got the twentieth lot chose the life of a lion; it was
the soul of Telamonian Ajax, which shunned becoming a human
being, for it remembered the judgment of arms. And after it was
the soul of Agamemnon; it, too, hated humankind as a result of its
sufferings and therefore changed to the life of an eagle. Atalanta’s
soul had drawn one of the middle lots; it saw the great honors of
an athletic man and couldn’t pass them by but took them. After this
he saw that of Epieius, son of Panopeus, going into the nature of
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an artisan woman. And far out among the last he saw the soul of
the buffoon Thersites, clothing itself as an ape. And by chance the
soul of Odysseus had drawn the last lot of all and went to choose;
from memory of its former labors, it had recovered from love of
honor; it went around for a long time looking for the life of a private man who minds his own business; and with effort it found one
lying somewhere, neglected by the others. It said when it saw this
life that it would have done the same even if it had drawn the first
lot, and was delighted to choose it. And from the other beasts, similarly some went into human lives and into one another—the unjust
changing into savage ones, the just into tame ones, and there were
all kinds of mixtures.”
So far the report of Er. Socrates interrupts his recounting it just
once, to emphasize the supreme importance of this choice of a life
and to point out that we really ought to devote all our energies to
acquiring the art of making this choice well. His way of talking
about what would make for a good choice is very interesting, and
I will return to it near the end of this lecture. But for now, let us reflect on the many ways in which the story gives the attentive reader
pause and does not simply supplement the dialogue’s account of
what justice is and what effect it has on souls. The story, it must
be said, does not do just what it was said to do.
In the first place, it is worth reflecting on how extravagant the
whole section on the souls’ choice of life is. The account was introduced and admitted on the pretext that it would supplement the
dialogue’s account of the power that justice has in the soul without
the assistance of reputation or other external benefits. Like other
such familiar tales, it accomplishes this by adding to whatever uncertain external benefits justice and injustice might win in life and
among humans, a certain and unerring exactitude in punishment
and reward from the gods in a sort of life after life. So, one might
reasonably inquire how this purpose is advanced at all by the elaborate account of the spindle of Necessity or the whole idea of souls
choosing their next life, not to mention the many examples of particular choices made by souls famous and unknown. At most, one
might argue that the fact that the lives for which the souls are being
rewarded or punished were of their own choosing underscores
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souls’ responsibility for their own justice or injustice, and thus
shows that the rewards and punishments are deserved. Even according to this explanation, however, the wealth of detail concerning particular souls’ choices, as well as the cosmic backdrop, would
be only so much ornament.
But of all the reasons for taking the Myth of Er as a figure for
something other than what it is said to be, the most compelling is
the fact that the rewards and punishments pointedly do not have
the character we might expect they ought to have: they are ineffectual or at least unfathomably obscure in their mechanism.
That the rewards for a just life are ineffectual we learn from the
example of the soul that draws the first lot and chooses its next life
first. It had come from heaven, and apparently a thousand years’
worth of beautiful sights and enjoyment was not enough to persuade it of anything but its own fitness to be the biggest tyrant of
all. Although it was happy enough to reach immediately for this
life, it was also particularly resistant to taking responsibility for its
own choice when it became clear that the life contained many evils.
This kind of remorse over bad choices, Socrates’s summary indicates, was not uncommon among those who came down from the
heavens.
What of the others? Those who had toiled and suffered below
the earth and had seen the toils and suffering of others were said
to choose more carefully, and thus on the whole, we are told, there
was an exchange of goods and evils for most souls. This might lead
one to the conclusion that while the rewards do not promote the
choice of justice, the punishments do.
But several things undercut the confidence we might have in the
efficacy of posthumous punishments: in particular, the fate of the
incurable or unholy, the complete forgetfulness of the living, and
above all the impossibility of adequately representing injustice to
the unjust perspective. As for the first, there are those like Ardiaeus,
for whose crimes, it seems, no finite punishment could be adequate, on the grounds that his soul was incurable, and possibly also
because of the enormity of his crimes, which transcend the horizon
of justice altogether, being not only unjust but also unholy.
A second problem with the notion that the punishments of the
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afterlife are effective in curbing injustice lies in the fact that souls
are made to drink from the river of Carelessness on the plain of
Forgetfulness before continuing into the life they have chosen, and,
as a result, forget everything. Those who have chosen a just life,
being the majority of those who completed the underground passage, will go through it and then join those who make the heavenly
passage. Now having forgotten their former labors, they are likely
to choose hastily and with misplaced confidence in their ability to
discern what is a good life. Interestingly, this “exchange of goods
and evils” for most souls was already inscribed, so to speak, in the
topography of the place of judgment: the opening that leads out of
heaven is located above and opposite the one that leads into the
earth, as the one that leads out of the earth lies below and opposite
the opening that leads back into heaven. Forgetfulness and carelessness seem to guarantee that there will be a revolution not only
of whorls, but also of souls. But forgetfulness and carelessness are
not magical effects brought about by the eponymous plain and
river. If punishment is the engine driving the motion of souls upwards and towards justice, then the beautiful sights and enjoyment
found in the heavenly passage do no less to drive them down, towards injustice. This is precisely not the image of a world-order
that uses rewards and punishments to produce justice with mechanical accuracy and inevitability, but the image of a world-order that
strongly inclines souls towards an eternal and predictable alternation of good and bad. Why should this be the purpose of the cosmos?
A third problem with the account is that it is difficult to see what
the souls must be in order for their passage to be able to teach them
anything. This difficulty is thrown into relief by a significant omission. Of the souls returning from beneath the earth, Socrates says:
“They were punished for each injustice once every hundred years;
taking this as the length of a human life, they could in this way pay
off the penalty for the injustice ten times over. Thus, for example,
if some men were causes of the death of many, either by betraying
cities or armies and had reduced men to slavery, or were involved
in any other wrongdoing”—and here I interrupt to note that just
where one might hope to learn precisely how such acts are an-
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swered in that other place, Socrates concludes simply, “they received for each of these things tenfold sufferings.” In other words,
Socrates provides us with no specific information. Plato handles
the issue of narration very deftly here, for he has Socrates preface
this section with a warning about its incompleteness; Socrates says,
“Now, to go through the many things would take a long time, Glaucon. But the chief thing is this,” and then proceeds with the summary I just read. But if the purpose of resorting to summary was
to avoid trouble, then it is difficult to understand Socrates’s choice
of examples.
In the first place, the list of specific forms of injustice by itself
leads one to expect a similarly specific list of punishments. Also,
the fact that each “cycle” of punishments is calibrated to the length
of an average human life supports the expectation that punishments
will somehow correspond to, mirror, or just repeat in inverted form
the particular wrongs one has done. But the examples of injustice
Socrates in fact offers do not fulfill any of these expectations, for
the important reason that the victims of these injustices are in each
case many in number. If a man betrays an entire city, how can his
single life (or a single afterlife) stand any chance of comprising
the myriad injustices done to his fellow citizens? If he sold dozens
into slavery, how could his life encompass suffering the same fate
dozens of times? Even if somehow it could, it would also have to
contain dozens of instances of the state of freedom that slavery destroys. And each of these would have to be in some way pristine,
so that the evil that is enslavement could have its full effect on the
soul being punished in this way—for enslaving one person twice
is not the same as enslaving two different people. In general, then,
it is unclear how a single life can have the evil it does to many represented to it effectively.
One solution to this conundrum, of course, is to take one sort of
evil to stand for all others, to serve as a kind of medium of exchange. Maybe pain could serve as such a punitive currency, repaying specific evils with generic badness. The extravagant
punishment of the soul of Ardiaeus, however, serves both as an example of this sort of thinking and as a sign of its insufficiency. The
punishment is not only of infinite duration; it is also unimaginably
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intense, and the one being punished in this way does not in any
way signal to us what his experience is. Now, it is possible, of
course, that we hear nothing from the soul of Ardiaeus because
there is no need. If his soul is incurable, perhaps his punishment is
not for him but an example to others, and in order for him to serve
as an example, all that matters is that they take his experience as
an example, whatever he himself may think of it. Consistent with
this interpretation is the presence of the guards who point out to
the others why these souls are being singled out for such treatment;
that is, it seems at least in part to be a show put on for their benefit.
Also consistent with this view is the claim that what improves the
judgment of those who make the underground passage is not just
that they have labored and suffered themselves, but also that they
have seen the labors and sufferings of others. Nonetheless, the absence of the directly suffering soul’s perspective on the single particular punishment reported to us underscores the problem,
outlined by omission in the preceding passage, of how a soul’s evil
can be represented to it—and this remains a problem.
If the soul’s thousand-year journey below the earth is to teach it
anything—as the improvement in its choice of life suggests it
does—then the soul must somehow have the evils it engaged in as
though they were something good presented to it as what they in
fact are. But in order to recognize one’s own wrongdoing for what
it is, the perpetrator must have a different perspective than was
available to him during the act, and this kind of thoroughgoing
change in perspective is, as we have learned, terribly difficult. In
the cave image, it is represented as a turning around that can simultaneously be a passage from what is darker to what is brighter
(that is, an actual improvement) and a passage from what is perceived clearly and comfortably to what is perceived only dimly
and painfully (that is, an apparent worsening). Something else is
needed: a trustworthy and trusted guide who can articulate what is
happening to the soul being forcibly turned around in this way. In
the end, pain by itself is too diffuse, too immediate, and too uncontextualized to bear the articulated meaning that would be necessary in order to effect this change, a fact that is perhaps hinted at
by the punishment’s tenfold repetition. Even the torture of the souls
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of the unholy, which might seem to stand on its own as an object
lesson in the wages of wrongdoing, is supplemented in the story
by agents standing by to explain it, which suggests that it cannot
bear its meaning within itself on its own.
In the case of both punishments and rewards, then, the report of
Er sets up certain expectations or requirements that it then pointedly does not or cannot fulfill. The rewards for a just life, we feel,
ought to reinforce the choice of justice, but instead they are presented as strongly correlated with the careless haste and entitled
self-importance that lead to a bad choice of life. As for the punishments, while they are said to have the effect they ought to, still,
the mechanism by which they are meant to accomplish this is
markedly obscure, and inquiring more closely into it only makes
the confusion more intense, particularly by directing attention to
the source of the problem: the soul and its perception of, or perspective on, the good. If the myth’s self-presentation is at odds with
its content, particularly in its central conceit, we have to turn elsewhere to discover its real import. One thing that is clear, as we
have just seen, is that the story concerns the soul. Just what is the
soul in this story?
One phrase in the description of souls’ choice of lives incidentally brings to the fore one of the key features of the myth’s portrayal of the soul. Er saw “a soul that used to belong to Orpheus”
choosing the life of a swan. The striking phrase “used to belong”
underlines something that must be assumed in order for the story
to work at all, and it does so compactly and forcefully. For the myth
to work, a soul, whatever else it may be, cannot be identical with
any named person. The name “Orpheus” must indicate the temporary composite of an otherwise anonymous soul with the singer’s
life whose story we know from myth. Any name, then, must miss
the soul and indicate only such a composite, even my name or
yours. The possessive in the phrase “my soul” becomes particularly
obscure. If I were to utter the words “my soul,” who would I be
saying the soul belongs to, and what would I be taking myself to
be that is distinct from my soul? Who or what is speaking when
the words “my soul” are uttered? Whatever we might previously
have thought it was, the story is now telling us that a soul is not
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identical with a life or a person, since it precedes and outlives both.
One possible source for this strange conception of the soul is the
discussion of its immortality earlier in Book 10 (608d-612a).
There, the question arises how the soul can be both immortal and
capable of being at odds with itself. Self-opposition (of the sort examined in Book 4) is associated with being composite, and this, in
turn, is associated with change and decay. A soul composed of
parts, it seems, could only be mortal. Instead of investigating this
dilemma, Socrates merely suggests that the view of soul that we
have—and that he and his interlocutors have had throughout the
whole of the dialogue—is like the view one would have of how a
man looks if one were to see only the statue of him that had lain at
the bottom of the sea for many years and become disfigured and
covered with shells, seaweed, rocks and so forth, as in the case of
the statue of Glaucus. The image more or less directly asserts that
our embeddedness in body, change, and manyness has made our
souls unrecognizable. This is an unpromising starting point, but
Socrates remains confident and ventures the guess that the soul’s
true nature is to be found by our looking to its philosophia, its love
of wisdom. This recalls another account of the division of the soul
that emerges from the yet earlier discussion of the terrible evils of
tragic poetry in Book 10. This account divides the soul’s philosophical, calculating, law-abiding part, which suffers misfortune
in silence and tranquility, from another part, which indulges in loud
lamentation. The latter is itself indulged by writers of tragedies,
who trick even the decent man into weeping immoderately at the
misfortunes of another on the grounds that this is at least not selfpitying, and is only a kind of play (606a-b). The gist seems to be
that the first part of the soul would do its work better without the
second. Both accounts, then, solve the problem of manyness by
making one part stand for the whole. Whatever the merits or faults
of such a solution, we should consider that if the true identity of
the soul should turn out to be only its rational part understood in
this way, then the whole drama of existence—the stories of our
lives as we commonly understand them—would be wholly irrelevant, composed entirely of a sort of encrustation of alien matter
that only serves to obscure the soul from view. By themselves, on
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this view, souls might essentially have nothing to do with lives.
While these two prior discussions of soul seem relevant to the
myth and are consonant with some aspects of its sharp distinctions
between soul and person and between soul and life, they are at odds
with others. Souls in the myth are not heartless calculating machines, but beings capable of feeling and expressing emotion.
When the souls complete their respective journeys, they go off
“with delight” to the meadow where they confer. When those who
came from the underground passage recount what they have seen
and undergone there, they cry and lament in recalling it. When
these souls are nearing the exit and see some like the soul of Ardiaeus being rejected, they experience a great fear, which they note
is only one among many they have suffered. In sum, then, the souls
in the story respond emotively and expressively to their situation,
even during this time when they are presumed to exist in separation
from body and life.
In addition to transitory affections such as a moment of fear,
souls in the myth also have longer-standing dispositions or traits
of character. The soul of Ajax, son of Telamon, bitterly recalls the
judgment that granted the arms of the departed hero Achilles to
Odysseus instead of to him, and so flees humanity. The souls of
Orpheus and Agamemnon, in turn, make their choices of animal
lives out of long-standing hatred, of women in the first case and
of humanity in general in the second. In each case, these quasi-permanent states were crystallized, so to speak, by the trauma of their
previous lives (the very ones we associate with their names, as if
their souls had become those single lives). Their hatreds and resentment are very much not the passions of a moment, as they appear to have persisted unchanged and utterly undiminished
throughout their millennial journeys. A final, most significant example of a state or characteristic of soul allowed by the myth is
that of the soul of Odysseus, which “from memory of its former
labors, . . . had recovered from love of honor.” Somehow, the soul
as portrayed in the myth is capable of being affected by its life,
and affected in such a way as to be able to learn, not just greedily
carry forward the savor of bitter memory. In either case, however,
what we see is that however distinct souls may be from lives, their
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lives affect them. In light of this, perhaps it is time finally to turn
directly to what the story must take a life to be.
This is in one way the most straightforward and familiar element
of the story; everyone knows what a life is, what it is composed
of, why it is important, what makes it good or bad, and so forth. In
another way, however, the central conceit of the myth of Er requires a life to be something that is almost impossible to understand. Recall that the life contains elements like wealth or poverty,
good or bad birth, strength, beauty, political office or rule, and indeed everything that could characterize a life, or almost everything.
For, as was explained, since the soul that lives the life must be
changed by it, the life considered by itself does not contain an “ordering” or “arrangement” of soul (taxis). If our question is what
we ought to remove in thought from our usual conception of what
a life is in order to arrive at an idea of the lives whose paradigms
lie in the lap of Lachesis, the answer is both simple and perplexing:
we must remove everything that soul is. As it has done in many
places, the dialogue is once again causing a problem by treating a
distinction as a separation. When Socrates manages to bring the
conversation to a halt of this sort, he often turns to an image or example that retroactively modifies one of the discussion’s starting
points. We could try the same, and instead of trying to proceed with
delimitation or definition in the face of aporia, we might turn to an
example of what the myth takes to be a life, which it obligingly
provides.
None of the lives is very extensively described, but the first example of a life that is chosen is among the fullest. The nameless
soul that drew the first lot—which “participated in virtue out of
habit, without philosophy” after living in “an ordered regime”—
picked the life containing the biggest tyranny straightaway, “but it
escaped its notice that eating his children and other evils accompanied this.” It escaped his notice. How strange. How can we understand this? Should we agree with the old song that “the large print
giveth and the small print taketh away”?2 Do the events or elements
of a life presented to choice differ in their prominence, such that
some would count as the large print, and some as the small? And
2. Tom Waits, “Step Right Up” (Small Change, Asylum Records, 1976).
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what would determine which appear more or less prominent? Just
what is written or figured on the paradigms of lives in the lap of
Lachesis? In the example just considered, the great tyranny looks
good at first, but when the soul “considered the life at its leisure,”
it discovered its evils, and was unhappy with its lot.
In a way, this latter portrait of a life is familiar and cogent: a life
containing an apparent good may of necessity also contain actual
evils that counterbalance or even outweigh the apparent good. But
in another way, this is an unsatisfactory way of talking about a life.
It tries to mark the badness of the life that contains one sort of fact
sometimes thought to be good (being a tyrant) by pointing out that
it also contains another sort of fact, which is generally acknowledged to be bad (eating one’s children). The whole question of
what makes a life good or bad has been reduced to the piecemeal
evaluation of particulars, and the summation of such judgments,
as in what is sometimes called a rubric.
But we really ought to doubt this soul’s assessment of its chosen
life, since we have already been told that it makes the choice affected by folly and gluttony. It could be so misguided as to be mistaken about which of the life’s elements is good and which bad. In
fact, we have already been told in Book 9 that the worst possible
eventuality for a soul that is tyrannically inclined is for it to become
an actual tyrant. Conversely, it may be that something as horrible
as eating his children is an appropriate accompaniment to the
“large print” of his being a tyrant.
But just inverting the assessment this foolish soul made of each
of these facts does not really solve the deeper problem, of which
the problem of the relative prominence of a life’s parts—its large
and its small print—is just a symptom. The component elements
of a life in the myth are subject to two seemingly contradictory demands: they must be “without an arrangement of soul,” and thus
be somehow meaningless, and they must be capable of “leading”
the soul to being just or unjust, and thus somehow have a meaning.
As for the former term of the contradiction, given that there are
good and bad among rich and poor alike, wealth, to pick one example, looks like the sort of thing that the Stoic Epictetus would
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call indifferent, something that is of no importance when compared
with the greater question of whether we are living well, and does
not by itself answer the question. As for the latter, however, the
soul that has learned the art of choosing lives well, Socrates says,
will call lives good or bad depending on whether they “lead to
virtue or vice.” But now we have to ask: how can events be said to
“lead” to virtue or vice at all unless they have within them the germ
of a sense, an incipient significance that is preserved in what it
gives rise to?
As in other similar cases, the commentary on the myth is quite
relevant and helpful, if somewhat oblique. Socrates portrays in
some detail the person who has acquired the art of choosing lives
well. He says: “He will take into account all the things we have
just mentioned and how in combination and separately they affect
the virtue of a life. Thus he may know the effects, bad and good,
of beauty mixed with poverty or wealth and accompanied by this
or that habit of soul; and the effects of any particular mixture with
one another of good and bad birth, private station and ruling office,
strength and weakness, facility and difficulty in learning, and all
such things that are connected with a soul by nature or are acquired.
From all this he will be able to draw a conclusion and choose—
while looking off toward the nature of the soul—between the worse
and the better life, calling worse the one that leads it toward becoming more unjust, and better the one that leads it to becoming
more just” (618c-e).
One of the most striking things in this passage, I think, is the intensity of its emphasis on combination. The possessor of the art of
choosing lives is said to consider the elements of lives both “separately and in combination” but all the examples are of complex
configurations. Here, then, is one way in which something can both
have a meaning and not have it in itself: it can have its meaning in
being combined with something else. Note that the myth helps us
here. The composition of elements that makes up each life is not
something chosen; the lives have already been assembled by the
time the souls have to choose them. Rather, souls are to call lives
good or bad on the basis of no element in them, but on the basis of
what living such a life will work in the soul that lives it. That is,
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what was being chosen (whether or not this escaped the choosers’
notice) was not an indifferently composed aggregate of particular
life-events or features, but something whose value lies on another
level.
Another striking feature of the passage is how thoroughly confusing it makes the separation of life and soul that lies at the basis
of the myth. In the first place, the possessor of the art is said to
know about the effects of mixtures that include elements such as
“this or that habit of soul.” This seems directly opposed to the
claim that lives are without an “ordering” or “arrangement” of soul.
Including this feature does not in itself introduce an inconsistency;
rather, it states the problem well: the soul that sets out to have
wealth or any other good thing will be changed by its pursuit, so
that there is no guarantee it will still want or be able to enjoy what
it was pursuing by the time it gets it. The one who possesses the
art would have to be able to predict what changes the living of a
life would work in the soul. In short, what makes elements of a life
part of a life that can be called good or bad is their connection with
the soul that has to live that life—the suffering, rejoicing, experiencing, remembering, expressing, and thinking being. These powers are what lend to those events or conditions whatever sense they
have. Here we see another way in which a life has a meaning, but
not in itself; it has a meaning in and for a soul.
To state the matter most generally, elements of a life are capable
of having a meaning that is not in them because that’s just what it
is to be an element of a life: to be a “Here” that is also, with all the
weight Plotinus gives the word, a “There.” The seeming paradox
is just the reality of our situation, and one that Plato has been carefully directing our attention to throughout the dialogue. We spend
as much time as we do in this dialogue on the proper organization
of an educational program not merely for the stated reason—that
we need guardians who will be both harsh with the city’s enemies
and gentle with its citizens. Rather, as the central books show and
the final myth signifies, the deeper issue is that what is most immediately apparent is always somehow a distraction from the intelligible reality of what is. But the sensible is not merely
something other than the intelligible: it is the region wherein the
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intelligible shows itself; it is where we live. The small things matter. The ball I learn to catch may be little more than arbitrary mineral, vegetable, and animal products refashioned to the measure of
a human hand, but the act of catching that this ball makes possible
is an emblem and anticipation of all sorts of future forms of mastery. The little bumps and tussles of playground life are like so
many prophetic utterances spoken to us in childhood that foretell
adult life’s disappointments—its alliances and betrayals, its kindness and its savagery—and they foretell them with both the accuracy and the obscurity that are characteristic of an oracle. Our lives
consist not in isolated events, but in pattern and paradigm, eidē on
the move.
This strange mode of being of the elements of our lives is a feature of the world of the myth of Er that also happens to be a feature
of our world; it is the literally true thing at the center of a mass of
figurative falsehoods, and around which the whole turns. It is the
true thing that seems strange to us who have become strangers to
it. The elements of lives can appear big or small, cruel twists of
fate, or irrelevant impediments to powers we find we do not need
to get by. We who live them do not experience ourselves as having
chosen them. But reflecting on the image of our souls choosing
our lives can awaken us from the dream-state in which we treat the
meanings of our lives as beings, as ta onta, as things that always
are, with no tincture of ambiguity or self-opposition, no dependence on perspective or interpretation, no horizon of possible transformation. On the contrary, we should recognize our lives in their
truth: they are the materials—somehow both indifferent and essential—out of which souls weave the tissue of meaning they first put
on and then inhabit; they are elements that stand to our souls and
hearts as those other elements—earth, air, fire, and water—stand
to the multifariously capable bodies of living beings of all kinds,
their material support and flesh. When the elements of our bodies
or lives fail us, we break, but when they cooperate, we succeed in
being something they would not be on their own, something other
and beyond.
The myth tells us that we need to learn how to cooperate with
these elements and their ways, so that we may make a good pas-
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sage in this life and the next, and perhaps in the next after that. But
what would make for a good passage? What should we hope for?
A well-deserved reward? Or a suffering that makes the soul better?
The beautiful sights and pleasant experiences that the myth sets up
as a reward for a good life carry with them the same ambiguity as
the goods of this life: many souls are not improved by them, but
turn out worse. To answer the question, we might think of the soul
that once belonged to Odysseus. Of this restless and clever soul,
we were not told whether it had come down from heaven or up
from the earth, only that memory of its former labors had cured it.
Those labors could have been carried out on earth as part of the
life we associate with Odysseus’s name—where he struggled to
regain his home after long years in foreign lands, losing all his
comrades—or they could have been performed as payment in that
place beneath the earth, some days’ journey from the spindle of
Necessity where lives are woven. Perhaps our hope and prayer
should be the same as his could have been: may we all perform
such labors, and remember them, and be cured of what ails us.
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Artistic Expression in Animals
Linda Wiener
I have three main goals in this lecture. The first, and most important, is to inspire you to be more open to and aware of the animals
all around you. The second is to give some history of a fascinating
debate on animal color and behavior that began in the early twentieth century in the United States; this will illustrate how difficult
it is to elicit any sort of Truth from the phenomena of nature. The
third is to persuade you that, at least some of the time, animals engage in artistic expression for its own sake.
Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species
in 1859,1 by far the most popular way of interpreting the appearance and behavior of organisms has been through the theory of natural selection. According to this theory, if a mutation appears in an
animal and that mutation helps the animal survive and reproduce
better than similar animals in their environment, the mutation and
the animals that carry it will be preserved while others will eventually decline and die out. But ever since this theory was published
there has been dissent. The most well known dissents are from religious objectors, however there have always been some scientists,
naturalists, philosophers, and others who work intimately with
plants and animals who accept the theory of evolution through natural selection, but believe that it is not sufficient to account for all
the phenomena of nature. I am one of this latter group.
In this lecture, I will use the lens of artistic expression in animals
as a way of exploring this question. I begin with an example from
bird song. I was at a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,
Linda Wiener is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This paper is adapted from a lecture delivered at the College’s Annapolis
campus on September 6, 2013. The original lecture involved images and
some video clips. This version makes do with some photographs, as well
as links to images on the web. Be sure to open the links and look at the
images while reading!
1. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, first edition (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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given by the Santa Fe Community Orchestra at the Santa Fe Opera
House in May, 2008. The opera house is covered on top, but open
around the sides. At the very beginning of the third movement, a
flock of house finches flew in and perched above the orchestra.
One male joined in singing with the music in such a way that it
seemed a part of the piece. He sang for most of the third movement
and at the very end of that movement, when the orchestra plays
four notes, the bird came in afterward, using the contact chirps of
the species, and mimicked those last four notes.
This is an example of a bird singing in his capacity as a musician. He shows that he knows something about music and can employ it appropriately outside its use for attracting mates and
protecting territories. This propensity of a least some birds to sing
outside the mating and nesting seasons was noted by Thoreau and
more recently by David Rothenberg in his book Why Birds Sing.2
David is a philosopher and jazz clarinetist. He plays his clarinet
with birds in aviaries and in the wild, sometimes with remarkable
results. As with the bird at the opera house, some birds respond
musically to his musical prompting. I particularly like a duet he
participated in with a laughing thrush; it can be heard online.3
Rothenberg concludes that birds sing because they enjoy it.
Other animals have been reported to respond to human music. I
read that crickets will approach when they hear music and start
singing. My own experiments with two species of crickets were
inconclusive; they chirped so much it was hard to tell when they
were responding to music and when they were chirping in their
natural rhythms. I have been told stories of raccoons coming on
stage during a concert. There is also record of a bear doing the
same thing (Fig. 1).
Moving on from music, probably the most famous artistic animals are the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea. For instance,
the satin bowerbird builds an oval shaped bower out of sticks and
decorates it with mostly blue objects. This includes flowers, berries,
and even human-made items like plastic drinking straws. Other
species have differently shaped bowers and use different color
2. David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
3. http://www.whybirdssing.com
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63
Fig. 1: Bear at concert4
schemes. The vogelkop bowerbird builds a conical bower and decorates mostly with red and orange objects.5 The females come
around to check out the male bowers, the males dance for them, and
then the female selects a male to mate with. She then goes off to
build a nest and raises the young on her own.
This is a classic example of what Darwin called “sexual selection” in his book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.6
In Darwin’s account, the females have aesthetic standards and
whichever male best meets those standards is the one she chooses
as a mate.
Darwin thought sexual selection less rigorous than ordinary natural selection because it was not a life and death matter. Recently,
Darwin's view of sexual selection has been revised. Now, the
building, decorating, and dancing activities of the male are seen
as direct reflections of the actual genetic quality of the males. The
females are selecting the males not according to an aesthetic standard, but according to which are the most genetically fit. This
brings sexual selection theory more in line with the classic theory
of natural selection.
4. From Carl Marty, Northenaire’s Ginger and Her Woodland Orphans
(Park Falls, Wisconsin: MacGregor Litho, 1953).
5. http://www.duskyswondersite.com/animals/bower-birds
6. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New
York: Penguin, 2004).
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A group of birds called the catbirds, in the same family as the
bower birds, helps raise a few questions about this modern understanding. In the catbirds, the males and females cooperate to build
the nest and rear the young; on average catbirds rear more offspring than the bowerbirds. An alternative explanation for bowerbird behavior is that the bower birds have “chosen” in some way
to forgo their maximum reproductive potential in order to devote
energy to the creation and appreciation of art.
Closer to home, there are other collecting and decorating animals. The pack rat of the Southwestern states is one. They are
beloved by archaeologists because they collect all sorts of things
from their surroundings and store them in their nests. An ancient
pack rat nest can tell scientists a lot about the sorts of things that
were around at the time. Pack rats are also famous for being destructive when they choose to nest in your home or vehicle. Whenever I hear friends complain about a pack rat nest, I beg them for
photographs.
Pack rats have different preferences when constructing their
nests. Sometimes, it is just a bunch of sticks and a few fabulous
items they have collected. My friends Betsy and Jamie had a nest
in their vehicle with a central white fluffy nest structure, then an
attractive bed of greens with dried red chiles piled in the center
(Fig. 2a). My friends Robert and Susan had a pack rat nest in their
vehicle with a central grey fluffy nest structure surrounded by a
variety of sticks, stems, and cholla cactus pads (Fig. 2b).
Fig. 2a
Photo by Jaimie Haskell
Fig. 2b
Photo by Robert Schlaer
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ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
Another friend, Pam, tells this story about a pack rat nest she
found in her truck. She was so mad when she saw the nest, she
threw everything on the ground; when she came back some time
later, it was all back in the truck. Not only that, it was back in just
the way it had been before, with each major element, stems, sticks,
and other items in exactly the same spot. This shows us that the
nest isn’t just a bunch of stuff thrown around. The pack rat arranges
her space to her own taste. Just as when someone messes up one
of your rooms, you put it back to its original arrangement, so too
does the pack rat.
Let’s look at some domestic animals. I had three ferrets over a
period of about nine years. They were all avid collectors. They had
stashes of the stuff they collected; there was a main stash usually
under and couch or in a cabinet, and smaller satellite stashes in
various locations. I noticed that they went through periods of collecting. My ferret Fennel collected soft things like beanie babies
and stuffed animals for a while and then switched to hard things
like pill bottles and vials. They also had a sense of value. If they
found something unusual, it would be hidden way in the back underneath other items in the stash, whereas a common object like a
pencil would just be thrown in anywhere.
My colleague Llyd Wells in Santa Fe has a ferret named Tomato
who makes stashes.
Tomato keeps a stash of mostly soft items in the closet in the
bedroom (Fig. 3a) and another stash of mostly harder rubber items
under the sink in the bathroom (Fig. 3b). Llyd will switch an item
Fig. 3a
Tomato’s bedroom stash
Fig. 3b
Tomato’s bathroom stash
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out of one stash into the other and Tomato is quick to “correct”
this. Tomato has organized her stashes and knows how they are
supposed to be.
If it seems like I am talking about ferret collecting in much the
same way I might talk about human collecting, it is because I am.
This brings up the bad word anthropomorphism. I am accused of
projecting my own desires, intentions, and activities onto the ferrets. However, if I see an animal acting in much the same way I
would in a similar situation, why shouldn't I, at least as a first step,
assume that it is acting with similar desires and motivations? After
all, the ferret, the pack rat, and me are all children of nature. We
have all evolved on this earth; why should we be assumed to be so
alien to one another?
Here is one more example from our domestic animals. Robby
is a dog who belongs to friends Jonathan and Barbara. He has a
basket of stuffed animals and when his people are away he makes
careful arrangements of them on the living room floor. A typical
one has four evenly spaced animals in a straight line, with one off
center (Fig. 4a). A slightly more complex arrangement has two of
the same animals, in different colors, together. There are two animals, evenly spaced on either side of these two and then down from
the ends, another animal on each side with different, but still even,
spacing (Fig. 4b).
Fig. 4a
Robby’s animals, simple
Fig. 4b
Robby’s animals, complex
Also typical of Robby’s work: the stuffed frog is in every arrange-
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67
ment. This is definitely not the work of an animal just throwing
things around because he is mad that his people are away.
A few years ago on YouTube there was a doberman who made
similar stuffed animal arrangements, though he went in more for
circular patterns. Let me take a moment to recommend YouTube
as a valuable source of information about animal behavior. Now
that most people have small video cameras or cell phones with
them all the time, an amazing variety of animal behavior has been
recorded and put online. Behaviors that I would have been called
crazy for reporting ten years ago are now accessible to everyone.
And everyone can judge for themself.
These collecting and decorating behaviors show us a range of
possibilities in nature. They are essential to the reproductive biology of the bower birds and certainly serve a utilitarian function for
them. For pack rats and ferrets these activities are typical of the
species, but do not serve any essential functions that we know of.
Robby the dog’s activities are not at all typical of the species, but
such behavior pops up now and then among dogs. I have read of
other cases in which one or a few animals engage in these kinds of
activities, though, again, they are not typical of the species. There
were a group of pigs7 who made arrangements out of shingles and
dirt and even a wolverine who made arrangements of sticks in a
chain link fence, left them up for a few days, and then made a new
arrangement.8
I suggest that the musical, collecting, and decorating activities I
have been chronicling are not always specifically evolved to serve
mating rituals or other survival needs, but may be part of a much
broader expressiveness in the natural world that can be turned to
utilitarian functions, but need not be.
When we look at invertebrates, it is a little harder to judge what
they intend, because they are not so closely related to us. Let’s look
at a few examples that might count as art for art’s sake. The decorator urchin collects various materials from the ocean floor and
7. Noel Perrin, Second Person Rural (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980).
8. Douglas Chadwick, The Wolverine Way (Ventura, California: Patagonia
Books; 2010).
9. http://www.flickr.com/photos/benjaminbull/2844381114
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puts them on top of its spines. I have read that this is for camouflage, but the photos that I have seen do not support this; they are
all highly visible.9
Harvester ants are common in the Southwestern United States.
Their nests are covered with small stones and are famous as collecting sites for various materials that people want. Some are covered
in crystals and sparkle in the sun. People know they are the place to
go to find turquoise and beads. Paleontologists find small fossils
from rodents on their nests, and scientists studying radioactive minerals go to their nests to find trinitite, the mineral formed from the
first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site in New Mexico.10
Garden spiders, also called writing spiders, build orb webs and
decorate them with zig zag patterns that are different for each
species.11 Henri Fabre, the great French entomologist, called these
their “signature.” I had, until recently, not read any plausible accounts of their function. It turns out, however, that the silk in the
“signature” is different from the web silk. It reflects ultraviolet
light and may function to attract insects into the web.
This is still untested, but does seem plausible. Even so, a further
question is why the web is decorated in just this way. Why do such
decorations seem more than is needed to fulfill the functions they
serve? This is one of the main questions that David Rothenberg,
the man who wrote Why Birds Sing, pursues in a more recent book
called Survival of the Beautiful.12
Usually when we think about animals and art, we are not thinking
about the arrangement of a pack rat’s nest or the beads on a harvester ant’s nest. We are thinking, rather, that animals are beautiful.
Humans have long appropriated bird feathers and animal skins for
our own adornment. I am an entomologist, and so I look at insects
a lot. Consider this beetle (Fig. 5)—the highly ornamented form of
the legs, the shape and texture of the thorax, the colors and patterns
on the wing covers. It is a fantastic animal and only has to be put
on a background and photographed to be easily seen as art. This is
10. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mouser-nerdbot/5334689193
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Argiope_aurantia_web.jpg
12. David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011).
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Fig. 5
“Coleoptera” by Jo Whaley
one of the ideas behind a book, The Theater of Insects,13 that I collaborated on with photographer Jo Whaley.
Other insect colors are understood as serving important protective functions. The great purple hairstreak, a butterfly I see in New
Mexico, has prominent white polka dots set in a black background
on its head and thorax, a bright orange abdomen, and iridescent
scales on its wings.14 The top of the wings are a beautiful irridescent purple. The bold black, white, and orange colors are referred
to as warning coloration. Insects that are poisonous such as the
black and orange monarch butterfly, or dangerous like the yellowand-black-striped wasps and bees, have these kinds of color patterns. The theory is that predators such as birds learn to avoid these
patterns and so the animals are protected. Also, insects that are neither poisonous nor dangerous may evolve these patterns to fool
predators into refusing to eat them.
The peacock spiders, a group of jumping spiders, have wonderful bright color patterns, and special flag-like structures on their
second pair of legs.15 They do elaborate courtship dances for the
females. This again seems like a classic example of sexual selection in that the colors, patterns, ornaments, and dancing serve an
13. Jo Whaley, Deborah Klochko, and Linda Wiener, The Theater of Insects (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008).
14. http://www.jeffpippen.com/butterflies/greatpurplehairstreak.htm
15. http://amazinglist.net/2013/02/the-peacock-spider-maratus-volans
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essential function in attaining a mate.
Consider, however, the radiolarians. They are one-celled animals
that live in the ocean. They are an old lineage, existing for over
600 million years. They have an amazing variety of forms, ornaments, and textures that serve no known functions.16 It seems that
as soon as there were animals, even just single-celled ones, there
was already a tendency toward elaboration. Again, I suggest that
such elaboration may be part of a basic expressive function of nature. Such appearances are not necessarily evolved to serve particular survival or reproductive functions.
Hold that thought. Now I am going to turn to the debate I mentioned earlier. Abbott Thayer was a well known portrait painter in
New England at the turn of the twentieth century. He was famous
for portraits of women with angel’s wings. He was also famous for
his theory of animal coloration. With his son Gerald, he published
a book in 1909 called Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom.17 I came across this book quite by accident about eight years
ago and was enthralled by it. Contrary to the theory of his day, and
also contrary to the theory of our day, the Thayers thought that all
animal colors were concealing.
The frontispiece of the book, a painting, shows a male peacock
with his colorful tail concealed in the colorful leaves on the forest
floor and his beautiful blue neck concealed against the sky (Fig. 6).
This vantage would be from the point of view of a ground predator
such as a fox.
More plausible, perhaps, is his photographic plate of a grouse
showing it concealed in its forest environment (Fig. 7).
Almost everyone would agree that grouse are well concealed in
the forests in which they live. But, Thayer goes further. He tells us
that if you want to know what a forest looks like, you should not go
around looking at forests because they will confuse you with their
idiosyncracies. You should look at animals such as the grouse who
must be concealed wherever they are in the forest. Thayer writes:
16. http://incrediblebeings.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/radiolarians-10species-2.jpg
17. Gerald Thayer and Abbott Thayer, Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (New York: MacMillan, 1909).
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Fig. 6
Thayer plate of a grouse
concealed in the forest
Fig. 7
Thayer plate of a grouse
concealed in the woods
They are, in the best sense of the word, triumphs of art;
and in a sense they are absolute, as human art can never
be . . . There he will find it in epitome, painted and perfected by nature herself. Color and pattern, line and shading, all are true beyond the power of man to imitate, or
even fully to discern.18
It was this insight that led Thayer to become the father of military camouflage. He went around trying to get the U. S. military
18. Thayer, 240.
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to adopt the idea. He failed, though the French military took him
up on it. Now, of course, military camouflage is well established
everywhere.
Under the influence of this book, I was failing to see animals
everywhere. Driving in the high plains along Route 285 in New
Mexico in the early spring, I would think of Thayer’s claim that
antelope are marked so as to be concealed on the patchy background of snow and bare soil.19 I would be thinking that there were
hundreds of antelope out there, but that I could not see any of them.
The problem with this construal is that in fact you can see them,
especially if you are looking for them.
One person who read Thayer’s book and was incensed by it was
Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, he was so incensed that he published
a 120-page rebuttal in the Bulletin of the American Museum of
Natural History.20 Roosevelt writes: “It is impossible to go over
page by page the really countless erroneous statements, wild
guesses, and absurd interpretations of fact which the book contains.” He cuts the Thayers some slack because of their artistic temperaments, but finds their lack of knowledge inexcusable. As you
may know, Roosevelt was famous as a big game hunter and could
easily take the point of view of a predator. He was also an excellent
naturalist and knew the names and habits of all the small birds and
mammals that lived around him. Going back to the frontispiece,
Roosevelt points out that if the peacock is indeed concealed in the
forest environment, then the peahen—which is very differently colored—must be conspicuous in that environment.
Here is a summary of some of his main objections: First, Roosevelt says that it is our eyes, and not the colors of the animals,
that determine whether we will see them. He tells us that his native
guides in Africa could often see animals he failed to pick out. Further, cover is more important in concealing animals than their colors, motion is also more important than colors, and besides, most
predators hunt by scent and do not use their eyes until they are very
19. http://kenarcherphotos.com/p953706307/h1BF0CD15#h1bf0cd15
20. Theodore Roosevelt, "Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds
and Mammals,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 30
(1911):119-239.
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73
close—and by then they already know the animal is there. All these
objections have merit. In fact, Roosevelt almost, not quite, but almost, claims that all animals are conspicuously colored, the opposite of the Thayers’ claim.
Before going on I want to relate an incident that happened while
I was still very much under the influence of Thayer’s book. I was
watching mallard ducks on a pond at sunset with my daughter. The
speckled brown females were difficult to see wherever they were—
on the bank, in a tree, or in the water. The males, which Thayer
claims are concealingly colored in the pond environment, were
very easy to see.21 We were watching a particular male swim across
the pond, and at one point it suddenly and completely disappeared.
That is, its white back matched the sparkly white water of the pond
at sunset, its brown breast matched the reflection of a tree trunk in
the water, and its green head matched the reflection of foliage in
the water. It was so startling that I actually jumped. Then, a halfsecond or a second later, it swam out of that position and again
could be easily seen.
So, Thayer is only a little bit right when he claims that male mallards are concealed in their pond environment. For the most part
they are not. However, a kind of secret was revealed through this
experience. They seem somehow born of their environment. It was
as if someone had taken a piece out of a jigsaw puzzle of a pond
at sunset and turned it into a male mallard duck.
One more important participant in this debate on animal coloration was John Burroughs, a naturalist and writer from New York
state. He published an essay in 1908 entitled “Gay Plumes and
Dull.”22 In it he takes up the topic of concealing coloration. He has
his own set of objections to the theory. He points out that if concealing coloration were so important to animal survival, you would
expect all animals in a given environment to be the same color, yet
we see that they are not. Also, we would expect concealingly colored animals such as grouse to be more abundant than brightly col21. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mclap/4366013629
22. John Burroughs, “Gay Plumes and Dull,” in Leaf and Tendril (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
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ored animals such as male cardinals and pheasants, and we would
expect the females of these last two species to be more abundant
than the males. Yet, this is not what we see. From experience I can
say that this is also the case with insects. Species with concealing
colors are not more numerous as a rule than brightly colored ones.
Burroughs writes:
Whatever truth there may be in this theory of protective
coloration, one has only to look about him to discover
that it is a matter which Nature does not have very much
at heart. She plays fast and loose with it on every hand.
Now she seems to set great store by it, the next moment
she discards it entirely.23
Burroughs accounts for the colors of the antelope and other animals like this:
Things in nature blend and harmonize. One thing
matches with another. . . . Arctic life will blend more or
less with Arctic snows, tree animals will show greater
variety in tint and form, plains animals will be dull of
hue like the plains . . . through the law of natural assimilation, like begetting like, variety breeding variety.24
He reaches for a “law of natural assimilation” to explain this,
and also reaches for another natural law to explain differences in
coloration between males and females of the same species:
His gay plumes are the badge of his masculinity . . . the
riot and overflow of the male sexual principle.25
Females being generally more dull in hue partake in a more passive female principle of nature. Burroughs still feels that the appearances have not been fully accounted for. He goes further,
speculating that:
It is like the caprice of fashion . . . exaggerated plumes,
fantastic colors, and monstrous beaks of many birds in
both hemispheres have as little apparent utility, and seem
23. Burroughs, Leaf and Tendril, 61.
24. Ibid., 80.
25. Ibid., 95.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
75
to be quite as much the result of caprice, as are any of
the extreme fashions in dress among human beings.26
Even in the animal world, there is fashion. One man who takes
up this theme, decades later, is Roger Caillois, a French philosopher who published a book in 1964 entitled The Mask of Medusa.27
Caillois was especially interested in the phenomenon of mimicry
in the insect world. The dead leaf butterfly is a good exarnple.28
The undersides of the wings are a perfect mimic of a dead leaf,
complete with leaf veins, fungal spots, and a broken stem. If this
butterfly was immobile in leaves on a forest floor, you would never
see it. However, it is not uncommon to see these insects outside of
the environment where they would be concealed, as if they are,
perhaps, showing off.
Another spectacular mimetic caterpillar is Hemeroplanes triptolemus, found in Central America.29 It looks like a regular caterpillar when it is feeding on a branch, however in the last stage
before it pupates, if disturbed, it turns upside down and comes at
you looking for all the world like a tree viper, though the “eyes”
are not real and cannot see. The theory is that birds or other predators think they are in the presence of an animal that is dangerous to
them and are frightened away, instead of eating the caterpillar. It is
thought that any caterpillar that deviates from the perfect mimetic
form will be spotted and eaten by predators until, eventually, the
most perfect mimics are “created” by this selective predation.
Many butterflies and moths are known as snake mimics. The
spicebush swallowtail, native to the United States, is one such
caterpillar.30 To me, this caterpillar looks more like a friendly
stuffed toy snake than a dangerous enemy. We need to wonder why
it is that the first mimic is so perfect if this second one is an effective deterrent of predation. Adults may also be identified as snake
26. Ibid., 90.
27. Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, tr. George Ordish (New York:
C. N. Potter, 1964).
28. http://beastlyvirtues.blogspot.com/2013/03/fuxianhuia-who.html
29. http://madasamarinebiologist.com/post/16015203836/snake-mimiccatepillar
30. http://www.pinterest.com/pin/459859811920520201/
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mimics. Philip Howse, of Southampton University in England
claims that the wing of the atlas moth is a cobra mimic.30 Look at
a whole atlas moth.31 Again, we are led to wonder why, if birds are
such astute and perceptive predators, they don’t know that cobras
are five feet long and live in the rice paddies, not five inches long
and hanging in the air.
Caillois notes this “aimless delirium of perfection in nature,”
and proposes that mimicry is an autonomous force in the world of
biology that does not require utilitarian explanations. He goes further and also invokes, like Burroughs, a principle of fashion, connecting it with the phenomenon of mimicry:
But in the case of man, fashion is also a phenomenon of
mimicry, of an obscure contagion of fascination with a
model which is imitated for no real reason.32
The plant hoppers are a group of sap-sucking insects that live
on trees and shrubs. They have an astounding variety of forms.33
They may resemble wasps as one of the photos on the foregoing
site sort of does. You can see the black and white stripes, the narrow “wasp waist,” and a variety of pointed projections that may
deter a predator. Notice that the real body is underneath the wings.
The whole “wasp” is a projection of the prothoracic segment. It is
as if the plant hopper is wearing a mask or a costume. If we look
at other plant hoppers, we will be impressed that many do not seem
to be mimics at all. Their colors, shapes, and ornaments seem more
like the work of a playful, creative imagination.
So far, I have been referring to art as something like “the beautiful.” Now we are seeing, in the natural world, a different category
of art, that of mask and costume, a category that has a wide variety
of functions in the human world. Caillois was especially interested
in an insect called the lantern bug (Fig. 8). They are related to the
30. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8082739/Butterflies-andmoths-mimic-snakes-and-foxes-to-fool-predators-claims-researcher.html
31. http://butterflycircle.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-atlas-moth-chroniclesepisode-1.html
32. Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, 41.
33. http://femtasia.blogspot.com/2010/11/membracidae.html
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
77
Fig. 8
Lantern Bug34
tree hoppers and also live by sucking sap from trees. It is a Swiss
army knife of a bug; the forewings mimic dead leaves, when they
are lifted up there are two prominent eye spots. These are generally
interpreted as looking like vertebrate eyes so that a potential predator, thinking it is in the presence of a larger predator that could be
a danger to it, will be frightened away. Best of all, it has a large alligator mask above its real head. You can see the eyes, the nostrils,
and the row of teeth. Again, we must question. Don’t the predators
know that alligators are 6 feet long and live in the river, rather than
an inch or so long and in a tree?
Caillois compares the lantern bug to a human shaman. The dead
leaf forewings are its cloak of invisibility which can be suddenly
thrown off to reveal the conscious being who had been hidden. He
writes:
Where there was nothing, there is suddenly horror. The
insect knows how to frighten; what is more it gives rise
34. James Duncan, Introduction to Entomology, Vol. 1 [Vol. 30 of The
Naturalist’s Library, ed. Sir William Jardine] (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars,
1840), Plate 22.
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to a particular kind of fear, an imaginary terror not corresponding to any real danger . . . working through the
strange and fantastic.35
One further example of this phenomenon is the oleander hawkmoth caterpillar, Daphnis nerii.36 This caterpillar, when viewed
from a certain angle, exhibits creepy glowing eyes that do not look
like those of any animal, but evoke horror. They have the same kind
of effect as eyes painted on a shield or the bow of a ship. This suggests that birds, monkeys and other predators may be susceptible
to a kind of existential dread brought on by these false, staring eyes.
The wide range of such costume- and mask-effects in insects
mirrors the many uses of masks in human communities. There
are masks to disguise, to camoflauge, to frighten, to take on the
look and energies of another kind of creature—there are even
masks just for play. If we go with Caillois’s thought, we can see
that humans are not isolated from the rest of the natural world by
our art, our mythology, our psychology. We belong to the world
and can see aspects of these human features represented in the
behavior, or printed on the actual anatomy, of other animals.
I have been arguing that there is more going on in the world of
biology than natural selection for the purposes of survival and reproduction. Especially today, when most thinking about evolution
is connected with thinking about genes, we confine ourselves to a
narrow range of interpretation of biological phenomena. As a result,
we are continually underestimating the capacities of animals, and
this underestimation takes place before there are any data. We are
always tempted to read the capacities of animals off of their genes
or anatomy and from the theory of natural selection. No matter how
many times this is shown to be wrong-headed, these strategies are
constantly invoked. Truly, it is not possible to know what an animal
is capable of without actually observing its behavior for a long time
under a variety of circumstances.
It is assumed that bees have such tiny brains that they cannot do
symbolic reasoning, but showing that they do somehow does not
35. Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, 104.
36. http://www.flickr.com/photos/77995220@N00/9398097107
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
79
challenge the general principle. When we limit beforehand what
we believe is possible, we often cannot see what is right in front
of our eyes, or we fail to reflect about it at all because we have already sorted out the observed appearance or behavior into one of
our preset categories. One thing is warning coloration, another is
sexual selection, another is protective coloration—and we’re done.
Not only do we fail to see, we lose a language that is adequate to
the actual phenomena. We lose a sense of Nature with a capital
“N,” a nature rife with potentiality and surprises, Nature as a principle of motion and change. Only the poets still use this sort of language with a good conscience.
I’ve been using the lens of artistic expression in animals as a
way to explore this issue.
Here at the end, in the coda, I would like to switch to a different
sort of example to illustrate this point. A few years ago there
showed up on YouTube some footage of an elk, named Shooter, at
the Pocatello Zoo in Idaho, saving a marmot from drowning in a
water tank.37 There were two witnesses, a veterinarian and an educator. The whole event took about 15 minutes. The elk was pawing at the water and with his big unwieldy antlers, trying to get his
head in the tank. Finally he lifted out the marmot, put it on the
ground, and gently nudged it with his foot. In a little while the marmot shook itself and ran into its hole. It is wonderful footage.
The odd thing to me was the narrative of the witnesses. Even as
we are watching, they are explaining that elk don’t do this. They
are all about survival. They speculate that it is only because
Shooter lives in a zoo and has his needs met that he can develop
more elaborate behavior. The scientist in me immediately asks how
we know that elk don’t do this. Do we have dozens of examples of
marmots squeaking in distress as they drown in mountain lakes
while elk graze unconcernedly on the shore? We don’t really know
as we only have one example of an elk confronted with this situation. Underlying the narrative is the view that elk behavior is
generic and aimed only toward survival. I suggest that the elk and
37. http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?id=8211416
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the marmot, who after all live in the exact same place, know each
other. This may be an act of individual friendship, not calling for
any explanation at all in terms of natural selection.
I hope I have stimulated you to look more carefully and think
more widely when you observe animals. The world of animal appearance and behavior is wide and wonderful. The next step is for
you to go outside and start looking around for yourself.
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Troy
Hannah Eagleson
Eris
You cannot even bite into it,
Feel color burst in your mouth,
Taste nectar on your tongue.
Hard gold spinning down the table,
Stopping talk,
Clanging pitchers,
Breaking glasses.
Spilling wine
On immortal gowns.
Setting at war
Beauty, wisdom, power
Unleashing the bronze spear and gleaming chariot,
The arrows’ iron,
Drawing jagged lines.
Eve had at least the momentary taste,
Flavor widening her eyes,
Fruit in her mouth
In exchange for Eden lost.
Troy fell for an apple no one tasted.
�POEMS | EAGLESON
Judgment
Did Priam ever wonder,
Why Paris? Like a filigree circlet,
Looking fine enough, delicately wrought,
But not much use in battle.
Why not Hector, steady and strong,
Brave and to be trusted?
Why not honey-tongued Odysseus on the other side,
Or fierce Agamemnon himself?
Why should Paris be unlucky enough
To stumble near the gods’ celebration,
Fool enough to think he could judge
Among beauty, wisdom, power?
And who would choose beauty?
What good is that,
To managing a kingdom?
Does it build the walls or feed the hungry?
Does it grow the wheat or press the grapes?
Does it strengthen the gates or make the wells run deeper?
Who would have thought that epics begin
Not with the bright spear or bronze helmet,
Not even with the twist of golden hair,
But with the slight prince
Strayed to the wrong table,
Making a fool’s choice?
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Three Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal
by Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Peter Kalkavage
The Swan (to Victor Hugo)
I
Andromache, I think of you! That little stream,
Poor and gloomy mirror where once there shone so bright
The tremendous majesty of your widow’s grief,
That lying Simoïs that grew great through your tears,1
Impregnated at once my fertile memory,
As I made my way across the new Carrousel. 2
Old Paris is no more (the form of one’s hometown
Is quicker to change, alas! than a mortal’s heart);
I see but in my mind that whole camp of makeshift huts,
Those piles of capitals, rough-hewn, and column-shafts,
The grass, the massive blocks turned green by standing pools,
And shining in the panes the scattered bric-a-brac.
There a menagerie at one time was spread out;
There I saw, one morning, under skies cold and clear,
At the hour when Work wakes, when street cleaners push
A menacing storm into the silent air,
A swan that had recently escaped from his cage,
And, scraping the dry pavement with his webby feet,
Was dragging his white plumage on the rugged ground.
Near a waterless ditch, the beast, opening his beak,
1. In the Aeneid (III, 302), Andromache, now a refugee in Epirus, weeps
for Hector near a “false” Simoïs, a river near Troy.
2. The Place du Carrousel, an area near the Louvre, underwent continual
renovation in the 1850s.
�POEMS | KALKAVAGE
85
Was nervously bathing his wings in the dust,
And said, heart full of his beautiful native lake:
“Water, when will you rain? Lightning, when will you roar?”
I see this ill-starred wretch, a strange and fatal myth,
Toward the heavens sometimes, like Man in Ovid’s poem,3
Toward the heavens ironic and cruelly blue,
On his convulsive neck straining his thirsty head,
As though he were addressing reproaches to God!
II
Paris changes! But nothing in my melancholy
Has budged! New palaces and scaffoldings and blocks,
Old quarters, all turns to allegory for me,
And my precious memories are heavier than rocks.
In front of that Louvre too an image weighs me down:4
I think of my great swan, with his gestures insane,
Like people in exile, ludicrous and sublime,
And gnawed by relentless desire! And then of you,
Andromache, fallen from a great husband’s arms,
Vile beast of the field, under Pyrrhus’s proud hand,
Near a bodiless grave, bent over in a swoon;
Hector’s widow, alas! and Helenus’s wife!5
I think of the negress, all consumptive and thin,
Trudging in the mud, and searching with haggard eye
For the now-absent palms of proud Africa’s land
In the distance behind the immense wall of fog;
3. Metamorphoses I, 84-85: “All other animals look downward; Man,/
Alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses,
trans. Rolfe Humphries [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960], 5.)
4. That Louvre, i.e., the Louvre before the reconstruction in 1852 that
eliminated the old streets separating the Louvre from the Palace of the
Tuileries.
5. After the fall of Troy, Andromache and Helenus (Priam’s son) became
the slaves of Achilles’s son, Pyrrhus, who eventually let them marry
(Aeneid III, 321-336).
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Of whoever has lost what will never return—
Ever, ever! Of those who sate themselves with tears
And are suckled by Grief as by a good she-wolf!
Of skin-and-bone orphans withering like flowers!
And so, in the forest that inexiles my mind
An old Memory sounds with full blast of the horn!
I think of the sailors forgotten on an isle,
Of captives, the vanquished! . . . and many others still!
Fogs and Rains
O ends of autumn, winters, springtimes steeped in mud,
Sleepy-headed seasons! I love you and I praise you
For enveloping thus both my heart and my brain
With a vaporous shroud and a vague sort of tomb.
On that vast open plain where the cold storm-wind plays,
Where the weathercock rasps through the long drawn-out nights,
My soul, even better than in spring’s tepid time,
Will proceed to spread wide its great raven-black wings.
Nothing is more sweet to the funereal heart,
And on which for so long winter’s chill has come down,
O seasons drenched in pallor, you queens of our clime,
Than the unchanging look of your deathly-white gloom,
—Lest it be, on a night without moon, two by two,
To put sorrow to sleep on a perilous bed.
�POEMS | KALKAVAGE
87
The Vampire
You who, like a thrust of the knife,
Entered inside my plaintive heart;
You who, as mighty as a herd
Of demons, came, adorned and mad,
To make your bed and your domain
Of my humiliated mind;
—Obscene one, to whom I am bound
Like the galley slave to his chain,
Like the hard gambler to his game,
Like the wretched sot to his bottle,
Like the carrion to its vermin,
—Accursèd, accursèd be you!
I pleaded with the rapid blade
To win my freedom back by force,
And told the poison, schooled in guile,
To come and aid my coward’s will.
Alas! the poison and the blade
Both held me in disdain and said:
“You’re not worthy to be relieved
From your accursèd servitude,
Fool! —if from that empire of hers
Our efforts would deliver you,
Your kisses would resuscitate
The cadaver of your vampire!”
�POEMS | ZUCKERMAN
The Second Sense
Elliott Zuckerman
Listen: In wind and water,
the second sense
records a message for the sixth
Before our birth
only a patch of reason moved the pulse
Before the germ
of anything like melody,
maternal heartbeat set the meter’s pace
In harmony
the pulse ascends to the unheard. Though sound
is left below, compatible numbers
continue climbing
That’s why the masters of man’s sound
enthralled by breeze and shower
and friendliness of field and leaf
reiterate the triad tirelessly
sustained beyond the call of need or taste
The level field
the rising cliff or tree
are the co-ordinates of the soul
In simple chords sustained
beyond all reason
one master celebrated greenery
striding and hunched, hands clasped behind his back.
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89
To Save the Ideas
A Review of Daniel Sherman’s Soul, World, and Idea: An
Interpretation of Plato’s Republic and Phaedo. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2013. viii + 410 pages, $110.
Eva Brann
“To save the phenomena” of heavenly motions by undergirding
them with rational, that is, mathematical, hypotheses—that is said
to be the problem Plato set for astronomers in a passage from the
Republic frequently referenced by Daniel Sherman.1 His own
project is, as I understand it, the inverse one: to save the Platonic
ideas by a new interpretation of the dialogues in the title of his
book. It might be said to be the deeper and more difficult problem
to solve—and just as enticing.
But what, you may think, is the use of an inviting review, when
you blanch at the price? This book, written by an alumnus of St.
John’s (Annapolis, 1963) after a long teaching career and obviously
much study and reflection, should be kept in mind by anyone of us
who has more than a nostalgic interest in the Platonic dialogues; if
you can’t afford it, you might persuade your local library to acquire
it or get it for you on interlibrary loan.
It is surely a book not to be overlooked in any serious study of
the Platonic dialogues, not just the Republic and the Phaedo. But—
in any responsible review there must be “buts,” and I’ll get them
out of the way, the more uninhibitedly to do this huge work justice—its very volume raises some obstacles, thought-provoking
enough to induce the following little prefatory meditation on voluminousness.
There is an aphorism by Callimachus (third century BCE), the
most famous librarian of the great ancient Library at Alexandria:
mega biblion, mega kakon, which our wicked undergraduates at
St. John’s used to translate: “A great book is a great evil.” What he
actually meant is probably: “A long book is a big pain,” since he
1. Republic 528 ff. Simplicius (Commentary 2.43, 46) reports Plato’s
challenge to the astronomers.
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considered long epics to be antiquated. Having, on several occasions, inflicted such pain, I have come to think of book length as
an independently significant factor. For one thing, it is involved
with the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” literature—between a difficult, rebarbative original and its ancillary elucidation. There’s “learning’s crabbed text” and then “there’s the
comment,” as Robert Browning says in “The Grammarian’s Funeral.”
A primary text may be as long as it pleases, say, the roughly
seven hundred pages of the Critique of Pure Reason or the nearly
double that of War and Peace. But a secondary text, a commenting
explication? Well, how can it help but be a good deal longer than
the original? It is, after all, an explication or “unfolding,” an explanation or “planing-out,” an exposition or “setting-out,” an elucidation or “bringing-to-light.” Anything that is smoothed-out will
be larger in bulk than it was in its original implicitness or self-entanglement. However, the length of an exegesis that “leads-out” of
a textual complexity is a very real problem of human temporality.
Even for willing learners, since ars longa, vita brevis, if the artfulness of the text is great and the commentator tries to be adequate
to it, there is the risk of displacing it, because human life is always
short on time. Moreover, while words clarify, wordiness obscures
matters.
To my mind this means that to make up for its preempting bulk,
an interpretation has the obligation to be easier—and so, faster—
to read, and the interpreter has the obligation to accordingly be
willing to accept a loss of subtlety and depth. Although one might
say that a great text is one long aphorism, being too brief for what
it bears, surely the difference between a weighty text and its analysis is not merely that of succinctness and amplitude. In addition,
an interpretation should willingly forego that mysterious penumbra
of connotation and resonance which attends a great book and candidly admit that a great author’s scope is apt to exceed the interpreter’s perspective (not withstanding his—dubious—advantage
of an added historical distance). To say it plainly: secondary writing has a smoothing function; to it shallowness is mandatory. So
much here for one of its qualities; more about its quantity below.
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91
There is a now often deprecated notion behind the “primary/secondary” distinction which goes beyond that of “original/commentary,” namely, “great/not-so-great.” The one main mark of textual
greatness is just this: exposition-proneness. Whatever spatial
metaphor you may apply to the effort—illuminating the surface,
delving into the depths, unrolling the convolutions—there is always more to be said about it. The exegete may be exhausted; the
book never is. Put another way: A great book will contain many
serendipities but few inadvertencies. (Even Homer nods, but rarely.)
Thus the interpreter’s care is safely invested; there will be returns.
I have slipped from “commentary” to “interpretation” because,
while a commentary might be pretty innocent, hovering around the
factual extrinsicalities of the text, interpretations get inside it and
are fraught with potential culpability. First of these is inadequacy
to the meaning of the text: To interpret well, you have to begin
reading literally, attend to the letter of the text. Any willing student
can be trained to do that. But then it gets complicated, especially
for the Socratic dialogues of Plato. Who among the participants
understands what Socrates is asking and what he himself is saying?
What is Socrates’s intention? Where is Plato? Which words or suppressions bear the meaning of the conversation? In what sayings
or silences is its locus of truth? The effort of cluing this out is very
nearly simultaneous with the exposition of that truth or of its occlusion—here’s a version of that notorious “hermeneutic circle,” that
the parts are known by the whole, but also, inversely, the whole by
its parts.2 Inadequacy, lack of acuteness in construing the text from
both ends, here vitiates the interpretation—but that is not at all the
problem of Sherman’s book, and thus not my problem here.
Second, the pedagogic ineffectiveness of interpretative commentary: I want to frame this aspect of secondary writing as a large
problem, so to speak, that is little regarded—the problem of bulk.
Having myself perpetrated several big books, I suppose I’m qualified. Here’s the problem: In writing of that sort there are levels of
aboutness. At the bottom there is, once again, what the primary
2. The “hermeneutic” or interpretational art is named after the herald-god
Hermes, one of whose offices it was to convey plainly the meaning of
messages.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
book literally says. On top of that (or wherever it’s to be located)
there is the originating writer’s meaning—not that he failed in saying
what he intended, but that he may have reached for a new language
to convey his original notions, or that he may have suppressed complete articulation so as to involve the attentive reader. For most (no
longer all) interpreters, it is an article of hermeneutic faith that there
is such an implicit meaning, that its novel language often needs an
interpreter, that the author’s intention is often not immediately obvious—and that they’re elected to open up the book to others’ view.
So on top of that comes the secondary writer’s own understanding
of the primary text, which any candid commentator will, by that
little margin of modest doubt, know how to distinguish from its
underlying template. And now, to top it off, there is a tertiary level,
huge and growing: the more or less deviationist opinions of all the
fellow interpreters, who each have different perspectives, reconcilable and irreconcilable. And in this perspectival fecundity lies
the proof both of the primary text’s grander scope and of its human
limitations.
Secondary bulk is a real and present danger: smoothing turns
into smothering. Oddly enough, there is a device for the self-neutralization of big secondary books: the Index. For original books,
excerpted reading is a hermeneutic no-no, precisely because of the
hermeneutic circle, because the clue to the whole may lie in any
or all parts. Not so in interpretative commentaries, whose writer
should not be out to piggy-back a masterpiece on the underlying
text, but should help the user to check out names, find definitive
passages, and follow up themes. Indices affirm the secondary
writer’s modesty; a detailed index signifies the writer’s blanket
permission to spot-read, to use the interpretation in thinking about
the text thus served. Primary texts usually aren’t indexed to begin
with. Soul, World, and Idea has an index, but I wish Lexington
Books had invested in a more ample one.
“Careful” unpacking, analysis, reading, is a phrase, the favorite
one in Soul, World, and Idea, of hermeneutic virtue. Here’s the
“but”: it leads to pertinent paraphrases of the text to be interpreted,
together with commenting qualifications, modifications, cautious
retractions—in short, to lengthiness. Add to this the dutiful inclu-
�REVIEW | BRANN
93
sion, both in the text and in long footnotes, of tertiary commentary,
in which the work comes to grips with, analyzes, critiques, or accepts a large number of contemporary interpretations by fellow
scholars. Just as the careful reading often yields welcome insights
(of which I’ll give an example a little below), the referencing of
scholarship is often helpful. Instead of just citing names and numbers, Sherman actually reproduces arguments. But it nearly doubles
the book’s length.
I am, as they say, “conflicted” about both of these efforts: the
written record of “careful reading” and the learned absorption of
“scholarship.” Who can doubt the value of carefully thinking
through a worthy text by engaging in extensive internal i-dotting
or the propriety of responsively considering others’ understandings
and making a mental note of their putative mistakes? But, then,
isn’t it the next best step to allow the bulk—not the gist—of our
own thinkings and others’ errors to pass away, unpublished, into
forgetfulness? Treat them as ephemeral, and let them die within
days of their birth (as do those eponymous ephemerids, the
mayflies) and enter forgetfulness, there to become the soil of reflection. Shouldn’t philosophy be resolutely anti-cumulative, ever
at the beginning? Absent a firm settlement of my misgivings about
bulky writings and extensive sourcing, I take refuge in a very practical solution: at least to pay attention to what is near and dear, and
certainly to the works of alumni.
So let me start with a sample of insights Daniel Sherman’s book
offers, combining close reading and responsiveness to scholarship
(p. 165). An interesting issue is “the autonomy of philosophy” seen
in personal terms, namely as the ability of ordinarily thoughtful
human beings to withstand the social order. Pierre Bourdieu, a
French sociologist, surmises that the categories imposed by the
power structure are intractable because they are unconsciously involved in the very struggle to escape them; thus even the not-soconforming characters of the Republic respond to Socrates’s
sedition with responses varying from “metaphysical fury,” through
friendly doubt, to sullen withdrawal. Against this defeatism, Sherman pits his interpretation of Platonic discourse as being very
awarely situated in medias res. Socrates indeed operates, albeit
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quite consciously, in the context of the social setting and its implicit
opinions. He employs dialogic practices to make these explicit and
to ascend, starting from within the social and natural world, to the
alternative realm of Ideas; the ideas are thus both continuous with
and opposed to the given social context, hence in a tension of critique and acceptance with respect to ordinary meanings. One might
say that Sherman saves the autonomy of thinking from circumstance by arguing that it is its very implication in the opinionenvironment of the world which, when brought to awareness,
gives it its rightful claim to independent knowledge. (P. 165.)
I’ve begun with this example, taken from the middle of the book,
because it is typical of Sherman’s saving, composing, middle-ofthe-way responses to exaggeratedly alienating views of Plato’s
project. Now it’s time to give a glimpse of the over-all structure of
the book, chapter by chapter. Keep in mind that this is a dense exposition, consisting of four-hundred meticulously argued pages, so
my summary will be skeletal indeed, and my queries will loom
larger than they would were the detail not suppressed.
The Introduction sets out the interrelation of cognizing soul,
experienced world, and Sherman’s own conception of discourseembedded ideas, in the Republic and the Phaedo. He reviews the
various values accorded by scholars to their dramatic aspect, from
mere embellishment, through an attendant enactment of philosophical life to an inextricable involvement of action and argument.
Jacob Klein3 was an early and vivid proponent of this third view,
and Sherman recalls Klein’s influence on him in the warm appreciation of his Preface. In particular, Klein’s close-to-life reading
of the dialogues is reflected in Sherman’s “most radical and challenging suggestion”: the ideas are not atemporal beings separated
from the world but have a temporal, world-implicated dimension;
consequently the Platonic account of ideal being can the better be
the operative basis of a philosophic life of learning, teaching, talking. Images and image-making—and image-recognition, I would
add—will be crucial in drawing the ideas into human cognition
and moral activity.
3. Jacob Klein (1899-1978) was tutor (1938-69) and dean (1948-58) at
St. John’s College, and teacher until his death.
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Chapter 1. The Interlocutor’s Request analyzes the problems
posed to Socrates in the Republic by Plato’s two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus: to show that justice is an inherent good,
hence a source of happiness. Here, I might comment, is a first
occasion for Sherman’s “careful parsing”; he delves deep into
the shallowness of Socrates’s talking partners. I think that approach, a dimension of the whole book, is a little hard on these
young men, as well as the all-but-boys of the Phaedo. After all,
they are there all night in the Republic and all day in the Phaedo,
attentive and eager; they do about as well as would any of us. If
I’d been there I wouldn’t have intruded my every mental reservation either, and, I think, that the same experience of a tacit
critical descant that Plato asks of a reader, Socrates respects in
his companions. We must supply knowing smiles, snickers,
raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, just as in a St. John’s seminar.
I think Socrates is more apt to bring out his present partners’
strengths than to expose their efforts to our cavils—if they’re
young.
To satisfy the brothers’ request Socrates sets up that problemfraught analogy between the offices of the castes of a well-constituted political community and the powers of the parts of the
soul. Sherman’s thorough expository prose obscures a little—a
dramatic hiccup would have helped—the arresting political assumption of this magnifying image, in which the individual psychology is said to be mirrored in the communal “constitution”
(whence the Greek title Politeia, “Polity”): civic justice is understood as the image of psychic adjustment. The consideration
of imaging becomes more urgent.
Chapter 2. Discourse treats of the possibility of realizing a
city so constituted. Recall here that Socrates in fact gives an unambiguous final answer: It makes no difference whether the
ideal city will ever exist or is just a model laid up in heaven; the
point is to practice our inner politics in its image—to use its politeia in turn as a model for constituting our own, individual,
psychic balance (592b). However, Sherman introduces several
levels on which the possibility question may play out. One condition for the existence of the just city is that a philosopher-king
will turn up—and, I would add, before he arrives there must be
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a pre-royal philosopher-founder—a proven unlikelihood, as is
shown by Plato’s misadventures with Syracuse’s tyrant-dynasty,
set out in his Letters. Therefore Sherman now reviews these
royal philosophers’ nature and their education, and in preparation, the underlying characteristics of degrees of cognition and
their objects. Thus the “digression of the central books” (p. 77)
is justified. Some readers may recall that Rousseau saw the center of the Republic in these books. Whatever the title may imply,
he says, it is really a treatise on education (Émile I) and, I might
add, on the constitution of the soul and the beings of the world.
Apparently, Sherman agrees (p. 137). However, he regards the
application of the ontology (the account of Being) and its realization in a program of education as provisional, incomplete.
The Phaedo is a necessary supplement. In any case, for him the
prerequisite imaging of the ideal in discourse looms yet larger.
Chapter 3. The Cave: Education and the Lack of It deals with
the Image of the Cave (the venue of human life) and the Divided Line (the gradation of beings and the ascent of cognition). Sherman takes the cave to be the city and, in clever
accord with the order of the Republic’s earlier books, where
city precedes soul, but in reversal of Books VI-VII, where the
enabling ontological line precedes the consequent civic cave,
manages neatly to insinuate his main thesis, the implication of
the Ideas in the human experience and knowledge of the world.
A bonus is Sherman’s account and critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Cave Image as embodying a loss of openness to the direct presence of beings, a receptivity still retained
by the Presocratics. Sherman shows that Heidegger himself actually appeals to the “ungrasped essence,” said to be deformed
by discourse, an appeal that vitiates the purity of his cherished
immediacy. Since Sherman himself supposes that beings come,
so to speak, into Being only in thinking and its speech, he argues that Plato’s image-dynamics more adequately facilitates
the sharing of Ideas between soul and world than does Heidegger’s hope of “unhiddenness.”
Chapter 4. The Divided Line and Dynamic of Ascent gives a
dynamic interpretation of the Divided Line, as an ascent and
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descent, turn and turn-about, of living thinking, whose motor,
so to speak, is imaging: the Divided Line represents the cosmos, both its shifting appearances and its stable beings, as a
top-down cascade of images and a bottom-up effort of imagerecognition.4 Sherman begins with the triple causation attributed to the Idea of the Good, which is off the line, “beyond
Being.” It is a hyper-principle that brings things into being, allows them to flourish, and makes them knowable (as its image,
the sun, causes birth, growth, and visibility). Sherman deals
with a scholarly claim (Annas’s) that the Good is too impersonal and offers no human fulfillment thus: As the source of
the world’s intelligibility it is surely good for human beings. I
would add that the Good was in Plato’s “Unwritten Doctrines”5
named the One; thus it is a principle of unification, hence responsible for all human community, be it the civic union of
politics or the private bond of friendship; that is why it is introduced in the Republic.
There follows a close reading of the Line as a ladder of dialectic
ascent, which cannot be thrown away—“a serious claim” (p. 134)
moving toward Sherman’s interpretation of the Ideas as tied to psychic activity. The problem of images comes ever more front and
center in a critique of one scholar’s (Patterson’s) analytic treatment
of the sort of things the original Forms (Ideas) must be if worldly
things are their images: The Form is what its name says it is, but
not as having the qualities its namesake images possess. This
makes more sense than you’d think (though like all analytic expla4. “Image-recognition,” which is the mode of ascent along the Divided
Line, is Jacob Klein’s rectifying translation of eikasia, often understood
as a mode of guessing, conjecturing (as by Sherman himself, p. 151). Thus
the ability to distinguish between original and copy becomes the basic and
pervasive ontological capacity. Images, the objects recognized by imagerecognition, the central problem of Plato’s Sophist, present a never-ending
enticement to ontological reflection, some of which is being carried on in
issues of this journal: Review of Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination
(1991) by Dennis Sepper, The St. John’s Review 42.1 (1993): 1-19; review
of Dennis Sepper, Understanding Imagination (2013) by Eva Brann in
this issue, 1-16; and now this review of Sherman’s book.
5. Plato’s oral speculations, reported first by Aristotle.
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nations it’s flatly clarifying rather than brightly illuminating): A
Horse-Form is what a horse in truth is, but it’s not for riding. Sherman must object. Whatever this analysis of being a form means, it
implies that forms, ideas, are quite separate in kind from their physical images; he is preparing to bring forward a way of understanding the (moderated) separateness of Ideas from Soul and World
that requires their (ultimate) interdependence. The rest of the chapter concerns the soul’s different cognitive relations to the rising reality of the objects represented by the upright Line.
Chapter 5. Education and the Mind’s Eye attends to
Socrates’s filling in the lack of education in the Cave with the
education for the philosophic rulers. Sherman dwells on the
significance of Socrates’s beginning the program of study with
arithmetic—not the technique of numerical calculation but the
science of the nature of numbers.6 This science, beginning with
the unit, the one that constitutes each of the unit-assemblages
called arithmos, has special powers of philosophical levitation.
The “one” that is the beginning of counting-up, of generating
numbers, is, one might say, the inverted image of the One that
is the principle of the unity of all that is, the Good: the least
constituent mirrors the whole constitution.
From the first study I pass directly—Sherman leaves no such
lacuna—to the final one, dialectic, which dwells on the Ideas:
“Dialectic, then, produces the image of discourse [my italics]
as the song of reason of which the relations of Ideas as a harmony of the whole is the ultimate objective content” (p. 198).
Sherman means this literally: the identity of Ideas is inseparable from the relations among them, and those relations are insubstantial, it would seem. By “insubstantial” I mean that
normally relations emanate from and terminate in beings,
6. He takes his departure from Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical
Thought and the Origin of Algebra (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992). Alumni
of the St. John’s Program will recognize all the elements of Socrates’s
program of learning, but will want to ponder the fact that we begin our
mathematical studies with Euclid’s geometry, with shapes and magnitudes
rather than with numbers and multitudes. I’d like to hear speculations
about, and opinions of, this pedagogic reversal.
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which is why humans have to be somebody to relate to somebody. It’s not that existence as a mere node of relations is unthinkable, but rather that it’s demeaning. However, since the
treatment of the objects of dialectic, the Ideas, is deliberately
inexplicit in the Republic, it is in any case insufficient for a
persuasive theory of ideal being, and that deficiency makes
room for Sherman’s speculation.
Chapters 6-8. The Phaedo’s Arguments for Immortality, The
Problem of Wrong Beginnings, From Logos to Idea—these
chapters bring in the Phaedo’s fuller account of the soul as capable of learning and its more direct treatment of the Ideas as
necessary hypotheses; “image” and “separation” (chorismos)
are the concepts to be further clarified (p. 211).
In Chapter 6, the issue is whether the separation of the soul
from the body that the Phaedo appears to propose, be it as a
means of moral purification or as a condition of immortality,
is to be taken literally or imagistically, whether it is logos or
mythos (p. 221, though as it turns out logoi are also “images”).
Sherman prepares for his denial of this separate existence of
the soul and that of the Forms, whose separation is implicated
in the immortality and thus in the separability of the soul, by
arguing that if the reading of the text is properly dramatic, separation will always appear as “mythical” (p. 256), that is to say,
figurative—and that the naive boys of the Phaedo are not up
to the image-recognition required by Socrates’s myths.
It is a little absurd to balk at a book’s bulk and then to ask
for more. But, by concentrating on the boys’ inept literalism,7
an image-ontology, though projected in Chapter 7, is displaced
by a critique of the interlocutor’s powers of image-recognition
and interpretation. Such an ontology would, I think, give an
account of two aspects of image-being: 1. whence comes the
difference in plenitude of being that distinguishes an original
from its image, that admixture of being and non-being which
7. I keep saying “boys.” Simmias and Cebes are neaniskoi (Phaedo 89a),
adolescents with incipient whiskers or youths with first beards. To me
they seem the age of freshman, boys and men in turn.
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makes an image a mere image to the detriment of its dignity
(as set out in Plato’s Sophist);8 and 2. what is that similarity,
that admixture of sameness and difference, that connects an
image to its original—a far more complex question. It is this
second inquiry that would seem to me pertinent to Sherman’s
central thesis, which will involve a right reading of imagistic
logoi or rational mythoi. Here is how the philosophical problem
of similitude presents itself to me: Can objects from realms that
are conjoined by no exhibitable “isomorphism,” no structural
identity, have an image-relation? How far can the ordinary
word “image” be stretched, salva significatione, with its meaning being saved?
But perhaps before ontology should come phenomenology, an
account of the way imagining works and images appear.9 Sherman
puts to use a long passage from Proust’s Remembrance of Things
Past (p. 236), a practice I like very much because good novelists
are master-phenomenologists—it’s their métier. Marcel is enamored of a black-eyed woman, but every time he re-envisions her
the memory presents her as blue-eyed—as he says, because she
was a blonde. Perhaps, he perversely concludes, if her eyes had
not been so strikingly, intensely black, he would not have been so
particulièrement amoureux with her as blue-eyed. Sherman understands Proust’s passage—due notice being given to its perversity—
to illuminate a kind of “recollection,” here of dredging up those
image-memories from the soul in which the image of an object
brings with it the image of a person, as in the Phaedo a lyre is associated with its owner, a beloved boy. His point is that this boyimage lacks observed detail; it is of a “total person,” and the details
8. Generally the original is distinguished by several primacies: in time,
dimensionality, functionality, reality. Not so in representative art: A
mound of two-dimensional, inedible, unreal apples, painted by Cezanne
from a prior arrangement, is generally regarded with more respect (and
certainly costs more) than a bag of Pink Ladies bought by anyone at the
supermarket. That’s the valuation Socrates wants, on ontological grounds,
to forestall in Republic X.
9. As Sherman comes near saying (p. 388). For if human discourse is
image-making, then its interpretation is image-recognition (p. 391).
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may well be mistaken. But—here’s the difficulty—Marcel is not
making a mistake. He knows, first and last, that the woman is
black-eyed. He is engaging in deliberate perversity: the imaginative potentiation by willful modulation of an observed reality that
is too opaquely positive for a languid sensibility. More simply put:
Marcel rearranges reality on the slight excuse of blondness to make
it his; so adjusted, it furnishes the object of his self-pleasingly
repetitive daydreams (je repensai); you might call it bed-ridden
love.10
I’ve picked on the Proust passage because Sherman infers from
it a solution to the problem of similarity I posed just above:
The picture does not look exactly like its original, but
then neither does the lyre look like the young boy, yet
we bridge this difficulty by our ability to respond to the
image as image. The sense of both “like” and “unlike”
is in fact multiple; it can be both in order of vivacity (picture vs. object) and visual resemblance (lyre-person).
And this is true of relations of the non-visible of “resemblance” and recollection (p. 237).
Sherman concludes that in the lyre-boy passage Plato is stressing
the possibility of such non-similar resemblance (I’ve intentionally
put it as a contradiction in terms), and that is what I want to question: When push comes to shove, how far up the ascent to Being
can image-recognition take you without obscuring the very nature
of the objects, the Ideas, which you want to attain?11
10. Proust’s way with love meets its refutation in a charming movie, It
Happened in Brooklyn, a 1947 film directed by Richard Whorf, starring
Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, and Jimmy Durante. The Sinatra character
takes his girl for granted, Lawford’s is really in love with her. Durante
(Brooklyn’s wise man) tests Sinatra: What’s the color of her eyes? He
dithers: perhaps blue? And so with other detail. Lawford knows on the
instant: brown. Q.E.D.: True love is hyper-observant; in fact that’s its
hallmark: acutely observational concentration.
11. Sherman has certainly considered, but apparently without consequence, the notion that for the highest thought, for noesis, the imagelogos might fail (p. 392, n. 1); but perhaps it is fairer to say that because
he gives so much “a wider interpretation” of images and image-making,
he considers the restriction overcome.
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In Chapter 8, From Logos to Idea, Sherman’s thesis is fully developed, once again with the aid of the Phaedo, where on his last
day Socrates himself says more about the Ideas than anywhere
else.12 Socrates recounts his taking refuge in the use of of logoi for
looking at the truth of beings, lest his soul be blinded by sensory
looking. To pursue this way Socrates has recourse to hypothesizing
(literally, “sup-posing”), a way of proceeding by hypotheses,
namely Ideas, such as the Beautiful Itself (Phaedo 100a ff.). Sherman observes helpfully that a Socratic hypothesis is not, as for us,
a theory to be verified by being tested against experience, but the
converse: experience derives such being and intelligibility as it has
through some sort of presence in it of the forms (pp. 294-5).
But to test (worldly) things against the (transcendental) idea
means—and here I am not certain I follow (that is, understand
rightly or, if I do, agree)—to test them against the “idea functioning
as a logos” (ibid.). Moreover, it now turns out that “the hypotheses
as the particular idea expressed as a dianoetic [discursive] logos is
the idea at work,” and that this logos-idea is in fact to be verified,
not to the detriment of the idea but to the logos which may have
applied it wrongly by misclassifying the things of which it meant
to give an account. This human action (praxis) is, then, “a verification of the idea as logos, that is to say, as a hypothesis which is
an image of its idea” (p. 299; I’ve italicized the last clause). But
Socrates has already said that his images are both deficient and not
logoi: “for I don’t at all concede that somebody who looks into beings in accounts [logoi] looks at them in likenesses [images] to a
greater extent than one who does so in actions” (Phaedo 100a)13—
namely, does not look at them at all.
12. Along with his first appearance, as a boy in the Parmenides, so that
they are shown to preoccupy him first and last as problems; the Socratic
Ideas are ever works-in-progress. In the Symposium and the Phaedrus the
vision of the Ideas is imaginatively consummated.
13. I’ve taken this rendering from Plato’s Phaedo, trans., with introduction
and glossary by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998). We thought that “in actions” means something
like “in sensory reality” (p. 14). My own sense, expressed elsewhere, is
that the Phaedo’s blatantly unpersuasive arguments for the immortality of
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The clearest formulation of Sherman’s thesis I found is this:
“The subjective form reflected in a logos must be seen as an image
of the objective Idea: the form is a rational image” (p. 217). The
soul’s ability to make and read “noetic images”14 is its very immortality, and the ideas it images are correspondingly eternal (p.
320). The logos-involved soul, that is, the form-informed soul and
the ideas share an ontology because they are interdependent;
“though something more than concepts, ideas do not have any real
independent existence outside this human dialectical triad of world,
soul and idea” (p. 387). And, as the logos-soul, the soul of the subjective form, is immortal and atemporal in the act of knowing in
which it accepts the eternal idea, so, reciprocally, the objective
ideas are timeless because they are congruent with the soul, not
because of some otherworldly stability (ibid.).
This account, if I have it correct, is certainly circular,15 which is no
argument against it. The most invulnerable philosophical accounts
are circular; they are ontological mirror images of the above-mentioned hermeneutic circle: Grounds “cause” consequences, consequences “confirm” grounds; inquiry requires pre-knowledge,
knowledge comes from inquiry. But in this perfect mutuality of
soul and idea, the outside third, the world (and the Idea of the Good
that makes the world intelligible) have somehow dropped out; how
are worldly things, which ideas were to serve both as causes
(sources of existence) and as reasons (sources of intelligibility),
actually involved in the triad?
the soul are each occasions for Socrates’s formulating the questions he is
leaving behind; he is handing on his forms as works-in-progress, as problems for future philosophy.
14. Sherman apparently identifies “rational” (dianoetic, discursive) and
“noetic” (intellective, directly beheld); they are, however, different segments
on the Divided Line.
15. While circularity—certainly no venial sin in secular argumentation—
is excusable in philosophical discourse, equivocation is, except in deliberate, inspired double-speak (such as Socrates’s “invisible looks,” the
Ideas) not so acceptable. I think some of my difficulties stem from subtle
meaning-shifts in key words such as image, separation, soul, rationality—
shifts away from common usage and also variations of use within the book.
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There is surely much at stake here for those of us who have the
sense that the explication of these matters might be, in all unhyperbolic sobriety, a matter of life and death. The reason is that, if we
believe that philosophical reflection (even if only occasional) makes
life more—and death less—real, this is an ever-present question:
Are there supersensible realms for us but also beyond us, attainable
but not just yet? And Sherman is surely speaking to just that question, but perhaps not altogether clearly.
Chapter 9. Closing the Circle. Now Sherman “closes the circle”
by returning to the Republic, to its last book. On the basis of his
theory of thinking as primarily image-recognition, he defends
Socrates’s condemnation of the imitative arts as practiced primarily
by painters and also poets against various scholarly critiques:
Socrates is not simply against the fine arts and their ways with reality, but he, in fact, has knowledge of a more veracious imagemaking and a more truth-telling myth-making (p. 349). So
Sherman ends by recurring to the inadequacy of the conversation
partners here, especially the vein of reward-seeking he discerns in
Glaucon (which is, in accord with the pervasive human theme of
the Republic, the happiness to be gotten from practicing justice
even incognito). Finally he resumes his own hermeneutic preoccupation by interpreting in his own mode the final myth, the myth
of Er, who returned from the Afterworld: It requires us “to see
through our images to the invisible in this life” (p. 379).16
Although it is not Sherman’s modus scribendi to collect his theses in one place succinctly and crisply as he goes, the Conclusion
does contain some summations, and therefore I may properly park
my three main queries under its title, ready to withdraw them if
I’ve misread the text.
16. That sounds just like our understanding in the Phaedo translation: the
Socratic invitation to practice death in this life (61c ff.) intends us to rise
in thought to the invisible realm here and now (and, of course, now and
then). But we did not mean that the realm of invisibility is somehow subjective, that is, only equivocally objective, psychically objective, so to
speak, or, on the other hand, that human beings come within actual sight
of it—except perhaps Socrates in the several episodes mentioned in the
dialogues, when he seems to be enraptured (e.g., Symposium 175b, 220c).
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1. This three-pronged question eventually arises in reading Platonic texts: Do the thirty-six dialogues form a somewhat organic
corpus, are the dialogues parts of a whole, or is each dialogue its
own dialectic universe, a conversational world of its own? In reading dialogues, we should, I have no doubt, begin with the latter
supposition. But for a global interpretation it seems necessary to
take notice of the ensemble. Sherman leaves the erotic dialogues,
the Symposium and the Phaedrus, out of account, and in these (as
well as in Plato’s Seventh Letter) the ascent to the Ideas is a work
of love, the virtues are practiced to disencumber the soul from the
world, the logos ceases as the soul comes within sight of the Ideas,
and the sojourn with them has an ecstatic element. In fact, in the
Symposium it is said explicitly of the paradigm form, Beauty, that
it is “neither some logos nor some knowledge” (211a).17 So I think
that Sherman’s sort of implication, his dialogical immanence, has
to be balanced, reconciled—whatever—with the other-world separateness of the Ideas as desirable and distinct objects. And, to be
sure, that is practically impossible within the constraints of “careful” dissection, scholarly respectability, and the effort to keep Plato
plausible to contemporaries. For it requires a certain—rightly suspect—suspension of scrupulosity.18
2. I have misgivings about a Socratic (though not so much about
a Platonic) ontology of the soul. To be sure, Socrates is a master
of psychology, of the soul’s phenomenology. But it seems to me
that in the Socratic dialogues, and so in Plato’s view of Socrates,
the human soul hovers outside and around the structure of beings
and Being. As Sherman flips the Socratic sequence of Divided Line
and Cave, to give preeminence to the human context, so he seems
to me to have flipped the Divided Line laterally, so to speak. Reading left to right, the four line segments representing objects of
17. However, the logos—not as thinking but as uttered language—is
imaged, “as in a mirror,” namely, in sounds (Theaetetus 206d).
18. It is a fair question what role the very desire for a beautiful Beyond
plays in making it plausible. One side might well say that such longing
vitiates sober inquiry. The other may counter that, on the contrary, the
desire is itself a testimonial to transcendence, since it is fed by veracious
intimations.
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knowledge come first, on the left side, together with their inherent
kind of knowability. The four corresponding human capacities, including image-recognition, are appended in one sentence (Republic
513d) to the right—an afterthought, as it were. But Sherman gives
them priority. Perhaps the thoughtful soul’s standing among beings
remained a rousing enough problem in the Platonic Academy for
Aristotle to center his own philosophy around its solution, achieved
by setting up the unmovable moving divinity of his cosmos as Nous,
“Thought” or “Intellect,” whose activity is noesis, “intellection,”
the highest power for Socrates. Thus Aristotle made possible an integration of soul and being—and a soul-ontology. For now beings
do not one-sidedly inform the soul, but intellect reciprocally moves
the world into its own being, its fulfillment.
But if it is the case that the soul for Socrates is not within but
about being, then it may be difficult to make it the part-parent of
the Ideas. And even if the soul is a being among beings, I don’t
grasp just how the Ideas can be in their relation to it dependent and
also in themselves independent, in short, how they can be both subjective and objective. I am all for paradoxes; I think our world is
such that they are its most adequate type of speech—provided the
inner nature of the beings that elicit them is first clearly worked
out, so that paradoxical speech is summary speech, language that
collects necessarily disparate insights. That is why I here conclude
with queries rather than with counter-claims—because I’m not sure
how the “both/and” is justified, what mental incongruities I must—
and would willingly—entertain to get the good of the duality.
3. Now comes the more technical crux of these inquiries. Just
how is logos imagistic? Out of the welter of uses for the word
logos, let me choose the two most prominent ones: word (or noun)
and rational discourse (or thoughtful speech). One word names,
intends (how is unknown) numerous instances, distinct in time,
place, or shape (morphe) and yet the same in some respect (or we
would not have a natural inclination to use this logos collectively);
that something “same” in all of them is what a logos picks out and
names; it is Socrates’s form (idea). A word conveys (how is unknown) the idea without being in any normal sense a likeness: I
think it is impossible to detect any image-function in this naming-
�REVIEW | BRANN
107
logos without stretching the meaning out of all recognition. I shall
say why.
“Rational discourse” consists largely of propositions conveying
meaning. Some of these sentences are descriptive and raise mental
images (how is unknown), and such logoi are indeed image-making
(Plato, Sophist 234c). Others, however, are not descriptive but dialectic or “dianoetic;” they “think through” the thought-structure
of appearances and beings, and such logoi are only forcibly imagistic. To be sure, in the lower reaches, some logical arguments can
indeed sometimes be represented in spatial diagrams19 (how is unknown), because the logic-diagrams image not the proposition but
a mental image, a quasi-spatial corralling of class-members: Visualize “All bulls are bovines” as a herd of cattle, enclosed in a
barbed-wire fence, which includes a round pen just for the uncastrated males; then erase the cattle and retain the spatial schematism.
So, if, going from the second to the third part of the Divided
Line, I recognize by the power of dianoetic (thoughtful) imagerecognition that a geometric sphere is the true, more being-replete
original of a soccer ball (quite a feat, since to ordinary thoughtless
image-recognition the ball is surely more real), it is not because
the logos is an image but because it isn’t; it’s about images; it comprehends them. In other words, insights of image-recognition (eikasia) seem to be expressible in logoi, but they aren’t images.20 I have
a suspicion why that is: The logos has a negative capability: not or
non-, while images have no inherent negativity. They have the
same thoroughgoing positivity as the spatial world. It takes words
to dub any aspect or space, even emptiness, as a not-this or an absence. As I said, with Sherman I like to see the novelists bear me
out: The fatal Marabar Cave, in Forster’s Passage to India (Ch.
XIV), is the venue of negation in words, but in experience it is a
resounding “boum”—for negation has no sensory image as such,
and so propositions that are negated can’t be wordlessly imaged.
19. Such as Euler diagrams.
20. Sherman actually speaks mostly of image-making rather than imagerecognition. But I think the logos penetrates rather than produces images.
The difficulty may be located just here: What, in Sherman’s view, is the
work, what are the processes proper to logos?
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In sum, I’m not sure whether language intends, symbolizes, or represents,21 but it doesn’t seem to be at all isomorphic with sensible
objects so as to image them. And when it comes to speech about
the Forms, verbal, expressible thinking seems to fail, as Sherman’s
helpful report of scholars’ battles, for example, with self-predication22 amply shows.
****
These queries have been about Sherman’s unquestionably
thought-arousing interpretation of the Republic and the
Phaedo, or rather, about its philosophical consequences; indeed
they are the very proof of its interest. But Sherman also has,
besides the intention of doing the texts justice by reading them
as conversations among differently inclined and diversely responsive human beings, a motive, a hoped-for effect, which his
interpretation is to serve: to let us, with Socrates, “see ourselves as essentially engaging collectively in a discourse that
brings us together rather than drives us apart” (p. 392). And
that aim is beyond querying; what is an open question, one on
whose terms Sherman’s opus focuses the mind, is this: Do we
come closer to the way things are by recourse to the workinghypothesis of Ideas, unattainable in this life but informing the
soul from beyond with expectant desire and responsive logoi?
Or do we do better by means of Sherman’s thesis of a human
rationality so inseparably involved with the Ideas that they are
“not manifest” outside this union, within which they are interpretable “as essentially atemporal experience wholly in this
21. I half suspect that Sherman would answer my difficulty by saying that
he has enlarged the meaning of “image” so as to mean representation, a
way of re-presenting something, of recalling, of standing-for a thing, that
requires no similarity. I think it would still be necessary to show how
logos “represents.” The proper naming of logos’s relation to the things it
is about is, I think, the perplexity of language.
22. For example is the Idea of Justice itself just? The problem is a version
of the question raised in a note above: Is “similarity” reciprocal between
an idea and its copy? I should say that to me philosophy becomes wonderful just when “rational speech” (actually a redundancy: logikos logos)
fails, becomes para-doxical, “counter-credible.”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES |
109
life” (p. 386)—as our experience, it seems, not as unequivocally separate Beings?
Has Daniel Sherman saved the Ideas and if so, are they
Socrates’s Ideas? I leave that question open. But he has surely
done his part to see that the “myth was saved” (Republic, 621b)
and is now before us to consider—just as Er did by not drinking of the River of Forgetting.
�
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Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
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Sachs, Joe
Fried, Michael N.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 54, Number 2 (Spring 2013)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
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Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
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ISSN 0277-4720
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Unbecoming Conduct in the Reign of Tiberius ....................1
According to Tacitus
David Appleby
Dionysus: The Therapeutic Mask .......................................35
Richard B. Carter
Fields, Particles, and Being .................................................57
Dylan Casey
Miracles and Belief .............................................................89
Joseph Cohen
The Question of Questions ...............................................115
Michael W. Grenke
Review
The Rehabilitation of Spiritedness ....................................135
Book Review of Gary Borjesson’s Willing Dogs
and Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs.
Eva Brann
��1
ESSAYS & LECTURES
Unbecoming Conduct in the
Reign of Tiberius According to
Tacitus
David Appleby
Besides, there is a great difference between doing what one does not approve of
and feigning approval of what one does:
the one is the part of a weak man, but the
other belongs only to the habits of a valet.
—De Tocqueville1
1. INTRODUCTION
One of the few positive characteristics Tacitus attributed to
Tiberius was an interest in public moderation: the proper, the
decorous, and the fitting. A memorable example occurs in 22
AD, a year of peace abroad but anxiety in Rome about possible measures to curb rampant luxury. Aware of the princeps’
old fashioned frugality, and in view of widespread neglect of
the existing sumptuary law, the senate simply referred the
matter to Tiberius. He had often remarked in private that attempting to limit these excessive appetites might not be worth
the indecency (indecorum) of trying and failing, or succeeding through coercive measures and bringing great men into
dishonor and ill-repute (ignominiam et infamiam). He answered the senate in a letter decrying shameful luxury: vast
houses and domestic retinues, rich furnishings and ornament,
foppish attire for men, exotic gems for women, over-the-top
banquets. All were symptoms of an illness of the soul, one
that harms the state even as it ruins great families. “May decency (pudor) change us for the better—the poor because they
must; the wealthy because they have had enough.”2
The Annales make it clear that self-interest, ambition, and
David Appleby is a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula,
California.
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vice led Tiberius to present himself as an enemy of unbecoming conduct. By contrast, Tacitus’s own concern for decorum
was deep and sincere. The obligation to speak and behave
with dignity and seemliness, with the attendant imperative to
avoid unbecoming conduct, was a principle of his moral and
social world-view. I shall argue that one of his greatest objections to the new regime under the Caesars was that it created a climate in which members of the senatorial order,
Roman society’s natural leaders, were induced to behave in
disreputable ways. When the public arena in Rome became
a sort of theater in which great men routinely presented themselves in ways that were false, unworthy, and ridiculous, not
only individuals and their families were disgraced, but the
whole class was placed in an unflattering light. In Tacitus’s
judgment, this was one of the most unforgiveable effects of
the tyranny.
Why did Tacitus take such an interest in seemliness? Two
main reasons present themselves, the first more obvious than
the second. In the first place, Tacitus was keenly aware of
style and its effect upon readers. As we shall see, an important
aspect of decorous speech and behavior was paying attention
to how others perceive one’s words, gestures, and facial expression. Educated Romans knew that identifying what is
seemly involves anticipating how one’s interlocutors will perceive one’s words and appearance. As annalist, historian, biographer and ethnographer, Tacitus represented reality in a
highly personal and even idiosyncratic manner. But his words
seem always to have been chosen for their likely impact upon
readers. He created the effects that he sought through vivid
description, asymmetrical construction, oblique narration,
and epigrammatic brevity, disposing readers not only to behold the spectacle in a certain light, but to judge along with
the author. Anticipated impact upon his reader seems to dictate word choice, sentence structure, and narrative strategy.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | APPLEBY
3
What he described—wars and mutinies, plots and murders,
above all the gloomy sense of impending dread under the
Julio-Claudians—is memorable in large part because of the
way he described it.3
His arresting style tends to obscure the second reason for
his interest in seemliness, namely his practical experience as
magistrate and orator. The son of a senatorial family in southern Gaul or northern Italy, Tacitus belonged to a privileged
social order whose members felt entitled to honor their ancestors by exercising authority and generally playing the
leading roles in affairs of state. Along with this came an obligation to present oneself in word, gesture, and deed in conformity with one’s social standing. With this innate sense of
duty and appropriateness, he began an official career under
Vespasian (r. 69-79), continued it during the difficult reign of
Domitian (r. 81-96), and in 97 became consul under Nerva
(r. 96-98). Under Trajan (r. 98-117), Tacitus delivered an important funeral oration, joined his friend Pliny the younger
in a high profile prosecution, and served as proconsular governor of Asia. He was known as an impressive speaker, and
around the year 100 he published a treatise on style and various sorts of oratory. In short, as man of action no less than
as man of letters, Tacitus was attuned to appearance and how
one is perceived.
2 DECORUM
Before investigating seemliness in the Annales, it is worth
considering the idea in the tradition within which Tacitus
worked and in the pages of one of his distinguished Roman
predecessors. The noun decorum refers in the first place to
the beauty or pleasing appearance of a thing or person; it applies secondarily to non-visual beauty, elegance, charm, and
distinction; and then it opens onto other things that are appropriate, seemly, and fitting in ways that attract honor and
approval. Like to prepon, its Greek counterpart, decorum is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
hard to render consistently with one word in English because
of its range of aesthetic, histrionic, forensic, and moral meanings. In the rhetorical tradition to prepon had been a principle
since Aristotle and Theophrastus, and by the time of Quintilian (d. ca.100) decorum applied to invention, style, arrangement, and delivery. Quintilian owed an immediate debt to
Cicero (106-43 BC) whose remark in De oratore that “by action the body talks, so it is all the more necessary to make it
agree with the thought”4 bears some relation to the subject at
hand.
Cicero’s expansive account of decorum as a moral concept in Book I of his De officiis helps us to approach the intellectual milieu of the Annales; for Tacitus, while not himself
a Ciceronian, still wrote for, and belonged to, a class that understood itself as embodying the urbanity and standards of
conduct that Cicero assumed as normative.5 The discussion
of what is honorable that occurs in Book I of De officiis includes a consideration of the four cardinal virtues as the
source of all moral goodness, and hence the source of all that
is honorable.6 Decorum and the duties it entails spring from
the broader virtue of moderation.7
Decorum consists in thinking, saying, and doing what one
should, and in appearing to be as morally well ordered as one
is. Since the decorous is neither deficient nor excessive, it reflects moderation, and this is understood not only with respect to particular objects or actions, but as the overall
balance, order, and harmony of the soul, and as the beauty of
the life of one who enjoys such moral equilibrium. Cicero
presents decorum as the outward manifestation of the soul’s
integrity, the moral analogue of physical beauty.8 Decorum
is thus the perceptible aspect of moral goodness; every act of
moral rectitude, whether in thought, word, or deed, reveals
some element of propriety. Just as the beauty of the body reflects bodily health, decorum reflects moral virtue.9
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | APPLEBY
5
Cicero also emphasizes the social aspect of decorum: the
good person’s speech, actions, and appearance make his
moral virtue discernible to others; and the good person has
modesty (verecundia)—that is, he shows consideration for
the sensibilities of others. Much of the discussion of decorum
in De officiis aims at instilling in the reader a greater awareness of the impression he makes upon others. Cicero explains
that playwrights have just this aspect of decorum in mind
when they craft words and actions to express the qualities of
a particular role (persona).10 The audience knows the characters in the play only by what it can infer from their words,
expressions, gestures, and deeds. As a sort of playwright outside the theater, nature assigns us the parts (personae) of consistency, moderation, and self-control, but also teaches us to
have respect for others and to attend to how we appear to
them. Once again comparing decorum to physical beauty,
Cicero says that just as the order and symmetry of the limbs
of a body attract the eye and please the viewer, decorum,
which illuminates the whole life, is an order, consistency, and
moderation of every word and deed that attracts the approval
of the people among whom we live.11
According to Cicero, the duties associated with propriety
are rooted in nature. This means, in the first instance, submitting the appetites to the control of reason, especially in
one’s pastimes, joking, and pleasures. One thereby avoids the
vulgarity and sensuality of an uncontrolled, irrational, or bestial life, and instead lives with the self-control and steadiness
appropriate to man’s rational nature.12 These are fundamental
matters of decency, but are not the only duties associated with
propriety.
Specifying these other duties is hard, not only because
propriety is assessed with respect to circumstance, occasion,
and context, but because it is also inextricably linked to one’s
personality and character. Cicero explains that nature clothes
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
each of us in two roles (personae), one common and universal, the other individual and proper to each. Our common
human role provides us with our dignity as rational beings,
our moral goodness, and thus our decorum; we must use our
rationality to control our appetites and observe at least minimal standards of decency and consideration.13
The particular role that nature has assigned each one of
us accounts for the other duties associated with propriety.
Just as one person differs from another in bodily size and
physical constitution, so too we find diversity of manner,
temperament, and aptitude. While harmless in themselves,
these differences have to be taken into account when determining what is fitting and proper for each person. Cicero explains that, within the limits set by universal human nature,
the gentleman will attend carefully to his own particular nature in order to determine what is proper and seemly: “nos
studia nostra nostrae naturae regula metiamur.”14
On the other hand, just as nothing is so becoming as to
find the way of life suited to one’s own nature and then to
follow it in a steadfast and consistent way, the inconsistency
of a moral lightweight is highly indecorous.15
Decorum of the sort Cicero described stayed on the minds
of educated Romans during the principate. Lucius Annaeus
Seneca (d. 65), for example, pictured the happy life of the
self-consistent man in terms reminiscent of Cicero’s account.16 Again, the correspondence of the younger Pliny
shows that in its general outline Cicero’s view of decorum
was still influential during the lifetime of Tacitus. Although
these letters adhere to a different formality than that of the
philosophical manual or discourse that Cicero and Seneca
had written, the elements of upper-class seemliness nevertheless appear frequently.17
3 PRINCEPS AS TONE-SETTER
Like Cicero, Tacitus was aware of decorum and its social di-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | APPLEBY
7
mension, and like him Tacitus accepted it as a principle of
civilized conduct. But as moralist and political philosopher,
Cicero concerned himself with action as it should be, with
theory more than practice. As historian, Tacitus reported how
people actually behaved, which in many cases fell far short
of the norms and ideals of the theorist. Perhaps there had once
been a time when prominent citizens had conformed to standards of decency and comportment rooted in nature and discovered by reason. What Tacitus saw in his own generation,
and what he could learn of the reign of Tiberius, however,
was that the princeps himself more and more became the
axial pole of decorum; that is, the place that Cicero had attributed to nature and reason in determining the criteria of
decorous behavior, Tacitus found, in practice, had been taken
over by the princeps himself. This is not to say that Tacitus
knew nothing of nature as norm, or of reason as the guide to
understanding nature. Indeed, as we shall see, the men he
praised had moral strength and good character consistent
with, if not explicitly related to, natural law. But for many
prominent Romans the preponderance of the first citizen
eclipsed any view of a natural standard. For them it seemed
more expedient to conform themselves to his perspective and
his way of doing things than to an abstract ideal of natural
virtue. The reason they used to determine their behavior was
the prudence involved in first trying to discern the expectations of the princeps and then attuning themselves accordingly.
The princeps came to set the standard of decorous behavior because of the character of the regime. Force and political
inequality lay at the root of the principate, but its day-to-day
aspect was the tone set by the princeps himself. Augustus
himself had established the pattern of effective autocracy tacitly juxtaposed with republican institutions and the semblance
of liberty for the senatorial elite. He took the lead in matters
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
of public behavior, holding or declining certain magistracies
and official posts, nominating friends as candidates for others. Sometimes setting the tone meant giving direct advice
and instructions, but more often it involved modeling this or
that behavior, enacting or showing how things were to be
done. The poetry of Virgil and the histories of Livy reflect
the classicizing and patriotic outlook of Augustus and his circle. So do buildings and statues like the Ara Pacis and the
Augustus of Prima Porta.18 Even Augustus’s epitaph, which
he composed for himself, has a calm tone, evokes a sense of
its author’s modesty, and presents an image of strength in
service of the common good.19
Noble Romans accommodated themselves as best they
could to the example or standard of the first man. As Tacitus
puts it, “with political equality gone, everyone looked to the
commands of the princeps.”20 They did this for various reasons. Tacitus is aware that people often unconsciously emulate their superiors, and sometimes this urge to get into line
(amor aemulandi) is more effective than the threat of punishment in promoting conformity of mores and behavior.21
Other people realized that the new social and political order
presented opportunities for advancement or enrichment to
those who could adapt properly. But apprehension and outright fear were more important incentives to conformity. Augustus had dealt harshly with his opponents in the civil war
and afterwards, and from the outset it was evident that
Tiberius was not a man to cross if one could avoid it.
But how was one to avoid crossing him? Conformity was
bound to be difficult insofar as the standard to which people
sought to conform kept shifting. A mutable standard of propriety was to some extent endemic to the new regime. Always
in the principate there was disparity between appearance and
reality, between the appearance of liberty of a republic restored by the first citizen and the fact of one man’s hege-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | APPLEBY
9
mony.22 The norm of behavior always tended to oscillate between the image of liberty and the reality of domination, because such oscillation reflected the nature of the regime itself.
A princeps whose public character was affable, fair, and
steady might minimize this oscillation and thereby make it
easier for others to attune themselves. He would moderate
his own speech and behavior in ways the leading men could
decipher and respond to with as much dignity as the circumstances of the autocracy would allow. But a weaker princeps
might not.
Whether Tacitus judged Augustus to be a better ruler, less
tyrannous than Tiberius, is not clear. There are signs that he
viewed the regime’s founder with irony and skepticism.23 But
at least Augustus had presented a consistent figure and a
steady face. This made it possible to live with the new order
and its master. According to Tacitus, life was more difficult
under Tiberius because of the dissonance between his public
mask and his real thoughts and intentions.
Tacitus’s censure and disapproval of Tiberius are open,
though at first somewhat muted, for he mentions that the
tyranny emerged in stages, as the man’s character gradually
showed itself. Before the death of Tiberius’s son Drusus in
23, business had been conducted in the senate, where there
was still some free discussion. The princeps himself had discouraged flattery, and tried to make sure that offices and magistracies went only to those whose birth, merit, and distinction
made them worthy. Taxes and provincial administration were
handled equitably. After 23, with Drusus out of the way, Sejanus, Tiberius’s sinister lieutenant, gained greater influence,
with the consequence that moderate policies were dropped,
and Tiberius eventually withdrew from the city.24 Another
turning point came in 29 at the death of the Augusta,
Tiberius’s mother. Livia, who had been a match for her
smooth and voluble second husband, Augustus, was also
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
equal to the secretiveness and dissimulation of her son. She
had exercised a moderating influence upon Tiberius and Sejanus, but once she was dead, they openly took action against
those they perceived to be enemies of the government.25
The depth of Tiberius’s corruption may have become
more apparent over the years, but all along he had been hard
to deal with because he was cryptic and obscure, cruel and
vindictive. Even before he assumed overall power, he was
secretive and prone to dissemble. When Augustus grew old
and ill, speculation as to his successor quickly brought
Tiberius into consideration. He had the maturity and the military experience necessary to rule but suffered from the congenital arrogance of the Claudian family, and “many signs of
a cruel character broke out, try though he might to control
them.” His time spent on Rhodes, which was called retirement but was in fact exile, had been filled with anger, deceit,
and hidden passions.26
The first notable deed of Tiberius’s principate was one of
violence and deception. He ordered the murder of Postumus
Agrippa, grandson of Augustus and possible rival for
supreme power, and then pretended his father had commanded it.27
In his treatment of the senate and the magistrates Tiberius
was also hard to read. Immediately after the death of Augustus, he acted “as though the republic still existed and as
though he was doubtful about taking up command: even the
edict by which he summoned the senators to assemble was
issued in virtue of the tribunician power that he had accepted
from Augustus. The words of the edict were few and very
modest.”28 But in sharp contrast to the edict and his apparent
concern for republicanism were his actions. He had armed
guards at the court, soldiers in the forum, soldiers in the senate house; he sent letters to the army as a veteran leader
would, and never showed hesitation except when he spoke
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | APPLEBY
11
in the senate.29 Tacitus reports that the main cause of
Tiberius’s fear was the thought that his nephew, Germanicus,
who commanded a large army and was extremely popular at
home, might prefer to have rule instead of just waiting for it.
Also, Tiberius wanted to make it seem that he had been called
and chosen by the state rather than forced on it through his
mother’s ambition in getting Augustus to adopt him. Tacitus
adds that it later became known that Tiberius pretended to
hesitate in order to ferret out the intentions of the senators,
carefully remembering what he took to be their expressions
of hostility so that he could eventually exact revenge.30
At times it seemed that Tiberius was reserved and cryptic
because he suspected treachery. Certainly he had enemies,
some open, others camouflaged. Germanicus, Agrippina, and
their supporters he considered rivals, and mistrusted.31 Augustus was said to have given Tiberius a list of men to
watch.32 In public or private, he was capable of receiving insult with apparent equanimity, but he did not forget a slight,
storing up his anger even over a period of years.33 Sejanus
knew Tiberius’s suspicious and credulous (suspicionum et
credendi temeritas) character, and after the princeps’ withdrawal to the island of Caprae in 28 he supplied information
carefully selected to arouse and channel it.34 People even
wondered about the quality of the relationship between
Tiberius and his mother, which looked amicable on the surface but which included unmistakable indications of bitterness.35
Misdirection was a tactic for Tiberius, as, for instance, in
16 when he showed favor and friendship to Marcus Scribonius Libo Drusus, who had been denounced privately for treasonous plotting. In private conversation with Libo, “Tiberius
could have halted all his words and deeds, but he preferred
to know them.”36 But in the sequel the utility of concealment
was less apparent. Once Libo came to trial before the Senate,
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he directed supplications to Tiberius who listened with a
blank expression, and Tiberius read out the charges and
names of the accusers in a moderate tone of voice that
seemed neither to minimize nor exaggerate the charges.37
At other times, shame caused Tiberius to avoid the public
gaze. Tacitus reports that Tiberius’s son Drusus led a life of
frivolity—theater and arena by day, banquets by night—pursuing the pleasures often sought by young men. His father,
by contrast, kept to himself and led a joyless life of dark
watchfulness and malevolent undertakings.38 Tacitus suspects
that Tiberius withdrew permanently from Rome in 26 not
only because of the influence of Sejanus and an aversion to
his mother, but to lead his vicious and licentious life in secret.39
Quite aside from their utility, however, opacity and concealment seemed to suit Tiberius. He prized dissimulation as
his own greatest virtue, clinging to it all his life.40 He projected his personal preference for secrecy onto the divine
when in 15 he rejected a proposal to open the Sibylline books
to seek guidance in responding to recent destructive flooding
of the Tiber.41 He habitually mingled jest and earnestness,42
and routinely spoke in euphemisms.43 Only shock or crisis
provoked outbursts of frankness, and these could be dangerous, as when anger toward personal enemies caused lapses
in his prudent moderation.44 Even when advanced age and
illness brought him close to death, Tiberius pretended (simulans) to be healthy, and Tacitus remarks that dissimulation
(dissimulatio) was the last power to leave him.45
Although the speeches of Tiberius often carried a double
meaning,46 sometimes they were simply inscrutable. After the
funeral of Augustus, his address to the senate was so uncertain and ambiguous that his intended meaning was impossible
to understand.47 Again, in 20, at the trial for treason, magic,
and adultery of Lepida from the illustrious gens Aemilia,
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Tiberius “mixed signs of anger and clemency,” and intervened in the proceedings in ways that some considered nonautocratic, but others saw as prejudicial to the defendant.
Lepida was condemned and exiled.48
Doubt often enshrouded the real thoughts and feelings of
Tiberius, but it must have been apparent to all that he was
watching. The more they looked to him for clues of his expectations, the more they were aware of being under scrutiny.
He and his friends and informers attended to their words and
actions, their gestures and appearances.
He watched the senators carefully, twisting their words
and facial expressions into criminal significance, and storing
them away in his memory, as was mentioned earlier.49 Even
at a distance Tiberius was informed not only about the actions
of important men, but about their appearance and comportment. While Germanicus toured Egypt, word reached
Tiberius of the manner of his dress and behavior, that it was
disagreeably informal and Hellenic, comparable to that of
Scipio Africanus while he was in Sicily.50 Thus, finding themselves under scrutiny, those around him sought to make sense
of Tiberius’s thoughts and desires so as to conform themselves to his expectations.
4. VARIETIES OF CONFORMITY
People who came into contact with Tiberius behaved in ways
that reflected not only the opacity of the princeps but also
their own fear, ambition, corruption, and sometimes even
moral strength. That is, in most—but not all—cases their
words and comportment mirrored not a Ciceronian standard
of nature and reason but their more or less accurate reading
of how best to save themselves, or how best to profit in the
prevailing climate. Here I shall survey the main varieties of
conformity as Tacitus presents them.
Those who were most like Tiberius accommodated themselves best to him. Men like the astrologer Thrasyllus51 un-
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derstood him, and so were able to conform their behavior to
his expectations. It is no accident that the two people Tacitus
presents as most successfully attuning themselves to him
were the villainous Lucius Aelius Sejanus and Gaius Julius
Caesar Germanicus. Sejanus was an equestrian whom
Tiberius appointed commander of the Praetorian Guard and
then came to depend upon to carry out his policies in the Senate, especially after retiring to the island of Capreae. To Sejanus alone Tiberius disclosed his secret designs in an
unguarded way. Decent outwardly, inwardly Sejanus was
consumed with lust for power.52 He hounded the adherents
of Agrippina in a series of treason trials, but his hope to marry
into the imperial family came to nothing, and he was eventually purged for aiming at the principate itself. Ominously, it
was Gaius, or Caligula as he was called, the grandson and
terrible successor of Tiberius, who came to mirror the mood
and even the words of Tiberius more closely than any other
person Tacitus mentions.53 His reign began with the murder
of Tiberius.
Those who were not like Tiberius, or less like him, found
life challenging. Most conformed in more or less indecorous
and shameful ways. Some went beyond disgrace to the active
commission of crimes. Some refused to conform and usually
perished before their time. A few managed to serve and lead
public careers worthy of their ancestors almost as though the
free republic still existed. All experienced a public discourse
that was “narrow and slippery under a princeps who feared
liberty but hated flattery.”54
From the outset many dishonored themselves by composing their appearance and words in false, and therefore indecorous, ways. When the news arrived in Rome that Augustus
was dead and Tiberius in charge, “consuls, senators, and
knights rushed headlong into servitude; the more noble were
also more false and hasty, with expression carefully arranged
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to appear neither happy at the death of the princeps nor sad
at the accession, they mingled tears and joy, lament and flattery.”55
People tried to read the meaning behind Tiberius’s words,
and then to articulate responses that mirrored well enough—
but not too clearly—what the listener thought Tiberius was
getting at. The results were always dishonorable, sometimes
absurd, and occasionally dangerous.
In 14, after the funeral of Augustus, Tiberius ostentatiously refused the leading role. The senators, who were
afraid to show that they saw he wanted to be asked and to be
persuaded to accept power, poured out tearful prayers to him,
reaching toward the gods, the statue of Augustus, Tiberius’s
knees. Declining to bear the whole burden of government,
Tiberius expressed a willingness to accept whatever part was
entrusted to him. Gaius Asinius Gallus then made the mistake
of asking what part of the government Tiberius wished to be
given. Tiberius registered his annoyance with a dark look and
protracted silence, but then reiterated his preference to be excused altogether, and said he refused to pick and choose. Gallus tried to smooth over his blunder, saying that he had only
tried to get Tiberius to acknowledge that rule could not really
be divided at all. This and further flattery failed to allay
Tiberius’s irritation with Gallus, who was also the object of
hostility for having married Tiberius’s ex-wife, Vipsania.56
Flattery took the form of undeserved civil or military honors.57 An ironic example occurred in 29 when, seeking a remedy in flattery (remedium adulationis) for the fear generated
by the wave of treason trials, the senators voted to erect altars
to Mercy and Friendship, the latter flanked by statues of
Tiberius and Sejanus.58
Flattery often shaped elections, as in the year 21, when
Tiberius recommended two men to the senate for consideration as governor of Africa, one a distinguished noble, the
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other the uncle of Sejanus. It was assumed that the latter was
the approved candidate. While both men begged to be excused, Sejanus’s uncle was less convincing, and a chorus of
flatterers urged him to accept.59
Flattery also led men beyond disgrace into active wrongdoing. In the year 22, the new consul, Decimus Haterius
Agrippa, proposed death as the fitting punishment for the
equestrian author of scurrilous verses about Tiberius’s son,
Drusus. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus countered by proposing a
lesser sentence better proportioned to the offense. All but one
of the senators, Gaius Rubellius Blandus, supported Haterius,
and the equestrian was immediately put to death. Tiberius rebuked the senate, but with enough ambiguity not to preclude
similar punishments in future. Lepidus and Blandus had been
unable to prevent shameful adulation from becoming outright
injustice.60
Although at first it seemed a means of attaining safety,
flattery quickly became equivocal, for in an environment of
corrupt mores, express servility could be dangerous by its
presence as well as its absence.61 This fact may have intensified the search for new strategies to protect the frightened,
and new strategies of advancement for the ambitious.
Servitude rapidly assumed the colors of liberty. In the
year 14, when Marcus Valerius Messalla Messallinus proposed in the senate that the oath of allegiance to the new princeps be repeated annually, Tiberius asked him to
acknowledge that he had not put him up to that proposal.
Messalla said that when it came to public business, he would
express his own thoughts, no matter who took offense. The
historian’s terse judgment is that this was the only sort of flattery left.62
Again, in 22, Lucius Ennius, an equestrian, found himself
before the senate charged with treason for melting down a
silver statue of the princeps. In response to Tiberius’s inter-
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cession on behalf of the accused, Gaius Ateius Capito made
a show of independence, urging that the senate’s power of
judgment ought not be diminished, and pointing out that the
offense had serious public implications, even if Tiberius was
willing to overlook the injury to himself personally. Tacitus
remarks that Capito’s behavior was all the more infamous because, as a civil and religious jurist of note, he dishonored
these arts as well as himself.63
Shameful displays of independence became competitive.
In 16, the senators Gaius Asinius Gallus and Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso disagreed over whether the senate should conduct
business during the absence of Tiberius. Piso claimed the
“speciem libertatis” by asserting that it would be worthy of
the republic that senators and equestrians could continue their
official work even in the absence of the princeps. Gallus answered that nothing would be more illustrious or worthy of
the Roman people than to do business only in the presence
and under the eyes of Caesar. Tiberius listened in silence to
these undignified invocations of the dignity of the state. No
action was taken.64
Unbecoming conduct grew worse. Just as the treacherous
path of public discourse led great men to competitive adulatory assertions of liberty, so too did compliance and obsequiousness gradually degenerate into wickedness, as
members of the aristocracy turned informer.65
A remarkable instance occurred in 16, when Firmius
Catus, a senator eager for advancement, and Lucius Fulcinius
Trio, a well-known prosecutor who hoped to increase his notoriety, brought Marcus Scribonius Libo Drusus to trial for
conspiracy against the princeps. The charges were trumped
up; Libo’s consultations of astrologers and necromancers
were inept and pathetic, not threatening. But Trio presented
the matter as “res magna et atrox,” and by the time the case
came before the senate, Catus and Trio had been joined by
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Fonteius Agrippa and Gaius Vibius Serenus. Libo anticipated
the guilty verdict by taking his own life. His property went
as reward to the accusers, along with the rank of extraordinary praetor to those of the senatorial order.66
Libo’s posthumous condemnation triggered a flurry of
sycophantic proposals and resolutions in the senate. Tacitus
omits nothing: Cotta Messalinus moved that the image of
Libo be barred from the funeral processions of his descendants; Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus proposed that no Scribonianus should bear the cognomen of Drusus; Lucius
Pomponius Flaccus suggested that days be set aside for public thanksgiving; Lucius Munatius Plancus, Gaius Asinius
Gallus, Marcus Papius Mutilus and Lucius Apronius voted
thank-offerings to Jupiter, Mars, and Concord, and they
moved that 13 September—the date of Libo’s death—should
be a public holiday. Two astrologers were executed, and the
senate ordered that the rest be expelled from Italy. The historian’s explicit purpose in cataloguing all this is to make
known how early the public disgrace began.67
Some of the doings of spies, informers and accusers were
ludicrously outrageous. In 28, four senators hoping for advancement sought to please Sejanus by prosecuting an illustrious equestrian friend of Germanicus, Titius Sabinus,
ostensibly on charges of treason, but really because of the enmity between Sejanus and Agrippina, the widow of Germanicus. Tacitus records the names of the four, and explains how
one of them, Latinius Latiaris, lured Sabinus into his confidence and induced him to complain about Sejanus and
Tiberius. To strengthen their case, the others hid between the
roof and the ceiling with their ears pressed to holes and cracks
while Latiaris conversed with Sabinus in the room below
about recent hardships. Then in a letter to Tiberius, the four
detailed their findings as well as their disgraceful (dedecus)
ploy.
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This was material better suited to the comedian or satirist
than to the historian, but the unfortunate truth was that the
main actors were among the most prominent members of the
senatorial order. Sabinus was immediately condemned and
put to death. Tacitus reports this event’s chilling effect upon
public life: fear emptied the roads and squares; conversation
ceased even among friends; people eyed the very walls and
ceiling with suspicion; it was assumed that Tiberius was tightening the noose on Agrippina and her son.68
Since they were entitled to claim a part of the property of
those condemned for treason, accusers had strong incentive
to file charges. The grotesque results went beyond injustice to
impiety, as son accused father and brother sister.69 The senate
was filled with informers; friends turned against one another;
no place, public or private, was safe for open conversation. It
was like a plague in the city.70
Those foolish or honest enough to speak their minds were
at risk, as Agrippina discovered. After the poisoning of
Drusus, son of Tiberius, there was widespread but secret rejoicing at the prospect of one of Germanicus’s sons eventually succeeding Tiberius. While the senate and people
“concealed their joy with expressions of sorrow,” Agrippina,
widow of Germanicus, concealed her hope less effectively,
and thereby brought down a quicker ruin, when Sejanus, who
had planned the murder of Drusus and had imperial ambitions
for himself, was able to point to Agrippina’s hope and her
popularity in order to intensify Livia’s animosity toward the
sons of Germanicus.71 It seems likely that the brutal Sejanus
would have targeted these boys whether or not their mother
had disguised her thoughts more effectively. But according
to the historian her failures to dissemble and conceal her true
thoughts at least hastened (adceleravere) their destruction.
Another example of the high cost of open expression is
the outspoken and independent-minded Lucius Calpurnius
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Piso. He openly registered his disgust with the corruption and
aggressive tactics of prosecutors, and was bold enough to
bring charges against a protégée of Livia. Although he announced his withdrawal from public affairs and resolved to
leave the city, he apparently did not leave, and a few years
later was charged with treason. Piso’s timely death, whether
by suicide or natural causes, prevented the case from coming
to court.72
In the year 25, the historian Aulus Cremutius Cordus
faced the senate charged with treason for praising the assassins of Julius Caesar in his own Annales. Because his accusers were minions of Sejanus, and judging by the grim
expression (trux vultus) of Tiberius, the outcome of the case
was not in doubt. Knowing that death was near, Cremutius
defended himself with dignity, calmly adducing examples
from the Roman tradition of legitimate free expression. Cremutius was allowed to starve himself to death. The senate
voted to have his books burned.73
Because Tacitus’s Annales contain many examples of the
danger of openness and candor, we suspect irony when he reports candor going unpunished. In the wake of Sejanus’s fall,
the backlash that engulfed his associates prompted most people to pretend they had not been his friends. But the equestrian Marcus Terentius was unapologetic. He had been the
friend of Sejanus, who was himself the friend of Caesar; it
was more fitting for an equestrian to obey than to challenge
the policies of his superiors; and his friendship with Sejanus
had ended when Tiberius’s did. Terentius escaped punishment. His accusers suffered exile or execution. Tacitus cannot
have missed the irony that the only person saved by telling
the truth in a brave speech (constantia orationis) was an associate of Sejanus.74
Although he admired their refusal to accommodate themselves to the expectations and tone set by the autocrat, Tacitus
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did not give his highest praise to those who courted death
through outspoken opposition. Whether what bothered Tacitus about these men was the jarring quality of their extreme
dissonance or their failure to benefit the state in a more sustained way, he did not say. But it is clear that he reserved his
highest admiration for those who managed to have dignified
and honorable public careers despite the princeps. Doing so
under Tiberius was very difficult—but not impossible.
Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was praised as dignified and
wise because he so often managed to reduce the harm done
by flatterers, and because he possessed enough moderation
to stay on working terms with Tiberius. His case even led
Tacitus to wonder whether fate and chance of birth control
men’s destinies, or whether their own decisions allow some
men to find a safe course between dangerous insubordination
and ugly servility.75 In 17, Marcus Furius Camillus, the proconsular governor of Africa, revived his family’s ancient reputation for military glory (decus militiae) by defeating the
Numidian leader Tacfarinus. Tiberius praised him in the senate, and he was voted an honorary triumph which he lived to
enjoy, Tacitus comments, because of his modest behavior.76
We read of some others who also lived in a manner worthy
of their great family and died peacefully.77
In the Annales, references to distinguished men in the
reign of Tiberius who managed to avoid the extremes of base
conformity and perilous honesty but still have careers of public service are few and not presented in much detail. To see
clearly portrayed the career and record of the sort of man Tacitus most admired, one may turn to his own father-in-law,
Gnaeus Julius Agricola (40-93), about whom Tacitus composed a Vita.78
The son of a senator from Gallia Narbonensis (the modern Provence), he had an impressive administrative and military career. His extensive military campaigns in Britain
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occurred during the reign of the tyrannical Domitian (81-96),
and Tacitus admired his ability to distinguish himself on behalf of the state without incurring the lethal wrath of the princeps.79 When confronting the notoriously hot-headed
Domitian in person, Agricola softened him with his prudence
and moderation, and refrained from seeking renown and a
swift end by open defiance and the useless assertion of liberty.80 “Let those who habitually admire disobedience know
that even under bad rulers there are great men, and that a decent regard for authority, if backed by hard work and military
toughness, is even more praiseworthy than the death-seeking
perilous course, of no use to the state, through which some
became famous.”81 In short, Tacitus praised Agricola for his
noble public service under difficult circumstances. Avoiding
both craven compliance and ostentatious martyrdom, Agricola played his part with a seemliness worthy of his forebears. He might have lived longer but could not have lived
better.82
5. CONCLUSION
With few exceptions, then, the Tiberian books of the Annales
are as somber as the reign they chronicle. Tacitus was aware
of this, and expressed regret over the tedious character of the
ills he catalogued,83 and in general over the narrow and inglorious scope of his project (in arto et ingloriosus labor).84
The times he chronicled were infected and dirty with servility
(infecta et adulatione sordida). But the historian had a moral
purpose, to record the virtue of those who had measured up,
and the disgrace of those who had fallen so short of the dignity of their family and order. The wicked might be deterred
by the certainty of posthumous infamy.85 Even when the
books of historians are burned, it is folly to imagine that the
power of today can snuff out the memory of the future. Quite
the reverse, for repressed thought grows in prestige, and conquerors, together with those who behave as brutally as con-
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querors, only achieve dishonor (dedecus) for themselves and
renown for their victims.86
Besides its moral aim, Tacitus mentioned one other value
of the work. Admitting that the dossier of minor events centered on the princeps makes tedious reading, Tacitus insisted
that such a history is useful for examining “matters that seem
trivial at first glance, from which the movements of great
things often arise.”87 Here, the modern reader might anticipate a reference to patterns of group behavior that set in motion impersonal and potentially disruptive social forces.
Persistent dishonorable behavior of the leading men might
bring their entire order into disrepute. In turn, questions about
the possible disjunction between reality and appearance in
the leading order could easily provoke tremors of doubt about
social hierarchy. In such a scenario, decorum would be not
only a matter of the self-respect of a few score senators, it
would also ultimately be linked to something elemental and
tectonic in Roman society itself. Whether Tacitus thought
along these lines is not clear. But he wrote that, since the balanced and mixed form of government is seldom found in
practice, and is short-lived even when it is found, the prudent
man will familiarize himself with the leading actors in whatever form of government happens to prevail currently: the
rule of the best men, of the many, or, as in Tacitus’s time, of
the autocrat. For most people, the best way to learn how to
behave effectively and honorably is to study the experience
of others.88
Half a century ago Ronald Syme remarked that as “a form
of government the principate was essentially equivocal, and
the nobilitas was called to play a false role therein, forfeiting
power but ostensibly retaining honour and prestige.”89 False
the part might have been, but at least under a morally and
psychologically steady princeps one could play it with some
dignity. As de Tocqueville saw, weakness might compel one
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to play a false part, but one who feigns approval of that false
part is truly base. Under Tiberius, however, the quest for security or advancement led men to guess at, and conform to,
his desires and expectations. They gradually attuned themselves to a standard far removed from any persona nature
might assign or reason discern. It was Tacitus’s somber genius to recognize that the danger of such attunement was that
a man might become the person he pretended to be, thereby
confirming the contemptuous judgment of Tiberius himself
that the senators were “men fit to be slaves.”90
NOTES
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),
246. For their helpful comments on drafts of this essay, I am grateful to
Bob Haynie, John Goyette, and Meghan Parker. I dedicate the article to
Mark Morford, my teacher and friend.
2. Cornelii Taciti Annalium ab excessu divi Augusti libri, ed. C. D. Fisher
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906), 119-120. (Hereafter abbreviated
Annales.) For comments on Tacitus’s views within the context of Roman
thought about luxury, see Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 67-70. See also Annales, 92-95 for Tiberius’s statement
about decorous and moderate public mourning.
3. As Ronald Syme put it, “men and dynasties pass, but style abides.”
Ronald Syme, Tacitus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958),
Vol. 2, 624. Still worthwhile for understanding Tacitus’s literary strategies
are Einar Löfstedt, “On the Style of Tacitus,” Journal of Roman Studies
38 (1948): 1-8, and Uwe Rademacher, Die Bildkunst des Tacitus
(Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1975). Francesca Santoro L’Hoir, Tragedy,
Rhetoric, and the Historiography of Tacitus’ Annales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) draws attention to the influence of Greek
drama upon Tacitus.
4. Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 349 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1942), 178: “Est
enim actio quasi sermo corporis, quo magis menti congruens esse debet.”
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5. That Tacitus wrote for “elite males of senatorial and equestrian status,”
is demonstrated in S. H. Rutledge, “Trajan and Tacitus’ Audience: Reader
Reception of Annals 1-2,” Ramus 27.1 (1998): 141.
6. Cicero’s view of decorum occupies a place within a longer moral tradition that reached back at least as far as Panaetius of Rhodes (second
century BC), whose own treatise, On Duty, was a main source for Cicero’s De officiis. See the editorial introduction to Cicero: On Duties, ed.
M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
xix-xxi.
7. Cicero, De officiis, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 30 (Boston: Harvard
University Press, 1913), 182.
8. Cicero, De officiis, 14-16.
9. Cicero, De officiis, 98.
10. Cicero, De officiis, 97; see also Cicero, De oratore, Loeb Classical
Library, Vol. 348 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1942), 378, for another example of the convergence of theatrical and oratorical decorum.
11. Cicero, De officiis, 100.
12. Cicero, De officiis, 102-108. Still illuminating for a discussion of Cicero’s place within the history of doctrines of natural law is Felix Flückiger, Geschichte des Naturrechtes: Altertum und Frühmittelalter (Zurich:
Evangelischer Verlag, 1954), 221-238.
13. Cicero, De officiis, 108.
14. “We may judge our activities by the measure of our own nature.” Cicero, De officiis, 112. In connection with discerning what is right for oneself, Cicero mentions two more personae that we must play, one imposed
by chance or circumstance, the other a matter of our own choice. See De
officiis, 116-118; and for discussion see Christopher Gill, “Personhood
and Personality: The Four-Personae Theory in Cicero, De Officiis 1,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6 (1988): 169-199.
15. Cicero, De officiis, 122 and 126-128.
16. Seneca, Letter 120 in Epistola, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb
Classical Library, Vol. 77 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1925), 386
and 388. On this passage within a larger context see Christopher Gill, The
Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 163. See also Seneca, De constantia sapientis, Loeb
Classical Library, Vol. 214 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1928), 102
and 104.
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17. Pliny praises those who manifest constantia, dignitas, verecundia, or
decor in word, deed and appearance; his disapproval attaches to their opposites. For a careful study of the letters see Stanley Hoffer, The Anxieties
of Pliny the Younger (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1999).
18. See Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
19. See Res gestae divi Augusti: The Achievements of the Divine Augustus, ed. P. A. Brunt and J. M. Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1967), 34-36.
20. Tacitus, Annales, 3: “omnes exuta aequalitate iussa principis aspectare.”
21. Tacitus, Annales, 121: “obsequium inde in principem et aemulandi
amor validior quam poena ex legibus et metus.”
22. Two examples from the reign of Tiberius should suffice to illustrate
a characteristic that Tacitus attributes to the regime as a whole. When
Tiberius speaks of free elections open to men of talent, Tacitus (Annales,
47) comments: “speciosa verbis, re inania aut subdola, quantoque maiore
libertatis imagine tegebantur, tanto eruptura ad infensius servitium”
(“things attractive in speech, but in fact meaningless or deceptive, and
the more they were represented in the figure of freedom, the more they
were preparing to break out into more dangerous subjection”). In a different context, Tacitus remarks (Annales, 122): “Sed Tiberius, vim principatus sibi firmans, imaginem antiquitatis senatui praebebat postulata
provinciarum ad disquisitionem patrum mittendo.” (“But Tiberius, while
establishing the power of the principate in himself, was keeping up the
image of the old senate by sending the demands of the provinces to be
dealt with by the senators.”)
23. For evidence and discussion see Syme, Tacitus, Vol. 1, 397-416.
24. Tacitus, Annales, 135-136. Note the turning point that occurs with the
words “Tiberio mutati in deterius principatus initium ille annus attulit”
(“that year brought for Tiberius the beginning of the principate’s change
for the worse”) and “donec morte Drusi verterentur” (“until things
changed with the death of Drusus”).
25. Tacitus, Annales, 177: “Ceterum ex eo praerupta iam et urgens dominatio” (“But from that point on there was precipitate and acute despotism”). For another statement of the gradual disclosure of Tiberius’s real
character, see Annales, 211.
26. Tacitus, Annales, 3: “sed vetere atque insita Claudiae familiae super-
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bia, multaque indicia saevitiae, quamquam premantur, erumpere. . . ; ne
iis quidem annis quibus Rhodi specie secessus exul egerit aliud quam
iram et simulationem et secretas libidines meditatum” (“but the old and
innate arrogance of the Claudian family, together with many indications
of cruelness, although repressed, burst forth. . . ; not even during the years
he passed in exile on Rhodes under the cover of retirement was he meditating anything but anger and dissimulation and concealed lust”). Even
Augustus acknowledged objectionable irregularities in Tiberius’s deportment, dress, and habits; see Annales, 8: “Etenim Augustus paucis ante
annis, cum Tiberio tribuniciam potestatem a patribus rursum postularet,
quamquam honora oratione, quaedam de habitu cultuque et institutis eius
ieceret quae velut excusando exprobraret.” (“Even Augustus a few years
earlier, when he was once again requesting from the senators the tribunician power for Tiberius, although speaking approvingly, let fall certain
indications about his attitude, dress, and manners of which he disapproved, even though he was excusing them.”)
27. Tacitus, Annales, 4: “Nihil de ea re Tiberius apud senatum disseruit:
patris iussa simulabat.” (“Tiberius discussed nothing of this with the senate: he pretended it was the father’s command.”) Again, for the murder
of Sempronius Graccus in 14 Tiberius tried to shift blame from himself
onto the proconsul of Africa. See Annales, 31: “Quidam non Roma eos
milites, sed ab L. Asprenate pro consule Africae missos tradidere auctore
Tiberio, qui famam caedis posse in Asprenatem verti frustra speraverat.”
(“Some have said that these soldiers were not sent from Rome, but by L.
Asprenas, proconsul of Africa, at the urging of Tiberius, who had hoped
in vain that the blame for the murder could be pinned on Asprenas.”)
28. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “. . . tamquam vetere re publica et ambiguus imperandi: ne edictum quidem, quo patres in curiam vocabat, nisi tribuniciae
potestatis praescriptione posuit sub Augusto acceptae. Verba edicti fuere
pauca et sensu permodesto.”
29. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “nusquam cunctabundus nisi cum in senatu loqueretur” (“never hesitant except when he was speaking in the senate”).
30. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “Postea cognitum est ad introspiciendas etiam
procerum voluntates inductam dubitationem: nam verba vultus in crimen
detorquens recondebat.” (“Afterwards it was recognized that the hesitation was also put on in order to observe the intentions of the leaders: for,
twisting a look, he would store up insults.”)
31. For example, Tacitus, Annales, 36 and 40-41.
32. Tacitus, Annales, 10.
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33. Tacitus, Annales, 144, in relation to the slight of Lucius Calpurnius
Piso, several years earlier: “Quae in praesens Tiberius civiliter habuit:
sed in animo revolvente iras, etiam si impetus offensionis languerat,
memoria valebat.” (“And at the time, Tiberius took these things courteously: but in his mind, which ruminated over resentments, the memory
was intense, even if its initial force had dissipated.”)
34. Tacitus, Annales, 170.
35. Tacitus, Annales, 125.
36. Tacitus, Annales, 60: “Atque interim Libonem ornat praetura, convictibus adhibet, non vultu alienatus, non verbis commotior (adeo iram
condiderat); cunctaque eius dicta factaque, cum prohibere posset, scire
malebat.” (“And meanwhile he granted Libo the praetorship, invited him
often to parties, neither unfriendly in his appearance nor excited in speech
[so completely he had concealed his anger]; and Tiberius could have
halted all his words and deeds, but he preferred to know them.”)
37. Tacitus, Annales, 60: “Mox libellos et auctores recitat Caesar ita moderans ne lenire neve asperare criminia videretur.” (“Next Caesar read out
the complaints and the accusors, controlling himself so that he seemed
neither to soften nor harshen the charges.”)
38. Tacitus, Annales, 112: “Solus et nullis voluptatibus avocatus maestam
vigilantiam et malas curas exerceret.” (“Alone and withdrawn from all
pleasures he was engaged in gloomy vigilance and wicked plans.”)
39. Tacitus, Annales, 165 and 170.
40. Annales, 173: “Nullam aeque Tiberius, ut rebatur, ex virtutibus suis
quam dissimulationem diligebat: eo aegrius accepit recludi quae premeret.” (“Tiberius, so he thought, liked none of his virtues as much as
dissimulation: all the more angrily, then, he took the disclosing of the
things he concealed.”)
41. Tacitus, Annales, 44: “Renuit Tiberius, perinde divina humanaque
obtegens.” (“Tiberius refused, thus keeping hidden both things divine and
things human.”)
42. Tacitus, Annales, 181: “Tiberius tamen, ludibria seriis permiscere solitus.” (“Tiberius, however, customarily mixed jests with serious matters.”)
43. Tacitus, Annales, 143: “Proprium id Tiberio fuit scelera nuper reperta
priscis verbis obtegere.” (“It was characteristic of Tiberius to cover over
recently invented crimes with long venerated formulas.”)
44. Tacitus, Annales, 15: “Haec audita quamquam abstrusum et tristissima
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quaeque maxime occultantem Tiberium perpulere.” (“These things coming to his attention impressed him deeply, although he remained reserved
and kept secret everything that was very sorrowful.”); see also Annales,
44, where Tiberius gets angry enough to break his customary taciturnity,
and Annales, 128: “prudens moderandi, si propria ira non impelleretur”
(“skilled at observing moderation, if his own anger was not incited”).
45. Tacitus, Annales, 208: “in patientia firmitudinem simulans” (“in suffering simulating good health”) and 210: “Iam Tiberium corpus, iam
vires, nondum dissimulatio deserebat.” (Now his body was forsaking
Tiberius, now his strength, but not yet the power of dissimulation.”)
46. Tacitus, Annales, 30: “magis in speciem verbis adornata quam ut penitus sentire crederetur” (“more embellished with words for show than so
that he might be believed to feel it in his inmost heart”).
47. Tacitus, Annales, 9: “Plus in oratione tali dignitatis quam fidei erat;
Tiberioque etiam in rebus quas non occuleret, seu natura sive adsuetudine,
suspensa semper et obscura verba: tunc vero nitenti ut sensus suos penitus
abderet, in incertum et ambiguum magis implicabantur.” (“There was
more grandeur in this sort of speech than credibility; either by nature or
by custom, halting and unintelligible language was Tiberius’s style even
in things he was not trying to hide: but then, when he was striving to conceal his meaning entirely, it got even more wrapped up in uncertainty and
obscurity.”)
48. Tacitus, Annales,103: “Haud facile quis dispexerit illa in cognitione
mentem principis: adeo vertit ac miscuit irae et clementiae signa.” (“It
was not easy for anyone to discern the mind of the princeps at this trial:
so much did he interchange and mingle the signs of anger and clemency.”)
Also “Quod alii civile rebantur . . . quidam ad saevitiam trahebant.”
(“What some thought considerate . . . others took for cruelty.”)
49. See note 30.
50. Tacitus, Annales, 78: “Tiberius cultu habituque eius lenibus verbis
perstricto . . . increpuit.” (“Tiberius remonstrated a bit in mild terms about
his bearing and attire.”)
51. Tacitus, Annales, 192. Although Tiberius believed Thrasyllus was a
true oracle, Tacitus presents his real skill as that of reading Tiberius.
52. Tacitus, Annales, 132: “Mox Tiberium variis artibus devinxit adeo ut
obscurum adversum alios sibi uni incautum intectumque efficeret.”
(“Soon he subdued Tiberius by various means, so much so that he made
him—so covert toward others—open and sincere with himself alone.”)
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Also, “palam compositus pudor, intus summa apiscendi libido” (“outwardly all propriety, inwardly the greatest lust for acquisition”).
53. Tacitus, Annales, 192: “Qualem diem Tiberius induisset, pari habitu,
haud multum distantibus verbis.” (“Whatever humor Tiberius put on, his
attitude was the same, and his speech not very different”). See also Annales, 207 for the observation that Gaius had learned dissimulation
through contact with Tiberius.
54. Tacitus, Annales, 91: “Angusta et lubrica oratio sub principe qui libertatem metuebat adulationem oderat.”
55. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “Ruere in servitium consules, patres, eques.
quanto quis inlustrior, tanto magis falsi ac festinantes, vultuque composito
ne laeti excessu principis neu tristiores primordio, lacrimas gaudium,
questus adulationem miscebant.” For another example of false mourning,
see the public response to the death of Tiberius’s son, Drusus, in the year
23, Annales, 138-139: “Senatus populusque habitum ac voces dolentum
simulatione magis quam libens induebat, domumque Germanici revirescere occulti laetabantur.” (“The senate and the people put on the attitude and the tone of mourners insincerely rather than willingly, and they
rejoiced secretly that the house of Germanicus was reviving.”)
56. Tacitus, Annales, 9-10.
57. Tacitus, Annales, 116: “Dolabella Cornelius dum antire ceteros parat
absurdam in adulationem progressus.” (“Dolabella Cornelius, while trying to outdo the others, went forward with a ludicrous bit of flattery.”)
Quintius Haterius gained infamy in 22 (Annales, 122) through a “most
disgustingly servile” proposal that the senate’s resolution honoring
Drusus should be recorded in gold letters. The same Haterius had narrowly escaped death in 14 (Annales, 10) when, shamefully groveling, he
accidentally tackled Tiberius. In 34 (Annales, 195), the senate voted
thanks to Tiberius for allowing Agrippina to die in exile instead of having
her strangled.
58. Tacitus, Annales, 175.
59. Tacitus, Annales, 111.
60. Tacitus, Annales, 117-118.
61. Tacitus, Annales, 142: “[adulatio], quae moribus corruptis perinde anceps, si nulla et ubi nimia est” (“flattery, which, when mores have been
ruined, is just as dangerous when there is none and when there is too
much”).
62. Tacitus, Annales, 8: “Ea sola species adulandi supererat.”
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63. Tacitus, Annales, 128-129.
64. Tacitus, Annales, 64. Tacitus presents Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso as
standing up to Tiberius at Annales, 44, not so much because of republican
sentiments as from a sense of his own worthiness to rule. That insubordination ran in the family; see Annales, 69. As for Gallus, Tacitus records
another public disagreement with Tiberius that, perhaps inadvertently,
penetrated to the very heart of rule (Annales, 64): “Eam sententiam altius
penetrare et arcana imperii temptari.” (“This motion penetrated more
deeply and made an attempt at the secrets of the imperium.”) Tiberius,
however, managed to turn this to his own advantage.
65. Tacitus, Annales, 126: “Paulatim dehinc ab indecoris ad infesta transgrediebantur.” (“After this they gradually passed over from shameful
deeds to outrageous ones.”)
66. Tacitus, Annales, 60-61.
67. Tacitus, Annales, 62: “Quorum auctoritates adulationesque rettuli ut
sciretur vetus id in re publica malum.” (“I have reported the motions and
the flatteries of these men so that this old evil in the state might be recognized.”)
68. Tacitus, Annales, 171-173.
69. Tacitus, Annales, 147 and 149. See also Annales, 149, where it
emerges that even the property of those who anticipate a guilty verdict
by suicide is subject to confiscation and division among the accusers.
Also at Annales, 170, there is an accusation within an extended family.
70. Tacitus, Annales, 184.
71. Tacitus, Annales, 138-139; see note 55 above, which comments on
the hypocrisy of the many. The rest of this chapter discusses Sejanus’s
effort to magnify Livia’s hatred. In another instance during the year 32,
Tacitus records that a mother was condemned and executed for weeping
for her executed son (Annales, 186).
72. Tacitus, Annales, 144.
73. Tacitus, Annales, 151-152.
74. Tacitus, Annales, 185-186.
75. Tacitus, Annales, 143-144: “Hunc ego Lepidum temporibus illis
gravem et sapientem virum fuisse comperior: nam pleraque ab saevis adulationibus aliorum in melius flexit. neque tamen temperamenti egebat,
cum aequabili auctoritate et gratia apud Tiberium viguerit. unde dubitare
cogor fato et sorte nascendi, ut cetera, ita principium inclinatio in hos,
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offensio in illos, an sit aliquid in nostris consiliis liceatque inter abruptum
contumaciam et deforme obsequium pergere iter ambitione ac periculis
vacuum.” (“I am convinced that this Lepidus was a serious and wise man
for those times: for he turned very many things arising from the cruel flatteries of others to better effect. Nor did he lack moderation, since he retained steady influence and esteem with Tiberius. Hence I am compelled
to doubt whether, as with other things, the favor of leading men toward
some and their disfavor toward others is from the fate and chance of birth,
or whether it is something within our own purvue, and one has the freedom to pursue a course between severe autonomy and base servility that
is also free from dangers.”). His obituary in the year 34 (see Annales,
196), praises his moderation and wisdom, presenting him as a worthy
member of a family rich in good citizens (“genus fecundum bonorum
civium”).
76. Tacitus, Annales, 74: “Quod Camillo ob modestiam vitae impune
fuit.” (“And this was safe for Camillus because of his unassuming conduct in life.”)
77. Tacitus, Annales, 167, mentions Marcus Asinius Agrippa, a man
“claris maioribus quam vetustis vitaque non degener” (“with distinguished rather than ancient ancestors, and not ignoble in his way of life”),
who died in 27.
78. Tacitus, Cornelii Taciti de vita Iulii Agricolae liber (hereafter abbreviated as De vita Agricolae), ed. M. Winterbottom and R.M. Ogilvie, in
Cornelii Taciti Opera Minora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
79. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 29: “Ceterum uti militare nomen, grave
inter otiosos, aliis virtutibus temperaret, tranquillitatem atque otium penitus hausit, cultu modicus, sermone facilis, uno aut altero amicorum comitatus, adeo ut plerique, quibus magnos viros per ambitionem aestimare
mos est, viso aspectoque Agricola quaererent famam, pauci interpretarentur.” (“Moreover, to moderate his military renown—which is imposing
for civilians—with other virtues, he yielded completely to tranquility and
leisure, dressing simply, conversing affably, accompanied by just one or
two friends, so much so that most people, whose custom is to judge great
men by their ostentation, having seen Agricola and scrutinized him, would
wonder about his good repute, but few could comprehend it.”)
80. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 30: “Domitiani vero natura praeceps in
iram, et quo obscurior, eo inrevocabilior, moderatione tamen prudentiaque
Agricolae leniebatur, quia non contumacia neque inani iactatione libertatis
famam fatumque provocabat.” (“Now Domitian’s nature was inclined to
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anger—and the more disguised, the more implacable—nevertheless it
was mollified by the guidance and judgment of Agricola, because he did
not provoke public opinion or fate by arrogance and empty displays of
personal liberty.”)
81. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 30: “Sciant, quibus moris est inlicita mirari, posse etiam sub malis principibus magnos viros esse, obsequiumque
ac modestiam, si industria ac vigor adsint, eo laudis excedere, quo
plerique per abrupta, sed in nullum rei publicae usum ambitiosa morte
inclaruerunt.”
82. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 31: “Et ipse quidem, quamquam medio in
spatio integrae aetatis ereptus, quantum ad gloriam, longissimum aevum
peregit. Quippe et vera bona, quae in virtutibus sita sunt, impleverat, et
consulari ac triumphalibus ornamentis praedito quid aliud adstruere fortuna poterat?” (“And he indeed, although snatched away at the midpoint
of a complete life, he completed the longest possible course of life in regard to honor. Since, in fact, he had acquired the real goods which depend
on virtues, what else could fortune add to someone who had received the
distinctions of the consulship and several military triumphs?”)
83. Tacitus, Annales, 185.
84. Tacitus, Annales, 149-150.
85. Tacitus, Annales, 126.
86. Tacitus, Annales, 152: “Quo magis socordiam eorum inridere libet
qui praesenti potentia credunt extingui posse etiam sequentis aevi memoriam. nam contra punitis ingeniis gliscit auctoritas, neque aliud externi
reges aut qui eadem saevitia usi sunt nisi dedecus sibi atque illis gloriam
peperere.” (“One is disposed to laugh all the more at the folly of those
who believe that, using their present power, they can extinguish the memory of the following generation. For on the contrary, when natural superiority is penalized, its influence flares up, and foreign kings or those who
have acted with the same sort of cruelty have generated nothing but dishonor for themselves and renown for the others.”)
87. Tacitus, Annales, 150: “illa primo aspectu levia ex quis magnarum
saepe rerum motus oriuntur.”
88. Tacitus, Annales,150.
89. Syme, Tacitus, Vol. 2, 573.
90. Tacitus, Annales, 126: “homines ad servitutem paratos.”
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35
Dionysus: The Therapeutic Mask
Richard B. Carter
Part I
Myths in General and
the Myth of Dionysus in Particular
One of the best accounts of the essence of myth occurs in
Jacob Klein’s unpublished explanation of Aristotle’s concept
of coming-to-be, or generation. In relation to Nature’s great
cycles—the seasons, birth and death, and the like—Klein
writes:
The old myths tell this story over and over again. In fact,
genesis is the very soul of any myth. To understand the
world, the story of its genesis has to be told. To understand the gods, the study of their genesis has to be told.
Cosmogony and Theogony are the primary subjects of
any myth. To understand properly any event in human
life, or character of a people or a city, this event and this
character has always to be related, it seems, to its mythical origins. To tell the myth of something means to tell
how this something came to be. An enterprise of this kind
does not make much sense unless one relates everything
ultimately to beginnings, which make any genesis possible. These are precisely the mythical origins. They contain, of necessity, these two elements: the Male and the
Female. And however distant the sobriety of Aristotle is
from the exuberance of those ancient tales, still the same
aspect of the world as a chain or as cycles of generation
dominates his thought.1
In accordance with Klein’s account, I intend to uncover the
thing itself of which the myths tell the origins, keeping in
Richard Burnett Carter is now retired from over forty years of teaching
as a professor of philosophy. He has written on Descartes’s invention of
mechanistic medicine, and has recently published several novels as well
as a book explaining key terms in the language of Zen.
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mind that the Greek word for the plot of any story or play
was the word mythos.
The principal mythical roles of Dionysus are these:2 He
is the patron deity of the theater and the god of drunken revel.
He is also the god of manic possession of women, who under
his influence, butchered baby animals and their own infants
while suckling the young of deer and lions, wore poisonous
snakes around their waists under their clothing to prevent
men from raping them while they lay senseless in the wake
of their mad mountain revels. He was also known as dendrites—tree-like—and indeed we find representations of him
as a post with a mask tied to it. In a different key, one ancient
source tells us that Dionysus was identical with Hades, claiming that Dionysus is both the god of the dead and the god in
whose honor processions of drunken revelers carry huge
leather phalluses and sing filthy songs.3
Comparing the various collections of myths, we find
eight distinct elements that describe the conception, birth,
death, resurrection, and subsequent deeds of Dionysus.
1. He was the child of Zeus and the mortal Semele,
a princess of the royal house of Thebes. Semele
was destroyed when she looked at Zeus in his full
glory, and, as she was being consumed in the
flames, Zeus rescued the fetus from his mother’s
womb and inserted it into his own leg, where the
child was nurtured and came to term. According
to this myth, Dionysus is thus twice-born—once
from the womb of his mortal mother, Semele, and
again from the leg of his divine father, Zeus.
2. After Dionysus was born the second time,
Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera, set Titans upon the newborn babe, who tore it into countless fragments.
The pieces were subsequently gathered together,
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reassembled, and resuscitated by the Titan, Rhea,
the mother of the newer gods.
3. Dionysus was then reared on Mt. Nysa by
nymphs, among whom were three of special note:
Erato, Bromie, and Bacche. He cultivated wine
there, and then he subsequently traveled around
the world teaching people how to plant vines and
make wine. When people opposed his missionary
efforts, his punishments were ghastly—for instance, he flayed some alive. For a period during
these travels he was driven mad by the ever-jealous Hera, but he then regained his sanity.
4. Known as Bromius after the nymph Bromie
who raised him on Mount Nysa, he led a large
band of women through Asia and around the
Mediterranean basin spreading vine-culture, winemaking, and wine-drinking. His attendants then
were called Bacchae after his nurse-nymph, Bacche. Lycurgus, the king of Edonia, resisted the
proselytizing of Dionysus. They fought, and the
king drove Dionysus into the sea. Lycurgus then
killed many of the Bacchae with an ox-goad. The
vengeful Dionysus drove Lycurgus mad, so that he
mistook his son for a grapevine, killed him with a
pruning knife, and then pruned off his ears and
nose. Lycurgus himself was later torn apart by wild
horses.
5. Dionysus eventually made his way to his
mother’s city, Thebes. There, King Pentheus, his
uncle, rejected him. For this insult, he was torn
limb from limb by the Bacchae. His head was
ripped from his body his own mother, Agave, who
had joined with nearly all the Theban women in
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following Dionysus into the mountains.
6. When women rejected the worship of Dionysus,
their punishment was to be driven into delirium,
so that they would tear their own nursing children
limb from limb. Sometimes they would even devour the dismembered corpses, not recognizing the
parts as belonging to their own infants.
7. One myth tells us that Dionysus married Ariadne of Crete after she had been abandoned by
Theseus of Athens.
8. Other women who rejected his worship seem to
have been punished by being made to kill and devour their own babies; but, when they repented,
and when their menfolk and their kings accepted
Dionysian worship, these women joined his joyful
band of singers and dancers who continued to rend
asunder fully grown lions and oxen and deer in the
mountains where they held their revels. They are
sometimes pictured as suckling the young of all
these animals, and even the young of poisonous
snakes.
This is enough to show that Dionysus is something of a
protean figure. From the evidence of the myths, Dionysus
was the god of wine and the god of the dead, of spring growth
and of magic possession. He acquired other characteristics
after the main myths had been created. For instance, he seems
to have become the god of theater by association with the
satyrs who worshipped him, and who were also thought to
be the originators of play-acting. Homer imputes diametrically opposed qualities to Dionysus, calling him both “raging” (mainomenoio, Iliad 6.132) and “joy of mortals”
(charma brotoisin, 14.325). Dionysus had his own oracle at
Delphi, who was considered just as important as the oracle
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39
of Apollo. Indeed, the Dionysian oracle may have been the
original oracle of Delphi: Plutarch, himself a priest at Delphi,
says that the oracle speaks mainomonoi stomati, with raging
mouth, and this reference to Homer’s “raging” may indicate
that Dionysus is the divine power behind the oracle’s pronouncements.
If we recall Klein’s notion that myths are always about
beginnings, this almost bewildering list of different attributes
accruing to Dionysus forces us to ask, With the genesis of
what in particular—that is, with the very first “pre-historic
beginnings” of what—are the myths of Dionysus concerned?
Modern attempts to address such questions are characteristically anthropological in nature. Ultimately, this viewpoint
will not be sufficient to help us understand the originary significance of Dionysus. To show this, let me begin the investigation by explaining some of the things that Dionysus did
not represent.
Part II
What Dionysus was not
In his Dionysus: Myth and Cult,4 Walter Otto critiques what
seem to be the two principal schools of interpreting ancient
myths in relatively modern times: the anthropological school
and the philological school. The first group uses the methodologies developed by academic anthropology starting in the
late nineteenth century. The second group is comprised of literary analysts who are also classics scholars. We can gain
some insight into what Dionysus is not by listening to Otto’s
criticism. Discussing one of the leaders of the philological
school, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf,5 Otto says:
His attacks on the views and methods of the “anthropologists” were so sharp and, indeed, frequently so bitterly
scornful that we had the right to expect to find in his own
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presentation an entirely different answer to the basic
questions involved. But we were disappointed. It became
clear that the philological school, for which he could
speak as a legitimate representative, actually agrees completely—in all its crucial points—with its opponents.
Both apply the biological concept of evolution in exactly
the same way.6
Otto then goes on to explain what he means by the expression, “the biological concept of evolution.”
Just as biology thought it was justified in believing that
a line of constant development leads from the lowest to
the highest organisms, so these two schools also place
so-called “simple” concepts at the beginning of an evolution of religious thought out of which are to grow,
through gradual change, the forms which the great deities
assume at their peak. To be sure, in the course of time biology itself had to become a little more modest and had
to acknowledge sudden new creations where it had formerly seen only continuous processes. Yet this is not the
crucial objection to the methods used in our study of religion. When biology talked of evolution, it always put
an organism at the beginning—an organism which still
had to have, in every instance, no matter how simple it
was thought to be, the main characteristic of an organism: it had to be a self-established whole. Only that
which is alive is capable of developing. But in the dialectic advanced by the study of religion, evolution does not
proceed from a simple form of life to a more complex
and higher form but from the Lifeless to the Alive. For
the elements of faith which this study considers primal
are nothing but conceptual systems from which life is
completely lacking.7
Otto then gives a striking example of the character of the sort
of thinking he is criticizing, in which the analysts attempt to
base a vital religious belief on an empty concept:
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In origin, the god Hermes is supposed to have been nothing more than a protector, and the stone pillars and heaps
of stones in front of farm houses point to his presence.
But all the features which define his character—the paradox of his guiding and his leading astray, the sudden
giving and taking away, the wisdom and cunning, the
spirit of propitious love, the witchery of twilight, the
weirdness of night and death—this diverse whole, which
is inexhaustible and yet nowhere denies the unity of its
being, is supposed to be only a complex of ideas which
had gradually developed from the way of life of the worshippers, from their wishes and inclinations, ideas enriched by the love of story telling.
For the primal and solely true belief, there is left, according to Wilamowitz, only the thought of a protecting
and helping god, in short, the idea of an X which lends
assistance but which has no other properties except, perhaps, the power necessary for help.
At the beginning of the process called evolution
there is, then, a mere Nothingness, and the concept of
evolution has consequently lost its meaning. For, a god
like the one assumed here has no real substance, and that
which has no essence is nothing. . . . That which should
be respected as the most sacred object of belief turns out
to be “not there” the first time it is tested, and the objection which Wilamowitz himself raised against Usener’s8
theory—“no man prays to a concept”—applies to Wilamowitz’s theory as well. . . .
As for the “Vegetation Deity,” the “Death God,” and
similar generalities into which we now like to dissipate
living deities as if we had in them the primal concepts of
religious consciousness—these too are nothing but lifeless ideas. How could they ever have fulfilled the demands of devotion, lifted up the spirit, elicited the
powerful forms of cultus? No life proceeds from a concept, and if the great forms of the gods, which could motivate the creative spirit of a culture of highest genius,
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are to be understood historically, then there would be no
more unproductive application imaginable than this.9
One final quotation from Otto reveals the reason why the
philological and anthropological approaches are insufficient
for understanding the essence of a god or for entering the
realm in which such a being has its life:
[O]ur fragmented, mechanistic thinking knows nothing
of such realms of Being, nothing of their unity. How,
then, could it understand their divinity? It examines belief in deity with an astounding naiveté, dissipating its
forms only to place them together again artificially to fit
the pattern of a historical process. . . . That it is suspiciously like our dynamic way of thought is a serious
charge against it.10
In short, human begins are not so constructed, nor have they
ever been so constructed, that they could worship anything
like the pallid verbal constructs described as deities by the
anthropological school and the philological school. The
essence of Dionysus is not an empty concept.
Part III
What Dionysus might have been to
some of his ancient followers
The evolutionary, synthetic approaches used by modern
physics and biology does not and cannot explain the belief
in deities who are almost always characterized by a large
number of mutually contradictory powers. Otto insists that it
is precisely the inability of an evolutionary view of religion
to construct a deity with numerous conflicting powers that
most strongly justifies rejecting the evolutionary accounts of
the anthropological and philological schools of interpreting
religion. How could the same primary concept, such as a
power signified by a pile of rocks on the roadside, grow into
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43
a great god by the gradual addition of powers that were mutually contradictory to one another? On what grounds could
a people choose to relate contradictory elements in order to
construct a synthetic whole? To Otto, the most outstanding
evidence that the ancients believed in gods as truly existing
substances of some sort—rather than as unconsciously synthesized psychological projections of fears and hopes—was
precisely that one and the same deity did have so many conflicting powers. The Hermes of the ancients did not grow into
Hermes gradually. On the contrary, there first had to be a belief in a single, truly existent deity. Only an existing deity
could be the ground a diverse collection of mutually conflicting attributes. Hermes was not built up out of his many different qualities; rather, he was the vessel into which the
attributes could be poured, the container that could hold a
true mixture of the attributes within its substantial unity.
But what are we to think about these different, often contradictory, powers and attributes? Are they merely different
facets of one and the same god, as though the divinity were
a gem that revealed different colors depending of the angle
of the incident light? Is Dionysus the baby-killer merely another manifestation of the same Dionysus who is also the
giver of joy to mortals? If so, it would seem to follow that
the ultimate meaning of baby-killer is identical to the ultimate
meaning of giver of joy to mortals. And this would seem to
mean that Dionysus was conceived by his most fervent
votaries as being both of these identically in his inmost
essence. In the context of psychological anthropology, the
consequence of these considerations would imply that the
human psyche is constructed in such a way that it takes deep
delight in the most ghastly of butcheries; that the horrifying
rituals of child-murder answer a deep need in the human soul;
and that this need is at root identical with the tender love of
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a mother for her child.
But is this true? Are nurturing and destroying really only
“symbolic” expressions of a single underlying unity? If so,
then the absence or presence of such manifestations are must
be merely different modes of expression, different symbolic
representations of an essence in which there is no fundamental distinction. In this view, however, the issue of whether one
mode of expression or another comes to the fore becomes
merely a cultural and historical matter, not a psychological
or anthropological one, since the structure of the psyche is
not reflected in the mode of expression. The appearance of
different symbols is purely relative to time and place.
Moreover, this view of symbolic expression does not address the question, Does every in the psyche have its own
particular expression? Or are we to think that one and the
same thing in the psyche can have distinctly different symbolic expressions? If so, we find ourselves committed to an
anthropology in which all the expressions of inner drives or
impulses would be theoretically reducible to a single drive
or impulse.
Inasmuch as Otto appears to hold this view of symbolic
relativism—for he never even raises this rather obvious problem—it seems that he may have agreed fundamentally with
the cultural anthropologists he attacked so forcefully.
In any case, the approaches of the philologists and the anthropologists are insufficient for us. Let us begin, instead, by
approaching the myths directly. Since drunkenness is deeply
associated with the cult of Dionysus, we will begin our own
analysis of this question by asking about the relationship between drinking and the worship of Dionysus.
Part IV
Dionysus and drunkenness
Different levels of intoxication give rise to different degrees
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45
of visual impairment. The sober person sees things clearly.
Moderate inebriation leads to distorted vision. In this condition, a person sees just what he sees when sober, but with all
sorts of errors, such as double vision and shaky vision. Extreme intoxication, however, induces delusions. In this condition, a person sees things that are not there, experiences
hallucinations, and falls into delirium. Delirium, the result of
extreme drunkenness, was Dionysus’s punishment for the
women who refused to worship him. His proper votaries,
however, were only moderately drunk, and in this state, liberated a bit from the strictures of sobriety, they were lighthearted and joyful.
It might seem at first glance that moderate drunkenness
is a mean between sobriety and delirium, but this is not the
case. Delirium withdraws a person entirely from the world
of shared experience that characterizes sobriety and moderate
intoxication. Hence, moderate drunkenness is not a mean between the two extremes: on the contrary, it groups itself together with its cousin sobriety. Nevertheless, we tend place
people into one of three categories in relation to their state of
inebriation: the sober, the moderately drunk, and the delirious.
Now what if we ask, How drunk must a worshipper of
Dionysus be in order to perceive one and the same god as
being both a baby-killer and a bringer of joy to mortals? Attitudes toward this question would differ depending on the
category of the person hearing it. The sober, for whom the
contradiction is anathema, would think that only a delirious
person could imagine such blasphemies. The delirious, for
whom the contradiction is not a difficulty, would think that
only a blind person could raise such a doubt. And the moderately drunk—who have loosened the bonds of sobriety
enough to entertain the question but, not being delirious, have
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not settled the matter—would be regarded negatively by both
the other groups. The sober person regards even the moderately drunk person as addled for not keeping the distinctions
clear, whereas the delirious person regards him as cloddish
for breaking up an obvious unity. Thus, the moderately drunk
seem to be opposed in different ways to the other two groups.
To the moderately drunk, on the other hand, both of the other
groups appear to be delirious: the sober because in their literalness they can make nothing of anything; the delirious because in their associative fugue they make anything of
nothing at all. Both extremes are mistaken in not making the
right things of the right things.
The attitude of the moderately drunk, therefore, is open
to the possibility of transformation, to the possibility that distinctions might become unities or vice versa. Hence the importance in the cult of Dionysus of the image of the serpent,
which remains what it is although it continually sheds its own
form. But does this idea come too close to imputing to the
votaries of Dionysus the empty abstraction of the philologists
and anthropologists, namely, the idea that Dionysus is the single, constant entity underlying the many symbolic manifestations he throws off, just as the snake is the single, constant
entity underlying the many skins it throws off?
Part V
The Masks of Dionysus
Fortunately, another Dionysus steps forward to block this line
of thought. Dionysus of the theater was surely a master of
images, and so he certainly knew what any child dressing up
in costume knows—that the essence of an image is to present
itself as just what it is not. The serpent’s shed skins need not
be interpreted as different manifestations thrown off by a single, constant entity; they could instead be the remnants of
what the serpent is not. Of course, this would mean that each
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47
skin showed the serpent as what it was not even while the
serpent was wearing it. Or, translating this idea into the realm
of theater, the different aspects of Dionysus, each one an
image left behind after a transformation, are just so many
masks, just so many presentations of what he is not. If this is
the case, then one of the central teachings of the cult of
Dionysus must be this: To unmask is not to know.
Dionysus’s different masks, then, cannot be merely disguises. They cannot be coverings worn by a single, self-same
being of false fronts intended to hide the identity of a single,
self-same being from onlookers. And yet, isn’t that what
masks are? Perhaps not. Perhaps we need to think more radically about the concept of a mask.
Masks are essentially superficial. They belong in the
realm of externalities, of surfaces, of things-as-they-present
themselves. Curiously enough, this makes them similar to
solid bodies, which likewise manifest themselves to us as “all
surface.” If we carve away the surface of a wooden block,
for instance, we reveal a new solid that presents itself to us
in a new way. But the new solid was not “contained by” the
original one, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense. This
point may be easier to grasp by means of a negative example.
A box with another box fitting snugly inside it is not a solid.
That is why there is room in it for the second box. Solids, on
the contrary, do not have space for containment within them,
and thus they cannot contain other solids. Nor do they contain
some sort of originary object that remains the same through
every alteration of surface. Each solid has only one surface,
each surface is the surface of only one solid, and two different
solids have two different surfaces. Similarly, each mask, because of its essential superficiality, cannot mask another
mask, let alone some originary object that remains the same
through every change of mask.
The multiple masks of Dionysus, then, cannot be thought
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of as containing one another; they are not a set of nested
boxes in which the outermost box conceals those within.
Each mask presents itself as a distinctly different thing with
an identity of its own, just as the carved wooden block presents itself as distinctly different from the block from which
it was carved. Nor do his masks contain some originary being
that remains the same through transformations of the masks,
any more than solids contain originary objects. Consequently,
the masks of Dionysus are not disguises: nothing is concealed
within them, neither other masks nor an originary being. So
trying to penetrate his masks in order to unmask a wearer is
clearly a pointless task. It may not be quite so clear at this
point that this task is also perilous.
Part VI
Masks, Shame, Orgies, and Horror
If we continue to view a mask as a sort of disguise, we continue to think of it as a sort of magic shield of invisibility, a
ring of Gyges. Wearing a mask as a disguise seems to be a
way of hiding one’s identity, of concealing what one really
is with a surface that presents what one really is not. The
wearer of a disguise seems unaccountable for his actions, and
hence free to do things that he would be ashamed to acknowledge in his own person. But since, as we have seen, a mask
is not in fact a disguise, we should expect that the attempt to
hide one’s identity with a mask should fail, should show itself
as impossible in some way. And so it does: the unaccountable
masked person is not at all the same as the unmasked person.
The one does things that the other will not do. The one has
shame, the other does not. It is simply a mistake to think that
the masked person is somehow identical with the unmasked
one. Looking aside from this error for the time being, however, we can see that the notion of a mask understood as a
disguise raises the issue of shame, and this brings us to another central aspect of Dionysus and of his cult: the orgy.
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The word orgy comes from the Greek orgia, which is related to the word ergon, a deed, a task, or something accomplished. In classical usage, an orgy is not a celebration of
wildly licentious sexual abandon—this meaning appears in
English only in the seventeenth century—but rather an enjoined task, specifically of a religious character. It refers to
religious rites such as the rites of Demeter, of Orpheus, and,
most frequently, the rites of Dionysus. An orgiastic act, then,
is like that part of a religious service in which every word
and gesture of the officiating priest is ordained by preset ritual—as opposed to, say, a sermon, in which the officiating
minister can speak in his own name.
Another example of an orgiastic act in classical times was
the presentation of a play by actors, in which the speeches
had been ordained by the play’s author and—as we know was
the case with the actors of Dionysus’s theater—the masks
worn by the actors were ordained by tradition. The orgies of
the cult-worshippers of Dionysus dramatize—that is, act out
in prescribed word and deed—the great myths of the deity.
The drama is portrayed by masked actors who are precisely
what their masks show them to be, and who can be so because all their speeches and actions are prescribed to be exactly the speeches and actions belonging to the mask.
Conversely, at the same time, the actors’ masks are precisely
the surfaces appropriate to them in their character as worshippers of Dionysus in the orgiastic performance. And this
relationship is very strict: thus, no single actor presents two
different characters with the same mask or the same character
with two different masks. (If the latter should happen, as with
Oedipus before and after he blinds himself, it indicates that
the character has changed radically.)
These characteristics of orgiastic performance teach us
about the nature of Dionysus, the god of play-acting. His
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manifestations, on the one hand, as the god of baby-killing
and, on the other hand, as the god who brings joy to mortals
must not be understood as two different masks of the selfsame deity. The dreadful mask of the baby-killer, the amiable
mask of the joy-giver—these indicate simply that masks
exist. They do not reveal any persisting entity behind the
masks. Moreover, the plays that embody the orgiastic tradition tell us that our insistence on trying to unmask the nonexistent entity behind the mask is not just pointless, but
dangerous. And indeed, that is what we should expect, since
all attempts to put mistaken beliefs into practice can only
meet with tragic consequences. In the plays, the raving characters represent those who try to unmask others. Agave—
who claimed that Semele had become pregnant with
Dionysus by a mortal rather than by Zeus—attempted to unmask Semele as a liar. Pentheus—who was certain that the
rites of Dionysus were wild, unsanctioned, and licentious
rather than prescribed religious performances—tried to unmask Dionysus himself. Their delirium is a symptom, as we
saw earlier, that they have left the realm of shared experience.
The proper votaries of Dionysus do not rave; madness belongs to those who are outside communal awareness, and
thus outside of the celebration—as Euripides saw so clearly.
And the punishment for the attempt to unmask is terrible:
first, it leads to raving, since the person making the attempt
is trying the impossible, namely, to make something out of
nothing by reducing two different masks to expressions of
one nonexistent entity; second the raving leads to self-destruction as the person tries to act on the basis of delusion.
Thus Agave is led to dismember her own son and Pentheus
is compelled to dive headlong into the bevy of Bacchae who
will tear him apart. The attempt to unmask comes to grief,
because unmasking is impossible.
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This is what the myths of Dionysus are trying to tell us:
We human beings are masked. The baby-killer is a mask just
as much as the nurse or mother is a mask. If the nurse or
mother mask is transformed into the baby-killer mask, this is
not because the bloodier mask is another version of the more
pleasing one, and certainly not because it is the true being
concealed by the pleasing mask. On the contrary, the bloody
mask is the consequence of trying to unmask at all. The attempt to unmask is the cause of the bloody mask that is found
“underneath” the pleasant mask. The lesson of the dreadful
myths of Dionysus is that, as we tear off our masks, each successive mask will be a bloodier, more horrifying result of the
attempt to tear off the previous mask. On this view, Otto was
right inasmuch as he thought that the various contradictory
aspects of Dionysus point toward a sort of unity, but he was
wrong in believing this unity to be a substance of some kind.
The masks of Dionysus point toward a unity in the sense that
they show us the self-same process repeating itself in the successively more horrifying masks that come into being from
each previous attempt to unmask.
We can relate this insight to our daily lives in this way:
In contemporary terms, we describe the attempt to unmask
in various ways—to “find ourselves,” to “act on our true feelings,” to “be our authentic selves,” and so on. The myths of
Dionysus teach us, however, that we are masked actors in an
orgiastic performance. The grief we suffer for rejecting this
insight, and for trying to unmask ourselves in spite of it, is
that we flay our own faces in the attempt to unmask ourselves. By tearing off our mask, we rend the flesh, leaving a
bloody layer of pulp that had previously been protected by
the mask. The original face, the mask, was not disguising the
horror that appears after removal; the horror comes into existence only as a result of the attempt to unmask.
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Part VII
The therapeutic mask
In what we have said up to this point, there are some indications that moderate drunkenness, with its openness to transformation, might be preferable to the anti-Dionysian
literalness of absolute sobriety and the anti-Dionysian madness of delirium. What does this tell us about everyday existence? What might be the analogue of moderate drunkenness
in our daily lives? What would it mean to live in such a way
that we are neither utterly sober nor intoxicated to the point
of delusion? Here we will benefit from two other aspects of
the deity we are studying: Dionysus as the god of marvels
and Dionysus as the god of the dead.
As the patron of theater, Dionysus is the god of the marvelous, the miraculous, and the wonderful. He is in the first
instance, then, the patron of comedy, the genre in which a
marvelous turn of events—such as the appearance of a deus
ex machina or an unexpected savior or a startling revelation—brings about a change from imminent bad fortune to
good fortune. This last consideration also shows the link between comedy and tragedy: if the marvel does not occur, imminent bad fortune comes to pass. And this too is wonderful
in a different way: we wonder why the marvel did not occur,
why the bad fortune was not averted, why the suffering had
to be. Dionysus is in the second instance, then, also the patron
of tragedy.
For the moment, we are going to set aside Dionysus as
the patron of comedy and tragedy to investigate yet another
side of the god. As we saw very early on, Dionysus was also
identified with Hades, the god of the dead, and was worshipped by drunken revelers carrying leather phalluses while
singing lewd songs. The connections among the ghosts of the
dead, leather phalluses, and filthy songs will reveal one more
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aspect of Dionysus to us, which will, in combination with
Dionysus’s role as the god of theater, teach us the final lesson
that can be drawn from the myths of Dionysus.
We begin by asking, What do the leather phalluses and
filthy songs have to do with the worship of the god of the
dead?
We know from many sources that in Athens in early
spring, during the month Anthesterion, a three-day festival
of flowers included two days of Dionysian merry-making followed by a third day, called the Chutroi, the feast of pots, a
festival of the dead at the end of which ghosts were exhorted
to leave the city.11 But, during this very somber third day,
comedies—represented in parade as outsized phalluses and
dirty songs—were presented. It appears that the Athenians
regarded theater performance as suitable either for entertaining the benevolent ghosts, or for distracting the malevolent
ghosts, who walked abroad during the festival. In either case,
Dionysus the god of theater was the appropriate deity for laying ghosts to rest. Dionysus thus begins to come to light as
the god of rest, as the deity who blesses leisure. And this is
not very surprising. After all, are not drinking and theater
both acts of leisure? Perhaps the most all-encompassing of
Dionysus’s aspects is that he is the god of leisure.
But leisure presupposes trust. No one can rest comfortably without trusting in a multitude of protective guardians
and helpers, from family members to neighbors to policemen
to public service providers to soldiers. When we are made to
question this trust—when one of these protective figures violates our trust—our sense of complacency is disturbed, and
our ability to experience leisure evaporates. Violation of trust
is, therefore, the supreme sin. It undermines the faith that humans need to feel safe in their own lives. Perhaps this is why
Dante, in the Divine Comedy, places Brutus, Cassius, and
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Judas—exemplars of treachery—in the gnashing jaws of
Satan himself—also a traitor—at the heart of Hell, which is
the Christian version of Hades. If violation of trust is the destruction of faith and the leisure that depends on it, Dionysus
the god of leisure must be opposed in all ways to treachery.
He must be the guardian of guardianship and of all forms of
protective care. Indeed, the female worshippers of Dionysus
were called by the honorific title tithēnai, that is, nurses. The
worship of Dionysus involves nurture and guardianship,
without which leisure is impossible.
As we said, theater is also a leisure activity. Hence we
should also expect it to relate in some way to nurture and
guardianship. This relationship is found in the realm of sight:
theater cultivates and civilizes vision for sake of increasing
trust, and thus securing leisure. The epitome of self-involved
vision is solitary dreaming. In our dreams we are drawn into
a self-contained world into which intrude only phantoms
from our shared, waking life. Theater borrows these intruders, as it were, and introduces them to the companions of our
shared life for their approval or disapproval. Theater civilizes
our dreams by teaching us to distinguish between things that
belong only to our solitary reverie and those that belong to
our shared life with others. In doing so, it transforms our selfcontained consciousness into shared, civil consciousness.
This civil consciousness is conscience. Conscienceless
theater is anti-theater. Conscienceless theater tries to undo
the transformation of our dreams by tearing off what seems
to be their civil mask, and recklessly presenting our solitary
consciousness to the prying eyes of strangers. Conscienceless, unmasking, theater is pornographic theater. It demands
of its spectators that they publicly unmask and share all their
dreams—the more private the better. But we have seen the
consequences of the attempt to unmask, and those conse-
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quences can be expected to occur if unmasking theater is not
checked: waking life will become a nightmare. Dionysus the
god of theater reminds us that conscience, the mask of consciousness, is also its nurturer and its guardian.
Dionysus is, therefore, the guardian deity of civilized
consciousness. His dual realm is the underworld of solitary
dreaming together with the portion of it that can be seen in
civil consciousness. Human beings see the light of day only
when they are masked. It is only as masked that we humans
see the true light of day. Unmasked, we live in nightmare.
Without our masks, we are as insubstantial as dreams; we are
phantoms whose thinness is proved by the fact that they cannot withstand the light of day. Ultimately, then, the mask of
Dionysus is the mask of conscience, the mask that allows
some of our dreaming visions to be seen communally in the
light of day. Dionysus, finally, is the god of that which is
properly visible, the god of the properly shared, the god of
civility.
NOTES
1. Unfortunately, the source of this quotation—most probably one of
Klein’s many lectures delivered at St. John’s College—is not known.
2. The stories of the Greek Gods are described in exhaustive detail in
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (New York: Penguin, 1960).
3. Heraclitus, Fragment 15. See Heraclitus, Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981),
17.
4. Walter Otto, Dionysos: Mythos und Kultus (Klostermann: Frankfurt
am Main, 1933). References in these notes will be to the English translation by Robert B. Palmer, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965).
5. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf (1848-1931) was an expert on the
literature of ancient Greece. He championed the notion that surviving an-
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cient manuscripts, besides being objects of literary history, could also be
mined for biographical, political, and general historical information.
6. Otto, Dionysus, 8.
7. Otto, Dionysus, 8-9.
8. Hermann Usener (1834-1905) was a philologist and historian of religion, and a teacher of Wilamowitz. The statement made here seems to be
Wilamowitz’s version of something Usener used to say, not a quotation
from a publication.
9. Otto, Dionysus, 9-11.
10. Otto, Dionysus, 11.
11. See, for instance, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.15,
and Aristophanes, Acharnians, 1076.
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Fields and Particles and Being
Dylan Casey
1 Introduction
Particles and fields, broadly speaking, describe two basic accounts of what the world is made of. The particle is the quintessential ball, grain of sand, or individual. It contains the
notion of individuation—the very criterion of distinguishing
this from that. The field is an expanse, a continuous entity
that occupies space, has shape, contour, and variation, but
these qualities are always reflected back onto the field itself.
The rolling, wheat-covered hills comprise a field. These two
options correspond to two claims about the world in general:
that it is discrete, like particles, or continuous, like fields. As
with all good arguments, there are respectable proponents
on both sides, each offering a little twist on the common
theme.
For example, Lucretius, on the face of it, is a particle
guy. Accordingly, he writes:
All nature, then, as it is in itself, consists of two things;
for there are bodies and the void in which they are located
and through which they move in different directions.1
The world is full of a variety of fundamental particles zipping around in an otherwise empty container, colliding with
one another making all that we see. I should mention that
there is the possibility of intrinsic self-motion—the
swerve—of these particles (or at least one of them) in addition to the motion imparted by collisions, but that would lead
to a different lecture.
Dylan Casey is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture
was originally delivered on 22 April 2011 as part of Mr. Casey’s tenure
as the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in Modern
Thought. It has been modified slightly for publication.
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Newton, more or less, is also a particle guy. For him, light
is corpuscular—a view that might be considered prescient
given the photonic understanding of light that appeared over
two centuries following his work. The action-at-a-distance
interpretation of his gravitational theory also implies a particle
view of the world in which each particle acts on the others,
not just through collision, but also directly and instantaneously. In the end, action at a distance is a refinement of the
Lucretian world of colliding particles to account for remote
actions like magnetism and gravity.
I should note that Newton had grave misgivings about action at a distance:
That one body may act upon another at a distance through
a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and
through which their action and force may be conveyed
from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent
faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.2
Roughly in the field camp, Descartes gives us the plenum.
He insists that the world be full and continuous. There are no
essential entities, but rather amorphous extension combined
with swirling vortices. Descartes expected the world to be a
self-contained whole—motion and extension together—
though he might have conceded that the ball needs to start
rolling at some point.
Also standing in the field camp, in his own way, is Leibniz. His world is full as well, but his monads are discrete, essential entities colliding in a motion ultimately governed from
the outside by God. While agreeing with Descartes about the
necessary fullness of the world, Leibniz takes issue with
Descartes’s inability to account for individuation. The monads go some way toward keeping the notion of individual entities in a full world.
Obviously, the preceding accounts are just sketches of the
ideas of the authors. And I do not intend to give the impres-
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sion that all particle views and all field views are the same.
They’re not. But all particle views emphasize certain features
and address certain questions in common, as do all field
views. For the particle guys, the emphasis is on distinction
and difference. Their ultimate standpoint is that there must
be, somewhere, essential differences that are ineradicable,
maybe even eternal. There is something naturally attractive
about this view. One of the manifest features of the world is
the distinction between this and that. The individuation that
underlies the simple act of counting presumes boundaries between things as a precondition for counting them. Furthermore, we break up individual things into smaller individuals
all the time, and many of them have natural boundaries. Like
a ball or a grain of sand, such things maintain their integrity
over time. Extrapolating to smaller pieces and to elementary
particles is a straightforward exercise of the intellect: the
smallest things ought to embody (or even exemplify) the distinctions that are manifest to us everyday.
If individuation is a common feature of particle views,
then the void is a common problem. The void seems to be
an amorphous nothing that functions as a container for
everything that exists—and, of course, speaking of nothing
is difficult. Similarly, the genuine separation of individual
entities that characterizes particle theories gives rise to the
problem of action at a distance. There are certainly phenomena, like magnetism, in which it is difficult to explain how
separated individuals interact with one another when action
between those individuals isn’t easily attributable to simple
collision. If you dispense with the void, you are left asking
what fills it up.
For the field guys like Descartes and Leibniz, the emphasis is on wholeness and continuity—on the fullness and completeness of the universe. This emphasis on oneness doesn’t
seem incidental. Rather, it seems fundamental to scientific
activity to assume a whole with respect to which measure-
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ments are made. For measuring to work at all, one needs a
whole. Once the whole is assumed, however, the problem of
distinction and identity is ever-present. One is left wondering
about the cause of differences between individuals, or questioning whether such differences aren’t necessarily illusions.
This is particularly true of Leibniz. By filling the universe
with monads, he creates the appearance of individuality that
is characteristic of the particle view. Since the monads fill the
world, it seems that it might be possible to sidestep the void.
But in the end, the monads form a whole in which their independence is utterly illusory. Rather, each monad is a mirror
of the whole universe through its internal connection with
everything else in the universe.
Here is an image of a physical system that highlights
these problems and tensions: two conducting spheres, each
hanging from a string, each holding some net negative
charge. Since like charges repel and the two spheres are relatively close to one another, they push each other away. We
can tell this is happening because the strings from which the
spheres hang are neither parallel nor plumb, but angled away
from each other. If we push on one of the spheres, we see the
other move away, and if we move one sphere around, the
other moves as well. Now this is not an everyday sort of observation. We don’t usually have charged spheres hanging
around near us. But, it isn’t difficult to arrange and, nowadays, isn’t likely to surprise many people. It’s so easy, in fact,
that we do very similar demonstrations in our Junior Laboratory classes with pith balls hanging from threads. An initial
account of this phenomenon might go like this: charges exert
electromagnetic force on each other and, since the charges
are confined to the spheres, that force overcomes the uniform
downward tendency of the spheres due to gravitation. The
relative angle of the strings reflects the net force acting on
the spheres.
This system of hanging charged bodies incorporates the
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most important questions about fields and particles, about
wholes and parts, about the continuous and the discrete. What
is happening between these spheres? This is, in short, the
field question. Second, how do I understand these spheres
themselves? This is, in short, the particle question.
2 Classical Fields
Although Descartes and Leibniz laid the foundations for field
theory with their emphasis on continuity and the fullness of
the universe, it was the work of Michael Faraday that marked
the beginning of our modern notion of the field. During his
research into the nature of electricity and magnetism, he
coined the term field to refer to the interstitial action between
charged parts of matter and between magnetized parts of matter. In his experiments he had located and measured charges,
confirmed the discreteness of charge, and demonstrated that
changing magnetic forces induce electric currents in nearby
wires. These electric and magnetic forces could penetrate
matter and persist in a vacuum. The effects of charges on one
another, as well as the effects of magnetism and electromagnetic induction, seemed like instances of action at a distance,
and all of them could be described by contemporary mathematical formulations.
Faraday didn’t buy it. For him, something had to travel
between the charges and between the magnetic poles. Ultimately, the world had to be full, and action couldn’t happen
without touching. Although one might call this a metaphysical predisposition on Faraday’s part, he nevertheless searched
tirelessly for the smoking gun that would reveal the presence
of a field as the medium through which separated pieces of
charged matter could touch. First of all, he considered the
time required for electrical action to occur as evidence of the
presence of a field. Using a very long wire, he could measure
how long it took for electricity to travel through a circuit. The
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fact that such action was measurably non-instantaneous revealed that there was a moment when the action of one
charged particle was “emitted” but not yet felt by another
charge. If the whole long electrical interaction takes any time
at all, the smallest communication of action must also take
time. At some moment, therefore, the action was somewhere
in between the two charges.
For Faraday, this amounted to direct evidence against an
action-at-a-distance account of electrical and magnetic force.
The action between the charges must be contained within a
field, within a continuous entity that was not confined by a
particle of matter. The action of one charge on another had
to occur through time and through space, of course, but it
needn’t itself be particle-like in nature. By hypothesizing the
existence of the field, Faraday imagined a new type of substance in the world.
In holding this view, Faraday put himself at odds with a
well established camp of believers in action at a distance who
denied the necessity of a continuity of action from here to
there. In their minds, each bit of charge acted directly on
every other bit of charge. This notion was similar to Newton's
account of gravity, in which each bit of matter exerted an instantaneous gravitational pull on every other bit of matter,
with the strength of that force decreasing as the square of the
distance between the bits.
(As an aside—and this probably reveals my own disposition on the subject—I would note that the sensitivity to distance in action-at-a-distance theories is puzzling at the outset,
if action is supposed to take place entirely between one particle and another. How do the particles sense the distance between them in order to regulate the force? Even if the
information took no time to propagate, which creates a new
problem concerning instantaneous transmission of anything,
this sort of action at a distance still requires a radical sensitivity of each part to the global arrangement. It cannot be the
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case that the action is determined by only the two bits in
which we happen to be interested; each part must know
where every other part is within a larger context. In a funny
way, action at a distance presumes a radical wholeness of all
things due to the instantaneous activity of the putative parts
upon each other.)
Faraday’s field idea reaches fruition in James Clerk
Maxwell’s reformulation that is eventually embodied in his
equations for the electromagnetic field. Maxwell adds mathematical clarity and refinement to Faraday’s initial notions
of the field. Among his greatest clarifications was rendering
Faraday’s field as a mathematical quantity whose value depends upon spatial locations. This is how the field is continuous: it has a value at all points in space. Temperature is a
good and typical example of a field. Each point in the room
has a temperature and the mathematical function in three spatial directions that describes the temperature is called the temperature field.
Maxwell’s account of electromagnetism invokes electrical and magnetic fields that persist throughout all space. If
we return to our two hanging charged spheres, Maxwell
would say that there is an electrostatic field—electrostatic
because we don’t have to account for any magnetism in this
system—between the two spheres and that the field is described by a field strength at each point between the spheres.
It’s worth noting that the mathematical form of an electrostatic field is richer and more complicated than a temperature
field. For instance, the electrostatic field is represented mathematically at each point in between the spheres by three components corresponding to the field strength in each of three
spatial directions. And each of those components depends on
three coordinates of position as well. That makes it what is
called a vector field, but it’s still a field, which is to say, an
extended whole in between two things. (The simpler temperature field would be called a scalar field, since each point is
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represented by a number and not a vector.)
Following Maxwell, we can refine the system of our
hanging spheres in this way: The spheres are aggregates of
charge and the force between them is the action of a connecting electromagnetic field. Each charge is the source of an
electromagnetic field that pushes the other. In this way of seeing things, the world consists of particles floating on an ether
sea in which the motions of the particles touch off waves of
force that act on other particles.
This, in large part, is the ontology of classical fields: there
are, on the one hand, particles that are sources and recipients
of disturbance, and, on the other hand, fields which communicate the disturbance between the sources. And one of the
most amazing aspects of Maxwell’s theory is the consequence that these disturbances become the manifestation of
light. Light itself is revealed as electromagnetic action born
out of the motion of charges.
This unifying character of the field, its ability to communicate action between charges, was a wonder to Maxwell.
Here is just a taste of his enthusiasm from his article “On Action at a Distance”:
The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no
longer be regarded as waste places in the universe, which
the Creator has not seen fit to fill with the symbols of the
manifold order of His kingdom. We shall find them to be
already full of this wonderful medium; so full, that no
human power can remove it from the smallest portion of
space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity. It extends unbroken from star to star; and when a
molecule of hydrogen vibrates in the dog-star, the
medium receives the impulses of these vibrations; and
after carrying them in its immense bosom for three years,
delivers them in due course, regular order, and full tale
into the spectroscope of Mr. Huggins, at Tulse Hill.3
Now stipulating a field as a new kind of entity that acts
as the mediator of action between particles doesn’t settle the
discreteness/continuity problem. What is a field anyway? Is
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it like water connecting one shore to another in such a way
that the waves from a dropped stone lap upon the other side,
dislodging stones there? This is exactly the sort of image that
comes to mind when we think about point charges moving
in the continuous field that propagates vibrations at the speed
of light. If this is the case, then what is the field made of?
Does it have parts, as water surely does? Is it composed of
particles? If it is, what holds those particles together? Some
of these questions arise from the very notion of extension. It
is difficult to see how any extended thing can exist without
being made up of “sub-things.” Any successful account of
things will need to address these questions about extension
and its sub-structure.
On the other hand, what is a particle? Where are its
boundaries? How is it distinguished from the force field of
which it is the source? Where would one cross from charge
to field? These questions of crossing and transformation from
one thing to another are at the root of discreteness, difference,
and individuality. Looking for an elementary particle is looking for a fundamental “this” that is clearly distinguishable
from some different “that.”
Behind all these questions lurk the nagging problems I
mentioned at the outset: the problems associated with the attempt to come to terms with the distinctions between continuity and discreteness. A satisfying understanding of fields
and particles ought to reveal some resolution of the tensions
between these two accounts of world. To obviate the need for
the void, we need a full universe. To articulate identity, we
need ways of isolating individuals from the whole while
maintaining connections so that we still have a whole.
Maxwell’s field theory is looks like marbles and goo: the particles—the marbles—are point sources of mass and charge;
the field—the goo—sticks all the particles together, communicating their separate actions to one another.
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3 Quantum Field Theory
While Faraday and Maxwell pioneered the notion of the field,
its ultimate expression is found in modern quantum field theory, which represents our best current account of the structure
of all matter. This account is called the Standard Model. If
the name evokes for you a simultaneous sense of elevation
and dreariness, you feel much the same way as most particle
physicists, for whom the Standard Model is both a triumph
and an affliction.
In the Standard Model, the world contains elementary
particles like electrons, neutrinos, and up quarks, which interact with one another by means of four forces: the electromagnetic force, which holds together everything from atoms
to asteroids, and is the mediator of all chemical interactions;
the strong force, which holds together the nuclei of atoms;
the weak force, which doesn’t hold together anything, but mediates some forms of radioactive decay; and the gravitational
force, which holds together planets, stars, solar systems,
galaxies, and so on. Gravitation doesn’t really fit in the Standard Model very well right now. This is regarded as an acceptable dilemma, because particle physicists still need jobs
in this struggling economy.
The Standard Model contains sub-theories associated
with each of the forces. The part dealing only with electromagnetism is called QED, an acronym for “quantum electrodynamics.” The part dealing with the strong force is called
QCD, for “quantum chromodynamics.” The part dealing with
the weak force is an extension of QED called the “electroweak” theory. All of these are quantum field theories and
anytime you hear or read things like “quark,” “lepton,”
“QED,” “W and Z Boson,” or “Higgs Boson” you’ve wandered into the land of quantum field theory.
It is completely uncontroversial that quantum field theories are the most successful accounts ever devised about the
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structure of the world. By “successful” I simply mean that
they are the most precise accounts verified by experiment.
Calculations of phenomena based on the Standard Model
agree more closely with our best measurements than any
other physical theories that we have. The best example of this
is the value of something called “the fine-structure constant,”
which is a number that characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions. The quantum-theoretical value of this
number agrees with the physical measurement to 10 decimal
places—better than one part in one billion. As an experimentalist, I would like to point out that it is a pretty wicked measurement that has an uncertainty of one part in a billion!
Now, quantum field theory is kind of a crazy thing to try
to cover in my remaining time. To do so succinctly, I would
have to present you with some challenging, but extremely
beautiful mathematics. But rather than try your patience in
that way, I’ll attempt to describe as much of the theory as I
can in plain English. I’ve provided a short annotated bibliography for those of you who would like to study some of the
details in more depth.
For now, I’m going to try to present some of the salient
points of quantum field theory and talk a bit about what it requires us to think about the world. So let’s begin with this
question: What do we buy when we buy a quantum field theory?
3.1 Relativity and Quantum Mechanics
First and foremost, quantum field theory is a complete synthesis of special relativity and quantum mechanics that attempts to account for the physics of the entire universe.
Because it incorporates special relativity, quantum field theory is “relativistically invariant,” which means that all the results of all calculations remain unchanged under a Lorentz
transformation. This tells us that two identical experiments
will get the same results even if one lab was here on earth
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while the other was hurtling through space at nearly the speed
of light. A physicist would say “all the physics in two systems
is the same regardless of the relative speed between them.” For
our purposes, there are two salient consequences of this fact:
1. All positions and times are determined relative
to each other. There is no absolute now and then,
no absolute here and there. And there is no simultaneity.
2. Mass and motion are aspects of the same
thing—energy. Mass and motion can be converted
into each other and, together, they embody the
total energy of the system. Energy rules.
Quantum field theories also encapsulate all of the ideas
of quantum mechanics. Maxwell’s account of a world of
charges communicating motion through vibrations in a field
fails miserably in its attempts to account for the structure of
the atom. Quantum mechanics solves those problems, but it
entails certain consequences. For one thing, fundamental
quantities like energy and angular momentum are discrete,
which means that they come in little units that are the smallest
amounts possible; or, as the physicists say, these properties
are quantized. For another thing, certain quantities, like position and momentum, don’t admit of being determined simultaneously. (This is the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle). Third, the fundamental quantity in a quantum mechanical system is called a “state,” which has a configuration
that depends upon how it is selected. And fourth, all predictions are made in terms of likelihoods and probabilities—not
because we are making estimates about large numbers of objects like, for example, the number of molecules in a container of gas, but because nothing in the quantum world is
determinate. Probability is intrinsic and goes all the way
down to the states, which are themselves sums of a number
of possibilities.
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3.2 The Lagrangian and Minimization
In any serious discussion about quantum field theory you’ll
very quickly run into the term “Lagrangian.” Joseph Louis
Lagrange was an eighteenth-century mathematician who developed the calculus of variations, in which differential equations are solved by taking into account the possible
constraints on the internal parameters to determine a global
solution. In physics, the term “Lagrangian” refers to a mathematical relation describing the dynamics of a system. First,
you write an equation that describes the internal dynamics of
the system fully, and then you integrate it over the whole time
during which the system is in motion, thus producing an expression for the total action of the system. If you then minimize that expression (that is, find the least possible action
that the system could possibly have used to get from its starting state to its ending state), you produce a differential equation expressing that least possible action terms of the
Lagrangian. Classical mechanics and electrodynamics can be
formulated in terms of minimizing action in cases for which
the Lagrangian can be identified as the difference between
the system’s kinetic energy and its potential energy.
As an example, consider the path of a projectile under the
influence of gravity—a potato, perhaps, launched from a potato cannon. Such a contraption looks pretty much like a cannon made of PVC pipe. To load it, the potato is pushed down
the muzzle to the edge of the firing chamber. Propulsion is
provided by igniting aerosol hair spray in the combustion
chamber using a sparking device. (I, myself, through trial and
error, have found that Aquanet® provides the biggest kick
per dose by far.) The kinetic energy of the potato is given by
its mass and speed, the latter of which depends upon position
and time. The potential energy of the potato is given by its
mass, the constant force of gravity, and its height, which also
depends upon position and time. The Lagrangian function
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would be the difference between the function for kinetic energy and the function for potential energy. Now, in principle
there are many possible paths between the starting point and
the landing point for the potato, each with its own action. For
instance, it could travel in a parabola. Or, it could fly up for
a while and do a few loop-the-loops before landing. Each of
these paths has an associated action given by adding up the
difference between the kinetic energy and the potential energy at all the points along the path. In the end, the path corresponding to the physical path—the path actually traced out
by the potato—is the one with the least total action.
One can perform a similar calculation in classical electrodynamics considering the motion and configuration of
charged spheres or even of electrons. Considering their total
kinetic and potential energies, the principle of least action
stipulates that their configurations and motions will always
be such that the action is minimized. All of the dynamics of
the system is contained in the Lagrangian, and all calculations
regarding the system would ultimately go back to that Lagrangian. Minimizing the action allows us to pick out which
arrangement of dynamics will be followed by actual physical
objects.
In quantum field theory, there are two important twists
on this classical principle. First, the Lagrangian is not in any
simple way the difference between the kinetic energy and the
potential energy; it is mathematically much more complicated
than that. Second, the dependent quantities are field configurations, not paths. In classical formulations the minimization
of the action is obtained by considering different paths
through spacetime, as in my potato example. In quantum field
theory, the minimization is obtained by considering different
field arrangements.
I don't have time to say more about least action here. But
I do want to emphasize that the Lagrangian is the key to the
physics of any system. For instance, when physicists speak
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of invariances under transformation (as they do in regard to
special relativity), they are implicitly saying, “the Lagrangian
doesn’t change under that transformation.” This amounts to
the claim that the Lagrangian contains all possible information about the system. In other words, the Lagrangian “holds
all the physics.”
3.3 Quantum Fields
So, as a structural matter, when you buy quantum field theory,
you are buying quantum mechanics, special relativity, and
least-action principles formulated in terms of a Lagrangian
function. Now for the fields. In quantum field theory, all of
the fundamental entities are space-permeating fields which
are themselves physically manifest as discrete quanta. These
fields is not made of anything else. They are their own entities, just as the fields of Maxwell and Faraday were their own
entities. The quanta of these fields are the so-called elementary particles, but the fields are prior to, and necessary for,
the existence of the particles. The particles are resonances,
modes of the field. Crudely put, the particles are vibrations.
All quantum mechanical entities are vibrations.
You can never touch a quantum field per se—it becomes
manifest only when there is a discrete interaction. Bumping
up against a quantum field means bumping up against a quantum of that field. Now there are two classes of fields—matter
fields and interaction fields, the latter also known as force
fields. A good example of an interaction field is the electromagnetic field, whose quanta are photons of light. A good example of a matter field is an electron field, whose quanta
are—you guessed it—electrons. A less familiar example of
an interaction field would be the strong nuclear field, whose
quanta are gluons (eight of them) that connect to quark fields
whose quanta are up and down quarks.
The earlier image of the two charged spheres can be refined a bit to reflect these fields. In Maxwell’s case, each
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sphere is a bundle of charge and the force that angles the support strings is communicated by the electromagnetic field
joining the charges. In the electron field, for instance, each
sphere is rendered as an individual electron, itself a quantum
of an electron field, and the electromagnetic force between
the two electrons is rendered as a photon, the quantum of the
electromagnetic field. The angle of the strings represents the
exchange of photons between the electrons.
Now, this is a bit of a conundrum, and you may well feel
like I’ve pulled a fast one. It’s quantum field theory, after all,
not quantum particle theory. How exactly did this particlerabbit get pulled out of that field-hat? The short answer (and
really the long answer too) is that the particles and fields
come together. In a quantum field, the quanta, the particles,
are the manifestation of the fields. There is no getting around
this stipulation in quantum field theory. The particles arise
out of the quantization of the field. The field holds all the
possibilities—that is to say, all the energy—for the particles.
The particles are the manifestation of the field. In this
way quantum field theory makes a choice that Maxwell’s
field theory does not. Maxwell’s theory has point sources that
are distinct from fields—charges that are independent of the
forces between them. In quantum field theory there is no distinction of this sort between source and force. Both are rooted
in continuous fields which become manifest as particles.
There are a few features of quantum fields that are worth
emphasizing:
1. The particle types associated with each field are
the same everywhere. All electrons, for instance,
are the same, because they are all quanta of the
same field.
2. The field endures, but particles can come and
go, transforming one into the other. There are constraints to the transformations, but, as a general
rule, “anything that can happen, will happen.” As
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in ordinary quantum mechanics, probabilities for
transformations can be assigned, but any given
transformation is undetermined. I can tell you the
possible final states for the decay of a muon and
on average how long it will take to decay, but I
can't tell you when it will happen. No one can.
The available possibilities for transformation
increase dramatically with increased energy. As a
typical example: colliding a high-speed (and therefore high-energy) electron and positron, one might
easily end up with showers of particles containing
ten pi mesons, a proton, and an antiproton.4 Together, those particles weigh thirty-thousand times
more than the original electron and positron. So
mass is not conserved, but rearranged with the
available energy. This is a direct consequence of
special relativity.
Such a collision is also a genuine transformation. The particles that resulted from the collision
of the electron and the positron just mentioned
were not hidden inside the electron and the
positron, just waiting to be unleashed by the force
of the collision. The electron and positron disappear and the available energy in the fields becomes manifest as the particles of the final state. I
also can’t tell you which final state particles will
appear in a given collision any more than I can tell
you when a muon will decay. The best I can do is
outline the possibilities.
A corollary is that impossible transformations
don’t happen. For all experimental purposes, the
muon is a heavy electron—all of its quantum numbers are the same as an electron, except that it’s
two hundred times heavier. And, it spontaneously
decays into an electron plus some other particles.
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The electron never decays. It is the end of the line.
The only account of this I know is that there is no
where for the electron to go, because there is no
smaller package in which energy prefers to manifest itself.
3. The quanta don’t constitute the field. The field
is not made up of quanta. The electromagnetic
field does not contain photons. It is not a bag of
marbles, nor a stack of blocks. The field has its
own motions, its own resonances, and these are
photons of various energies. Physicists use the
analogy of the vibrating string to try to explain this
fact: Just as a vibrating string has its overlapping
series of normal modes, the up quark, the down
quark, and the Z boson are all resonances in an underlying, undulating field.
4. For quantum fields, all interactions are pointlike, occurring at a specific point in space-time and
involving specific combinations of field quanta. In
other words, all interactions are discrete. Every interaction is broken down into individual interactions between individual quanta. And these quanta
are manifestations of the energy present in the underlying continuous field.
4 Interactions and Local Symmetry
So, what’s the big picture? We have a world filled with fields,
all of which are manifest only by particles, all interacting with
one another. But what does “interaction” mean? How are
these fields/particles related to their interactions? Considering
this brings us to the notion of invariance, the notion that despite the appearance of change, things stay the same. Physicists apply invariances by insisting that “the physics” of a
system doesn’t change under certain transformations. The use
of invariances (and the related notion of conservation) has a
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long history in physics, and in the sciences generally. One
might consider the story of physics as the search for the true
invariances within the world.
This is the idea that Huygens leverages in “Motions of
Colliding Bodies,” which we read here at St. John’s in the
Junior Laboratory. In that work, Huygens considers two balls
colliding with one another, and he works out the general kinematics of hard collisions. Here is the beginning of the proof
of his first proposition. (I’ve made minor edits that obviate
the mathematical proportions and variables):
Figure from Proposition 1 of Huygens’s
Motion of Colliding Bodies
Imagine that a boat near a bank is carried along by the
current, so close to the bank that a passenger standing in
it can stretch out his hand to a friend standing on the
bank. Let the passenger hold in his hands . . . two equal
bodies . . . suspended on strings, and . . . by bringing together his two hands with equal motions, understood in
relation to himself and the boat, until they touch, he thus
makes the two balls collide with equal speeds. The balls,
therefore, must necessarily rebound from their mutual
contact with equal speeds . . . in relation to the passenger
and the boat. Moreover, suppose that in the same time
the boat is carried to the left with . . . the same speed with
which the left hand . . . was carried toward the right. It is
therefore clear that the passengers [left] hand has remained motionless in relation to the bank and to his
friend, but that [his right hand], in relation to the same
friend was moved with [double the] speed. . . . Therefore,
if the friend on the bank is supposed to have grasped,
with his own [right hand], the passengers [left hand], together with the end of the string which supports [one
ball], but with his other [left hand] the passengers [right
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hand], which holds the string from which [the other ball]
hangs, it is apparent that while the passenger makes [the
two] balls strike one another with a speed equal in relation to himself and the boat, the friend on the bank, in
the same time, shoved [one ball against the other ball,
one at rest and the other with a speed double that of the
boat] in relation to the bank and to himself. And it is evident, however, that as for the passenger, who, as was
said, makes the two balls move, it makes no difference
that his friend on the bank has taken his hands and the
ends of the strings, since he only accompanies their
movement and doesn’t hinder them at all. For the same
reason, the friend on the bank who makes [one ball]
move toward the [motionless ball] is not disturbed at all
by the fact that the passenger has joined hands with him.5
Huygens determines the laws of collision by requiring
that the collision itself remain the same, even if it may seem
different to different viewers. Even though different viewers
would obtain different results for the speeds and directions
of the colliding bodies, Huygens presumes that all such views
would be ultimately commensurable, and that they could be
transformed into one another if we know the parameters of
the transformation. Indeed, this difference is plain, since the
passenger on the boat moves his arms at the same speed,
while his friend on the shore keeps one arm still and the other
rushes along at twice the speed of the boat. The leverage
Huygens has in this analysis is the presumption that the collision for the passenger and the collision for his shore-bound
friend are one and the same; indeed, it certainly seems that
there is only one collision, not two. Huygens reinforces our
presumption about this by having them touch hands in such
a way that the hands are in the same place, with the same motion, but neither pair disturbs the other. The difference in relative speed between the observers—that is, between the
passenger and his friend on the shore—cannot make a genuine difference to the physical laws involved, because then
there would be two collisions rather than one. Any distinction
between the two observers must be accounted for by a trans-
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formation that may render the component details different,
but must leave the collision alone. Huygens’s assumption of
invariance preserves the identity of the collision as a single
event, and this identity consists of a single interaction in a
particular place at a particular time.
The sort of leverage Huygens employs is very powerful
and is used over and over in physics. As an intellectual activity, it presumes that, in some articulable way, the world is
unchanging and that distinctions are variations that fill up that
unchanging whole. This is sensible and reasonable. In fact,
it is rational in an explicit way. The shapes of the parts and
the distinctions among them are measured with respect to the
whole. Physics articulates difference by means of ratio, that
is, by means of comparison. One might well say that the root
activity of all physics is the art of comparison: the physicist
hunts for invariances in order to articulate distinctions that
make a genuine difference.
There are many sorts of invariances in physics. For instance, there is invariance with respect to translations in location or time. The criterion of such an invariance is that the
equation describing the dynamics of the system, namely, the
Lagrangian, is unchanged after some transformation. If we
say, to give an example, “the physics of this system is invariant with respect to translations in location,” we mean that if
any increment is added to the variable for location in the Lagrangian, when we work out the algebra, the new Lagrangian
simplifies back into the original one.
Now this kind of invariance has a very special consequence. If a Lagrangian has an invariance, there is an associated conserved quantity and vice versa. In other words, if the
physics has an invariance something is conserved, and if
something is conserved there is an invariance. So space-translation invariance (invariance with respect to increments in
spatial locations, also called space-translation symmetry) implies conservation of momentum. Time-translation invariance
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(invariance with respect to increments in time, also called
time-translation symmetry) implies conservation of energy.6
The reverse is also true: momentum conservation implies
space-translation symmetry and energy conservation implies
time-translation symmetry. Conservation principles turn out,
therefore, to indicate symmetries in the physical world. Momentum conservation points at a fundamental homogeneity
in the universe: here and there aren’t different from the perspective of physical laws. Similarly, energy conservation indicates the same thing about time: now and then aren’t
different from the standpoint of physical laws.
These symmetries are not restricted to kinematical quantities, like momentum, associated with the motion of physical
objects. They can also be associate with the state functions
of quantum field objects; that is to say, there can be internal
symmetries in the different quantum fields and in the particular quanta that belong to them. One such internal symmetry
is called phase symmetry. In quantum mechanics, all the
states of any system have an associated phase, because the
mathematical descriptions of the states are very complex
wave functions, and every wave has a phase. Now phase isn’t
a very complicated idea; it’s just the marker of a repeating
motion. Imagine sitting in a boat on a lake as a wave passes
underneath, lifting and lowering the boat (and you with it)
over and over. If you were next to a dock, you might go from
looking at the barnacles under the dock while the boat is in
the wave’s trough to looking over and across the dock at your
neighbor’s yacht while the boat is riding at the wave’s crest.
And you would repeat this up-and-down trip with every complete cycle of the wave beneath your boat. This repeated upand-down motion is circular in nature: you go up a certain
height from trough to crest, then down again through the
same distance, then up again, and so on. You could even track
your relative position on the wave by marking out your position on the up and down cycle on the face of a clock, so that
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one turn around the clock corresponds to one cycle of upand-down motion. Assigning your highest point above the
dock to the twelve-o’clock mark, you’d descend to dock level
at quarter past, bottom out at half past, ascend to dock level
again at quarter to, and return to your highest point again
when the hand returns to noon. (Notice that you can choose
any point in the up-and-down motion to be the start of the
phase. You can assign the twelve-o’clock mark to the lowest
point of the motion, or to the point that is level with the dock
if you wish. Your boat will always be back at the same place
when the hand goes all the way around.) These points on the
clock, as well as all those in between, mark your phase,
which is the clock position that corresponds to your height at
any moment within one cycle of the wave’s motion.
Now consider your neighbor’s yacht on the other side of
the dock. Assuming that the wave lifts your boat first, travels
under the dock, and then lifts your neighbor’s boat, his boat
will also rise and fall. And depending on the phase of each
boat—that is, depending on the location of each boat in the
wave’s cycle—the relative motion of the two boats will be
different. If the boats are in phase, then both of them will go
up and down together. If the boats are completely out of
phase, and your boat will be at its highest point when your
neighbor’s is at its lowest point.
Quantum states are a bit like these boats, each moving up
and down, each having its own phase, akin to a hand sweeping around the face of a clock. (As a technical matter, this
phase is part of the complex number-value of a quantum mechanical wave function.) And, just as the starting point of the
phase doesn’t matter for the boats, it also doesn’t matter for
the quantum state. No measurement can reveal the absolute
value of the phase. In the end, only differences in phase between systems can ever be revealed experimentally. This is
akin to being able to know only the difference in the relative
heights of your boat and your neighbor’s, but not being able
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to know his height or your height absolutely. (Presumably,
this means that there is no reference point analogous to “sea
level” in the world of quantum fields. On the other hand, we
could be wrong in thinking that “sea level” is a useful reference point.)
Now, let’s consider some possible symmetries associated
with phase. One possibility would be to demand that physics
doesn’t change if all the phases in the whole universe are
modified by the same amount. This amounts to saying that
the results of my experiments won’t change if every internal
clock is modified by the same amount. Imagine moving all
the start times for all the clocks by the same amount. (This
is done mathematically by multiplying every state by the
same value.) Such a property would be a global symmetry
that reflected a global invariance. Global symmetry (or
global invariance; we will use the terms interchangeably,
since one implies the other) is good because it establishes a
closed system. For instance, it would be very nice if charge
were globally invariant: that would mean that charge is conserved, and that would be reflected in no net change of
charge in the universe at all. Conversely, global invariance
is bad because the closed system that it establishes is necessarily the entire universe, not just the one point in the universe where an interaction occurs. Global invariance
over-constrains the physics by tying the activity of the system at any given point to the activities happening at all other
points; it implies that every point in the universe is instantaneously sensitive to all the others. The problem with global
invariance is that the arbitrariness of the phase for each state
isn’t preserved; that is, it doesn’t allow me to arbitrarily decide where to start my phase clock. Under global invariance,
I am able to set the clock arbitrarily for one state, but doing
so fixes the phase for all other states—instantaneously,
everywhere. This is just the kind of action at a distance to
which Faraday objected, because it makes the entire the uni-
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verse one gigantic causal connection.
A better alternative, which neither violates special relativity nor implies action at a distance, is local invariance or
local symmetry. Mathematically, this means that the physics
doesn’t change if states are modified depending on their position in space-time. On the one hand, local invariance is an
even stronger restriction than global invariance, because we
are requiring the physics to be the same regardless of location—something that global invariance does not require. On
the other hand, local invariance liberates states from the
tyranny of the whole universe, subjecting them instead to the
less all-encompassing tyranny of their space-time locations.
Being tied to conservation, invariance is a whole-defining
or system-defining feature. Conserving momentum and energy, for instance, is a fundamental criterion for having a
closed system at all. A ball rolling across a table slows down
and stops due to friction. Such a system is non-conservative—the momentum at the beginning is not equal to the momentum at the end. Friction is like a sinkhole into which
flows all the energy and momentum of the ball. In the end,
non-conservative systems leak. The most basic ambition of
fundamental physics is an account of the world with no leaking. Any description of a fundamental system will need to
exhibit global invariance as a precondition for being satisfactory, but it’s really too coarse a requirement because it forces
us to look at the whole universe every time we want to look
at an interaction. Local invariance actually does more for us,
because it implies integrity in the parts that make up the
whole, and it requires a whole system at each space-time
point.
Now you don’t get local symmetry requirements for nothing; there are consequences to be met. To illustrate them,
consider a single free electron. Such a particle would be one
quantum of an electron field. It would be characterized by
having a particular momentum and energy. As a quantum
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state, this electron can have any phase at all—the hand on the
clock can be at any location. Now, stipulating global phase
invariance implies that the charge of this electron is conserved in the universe. And since my system has only one
charge, my physics will be constrained always to have a total
of one net charge in the universe. Now, if you go through the
mathematics, you'll find that the Lagrangian for the free election, which determines its physics, won’t be invariant under
a local phase transformation—that is, the physics won’t exhibit local symmetry. However, you can make the system be
locally invariant by adding two terms to the Lagrangian, one
term that corresponds to the electromagnetic field and its
quantum, the photon, and another term that corresponds to
the point coupling between the two fields. The upshot is that
making phase locally invariant requires that there be both
electrons and photons—and consequently both electron fields
and electromagnetic fields—in the world, together with all
their mutual interactions.
This sort of local phase symmetry is the underlying feature of all the quantum field theories comprising the Standard
Model. Indeed, each force is associated directly with an underlying local symmetry that individuates both the quanta of
the matter fields and the quanta of the force fields and joins
them in a local interaction. Local symmetry operates much
like Huygens’s assumption that there is a single collision to
which the parts can be related: the interactions among field
quanta become the primary source of connection and unification. So the electron and photon always and only come together as a single interaction called a vertex. This example
belongs to the theory of quantum electrodynamics—the oldest of the quantum field theories. The other parts of the Standard Model include different interactions. QCD has
quark-gluon vertices, electroweak theory has neutrino-W
boson vertices. Each kind of vertex is characteristic of the
type of interaction.
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This move from global to local invariance makes quantum field theories philosophically satisfying in a way that
older physical theories are not. As I’ve said, part of the problem with global invariance is that it smacks of action at a distance and feels like an imposed constraint. Such an invariance
amounts to a box for the activity inside, a box that is affected
in no way by the motions inside it. In this containerized
world, the problems of relating parts and wholes never come
up. Generating these boxes in order to gain leverage on understanding physical systems has long been a feature of fundamental physics. On the other hand, part of the intellectual
trajectory of fundamental physics has been to search immediately for ways to remove external constraints once they
have been characterized. This describes the reductionist activity of physics, epitomized by looking for new particles beneath the peeled-back skin of the current crop of fundamental
particles. First there were molecules, then atoms, then electrons and nuclei, then protons and neutrons, and now there
are quarks—and we’re just waiting for the next step down in
size.
Here lies the central difficulty of any kind of foundationalism: as we uncover the foundations we also experience the
disquieting realization that the foundations must rest on
something else. The solution to this problem, both physically
and philosophically, is to sort out a whole that is internally
constrained so as to allow individuation; to show how the internal characteristics serve to constrain the thing as a thing.
This is the effect of local invariance. In this sort of foundation, there can be fundamental things that are not marble-like
particles, but intrinsically active quantum mechanical states.
Furthermore, any account of the fundamental things that
includes individuation must also account for the way a connection is made to the rest of the world. Locally symmetric
quantum field theories provide an example of an account in
which the part maintains integrity while also being inextri-
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cably embedded within the whole. The solution in quantum
field theory is that the individual parts must interact with one
another in forming a dynamic whole. We see in quantum field
theory the ontological reflection of the necessary characteristics of self-constraint: internal variability and the fundamental coexistence of things unified by their interactions.
Indeed, in the end, the truly fundamental thing may in fact
be the interaction.
The structure of quantum field theories with local invariance provides individuation through local symmetry requirements, but requires interactions between localities if we are
to preserve the invariances essential to wholeness. The invariances are conditions of intelligibility and conditions of
individuation; there is no distinction possible without wholeness. Wholeness without distinction is possible, though completely amorphous. Individuation, however, isn’t possible
without appealing to something within which the individual
lies. Quantum field theories incorporate this relation into their
very structure through local invariance.7
5 Things, fundamental and otherwise
Are electrons and electron fields fundamental entities? Is one
properly prior to the other? There are at least two ways to answer this question: an answer from within the account and answer from outside the account.
Let’s try to answer from within the account first. The activity of science is generally very pragmatic, and the starting
point is to assume the essential integrity of the objects at the
scale under consideration. Thus, the fact that all the atoms and
molecules in the baseball are constantly in motion does not
bear on considering the baseball a thing that has its own properties—its own weight, shape, and so on. At this scale of examination, the baseball is the integral thing, the individuated
thing, to which we pay attention. Why? The individuation of
the baseball is, among other things, manifest by invariances
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of its motion with respect to other things in the world. For the
physicist (and the baseball player), the baseball’s collective
motion individuates it. The physicist considers it a whole by
ignoring the possibility that there may be tiny pieces flying
off of it or being absorbed into it. If we looked at a larger scale,
say the motion of the earth, we would ignore the motion of
the baseball. Similarly, if we looked on a smaller scale, say
the motion of an electron around a hydrogen atom attached to
one of the organic molecules in the leather of the baseball, we
would ignore the motion of the whole ball. This notion of
scale and relative individuation is natural in physics, and is
part of the pragmatic nature of the activity. And when I say
that we ignore some of the motions, I don’t mean to imply that
we are choosing to make some sort of approximation for the
sake of convenience. I mean to say that ignoring such motions
is the same as looking for the invariances that are the signs of
actual things.
So answering the question What is fundamental? from
within quantum field theory yields this result: the fields and
the quanta are certainly elementary, and priority is given to
the fields, even though it is only as quanta that fields ever
manifest themselves.
Now let’s try to answer the question from outside of the
account. Here we have to wonder whether the inside answer
can’t be undermined by seeing the situation from a wider perspective. One way to adopt that perspective would be to revise
the question slightly: Are fields and particles really fundamental—as in “at the bottom of things”—or will the unitary electron of today’s physicists become a composite like a water
molecule for tomorrow’s physicists?
To the extent that electrons are simply smaller that water
molecules and are constituents in making, say, a hydrogen
atom, it is natural to consider electrons elementary in comparison to hydrogen atoms. In some ways, it’s the same as saying
that hydrogen atoms have electrons inside them, therefore
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electrons must be more elementary than hydrogen atoms. On
the other hand, the deep result of local symmetry in quantum
field theory is that the constituents and their interactions are
naturally and irrevocably coexistent as a condition for having
a coherent whole. Such a whole is now a coherent activity of
parts with internal invariances characteristic of those parts.
This criterion applies to water molecules, baseballs, and oak
trees as much as it does to electrons and photons, and this
makes us wonder whether the electron is really fundamental
in relation to the water molecule. The elementary bit of water
doesn’t naturally seem to be an electron, but rather a water
molecule. The action of the water arises out of the interactions
of its constituent parts, each of which has its own activity—
which is to say, a proper activity bound up with certain invariances. Furthermore, the characteristic sizes and distances of
interactions within liquid water are given by the water molecule, not by the electrons that make up that molecule. Indeed,
it isn’t at all clear that the integrity of the electron and the
water molecule—the feature by which I individuate them
from each other and call them different things—isn’t essentially the same. Each is a zone of stability surrounding amorphous activity. Distinction itself, particleness, arises out of this
amorphous activity in the form of stability of activity characterized by an insensitivity to internal activity.
The question of whether the electron has substructure in
the way that an atom has substructure is, as my undergraduate
advisor in physics said to me years ago, “a research project.”
For now, the electron is a best candidate for a fundamental or
elementary particle. But it cannot be regarded as a building
block, as something subsisting by itself that can be stacked
with others like it to construct something larger, like a brick.
On the contrary, quantum field theory tells us that electrons
are parts of a self-constrained world in which their individual
existence always arises out of, and within, a whole. There is
no “fundamental particle” apart from a “fundamental field.”
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NOTES
1. Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book I, lines 419-421.
2. Isaac Newton, letter to Richard Bently, 25 February 1693.
3. James Clerk Maxwell, “On Action at a Distance,” in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven, 2 vols. (Cambridge: At
the University Press, 1890), Vol. 2, 322.
4. This particular numerical example is borrowed from the beginning of
Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification
of Forces (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
5. The entire text is available online here:
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/texts/huygens/impact/huyimpct.html
6. This deep result is called Noether’s Theorem after the prolific German
mathematician Amalie Emmy Noether (1882-1935).
7. For the experts: I know that I’ve left out renormalization and that it
bears on the question of individuation. There is only so much I can fit
into such a small space.
Appendix:
Annotated Bibliography for Further Reading
I. J. R. Aitchison. “Nothing’s Plenty: The Vacuum in Quantum Field Theory.” Contemporary Physics 26 (1985): 333-391. A fine, detailed discussion of the vacuum in quantum field theory.
P. W. Anderson. “More is Different.” Science 177 (1972): 393-396. A famous article arguing that fundamental structure doesn’t correspond to
scale.
Sunny Auyang. How is Quantum Field Theory Possible? London: Oxford
University Press, 1995. A serious philosophical encounter with quantum
field theory.
William Berkson. Fields of Force: The Development of a World View
from Faraday to Einstein. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. A
history of the idea of the field, focussing on classical fields, with an attention to philosophical ideas.
I. J. R. Aitchison and A. J. G Hey. Gauge Theories in Particle Physics: A
Practical Introduction. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, 2012. A firstrate graduate-level quantum field theory text, focussed on the Standard
Model.
Robert B. Laughlin and David Pines. “The Theory of Everything.” Pro-
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ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (2000): 27-32. In line
with P. W. Anderson’s article and containing many physical examples.
Bruce Schumm. Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle
Physics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. A
thoughtful, detailed presentation of the Standard Model, emphasizing
symmetry issues.
Steven Weinberg. “The Search for Unity: Notes for a History of Quantum
Field Theory.” Daedalus 106.4 (1977):17-35. A excellent overview of the
problems and solutions in QFT, set in a historical progression.
Steven Weinberg. “Newtonianism, Reductionism, and the Art of Congressional Testimony.” Nature, 330 (1987):433-437. A discussion of what
is meant by “fundamental physics.”
Frank Wilczek. The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification
of Forces. New York: Basic Books, 2010. A popular science book, wellwritten, that emphasizes mass and QCD.
The articles by Anderson, Laughlin and Pines, and Weinberg’s “Newtonianism” are all included in the recent collection Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, ed. Mark A. Bedau and Paul
Humphreys. Boston: MIT Press, 2008.
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Miracles and Belief
Joseph Cohen
Is belief in miracles compatible with
a scientific understanding of the world?1
The idea for this lecture grew out of a philosophy tutorial in
which the assignment for one meeting was to read and discuss two philosophic arguments on the topic of miracles.
They were the chapter entitled “Miracles” in Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (1687) and the chapter
entitled “Of Miracles” in David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding (1748).
I asked the class to consider whether the arguments of
Spinoza and Hume constituted a refutation of the possibility
of miracles, and if so, in what way such a refutation might
affect a belief in divine providence, or religious belief in general.
The students found these questions provocative and challenging, but were also troubled and perplexed by them. Why
should the presumed impossibility of miracles occasion such
difficulties? I propose this suggestion.
Let us assume as an appropriate and accurate starting
point that miracles are understood to be: (1) phenomena
which are contrary to and cannot be explained by the established laws of nature; and (2) caused by the intentional acts
of a Divine Agent.
Since the existence of miracles implies the existence of a
God who is their cause, an argument against the possibility
Joseph Cohen is a Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered at St. John’s College in
Santa Fe, New Mexico on June 30, 2010. It has been revised slightly
for publication.
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of miracles further implies either the non-existence of this
God, or the absence in God of the attribute of providential
care and concern for particular individuals or peoples. It is
only by virtue of possessing this attribute that God would be
presumed to produce the intentional acts called miracles.
Therefore, to the extent that an argument against miracles is
persuasive, this would diminish the degree of certainty of a
belief in the existence of such a God or in God’s providential
care and concern.
Among the students who said they found persuasive and
worthy of acceptance the two philosophic arguments against
miracles, some volunteered that although they agreed that the
arguments were persuasive, they did not want to or were not
able to relinquish their belief in a providential God. Their
feelings and their faith committed them to this belief. Their
position seemed to be either that there was no real inconsistency in holding these apparently opposed convictions, or that
the inconsistency didn’t bother them.
The aim of this lecture is to explore further these questions and various responses to them. It has two parts: Part I:
Spinoza and Hume, and Part II: C. S. Lewis and Francis
Collins.
Part I: Spinoza and Hume
Spinoza
To place Spinoza’s discussion of miracles (Chapter 6) in the
context of the larger aims of his Treatise, it will be useful to
comment briefly on what precedes that discussion.
The peculiarly hyphenated title, Theological-Political
Treatise, makes us wonder what the connection of theology
and politics might be. On the title page, there is a subtitle that
summarizes Spinoza’s overall aim:
Containing some dissertations by which it is shown not
only that the freedom of philosophizing can be granted
while saving piety and the peace of the republic, but that it
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cannot be removed unless along with that very piety and
peace of the republic.
The Treatise is thus presented as a work of political philosophy, whose aim is to show how freedom, piety and peace
are necessarily interconnected within the framework of that
form of political organization known as a republic. Its argument as a whole can be divided into two parts, the theological
and the political. In order to achieve the aims of the political
part, Spinoza must first confront and overcome the claims of
the theologians and of the sacred texts from which they claim
their authority.
In the Preface, Spinoza reveals his motive for writing, describes and denounces the pervasive evils produced by superstition and prejudice, and sketches the main themes and plan
of organization of the Treatise.
The first sentence of the Preface, and hence of the Treatise,
declares:
If human beings could rule all their affairs with certain
counsel, or if fortune were always favorable to them, they
would not be bound by any superstition.2
With this, Spinoza launches a direct and sustained attack
against superstition, exposing its causes and tracing its pernicious effects. Superstition has its roots in fear (or dread)
and ignorance, joined with immoderate desires for the goods
of fortune and the incapacity of human beings to control either the turns of fortune or their own desires for her favors.
Being ignorant of the operation and order of Nature and fearful of supernatural powers, the people or their rulers place
their trust in those who claim to be able to interpret, and possibly to control, the course of events, whether determined by
fortune, or natural causes, or the will of the gods. Thus they
seek guidance from seers or prophets. In this way, superstition becomes associated with prophecy and religion.
Spinoza initially uses the examples of Alexander the
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Great and, closer to his own time, the empire of the Moslem
Turks, to highlight the pervasive and pernicious effects of
superstition. He then shifts the scene to the religious and political world dominated by Christianity. He declares he had
often wondered that those “who boast that they profess the
Christian religion—that is, love, gladness, peace, continence,
and faith toward all” should engage in such bitter hatred and
persecution of others. He finds “the cause of this evil” to be
the abuses arising from the admixture of religious belief and
political ambition, namely, the political abuse of religion and
the religious abuse of politics.
The Church has become an entrenched ecclesiastical and
political institution concerned with accumulation of honors,
privileges, and power, and “faith is now nothing else but
credulity and prejudice.” Reason is despised as being by nature corrupt, and the free judgment of each person to discern
the true and the false is impeded. Spinoza attacks this unholy
theological-political admixture, which makes it “seem as
though [it has] been intentionally devised for extinguishing
the light of understanding.” He therefore resolved “to examine Scripture anew in a full and free spirit,” contriving a
method of interpretation which would “admit nothing as its
teaching which was not taught by it very clearly.”3
As indicated in the Preface, the plan of organization of
the Treatise is keyed to a series of questions that guide the
course of argument of the following twenty chapters. The
questions pertaining to the chapter on miracles ask “whether
miracles happen contrary to the order of nature, and whether
they teach God’s existence and providence more certainly
and more clearly than do the things we understand clearly
and distinctly through their first causes.”4
How do human beings come to know “first causes”? Is
there more than one source available by means of which
knowledge can be acquired? In Chapter 1 (Prophesy) and
Chapter 2 (Prophets), Spinoza begins to explicate his account
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of natural knowledge as grounded in reason and experience,
in contrast to knowledge claimed through prophecy or revelation as grounded in imagination and faith.
Chapter 1 begins as follows:
Prophecy, or Revelation, is certain knowledge (certa cognitio) of some matter revealed by God to human beings. A
Prophet, moreover, is one who interprets the revealed things
of God to those who are unable to have the certain knowledge of the matters revealed by God, and so can only embrace the matters being revealed by mere faith.5 (Emphasis
added.)
Drawing on this definition, Spinoza then claims, “it follows that natural knowledge can be called Prophecy (cognitionem naturalem prophetiam vocari posse). For the things
we know by the natural light depend solely on knowledge of
God and of his eternal decrees.”6 (Emphasis added.)
What then, for Spinoza, is “natural knowledge”? How is
it distinct from the “certain knowledge” which prophets may
claim for themselves? And how does knowledge obtained by
the natural light differ from the certain knowledge revealed
by the prophetic light?
He begins to answer these questions in remarks that take
the form of an argument.7
1. “[N]atural knowledge is common to all human
beings—for it depends on foundations common to
all human beings.”
2. However, this kind of knowledge “is not well regarded by the vulgar [the multitudes], who are always panting after what is rare and alien to their
nature . . . ; when they speak of prophetic knowledge, they want this [natural] knowledge excluded.”
3. Nevertheless natural knowledge “can be called
divine (divina vocari potest), as can any other
knowledge, whatever it may be . . . . Yet in respect
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of the certainty that natural knowledge (cognitionem naturalem) involves and the source from
which it is derived (namely, God),” it is in no way
inferior to prophetic knowledge (cognitione
prophetica).
4. “Yet though natural science (scientia) is divine,
its propagators still cannot be called Prophets.” For
what the teachers of natural science impart to others can be grasped by them, not by faith alone, but
with a certainty and entitlement equal to that of the
teachers.
5. “[S]ince our mind . . . has the power to form
some notions explaining the nature of things and
teach the conduct of life, we can deservedly state
that the mind’s nature . . . is the first cause of divine
revelation.”
6. “[T]he idea and nature of God dictates everything we clearly and distinctly understand, not in
words but in a far more excellent mode, which best
agrees with the nature of the mind—as anyone
who has tasted the certainty of understanding has
without a doubt experienced within himself.”
These six steps lead to Spinoza’s powerful conclusion:
7. “For everything is done through God’s power.
Indeed, since Nature’s power is nothing but God’s
power itself, it is certain that we do not understand
God’s power to the extent that we are ignorant of
natural causes.”8
In this last statement, Spinoza reveals his deepest and
most comprehensive insight, namely, the fundamental unity
of God and Nature. Although the phrase “God or Nature” is
explicitly used in the preface to Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics,
the application of this insight runs through the Treatise and
forms the constant backdrop for its unfolding argument.9
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It is often debated whether Spinoza’s use of the phrase
“God or Nature” is to be understood as a deification of Nature
or as a naturalization of God. In either case, the term “supernatural” is drained of its meaning. For Spinoza the understanding and explanation of the phenomena of the world must
be attained through the acquisition of natural knowledge
alone. It is from this perspective that Spinoza’s philosophic
position can be called Naturalism, in opposition to the theological point of view called Supernaturalism.10
Spinoza fully develops his naturalistic position in the
Ethics. Its central teaching is that Man is necessarily a part
of Nature, that striving (conatus)11 is the essence of Man, and
that our supreme good and highest happiness can be attained
by means of striving toward what he calls “the intellectual
love of God.” In the light of what will be discussed later,
Spinoza’s account of the active emotion (or affect) of intellectual love can be construed as among the “spiritual rewards” experienced by those who seek to understand the
mind of God through understanding the system of Nature.
In Chapter 3 of the Treatise Spinoza employs this “God
or Nature” point of view when he restates the idea of God’s
providence in terms of God’s direction, God’s external and
internal help, God’s choosing, and fortune. He writes:
By God’s direction, I understand the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or the chaining together of natural
things. For . . . the universal laws of nature, in accordance
with which everything comes to be and is determined, are
nothing but God’s eternal decrees, which always involve
eternal truth and necessity. Accordingly, whether we say
that everything comes to be in accordance with the laws
of nature, or that everything is ordered on the basis of
God’s decree and direction, we are saying the same thing.12
Turning now to Spinoza’s analysis of miracles in Chapter
6, we see that the heart of the opposition between revealed
and natural knowledge comes to light in the questions con-
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cerning what miracles are and whether they are possible.13
He begins his discussion by stating “the opinions and
prejudices of the vulgar [i.e., the many] concerning nature
and miracles.” He notes that the vulgar call divine any knowledge that surpasses their understanding, especially works of
nature whose causes are unknown. These works of nature, of
whose causes they are ignorant, are also called works of God
or miracles. They believe that God’s existence, power, and
providence are most clearly established if they imagine that
God is the direct cause when something happens in nature
which is contrary to their opinion of how nature works. This
is because they assume that God and nature are two distinct
powers, and that if one of these powers is responsible for an
event, the power of the other must be excluded or suspended.
So that “partly out of devotion and partly out of a desire to
oppose those who cultivate natural science, they desire not
to know the causes of things, and they think that those who
seek to understand these so-called natural events deny God’s
existence, or at least God’s providence.”14 Thus, in the vulgar
view, a miracle is a providential act intended for human benefit to achieve a result that would be contrary to the ordinary
operations and power of nature.
Drawing on conclusions earlier established: (a) that the
power of nature is the same as the power of God; (b) that the
actions of God are eternal, necessary, and immutable; and (c)
that God’s will is identical with God’s intellect, Spinoza argues that miracles are not possible within nature.
Nor can miracles be understood as supernatural events
directly referred to God’s providential intervention in nature’s
established processes, for such an intervention by God would
contradict the principle that God acts from the necessity of
His own nature.
Moreover, since nature’s power is nothing but God’s
power, and God is understood to be infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, so also is nature’s power. Whatever may be the
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limits of nature’s power is the necessary consequence of its
own laws. On this account, there is no way to distinguish the
natural from the supernatural; there is no conceptual space
outside of Nature in which a supernatural Divine Agent, intending to produce a miraculous intervention, could act.
Spinoza’s argument can be summarized as follows. If
God is a supernatural agent distinct from nature, and has created and established the laws of nature, then a contradiction
would arise if God, acting from the necessity of His own nature, could act both according to and contrary to the laws of
nature. If God’s fixed and unchangeable order of nature is
suspended to accomplish a supernatural purpose, which is
what the vulgar call a miracle, then the processes of nature
are not fixed and unchangeable, and everything is subject to
doubt, including God’s fixed nature and existence.
Thus contrary to the vulgar view that miracles most
clearly affirm the existence and power of God, Spinoza argues that the incoherence of their view undermines the conclusion they wish to establish; it is rather this vulgar view
which leads to atheism.15 If, on the contrary, God is identical
with nature, then there are not two distinct and opposed principles; miracles, therefore, could not be supernatural events,
the cause of which is outside of and contrary to nature and
reason.
Further, if one nevertheless believes or supposes that
there is a transcendent supernatural God distinct from the system of nature, and that such a God is utterly mysterious, hidden and unknowable, the consequence of this supposition is
that human beings would not be able to distinguish the ordinary acts of nature from the so-called supernatural acts which
are the cause of miracles. Neither the principle of causality
nor any of the categories or aspects of human rationality
could be supposed to apply to such an utterly unknowable
Being.
Spinoza therefore understands and defines a miracle to
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be nothing else but an event whose natural cause cannot be
explained by the person who narrates it or who believes the
event to be supernatural and surpasses human understanding.
The designation of an event as a miracle is merely a way of
saying that we are ignorant of its cause, which, though
presently unknown, may not be unknowable.
Spinoza’s overall philosophical conclusions, the answer
to the questions posed in the Preface, are: (a) God’s existence
and providence cannot be known through miracles, but these
conclusions are far better established and understood from
the principle of the fixed and unchangeable order of nature;
and (b) the very idea of a miracle “whether contrary to nature
or above nature is a mere absurdity.”16
Hume17
In Section X of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
“Of Miracles,” Hume is not directly concerned with the metaphysical question, Do miracles exist or are they conceivable
within the order of Nature as a whole? Rather, he is concerned with the epistemological question, How can one know
or prove that a particular event is a genuine miracle, and not
merely the effect of excessive imagination, superstition, or
wishful thinking?
Necessarily involved in this epistemological question are
certain assumptions about the nature of belief and about what
it is reasonable for a person to believe. These assumptions
involve the meaning and use of such concepts as evidence,
proof, fact, probability and truth. In short, what is ultimately
at issue in any discussion about the possibility of miracles is
the concept of “rational belief.”
In pursuing the inquiry into miracles, Hume wastes no
time searching for a definition. It is already at hand. A miracle, he says “is a violation of the laws of Nature,” to which
he adds that “as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very
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nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. . . . Nothing is esteemed a
miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of Nature. It
is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should
die on a sudden. . . . But it is a miracle that a dead man should
come to life; because that has never been observed in any age
or country. There must therefore be a uniform experience
against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would
not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience
amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from
the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle;
nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered
credible, but by an opposite proof which is superior.”18
In a footnote to this paragraph, Hume refines and restates
his definition: “a miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the
Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” How
does this condition, that the cause of the miracle be attributed
to “a particular volition of the Deity,” affect our ability to
know that the alleged miracle is genuine? The answer is provided in Part 2 of this Section where he states:
Though the Being to whom the miracle is ascribed, be in
this case, Almighty, it does not upon that account, become
a bit more probable; since it is impossible for us to know
the attributes or actions of such a Being, otherwise than
from the experience which we have of his productions in
the course of nature.19
Thus Hume’s “direct and full proof” against the possibility of miracles is based on the well founded assumption of,
and the belief in, the regularity and uniformity of nature and
of its laws. This belief, in turn, is grounded in his philosophical analysis of human experience: he believes that we generate ideas and, within limits, acquire knowledge of nature
by means of a sustained application of the methods of the experimental sciences.
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In this same Section, Hume then proceeds to undermine
any and all claims of reported miracles, even those whose
pedigree is historically recent and bears the testimony of a
large number of highly placed political and ecclesiastical figures. Having previously supposed that the testimony in favor
of a miracle “may possibly amount to an entire proof,” he
then retracts this supposition: “[I]t is easy to shew that we
have been a great deal too liberal in our concession and that
there never was a miraculous event established on so full an
evidence.”20
To support this conclusion he offers a range of evidence
based on experience and well established principles of human
nature. He mentions such phenomena as self-delusion, a desire to deceive others, and the tendency of people to accept
as fact what is “utterly absurd and miraculous.” The cause of
this, he says, is that “the passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion,” gives rise to
pleasurable affects. Hume is especially harsh in condemning
those cases in which “the spirit of religion joins itself to
the love of wonder.” In these circumstances, “human testimony . . . loses all pretensions to authority.” Citing various
examples of “the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvelous,” he asks rhetorically whether it
is not such passions which “incline the generality of
mankind to believe and report, with the greatest vehemence
and assurance, all religious miracles.”21
Although Hume has labored to undermine all rational
belief in the possibility of miracles and in the veracity of
those who testify to them, what finally is the purpose of his
labors? He states that “the method of reasoning here delivered . . . may serve to confound those dangerous friends or
disguised enemies to the Christian religion, who have undertaken to defend it by the principles of human reason.”
He believes, it seems, that it is a deep disservice to the
Christian religion to defend it on those principles. To elim-
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inate the desire or the need to defend Christianity on rational
grounds, he then asserts: “Our most holy religion is founded
on Faith; and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to
such a trial as it is, by no means, fitted to endure.”22
In what is surely one of the most striking passages in the
book, Hume ends his essay on miracles by commenting:
Upon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even
at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person
without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of
its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it,
is conscious of a continuous miracle in his own person,
which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and
gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary
to custom and experience.23
Given Hume’s disbelief in all claims of reported miracles,
we may wonder: How can this concluding statement be construed to serve the interests of the Christian religion, or to be
a defense of the Christian faith?
Part II: C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins
C. S. Lewis
The arguments of both Spinoza and Hume against the possibility of miracles assumed a certain perspective regarding the
knowledge of nature’s processes and the existence of its laws.
This perspective has often been called naturalism. This means
that explanations of all phenomena must be sought within the
scope of natural knowledge as grounded in reason and experience, without recourse or appeal to explanations in terms
of supernatural causes or agents. The knowledge thus obtained by adhering to the principles and methods of the sciences yields conclusions, in the form of provisional laws of
nature, which are open to being tested, confirmed or disconfirmed, and corrected.
The alternative to this naturalistic perspective can be
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called supernaturalism.
These are exactly the pair of terms used by C. S. Lewis
in his book Miracles: A Preliminary Study.24 Lewis’s aims
are to confront the reader with the choice between naturalism
and supernaturalism, to show the limitations of the former
and the superiority of the latter, and to lead the reader to adopt
the particular form of supernaturalism supplied by Christianity.
Regarding naturalism, he concedes that “if Naturalism
is true, then we do know in advance that miracles are impossible: nothing can come into Nature from the outside because there is nothing outside to come in, Nature being
everything.”25
Therefore, in order to provide an affirmative answer to
the question of whether miracles can occur—that is, in order
to show that miracles are indeed possible—Lewis says that
he must first settle what he calls “the philosophical question.”26 Since the philosophical question at issue here is
whether miracles can occur, and since miracles are not possible if naturalism is true, he must either show that naturalism
is not true or he must argue that the opposite perspective—
supernaturalism—is true.
However, according to Lewis, an argument attempting to
show the possibility of miracles cannot be based on experience or history or the examination of biblical texts. This is
so because the evidence obtained from each of these sources
“depends on the philosophical views which we have been
holding before we even began to look at the evidence. The
philosophical question must therefore come first.”27 Lewis’s
general argument seems to be directed, initially at least,
against those who reject the possibility of miracles because
“we know in advance what results they will find for they have
begun by begging the question.”28
Does Lewis himself think he can settle this “philosophical
question” without any begging of the question? To avoid this
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result, he would have to confront and overcome the position
of those who accept the principles of naturalism as broadly
interpreted and applied. In particular he would have to show
that it is impossible for naturalism to fulfill its claim to provide
the best and fullest explanation of the whole range of phenomena constituting human experience. Let us see whether he succeeds in this undertaking.
Although different chapters of this book present various
aspects of his position, his overall argument in behalf of the
truth of supernaturalism seems to depend on at least the following premises or assumptions:
1. Nature is not the whole of reality. Rather it is
merely a partial reality embedded within a higher supernatural reality which constitutes a total reality.
Lewis agrees that “all reality must be interrelated and
consistent.”29 To find the grounds of this interconnection between the partial and the total reality, one must
go back to their common origin, the Creator God.
With this supernatural assumption of a Creator God,
plus the premise that this God might wish to intervene
in or interrupt the order of Nature, miracles can
occur.30
2. The system of Nature can only be partial. What it
essentially lacks is the spiritual element contained in
the Christian and Jewish doctrines which “have always been statements about spiritual reality.”31 What
these doctrines mean is that “in addition to the physical or psychophysical universe known to the sciences,
there exists an uncreated and unconditional reality
which causes the universe to be, [and] this reality has
a positive structure or constitution.”32 To distinguish
the Christian from the Jewish understanding of the
meaning of spiritual reality, he adds that this reality is
described “though doubtless not completely, . . . in the
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doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by
becoming one of its own creatures.”33
3. In order to tell the story of Christianity, supernaturalism is necessary because it is the realm in which
miracles find their being. In the Christian religion,
“the Miracles, or at least some Miracles, are more
closely bound up with the fabric of belief than in any
other.”34 Further, miracles, after all, are “precisely
those chapters in the great story [of Christianity] on
which the plot turns. Death and resurrection are what
the story is about.”35
4. To tell the Christian story, Lewis must also tell the
story of mankind. But from what perspective should
this story be told? To tell the story of Man is to give
an account of Man’s nature. Nature and human nature
are complex things, and as Lewis himself points out,
“the kind of analysis which you make of any complex
thing depends on the purpose you have in view.”36
Since his purpose is to give an affirmative answer to
the question whether miracles are possible, the story
of mankind must be told from the supernatural perspective.
When we are considering Man as evidence for the fact that
this spatio-temporal Nature is not the only thing in existence, the important distinction is between that part of Man
which belongs to this spatio-temporal Nature and that which
does not. . . . These two parts of a man may rightly be called
natural and supernatural. . . . [T]his “Super-Natural” part is
itself a created being—a thing called into existence by the
Absolute Being and given by Him a certain character or
“nature.”37
Thus, in order to argue for the truth of his Christian supernaturalism, Lewis assumes the very perspective according
to which the concept of Nature is arbitrarily narrowed and
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excluded from any connection to the moral or rational development of human beings. He thereby renders the naturalist
perspective incapable of explaining the most basic features
of human nature. Indeed, in the chapter entitled “Nature and
Supernature,” he separates Reason from man’s nature and asserts that “rational thought is not part of the system of Nature.”38 He then adds that “human minds are not the only
supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from
nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature: each
has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being,
whom we call God. Each is an offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature.”39
In short, from the supernaturalist perspective, the existence of each human being having the capacity to reason is
itself a miracle.
Lewis himself has emphatically asserted the elementary
logical point that “a proof which sets out by assuming the thing
you have to prove is rubbish.”40 Does he think he has somehow
avoided an enormous begging of the question?
Francis Collins
One strongly affected reader of C. S. Lewis is Francis Collins,
who is currently the Director of the National Institutes of Health
and previously the head of the Human Genome Project.
In his book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents
Evidence for Belief,41 Collins’s primary aim is to provide “the
possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual world views.”42 That these world views are
often said to be in opposition is expressed by such phrases as
“the ‘battle’ between science and religion”43 and “the conflicts between science and faith.”44
Note that, in presenting their opposition in these terms,
Collins consistently and freely substitutes the words “religion” and “faith” for the word “spiritual,” thus treating these
three terms as equivalent when set in opposition to “science.”
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In the introduction to his book, Collins poses the question
whether “the scientific and spiritual world views are antithetical.” His own answer to this question is:
No. Not for me. Quite the contrary. For me, the experience
of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this
most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific
achievement and an occasion of worship.45
From this answer we see that at least in his own heart and
mind the dichotomy of “science” on one side, and “religion,”
“faith” and “the spiritual world” on the other is only apparent.
But when he further says: “Science’s domain is to explore
nature, God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a world not
possible to explore with the tools and language of science,”46
the antithesis appears to harden. We now have on one side of
the dichotomy Science and Nature, and on the other side Religion, Faith, Spirit, and God. Since in his own terms each
side occupies a separate and distinct “domain,” it is not immediately evident how these two sides can come together.
On the religious or spiritual side, the book is the personal
story of Collins’s journey from atheism to wholehearted acceptance of the fundamental tenets of the Christian religion,
with its mysteries and its miracles, all centering on the person
of Jesus Christ: his Virgin Birth, his Divinity, his Death and
Resurrection.
On the side of science and nature, he discusses with elegance and insight, and with similarly wholehearted acceptance, the scientific view of the understanding of the natural
world. He writes:
Science is the only legitimate way to investigate the natural
world. Whether probing the structure of the atom, the nature of the cosmos, or the DNA sequence of the human
genome, the scientific method is the only reliable way to
seek out the truth of natural events. Yes, experiments can
fail spectacularly, interpretations of experiments can be
misguided, and science can make mistakes. But the nature
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of science is self-correcting. No major fallacy can long persist in the face of a progressive increase in knowledge.47
So the question continues: does Collins see and treat the
two world views as essentially separate, distinct and antithetical, or is their opposition only apparent and capable of being
harmonized?
Although Collins undoubtedly has a great love of science
and has attained a high level of achievement and satisfaction
through the understanding of natural phenomena, that way of
pursuing the truth is insufficient. For him “science is not the
only way of knowing. The spiritual world view provides another way of finding truth.”48 But Collins also thinks that
“each person must carry out his or her own search for spiritual truth.”49 What he desires for himself is a “way of seeking
fellowship with God,” of being able “to communicate with
Him.”50 What Collins also desires are answers to the questions that cannot be answered by science, the “eternal questions of human existence.” These are questions such as: Why
did the universe come into being? and What is the meaning
of human existence?51
But since these kinds of questions cannot be answered by
science, one must go beyond science, go beyond the natural
world and into the realm of supernaturalism and the transcendence of a creator God. Or as Collins puts it:
As seekers, we may well discover from science many interesting answers to the question “How does life work?” What
we cannot discover through science alone are the answers
to the questions “Why is there life anyway?” and “Why am
I here?”52
Collins finally finds the answer to such questions, including the question of the possibility of miracles, in the language
of the Christian Bible, in the texts of the four gospels, the
central figure of which is Jesus, the Christ. These texts revealed to him “the actual account of His life, . . . the eyewit-
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ness nature of the narratives, and the enormity of Christ’s
claims and their consequences.”53 He writes:
[I]f Christ really was the Son of God, as He explicitly
claimed, then surely . . . He could suspend the laws of nature
if He needed to do so to achieve a more important purpose.54
In attempting to understand God’s purpose, Collins wrestled with impenetrable theological conundrums, and again
found answers in the writings of C.S. Lewis. Through these
writings, Collins was persuaded of spiritual truths the logic
of which had previously seemed “like utter nonsense.”55 But
now that he has become “a believer in God,”56 this logic
seems to him compelling.
Although Collins’s Language of God is wonderfully clear
in explaining much of the reasoning and evidence supporting
the scientific conclusions of cosmology and biology (as in
Chapter 3, “The Origins of the Universe,” Chapter 4, “Life
on Earth: Of Microbes and Man,” and Chapter 5, “Deciphering God’s Instruction Book: The Lessons of the Human
Genome”), I find his language about “truth” to be at the least
fuzzy and puzzling.
On the one hand Collins speaks of faith as a “search for
absolute truth,”57 and says that “each person must carry out
his or her own search for spiritual truth.”58 Yet he praises the
truth-gathering methods of science as “the only reliable way
to seek out the truth of natural events” and asserts that “the
nature of science is self-correcting.”59 So at least some claims
regarding scientific truth, and the beliefs based on those
claims, are thereby discovered to have been false. But if each
person’s search for spiritual truth is a search for what most
satisfies his or her longing for fellowship with the Divine, by
what shared criteria can these private beliefs and spiritual
truths be judged to be either true or false? Is the search for
spiritual truth self-correcting in the same way and in the same
sense as the search for scientific truth?
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Perhaps what is called spiritual truth is a genuinely private matter, involving each person’s sense of the divine and
of what constitutes an adequate relationship to the divine. No
doubt such private thoughts and feelings are full of meaning
which can be shared with other like-minded persons. It is evident, however, that not everyone needs a belief in miracles
to achieve their sense of fellowship with the Divine. We have
already noted the example of Spinoza, and we would certainly have to include other philosophers or scientists or seekers after truth who find their spiritual satisfaction within the
horizons of a naturalistic world view without having to posit
another level of reality called “supernatural.”
Collins says that science and faith “fortify each other like
two unshakable pillars, holding up a building called Truth.”60
But there are good reasons to think that (1) the logical ground
on which each of these pillars stands is essentially different,
and (2) the paths toward scientific truth and spiritual truth,
as well as the human capacities required to pursue these, are
not the same.
Should we not conclude, therefore, that there is not one
but two very different buildings called Truth, the foundations
of which are laid in two separate realms in the landscape of
the human mind? If, as Collins himself describes, there are
two distinct world views, the scientific and the religious, and
if each relies on its own conception and criteria regarding the
truth, how is it possible, as he urges, to “seek to reclaim the
solid ground of an intellectually and spiritually satisfying
synthesis of all great truths?”61 (Emphasis in the original.)
Recalling for a moment the theological-political theme,
perhaps Collins’s desire for harmony can be understood in
light of his role as a preeminent scientist who heads a national
government agency. In this role one can understand that his
goal is to bridge the deep divisions in this country concerning
major biomedical issues such as stem cell research, cloning,
and the search for genetic cures to a wide spectrum of dis-
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eases, issues which often are polarized along both religious
and political lines. It is this goal which is reflected in his
“Final Word”:
It is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science
and spirit. The war was never really necessary. Like so many
earthly wars, this one has been initiated and intensified by
extremists on both sides, sounding alarms that predict imminent ruin unless the other side is vanquished. Science is
not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly
not threatened by science; He made it all possible.62
In response to Collins’s “final word” on this problem, let
us pose instead two “final questions.” First, how is it possible
to harmonize the truth claims of religious believers and the
truth claims of the scientific community without equivocating
on the meaning of the term “truth”? And second, if a truth
claim, in general, is understood to require a correspondence
between what is said or thought and some assumed objective
reality—call this the requirement of corresponding to reality—then how is it possible to establish with certitude that
this requirement has been met?
NOTES
1. This question is a narrowly formulated aspect of the larger perennial
question of the relation of reason to faith. Three relatively recent books
which argue for the compatibility of this relationship are: C.F. Delaney,
ed., Rationality and Religious Belief (Notre Dame, Indiana: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1979); Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff,
eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, Indiana: University Notre Dame Press, 1983); and Joshua L Golding, Rationality and Religious Theism (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing,
2003).
2. Preface, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1. In the following notes, all references
to the Theological-Political Treatise (referred to as TTP from its Latin
title Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) will be to Spinoza’s Theologico-
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Political Treatise, trans. Martin Yaffe (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Philosophical Library, 2004). Citations to the text will be in accordance with
Yaffe’s system of citations explained on p. viii of that edition. For example, in a subsequent footnote, TTP, 1.1.1-2 refers to Chapter 1, Paragraph 1, Sentences 1 and 2. “P” preceding Arabic numerals refers to the
Preface.
3. Partial summary of Spinoza, TTP, P.1.1 to P.5.l.
4. Spinoza, TTP, P.5.6.
5. Spinoza, TTP, 1.1.1-2.
6. Spinoza, TTP, 1.2.1-2.
7. The following statements numbered 1-6 summarize Spinoza’s sentences from TTP, 1.2.3 to 1.4.1. Statement number 7 quotes from TTP,
1.22.6.
8. In Chapter 2, Spinoza further distinguishes the certainty obtained
through the natural light versus the certainty obtained through the
prophetic light, finding the difference to be based on the prophets’ more
vivid power of imagining. He argues that “since simple imagination does
not of its own nature involve certainty, as every clear and distinct idea
does . . . it follows that by itself prophecy cannot involve certainty.” (TTP,
2.3.1). What is required to obtain the certainty of clear and distinct ideas
upon which natural knowledge is based is nothing other than the power
of reasoning itself.
9. Earlier in the Ethics (Part I, Proposition 29) Spinoza had introduced
the distinction between the active and passive expressions of Nature’s allcomprehensive dynamic system: natura naturans and natura naturata,
translated as Nature naturing and Nature natured.
10. As we will see below, these are the terms of the dichotomy proposed
by C. S. Lewis.
11. Conatus, translated as “striving” or “endeavor,” is Spinoza’s general
term, which includes as aspects “will,” “appetite,” and “desire.” See,
Ethics, Part III, Proposition 9, Scholium.
12. Spinoza, TTP, 3.3.1- 3.
13. Spinoza says that his treatment of this subject is explicitly philosophical; that is, his conclusions about miracles are drawn solely from the
principles of nature and reason. This procedure contrasts with earlier
chapters that treat of prophecy and prophets, which are theological matters, where he drew his conclusions from the text of Scripture alone.
14. Spinoza, TTP, 6.1.90-91.
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15. Ibid., 6.1.34.
16. Ibid., 6.1.31, 35.
17. References will be to sections, parts and page numbers in David Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Anthony Flew
(Chicago: Open Court, 1988). It is noteworthy that both Spinoza and
Hume—proponents of the philosophic point of view called Naturalism—
also share a common ground of political principle. Each quotes and adopts
the political ideal stated by Tacitus: “to be able to think what we please
and say what we think” (Histories, I.1). For Spinoza, see TTP, P 5.18, and
the content and title of Chapter 20: “It is shown that in a Free Republic
each is permitted both to think what he wants and to say what he thinks.”
For Hume, see A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an attempt to introduce
the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Maral Subjects, in which the
quotation from Tacitus serves as the epigraph both for Book I, “Of the Understanding,” and for Book II, “Of the Passions.”
18. Hume, Enquiry, X.l, p.148.
19. Ibid., X.2, p.164.
20. Ibid., X.2, p.150.
21. Ibid., X.2, pp. 151-52.
22. Ibid., X.2, p. 165.
23. Ibid., X.2, p. 166.
24. C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Lewis is also the author of many popular works of fiction
such as The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe (1950), and The Chronicles of Narnia (seven volumes between
1950 and 1956). The greatest influence on Lewis’s fiction seems to have
been the Scottish author George MacDonald, a preacher and Christian
apologist, who was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and fairy
tales. When Lewis was sixteen, he chanced upon MacDonald’s most famous novel Phantastes and was enchanted by his prodigious imagination.
The book was Lewis’s favorite, and he returned to it often throughout his
life. See Michael White, C. S. Lewis: A Life (New York: Carroll and Graf,
2004), 103-104.
25. Lewis, Miracles, 14-15.
26. Ibid., 2.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 4.
29. Ibid., 96.
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30. Ibid., 96-98.
31. Ibid., 124.
32. Ibid., 125.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 108.
35. Ibid., 157.
36. Ibid., 275.
37. Ibid., 276.
38. Ibid., 41.
39. Ibid., 43.
40. Ibid., 18.
41. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006). Francis Collins is connected to St. John's College by virtue of being the godson of Robert Bart,
a long time tutor both in Annapolis and Santa Fe and also Dean of the College in Santa Fe. Collins was one of the speakers at the memorial service
for Robert Bart held in McDowell Hall in Annapolis, February 3, 2001.
In a personal communication, Collins wrote: “As I recall, I spoke about
the remarkable role he played in my own education. He was my godfather,
and no godfather ever took that role more seriously—he gave me many
precious gifts as I was growing up, all of which had artistic, religious, or
intellectual significance and led to deep conversations. . . . I also remember
him assisting me with a particularly thorny calculus problem, and marveling that this sophisticated professor of humanities was also awfully
good at integrating by parts. Such was the St. John’s way!"
42. Collins, The Language of God, 6.
43. Ibid., 4. See also 272: “The current battles between the scientific and
spiritual worldviews need to be resolved.”
44. Ibid., 84.
45. Ibid., 3.
46. Ibid., 6.
47. Ibid., 228.
48. Ibid., 229.
49. Ibid., 225.
50. Ibid., 220.
51. Ibid., 6.
52. Ibid., 88.
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53. Ibid., 221.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 223.
56. Ibid., 118.
57. Ibid., 227. See also 271: “Given the uncertain ethical grounding of
the postmodernist era, which discounts the existence of absolute truth,
ethics grounded on specific principles of faith can provide a certain foundational strength that may otherwise be lacking.”
58. Ibid., 221.
59. Ibid., 228.
60. Ibid., 210.
61. Ibid., 234.
62. Ibid., 233. For readers wanting to pursue a comprehensive critique of
Collins’s book, see George Cunningham, Decoding the Language of God:
Can a Scientist Really be a Believer? A Geneticist Responds to Francis
Collins (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2010). For readers
wanting to pursue further the topic of Truth, see the recent collections of
essays in Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmonds, eds. Truth, Oxford
Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and
Kurt Pritzl, ed., Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010).
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The Question of Questions
Michael W. Grenke
What is involved in really asking a question? What is the
most important question a human being can ask? Tonight I
want to try to consider, along with you, these two questions
in the challenging and connected manner in which Martin
Heidegger presents them, especially in his Introduction to
Metaphysics.
If we try to rise to Heidegger’s challenge of really asking
these questions, then we face serious obstacles in our ordinary modes of living, thinking, and talking to one another.
Heidegger characterizes us “modern” human beings as people “who scarcely respond, and then for the most part emptily,
to the simplicity of the essential” (IM, 98).* But is not the essential that which is sought in all real questioning? And can
a minimal and mostly empty response be what is appropriate
to the object of real questioning? Later in his argument, when
considering the standards of discourse exemplified in contemporary books and newspapers, Heidegger laments “the
paralysis of all passion for questioning that has long been
with us. The consequence of this paralysis is that all standards
and perspectives have been confused and that most men have
ceased to know where and between what the crucial decisions
must be made” (IM, 143).
Lest we too readily exempt ourselves and our community
*Key to citations: IM = Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). BT = Being and Time,
trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: HarperCollins,
2008). Page numbers for Being and Time are keyed to the seventh German
edition, noted marginally in the English translation. In some instances
translations have been altered slightly for the sake of accuracy.
Michael Grenke is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was originally delivered on 7 November 2008.
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from these criticisms as though they are leveled only at “modern” men, not those who study great books, and only at the
discourse found in books and periodicals that we do not allow
ourselves to read here, we should consider what Heidegger
calls “idle talk” in Being and Time. “Idle talk” is discourse
that seeks to tone down the stakes of conversation and to keep
the responses of the interlocutors within well-prescribed and
familiar bounds. Instead of containing and conveying a “primary relationship-of-Being towards the being talked about”
(BT, 168)—a relationship of the kind that might deeply excite
or disturb the speaker and the listener, a relationship that
might move a human being as much as the thing in question
can move a human being—idle talk just passes words around
in the fashion of gossip. The worst part is that it pretends to
be real discourse, and in this pretending it hinders attempts
at real discourse. Surrounded by such discourse that says very
little while pretending to say all there is to say, the average
understanding “will never be able to decide what has been
drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much
is just gossip” (BT, 169). Heidegger finds this idle talk that
belongs to everyday average human life to be almost everywhere and to dominate almost everything about human discourse, both spoken and written. We should not pat ourselves
too readily or casually on the back and blindly assume that
this idle discourse goes on only outside our community or
only on the weekends and never in our classrooms. Idle talk
“discourages any new questioning and any confrontation”
(BT, 169). But might not all real questioning be, in a way,
new and confrontational?
In order to try to get free from the realm of idle talk and
really to ask questions, to question questions—die Fragen
fragen, as the Germans say—we must try to situate ourselves
in a realm of thinking and discourse that is not saturated with
the sense, the assurance, that whatever is to come next will
be comfortably like that which has already come before. Per-
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haps we can start to get a feeling for this in a slight observation of a feature of the text of the Introduction to Metaphysics
that might tend to frustrate us with Heidegger, or even make
us distrust him. The book asks a question in its very first paragraph, and it makes explicit the difficulty of really asking that
question. A large portion of the discussion on the pages that
follow is devoted to a discussion of that question and its asking. Nine pages in, Heidegger proclaims, “We have not even
begun to ask the question itself” (IM, 9). If the reader’s patience has not worn thin after nine pages, it may be getting
frayed at twenty-nine pages in, where Heidegger says, “We
still know far too little about the process of questioning, and
what we do know is far too crude” (IM, 29). In a way, the
saga of really asking a question goes on throughout the entire
book, all the way to the very end, where Heidegger suggests
that real questioning may be a matter that takes a whole lifetime.
I am not calling attention to these matters to complain
about the way Heidegger seems to avoid or defer satisfaction
of the desires he has aroused in his readers. The more generous and fruitful way to look at this, regardless of its accuracy,
is to think that Heidegger is really making a high demand
upon himself and upon his intended readers. He is not settling
back into the easy and comforting conviction that he already
knows how really to ask questions and that he already is asking real questions.
What would it take for us to follow Heidegger’s example?
In thinking about Heidegger’s challenge, I have been trying
to ask myself whether I have ever been involved in real questioning myself, and I have been continually struck by how
hard it is to make that a real question. Can you ask yourself
in a real way, in way that does not presuppose an answer, in
a way that does not let you shrug off, turn away from, or deny
the question, whether in our classes—and especially in those
most avowedly devoted to questions, our seminars—whether
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any real questioning has been going on? I do not ask this
question to satisfy any savage and lingering resentment you
might have over a seminar gone wrong; rather I mean it to
stir concern in you about your own questioning.
The Question of Questions
Now that you are stirred up, let us turn to a more detailed
look at what Heidegger has to say about questions. A brief
glimpse at Being and Time might help lay some groundwork.
In the second section of the book, Heidegger begins the task
of trying to “formulate”—or rather reformulate—the question
of Being, the question that is the leading question of the
whole work, and the question that Heidegger presents as the
question that is first in rank. The reformulation of the question is undertaken explicitly to “revive” the question, to make
it a matter of living concern again. In order to reformulate
this question, Heidegger tries to “explain briefly what belongs to any question whatsoever” (BT, 5). The following
scheme of three elements emerges: “Any question, as a question about something, has that which is asked about. But
every question about something is somehow a questioning of
something. So in addition to what is asked about, a question
has that which is interrogated. . . . Furthermore, in what is
asked about there lies also that which is to be found out by
the asking; this is what is really intended: with this the question reaches its goal” (BT, 5).
In fitting his leading question into the scheme that belongs to any questioning, Heidegger announces that Being is
what is asked about, even though Being is not a being, which
is to say Being is not a thing like other things. He then announces that the meaning of Being is what is to be found out
by the asking. And then he turns to the middle element of his
scheme—“that which is interrogated.” Since Being is the
Being of beings, the interrogation is to be directed at beings
themselves. Perhaps because many beings would seem to be
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rather unresponsive to interrogation, Heidegger notes, “When
we come to what is to be interrogated, the question of Being
requires that the right way of access to beings shall have been
obtained and secured in advance” (BT, 6). Method matters,
even if the motto of Heidegger’s phenomenal approach is “To
the beings themselves!” “Thus to work out the question of
Being adequately, we must make one being—the questioning
one—transparent in its own Being. The very asking of this
question is one being’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its
essential character from what is inquired about—namely,
Being. This being which each of us himself is and which includes questioning as one of the possibilities of its Being, we
shall denote by the term ‘Dasein’” (BT, 7). Dasein, “Being
there,” is Heidegger’s technical term for the kind of being
that is human being. Because human beings have a special
relationship to Being, because they are beings that ask the
question of Being, the rest of Heidegger’s Being and Time
occupies itself with an analysis of the structure of human
being.
In the Author’s Preface to the seventh edition, Heidegger
admits to the unfinished character of Being and Time. He admits that a promised second “half” of the book has not been
delivered, and he says that the first half, which is the book as
he has left it to us, would have to be newly presented if the
question were to be carried further. Heidegger then suggests
that in order to shed some light on this the reader should look
at his Introduction to Metaphysics, published in the same year
as the seventh edition of Being and Time.
The beginning of Introduction to Metaphysics focuses attention on the fundamental question of metaphysics and on
the difficulty of asking it.
Individuals and peoples ask a good many questions in the
course of their historical passage through time. They examine, explore, and test a good many things before they
run into the question “Why are there beings rather than
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nothing?” Many men never encounter this question, if by
encounter we mean not merely to hear and read about it
as an interrogative formulation but to ask the question,
that it, to bring it about, to raise it, to feel oneself in the
state of being compelled to this question (IM, 1).
Although this is a somewhat different question than the
leading question of Being and Time (IM,18-19), both are put
forth as the fundamental question and as the question that is
first in rank. Also because Heidegger asserts that the second
clause of the question, “rather than nothing,” is not superfluous, and because it reveals that the scope of the question aims
at the ground of beings (IM, 24), it is very close to being the
question of being. Does what Heidegger says here at the beginning of Introduction to Metaphysics serve, then, to help
us understand what he means in Being and Time when he
calls human being the being that asks the question of Being?
Also, what does this initial statement tell us about really
asking this (or any) question? What does it mean to “encounter” a question if it does not mean to hear it or to read
it? Heidegger’s gloss here on asking the question is that it involves bringing a question about, placing or “putting” the
question, and finding oneself in the state of feeling the necessity for the question. This suggests that the asking of a
question is very different from becoming aware of a question
or from “finding” a question. The relationship of the questioner to the question is more intimate and more essential than
the relationship of an uninterested, passive observer to an observed object. With respect to the fundamental question, Heidegger goes so far as to say “if this question is asked and if
the act of questioning is really carried out, the content and
the object of the question react inevitably on the act of questioning” (IM, 5). What is this reacting? Is it similar to what
Heidegger means when he says in Being and Time that the
being that asks the question of Being “gets its essential character from what is inquired about—namely Being”? Heideg-
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ger extends this thought here in Introduction to Metaphysics
in the context of its fundamental question—“this question
‘why,’ this question as to the being as such in its entirety, goes
beyond mere playing with words, provided we possess sufficient intellectual energy to make the question actually recoil
into its ‘why,’ for it will not do so of its own accord” (IM, 5).
Really asking this question means making the question
recoil into its why. This questioning of the question searches
for the grounds of the questioning itself. It asks “Why the
why?” And in so doing, it turns its attention toward the being
that questions. This “privileged question ‘why’ has its ground
in a leap through which man thrusts away all the previous security, whether real or imagined, of his life. The question is
asked only in this leap; it is the leap; without it there is no
asking” (IM, 6).
If this leap, without which there is no asking, involves
thrusting away all the previous security of life, it may be objectively impossible to determine when such a leap has been
made. “Let us be clear about this from the start: it can never
be objectively determined whether anyone, whether we, really ask this question, that is, whether we make the leap, or
never get beyond a verbal formula” (IM, 6). This might seem
to mean we can never know whether a question has really
been asked. But the sentence that follows this statement
seems to point to history as the obstacle to our objective determination. “In a historical setting that does not recognize
questioning as a fundamental human force, the question immediately loses its rank” (IM, 6).
The paragraph that immediately follows would seem to
be an example of such a historical setting. In that paragraph,
Heidegger considers those who hold the Bible to be divine
revelation and truth. For those believers, there would seem
to be a clear and immediate answer to the question “Why are
there beings rather than nothing?” They have this answer before the question is even asked. Heidegger says that such be-
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lievers cannot really ask the question. “One who holds to
such faith can in a way participate in the asking of our question, but he cannot really question without ceasing to be a believer and taking all the consequences of such a step. He will
only be able to act ‘as if’” (IM, 7). Thus Heidegger seems to
point to a situation in which he feels confident that the question is not really being asked. This is because he thinks he
can recognize a “historical setting” where questioning is not
recognized “as a fundamental human force”; rather, “[f]rom
the standpoint of faith our question is ‘foolishness’” (IM, 7).
Heidegger goes on to identify philosophy with this foolishness. He then says “Really to ask the question signifies a
daring attempt to fathom this unfathomable question by disclosing what it summons us to ask, to push our questioning
to the very end. Where such an attempt occurs there is philosophy” (IM, 8). Is Heidegger going so far as to suggest that
where there is no philosophy there is no real questioning?
Would that in turn lead so far as to suggest that where there
is faith there is no real questioning of anything? Does the
need for philosophy constitute some part of the obstacle to
the objective determination of whether a leap into real questioning has been made? For the historical is not the objective,
the historical is subject to “its own law,” not the universal
law. And Heidegger conceives of philosophy as historical, so
that “there is no way of determining once and for all what the
task of philosophy is” (IM, 8).
What I have presented so far has followed, with some
principle of selection, what Heidegger has to say about really
asking questions in the beginning pages of Introduction to
Metaphysics, up to page nine. You will recall that on page
nine Heidegger announces that, “We have not even begun to
ask the question itself.” What still stands in the way of our
really asking a question (or the question)? What needs to be
seen, done, or suffered?
The question of questions dies down in the text for about
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ten pages. Then it is resumed explicitly with a series of statements that might seem unnecessary. First Heidegger tells us
that “questions and particularly fundamental questions do not
just occur like stones and water. Questions are not found
ready-made like shoes and clothes and books. Questions are,
and are only as they are actually asked” (IM, 19). Heidegger
seems to fear that we might not yet be thinking properly about
questions. He feels the need to tell us questions are, that is
they have some kind of being. And he feels the need to point
out that questions do not have the kind of being that we might
tend to ascribe either to natural beings (stones, water) or to
artificial beings (shoes, clothes, books). This difference is
amplified when Heidegger claims, “A leading into the asking
of the fundamental questions is consequently not a going to
something that lies and stands somewhere; no, this leading
must first awaken and create the questioning” (IM, 19).
What kind of being, then, should we think that questions
have? Heidegger seems to think we might be tempted to think
that questions have the kind of being belonging to a particular
kind of sentence—the kind that ends with a question mark.
So next he tells the reader, “To state the interrogative sentence, even in a tone of questioning, is not yet to question.
To repeat the interrogative sentence several times in succession does not necessarily breathe life into the questioning”
(IM, 20). Is the task, then, to breathe life into our interrogative
statements? What can that mean? Heidegger makes it clear
that this is not a rhetorical move that can be accomplished
through repetition or through variation in tone.
Heidegger next considers the experience of listening to a
question. He points to a way in which one could mistake a
question to be a mere assertion about the questioning state of
the speaker. But if that is how you hear my question, then
“you do not join me in questioning, nor do you question yourself. No sign of a questioning attitude or state of mind is
awakened.” This consideration of what is involved in hearing
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a question as a question seems to reveal for Heidegger the
questioning state of mind. “Such a state of mind consists in
willing to know. Willing—that is no mere wishing or striving.
Those who wish to know also seem to question, but they do
not go beyond the stating of questions; they stop precisely
where the question begins. To question is to will to know. He
who wills, he who puts his whole existence into a will, is resolved. Resolve does not shift about; it does not shirk, but
acts from out of the moment and never stops” (IM, 20-21).
So a question is not a sentence uttered in the right tone,
but a sentence uttered with the right (rather extreme) attitude
or state of mind? It turns out that Heidegger also cuts off this
notion that a question is a certain kind of sentence uttered
with a certain kind of attitude. “So much the less will the interrogative sentence, even if it is uttered in an authentically
questioning tone and even if the listener joins in the questioning, exhaustively reproduce the question. The questioning,
which is still enclosed, wrapped up in words, remains to be
unwrapped. The questioning attitude must clarify and secure
itself in the process, it must be consolidated by training” (IM,
22).
In the case just described, the questioning done by the
speaker and shared in by the listener is not to be found wholly
in the sentence uttered or in the tone in which it is uttered.
The questioning would seem separable from the words; perhaps the questioning could be carried out with other words,
or even without words. The questioning attitude seems not to
be a thing of the moment, nor something finished and static.
This attitude needs clarifying, securing, and consolidating.
By what process or training might a questioning attitude be
properly developed? That attitude is characterized by a resolved will to know. What that will aims to know is the truth.
Under Heidegger’s analysis of the meaning of the word truth,
truth is “unconcealment.” This is to be distinguished from
thinking of truth as correspondence. And late in Introduction
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to Metaphysics, Heidegger asserts, “Unconcealment occurs
only when it is achieved by work” (IM, 191). Heidegger gives
many examples of intellectual work on the intervening
pages—especially in his laborious excursions into the primordial etymologies of important terms in Western thought—
and one might profitably attempt to consider much of what
he does in Introduction to Metaphysics as an attempt to begin
training a questioning attitude.
The Question of Questions
Let us turn now to look at Heidegger’s claims as to which
question is the most important question a human being can
ask. “Important” is my term. Sometimes Heidegger says
“fundamental,” or “first,” or “first in rank,” or “worthiest.”
We can try to discipline our conception of the most important
question by keeping in mind our observations regarding really asking a question—that questioning extends beyond specific verbal formulae and that a questioning attitude requires
work and training,. The most important question is not an object sitting somewhere. I cannot sell you a map with which
you can locate it in order to wonder at it. The most important
question is not a sentence written on a page in some rare
book, available to be read by anyone who can afford to purchase the book. I give you the most important question now
as Heidegger expresses it as a sentence. But to hear it properly, we must not get too caught up in its wrappings.
“The question ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’ is first in rank for us first because it is the most farreaching, second because it is the deepest, and finally because
it is the most fundamental of all questions” (IM, 2). Heidegger explains that this question is the most far reaching, the
widest, because it “confines itself to no particular being” and
thus “takes in everything” (IM, 2). The question is the deepest
because it “aims at the ground of what is insofar as it is” (IM,
3). It “penetrates to the ‘underlying’ realms and indeed to the
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very last of them, to the limit” (IM, 3). This question is the
most fundamental question because “it breaks open the
ground for all authentic questions and thus is at the origin of
all of them” (IM, 6).
From the standpoint of really asking questions, the asking
of this question stands out as special. “For through this questioning the being as a whole is for the first time opened up as
such with a view to its possible ground, and in the act of questioning it is kept open” (IM, 4). This statement about the fundamentality of this question—that it opens up a ground of
possibility and keeps that possibility open—might also be
taken as a statement about what it means really to ask this
question. Does really asking a question always involve asking
fundamental questions? This might explain Heidegger’s big
claim that “Our question is the question of all authentic questions, i.e., of all self-questioning questions, and whether consciously or not it is necessarily implicit in every question. No
questioning and accordingly no single scientific ‘problem’
can be fully intelligible if it does not include, i.e., ask, the
question of all questions” (IM, 6).
Pretty quickly, however, Heidegger finds an obstacle to
his pursuit of this question of questions and to his claims
about its importance. Heidegger finds he must confront a long
intellectual tradition that has found Being “unfindable, almost
like nothing” (IM, 35). Heidegger cites Nietzsche’s claim that
the highest concepts, “like Being,” are the “last cloudy smoke
of evaporating reality” (IM, 35). as both the final expression
and the culmination of this tradition, which holds being to be
an error, a mere word, empty of meaning. Heidegger feels the
need to confront Nietzsche, and through him the tradition,
because if Nietzsche is right, “the only possible consequence
would be to abandon the question” (IM, 35).
In order to respond to Nietzsche’s claim, Heidegger sets
out to show that the word being does have meaning. Heidegger gives a series of examples of ways we mean being when
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we use the word “is.”
We say “God is.” “The earth is.” “The lecture is in the
auditorium.” This man is from Swabia.” “The cup is of
silver.” “The peasant is to the fields.” “The book is
mine.” “He is of death.” “Red is the port side.” “There is
famine in Russia.” “The enemy is in retreat.” “The plant
louse is in the vineyard.” “The dog is in the garden.”
“Over all the summits, there is rest” (IM, 89).
Heidegger observes that in each of these cases the word “is”
is meant differently.
“God is”; i.e., he is really present. “The earth is”; i.e., we
experience and believe it to be permanently there. “The
lecture is in the auditorium”; i.e., it takes place. “The
man is from Swabia”; i.e., he comes from there. “The cup
is of silver”; i.e., it is made of . . . . “The peasant is to the
fields”; he has gone to the fields and is staying there.
“The book is mine”; i.e., it belongs to me. “He is of
death”; i.e., he succumbed to death. “Red is the port
side”; i.e., it stands for port. “The dog is in the garden”;
i.e., he is running around in the garden. “Over all the
summits, there is rest”; that is to say??? (IM, 90).
(There is no account given of the famine, the retreat, or
the infestation.) Heidegger gets a bit confused by the last example and tries out a number of meanings, without being satisfied by any of his own suggestions. This occurs perhaps,
Heidegger suggests, because the last example is a bit of poetry written by Goethe in pencil on a window frame. Be that
as it may, what Heidegger claims to have shown with these
examples is that “the ‘is’ in our discourse manifests a rich diversity of meanings” (IM, 91). This rich diversity is possible
because the word “being” is empty in the sense of being indeterminate enough to encompass all the various meanings
Heidegger presents in all his examples. But the word “being”
is not empty in the sense that what is meant in each particular
example is quite determinate and distinct (except perhaps for
the case of the quotation from Goethe). So Heidegger claims
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
this evidence proves that being is not an empty word. “If
being thus represents what is most unique and determinate,
the word “being” cannot be empty . . . . There is no such thing
as an empty word; at most a word is worn out, though still
filled with meaning” (IM, 79).
In replying to Nietzsche, Heidegger has been moved to
consider the kind of understanding of being to which human
beings already and always lay claim whenever they use the
word “is,” or any of its other inflectional forms. Heidegger
finds in this usage a word that is at once unique and determinate and indeterminate. Might this revelation about the ways
in which the word “being” is meant not suggest that being is
a realm uniquely suited to a questioning unwrapped from
words and a questioning attitude in need of development?
Questioning is the authentic and proper and only way of
appreciating that which, by its supreme rank, holds our
existence in its power. Hence no question is more worthy
of being asked than the question of our understanding of
being, unless it be the question of being itself. The more
authentic our questioning, the more immediately and
steadfastly we dwell on the most questionable of all questions—namely, the circumstance that we understand
being quite indefinitely and yet with supreme definiteness (IM, 83).
Is there a kind of fit between the mode of being that belongs
to human beings, the questioning beings, and the determinate
indeterminacy with which being manifests itself? Is the
human relation to being more than the merely “happy” accident that we happen to ask the question of being? As the questioning being, is human being a fit mirror for being itself? I
find it suggestive that Heidegger notes in passing in Being
and Time that “the idea of Being in general is just as far from
being ‘simple’ as is the Being of Dasein” (BT, 196).
Human Being and Questioning
I feel like I have been holding my usual critical judgment in
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | GRENKE
129
abeyance in much of what I have said so far. I have done this
in order to try to think Heidegger’s thought as genuinely as I
can on its own terms. That entails the abandonment of much
of our traditional sense of evidentiary criteria. For Heidegger
claims to be thinking about and writing about matters that are
more fundamental than our traditional notions of truth as correspondence, and more fundamental than our idea of argument as a progression of inferences that follow one another
according to the rules of logic. As Heidegger suggests, “Perhaps the whole body of logic . . . is grounded in a very definite answer to the question about the being” (IM, 25).
But still, isn’t Heidegger wrong about Nietzsche? Isn’t
he misstating the main point of Nietzsche’s claim? When Heidegger cites Nietzsche as saying that the highest concepts,
including Being, are “last cloudy smoke of evaporating reality,” Heidegger is referring to a passage in section 4 of Twilight of the Idols, called “Reason in Philosophy.” Being is not
mentioned in section 4, but is discussed in the following section as a concept that is derived by means of abstraction from
the concept of the I involved in willing. In section 4, the highest concepts are not said to be empty, rather they are said to
be emptiest. Therefore Heidegger’s overcoming of Nietzsche
by means of proving that being is not an empty word is no
real overcoming at all. Moreover, Heidegger’s treatment of
this passage seems to be silent about Nietzsche’s main point,
which is that the so-called highest concepts are actually the
last concepts, not the first; they are derivative concepts, not
first things. To address Nietzsche’s real point, Heidegger
would have to try to show that Being is available to human
beings in some primary—I am tempted to say “direct”—experience and that this primary experience contains the kind
of rich diversity that, as Heidegger demonstrates, belongs to
our use of the word “being.” I do not think Heidegger tries
to show this by means of argument, although at times he
seems to claim that it is the case; it may be, in fact, that Hei-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
degger would claim that such a primary experience of being
could never be shown in argument.
How would Heidegger respond, then, to the claim that he
got Nietzsche wrong? One possible type of response might
be found in a passage where Heidegger raises the complaint
on the reader’s behalf that Heidegger himself is misreading
Parmenides. Heidegger admits that “our interpretation of the
fragment must appear to be an arbitrary distortion. We are accused of reading into it things that an ‘exact interpretation’
can never determine. This is true” (IM, 176). Heidegger does
not leave the matter at a rather matter-of-fact “Very well, you
caught me.” Instead, he turns the complaint about his own
inaccuracy, his own making things up, into an opportunity to
transform the criteria of truth. He asks, “Which interpretation
is the true one, the one which simply takes over a perspective
into which it has fallen, because this perspective, this line of
sight, presents itself as familiar and self-evident; or the interpretation which questions the customary perspective from top
to bottom, because conceivably—and indeed actually—this
line of sight does not lead to what is in need of being seen”
(IM, 176).
Whether we should find this a slippery and discreditable
evasion of intellectual integrity, or an example of a very serious way to maintain intellectual integrity, or something in
between, I shall leave for you to ponder. Rather than trying
to resolve the matter, I will instead point out the way in which
Heidegger’s response to the question of the intrusion of his
own creativity into his interpretations of the texts connects
to the way in which he thinks about really asking questions.
Immediately after suggesting that his creative interpretation
has a right to be considered “true” interpretation, Heidegger
directly connects true interpretation to questioning—“to give
up the familiar and go back to an interpretation that is also a
questioning is a leap. In order to leap one has to take a proper
run. It is the run that decides everything; for it implies that
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | GRENKE
131
we ourselves really ask the questions and in these questions
first create perspectives” (IM, 176).
But how does really asking questions “create” and how
are “we ourselves” really involved? In Being and Time, Heidegger presents the kind of being of human beings that he
calls Dasein as always having its own “there.” One might say
crudely that a human being is its own “there” and makes its
own “there” but also makes a “there” for other kinds of beings. Heidegger suggests in one early passage of Introduction
to Metaphysics that the way a human being both is itself and
is a “there” is transformed by real questioning. “In this questioning we seem to belong entirely to ourselves. Yet it is this
questioning that moves us into the open, provided that in
questioning it transform itself (which all true questioning
does), and cast a new space over everything and into everything” (IM, 29-30). The human “there” is not some kind of
cloud of spatiality and temporality that follows each of us
around as we go about our day, like the personal clouds of
gloom one sometimes sees in comic strips. Rather, Heidegger
presents the human “there” as the projection of a human
being’s own self onto the given possibilities of a particular
historical circumstance. Usually this projection of self is not
a human being’s genuine self, but the projection of a universal, non-individuated self that belongs to the kind of average
way of being human that gives rise to “idle talk.” But it looks
like Heidegger wants to suggest that when questions are really asked, the questioner projects a self that is really his own.
The projection of one’s own self involves a more intense
set of possibilities of relating to beings than the projection of
just “someone.” Heidegger locates the most intense human
relations to beings in what he calls the primordial. In a way,
Heidegger seems to use the intensity of human affective relations to beings as the measuring stick of the primordiality
of those relations. Intensity seems to become the measure of
the truth. This would seem to lead philosophers to seek the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
intensity found in the primordial. Thus Heidegger claims,
“The ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force
of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself” (BT, 220). Note here that Heidegger does not say
philosophers try to “find” the force of the most elemental
words, rather they try to “preserve” that force.
Why is philosophy, which, as we saw earlier, is associated
with really asking questions, also burdened with the task of
preserving the force of primordial modes of expression? For
Heidegger, it is because every human experience, however
seemingly inactive, is some kind of human doing, that is, a
projection onto a possibility. It is possibilities that emerge
into the truth as unconcealment; but whatever force or power
is available in such possibilities is only available in the form
of some human action, and this very action depletes the possibility’s original intensity. “A beginning can never directly
preserve its full momentum; the only possible way to preserve its force is to repeat, to draw once again more deeply
than ever from its source. And it is only by thoughtful repetition that we can deal appropriately with the beginning and
the breakdown of truth” (IM, 191). The repetition of a possibility is always an act, and in order to access again the original affective intensity of that possibility, the “repetition”
cannot be exactly the same act. Remember, real questioning
is not to be achieved through the repetition of an interrogative
sentence.
This idea about the nature of the repetition of possibilities, then, is the defense of Heidegger’s creative, “inexact”
interpretations. This idea also seems to guide his sense of
what is involved in really asking questions. “Men can retain
basic truths of such magnitude only by raising them constantly to a still more original unfolding; not merely by applying them and invoking their authority” (IM, 145). It is
perhaps a corollary of this idea that “in principle, philosoph-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | GRENKE
133
ical questions are never dealt with as though we might someday cast them aside” (IM, 42).
These considerations may also help us to understand the
rather cryptic statement that very nearly ends Introduction to
Metaphysics: “To know how to question means to know how
to wait, even a whole lifetime” (IM, 206). Waiting is not just
sitting there. Waiting has to be a dynamic passivity. Waiting
must mean a creative holding-open of the humanly affective
and ontologically revelatory potential in possibilities. Questioning, then, becomes repeating those possibilities again and
again, each time differently.
*****
Whatever we might now think of Heidegger as I have presented him—whether we think he is an untrustworthy interpreter, whether we think he fails to give us sufficient
argumentative proof, whether we think he lacks sobriety and
has a dangerous proclivity toward the extreme, whether we
think what we know about his biography says all that need
be said—must we not agree that his thinking about questions
helps us to think about questions? If we can agree on that
much, then I want to pose one last question: Does what Heidegger shows us make us want really to ask questions?
We do not have to ask the fundamental question. We do
not have to ask any question in a real manner. Nothing urgent
or practical pushes us to it. “To be sure, the things in the
world, the beings, are in no way affected by our asking of the
question ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’ Whether
we ask it or not, the planets move in their orbits, the sap of
life flows through plant and animal” (IM, 5). But if the other
things that we always find alongside us in the world do not
make us want really to ask questions, what does? Has Heidegger managed somehow to convey to us a questioning attitude? And if we do find ourselves wanting really to ask
questions, can we ask ourselves why we want to do so?
�134
�REVIEW
135
The Rehabilitation of
Spiritedness
Gary Borjesson, Willing Dogs and Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs. Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2012, x + 251 pages. $14.95.
Book Review by Eva Brann
This book is a delight to read and a profit to ponder. It is a dog
story, a human story, a lesson book (for dog owners), and a philosophical meditation (for anyone). It is learned, but lightly so, and
it has a powerful thesis gently imparted.
I loved it, but my credentials for reviewing it are even better
than that: I don't like dogs. They slobber, shed and speak not a word
of English—none of which facts is denied in this account of friendship between dogs and humans. (In my defense: among the alogoi,
the wordless, I do feel friendly toward dolphins, who luckily live
in another element, and toward babies, who are both incarnations
of potential rationality and cute—for which the animal ethologist’s
term is “care-soliciting.”) Moreover, I have no idea whether Gary
Borjesson’s fundamental claim is true: that real—not in-a-mannerof-speaking—friendship between dog and human is possible. My
old friend Ray Coppinger, a dog evolutionist and breeder (he found
the Jack Russell terrier that inhabits the Assistant Dean’s office at
St. John’s College in Annapolis), whose expertise figures in this
book, thinks otherwise. He once said to me that attributing friendly
feelings rather than self-serving instincts to dogs is pure “anthropomorphizing.” So I’m starting out severely objective in several
respects.
Yet I’m captivated by the author’s account of his life with the
two dogs who are the principals in this story, Kestra and Aktis. His
claims rest on acutely attuned and prolonged observation of his
own dogs, and, peripherally, other people’s dogs. This affectionate
attention is at once trust- and doubt-inspiring. It makes an enchant-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ing story, but it might also be self-confirming, producing the illusions of mutual love. For example, his dogs often smile at him,
though I’ve read that animals with fangs don’t smile, that the evolutionary origin of the human smile is the wolfish snarl. So I’m
one of the author’s acknowledged dog-skeptics—or rather, one half
of me is. With the other half, I’m totally persuaded that the friendship view is the better hypothesis for dog, man, and world.
For not only is it a more coherent and a more friendly universe
if the friendship hypothesis proves out, but it is also a more interesting world, since this position rests on postulates that modulate
some current reductionist dogmas concerning beast and man, both
in themselves and together. There are thought-provoking lessons
here both for intra-species and inter-species relations.
Gary Borjesson’s philosophical reading continually underwrites and illuminates his meditations. Sometimes it’s almost as if
this dog-and-man tale came into its own as a corroboration of Aristotle’s, Plato’s, and Hegel’s insights into animate nature—especially Aristotle’s. Thus the epigraph to the second chapter, on the
spirit of friendship, is part of a passage taken from Aristotle’s Politics. Let me quote the whole, which I’ve always found puzzling,
but which becomes very satisfactorily clear in this book:
Spirit (thumos) is what makes friendliness. For it is the very
power of the soul by which we feel friendship. And here’s the
sign: Spirit, when it feels slighted, is roused more against intimates and friends than strangers (Politics, 1327b40-41).
And Aristotle mentions the Guardians, Plato’s warriors in the
Republic, who are friendly to those they know and savage to those
they don’t know, and whose nature Socrates compares—here’s
serendipity!—to that of a noble young dog (Republic, 375a-376b).
Spirit, spiritedness, passionate temperament, as a middle and
mediating aspect of the human soul, is a Socratic discovery. Sometimes it is obedient to reason, sometimes it in turn masters lust;
these latter are respectively the highest and lowest parts of our soul.
Why should spirit be the enabler of friendship? It is a working
postulate of Borjesson’s book that Aristotle is simply right: spiritedness is the condition of friendship. The argumentation is of the
�REVIEW | BRANN
137
best sort, the sort that starts in a variety of quarters, but from which
all roads lead to Athens: The high road, however, connecting spiritedness to friendship, is the desire to be recognized, attended to,
praised, and the corresponding recoil is the shame of being misconstrued, ignored, or disrespected.
By the intra-species hypothesis, dogs have spirit; it might even
count as an oblique proof that some dogs have a lot and others but
little, and even the latter have a sense of injury. One of the pleasures of this book is the interweaving of dog anecdotes and human
reflection, and the principal subjects of the often poignant stories—
never shaggy—are Gary Borjesson’s own two dogs. Kestra is
sweet-tempered, a little passive, and, for all her lovableness, a little
unkeen, but even she has an acute sense of her trust in her master
being betrayed.
If, then, people and dogs have common ground of a higher
order than animal needs, it must be in the territory of the spirit. For
the author is far from committing the philosophical solecism of attributing reason to dogs. Spirit, however, is, just as Aristotle says,
where friendship is at home. Now among us humans, this capability of the spirit is both an accomplishment and a work in progress,
and so it is if one of the friends is a dog.
This book is full of observations about friendship—discerningly borrowed and observantly original; it is a credible descendant
of those wonders of human perspicacity, Aristotle’s books on
friendship (Nicomachean Ethics, Books 8-9). One of those borrowed observations is that “the point of being friends is to charm
each other”; I love that, because I once long ago phrased it similarly to myself, sailing the Aegean with a friend: “The motor of
friendship is mutual delight.” It doesn’t have Aristotle’s gravity,
but he would not repudiate it. Applied to dogs, it does, however,
imply that what Aristotle considers the highest kind of friendship—
that of beings of intellect in increasingly deep, mutually satisfying
conversation—is not a necessary option (and indeed not available)
to a dog/man pair of friends.
And that indefeasible fact means that friendship as a work in
progress takes on a very different shape for this inter-species pair.
Here the work of friendship is obedience training, where man is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
master, dog subject! As the title of the book declares, dogs, the
good ones, are willing. Not that they are called good because they
like to obey, but they obey because they are good. They have in
them that which can listen—“obey,” from Latin ob-audire, means
“to listen and really to hear.” That is just what Socrates thinks of
spiritedness: It is pride able to listen to reason. They are, one might
say, a-rationally rational. They understand, and so they accept the
superiority of their masters.
Here is where Gary Borjesson’s book becomes topical and
controversial. The second part of his title is “Reluctant Masters.”
He analyzes out this component of our modernity: the reluctance
to act with authority, to accept the charge of mastery, be it in childrearing or dog-training. The result of this abashment—often moralizing—in the face of asserting the control of superior reason is
spoilage: spoiled children, ruined dogs. The book is full of funny
and sad examples; some are reports of outrage expressed by spectators watching the book’s author at work being a master.
One result of the failure of rational mastery is loss of dignity
on both sides, and with it, of equality. For, at its best, friendship is
mutual and so a relation of peers. Some of the most poignant passages of the book are about mutuality, the balanced equality of dog
and human in the territory of spiritedness. Indeed, in the controlled
competition that characterizes the play between these two spirited
animals from different species, the dog often wins—to the man’s
delight. The result of mastery accepted is an equality at once properly delimited and invaluable.
Aristotle, one last time, says that happiness is the soul fulfillingly at work in accordance with its own goodness (Nichomachean
Ethics, 1098a13-16). The willing master of this book really means
to train his dog to happiness. He (or she—the author’s favorite dog
trainer is Vicki Hearne) teaches the young dog to obey, first as parents habituate a child, by gentle and consistent compulsion, even
fear. That training produces the inner control that in us is called
self-determination, freedom. Within these bounds the dog has
scope to fulfill his dog-nature as a competitive pursuer and predator
of minor wild life and as a cooperative playfellow of humans and
�REVIEW | BRANN
139
dogs. The descriptions of these play-episodes induce sympathetic
joy.
I’ll now take it on faith, the writer’s faith, that dogs, domesticated wolves, may be happy under—no, may be made happy by—
human mastery. But that humans, uncircumventably the masters
of domesticated nature, can be exhilaratingly happy, and also better, more thoughtful, and more just in their friendly companionship
with dogs—that’s proven beyond doubt by this lovely book.
�
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 55.1 (Fall 2013)
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Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Tocqueville’s Worst Fears Realized? The Political Implications
of Ralph Waldo Emerson’sTranscendental Spiritualism .............1
Bryan-Paul Frost
“At the Very Center of the Plenitude”: Goethe’s Grand Attempt
to Overcome the 18th Century; or, How Freshman Laboratory
Saved Goethe From the General Sickness of his Age ..................40
David Levine
Special Section: Justice
Editor’s Note .....................................................................................70
The Actual Intention of Plato’s Dialogues on
on Justice and Statesmanship .......................................................71
Eva Brann
Reflections on Justice in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov..............................................................80
Chester Burke
Peaceniks and Warmongers: The Disunity of Virtue
in Plato’s Statesman......................................................................89
Peter Kalkavage
Raskolnikov’s Redemption ...............................................................99
Nicholas Maistrellis
Justice in Plato’s Statesman ............................................................110
Eric Salem
Reviews
Getting to Know Kierkegaard Better
Book Review of Richard McCombs’s
The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. ..............119
James Carey
Plato’s Political Polyphony
Book Review of Plato: Statesman,translated by
Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem. .........................134
Gregory Recco
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Tocqueville’s Worst Fears Realized?
The Political Implications of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Transcendental Spiritualism
Bryan-Paul Frost
It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters
at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science
fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess
wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once
the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is
Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism—a faith that
equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious
communion with the natural world. . . .
If this narrative sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism
has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation
now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he
went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven
through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose
mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the
galaxy together.”
Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. . . . A recent
Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs
about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that
would fit right in among the indigo-tinged Na’Vi.
As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming.
—Ross Douthat, “Heaven and Nature,”
New York Times, December 2009
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville delivered a blunt
verdict on the increasing popularity, in democratic countries, of pantheism: “Among the different systems with whose aid philosophy
Bryan-Paul Frost is the Elias “Bo” Ackal, Jr./BORSF Endowed Professor of
Political Science and adjunct professor of Philosophy at the University of
Louisiana at Lafayette.
�2
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seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me one of the
most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries;
all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should
unite and do combat against it.” For a writer whose moderation and
nonpartisanship are well known, these remarks are a heavy indictment indeed. Why did Tocqueville believe that pantheism is both
so alluring and so debilitating to democratic peoples? And whom
precisely did he blame for the seduction? The second of these questions is easier to answer. Tocqueville singles out the Germans and
the French for introducing pantheism into philosophy and literature, respectively. The editors of one of the most recent translations
of Democracy in America indicate that Tocqueville probably has
in mind philosophers such as Leibnitz, Fichte, and Hegel, on the
one side, and writers such as Alphonse de Lamartine and Edgar
Quinet, on the other side.1
Since Tocqueville found the democratic urge to be particularly
strong in the United States, one is naturally led to wonder whether
there might not be some American authors whose writings exhibit
the same worrisome tendencies. This paper will enlarge on Tocqueville’s critique by studying an American essayist who, probably
unwittingly, revealed in more concrete detail the full extent of Tocqueville’s fears about pantheism: Ralph Waldo Emerson.
At first glance, Emerson seems an unlikely mark for such a
charge. After all, in such inspirational essays as “Self-Reliance,”
he seems to champion “human individuality” and greatness, and
is a severe critic of majority tyranny, intellectual apathy, and the
slavish pursuit of wealth and reputation—all of which Tocqueville
too denounced as unhealthy extremes to which democracy is prone.
On the other hand, Emerson was also a founding member of, and
chief spokesperson for, the American Transcendentalist movement,
and his religious convictions had strong strains of Neoplatonic and
pantheistic spiritualism. Emerson’s transcendentalism had no little
impact on his political and ethical writings: indeed, his unique
brand of spontaneity, intuition, and creativity was based upon an
individual hearkening to the voice of God within him, a God that
permeated all nature and with the aid of whom one sought to act
in conformity with one’s unique calling. Emerson’s thought, it
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turns out, despite its apparent support for individual greatness, rests
on spiritual principles that eventually corrode, and ultimately undermine, both genuine human nobility and healthy democratic
ethics. In what follows, we will attempt to uncover the political
implications and effects of Emerson’s spiritualism—a spiritualism
whose basic tenets, as the preceding epigraph makes clear, are still
very influential today.
Easy Answers, Unmoored Souls:
The Debilitating Effects of Pantheism and Fatalism
Tocqueville’s brief treatment of pantheism (DA 2.1.7, 425–26) occurs as part of his discussion of the “Influence of Democracy on
Intellectual Movement in the United States.” The purpose of this
section is to articulate how the mind of a democratic people is influenced and shaped by democracy itself. This is an especially important topic in relation to democracy; for, as Tocqueville points
out earlier in the book, democrats rely only on their own reason
when judging or evaluating, and not on such factors as age, experience, tradition, class, and so on—precisely because, as egalitarians, they bow to no superior authority (DA 2.1.1, 403–4). One
might say this about the philosophic method of Americans, who
closely follow Cartesian precepts, Tocqueville says, without ever
having read Descartes themselves: in America, Je pense, donc je
suis means “I am the only one who can be relied upon to judge
things which are of concern to me.”
Of course, Tocqueville knows that democrats are not all
equally capable of making wise and informed decisions on their
own, and they will thus turn to sources of authority and intellectual
devices that will not offend their pride or undermine their fundamental belief in equality. In fact, Tocqueville argues, democrats
turn to an anonymous but omnipresent public opinion to supply
convenient answers and ready-made beliefs. He identifies the
source of this behavior in what he calls “the theory of equality applied to intellects”: “The moral empire of the majority is founded
in part on the idea that there is more enlightenment and wisdom in
many men united than in one alone” (DA 1.2.7, 236). Indeed, democrats are particularly susceptible to rely on and trust public opin-
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ion inasmuch as egalitarianism isolates and atomizes individuals
from one another; consequently, to go against public opinion leaves
one feeling small, feeble, and helpless (DA 2.1.2, 408–9). Moreover, Tocqueville explains why democrats have a tendency for general ideas and over-simplifications: these tools make thinking and
judging easier, even if they inevitably compromise accuracy. This
ease in thinking passes for skill, and so, overlooking the sloppiness
introduced by generalities, democratic peoples become prouder of
their intelligence even as they become lazier in their thinking (DA
2.1.3 and 4, 411–16).
Tocqueville notes, however, that there is at least one area in
which dogmatic or fixed opinions and general ideas are salutary
for democratic peoples, namely, in matters of religion. Religion
provides the necessary counterweight to the ill effects of individual
isolation or atomization and love of material pleasure—the twin
dangers to which democrats are most prone. By raising one’s mind
to the heavens, and by inculcating duties to one’s fellows, religion
imposes obligations and responsibilities that are contrary to the desires democrats would likely pursue if left to themselves (DA 2.1.5,
417–19). It is in this context that Tocqueville turns to pantheism,
and in this context it appears to be the culmination of his critique
of democratic thought.
Democrats are attracted to pantheism for two principal reasons.
In the first place, pantheism feeds the democratic prejudice to reject
all traditional sources of authority and rely exclusively on one’s
own reason. As everyone is part of the same, undifferentiated
whole (God included!), no claim to superiority or authority can
hold: human particularity or individuality is obliterated in universal
homogeneity. But it is precisely the elimination of particularity or
individuality that, while being so attractive to democrats, is also
so dangerous. Democrats are further atomized and enfeebled as
everyone is swallowed up in the whole, which encompasses all
Being. As Tocqueville explains: “As conditions become more
equal and each man in particular becomes more like all the others,
weaker and smaller, one gets used to no longer viewing citizens so
as to consider only the people; one forgets individuals so as to think
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only of the species” (DA 2.1.7, 426). We are, quite literally, withdrawn into our own little world, and this leaves democrats all the
more susceptible to the crushing and deadening weight of public
opinion: indeed, public opinion might become ever more despotic
as pantheism takes hold, for there is nothing—not even God Himself—that can stand as a bulwark against its dictates and demands.
To use language Tocqueville will use later in part 2 of the same
Volume (DA 2.2.2, 482: “On Individualism in Democratic Countries”): while democracy fosters the creation of atomized and isolated individuals, pantheism then eliminates the particularity of the
individuals thus created.
In the second place, pantheism appeals to the desire for unity,
general ideas, and single-minded explanations—indeed, it satisfies
this desire as no other religious or philosophic doctrine can. By reducing all Being—God and man, visible and invisible, change and
continuity—into a single whole, which alone is eternal and true
and real, democrats generate remarkably crisp, easy, and pleasing
answers when it comes to those first questions about human existence which trouble the soul (cf. DA 2.1.5, 418). By the same
token, however, this easy solution has deleterious effects on the
(already limited) intellectual capacity of democratic peoples: pantheism “nourishes the haughtiness and flatters the laziness of their
minds” (DA 2.1.7, 426) in the same way as all general ideas do.
But pantheism is more problematic than this. By collapsing the
material and immaterial world into a single whole, pantheism inadvertently collapses, or even eliminates, the tension between the
duties and obligations we owe to others and to heaven, on the one
hand, and the earthly desire for material well-being and pleasure,
on the other hand. Tocqueville is hardly so sanguine as to believe
that this tension could ever be overcome. He cautions religions that
they should neither try to uproot the desire for well-being (the implication is that this desire is generally stronger than the desires
proper to religion) nor try to provoke unnecessary conflicts with
generally accepted public opinions. Nevertheless, by keeping this
tension alive and well, democratic society is able to enjoy the salutary effects of religion and avoid the spiritual degradation to which
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democracy is prone. In sum, pantheism both exacerbates the worst
effects of what Tocqueville describes as “individualism” and undermines the salutary effects of religion on a democratic people.
One peculiar aspect of Tocqueville’s discussion is that it is not
quite clear whether pantheism is a philosophic doctrine or a religious system, or both, or neither. Tocqueville describes pantheism
as both a “doctrine” and a “system,” and in the latter case, he once
indirectly implies that it is a “philosophic system.” He never states,
however, that it is a “religious” doctrine or system. Nonetheless,
Tocqueville also seems to oppose pantheism to philosophy per se,
as when he says that the “Germans introduce [pantheism] into philosophy,” and that “[a]mong the different systems with whose aid
philosophy seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me
one of the most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries” (DA 2.1.7, 425–26). Could it be that pantheism is
a sort of secular religion, a sort of middle ground between Christianity and atheism? And if this is true, then would not the growing
strength of pantheism be one indication that a people are moving
away from religion properly speaking? In this respect, it is important to note that Tocqueville concludes the chapter preceding his
discussion of pantheism, “On the Progress of Catholicism in the
United States,” with this prediction:
It is one of the most familiar weaknesses of the human
intellect to want to reconcile contrary principles and to
buy peace at the expense of logic. Therefore there always have been and always will be men who, after having submitted some of their religious beliefs to an
authority, want to spare several others and let their
minds float at random between obedience and freedom.
But I am brought to believe that the number of these
will be smaller in democratic than in other centuries
and that our descendants will tend more and more to
be divided into only two parts, those leaving Christianity entirely and others entering into the bosom of the
Roman Church (DA 2.1.6, 425).
To the extent that pantheism is not a religion—to the extent that pantheism signifies the near absence of true religious conviction—then
a people embracing pantheism will be prone to moral and political
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servitude, as Tocqueville tried to show a bit earlier in the text.
When religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes
hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about matters
that most interest those like him and himself; one defends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as
one despairs of being able to resolve by oneself the
greatest problems that human destiny presents, one is
reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about them at
all.
Such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens
the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude.
Not only does it then happen that they allow their
freedom to be taken away, but often they give it over.
When authority in the matter of religion no longer
exists, nor in the matter of politics, men are soon frightened at the aspect of this limitless independence. This
perpetual agitation of all things makes them restive and
fatigues them. As everything is moving in the world of
the intellect, they want at least that all be firm and stable in the material order; and as they are no longer able
to recapture their former beliefs, they give themselves
a master (DA 2.1.5, 418).
Since pantheism appears to loosen religious sentiment, the widespread acceptance of this “doctrine” among a democratic people
might well indicate that they are becoming enervated and susceptible to bondage in the form of political salvation. Thus, although
Tocqueville claims that new religions cannot be easily established
in democratic times (for no one is willing to submit to an “intellectual authority” which is “outside of and above humanity” [DA
2.1.2, 408]), pantheism can be established, precisely because the
source of its belief is not outside of humanity, but within it, and
because it is not really a religion as Tocqueville understands the
term.
We can round off our consideration of Tocqueville’s ideas
about the effects of democracy on the thought of its citizens by
looking briefly at his discussion of the tendencies of democratic
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historians, a topic he said he would discuss at the beginning of the
chapter on pantheism. Democratic historians, he says, are prone to
underestimate or ignore the role of particular causes—that is “great
men”—in the course of history. He finds the root of this tendency
in democracy itself.
When . . . all citizens are independent of one another,
and each of them is weak, one finds none who exert a
very great or above all a very lasting power over the
mass. At first sight, individuals seem absolutely powerless over it, and one would say that society advances
all by itself—by the free and spontaneous concourse of
all the men who compose it (DA 2.1.20, 470).
Historians who adopt this attitude tend to think that history has a
sort of inevitable motion that cannot be regulated by human
agency.
When any trace of the action of individuals on nations
is lost, it often happens that one sees the world moving
without discovering its motor. As it becomes very difficult to perceive and analyze the reasons that, acting
separately on the will of each citizen, in the end produce the movement of the people, one is tempted to believe that this movement is not voluntary and that,
without knowing it, societies obey a superior, dominating force (DA 2.1.20, 471).
Such a force seems nearly impossible to resist, and belief in it leads
first to the conclusion that human freedom is illusory, and then to the
deduction that individuals are not responsible even for their own actions, let alone for the actions of their nation.
Even if one should discover on earth the general fact
that directs the particular wills of all individuals, that
does not save human freedom. A cause vast enough to
be applied to millions of men at once and strong enough
to incline all together in the same direction easily seems
irresistible; after having seen that one yields to it, one is
quite close to believing that one cannot resist it (DA
2.1.20, 471).
If the notion of such an irresistible force were to gain widespread
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currency in the thought of a democratic people, society would simply grind to a halt due to the general belief that no one is strong
enough to take any action that matters, any action that can push
back against the tide of history. The very possibility of human
greatness would fade out, because the freedom that nourishes that
possibility would no longer present itself to the mind.
Historians who live in democratic times, therefore, not
only deny to a few citizens the power to act on the destiny of a people, they also take away from peoples themselves the ability to modify their own fate, and they
subject them either to an inflexible providence or to a
sort of blind fatality. . . .
If this doctrine of fatality, which has so many attractions for those who write history in democratic times,
passed from writers to their readers, thus penetrating the
entire mass of citizens and taking hold of the public
mind, one can foresee that it would soon paralyze the
movement of the new societies (DA 2.1.20, 471–72).
In summary: Tocqueville understood that living in democratic
times could lead to modes of thought that would be highly detrimental, both for the freedom of the individual and for the freedom
of the whole people. In particular, the doctrines of pantheism and
fatalism dispose people to subservience: the first because it enhances individualism and weakens the moral force of religion; the
second because it eliminates the feeling that the individual has any
agency in, or responsibility for, the course taken by events. If Tocqueville is right, then anything that assists the spread of pantheism
and fatalism will present a danger to democratic societies.
Emerson’s Transcendental Spiritualism
In order to understand the political implications of Emerson’s spiritualism, and to see if that understanding leads to precisely the
consequences that Tocqueville feared, it is first necessary to lay
out Emerson’s views on transcendentalism, in particular, and on
Christianity, in general. Our effort here will be focused on showing
that Emerson’s spiritualism is remarkably similar to Tocqueville’s
pantheism.
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Although Emerson is often referred to as one of the principal innovators of American Transcendentalism, in his essay “The Transcendentalist” (1843), he denies that transcendentalism is a new or
original school of thought. In fact, he says, the roots of transcendentalism—which he also calls idealism—are as old as thinking
itself, and it is one of only two modes of thinking.
As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects,
Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on
experience, the second on consciousness; the first class
beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say,
The senses give us representations of things, but what
are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist
on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration,
on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of
thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that
his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all
that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense,
admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then
asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that
things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says,
affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts
which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their
first appearance to us assume a native superiority to
material facts, degrading these into a language by
which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only
needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every
materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never
go backward to be a materialist (RE 81).2
Whereas a materialist (e.g., John Locke) acknowledges the independent existence of an external world accessible through sense
impression and confirmed through experience, a transcendentalist
or idealist (e.g., Immanuel Kant) privileges his own consciousness
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and intuition, arguing that the “external world” is mental or spiritual, and is only apprehended or revealed through an individual,
self-conscious mind. The transcendentalist does not dispute that
objects are perceived by the senses; rather, he questions whether
sense perception is an accurate, complete, and final representation
of the object in itself.
After arguing that the materialist’s confidence in the solidity
of facts and figures is ill founded, Emerson makes the following
comparison:
In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one
product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his
consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance.
The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art and luxury, every establishment,
every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of
space, or amount of objects, every social action. The
idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical,
namely the rank which things themselves take in his
consciousness; not at all the size or appearance. Mind
is the only reality, of which men and all other natures
are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history,
are only subjective phenomena. . . . His thought—that
is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold
the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing
perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a
subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid
Unknown Centre of him (RE 82–83).
While Emerson’s transcendentalist appears at first glance to be
wholly sovereign and self-determined, he is also open to influences
or forces from without—albeit influences of a certain sort:
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of
spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light
and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He
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wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to
demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications
to the state of man, without the admission of anything
unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus the spiritual measure of inspiration is the
depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he
resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures
onthe spirit than its own (RE 84).
In order to develop a more detailed image of the transcendentalist, we must attempt to concretize Emerson’s elliptical remarks
about “spirituality.” What—or who—is this “Universe” which
“beckons and calls” the transcendentalist from inactivity “to
work,” which issues him the “highest command,” and with which
he seeks some sort of “union” (RE 91 and 95)? Emerson refers to
this deity or highest principle in a variety of ways with no discernable difference in meaning: in the essay “The Over-Soul” (1841)
alone, he uses the terms “Unity,” “Over-Soul,” “the eternal ONE,”
“Highest Law,” “Supreme Mind,” “Maker,” “Divine mind,” “Omniscience,” and “God” quite interchangeably. All of these terms
seem to refer to a transcendent spiritual force that permeates and
animates all existence—both human and non-human nature, organic and inorganic—and that binds and unites everything together
in a pure and sublime oneness or wholeness.
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise
silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and
particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this
deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is
all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing
seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one (RE 237).
Every individual is contained within this whole, and although the
ultimate source of both our being and the whole is unknown or hidden, before its power our soul is laid bare and we are revealed for
who we are.
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The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the
present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is
that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the
soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul,
within which every man’s particular being is contained
and made one with all other; that common heart of
which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which
all right action is submission; that overpowering reality
which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains
every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his
character and not from his tongue (RE 237).
13
Our communion with and access to this deity is through our own
soul, which Emerson states is neither an “organ,” nor a “function,”
nor a “faculty”: the soul is the unpossessed and unpossessable
“background of our being” which transcends time and space. If a
man is the “facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good
abide,” the soul would be a light shining from within or behind this
facade, illuminating all and giving direction to our will and intellect; and when we allow the soul to “have its way through us,” intellect becomes genius, will virtue, and affection becomes love (RE
238–39).
The perception and disclosure of truth in and through the
soul—“an influx of the Divine mind into our mind”—is what
Emerson calls “revelation.” Although revelation varies in both its
intensity and character—from the transfiguring to the tepid, from
the prophetic to the prosaic—all persons have the capacity to be
so moved, and all persons who are so moved belong to the same
general class of individuals, whether they be a Socrates or a St.
Paul. One reason for this vast resemblance among “prophets” is
that the “nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law” (RE 243–44). Unfortunately, the precise
content of this law is not articulated—indeed, it cannot and should
not be articulated. Revelation does not occur through words, nor
does it respond to our questions.
Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In
past oracles of the soul the understanding seeks to find
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answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from
God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do
and who shall be their company, adding names and dates
and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check
this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is
really no answer to the questions you ask. . . . Men ask
concerning the immortality of the soul, the employments
of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even
dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak
in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the
soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated.
Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these,
never made the separation of the idea of duration from
the essence of these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to
teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. . . .
These questions which we lust to ask about the future
are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them.
No answer in words can reply to a question of things
(RE 244–45).
We must apparently rest content with Emerson’s assurances that,
if we “forego all low curiosity” and live in the infinite present of
today, these questions will somehow be answered or resolved
through the silent workings of the soul. The key to existence is an
almost child-like innocence, simplicity, and authenticity, complete
honesty with oneself and with others, utter openness to the OverSoul and consequently all creation through it; being insincere, sophistic, or double in any way indicates disharmony in the soul and
distance from God.
These remarks naturally raise the question as to whether
Emerson’s deity is a caring or providential being. To begin with,
in what sense would one pray to this entity? Certainly, Emerson
does not understand prayer in any ordinary or traditional sense.
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He describes his notion of prayer in “Self-Reliance”:
In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which
they call a holy office is not so much as brave and
manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign
addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses
itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and
mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life
from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a
beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes
dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As
soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He
will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the
farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the
rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true
prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends
(RE 147–48).
Those who pray or beg to attain some selfish end (material goods
or worldly success) falsely assume a separation between themselves and the divine; those who express regret or recite creeds display an “infirmity” of the will or intellect (RE 148). Properly
speaking, prayer is the act of a healthy, self-reliant individual contemplating or celebrating the existence of God within his soul, and
it can be manifested in the simplest actions.
Nonetheless, Emerson’s deity is more than a transcendent spirit
animating existence, for he also affirms that God the “Maker of all
things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things” (RE 242–43). This supreme creator,
however, is not the God of the Old Testament, but the divine mind
or soul of Plotinus and the Neoplatonists: the world is an emanation
or overflow from the divine mind; all creation is contained within
this whole, and all the variety in nature is encompassed within this
unity (RE 18ff., 118–19, 252ff., 293). Although the divine maker
can apparently choose to inspire specific individuals, and although
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he sent Jesus into the world (albeit not in the sense of his being the
son of God), God does not perform miracles in any ordinary or traditional sense of the word. Christianity’s moral doctrines and not
its miracles are what move Emerson to belief, and the attempt to
convert others through miracles is a spiritual abomination: genuine
conversion comes through genuine instruction, and this is strictly
a matter of free internal acceptance, without any external compulsion whatsoever (RE 67–69, 106–8, 237). The greatest miracle of
all would seem to be the shattering and transfiguring beauty of the
universe as well as the immutable natural laws that govern its operation. At all events, whatever the precise character of this personal and mystic union with the Over-Soul, it seems ecstatic,
ineffable, and utterly compelling; it is much more a matter of the
heart than the intellect; and it does not rely on traditions, institutions, and rituals.
Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the
soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships
God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of
this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It
inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing
to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place,
effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments!
When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased
from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart
with his presence. . . .
Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all
thought to his heart; this, namely, that the Highest dwells
with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind,
if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know
what the great God speaketh, he must ‘go into his closet
and shut the door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other
men’s devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him,
until he have made his own (RE 248–49).
Although much more could certainly be said about Emerson’s transcendentalism, it seems clear from this overview that, at least from
Tocqueville’s perspective, Emerson’s “religious” system or doc-
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trine exhibits precisely those characteristics Tocqueville had described about pantheism: the material and immaterial world is encompassed in an undifferentiated unity or whole to which we are
inextricably and inexplicably linked.
Having briefly discussed Emerson’s transcendentalism, let us
now turn to the question of whether it exhibits some of the dangerous characteristics that Tocqueville feared. Does Emerson’s
spiritualism, for example, nourish “the haughtiness” and flatter
“the laziness” of our minds in the same way that all general ideas
do? A strong indication is Emerson’s doubt, in “The Over-Soul,”
about whether everyday language can capture the deity’s essence:
Every man’s words who speaks from that life must
sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same
thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My
words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and
cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!
their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal
as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane
words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven
of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected
of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law (RE 237–38).
Clearly, Emerson thinks that language, unaided by divine inspiration, cannot convey divine insights. In fact, he suggests in the Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838 that the very attempt to
communicate religion has an inherently corrupting effect. Historical Christianity, for example, has fallen away, he says, from the
true message of Jesus.
Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the
doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells,
with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.
The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no
preferences but those of spontaneous love (RE 68).
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Similarly, in “Self-Reliance” (1841) he also faults “all philosophy”
in its attempt to inquire into the divine source of such entities as
life, being, justice, and the soul.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes
us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When
we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we
ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul
that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its
absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates
between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary
perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so,
like day and night, not to be disputed (RE 141–42).
It would seem that certain subjects are off-limits to philosophical
speculation because to communicate one’s findings profanes the
subject matter and is thus a sacrilege. Ultimately, Emerson’s religious understanding might be ineffable or untranslatable because
it rests on an entirely individual, and therefore inherently subjective, communion or experience. Emerson’s religious system or
doctrine is sweepingly comprehensive, but he relieves us from having to think about its specifics by cutting off all philosophic discussion. Thus Emerson forces his spiritual ideas to be extremely
simple and general.
But it is precisely this generality which, while appealing to
lazy minds, also leaves people without any real answers to those
fundamental questions of human existence that Tocqueville sees
as critical in religious dogma. Without answers to those questions,
democratic intellects expose themselves to all sorts of dangers. Although Emerson claims that questions concerning the immortality
of the soul, providence, and the afterlife are not properly asked of,
or answered by, his deity, Tocqueville has warned us that the democratic soul will become enervated or even paralyzed over time by
seeking answers to all these deep questions, and then become ripe
for political and moral enslavement.
Indeed, one wonders whether Tocqueville would even consider
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Emerson’s spirituality to be a religion at all inasmuch as it refuses
to provide answers about primary questions. At the very least, by
collapsing the tension between the material and immaterial world,
Emerson seems to have undermined what Tocqueville sees as the
salutary effect of religion on a democratic ethos, namely, promoting duties to others and limiting the unbridled pursuit of wealth.
Of course, there is nothing in Emerson’s spiritualism that encourages the opposite tendencies, and Emerson says on more than one
occasion that the mere pursuit of wealth is slavish. Nevertheless,
absent any sort of “divine sanction” or “divine punishment” to
deter those who might be tempted to forego their obligations to
others, one wonders how Emerson’s transcendentalism, over the
long run, could fully support a healthy democratic ethos when
democratic passions run so clearly in the opposite direction.
Unitarian Christianity
This assessment of Emerson’s spiritualism needs some amplification. After all, Emerson was (however briefly) a Unitarian minister,
and therefore his rather “unorthodox” transcendentalism must be
understood in the context of his more “orthodox” Christianity. Certainly any complete account of Emerson’s religiosity must give
due weight to his understanding of Christ and Christianity; but, as
we shall see, even when this is taken into account, it is difficult to
reach conclusions that differ much from our previous assessment.
Let us begin with Emerson’s sermon called “The Lord’s Supper,” delivered on Sunday 9 September 1832, in which Emerson
argues that a close reading of the New Testament indicates Jesus
never intended the Eucharist to become a permanent institutional
ritual of the Church; and even if he did intend it, the ritual is actually harmful to the genuine religious sentiment Jesus intended to
instill (RE 99–109).3 But even aside from these claims, Emerson
finds the most persuasive case against the Eucharist in the aversion
which he has to the symbolism of the bread and the wine, which
he refers to as “the elements”:
Passing other objections, I come to this, that the use of
the elements, however suitable to the people and the
modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is
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foreign and unsuited to affect us. Whatever long usage
and strong association may have done in some individuals to deaden this repulsion, I apprehend that their use
is rather tolerated than loved by any of us. We are not
accustomed to express our thoughts or emotions by
symbolical actions. Most men find the bread and wine
no aid to devotion, and to some it is a painful impediment. To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of
Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.
The statement of this objection leads me to say that
I think this difficulty, wherever it is felt, to be entitled
to the greatest weight. It is alone a sufficient objection
to the ordinance. It is my own objection. This mode of
commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is
reason enough why I should abandon it. If I believed
that it was enjoined by Jesus on his disciples, and that
he even contemplated making permanent this mode of
commemoration, every way agreeable to an Eastern
mind, and yet on trial it was disagreeable to my own
feelings, I should not adopt it. I should choose other
ways which, as more effectual upon me, he would approve more. For I choose that my remembrances of him
should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him
as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship,
and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do those
whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a
moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of
love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true
commemoration (RE 106–7).
Because every religious ritual has the potential to impinge upon
the autonomy and independence of the soul—upon its freedom to
choose the manner and method of worship—no ritual or form can
ever be declared inviolate and sacrosanct.
Freedom is the essence of this faith [i.e., Christianity].
It has for its object simply to make men good and wise.
Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants
of men. That form out of which the life and suitable-
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ness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes
as the dead leaves that are falling around us (RE 108).
To hold onto outmoded rituals is to betray the very purpose of
Christ’s crucifixion, for Jesus was sent to deliver mankind from
religions in which ritual forms are more important than personal
transformation.
That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that
for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end
that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who
have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal
religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The whole world was full of idols
and ordinances. The Jewish was a religion of forms; it
was all body, it had no life, and the Almighty God was
pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men
that they must serve him with the heart; that only that
life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke, and forms were shadows (RE 108).
In the end, Emerson himself will judge the worthiness of all traditional ceremonies, conventions, and customs—even those that
Jesus might have specifically ordained.
Emerson’s departure from the traditional institutions and doctrines of Christianity is even more pronounced in his Harvard Divinity School Address, in which he identifies two fundamental
errors in the administration of the Christian church. He describes
the first in this way:
It [historical Christianity] has dwelt, it dwells, with
noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The
soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand
to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and
fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of
man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with
expressions which were once sallies of admiration and
love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all
generous sympathy and liking (RE 68).
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The Church’s obsession with the personality of Jesus distorts and
vulgarizes his teaching by claiming that he was the son of God.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He
saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by
its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived
in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to
what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates
himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take
possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts;
through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’ But what
a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the
same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no
doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by
the Understanding. The understanding caught this high
chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age,
‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill
you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the
place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes (RE 67–68).
The Church fails to understand that Jesus was a prophet not because he was divine, but because he alone saw the divinity of all
men. 4
The second great error of the Church is a consequence of the
first: by regarding Jesus and his message as an historical figure
who established the religion in the far distant past, the living spirit
is extinguished from present worship. By failing to make the soul
in all its glory the foundation of religious instruction, contemporary
preachers (unintentionally, to be sure) smother the joyous temperament in their congregations that characterizes genuine piety. This,
in turn, corrodes the faith of the nation as a whole. Rehearsed rather
than inspired, doctrinaire rather than personal, formal rather than
uplifting, monotone rather than celebratory, “historical Christianity
destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the ex-
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ploration of the moral nature of man” (RE 73). Emerson offers his
auditors a vivid sampler of the sorts of “moral” subjects whose absence in American churches causes people to think twice about
participating in public worship:
In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me,
is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that
the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he
is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds
the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my
heart, and so affirms its own origin in heaven? Where
shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to
leave all and follow—father and mother, house and
land, wife and child? Where shall I hear these August
laws of moral being so pronounced as to fill my ear,
and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost action
and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should
be its power to charm and command the soul, as the
laws of nature control the activity of the hands—so
commanding that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising and
of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird,
and the breath of flowers. But now the priest’s Sabbath
has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are
glad when it is done (RE 71).
The power and the beauty that Emerson demands from vital religion are missing from most modern Christianity.
What does Emerson recommend to repair this situation?
I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus
with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith
makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own
forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold
as the new worship introduced by the French to the
goddess of Reason—to-day, pasteboard and filigree,
and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather
let the breath of new life be breathed by you through
the forms already existing. For if once you are alive,
you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The
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remedy to their deformity is first, soul, and second,
soul, and evermore, soul (RE 77–78).
Emerson thus does not advocate the creation of “new rites and
forms” but the spiritual reinvigoration of those forms already at
hand. As for the current generation of preachers, they must stride
forward in a spirit of fierce independence from all traditional authority, maintain the most rigid personal integrity and virtue, and
be open to the sublime wonder and limitless potential in man—
which is the true gospel of Christ, and is as alive today as ever (RE
75–78). Emerson’s views were so unorthodox that many of the faculty members at Harvard publicly denounced the speech. He was
not invited back to speak at his alma mater for some thirty years.
Two features of Emerson’s heterodox Unitarianism are particularly significant in the context of the questions we are pursuing.
First, his absolute reliance on his own judgment exemplifies the
practice he recommends to everyone: the individual alone is the
sole judge in matters of religious doctrine and form. What the individual determines to be satisfactory is necessarily so, and that
judgment is sufficient in itself. Second, Jesus’s fundamental message, according to Emerson, fully supports transcendentalism (and,
we maintain, pantheism): we are to find and worship the god within
all of us.
What sort of religious reform could proceed from Emerson’s
appeals? He may have wanted spiritual revival within the Church,
but achieving that revival on his terms would require the rejection
of so many aspects of traditional, orthodox Christianity that one
wonders just what sort of “church” would remain. All things considered, Emerson’s iconoclastic Unitarian Christianity imparts a
unique flavor to his pantheistic spiritualism, but since it remains
pantheism at bottom, it still promotes the dangerous effects that
Tocqueville feared.
The Individual as Supreme Lawgiver
The foregoing discussion has concentrated on the first aspect of
the Tocquevillian critique of Emerson’s spiritualism—how its generality and simplicity flatters the democratic intellect. We must
now ask about the second aspect: What effect does Emerson’s spir-
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itualism have on individuality and the capacity of individuals to
remain free? We approach this question by examining Emerson’s
teaching about the source of individual actions and judgments—
especially moral and ethical judgments.
Throughout his writings, Emerson insists that the transcendentalist is a self-legislating individual: there is no law or commandment that is unconditionally binding upon him. And there is no
institution—no government, no church, no society—that is worthy
of his respect and allegiance unless, as is said in “The Transcendentalist,” it “reiterates the law of his mind” (RE 83). The transcendentalist’s conduct is not governed by deliberation or experience,
but by intuition, spontaneity, and trusting one’s instincts—even, it
seems, when one can give no rational account of them. Only spontaneous action—which is receptive to and motivated by the
prompting of the divine voice within—is genuinely obedient to
God. By becoming the channel through which the divine makes itself manifest, we shed all gross vanity and pretension while simultaneously solidifying and strengthening our own character.
A little consideration of what takes place around us
every day would show us that a higher law than that of
our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple,
spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting
ourselves with obedience we become divine. Belief and
love—a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of
care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the
centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that
none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its
strong enchantment into nature that we prosper when
we accept its advice, and when we struggle to wound
its creatures our hands are glued to our sides, or they
beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes
to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance
for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the
right word. Why need you choose so painfully your
place and occupation and associates and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible
right for you that precludes the need of balance and
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wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and
congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the
stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom
it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth,
to right and a perfect contentment. Then you put all
gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the
measure of right, of truth, of beauty (RE 176).
By keeping our soul open to the ebb and flow of the Over-Soul,
we will be made privy to the truth; we will become genuinely
moral by attentively listening to the poetry of our own heart, which
is itself a reflection of the poetry of the universe and its animating
spirit. Emerson replaces the ancient injunction “know thyself” with
“trust thyself,” because the latter contains or is the means to the
former (RE 133).
Emerson’s celebration of individual intuition, integrity, and
spontaneity is stated perhaps nowhere more succinctly and powerfully than in his most famous and inspirational essay, “Self-Reliance” (1841). Like Moses, Plato, and Milton, we must learn to
heed the flash of genius when it ignites within us, trusting, almost
child-like, that God has a purpose in our work and that divinity
does not traffic in counterfeit forms. But if God urges us to listen
to our heart, society does not, and the more we become accustomed
to the ways of the world, the more our native light of genius grows
dim (RE 132–34). Two problems arise from this tension between
God and society: conformity and consistency. Regarding conformity, he considers it nearly impossible to resist:
[T]he discontent of the multitude [is] more formidable
than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough
for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage
of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation
of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor
are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies
at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it
needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it
godlike as a trifle of no concernment (RE 137–38).
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Regarding consistency, Emerson downplays its importance, and
argues that sincerity, over the long run, will exhibit its own logic
and integrity: “Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing” (RE 139).
Emerson highlights these two problems because they, more
than anything else, undermine the self-trust necessary to act spontaneously or instinctively. Self-trust is the source of all spontaneous
and ingenious action.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who
is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a
universal reliance may be grounded? . . . The inquiry
leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of
virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all
later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last
fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find
their common origin. For the sense of being which in
calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not
diverse from things, from space, from light, from time,
from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously
from the same source whence their life and being also
proceed. We first share the life by which things exist
and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and
forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that
inspiration which giveth man wisdom and which cannot
be denied without impiety and atheism (RE 141–42).
To those who might argue that overstressing individual self-reliance
in this way could well have injurious effects on society’s necessarily
collaborative structures—such as government and the family—and
could delude a person into committing atrocities in the name of “intuition” and “spontaneity,” Emerson’s response in this essay is unaccommodating: So be it.
I remember an answer which when quite young I was
prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont
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to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the
church. On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?”
my friend suggested—“But these impulses may be
from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not
seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I
will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to
me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names
very readily transferable to that or this; the only right
is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what
is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence
of all opposition as if every thing were titular and
ephemeral but he (RE 135).
Emerson holds that we must give expression to the unique incarnation of the divine within us. We must not continue to be the predictable herd animals that we are at present: conformity—not
self-reliance—is the real threat to a vibrant political and civic life.
Indeed, ignoring the divine voice within us, since it is the sacred
source of all life and wisdom, is true atheism and impiety. Self-reliance thus turns out to be God-reliance—if by “God” is meant the
divine voice within as you interpret it (RE 141–45).
It is here, with all probability, that Tocqueville would find the
most dangerous implications of Emerson’s spiritualism: he forthrightly rejects any moral guidance that comes from without and demands that individuals judge for themselves. Of course, it is
precisely this celebration of individual autonomy that causes many
to classify Emerson as a staunch “individualist”—not in Tocqueville’s derogatory sense as applied to someone withdrawn into
himself, but in the complimentary sense of someone who, opposing
mass opinion and fashionable trends, stakes out his own ground.
Emerson is certainly aware, as we have seen, of the force exerted
on the individual by majority opinion. But he does not believe, as
Tocqueville does, that individuals left to be their own moral legislators and lawgivers become atomized and isolated in society, leaving them more susceptible to the tyrannizing and homogenizing
effects of public opinion. To Emerson’s mind, individuals must rely
on themselves rather than on traditional sources of authority if they
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are going to be genuinely moral and have the strength to withstand
mass opinion.
Notwithstanding Emerson’s contagious optimism, one question persists throughout his discussion of the individual as judge
and executor of his own laws: How does one distinguish between
inspiration and madness? Even if we are all part of a greater whole,
what standard can be employed to determine whether someone has
correctly “received” and spontaneously acted upon the moral law?
Why could someone not simply claim that his subjective experience points to an entirely different philosophical system than
Emerson’s? How would Emerson refute such a claim?
In the first place, Emerson suggests that everyone knows the
truth of what he is saying in the depths of his own heart. If we
would be honest with ourselves, if we would return to our better
thoughts and listen intently to the sublime whisperings of the soul,
we would understand as he understands, and act authentically as
he acts authentically.
If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave
to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not
selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest,
and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt
in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day?
You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as
well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us
out safe at last.—But so may you give these friends
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power,
to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their
moments of reason, when they look out into the region
of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the
same thing (RE 146).
In the second place, Emerson refers several times to a moral sense
or sentiment in all men which commands and forbids actions, and
which is rooted in or is coextensive with the Divine Mind. But while
Emerson acknowledges the existence of a conscience, it neither
seems to be in command, nor are its laws capable of articulation. For
Emerson, the moral universe is accessible by all of us subjectively,
but it cannot be formulated into any sort of objective ethical code:
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The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this
homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem
foolish details, principles that astonish. The child amidst
his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love,
fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These
laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be
written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They
elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly
in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own
remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into
every virtuous act and thought—in speech we must
sever, and describe or suggest by painful enumeration
of many particulars (RE 64).
And finally, in the third place, Emerson claims that spontaneous
action is so compelling that its example almost compels imitation:
by being law unto oneself, one becomes a universal legislator.
A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True,
as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he
stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt
them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun,
journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium
of the highest influence to all who are not on the same
level. Thus men of character are the conscience of the
society to which they belong (RE 331).
If this is true, however, it is hard to square with Emerson’s insistence on autonomy. How can individuals be true to themselves by
following someone else’s law? If the law were universal, then it
would make sense to follow the example of a virtuous person. But
this contradicts Emerson’s belief in the individual divine voice that
speaks to each person uniquely.
By having us be our own lawgivers, by asserting that “[o]ur
spontaneous action is always the best” (RE 264), is Emerson not
unwittingly advocating indulgence in our worst passions? In the
essay called “Circles,” he tries to defend himself against this
charge:
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And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader
exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an
equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would
fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes
may be lively stones out of which we shall construct
the temple of the true God!
I am not careful to justify myself. . . . But lest I
should mislead any when I have my own head and
obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am
only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on
what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if
I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle
all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane;
I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at
my back (RE 260).
This very convenient disavowal of setting an example sidesteps
the effect of Emerson’s teaching on others; he does not want to
take responsibility for the behavior that might be unleashed or justified by his doctrine of self-legislation. Not everyone’s spontaneous impulses and private intuitions would lead to the sort of
fortunate and moderate choices that Emerson seems to make.
If we return now to Tocqueville’s democratic man seeking
moral guidance in an egalitarian society, we see that Emerson has
nothing to offer him. The evaporation of human individuality in
the Over-Soul, the directionless invocation to look to one’s own
inner divinity, and the refusal to take responsibility for one’s example in the world all leave democratic man in the lurch. It is no
wonder that he turns to public opinion for moral guidance.
The Ambiguity of Politics
One way to temper the debilitating effects of majority opinion, in
particular, and the spiritual trajectory of the principle of equality,
in general, is through political activity. Over and over again, Tocqueville shows us how civic engagement at the local level can help
to cure the ills to which democracy is prone. In respect to the particular issues of this essay, civic participation and institutions help
to prevent our slide into individualism. We are unable to withdraw
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into our own world of family and friends when we must take part
in various community activities. Civic engagement also tempers
our rage for general ideas: when we are practically engaged, we
see the necessary limitations of such ideas. Emerson, however, in
many ways discourages political activity—and perhaps necessarily
so. The rapturous inner life of the transcendentalist likely makes
all political activity seem paltry and pale.
In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson observes that these individuals are both solitary and lonely. They are solitary because nothing that society can offer appeals to them: whether it is popular
entertainment or commercial competition, they see most of what
excites society as little more than drudgery and thoroughly degrading in comparison to their talents. They are lonely because the
human fellowship they seek is so acute and fervent that few persons could satisfy or endure the demands of such a relationship:
tolerating neither frivolity nor hypocrisy, they are seen by most
persons as rude, shallow, or simply ridiculous (RE 87–90). But if
Emerson’s transcendentalist is indifferent toward such things as
the accumulation of riches and wealth, so too is he indifferent toward politics in almost all its manifestations. From the great political debates of the day to the building of empires to the prospect
of rule, the transcendentalist finds little in this petty arena to tempt
him from his solitude.
But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors
of the world; they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the
public and private burdens; they do not willingly share
in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in
the enterprises of education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote. . . .
What you call your fundamental institutions, your
great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, and,
when nearly seen, paltry matters (RE 90).
Emerson does not deny that there are great and holy causes—albeit
far fewer than most imagine—but by the time a potentially worth-
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33
while cause reaches the political arena, it has been prepackaged and
predigested for public consumption. Since the transcendentalist attitude is a blanket critique of political life, Emerson rightly concludes
that this outlook will strike society as threatening. The disdainful
aloofness from the world of those who hold such beliefs, together
with their willingness to abjure the public burdens that make community possible, seem like a direct accusation of society; and society
will not remain indifferent, but will retaliate against this challenge to
what it holds dear. But despite the fact that society treats these individuals as outcasts, and despite the fact they seem to perform no useful occupation, Emerson insists that they are the moral touchstones
by which to judge whether “the points of our spiritual compass” are
true. Society therefore has an interest in them and a duty to “behold
them with what charity it can” (RE 95).
To the extent that Emerson hopes to improve American society,
he directs his appeals for moral reform at the individual and not the
group: there is little or no salvation through political activity unless
the individual himself has first been spiritually transformed. In the
essay “New England Reformers” (1844), he points out two problems
in attempting the former before or without the latter. First, all political reforms tend to be partial:
I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and
the indication of growing trust in the private self-supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative
principle of the recent philosophy, and that it is feeling
its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this
very hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede
that in this, as in every period of intellectual activity,
there has been a noise of denial and protest; much was
to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those who
were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes in his
removal of rubbish; and that makes the offensiveness
of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the
work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault
on the kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and
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power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two
or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but
of much that the man be in his senses (RE 406–7).
In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst
of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false
churches, alike in one place and in another—wherever,
namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it will
do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition, law, or school in which it stands, before the law
of its own mind (RE 408).
Emerson here disparages piecemeal efforts at social change as futile or misguided given the enormity of the task. By contrast, “a
just and heroic soul” will be able to abolish the old condition
through the force of his character and actions in the here and now.
Second, reformers overestimate the power of associations or
numbers. Groups are no better or worse than the individuals who
make them up, and unhealthy individuals make unhealthy groups:
indeed, the more united and efficacious a group is politically, the
more it will require its members to compromise their unique individuality, forcing out those of superior talent (RE 407–10).
These new associations are composed of men and
women of superior talents and sentiments; yet it may
easily be questioned whether such a community will
draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good;
whether those who have energy will not prefer their
chance of superiority and power in the world, to the
humble certainties of the association; whether such a
retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those
who have tried and failed, rather than a field to the
strong; and whether the members will not necessarily
be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot
enter it without some compromise. Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of
the best of the human race, banded for some catholic
object; yes, excellent; but remember that no society can
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
35
ever be so large as one man. He, in his friendship, in
his natural and momentary associations, doubles or
multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one (RE 408–9).
Thus, Emerson’s aim is not political but private, an attempt to
unify our presently disharmonious souls. “The problem of restoring
to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption
of the soul” (RE 38). “This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of
the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man” (RE
55–56). How this domestication will occur without radical political
changes (e.g., in the education system [cf. RE 410–11]) is not clear.
In sum, it would seem that Emerson’s rapturous spiritualism casts
a long shadow over politics and political activity: civic engagement
is neither an Aristotelian fulfillment of our nature nor a Tocquevillean means to maintain its health.
A Corrective to Democratic Historians
In conclusion, it is necessary to point out that there is at least one
area where Emerson’s philosophy is in harmony with Tocqueville’s,
namely, in his deep appreciation for the power of great individuals
and individual action. In his essay on Abraham Lincoln and the
Emancipation Proclamation, or in his address commemorating the
anniversary of the end of slavery in the British West Indies, one
does not read about immutable and unseen forces propelling men
ahead on the unstoppable current of history. In this respect, at least,
Emerson’s celebration of the individual is the same as Tocqueville’s.
Nonetheless, this celebration of individual initiative and independence is coupled with yet another potentially worrisome aspect
of Emerson’s writings. Just as he conceives the individual as the
standard in judging the rectitude of an action and the worth of an
institution, so too he conceives of the new American nation as a
standard in judging its own needs. America must emancipate itself
from the tyrannizing effects of a slavish veneration of the “mind
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of the Past” (RE 46)—especially Europe’s aristocratic past—in all
its incarnations: history, philosophy, art, architecture, and literature.
Although this call for originality can already be seen in the opening
paragraph of Emerson’s first book Nature (1836), perhaps the most
stirring expression of this sentiment is his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa
address, “The American Scholar” (1837), which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes called “our intellectual Declaration of Independence”
(RE 3, 846). The moment some form of the past is declared perfect
or inviolate, then the present generation will atrophy and cease
thinking and creating—it will become a satellite of the past rather
than its own solar system. The genius of an age is lost when it passively accepts the dogmas of the past and does not actively seize
upon and articulate its own creative principles: “The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized [sic] now for two hundred years”
(RE 47). Indeed, we must not subordinate our own thinking to the
thinking found in books:
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be
sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s
idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is
too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of
their readings. But when the intervals of darkness
come, as come they must—when the sun is hid and the
stars withdraw their shining—we repair to the lamps
which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to
the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we
may speak (RE 48).
Books should be used to guide the scholar back to the light of his
own inspirations.
Emerson is not rejecting the past outright. His frequent praise
of past philosophers and authors and poets demonstrates this. Instead, he wants to challenge what he calls the backward—that is,
conservative—tendency of all institutions to defend some ancient
authority and to use this as an excuse for not moving forward.
The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or
creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of
here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
man. In its essence it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop
with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say
they—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They
look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his
hindhead: man hopes: genius creates (RE 47).
37
The past must come alive for the present and speak to its concerns
and circumstances. If it fails to do this, then it need not be studied
and must not be revered. Discard the relics of the past or reanimate
them—if Greece or Rome or Constantinople or Paris or London
do not speak to us, we need not worry: someone or something else
will (RE 115–17, 120, 130–31, 140, 150–51, 272–73).
Emerson sees some encouraging signs of intellectual liberation
in the growing prevalence of “the near, the low, the common” as a
new subject of literature (RE 57). He saw that contemporary writers and artists were beginning to expand the range of their interest
beyond traditional high subjects to include the more mundane:
The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the
philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life,
are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a
sign—is it not?—of new vigor when the extremities are
made active, when currents of warm life run into the
hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote,
the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is
Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the
low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the
antique and future worlds. What would we really know
the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the
pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the
glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;
show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me
the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the
polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and
the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the like
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cause by which light undulates and poets sing; and the
world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumberroom, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there
is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the
farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench (RE 57–58).
Because the lowest objects are bursting with the same sublime soul
as the highest, they can be made the focal point of a literary and
spiritual renaissance appropriate for this new era and new nation.
At the end of the day, Emerson applauds the fact that the same
egalitarian political movements, which both raised the “lowest
class in the state” and gave new dignity and respect to the “individual,” are now fostering an appropriate egalitarian literature (RE
43, 57–58). Emerson here reveals what Matthew Arnold calls his
remarkable “persistent optimism” (RE 846) in the potential of each
and every individual to become a fully realized human being: he
repeatedly affirms that all men have “sublime thoughts” (RE 76);
that all possess a “native nobleness” (RE 242); that all are wise;
that all are latent prophets; that all have the potential greatness of
George Washington and Julius Caesar; that all carry within a
“miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal
History” (RE 267). Even genius is less a matter of innate ability
and more a matter of art and arrangement, and of giving free reign
to the divine, which is in all of us (RE 411ff.). As Henry David
Thoreau rightly said in his journals about his friend: “In his world
every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take
place, Man and Nature would harmonize” (RE 847). We are left to
wonder, however, whether Emerson’s suspicions of the past, coupled with his new emphasis on “the near, the low, the common” in
literature will, over time, help to sustain his celebration of genuine
human greatness, or eventually undermine and distort it in a predictable but unhealthy democratic fashion.
NOTES
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey
C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), 425–26, hereafter cited in the text as DA, followed by volume,
part, chapter, and page number. In general, I have used this translation
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
39
throughout, although I have checked it against the French original for accuracy. See also the four-volume, bilingual, historical-critical edition of
the same, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010).
2. References to Emerson’s works are from The Essential Writings of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library,
2000), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as RE. All emphasized
words in quotes are contained in the original. For details on his life and
times, readers may consult with profit Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson:
A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1981).
3. Emerson was ordained as the Unitarian pastor of the Second Church
of Boston in 1829. In June 1832, his grave reservations concerning the
sacrament of communion reached a crescendo, and he asked the Church
if he might stop administering it in its present form. After considering his
petition, the members of the Church were unable to grant it. Because
Emerson would “do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart” (RE
109), he judged it best to resign as pastor, and he stated his reasons for
doing so to the congregation in the sermon we are about to discuss. Although Emerson continued to give sermons to various churches throughout his life, his service at the Second Church was his first and last
appointment as a permanent pastor.
4. Emerson also suggests the likely cause of this error. It was only natural
that a soul as “great and rich” as Jesus’s, falling among a “simple” people,
was bound to overwhelm them. They were thus not able to see that Jesus’s
true message was that they needed to discover and make manifest the gift
of God in their own soul and not that Jesus was the son of God Himself
(RE 69). Given the simplicity of the “primitive Church,” Emerson is very
hesitant to adopt any of its doctrines or practices. The early Christians
not only refused to shed their “Jewish prejudices” but they were rarely
enlightened by the example of Christ himself. Emerson thus concludes
that “[o]n every other subject succeeding times have learned to form a
judgment more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than was the
practice of the early ages” (RE 105).
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40
“At the Very Center of the Plenitude”:1
Goethe’s Grand Attempt to Overcome the 18th Century;2
Or,
How Freshman Laboratory Saved Goethe
From the General Sickness of his Age
We have failed to restore to the human spirit
its ancient right to come face to face with nature.
—Goethe3
Nature has become the fundamental word
that designates essential relations . . . to beings.
—Heidegger4
Goethe teaches courage . . . that the disadvantages
of any epoch exist only to the fainthearted.
—Emerson5
1. Incidental Thoughts, Fruitful Life
To everyone: Welcome! To our freshman in particular: a special
Welcome!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: We know him first as a poet and
playwright—seniors will read his Faust next week. Yet there is another Goethe that is less well known but who, from his own point
of view, is of equal, if not greater consequence,6 the Goethe who
spent his life studying nature—botany, zoology, geology, meteorology, theory of color—and is known, in this regard, for his work
in morphology. I would like to speak about this lesser known
Goethe tonight.
There are two subtitles to this evening’s lecture “At the Very
Center of the Plenitude.” The first is given to it by Friedrich Nietzsche, the second, my own curious invention. The first is “Goethe’s
Grand Attempt to Overcome the 18th Century.” As we will see,
from Nietzsche’s perspective Goethe was a philosophical thinker
of the highest order who inherited, as we all do, ideas from previDavid Lawrence Levine is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. This lecture was originally presented as the annual Dean’s
Lecture to open the thirty-seventh academic year at the Santa Fe campus.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LEVINE
41
ous generations and thinkers, ideas that he thought were ill conceived and needed to be rethought. Thanks to these ideas, we had
become, according to Goethe, “blind with seeing eyes.”7
Similarly the second subtitle, “How Freshman Laboratory
Saved Goethe from the General Sickness of his Age.” This clearly
reflects our unique studies here at St. John’s. Here too we see
something of greater moment than we might first have seen. Here
we will have a chance to see that his life’s work studying nature—
as seen in the paper that we read in freshman laboratory—has a far
greater significance than just “science,” great though this is in its
own right.8 For Goethe the study of nature was the necessary antidote to a growing tendency—“sickness” he called it—that needed
to be countered for the sake of our lives and health.
Goethe’s thinking, though philosophical, is not systematic, and
that means there’s no one place where his deepest thinking is to be
found. Just the opposite, his profoundest thought is to be discovered throughout his works, and not just in his major works, but
minor ones too, often just jottings here and there, on slips of paper,
in the margins of books, the corners of newspapers, in brief letters,
in short wherever occasion found a suitable surface for pen and
ink to secure for a time his emergent thoughts. These were often
then collected into “maxims and reflections,” sometimes inserted
as the thinking of one of the characters of his novels, sometimes
collected under his own name.
These occasional thoughts will provide much of the material
for tonight’s talk. But incidental thoughts are not necessarily insignificant thoughts.9 Not unlike flotsam and jetsam, thoughts appear throughout our day. Are these daily musings ‘distractions of
the moment’ or ‘disclosures of moment’? Such irrepressible
thoughtfulness and imagination gives added dimension to the thin
linearity of time. A day punctuated by the wondrous, sparked by
light, is not just another day. Daily discovery is meat not spice,
nourishment, not just flavoring. And its joy is invigorating. The
mundane is thereby transformed. Thinking happens.
One such collection of thoughts is a book of selected conversations by his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, a man of no
small talent, who took it upon himself to record for posterity per-
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sonal conversations he had with his world famous employer during
the last nine years of his life. These are intermittently and imperfectly recorded, often self-conscious, sometimes seem contrived,
and are frequently without a definite outcome. There we find observations about passing acquaintances, deliberations about the
wine list for the evening dinner, plans for journeys to be taken, personal estimates about famous and not so famous authors and statesmen, latter-year reflections and regrets about his youthful writings,
plans for the reconstruction of the local theater that had burned
down, conversations with his patron the Grand Duke of Weimar,
observations about his wife and children, expressions of hope and
disappointment about friends, frustrations about works of his that
had been overlooked or were under appreciated. But throughout
the rich array, there emerge as well recurrent themes and persistent
questions of consequence.
The same author mentioned above, Nietzsche, says the following: “Apart from Goethe’s [own] writings, and in particular
Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann, the best German book
there is, what is there really of German prose literature that it would
be worthwhile to read over and over again?”10 “The best German
book there is,” worth “reading over and over again”? Hardly on
the face of it.
Though perhaps prone to hyperbole and “philosophizing with
a hammer,” Nietzsche was not prone to misrepresentation. What
could he mean by such exaggerated praise? Perhaps what is remarkable is not the book per se, but what is portrayed therein? Perhaps what is notable is not its ultimate literary value—the book is
not on our program—but the attempt to record a life that is in no
way ordinary? Indeed, even through Eckermann’s eyes we glimpse
new possibilities for a human life that aspires to what is extraordinary, a fullness of possibility rarely seen. We glimpse a paradigm
of a fully engaged, ever creative, wholesome fecundity. In short,
we see philosophy as a way of being in the world, not as a book
bound between leather covers.
2. “Everything Nowadays is Ultra”
In 1825, late in life, Goethe wrote a letter to his friend, the composer Zelter, in which he reflected on the character of life as it had
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43
come to be lived in their lifetime:
Everything nowadays is ultra, [he writes] everything is
being transcended continually in thought as well as in action. No one knows himself any longer; no one can grasp
the element in which he lives and works or the materials
that he handles. Pure simplicity is out of the question; of
simplifiers we have enough. Young people are stirred up
much too early in life and then carried away in the whirl
of the times. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires. . . . Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every
possible kind of rapid communication are what the educated world seeks but it only over-educates itself and
thereby persists in its mediocrity. It is, moreover, the result of universalization that a mediocre culture [then] becomes [the] common [culture].
He then adds ruefully: “We and perhaps a few others will be the
last of an epoch that will not soon return.”11
According to Goethe, a radical transformation of our way of
being has taken place: 1) a change in the character of human thought
and action, 2) a change in our knowledge of ourselves, 3) a change
in our sense of place, and finally, 4) a change in the character and
efficacy of education.
“Everything nowadays is ultra”: As early as the beginning of
the nineteenth century, what was coming to characterize human
life—and thereby change the face and depth of human experience—was the speed (die Voloziferishe) at which life was lived, a
hitherto unheard of, dizzying and disorienting pace such that young
people—but not only—could only be caught up in “the whirl of
the times.” “Being caught up” means living some other life than
one’s own, being inauthentic.
“Railways, quick mails, steamships”: Ever faster communication changes the lived dimensions of life: time quickens, distance
collapses. There is no delay between an event and its hearing. “It’s
as if we were right there.” A leisurely walk is replaced by a carriage
ride, thereafter by a train ride, then a jet plane, and now by . . . a
transporter (or at least in our imaginations). The wait for “news”
from the pony express, a telegram, a phone call, a pager continues
to shrink. Our e-mail pings or our blackberry vibrates: we hear about
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an event “as it happens” no matter the distance. Life, in short, is lived
in fast forward. Goethe asks “Who can possibly keep up with the
demands of an exorbitant present and that at maximum speed?”12
This matter of life’s ever accelerating pace in not a philosophically indifferent one for Goethe. “The greatest misfortune [Unheil]
of our time,” he says elsewhere, “which let’s no thing come to
fruition, is that one moment consumes the next.”13 While the speeding up of things may assist us in “keeping informed” and “staying
in touch,” it also subtracts from other essential dimensions once
thought definitive of human life. It makes certain things more difficult, if not impossible, specifically those things that take time, for
example, those that require slow assimilation and acclimation,
above all human learning and experience. It takes time away from
thoughtful reflection and other possibilities of human carefulness.
For time and leisure (skolē) are the proper gestational home of reflection, philosophy and human care.
We hear too that our thought processes are affected: “everything is transcended in thought [as well as in action].” We have
somehow been made to think differently. We live at a new level of
abstraction, beyond the immediate, simple, obvious, primary
world, such that we no longer even understand “the element in
which we live.” What could this mean?
And most curious of all, Goethe says “No one knows himself
any longer.” How is this even possible? Elsewhere he says: “Learning fails to bring advancement now that the world is caught up in
such a rapid turnover; by the time you have managed to take due
note of everything, you have lost your self.”14 Are we not always
the same no matter our circumstances?
Education too is thereby affected. It is suggested that we might
even become “over-educated,” mis-educated, that education itself
has become, somehow, distorted. He reflects: “For almost a century
now the humanities have no longer influenced the minds of men
engaged in them.”15 Rather than distinction, we have mediocrity;
rather than a high culture, we have an ordinary one. What then of
the rewards of “perspective,” “balance” and “excellence” once
thought the outcome of an ennobling education?
The “whirl of the times” has only accelerated many, many fold
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since 1825. The author could not possibly have envisioned the pace
at which we live our lives today. To be sure, on first hearing, one
might be inclined to take the above observations as the grumbling
of a man seeing the world pass him by (empty biographism). We
might, however, also take this as notice to think better about the
character of our lives in our ultra-ultra world.
3. “The General Sickness of the Age”
Life is our lot rather than reflection.
—Goethe16
Goethe’s exclamation that “nowadays . . . no one knows himself
any longer” clearly needs further consideration. How could this
be? Don’t we know ourselves?
Throughout the modern disciplines—the physical sciences,
history, even poetry and literature—was a growing trend, evident
to Goethe, to what he called “subjectivity.” Juniors and seniors will
remember, in the Discourse on Method, Descartes’s identification
of the “ego” as the primordial truth about which we alone can be
immediately “certain.” The immediate evidence of this self-intuition then provides the standard of truth for all else, now thought
true only if “clearly and distinctly” conceivable to us. Odd though
this may sound, this new self-certainty leads to our world being
reconceived as “the external world,” about which we can now have
only a small measure of certainty and that of its radically stripped
down mathematical qualities. To be sure, this made a “modern science” of such a world possible, yet it gave us a new definition and
sense of self that was problematic.17 This excessively polarized and
reduced view of the ego as “subject”—understood as standing
“over against”18 some bare objective world—is what Goethe meant
by “subjectivity:” polarized, withdrawn, exiled to its own interior
world, and thereby alienated from any sense of world in which it
could feel itself integrated or at home.19
For Goethe the consequences of this influential (nay, fateful)
redefinition of self are nowhere better seen than in his own vocation, poetry. We have all heard the caricature of the modern “romantic” poet: a suffering recluse, retreating to his Paris garret,
whose only truth is his inner pain. But for Goethe there is, unfor-
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tunately, an element of truth to be found therein: He observes: “All
the poets [today] write as if they were ill and the whole world were
a lazaretto [leper colony]. They all speak of the woe and misery of
this earth and the joy of a hereafter: all are discontented. . . . This,”
he adds, “is a real abuse of poetry.”20 “I attach no value to [such]
poems.”21
From Goethe’s perspective, “whoever descends deep down
into himself will always realize he is only half a being,”22 and being
half will discover there limited resources for creativity. “A subjective nature has soon talked out his little internal material and is at
last ruined by mannerism [that is, excessive affectation],”23 he
notes regretfully. “Such people look at once within; they are so occupied by what is revolving in themselves, [that] they are like a
man in passion, who passes his dearest friends on the street without
seeing them.”24 With reduced openness to the world around them,
they have become “blind with seeing eyes.” This excessive onesidedness, and consequent risk of self-absorption, Goethe named
“the general sickness of the present age [heutigen Zeit],”25 and led
Doctor von Goethe to his famous diagnosis: “What is Classical is
healthy; what is Romantic is sick.”26 Sick? Unhealthy, unproductive, foundationless, and ultimately untruthful. We lose our fullest
selves.
Goethe thus found himself standing at the point of the divide
where, for all our efforts to think about each separately, subject
and object were being ever more pulled apart. This experiential
breach was of fundamental concern because, when either is overpolarized—when the soul is diminished as an isolated, worldless
ego (psyche), res cogitans or when the world is diminished as external, even foreign, barren res extensa—both subject and object
are diminished for want of their natural correlate. If I may indulge
in a somewhat dramatic image: like a man standing between two
horses pulling him apart, Goethe found that—for the sake of
health27—he had everything he could handle to keep himself and
the world whole.28
Goethe himself thus resisted being “caught up in his time;”
he was not a “romantic.” As he said, “my tendencies were opposed
to those of my time, which were wholly subjective; while in my
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objective efforts, I stood alone to my disadvantage.”29 His “objective efforts”? How could he resist the subjective tendency?
4. “The Element in which we Live”
In all natural things there is something wonderful. . . .
So we should approach the inquiry . . . without aversion,
knowing that in all of them there is something
natural and beautiful.
—Aristotle30
Surprising though it may seem to some, the answer is nature. Thus
it is apt that the Goethe we first meet is not the poet but the Goethe
who spent his whole life researching “the element in which we
live,” that is researching into nature. It is this “objective” involvement that saved him from the excesses of his—and our—time, not
to mention giving him “the most wonderful moments of his life.”31
So, what is nature?—OK, a simpler question.—What is a
plant? Which grammatical form best names its being, a noun or a
verb (or a gerund, a verbal noun)? By plant do we intend a static
state or an activity alive with change, something that has grown or
some process of growth?32 Clearly we need to name both—form
that is also in the process of self-formation. “Growth is the point
of life.”33
For us here in the Southwest, sumac, oak, aspen, pinõn, mallow and mullen are different kinds of plants. The principle at work
is the same throughout the stages of the life cycle of a mallow, for
instance, from seedling to flowering, fructifying plant. Hence we
name it one thing—a mallow—despite all these various stages and
differing formal manifestations.34
But it is not only this individual plant that is before us, so is
the species “mallow,” and even further so is the kingdom “plant,”
and these, as Goethe will insist, not as abstract concepts in the mind
but somehow in the living instance itself. Thus Goethe sought to
account for plant life as such, despite the dizzying fact that they
take infinitely many and wondrously different shapes. Sumac,
aspen, mallow are in “inner essence” still “plants.”35 What is
needed in this view is to identify the unifying principle at work
(not “underlying”) in each and every form at whatever stage of
growth and complexity they might be. But how to do so? And how
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to find a language that captures this universally active principle of
forms forming themselves?
To do so Goethe had to depart radically from his contemporaries and from their analytical approach. But in so doing this departure brings him closer to us. We can see this at the outset of the
Metamorphosis of Plants that we read in freshman laboratory,
where he appeals, not to results of the latest scientific journals, but
to our own untutored experience. He begins: “Anyone who has paid
a little attention to plant growth. . . .”36 This means that we, ordinary human beings, still have access to a realm of primary significance, one not to be diminished as “pre-scientific,” if what is
meant thereby is “pre-insightful.” Rather we, you and me, have
deep access into what is before us.37
Indeed he is critical that, with all our education and learning,
we may on the contrary be closing ourselves off from this primary
level of our experience. He often referred to a passage in one of
his early plays to illustrate this eclipse of experience by theory:
[A]s it is said in my Goetz von Berlichingen, that the
son, from pure learning, does not know the father, so
in science do we find people who can neither see nor
hear, through sheer learning and hypothesis. Such people look at once within; they are so [pre-] occupied by
what is revolving in themselves, that they are like a
man in passion, who passes his dearest friends in the
street without seeing them. [Rather] the observation of
nature requires a certain purity of mind that cannot be
disturbed or preoccupied by anything. . . . It is just because we carry about with us a great apparatus of philosophy and hypothesis, that we spoil all.38
“Like a man in passion”: Ideas, no less than passions, can take hold
of our minds, preventing us from seeing what might otherwise be
evident and thereby preventing us from attending to our primary
experience.39 So overwhelming are our present-day theoretical preoccupations that—in one of his most shocking statements of all—
Goethe claims that we no longer even concern ourselves with
nature. “That nature, which is our [modern] concern, isn’t nature
any longer,” he says.40 Extraordinary!
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What has been lost, in Goethe’s view, is a sense of the wholeness of wholes and the interrelatedness and integration of all things,
in short, Nature (capital N). This loss is the necessary consequence
of any approach wherein wholes are but “by-products”41 of uncoordinated, underlying, isolated forces and elements (“matter in the
void”). Looking at things in terms of their parts—elements, simples, particles, atoms—analytical ways of thinking stumble in the
face of the Humpty Dumpty problem: how to put the whole back
together again.42 If we begin with parts, we end up with reconstituted conglomerates, aggregates, bunches, but the wholeness of
things, the integral reality, remains a secondary phenomenon, a
mystery, if not an accident.43 Here too we’ve become “blind with
seeing eyes.”
Juniors are soon to read and seniors will remember Descartes’s
famous experiment with the wax at the end of Meditations II. There
Descartes places a piece of fresh bees wax near a burning candle,
whereupon it melts and loses its original color and smell, texture
and shape (i.e. primary as well as secondary qualities), that is loses
all its original properties but res extensa, mere extension (though
this changes too). This experimental method is designed to bring
us to see what is “elemental” (if not fundamental). Descartes then
proceeds to claim that by “an act of intuition of reason” he—and
we—would know this transmogrified, charred lump in front of us
to be the same thing as before his infernal experiment. He asks,
who would not so conclude thus? (Aristotle, for one) Well . . . if
that were a plant, and not an amorphous hunk of bees wax, who
would concur with Descartes that what remains is the same as what
was put to the flame?44
The analytical flame dissociates or separates what originally
was together. It “kills.” So this method.45 The disfigured, deracinated, blackened carcass of the plant is anything but, the living
whole, nowhere to be found. The mass of matter lying before
Descartes is “the same” only if life and death are not different, and
if form is not an active principle but a derivative by-product. With
this “lethal generality”46 we lose—and lose sight of—“the spirit of
the whole,” as Goethe would say. For this reason, he claimed as
well that the modern approach—subjectively predisposed to take
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the objects of our experience in such a reduced way—loses its
claim to “objectivity.”47
The question for Goethe—and for us—is whether and how we
can recover the whole. Is it still possible to begin elsewhere, think
differently such that the whole is retained along with its manifold
parts? Can we yet begin where we naturally begin, with what is
“first for us” (Aristotle), with integral wholes?
5. Our Ancient Right
The spirit of the actual is the true ideal.
No one who is observant will ever
find nature dead or silent.
—Goethe48
Goethe thus sought “another way,” in order, as he said, “to restore
to the human spirit, its ancient right to come face to face with nature.” 49
He asks: “What does all our communion with nature amount
to . . . if we busy ourselves with analyzing only single portions,
and do not feel the breath of the spirit that dictates the role of
every part and restrains or sanctions all excess through an immanent law?”50 Thus “phenomena once and for all must be removed
from the gloomy empirical-mechanical-dogmatic [torture] chamber [Marterkammer],” he said, “and [be] submitted [rather] to the
jury of [common human understanding].”51 But how are we to do
this, to return to “common human understanding”?
Since apparently we can live in more than one world, Goethe
makes his bid—“naively” yet knowingly52—to reclaim nature as
our home-world. “If we are to rescue ourselves from the boundless multiplicity, atomization and complexity of the modern natural sciences,” he says, “and get back to the realm of simplicity,
we must always consider [this] question: how would Plato [or
any non-modern] have reacted to nature, fundamentally one
unity as it still is, how would he have viewed what may now appear to us as its greater complexity?”53 We need to remove what
“now” stands in the way.54 We need somehow to shuck off our
modern predisposition to see all things as artificially reconstituted55 and see our world, rather, as one might whose vision was
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not so refracted. But how?
Mindful that “the first stages of a discovery leave their mark
on the course of knowledge,”56 Goethe first seeks to reorient us.
To begin with, “anyone who has paid a little attention” has to acknowledge that our primary and original experience of things is
otherwise than we’ve been brought to conceive. “In nature,” he
said, “we never see anything isolated: everything is in connection
with something.”57 Any account, then, of our experience must
begin here with the unity and interrelatedness of all things.
Herein lays Goethe’s unified field theory: “I abide by what is
simple and comprehensive,” he says.58 (This he also calls his
“stubborn realism.”59)
As we heard, a certain kind of undisturbed purity of mind—
clarity, breadth of survey, attention to manifest differences—is
the pre-requisite to any genuine openness. In the garden, along a
path, in the laboratory, we need first to see the things themselves,
to recognize the ways and means that the plant [or whatever our
object] uses,”60 “to follow it carefully through all its transitions,”61 in short, “to follow as carefully as possible in the footsteps of nature.”62 “In the process,” he says, “we become familiar
with certain requisite conditions for what is manifesting itself.
From this point of view everything gradually falls into place
under higher principles and laws revealed not to reason through
words and hypotheses, but to our intuitive perception [Anschauung] through phenomena.63” In this way, our relationship to
things is not at first “speculative,” but what Goethe calls “practical,” that is grounded in the concrete experience of individuals
and the real.64 (Here have we a model of openness and extreme
care that will serve us well, not only in the laboratory, but
throughout our work at the college.)
Given this, given observation that is undertaken with a “truly
sympathetic interest,”65 a remarkable transformation can then
begin. We can be moved to insight. In an often quoted passage
from the Introduction to his Outline of a Theory of Color, Goethe
addresses this process of natural ideation. He writes:
An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never
met . . . that [bare] empirical data should be presented
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without any theoretical context. . . . This demand is
odd because it is useless to simply look at something.
Every act of looking [naturally] turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act
of reflection into the making of associations: thus it is
that we theorize every time we look carefully at the
world. The ability to do this with clarity of mind, with
self-knowledge, in a free way, and (if I may venture
to put it so [he adds]) with irony, is a skill we need in
order to avoid the pitfalls of [modern scientific] abstraction.66
Nature converses with us. Like any organic transition, thought is
the natural and continuous outgrowth of its prior condition, the
fruit of concrete experience. As such we are naturally led to a
higher integration through “the practical and self-distilling
processes of common human understanding.”67 “We theorize every
time we look carefully at the world.”
When we are able to survey an object in every detail,
grasp it carefully and reproduce it in our mind’s eye [he
reflects, then] we can say we have an intuitive perception [Anschauung] of it in the truest and highest sense.
We can [rightfully] say it belongs to us.... And thus the
particular leads to the general [as well as] the general
to the particular. The two combine their effect in every
observation, in every discourse.68
As much as we take the lead in inquiry, then so too are we led
by what we are inquiring into. Experience is bi-directional. Subject-object; object-subject. True sympathetic observation results
in the recapitulation in our summary imagination of the originating principle. The object becomes for us as it is in itself. In this
way the object “belongs” to us as much as we, in communion, belong with it. Our natural correlation is thereby reestablished, the
Cartesian subjective reduction of experience is offset, if not reversed, and a kind of renewed originality is returned to human experience, widening and opening our purview69, whereby we might
be thought once again to come “face to face” with nature. Our ancient right is thereby restored.
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6. The Original World
. . . the sublime tranquility which surrounds us
when we stand in the solitude and silence of nature,
vast and eloquent.
—Goethe70
A living thing cannot be measured
by something external to itself.
—Goethe71
This reunion of observer and world—we should say union—is possible because of a unique human faculty—one out-rightly denied72
or at least overlooked by other modern thinkers—but to which
Goethe again and again returns our attention. As we read: “When
we are able to survey an object in every detail, grasp it carefully
and reproduce it in the mind’s eye, we can say we have an intuitive
perception of it in the truest and highest sense.” This capacity for
concrete, summary “intuition,” intuitive perception, Anschauung,
is our faculty for experiential wholes wherein the actively unifying
principles at work in the world manifest themselves. Deny it and
we have no wholes. They are not deduced, inferred, or synthesized.
We do not have to go beyond or behind73 the phenomena to see
these at work. These are made known to us at the level of our primary experience. We “see” them.
There’s a famous story: At a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in Jena there was a “fortunate encounter” between
Goethe and the poet Friedrich Schiller—whose poetry at the time
Goethe thought too romantic, too subjective. Goethe sought to explain to him his own attempt to articulate such a principle whereby
the natural plenitude of plant life might be accounted for. His
“idea” was, he admits, “the strangest creature in the world,”74
wherein the whole range of plant formation might be seen as
“stemming” or “derived” from an aboriginal form that was in this
regard the formal progenitor of the whole kingdom. Goethe named
this the Urpflanze,75 the original or originary plant.76
Schiller’s first response to this suggestion reflected his philosophical background, in particular his indebtedness to Kant. “This
is not an observation from experience,” he said, “This is an idea.”77
Schiller could not see what Goethe claimed he saw. He was disin-
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clined—as we may be—to grant that this was anything but a “regulative idea” constructed by reason to help it organize its experience, not a principle at work in the world organizing the
phenomenal array of plant forms. It was merely an idea, merely
“subjective.” For him and for Kant, it couldn’t be anything more,
as in their view phenomena are themselves constituted by consciousness and are thus not things in themselves.
Convinced, rather, that he had identified the objective generative source of all plant forms, Goethe replied: “Then I may rejoice
that I have ideas without knowing it, and can even see them with
my own eyes!” For Goethe, perception and reason, as moments of
a natural process, are not disparate faculties, but continuous. Thus
this, and all other Ur-phenomena, immanent and at work throughout our experience, are real and hence must be available to us on
the primary level of common human understanding.78 He wonders:
“Why should it not also hold true in the intellectual area that
through an intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may
become worthy of participating spiritually in its creative process?”
He thus insisted that he could see with his eyes something to which
others seem to have become blind.79 (Despite this fundamental difference, the two became close friends.)
But more needs to be said about this “strangest” of all creatures
that holds, in Goethe’s words, “the secret of the creation and organization of plants” (or any family of phenomena). As we mentioned earlier, Goethe’s interests were vast and not restricted to
botany; he also did research in osteology or bone formation. Indeed
it was Goethe who discovered the role of the intermaxillary bone,
the missing link that allowed zoologists to connect man and ape
anatomically. In a passage from his work On Morphology, we see
most clearly the point of origination of his thinking concerning Urphenomena:
The distinction between man and animal long eluded
discovery. Ultimately it was believed that the definitive
difference between ape and man lay in the placement
of the ape’s four incisors in a bone clearly and physically separate from other bones. [Goethe provides the
link.] . . . Meanwhile I had devoted my full energies to
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the study of osteology, for in the skeleton the unmistakable character of every form is preserved conclusively and for all time. 80
55
The developmental history of an organism is not past; rather the
history of successive generational transformations is preserved
and encapsulated in the fullness of any present form. Just as osteogeny can now be seen to recapitulate phylogeny, so more generally can any such morphological account. This “pregnancy”81
of the present form allows of a new kind of thinking to uncover
the Ur-principle at work, a reverse thinking that “traces the phenomena [back] to their [empirical] origins.”82 (This is the first
methodological principle of the new science of morphology83).
In another context he reflects on this Ur-principle, now also
called an “archetype”: “an anatomical archetype will be suggested here, a general picture containing the forms of all animals
as potential, one which will guide us to an orderly description
of each animal.”84 The Ur-principle is thus a kind of omni-potential in conversation with its environment and out of which the
whole polymorphic metamorphosis issues. “All is leaf.” As such
these are not ideas in the usual sense of Plato or Kant, neither
separate nor abstract. Rather they are like ideas in enabling us to
give an account of the unifying principles at the origin of the
plenitude. They are like ideas, as well, in that they might serve
as a kind of “formula” providing a way to generate new forms—
if only in imagination.85 The “derivation”86 is not of hypothetical
but real possibilities. Though they are more like the eidos in Aristotle, an active principle embodying the manifold fruitfulness
of nature, here however “the secret of the creation and organization” of the family of forms. (He sometimes called it entelechy.87)
Thus whatever the family of phenomena—botany, osteology, geology, meteorology, color—Ur-phenomena emerge. We
come to see the unifying principle, the spirit “that dictates the
role of every part and restrains or sanctions all excess through
immanent law.” From this “empirical summit,88” all things can
be seen as unified. Thus we have order out of chaos,89 integration where we might otherwise have discontinuity. The plenitude is comprehended.
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Therefore when you pick up Goethe’s Metamorphosis of
Plants to read, or any of his other writings on nature, do not close
yourselves off when hearing its foreign language, rather attempt
to hear its new voice and direction for the understanding of nature, “the element in which we live.” Whether, indeed, Goethe
has bequeathed us a fruitful path by means of which our ancient
right might be restored or whether it is but a false portal, is for
each of us to determine for ourselves.
7. Against Self-knowledge
Everything that liberates our mind
without at the same time imparting
self-control is pernicious.
—Goethe90
Where are we, then, in the midst of all this? Is there a lesson to be
learned about ourselves from this “other way of studying nature”?
As we’ve seen there are two unities that are reestablished by
Goethe’s way of thinking: there’s the unity of wholes that had been
fragmented, and the unity of observer and world that had been
alienated. Let us think more about the latter.
This unity of observer and world means that, like any organism, man cannot be known, nor know himself, apart from his
world—his environment— which sustains him and of which he is
an integral part. Given the polarized, inauthentic, and diminished
sense of self that is the consequence of the divorce of the “ego”
from its world in modern thought, it is understandable, then, that
to Goethe “no one knows himself any longer.” This led him to his
famous—if at first shocking—remark concerning the Delphic oracle: “I must admit,” he said, “that I have long been suspicious of
the great and important sounding task: ‘know-thyself.’ This has always seemed to me a deception practiced by a secret order of
priests who wished to confuse humanity with impossible demands,
to divert attention from activity in the outer world to some false
inner speculation.”91 Self-knowledge—or what we take to be
such—can be misleading, indeed disabling.
But how can we make it truthful . . . and enabling? As we
would expect, for Goethe the success of our efforts to know ourselves depends on the degree to which we are willing to extend
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ourselves beyond ourselves. “Man is by all his senses and efforts
directed to externals—to the world around him ,92” he stresses, and
thus “the human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the
world; he perceives the world only in himself and himself only in
the world.”93 This brings to mind his earlier observation: “Whoever
descends deep down into himself will always realize he is only half
a being;” this thought was then completed with “let him find . . . a
world . . . and he will become whole.”94 In short, that we might be
drawn out of our overly self-polarized existence, we need to
reestablish ourselves once again as worldly beings, fully engaged
with and in our natural correlate “the outer world.”
Thus he answers the question “How can we learn self-knowledge?” in this way: “Never by taking thought but rather by action.”95
This reply should not surprise us, for it was our history that our very
attempts to think about ourselves and the world brought us to this
unnatural polarization. Thus it is “activity in the outer world” alone
that is necessary to restore a balanced polarity and healthy equilibrium. We see this in Goethe’s own “objective activity”:
Without my attempts in natural science, I should never
have learned to know mankind [including himself] as
it is. In nothing else can we so closely approach pure
contemplation and thought, so closely observe errors
of the sense and of the understanding, the weak and
strong points of character. All is more or less pliant
and wavering . . . but nature understands no jesting; she
is always true, always serious; always severe . . . the
errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to
the apt, the pure and the true, does she resign herself
and reveal her secrets.96
Here we see Goethe learning lessons from nature that once were
thought the fruit of introspection and the study of the human sciences. The book of nature, as other texts, can serve as an occasion
for self-reflection. “The apt, the pure, and the true” learn about
themselves and other human beings as they self-critically open
themselves up to new fields and methods. The earlier passage, “For
almost a century now the humanities have no longer influenced the
minds of men engaged in them;” comes to mind. It is followed by:
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“it is a real piece of good fortune that nature intervened, drew the
essence of the humanities to itself and opened to us the way to a
true humanitarianism from its side.”97 The study of nature can thus
be a liberating study, freeing us from the burden of blinding conceptions and enabling us to return to our original worldliness
wherein we, once again, can open ourselves to our fullest possibilities. In this way, the study of nature is properly a liberal art.
8. The Grand Attempt
Where do we meet an original nature?
Where is the man with strength to be true,
and to show himself as he is?
—Goethe98
Finally, certain questions emerged earlier about our modern way
of life. How are we, given the “demands of an exorbitant present,”
not to get “caught up” in the whirl of our times and to reclaim a
sense of productive leisure? For Goethe the answer is . . . nature,
whose rhythms, it was once thought, could not be accelerated, and
through our study of which intimations of timeless self-sameness
might prove a refuge and shape our own being in the world. How
are we to regain a footing “where everything is in flux of continual
change”? Here too, the answer for Goethe is nature, our home
world, whose inherent lawfulness, as evidenced in the unities of
life forms, can thus provide a secure base upon which to take our
next steps. How are we to know ourselves more completely? Nature is especially needed here to offset our tendency to over selfinvolvement and to return us to our original fullness of being. And
how are we to educate ourselves more truthfully? Since modern
education only brought us, in Goethe’s view, to become “blind with
seeing eyes,” he sought in nature a complement—not to mention
an antidote—whose truthfulness would bring us “to see with seeing eyes” that fullness of view, perspective and measure that is the
proper fruit of serious study. Our question: can our own sustained
reflection on these questions, beginning with freshman laboratory,
lead to lessons such as these as well?
By way of conclusion I would like to quote Nietzsche one last
time. Toward the end of his life (1889), he himself tried to capture
in one of his aphorisms “the European event” that was Goethe.
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This distillation lives up to his well-known boast that he “wrote
whole books in one sentence,”99 though in this case he is somewhat
more loquacious, for it took him a whole paragraph to epitomize
this extraordinary life:
Goethe—not a German event but a European one: a
grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century
through a return to nature, through a going-up to the
naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.—He bore within him its
strongest instincts: sentimentality, nature-idolatry, the
anti-historical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary. . . . He called to his aid history, the natural sciences,
antiquity, likewise Spinoza, above all practical activity;
he surrounded himself with nothing but closed horizons; he did not sever himself from life, [rather] he
placed himself within it [that is, “at the very center of
the plenitude”]; nothing could discourage him and he
took as much as possible upon himself, above himself,
within himself. What he aspired to was totality; he
strove against separation of reason, sensuality, feeling,
will (—preached in the most horrible scholasticism by
Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself
to the whole, he created himself. . . . Goethe was, in an
epoch disposed to the unreal, a convinced realist; . . .
Goethe conceived of a strong, highly cultured human
being, skilled in all physical accomplishments, who,
keeping himself in check and having reverence for
himself, dares to allow himself the whole compass and
wealth of naturalness, [one] who is strong enough for
this freedom. . . . A spirit thus emancipated stands in
the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything
is redeemed and affirmed—he no longer denies. . . .
But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I
have baptized it with the name . . . Dionysus.—100
Those who’ve read more widely in Nietzsche will recognize this
last act of baptism as extraordinary: there is no higher, nor deeper,
nor more original mode of being for Nietzsche than this aboriginal
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and creative life force that he identifies in the person of Goethe:
1) this rare independence from it’s times, 2) this extraordinary, if
circumspect, positivity, 3) this unlimited and deep interest in all
things, 4) this secure groundedness in practical, concrete reality,
5) this insistence on our original, primary experience, 6) this noble
distance from suffering, 7) this incomparable sense of measure,
and of course 8) this Olympian courage. If not Dionysus, then what
name or word would be appropriate?
Goethe and Nietzsche saw that we moderns have a hard choice
before us: between disaffection and engagement, between cynicism101 and wonder. Goethe somehow was able to affirm life, to
say YES!102
So we ask you tonight to consider this figure, how he might
move you to “discipline yourselves to the whole” and summon the
natural fecundity of your inherence.
And we ask you tonight “to place yourselves within life,” to
seek out what is primary and original and, daring to speak the language of discovery, to speak “poetically.103”
And we ask you tonight to “make time” for thoughtfulness,
that you transform the mundane with the joys of daily discovery,
that your life be rich and your days not ordinary ones.
One last comment: Eckermann observed that even until
Goethe’s last days (that is, into his eighty-third year), he was continually learning. May this be so for you as well.
Thank you.
NOTES
1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, #337; also
#664 (hereafter MR). Given as the annual Friday night “Dean’s Lecture”
to open the thirty-seventh academic year at St. John’s College, Santa Fe.
See MR #864. This talk is a further development of work begun in 1986
(see Levine, “The Political Philosophy of Nature, A Preface to Goethe’s
Human Sciences,” (hereafter Political Philosophy) Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 11 [1986]: 163-178). It was Thomas McDonald who introduced me to the work of Eric Heller and Karl Löwith, and all three
who introduced me to the depth of Goethe’s thinking; my debt to them
continues. For the ambiguity and greatness of Goethe’s “grand attempt,”
see Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. John Ox-
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enford, (London: E. P. Dent, 1951 [1850]) (hereafter ECK), October 20,
1828.
2. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Hammondworth: Penguin, 1968 [1889])
(hereafter TI), 102.
3. “Analysis and Synthesis” (hereafter AS), in Goethe, Scientific Studies,
(hereafter SS), ed. and trans. Douglas Miller, Vol. 12 of Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 48. The publication of this collection of Goethe’s disparate scientific works has
provided a new occasion for further reflection about his “grand attempt.”
4. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1,” in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998) (hereafter Phusis), 183.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Goethe; or, the Writer,” in Representative Men
(New York: Marsilio, 1995 [1850]), 195.
6. ECK January 4, 1824, May 2, 1824, February 18 and 19, 1829.
7. ECK February 26, 1824.
8. ECK March 1, 1830.
9. Outline of a Theory of Color (hereafter OTC), in SS, #743; see also
note 21.
10. Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” in Human all too
Human, A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdate (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 1986) Vol. II, Part II, #109, 336.
11. Letter to Zelter, June 7, 1825; in Löwith, Karl, “The Historical Background of European Nihilism,” “The Fate of Progress,” Nature, History,
and Existentialism, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History
(Evanston, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1966) 4, 156-7; From Hegel
to Nietzsche, the Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1964), 27-8, 177-181 (hereafter HN); also
MR #480.
12. MR #474.
13. MR #479.
14. MR #770.
15. HN, 226.
16. “The Enterprise Justified,” in On Morphology, SS, 61.
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17. The ego or modern self is doubtful of all but bare existence, where
even the externality, the worldness of the world, is in question.
18. For an interesting reflection on the problem of the subject-object polarity, see Heidegger, Phusis, 188.
19. A modern irony: man is least at home in a world of his own conception.
20. ECK September 24, 1827.
21. ECK September 18, 1823. By contrast, all of Goethe’s poetry was insistently “occasional,” that is objectively motivated: “The world is so
great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never want for occasions for poems. But they must be occasioned [poems] [Gelegenheitsgedichte]: that is to say, reality [Wirklichkeit] must give both impulse and
material. A particular event becomes universal and poetic by the very circumstance that it is treated by a poet. All my poems are occasioned
poems, suggested by real life, and having therein a firm foundation.” A
radically different orientation and tone is apparent here. See also January
29, 1826 and MR ##337, 393, 119.
22. MR #935.
23. ECK January 29, 1826: also MR #1119.
24. ECK May18.24.
25. ECK January 29, 1826.
26. MR #1031; ECK May 2.1829.
27 .A comparison with Nietzsche is appropriate here.
28. ECK March, 14, 1830; also December 21, 1831; and “Significant
Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase” (hereafter ITP), in SS, 39.
29. ECK April 14, 1824; also “The Content Prefaced,” (hereafter CP) in
On Morphology, SS, 67, and HN, 6-7.
30. On the Parts of Animals, I.v. 645a16, 19-27.
31. Fortunate Encounter (hereafter FE), SS, 18.
32. “The Germans,” Goethe notes, “have a word for the complex of existence present in the physical organism, Gestalt [or structured form] . . .
[whereby] an interrelated whole is identified, defined, and fixed in character. But if we look at all these Gestalten [all these forms], especially organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, nothing is
at rest or defined—everything is in flux of continual motion. This is why
the Germans frequently and fittingly make use of [another] word Bildung
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[formation] to describe [both] the end product and what is in process of
production as well.” “The Purpose Set Forth,” in On Morphology, SS, 63.
33. ITP, 40.
34. CP,. 69; also Eric Heller, “Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth,” in
The Disinherited Mind (hereafter Heller) (New York: Meridian, 1959), 10.
35. Metamorphosis of Plants (hereafter MoP), in SS, 60, 67.
36. MoP, 76.
37. OTC #743.
38. ECK May 18, 1824; also January 17, 1830.
39. This is the “modern cave.” We may not be disposed at first to include
the philosophers among the “opinion makers” parading above and behind
the chained onlookers in Plato’s cave (Republic VII). But they are wordsmiths and as such we are indebted to them for our language and lenses
as well; see also Hegel, “Preface,” Phenomenology of Spirit, trans, A. V.
Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), #33, 19-20: “In modern
time the individual finds the abstract ready made . . . . Hence the task
nowadays consists . . . in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity
so as to give actuality to the universal and impart to it spiritual life.”
40. MR #1364.
41. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, II.
42. “These attempts at division also produce many adverse effects when
carried to an extreme. To be sure, what is alive can be dissected into its
component parts, but from these parts it will be impossible to restore it
and bring it back to life.” See “The Purpose Set Forth,” in SS, 63. The
natural plenitude is now compounded exponentially by the analytical dissolution or decomposition of wholes; cp. Heidegger’s characterization
that the original “atomic bomb” is to be found here in our modern analytical disassociation or explosion of all things into bits, parts and particles. See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poety, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 168.
43. And thus the diminished reality of those who think that a home is
bricks and mortar, and humans their chemical makeup.
44. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, II, AT, 19-34. How
someone could even think this is worth further thought.
45. A science that had given up trying to explain our experience was simply incomprehensible—not to mention infuriating—to one so firmly
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rooted in the actual (“at the very center of the plenitude”). “The Extent to
Which the Idea ‘Beauty Is Perfection in Combination with Freedom’ May
be Applied to Living Organisms,” in SS, 22; also ECK September 2, 1830;
see also Goethe’s longstanding debate with the Newtonian school and their
tendency to substitute secondary for primary phenomena; OTC ##176,
718.
46. “The Enterprise Justified,” in On Morphology, SS, 61.
47. In this regard one might want to compare Goethe’s and Nietzsche’s
respective attempts to “stave off the nihilistic consequences of modern
science” See David Lawrence Levine, “A World of Worldless Truths, An
Invitation to Philosophy” (hereafter Worldless Truths)in The Envisioned
Life: Essays in Honor of Eva Brann (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2008), 163.
48. OTC #158.
49. AS, 48.
50. ECK September 2, 1830; also Heller, 16.
51. MR #430: gemeine Menschen verstand (not “common sense”); cf.
“Empirical Observation and Science,” (hereafter EOS) SS, 25.
52. “Naively”: see Levine, Political Philosophy, 163-78.
53. MR #664; also ECK January 29, 1826: “People always talk of the
study of the ancients; but what does that mean, except that it says, turn
your attention to the real world.”; see also OTC #358. Yet as we shall see
Goethe is not an ancient but seeks to carve out a middle position between
ancient and modern science. While there is deep agreement with Aristotle
about our experience of nature in terms of wholes, there is disagreement
about what is eternal. In making form eternal, Aristotle, he said, was
prone to “precipitousness.” By contrast, for him it is the process, not the
form, which abides. “Everything is in flux of continual motion.”
54. “There is no worse mistake in physics or any science than to treat secondary things as basic and . . . to seek an explanation for the basic things
in secondary ones” (OTC #718). It’s as if we were “to enter a palace by
the side door” and thereafter base our description of the whole on our
first, one-sided impression. See “General Observation” (hereafter GO),
SS, 42 and OTC, 160); also, #177, 716 and its application to the “grievous” Newtonian error at #176.
55. See Heidegger, Phusis: “The act of self-unfolding emergence is inherently a going-back-into-itself. This kind of becoming present is phusis.
But it must not be thought of as a kind of built-in ‘motor’ that drives something, nor as an ‘organizer’ on hand somewhere, directing the thing.
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Nonetheless, we might be tempted to fall back on the notion that phuseidetermined being could be a kind that makes themselves. So easily and
spontaneously does this idea suggest itself that it has become normative
for the interpretation of living nature in particular, a living being has been
understood as an ‘organism.’ No doubt a good deal of time has yet to pass
before we learn to see that the idea of ‘organism’ and of the ‘organic’ is a
purely modern, mechanistic teleological concept, according to which
‘growing things’ are interpreted as artifacts that make themselves. Even
the word and concept ‘plant’ takes what grows as something ‘planted,’
something sown and cultivated” (195), and “But is not phusis then misunderstood as some sort of self-making artifact? Or is this not a misunderstanding at all but the only possible interpretation of phusis, namely,
as a kind of techne? This almost seems to be the case, because modern
metaphysics, in the impressive terms of . . . Kant, conceives of ‘nature’ as
a ‘technique’ such that this ‘technique’ that constitutes the essence of nature provides the metaphysical ground for the possibility, or even the necessity, of subjecting and mastering nature through machine technology”
(220).
56. GO, 42.
57. ECK May 12, 1825; also AS, 48.
58. ECK April 11, 1827.
59. FE p. 20.
60. “The Influence of Modern Philosophy,” (hereafter IMP) in SS, 28.
61. MoP #77.
62. MoP #84.
63. OTC #175.
64. EOS, 25.
65. OTC #665. There are times when Goethe seems to anticipate Husserl’s
phenomenological approach, in particular in “The Experiment as Mediator Between Object and Subject” [hereafter EMOS], in SS, 16, and IALO,
22, where the rigor and thoroughness of something like “eidetic variation”
seems to be proposed. The question is living form: “We cannot find
enough points of view nor develop ourselves enough organs of perception
to avoid killing it when we analyze it,” that is, multiple adumbrations
may give us a kind of whole but at the risk of rendering the outcome a
‘mental composition’ (as in Kant). It would be interesting to see how
Husserl and Heidegger treat life in its original vitality. See also OTC #166.
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66. “Preface,” OTC,. 159. We’ve taken the liberty to add the specification
“modern scientific” to abstraction. Throughout his OTC Goethe addresses the problems of scientific cognition and its tendency to excessive
abstraction (##310, 716, 754, and p. 162). For Goethe, as for Hegel, this
tendency is consequential and reckless. See note 52.
67. EOS, 25.
68. “Polarity,” in SS, 155; OTC #175; Letter to Herder, May 17, 1778 (in
Heller, 10).
69. OTC #732 (“expanded empiricism”).
70. “On Granite,” in SS, 132.
71. “A Study Based on Spinoza,” in SS, 8.
72. Despite Kant’s denial of such a human faculty in his Critique of Teleological Judgment, Goethe found a window of opportunity. He wrote that
Kant had “a roguishly ironic way of working: at times he seemed determined to put the narrowest limit on our ability to know things, and at
times, with a casual gesture, he pointed beyond the limits he himself had
set.” The passage in Kant that Goethe alludes to reads thus: “We can . . .
think [of a kind of] understanding which [unlike our discursive one
is] . . . intuitive, [and] proceeds from the synthetical-universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, i.e. from the whole to the
parts. . . . It is here not at all requisite to prove that such an intellectus archetypus is possible, but only that we are led to the idea of it—which too
contains no contradiction—in contrast to our discursive understanding,
which has need of images (intellectus ectypus) and to the contingency of
its constitution.” However, Goethe then drew the opposite conclusion:
“Why should it not also hold true in the intellectual area that through an
intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may become worthy
of participating spiritually in its creative process?” he wonders. “Impelled
from the start by an inner need, I had striven unconsciously and incessantly toward primal image and prototype, and had even succeeded in
building up a method of representing it which conformed to nature. Thus
there was nothing further to prevent me from boldly embarking on this
‘adventure of reason’ (as the sage of Konigsberg himself called it).”
“Judgment through Intuitive Perception” (hereafter JIP), in SS, 31-2; also
EMOS, 11-17. Cf. Kant’s “aesthetic normal idea” in Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, §17.
73. OTC #177; if we deny this faculty of intuitive perception we have no
real wholes.
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74. Letter to Herder, May 17, 1787: “I am very close to discovering the
secret of the creation and organization of plants. . . . The crucial point
from which everything else must needs spring. . . . The Urpflanze is to
be the strangest creature in the world. . . . After this model [visual formula] it will be possible to invent plants ad infinitum, which will all be
consistent...would possess an inner truth and necessity. And the same law
will be applicable to everything alive” (Heller, 10). Also OTC #175, “Polarity,” in SS, 155.
75. Urpflanze is often translated as “symbolic plant.” While this rendering
might be helpful if we keep a strictly Goethean notion of symbol in mind
(as in MR #314), this translation more often misdirects us if it suggests
to the reader either a mental abstraction or a literary device. Rather it
seeks to embody the manifold fruitfulness of nature “in potential” (“Outline for a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, Commencing
with Osteology” (hereafter GICA), in SS, 118).
76. “All is leaf.” MoP #119; OTC #120.
77. FE, 20; ECK November 14, 1823.
78. Letters to Schiller, February 10, 14, 1787 (in Heller, 20).
79. Hegel too—who otherwise was well disposed to Goethe’s project, indeed helped Goethe see how it fit into the larger scheme of the development of ideas—Hegel too nevertheless failed to see the Urpflanze as
anything but an abstracted archetype (See Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark
Butler and Christiane Seiler [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1984], 681-711; HN, 11).
80. CP, 68-9. And we read in the Metamorphosis of Plants of the calyx
that it “betrays its composite origins in its more or less deep incisions or
divisions.”
81. ITP, 41.
82. OTC, 166. This may sound like ‘deconstruction,’ yet we would have
to consider whether it represents a true break with analytical thinking, as
Goethe seeks to do here.
83. CP, 69. Just as it led to his “discovering” the Ur-principle of the plant
kingdom, so Goethe is led in his other studies to “postulate” one for the
mammal family: “In the process I was soon obliged to postulate a prototype against which all mammals could be compared as to points of agreement and divergence. As I had earlier sought out the archetypal plant I
now aspired to find the archetypal animal; in essence the concept or idea
of the animal.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
85. Letter to Herder, May 17, 1787; OTC #175; “Polarity,” 155.
86. ITP, 41 (“ . . . my whole method relies on derivation”).
87. Aristotle’s eidos is not subject to metamorphosis. On the other side,
in Darwin the metamorphosis of form is not an unfolding of immanent
form but the haphazard “evolution of species” and creative adaptation on
the part of active wholes becomes “random selection.” See note 51. My
thanks to John Cornell for his helping me think this through.
88. OTC, #720.
89. OTC, #109.
90. MR #504.
91. ITP, 39. Also “If we take the significant dictum ‘know thyself’ and
consider it, we mustn’t interpret it from an ascetical standpoint. It does
not by any means signify the kind of self-knowledge advocated by our
modern hypochondriacs, humorists, and ‘Heautotimorumenoi’ [self-torturers], but quite simply means: pay some attention to yourself, watch
what you are doing so that you come to realize where you stand vis-à-vis
your fellows and the world in general. This needs no psychological selftorture; any capable person knows and appreciates this. It is good advice
and of the greatest practical advantage to everyone (MR, #657).” He objects only to those isolating tendencies of the subjective sciences and psychologies that are heir to the fateful alienation, if not divorce, of the ego
from the world.
92. ECK April 10, 1829.
93. ITP, 39.
94. MR #935; the whole passage reads “let him find a girl or a world, no
matter which, and he will become whole.” This is typical (see Eric Heller,
“Goethe in Marienbad,” in The Poet’s Self and The Poem, (London:
Athione Press, 1976).
95. MR #442 (“Try to do your duty and you’ll soon discover what you’re
like.”); also ##770, 935; ECK January 29, 1826.
96. ECK February 13, 1829.
97. HN, 226; also ECK October 18, 1827: In a conversation with Hegel
about the potential for modern sophistry of the “dialectic disease,”
Goethe says: “Let us only hope that these intellectual arts and dexterities
are not frequently misused, and employed to make the false true and
the true false. . . . The study of nature preserves me from such a disease.
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For here we have to deal with the infinitely and eternally true, which
throws off as incapable everyone who does not proceed purely and honestly with the treatment and observation of his subject. I am also certain
that many a dialectic disease would find a wholesome remedy in the
study of nature.”
98. ECK January 2, 1824; also March 12, 1828.
99. TI, #51.
100. Ibid., #49; cf. MR #864.
101. ECK January 2, 1824; letter to Zelter, June 18, 1831 (in HN, 27).
102. See also ECK January 24, 1825, October 12, 1825; February 1, 1827;
October 18, 1827; February 12, 1827; MR ##191 and 1121. See Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, passim. This affirmation is what Nietzsche found most admirable, indeed he was envious of this, for it was not
available to him. See “Afterword: Goethe and Nietzsche,” in Levine,
Worldless Truths, 163-65.
103. “A More Intense Chemical Activity in Primordial Matter,” SS, 137.
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Special Section:
Justice
Editor’s Note
In November of 2012, O. Carter Snead, Professor of Law at Notre
Dame Law School and Director of the Notre Dame Center for
Ethics and Culture, invited five tutors from St. John’s College in
Annapolis to speak at the Center’s thirteenth annual fall conference
entitled The Crowning Glory of the Virtures: Exploring the Many
Facets of Justice.
The following five papers were delivered on a panel session,
together with a sixth: “The Relevance of Lay Views on Punishment
to Criminal Justice” by Christopher Slobogin, Professor of Law
and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt Law School. A greatly expanded version of the paper was published the following month: Christopher
Slobogin and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, “Putting Desert in its
Place,” 65 Stanford Law Review 77 (January 2013). The article can
be accessed online at the following URL:
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/sites/default/files/
Slobogin-65-Stan-L-Rev-77.pdf
�SPECIAL SECTION: JUSTICE
The Actual Intention of Plato’s
Dialogues on Justice and Statesmanship
Eva Brann
71
Cicero famously said of Socrates that he was the one who brought
philosophy down from heaven to earth. This must be some other
Socrates than the one of the Platonic dialogues, perhaps
Xenophon’s of the Memorabilia. After all, even the comic Socrates
of Aristophanes’s Clouds is a meteorologist, a watcher of the heavens, though he does it hoisted up in a basket, butt up. Of course,
he is a sky watcher, since that is where the vaporous and loquacious
Clouds—Aristophanes’s comic version of the Forms—are to be
found. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that
Socrates connected earthly matters, such as politics, to the invisible
heavens, the realm of the forms.
There are three Platonic dialogues overtly and extendedly concerned with politics. The first, the second longest of all the dialogues, is the Republic, in Greek Politeia. It bears the subtitle,
added in antiquity, “On the Just.” The second is the Statesman, in
Greek Politikos; its ancient subtitle was “On Kingship.” And the
third, the Laws, Nomoi in Greek, subtitled “On Legislation,” is by
far the longest.
In the Republic Socrates is both narrator and main interlocutor.
In the Statesman he is the originating occasion of the dialogue but
not a participant. He sits it out as an auditor, perhaps at times somewhat skeptical; the leading speaker is a visitor, or stranger, from
Elea, Parmenides’s hometown. Finally, the Laws don’t even take
place in Athens but in Crete, and Socrates doesn’t appear at all,
though there is an anonymous visitor, a stranger from Athens. Who
doubts that the Laws is a work of practical politics, in fact the
mother of constitutions? As the Athenian says: “Our logos . . . is
of cities, and frameworks and law-giving” (678a). Perhaps we
might even say that the farther Socrates is from a dialogue the more
it is merely earthly.
When I speak, in my title for this brief talk, about “The Actual
Intention” of the first two of these dialogues, I imply that in them
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all is not as it seems. Here is Rousseau’s opinion of the Republic,
taken from the first book of his Émile: “Those who judge books
merely by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the
finest treatise on education ever written.” And, indeed, the central
books of the ten that comprise the Republic are taken up with the
ontology, the philosophical framework, that must underlie education, and with the ensuing education itself. To be sure, the education discussed is that of the philosopher kings who will found and
maintain that best Politeia, the civic framework with which the Republic is concerned (473c).
And yet again, neither this civic framework for the best city,
which will be superintended by the philosopher kings, nor its justice is actually the intended topic of the Republic. For recall that
this city is devised as a model writ large of the soul (368d), a model
from which we can conveniently read off the nature of individual,
internal justice. The book we call the Republic rests on are two
tremendous assumptions: One is that political frameworks—not
only the best but even more strikingly the worst—are analogous
to, enlarged projections of, the soul. And the other, even prior one,
is that the soul ought to be our first topic of inquiry, and it is only
on the way to it that we discover political ideals: Psychology absolutely precedes Politics; Souls make States.
Thus it would be a fair argument to say that the particular political justice which is generally understood to be the peculiar contribution of the Republic is, in fact, a civic construction meant in
the first instance to incorporate a notion appropriate to internal,
psychic justice. For the three castes of the best city are delineated
in such a way that the famous definition of justice as “doing one’s
own business,” which falls out from the community’s constitution,
is applicable to the soul as Socrates conceives it. In other words,
the just city is built from the first to be an enlarged soul.
Let me outline how Socrates makes it work. These castes are
functionally defined, each by its own specific task within the city.
Moreover, they form a hierarchy of command and responsibility
such that any one caste’s transgression is in fact rebellion, factional
strife. Such internal dissension is, however, nearly the worst fate—
as any Greek knew or should have learned in the course of the
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73
Peloponnesian War (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.82)—
that could befall a political community, because it is the prelude to
tyranny. To reiterate: for Socrates, the maladjusted and dysfunctional soul is the antecedent cause of political evil.
It is to me an unresolved problem whether Socrates was in politics the anti-egalitarian he is sometimes accused of having been.
In his demeanor, and what matters more, his conversations, he
seems as populist as possible, not much impressed by smart young
aristocrats about to go to the bad, like Critias, Charmides and Alcibiades; moreover, in the Republic he says of a democracy that
it’s “handy for searching out a politeia” (577d)—which happens
to be what he himself is doing right then, down in the city’s most
democratic district, its harbor. The solution to the problem depends
on how we look at the kallipolis, the “fair city” that he’s found or
made: Is it and its justice a serious political proposal, on a par in
earnestness with Aristotle’s Politics in antiquity or Locke’s, Montesquieu’s, and Rousseau’s works at the beginning of modernity?
In view of the motive for the constitution of Socrates’s city, that is
a reasonable question.
To lend my exposition some specificity let me give you the
briefest reminder of the model city, both as best and as paradigmatic for the soul—and let me once more anticipate the result: The
human soul too will be a hierarchy of functional parts, and it too
will sport the virtues displayed by the city, now operating in individual human beings much as they did in the community.
At the bottom of the city’s castes, then, are the craftsmen and
tradesmen whose business it is to perform their particular work
well and profitably, and to attend just to those assignments and no
other. Beyond that, they are pretty free and prosperous, and thus
satisfied. They are without a specific caste virtue other than competence, for they are driven by appetite rather than character. But
they are the class for the particular operation of the most encompassing virtue, justice. Justice is the virtue of the part and the
whole, of each part doing its own thing and thereby preserving the
integrity of the whole. (Temperance is another non-specific virtue,
that of agreeableness in the sense that each caste is accepting of its
position in the hierarchy.)
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The middle caste consists of the warriors who guard the city,
and it is the training ground of kings. This caste is defined by their
spiritedness, and it is the locus of honor, the source of a soldier’s
satisfaction through danger. These warriors do have a particular
virtue, courage.
The ruling caste is comprised of the philosopher kings, whose
virtue is wisdom and in whom the intellectual part, thoughtfulness,
dominates. Their satisfaction is the highest; their happiness is subject to interruption by the duties of governing. This hardship is,
however, alleviated by their affection for the young they teach—
and by a more selfish fact: that the city is essentially set up to protect philosophizing, one of quite a few signs that all is not as it
seems in this Republic.
There are certainly some other odd, even bizarre, aspects to be
observed in this political device. Its strict hierarchy of command
is inverted in respect to prosperity; the lowest caste, the craftsmen
and merchants are the rich ones, the warriors are allowed no
wealth. At the end of the books on the construction and the deconstruction of this city, we’re told outright that it is “a model laid up
in heaven” for anyone to look at who “wishes to found himself;
he’ll practice its politics only and no other” (592b; italics mine).
In other words, we really have all along been participating in soulconstruction rather than city-construction. But oddest is the notion
that the governors of this “fair city,” the philosopher kings, don’t
want to rule it—indeed, this reluctance is a criterion of fitness.
In fact, the education is set up so as to cancel political ambition—indeed, to capture the love of future kings for another realm,
to alienate them from the earthly city. For they are to have a carefully graduated program of learning, elevating them beyond the
world of appearances into the world of forms, the world of pure
trans-earthly being. That’s why Cicero’s dictum that I began
with—about Socrates bringing philosophy down for the heavens
to the earth—sounds so, well, inept.
In particular, the study that is the capstone of the education,
that levers the learner into this world of being and drags him out
of the terrestrial slime, is dialectic (531 ff.), of which more in a
moment. Now for Socrates—to the astonishment and disgust of a
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75
practical statesman like Jefferson, who waded contemptuously
through the “whimsies” and “nonsense” of the Republic (to Adams,
July 15, 1814) – the study of supra-worldly forms, of beings, is the
proper foundation for government. This is especially the case insofar as statesmanship is concerned with the virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom. For obviously, to properly locate
these in the city, in the civic community, it is necessary to know
them. But to know them is not a matter of empirical research but
of dialectical (that is, ontological) inquiry, a matter of the study of
beings as beings, the study of Being itself. So the education does,
after all, have a political purpose—if we agree that ethics, the inculcation and preservation of virtue, is the end of the polis and its
politikoi, the civic community and its statesmen. I do not think any
contemporary citizen, attached to our Madisonian tradition, can
really agree—nor wholly disagree—and that is one of the many
reasons why the Republic is indispensable to political inquiry. For
it raises the question of justice in this original way: Is justice in the
sense of the Republic, as the proper adjustment of the faculties of
the soul—in particular the ready subordination of the lower parts
to reason—the condition for political unity and civic peace? From
this question falls out a whole slew of problems: Can we commit
ourselves to a psychology of faculties such as those involved in
the Socratic psychic constitution? And if so, is the adjustment of
the functions and their subordination to reason a persuasive analysis of psychological soundness? And if so, does it follow that the
adjustment is a political—or even a social—task? And if so, can a
democracy produce government wise enough to accomplish these
psychic adjustments, to induce virtue?
Before going on to the Statesman, I want to return to Rousseau:
Is the real business of the Republic indeed education, rather than
politics? Socrates never says so explicitly, nor can he, since the
program there presented is not just an education for leadership
loosely speaking, but very specifically the education of kings—
and, as Socrates makes very clear, of queens (540c). It is an education very specifically geared to the Republic’s polis—although
it will, amazingly, become the general model of higher, liberal education, lasting until the middle of the last century.
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Nevertheless, I think Rousseau is right. Indeed, some aspects
of this “fair city” have been politically and socially realized: the
equality of men and women and (to some extent) the community
of marriage partners and children. But by and large it has remained,
blessedly, “a pattern laid up in heaven,” for it has its repulsive aspects. Its educational program, on the other hand, has, as I said,
cast loose and become viable even in a democracy, because what
is nowadays called its elitism is not an intellectually integral part
of this kind of learning. In fact, the college where my two translation partners and I teach, St. John’s College, is a remarkably close
incarnation of it, and it revels in its intellectual egalitarianism. That
is one more element in an argument that political justice is not the
actually intended topic of the Republic.
So now to the dialogue called The Statesman, a conversation
to which Socrates only listens. Here, at one point, things become
startlingly explicit. Near the very middle of the conversation the
stranger makes an announcement under the form of a rhetorical
question asked in that throwaway tone that alerts the reader of dialogues to a crucial turn. It concerns the ostensible search for the
true statesman. “Has it been proposed,” he asks, “for the sake of
this man himself rather than for our becoming more dialectical
about all things” (285d)? And the answer is: plainly for learning
to think dialectically. We thought we were learning about governing well; it turns out we are involved in a logical training exercise
using a universally applicable technique—dialectic, the expertise
of dividing and collecting subjects by terms.
Socrates is, once more, not a participant in this conversation,
and this dialectic is not quite his dialectic. His dialectic was a way
by which apt students, through being questioned cleverly and answering carefully, had their opinions, their mere assumptions
about the way things are, demolished and then reconstituted, so
that they might be led up into a solid knowledge of the true
sources of these things. It was, in short, an ascending way of learning. The stranger’s dialectic is a method that works the other way
around. From a tacitly assumed overview of the whole, the accomplished dialectician makes divisions (diaireseis). When he has
arrived at what will in later time (when this method has turned
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into the technique of classification) be called the “lowest species,”
he goes back up, making a collection of terms. These add up to a
definition. Many of our students begin by thinking that that is
what Socrates does when he philosophizes—he makes definitions.
Of course a collection of terms is not what Socrates looks for
when he asks, say, the question, “What is justice?”—but it is a
preparation for an answer.
Is definition-making, however, what the Elean Stranger believes to be the profitable end product of the dialectic for which
the statesman is only an example? No, nothing so unsubtle, as I’ll
try to show in a minute.
Not that this more subtle use of division is likely to have satisfied the auditing Socrates. We three translators of the Statesman
express this sense of his skepticism by our assignment of the last
speech of the dialogue. Someone says: “Most beautifully . . .
you’ve completed for us the kingly man, stranger, and the statesman.” Now the stranger’s interlocutor in the Statesman is a young
man who is also called Socrates. There is some question among
scholars whether the older or the younger Socrates speaks this valedictory line. We thought our Socrates, the older one, couldn’t have
thought it, and so he didn’t say it.
Here is what the stranger does with the dialectical art of division. First, the whole dialogue is a composition of divisions. To
see its handsome design, that of a tapestry, it is helpful to work
through its dialectical episodes and the way they are sewn together,
like the pieces of a figured robe. The beauties of this dialogue are
not imaginatively visual but logically structural; this text is a texture. But this cloaklike characteristic is not just a stylistic formalism. It signals that this new dialectic is a craft that produces
practical results. Its physical exemplification, and the great
metaphor of the dialogue, is weaving, cloak-making in particular.
And making intertwined, protective, enveloping compositions
turns out to be the royal art, the discerning and composing craft of
the statesman. This is no transcendentally derived wisdom, but a
technical expertise. For the subject of the Statesman, as contrasted
with the Republic, is unambiguously political; it is concerned with
human herds. However, from the vantage point of the king of
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crowds, of herds, the internal relations disposing the soul of an individual human being, which are the concern of the Republic, recede; they lie below the royal oversight. And with that distance
diminishes the interest in justice, which was, after all, the right relation of the soul’s parts. So justice is indeed no big concern of the
statesman, be it of the man or of the dialogue named after him.
So the statesman, who is, thus, not a philosopher king but an
expert ruler, sees each soul from afar as displaying one permanent
characteristic. My colleague Peter Kalkavage will point out the exceedingly interesting consequences for statesmanship of what he
discerns and what, again as a consequence, true statesmanship must
be. It is, its royal denomination notwithstanding, an expertise much
closer, I think, to our idea of politics than the philosophical rule of
the Republic.
Then what happens to the stranger’s startling claim, with
which I began my remarks on the Statesman? How can the dialogue’s real purpose be an exercise in dialectic when it will be
shown to be so precise and practical a doctrine about managing
multitudes?
Well, the Statesman is neatly reflexive. It is, one might say, a
self-reentrant dialogue. For by relentless dialectical division the
stranger establishes the precise location of the statesman in the
whole economy of crafts and sciences, materials and products,
regimes and rulers, virtues and vices. And in the course of doing
that, he is indeed also giving a lesson in the method of division to
young Socrates. It may even be that his teaching actually has more
effect on a finer young man who is also present, a second silent
listener, one of old Socrates’s two favorite partners in inquiry,
namely Theaetetus (the other being Glaucon in the Republic).
Then here’s the denouement: The art of dialectic, the ability
to distinguish perspicaciously the parts of any subject, an art for
which weaving is a very precise figure, is the true statesman’s expertise. Statesmanship, then, is the craft of setting up a civic
framework, a loom upon which the citizens of various temperaments, here the warp and woof, are interwoven into a cloaklike
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texture, which represents at once the body politic and its protective cover, as if to say that a well-interlaced citizenry will wrap
itself in its own constitution for security.
On this conclusion old Socrates may, after all, have smiled.
For among the Greeks weaving is always a women’s art, and that
women might match men as rulers is a teaching of his Republic.
So ends the Statesman, a dialogue that sets forth a doctrine of governing which requires an expertise for which participation in the
dialogue is itself the training.
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Reflections on Justice in Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Chester Burke
The last book of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is entitled
“A Judicial Error” because Dmitri Karamazov, the eldest Karamazov brother, is incorrectly found guilty of murdering his father Fyodor. Nearly all the spectators in the packed courtroom are stunned
by the verdict, despite the fact that most of them had assumed that
Dmitri had indeed committed the murder. Only his brother
Alyosha, his recently captivated love Grushenka, and his other
brother Ivan are certain of Dmitri’s evidence—Alyosha, because
of the innocence on Dmitri’s face when he said he hadn’t done the
deed; Grushenka, because “Dmitri isn’t the sort of man who would
lie” (683);* and Ivan, despite his loathing of Dmitri, because he
visits Fyodor’s illegitimate son Smerdyakov the night before the
trial and forces him to confess to the murder. Later that night,
Smerkdyakov commits suicide. Ivan’s testimony becomes worthless when, suffering from brain fever, he goes mad on the witness
stand, claiming that the only witness to this stunning revelation is
the Devil.
The first chapter of this final book is entitled “The Fatal Day.”
In the paragraph that concludes the previous chapter, Alyosha says
to himself, “Yes, with Smerdyakov dead, no one will believe Ivan’s
testimony; but he will go and testify . . . God will win!” (655) Having heard these three powerful words, “God will win,” the reader
is thrown into the human drama, that is, the trial. How can the truth
emerge from such a gigantic public spectacle, in which every one
of the participants has entered with his private opinions and passions? Dostoevsky characterizes the spectators, standing “in a
closely packed lump, shoulder to shoulder” (657), as having been
* Page references are to Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,
trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Strauss
& Giroux, 2002).
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enflamed by impatience. The women favor Dmitri’s acquittal and
the men, many of whom have been personally insulted by Dmitri,
wish to see him punished. The prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, trembles at having to oppose a famous Petersburg defense attorney,
whom he feels has overshadowed him since their younger days in
Petersburg. He believes that everything is at stake in this trial, both
for himself and for Russia. Fetyukovich, the famous defense attorney, exudes an air of confidence. The reader may feel a little uneasy
when Dostoevsky describes his eyes as small and inexpressive:
“his physiognomy had something sharply birdlike about it, which
was striking” (660-61). The material evidence with which the
reader is so familiar, wrenched from its living context, is on display
in the middle of the courtroom.
The prosecutor, known for (and sometimes ridiculed for) his
passion for psychology, puts together an account that seems to
make sense of all the facts, even though the defense attorney, having digested the situation with astonishing rapidity, is able to discredit many of the witnesses. Readers take delight in this passage,
because they have previous knowledge of these witnesses and the
ugliness of their souls. The prosecutor tells the compelling story
of Dmitri finishing “a poem” (717) that culminates in the murder
of his father, the stealing of 3,000 rubles, and running off madly to
find his lover Grushenka, only to relinquish her to a man who
abused her as a young girl. The defense attorney then accuses the
prosecutor of writing his own novel, of being a psychological poet
whose psychology is two-pronged and therefore equally capable
of proving a given statement of fact and its opposite. He masterfully shows that only the totality of the facts— and not a single
one of them in isolation—speak against his client.
Though he claims to demonstrate the limitations of psychology, the defense attorney is in fact a far better psychologist than
the prosecutor. He argues persuasively that there was no money,
no robbery, and no murder—at least no murder committed by
Dmitri. Seeing far deeper into Smerdyakov’s soul than most, the
defense attorney gives good reasons why Smerdyakov could have
killed his natural father.
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Only the reader has the privilege of having witnessed Dmitri,
filled with loathing in front of his hateful father, pulling out a brass
pestle from his pocket—and then not using it. Why didn’t Dmitri
kill his father? “God was watching over me then,” Dmitri used to
say afterwards. This is another reference to a divine intervention
that seems to have no place in a court of justice. (Recall Alyosha’s
“God will win!”) Due to Fetyukovich’s skill in destroying each
part of the whole accusation, there is, however, a reasonable chance
that Dmitri will either be released or at worst given minimal punishment. But in the chapter entitled “A Sudden Catastrophe,”
Dmitri’s spurned lover Katya, ready to sacrifice her honor for his
brother Ivan, who has just been carried out of the court suffering
an attack of brain fever, comes forward with a letter from Dmitri
that she has been withholding. She presumably intends to use the
letter to save Dmitri, despite the fact that he has stolen 3,000 rubles
from her—the entirety of which she thinks he has spent in a single
drunken binge with her rival Grushenka that night before the murder. In this letter, written just two days before the murder, Dmitri
says that he will get hold of the money he has stolen from her, even
if he has to rob and kill his father to do so. The reader knows that
Katya asked Dmitri to send these 3,000 rubles to a relative in
Moscow, though she fully believed at the time that he would spend
the entire sum on Gurschenka. Two other facts must be remembered: 1) before the events of the novel, Dmitri lent Katya 5,000
rubles to cover up a financial indiscretion committed by her father;
2) Dmitri (who did not in fact steal the 3,000 rubles from his father)
spent only half of Katya’s 3,000 rubles during his wild night with
Grushenka. He retained the rest in a packet tied around his chest,
uncertain whether to return the unspent half to Katya (thus removing half of his disgrace), or to keep it for the opportunity of running
off with Grushenka.
It is only natural that the reader should be confused by the intricate adding and subtracting of monetary sums. Dostoevsky, always in need of money himself, deftly uses sums of money to show
how human beings struggle to regulate equality, honor, pride, and
justice among themselves.
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But back to the letter. This suddenly revealed document, an
apparent blueprint of the murder, gives “mathematical significance” (619) to the prosecutor’s case. And though the words
“mathematical significance” are a clear signal to readers of Dostoevsky that whatever is certain in this way is certainly not true, it
is equally certain that a jury will be very unlikely to yield a verdict
of not guilty in the face of such evidence.
Aware of the difficulty of achieving a verdict of not guilty, and
despite having just produced his own “demonstration” that there
was no money, robbery, or murder, Fetyukovich (whose name in
Russian suggests the words “jerk, drip, sourpuss”) addresses the
jury, changing his tone and his approach: “I have it in my heart to
speak out something more to you, for I also sense a great struggle
in your hearts and minds. . . Forgive my speaking of your hearts
and minds, gentlemen of the jury, but I want to be truthful and sincere to the end.” “I do not renounce one iota of what I have just
said, but suppose I did, suppose for a moment that I, too, agreed
with the prosecution that my unfortunate client stained his hands
with his father’s blood” (741).
This begins the second part of Fetyukovich’s summary to the
jury. Dostoevsky entitles the chapter “An Adulterer of Thought,”
without any comment on this astonishing title. Since the corpse of
a father is the only fact in the case that could speak against his
client, Fetyukovich tries to show that Fyodor was not at all a father.
He masterfully summarizes the most poignant scenes in the novel
in order to paint Fyodor in the worst possible light. He shows why
it would have been completely natural for Dmitri to have beaten
and killed his father (who is in truth not a father) with the fatal pestle (which the reader knows was not even the real murder weapon)
without intention or premeditation. “Such a murder is not a murder.
Such a murder is not a parricide, either. Such a murder can be considered parricide only out of prejudice” (747). The attorney then
invokes a passage from the gospel according to Matthew, and compares Dmitri’s plight to that of Christ. The most terrible punishment, but the only one by which Dmitri’s soul will be saved, would
be for the jury to overwhelm him with mercy. Only then would
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Dmitiri— horrified by his deed—which, according to the defense
attorney’s earlier argument, Dmitri had not done)—realize that he
was guilty before all people.
Fetyukovich “adulterates thought” by fabricating a dangerous
novel (“novel upon novel,” shouts the prosecutor [748]), a concoction that is all the more wicked because it is a false image of Father
Zosima’s teaching. And, more important, it is the opposite of what
Dostoevsky has spent his whole life attempting to articulate. Only
the prosecutor, “breathless, inarticulate, confused” and “shaking
with emotion” (748), has the courage to respond. Of course his response will receive no sympathy from the mass of spectators, especially the mothers and fathers, who have amazingly enough
become enraptured by the words of the adulterer. Though the prosecutor is vain and beaten down by a failed life, though his superficial psychology prevents him from understanding the motives
and actions of the human beings right in front of him, he knows
with certainty that one cannot kill and not kill at the same time,
that one cannot praise and immortalize a man who murders his father, and that a false image of Christ and religion have been fabricated by his talented competitor. The reader is easily irritated by
the just response of this pathetic man (the prosecutor will himself
die soon after the trial) to a powerful and dangerous speech that is
arguing for a new understanding of human justice, one that includes a notion of mercy which could only be found in God or in
the heart of an individual human being.
I have pointed out that Dmitri, the prosecutor, and the defense
attorney have all been accused of acting out novels. By his subtle
but powerful use of chapter titles, Dostoevsky himself takes the
harshest stance toward the defense attorney. The Russian word for
“adulterer” (or “fornicator”) is a variation of the word for “lover.”
Fetyukovich, who claims to be able to feel “invisible threads that
bind the defense attorney and the jury together,” whom everyone,
including himself, expects to pull off some kind of miracle by proving Dmitri innocent when he is guilty, ends up by “proving” Dmitri
guilty when in truth he is innocent. His call to regenerate not only
Dmitri but also Russia herself is met with rapture and enthusiastic
weeping among the spectators, and the reader too is likely to be
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sympathetic. When he pleads with the jury to show mercy to
Dmitri even if he did kill his father, he shows himself not to be a
seeker of truth but to be unjust—indeed, an adulterer of thought.
He is unjust because he portrays Christ as an enlightened and compassionate liberal rather than the Son of God, who died in order to
save human beings from the power of sin.
We can detest Fyodor Karamazov in the depths of our souls.
We can pity the children that he brought into the world. We can
wish that he were dead and wonder why such a man is alive. But
we cannot excuse the man who killed him. That man, Smerdyakov,
hangs himself from a nail on his wall with a brief note saying that
he alone is responsible for his own death. This extreme isolation
is what Dostoevsky sees as the dreadful future of a world that denies God. Instead of hanging an icon or image of God on the wall,
we will end up destroying ourselves. Dostoevsky the novelist, committed to real justice and truth, cannot allow the jury to be won
over by this adultery of thought, even though what results is a momentary injustice in a court of law. By entitling the next chapter
“Our Peasants Stood Up for Themselves,” he shows that he is
pleased that the peasants (who comprise half of the jury) are not
seduced by this highest and ultimately most dangerous form of seduction. Though their verdict was incorrect, the peasants understood a deeper truth and rightly stood up for it. Their hearts rejected
false novels.
But the real novel ends several months after Dmitri receives
his sentence. It ends with the burial of a ten-year old schoolboy,
Ilyusha. Dmitri had gravely insulted Ilyusha’s father, a retired and
drunken officer known as the Captain, by dragging him out of a
tavern and across town, pulling him by his wispy beard. Desperate
to provide for his family—his wife and older daughter are crippled
and ill—the Captain was employed by Fyodor, assisting him in
shady financial dealings. One of them was to buy up Dmitri’s
promissory notes so as to bring him to financial disgrace. Seeing
his father publicly humiliated, the young Ilyusha begged Dmitri to
forgive his father, “rushing up to everyone asking them to defend
him, but everyone laughed” (192). When Ilyusha’s schoolmates
heard about the incident they teased him mercilessly. The next day
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he angrily threw stones at them, but he himself received a great
blow to the chest. He came down with a fever, and died two days
after Dmitri was sentenced for the murder he did not commit.
Given Dostoevsky’s masterful juxtaposition of scenes and
events, it would be easy to connect Dmitri’s punishment with the
death of this young boy. As the proud and angry Katya says to
Alyosha, “Dmitri committed a rash and unjust act, a very ugly act”
(193). She commissions Alyosha to give a large sum of money to
the Captain in recompense for this act. The attempt at justice (in
truth Katya, herself recently injured by Dmitri, considers herself a
fellow sufferer) does not work at first. The Captain initially takes
the money, imagining a way out of abject poverty for himself and
his miserable family. But suddenly, shaking and tearful, flings
down the money at Alyosha’s feet. He will eventually take not only
this money, but much more from the generous, though proud,
Katya. But his son will nonetheless die and the doctors will not be
able to cure his family.
It was not unlikely that the previously consumptive Ilyushka’s
life would have been short. But that is not the point. All of us are
continually doing harm to our fellow human beings. While it does
not seem possible that any system of justice could regulate the
damages, we humans are always trafficking amongst one another,
exchanging goods and money in an attempt to achieve some kind
of fairness.
“Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most
of all” (289). This puzzling statement, lying powerfully in the
background of the novel, is said repeatedly by Father Zosima
throughout the novel. I have tried to show that Fetyukovich’s version is a dangerous adulteration of this claim. Dmitri, Ivan,
Smerdyakov, and even Alyosha can be held responsible for the
death of their father. Yet only one human being killed Fyodor and
it is the responsibility of the legal system to find and punish that
human being. Dmitri had previously thrown his father to the floor
and brutally kicked him, suspecting that Fyodor was hiding
Grushenka from him. Though drunk, he had written the damning
letter. Ivan had tacitly given Smerdyakov permission to kill Fyodor
by leaving town on the day of the murder; even worse, he had spent
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much of the night before his departure listening for sounds in the
house, unconsciously anticipating and desiring that someone would
come and kill his dreadful father. Alyosha, distracted by the death
of his hero Zosima, and overwhelmed with grief by the dishonor
of Zosima’s rotting corpse, had forgotten to keep in contact with
Dmitri. But Smerdyakov, having spent his entire life serving a family whose members he despised—except for Ivan, whose respect
he craved—understood the character of these Karamazovs, at least
in its baser aspects. He was able to set up a scenario in which it
would be possible for him to kill Fyodor, who trusted him, and
then steal the 3,000 rubles for which Dmitri had claimed he would
risk all. With this money, Smerdyakov imagined that he could start
a new life. And only Ivan could get Smerdyakov to confess—Ivan,
who, though he hated bitterly both his father Fyodor and his
brother Dmitri, had a conscience deeper than he himself knew.
During their conversation about the murder, Smerdyakov comes
to understand the emptiness and dishonesty of Ivan’s thoughts,
though he understands nothing of Ivan’s heart. And in that understanding about his former idol, he gives up on life, which had never
offered him anything but pain and misery. Smerdyakov—far cleverer and wiser than even the most observant reader could suspect—
sees that Ivan is more like his father than any of the brothers.
The chain of responsibility is endless. Grushenka says in
court, “It all happened because of me” (682)—claiming responsibility both for Fyodor’s and Dmitri’s falling in love with her.
Shortly thereafter, she says of Katerina, who had tried to charm
her out of loving Dmitri, “She is the cause of everything” (683).
And at the time of Dmitri’s arrest, Grushenka, hearing that Dmitri
had supposedly killed his father, had cried, “I am the guilty one,
first and foremost, I am the guilty one!” (457)
But everyone gets the problem of justice wrong, precisely because it is impossible to see clearly into the heart of another
human being. Father Zosima immediately understands the danger
looming before the Karamazov family in the first chapters of the
novel. That is why he bows before Dmitri and encourages Alyosha
to look after him. But Zosima cannot control the outcomes stemming from human nature. He can only preach “active love”—a
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difficult and profound concept derserving of another talk—and he
can pray.
While I do not claim that the following is a solution to the
problem of human justice, I’d like to end this talk with a quotation
from Father Zosima:
If it were not for Christ’s Church, indeed there would
be no restraint on the criminal in his evildoing and no
punishment for it later, real punishment, that is, not a
mechanical one . . . , which only chafes the heart in most
cases, but a real punishment, the only frightening and
appeasing punishment which lies in the acknowledgement of one’s own conscience (64).
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Peaceniks and Warmongers:
The Disunity of Virtue
in Plato’s Statesman
Peter Kalkavage
89
I want to begin by saying how my theme is related to justice. Plato
and Aristotle often connect justice with wholeness. And it is wholeness—the whole of virtue and the whole of a political community—that is very much at issue, and at risk, in Plato’s Statesman.
Perhaps at risk as well is the wholeness of logos or discourse.
Plato’s mysterious stranger from Elea delights in division. In
the Sophist he uses the method of dividing genera or kinds to pin
down the elusive professor of wisdom. In the Statesman he uses
this same method, with some modifications, to show the genuine
statesman and king “naked and alone by himself” (304a). But the
stranger isn’t all about logic. Like Socrates, he enjoys images of
all sorts and regularly avails himself of their curious power to illuminate. In the Statesman, soon after the great myth about reversed
becoming, the stranger announces the need for paradigms in inquiry.
He tells young Socrates that they would do well in their search if
they came up with a paradigm that would, in its small and humble
way, help to reveal the magisterial form, the eidos, of the true king
(277d).
This paradigm, as we soon hear, is weaving (279b). Politics is
the master-art that weaves together all the other arts in the city and
bends them to its high purpose. But it is not until late in the dialogue, almost at the end, that the precise meaning of the paradigm
is explained. The true statesman, we discover, knows how to interweave courageous and moderate types of souls. To use the language of the paradigm, he combines the warp or hard woollen
threads, which resemble courageous natures, with the woof or soft
threads, which resemble moderate natures. Properly combined,
these human threads produce “the web of statesmanly action”
(311B). This web is the wisely constituted polis—the beautiful end
of politics conceived as a productive art.
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But the path to this beautiful end requires an account that the
stranger calls “somewhat astonishing”—astonishing because it
proceeds from the view that virtue is not a happy unity, in which
different portions of virtue are “friendly” to one another, as the
many say and as Socrates suggests in other dialogues. On the contrary, virtue has within it, and seems even to be defined by, a war
between courage and moderation. The stranger is unsparing in his
formulation. The two virtues, he says, “have a deep-seated enmity
toward one another and maintain an oppositional faction in many
of the things that are” (306b). The stranger, we must note, does not
ask Socrates’ question: What is virtue? Instead, he posits an opposition between two forms of virtue. This opposition, more than anything else in the dialogue, defines the political art.
To illustrate his point, the stranger urges young Socrates to consider the two forms (eidē) that come to light when we praise things
for their beauty—various doings and makings, whether of bodies
or of souls (306c). We praise things that manifest “keenness and
swiftness.” These can be the things themselves or their images—
the swift movement of a runner, for example, or a vase painting
depicting such a runner. The name for what underlies such praise
is andreia, “courage” or “manliness.” This is the form we are admiring when we praise the keen and the swift.
But we also praise what the stranger calls “the gentle form of
generation.” We praise as beautiful those actions and thoughts that
are quiet, modulated, slow, and careful. The name for this form is
orderliness or composure, kosmiotēs (307b) It refers to moderation
as the virtue of keeping things measured and undisturbed. We think
of things like a smooth transition in a piece of music or a soothing
tone of voice. To sum up, we are thoroughly contradictory in our
praise of beauty. We praise as beautiful those things that have a
manly look, and we also praise the look that is opposed to manliness. Furthermore, we blame as ugly both what is opposed to manliness and what is opposed to the opposite of manliness, that is,
what is opposed to moderation. We do all this, we should note, not
because we are inept but because beauty itself is self-opposed.
Shifting now from things that display opposed virtues to the
very natures of courage and moderation, the stranger refers to these
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as “looks [ideas] destined . . . to be split apart in hostile faction.”
He then turns to the people who have these natures in their souls,
not by choice or upbringing but by nature (307b-c). Faction is here
described as a feud between warring families. Members of each
family judge the beautiful and the good solely in terms of their
family virtue, and hate members of the other family simply because
they are in the other family. This love of Same and hate of Other
blinds each family to the common, if problematic, eidos of virtue
that both families share. Each family, by virtue of its virtue, is blind
to the virtue and beauty of the other. As a consequence, members
of neither family really know their own virtue, since they do not
know why and in what manner their characteristic virtue is beautiful and good. Because of this blindness and the mutual hate it engenders, the two families, though they live in cities, may be said
to occupy, in Hobbes’s phrase, a pre-political “state of nature” with
respect to virtue.
As if this situation weren’t bad enough, the stranger goes on to
say that the family feud between noble types is child’s play compared with the disease that is “the most hateful of all for cities”
(307d). It is here that the stranger shows why the two forms of
virtue, and the two opposed types of soul, constitute the central
problem of politics. Indeed, he demonstrates the urgent need of the
political art in the Reign of Zeus, the era in which the world has
been abandoned by its divine shepherd and guide.
The stranger gives a devastating portrait of what happens to
cities that fall prey to the ethos of peace at any cost. He refers, paradoxically, to the eros for composure (307e)—the only appearance
of this word in the dialogue—as if to say: “Look at these people,
young Socrates. To themselves they seem all calm and reserved,
but in fact they have a disordered desire for order. Why, they are
as crazy as a man in love!” Perhaps there is also the suggestion
that eros, for the stranger, is to be associated with what is soft or
tender rather than with the sort of tough love that Diotima describes
in the Symposium (203c-e). In any case, because of their unmeasured love of order, these people slip unwittingly into an unwarlike
condition and raise their children to be similarly unwarlike. The
condition spreads through the city like an infection and becomes
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more virulent with each generation. Since unmixed moderation
cannot accommodate itself to the aggression of an enemy, cannot
rouse citizens to display a decisive and manly spirit when this is
needed, the city eventually loses its freedom and becomes enslaved.
The very same result awaits the macho city that wants war at
any cost and is driven by thymos, spiritedness, rather than eros.
The rage for courage leads citizens and rulers to be constantly tensing up their cities for opportunities to display what they wrongly
take to be the whole of virtue. Before too long, the city that idolizes
courage eventually picks a fight with the wrong adversary, an
enemy it can’t vanquish, and so is vanquished in turn. Like the
peace-loving city, the war-driven city ends in destruction and slavery (308a).
Now we normally think of faction, stasis, as the strife between
two parties within a single city. But the stranger’s view in the present context is very different. The political problem par excellence
is, for him, not violent heterogeneity (for example, champions of
oligarchy vs. champions of democracy) but virtuous homogeneity,
the idolatry of one of two opposed virtues, either courage or moderation. To be sure, there is faction in its usual sense within the
form of virtue. This is the eidetic situation, known only to the
philosophic statesman. But the real-life political problem occurs
when the two naturally opposed virtues are not simultaneously
present. Hence, as the stranger sees it, the devastating political outcome of the principle “likes attract and opposites repel” is enacted
on the stage of inter-polis relations, when a city suffers destruction
at the hands of another city rather than from internal discord. The
stranger is surely not unaware of the evils of faction in this latter
sense—the horrors, for example, that Thucydides describes in the
case of Corcyra (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War,
3.82). But for the stranger this is not the central political problem,
which has its source in the eidetic opposition between the beautifully tough and the beautifully gentle that pervades “many of the
things that are.” The problem is not vice, or human nature simply,
or intense disagreement over which regime is best, but virtue,
which is by nature turned against itself.
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We might try to make sense of the stranger’s unsettling account
by citing Aristotle’s distinction between natural and ethical virtue,
the latter being guided by the intellectual virtue of phronēsis or
practical wisdom, which allows the virtuous individual to avoid
excess and deficiency by perceiving the mean (Nichomachean
Ethics, 6.13). This is helpful to an extent, but it takes the sting out
of the stranger’s insight into why virtue is a problem. The stranger
would no doubt agree with Aristotle’s opinion that virtuous dispositions, when left to themselves, are dangerous, and that they
need practical wisdom in order to be reliable virtues. But far more
important to the stranger is the primordial dyad of courage and
moderation—the dyad that defines the task of the political art.
That task is not how to interweave a multiplicity of virtues in order
to make them one but how to unite two naturally opposed virtues
so that they may complement rather than repel one another and
contribute their distinctive powers to the political web. These are
toughness and flexibility, quickness and caution, forcefulness and
grace.
It is tempting to say that the problem of politics, for the stranger,
is that of knowing how to interweave the male and the female
forms of ethical beauty. It is true that each virtue, by the stranger’s
account, must apply to both men and women. How else could one
trait come to dominate a city’s population through marriage and
procreation? Nevertheless, the manliness of courage strongly suggests as its correlate the femininity of moderation. If we admit this
sexual distinction in the case of the two virtues, it becomes interesting, to say the least, that the paradigm for political wisdom in
the dialogue is the feminine art of weaving. This may be Plato’s
way of showing that, of the two opposed virtues, moderation, as
the love of order and peace, is closer than courage to justice and
wisdom. It may also show Plato’s philosophic preference for
music over gymnastic, since weaving engages in deft material harmonization. In good statesmanship, as in philosophy, grace trumps
force to become the greatest force of all. This is true even for our
tough-minded, methodically rigorous stranger, who tells young
Socrates that the statesman and good lawgiver knows how to instil
right opinions in others “by the muse of kingship” (309d).
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The stranger proceeds to outline the education and nurture that
will generate the needful thing—the artful synthesis of virtuous
opposites in a coherent political whole. This whole, this web, in
order to be beautiful, requires beautiful threads that have been previously prepared by means of a subsidiary art. Statesmanship, like
all compositional art, is elitist: only the best materials will do. And
so, there must be an artful way to determine who is fit for an ethical-political education, and who is not. This consists in observing
children at play in order to see which ones show signs of a virtuous
disposition, whether of courage or moderation. The stranger lays
special emphasis on those who prove to be uneducable. He describes them as “violently driven off course by a bad nature into
godlessness and arrogance and injustice” (308E-309A). The political art, here seen in its harsh and decisive aspect, casts them out
“by punishing them with death penalties and exiles and the greatest
dishonors.” And those who “wallow in ignorance and much baseness” are put into the class of slaves.
The stranger at this point explicitly connects the union of manly
and moderate natures with the intertwining of warp and woof
(309b), in effect closing the paradigm-web he began to weave earlier in the dialogue. The city, in order to be a durable garment suited
to the protection of all those it embraces, needs both kinds of
human threads: the hard and the soft. This unity of opposites requires a two-tiered system of civic education that produces two
sorts of “bonds”—one higher, one lower. The higher bond is said
to be divine, since it applies to the part of the soul that is “eternalborn,” the part that thinks and holds opinions. The lower, human
bond is marriage, which applies to what the stranger calls “the animal-born part,” that is, the part of the soul that has to do with bodily desire. The bonds are produced successively: first the higher,
then the lower. Once the higher bond of right opinion is in place,
the stranger asserts, the lower one isn’t difficult to bring about
(310a). This optimism presupposes that the divine bond is strong
enough to overcome the greatest of all human drives—the erotic
attraction that human beings have for one another and that connects
them, as we hear in the Symposium, with the striving for immortality (207a).
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The higher tier of the educational process aims at inculcating
“genuinely true and also steadfast opinions about beautiful and just
and good things” (309c). These opinions are implanted in both
types of noble individuals. In other words, the inculcation of “one
opinion about what’s beautiful and just and good” supersedes the
idolatry of a single virtue and overcomes the natural impulse to
welcome one’s like and shun one’s unlike. Moderate and courageous individuals will share the opinion that it is good for the city
that they mingle, and bad if they don’t. In other words, they will
learn to respect, if not love, a virtue higher than either courage or
moderation—the virtue of justice. They will believe that they and
their respective virtues are threads that must be woven together to
form the political web.
I note in passing that the education the stranger describes is
based entirely on the cultivation of habits and right opinion. There
is no philosophic education for guardians, no turning of the soul
from becoming to being, as there is in the Republic. The stranger’s
version of a city in speech may be the work of a philosophic statesman, but it does not appear that this statesman, though possessing
kingly science, is in fact a king in this city.
The stranger dwells on how the higher sort of education, which
aims at the divine bond, tempers the excess in the two opposed
virtues. If a manly individual takes hold of true opinions about
what is good and beautiful and just, he will “grow tame and in this
way be most willing to commune with just things.” Without these
opinions, he will degenerate into a beast (309e). Similarly, the
order-loving individual who holds these same true opinions will
become “genuinely moderate and intelligent,” and the one who
doesn’t will rightly be called simpleminded or foolish. The establishment of these true opinions takes place through laws and customs that apply only to those naturally suited for an ethical
education. This education, the stranger asserts, is the “drug” prescribed by the ever-vigilant art of politics. It is the antidote for onesided virtue.
At last we reach the stranger’s account of marriage, the “human
bond” implanted by the political art. This bond, though lower than
the other, is crucial, since the city’s continuance and well-being
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depend on procreation through sexual union. We should recall that
it is not courage and moderation per se that bring about political
downfall but rather the gradual build-up and concentration of a single virtue through sexual generation over the course of time. As
the stranger approaches his culminating definition, he gets down
to the nitty-gritty of why people marry. He dismisses those who
marry for wealth or power and focuses on those whose care is family and children. These are the people who marry, or who arrange
the marriages of their sons and daughters, for the serious (if wrong)
reason that they always choose partners who are of their own family when it comes to virtue and eschew members of the opposite
family.
The political art counteracts this error, goes against nature, by
compelling members of each “family” to overcome their natural
repugnance for the other and to marry against type. This will prevent the spread of a single trait by producing hybrids that combine
both virtuous types. The stranger does not say what home life will
be like for married opposites, nor does he care. The only thing that
matters, from a political standpoint, is that the virtues are mixed
rather than kept separate. Of course, genesis in the Reign of Zeus
is unpredictable: there will always be children whose nature reduplicates that of, say, a courageous mother rather than a moderate
father. And so, the political art must exercise perpetual vigilance
and continually oversee marriage and sexual union. The war on
nature must go on.
The needful union of opposed virtues must be enforced at the
highest level of the city—that of the rulers. The stranger acknowledges that it is possible for one individual to have both virtues
(311a). The monarchic city must choose this sort of individual as
its supervisor. If more than one ruler is required—if the city is aristocratic—then the ruling class must have both kinds of virtuous individuals. The reason is that moderate rulers are cautious, just, and
conservative, but they lack, the stranger says, the needful acuity
and vigor, which would be supplied by the courageous among the
ruling class. The stranger ends his “astonishing account” of virtue
on a negative note: “And it’s impossible for all things having to do
with cities to turn out beautifully in private and in public when
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these characters [courage and moderation] aren’t present as a pair”
(311b).
Only one thing remains: the final definition of the web that is
produced by the true statesman’s knowledge. Will this web, as the
stranger glowingly describes it, ever be woven in deed as it is in
speech? From the stranger’s perspective, it does not matter. The
goal was to define statesmanship solely in terms of the statesman’s
knowledge or science, apart from whether he actually rules,
founds, reforms, or advises (259b).
What, then, does the statesman know? Not, it seems, how to
lead individuals to virtue, but how to temper the virtue they already
have by nature. The statesman’s wisdom is the wisdom of defence.
That is why the stranger tends to dwell more on bad things to be
avoided and feared than on good things to be sought and aspired
to. Politics is a defensive art. It is embodied in the web that ends
the dialogue. Strange to say, when we finally find the statesman
“naked and alone,” he turns out to be a maker of garments, which
earlier in the dialogue were placed in the class of defences (279c280a). He is the maker of the web that is both the body politic and
the political cloak that defends the otherwise naked city from its
enemies, the virtuous from their monomania and wrong marriages,
and all its inhabitants from exposure and need. Perhaps most of
all, the political web protects the city from the ravages and uncertainties of time. A good garment is one that wears well. It must
protect us from seasonal extremes. The same is true of the political
garment, which must defend the city not only during the winter of
war and its discontents but also during the summer of peace, prosperity, and inattention.
In Plato’s Statesman, politics appears in its true light only when
it is seen in the context of the stranger’s cosmic myth about the
Reign of Kronos and the Reign of Zeus. The myth compels us to
judge the tension-riddled, endangered life we have now by contrasting it with an earlier peaceful life that ended in disappearance
rather than old age and death, that had no sex or sexual desire, and
that needed neither politics nor clothes. The myth discloses what
is most needful for beleaguered humanity in this our Reign of
Zeus—the era that depends on the god-like statesman and shepherd
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because it can no longer depend on a kindly nature and a caretaking
god.
I suspect that the world for the stranger is, like virtue, fundamentally incoherent. Strictly speaking, there is no kosmos, no permanent world-order that grounds the inherent goodness of the
virtues. Instead there are two opposed cosmic eras, two opposed directions of becoming, and two opposed forms of human life and
human nature. In the Reign of Zeus—that is, in the realm of politics—the “condition of ancient disharmony,” the tendency toward
degenerateness that is woven into the very constitution of the world
on account of its bodily being, asserts itself (273c). That is why we
need the Promethean powers of method and art—to make order
where there is no order. In the Statesman—one of Plato’s fascinating experiments in post-Socratic philosophy—Plato tempts us to
consider the grounds and implications of this modern-sounding
world-view.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
Raskolnikov’s Redemption
Nicholas Maistrellis
99
The narrative of Crime and Punishment is very straightforward.
An impoverished university student named Raskolnikov plans and
commits a murder. The murder accidently turns into a double
murder. There follows a sequence of incidents and conversations
that reveal the turmoil this act causes in the soul of the criminal.
Through two conversations with a young prostitute named Sonya
the murderer finally confesses his crime, first to her and then to
the authorities. Finally there is an epilogue in which we are told
that Raskolnikov is sentenced to a period of imprisonment in
Siberia. Sonya follows him to Siberia. Remarkable things happen
to him there.
Of all the four great novels of Dostoevsky–Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov—it is only
in this one that Dostoevsky creates a sustained dialectic with the interior life of one and only one character. Crime, on the other hand,
is a theme in all the novels, but it’s only in this one that Dostoevsky
focuses single-mindedly on unfolding the nature of crime, together
with its causes and effects in the human soul. This makes it particularly relevant to the theme of this conference. However, Dostoevsky is not as interested in criminal justice as he is in the effects
of crime, first on the soul of the criminal, and finally, on the whole
human community. This doesn’t mean that he ignores justice. In
fact, the question of Raskolnikov’s debt to society occupies a large
part of the book, especially in the interrogation of Raskolnikov by
Porfiry Petrovitch, the investigating detective who suspects very
early in the book that Raskolnikov is the murderer, and in the conversations with Sonya, the prostitute who befriends Raskolnikov.
Considerations of justice are a dialectical moment in the unfolding
of crime, and not the highest moment. By “dialectical moment” I
mean that the claims of justice are gathered up and form part of the
transformation of the redeemed criminal. These dialectical moments
cannot be the highest moment of the transformation.
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Now, the claims of justice could be said to be satisfied when
the criminal is punished. But Dostoevsky is not interested in punishment as retribution. He thinks it is ineffective. He is interested
in punishment only in so far as the demand for it arises in the criminal himself, and results in his redemption. The highest moment
is when the criminal acknowledges his crime and asks for forgiveness from the whole human community. Thus, Dostoevsky’s treatment is “psychological,” if it is clear that by psychology one does
not mean a putative science of the soul, but an attempt to get to
know another human being. In his notebooks on Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky makes the extraordinary claim that it is the
crime itself that makes Raskolnikov a moral being. “His moral development begins from the crime itself; the possibility of such
questions arises which would not have existed previously.”1 It is
impossible in a short paper to do more than give a sketch of this
theme, and even this sketch will focus on only a few incidents.
Let me begin with Dostoevsky’s account of crime. The commission of a crime, for him, is a sign that the criminal has separated
himself from his fellow human beings. It is not the crime that separates the criminal, but some transformation in his soul which
causes him to focus his attention entirely on himself. Such transformations are hard to discern. Often, even those closest to the
criminal are puzzled about what is going on. Even the criminal
himself is not fully aware of what is moving him. He becomes surprised at his own behavior. I think this is Dostoevsky’s reason for
believing that ordinary punishment is useless in reforming the
criminal. Since the criminal has separated himself from society, he
feels that the power of society is arbitrary and that the freedom he
has given himself precisely by his separation from his fellows
makes retribution merely another act of violence equivalent to his
own. He both resents the power of society and despises it. Redemption cannot come from actions done to the criminal; it has to
arise in his own soul.
The whole novel takes place over the span of two weeks, and
the crime occurs at the end of Part I, about three days into the action. In the days leading up to the crime, Raskolnikov has stopped
going out. He has stopped seeing his friend Razhumikin, and has
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stopped communicating with his mother and sister. He has also
stopped tutoring students. He has no income. He hasn’t paid his
rent for a long time. He spends most of his time sleeping in his
room—a horrible garret. He eats only when Natashya, the caretaker, brings him something. He is withdrawing from the world.
On the very first page of the novel, the narrator says, “He was so
immersed in himself, and had isolated himself so much from everyone that he was afraid not only of meeting his landlady, but of meeting anyone at all.”2 Very soon, however, we are introduced to an
ambiguity in Raskolnikov. At the beginning of the second chapter
of Part I, we are told that he “was not used to crowds. . . . But now
something suddenly drew him to people.”3 This is the first indication of the doubleness in Raskolnikov’s soul. He separates himself
from others, but he cannot do it with his whole soul. Later we will
learn that it is this doubleness that makes redemption possible.
The sequence of events in Part I leading up to the murder is
very important to Dostoevsky’s dialectic, so I will take some time
going over them. On the first day, Raskolnikov wakes up, goes out,
and almost immediately visits the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna,
whom he is planning to murder. He pretends he wants to pawn
something. Dostoevsky carefully reveals to us Alyona’s poisonous,
grasping character. This visit is a rehearsal of the murder, so the
murder is committed twice in his soul. He assures himself of the
rightness of what he is planning by reminding himself of Alyona’s
wickedness. By this he shows the conventional side of his character, which he despises. He then decides that he wants to be with
people, and decides to go to the tavern. There he enters into conversation with Marmeladov, a civil servant and a drunkard who is
deliberately destroying his own life and his family’s life. Raskolnikov helps bring him home and meets his consumptive wife and
hungry children. Marmeladov is the father of Sonya, the fourteenyear-old prostitute with whom Raskolnikov falls in love. When he
departs, Raskolnikov leaves behind, without saying anything, most
of his money. The narrator makes it clear that Raskolnikov’s own
generosity at this moment is unintelligible to him. He returns home
and goes to sleep.
The next morning, he is given a letter from his mother that re-
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counts in great detail her numerous trials, including the decision
by his sister to marry someone despicable in order to escape
poverty. While reading the letter, the narrator tells us, his face was
wet with tears, but when he finishes, “it was pale, twisted convulsively, and a heavy bilious, spiteful smile wandered over his lips.”4
Raskolnikov returns to wandering around town, and he encounters a drunk girl whose disheveled clothing had clearly been
thrown on her by those who had made use of her before turning
her out on the street. She is being followed by a middle-aged, welldressed man whose intentions are obvious. Raskolnikov’s first impulse is to help her. He yells at the man, and calls to a nearby police
officer for assistance. He gives the officer some money for a taxi
to bring the girl home when they find where she lives. The narrator
then tells us, “At that moment it was as if something stung Raskolnikov, as if he had been turned about in an instant.” He immediately says to the police officer, “Forget it! What do you care? Leave
her alone. Let him have fun. . . . What is it to you?”5 Raskolnikov
now identifies with the presumed violator.
He then continues his frantic pilgrimage through St. Petersburg, and finally collapses in complete exhaustion under some
bushes, where he falls asleep. He dreams a terrible dream: He is a
boy walking with his father and they witness a peasant beating his
horse to death, accompanied by cheers from the crowd. He tries to
stop the peasant, but he cannot. He asks his father to explain, but
he only replies that it is none of their business. When Raskolnikov
wakes up, he exclaims, “Thank God it was only a dream!” followed almost immediately by “God! But can it be, can it be that I
will really take an axe and hit her on the head and smash her skull
. . . slip in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal, and tremble,
and hide, all covered with blood . . . with the axe . . . Lord, can it
be?”6 He has now identified himself not with the helpless witness
of the slaughter but with both the murderer and the victim, and he
is horrified. He continues walking and inadvertently discovers by
means of an overheard conversation that Alyona’s sister Lizaveta
will not be in their apartment at a certain time on the next day. He
takes this as a kind of presentiment, and the narrator tells us, “He
was not reasoning about anything, and was totally unable to reason;
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but suddenly felt with his whole being that he no longer had any
freedom either of mind or of will, and that everything had been
suddenly and finally decided.”7
On the next day, the third day, he kills Alyona with an ax. Unfortunately, Lizaveta comes home unexpectedly, and he has to kill
her too. He hurriedly and inexpertly steals some things and returns
to his apartment. He falls asleep again. He sleeps for a very long
time.
This is the account of Raskolnikov’s actions before, during,
and after the crime. The main thing I want to point out is Raskolnikov’s extraordinary ambivalence: he affirms the crime and yet is
horrified by it. He rejects human contact and yet seeks it. He weeps
for his mother and sister, yet he is filled with spite, and so on. He
cannot affirm anything in himself whole-heartedly.
Dostoevsky has structured the crime quite deliberately. In the
first place, he makes Alyona an unsympathetic victim. She is
greedy and selfish, and looks it. He does not want our confrontation
with the issue of crime to be sentimentalized by feelings of pity
for the victim. On the other hand, Lizaveta is a sympathetic character. We find that, although simple-minded, she is kind. In fact,
she is friendly with Sonya. Raskolnikov murders her purely for the
sake of concealment. So the disunity in Raskolnikov is mirrored
in the victims. Also, it is essential to the narrative that there is no
evidence against Raskolnikov. Through an improbable series of
circumstances, and in spite of his own blunders, Raskolnikov escapes undetected from a building filled with people, and manages
to hide what he stole before he is searched. Dostoevsky makes it
clear that all this is purely by chance, and even in spite of Raskolnikov doing things that could make it more likely that he would
be suspected. Dostoevsky has, in fact, constructed something like
a controlled experiment in which all variables except for the feelings and reactions of the criminal are controlled. If Raskolnikov is
to be found out, it would have to be by some action of his own.
We are ready now to consider the crime from Raskolnikov’s
point of view. He initially gives two reasons for the crime: first, he
needs the money to advance his career; second, he needs the money
to help his mother and sister. He understands both to be humani-
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tarian reasons. He is a very able man, and if he could advance his
career, he could do valuable work for mankind. He is a very able
man, and if he could advance his career, he could help his mother
and sister—and especially, he could prevent the unfortunate marriage of his sister, which she is clearly undertaking for financial
reasons. Contrasted with this is the fact that Alyona is a terrible
person, who not only has done nothing good for anyone but, in
fact, has done untold harm. Her death would be a blessing. Underlying these reasons is the idea that for the sake of humanity higher
human beings can transgress ordinary moral and civil laws. In fact,
Raskolnikov accepts the idea that great men do this all the time.
His recurrent example is Napoleon. In fact, Raskolnikov apparently
wrote an essay, which had been published, on this theme. Dostoevsky does not give his readers the opportunity to read it.
Up to this point in Raskolnikov’s internal dialectic, he considers himself a great man like Napoleon or Isaac Newton, a superior
person who needs to sacrifice ordinary conventions for some
higher good. But the conduct of the crime continually speaks
against this. The theft was botched because he didn’t take the time
to find the large cache of money in the apartment. He hides and
keeps the money and jewels he did manage to steal, ostensibly because it would be too dangerous to spend the money or sell the
jewels, but it is clear that its presence horrifies Raskolnikov because it reminds him of what he did. It becomes increasingly clear
that the reasons given for the crime do not come close to revealing
what is in his soul, or what he thinks is in his soul. This comes out
most decisively in what he says to Sonya during their second conversation:
“I tormented myself for so many days: would Napoleon
have gone ahead or not? It means I must already have
felt clearly that I was not Napoleon . . . . I endured all,
all the torment of this babble, Sonya, and I longed to
shake it all off my back: I wanted to kill without casuistry, Sonya, to kill for myself, for myself alone. I
didn’t want to lie about it even to myself! It was not to
help my mother that I killed—nonsense! I did not kill
so that, having acquired means and power, I could become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply
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killed—killed for myself alone—and whether I would
later become anyone’s benefactor, or would spend my
life like a spider, catching everyone in my web and
sucking the life-sap out of everyone, should at that moment have made no difference to me! . . . And it was
not the money above all that I wanted when I killed,
Sonya; not the money so much as something else. . . .
I know all this now. . . . Understand me: perhaps, continuing on that same path, I would never again repeat
that murder. There was something else I wanted to
know; something else was nudging my arm. I wanted
to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a
louse like all the rest, or a man? Would I be able to step
over or not! Would I dare to reach down and take, or not?
Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right—”
“To kill? The right to kill?” Sonya clasped her hands.8
105
What did Raskolnikov mean here when he says that he committed the crime entirely for himself?
The question of freedom was very important to Dostoevsky,
and especially the claim that the only way for a human being to affirm his freedom is through the commission of a crime for its own
sake. It is present in one way or another in all four of his major
works. Think, for example, of Nikolai Stavrogin in Demons. Dostoevsky takes this idea very seriously, and, in fact, affirms its truth
in some way. It is freedom that Raskolnikov is seeking, First, he is
seeking freedom from the bounds of social conventions, and also,
most importantly, from what he considers his own sentimental tendencies. This is why he has to separate himself off from other
human beings, why this separation is the source of crime. I do not
believe that Dostoevsky is saying that all criminals have motives
exactly like those of Raskolnikov, but I do think that some separation from mankind is at work in all criminals. Dostoevsky is particularly interested in exploring what happens when someone tries
to do this deliberately. After he commits the murder, Raskolnikov
is still torn, but now the stakes are much higher than before. Now
he has to see if he has the fortitude to affirm his crime, not as a
project, but as his deed. This affirmation would be the sign that
he was in fact a superior being, a free man, and not an ordinary
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criminal. But he discovers very quickly that he cannot affirm his
crime as he wishes. Sentimental regrets plague him. He becomes
ill, and experiences an almost overwhelming desire to confess. It
is this desire to confess which that exposes him to the interest of
the police. He now begins to feel regret for what he has done, but
this is not the regret the reader might expect. He does not regret
that he has done something wrong; he regrets that he cannot wholeheartedly affirm his crime. Of course, there is a part of him that
does regret the crime profoundly, that knows that he has done a
terrible thing; but it takes the the entire rest of the book for Raskolnikov to acknowledge that this other part is truly himself, and not
internalized convention. The doubleness we have seen in Raskolnikov’s behavior is now revealed as a doubleness within himself.
Through our own ambivalence, which is revealed to us as we read,
Dostoevsky shows us that this doubleness is not peculiar to Raskolnikov, but is true of us as well.
The novel proper ends with Raskolnikov’s confession, once to
Sonya, and once to the police. He has two conversations with
Sonya: the first is a rehearsal of his confession; the second is his
actual confession. This behavior mirrors the commission of the
murder. The confession to the police also has a doubleness about
it. He goes to the police station to confess, but at the last moment
runs out of the station. When he sees Sonya looking at him from
the street, he returns to the police station and confesses. The novel
ends with Raskolnikov’s confession, but the motive for it ambiguous. Is Raskolnikov finally filled with true remorse and the desire
for repentance, or is he confessing because he has failed to live up
to his own view of the murder and himself? Is he simply acknowledging his failure to affirm his crime? The novel inclines us to the
latter account, but it is hard to be sure.
In the Epilogue (which, by the way, does not appear at all in
Dostoevsky’s notebooks), we are told the Raskolnikov was sentenced to eight years hard labor in Siberia. Dostoevsky makes it
clear that both spirits in Raskolnikov are still at war during his imprisonment. The narrator tells us that Raskolnikov was suffering
not from remorse at the crime he committed, but from “wounded
pride” at the fact that he had to confess in order to find “some peace
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for himself.”9 But this was not repentance. “He did not repent of
his crime.”10 By the end of the Epilogue, however, he does repent.
How does this happen? I only have time here to give a bare sketch
of this transformation.
The first and most fundamental element of the change is his
love for Sonya. This love began almost from the moment he first
met her. This love was not intelligible to him. In fact, it annoys
him, and he tries to get rid of it, but it is clear, whether he likes it
or not, that she is what ties him to life itself. In Siberia, she becomes indispensible to him.
A second element in the change arises after an extraordinary
experience he undergoes while in Siberia. He discovers that all his
fellow prisoners, who have had much harder lives than he, love
life. “He looked at his fellow convicts and was amazed at how they,
too, all loved life, how they valued it! It precisely seemed to him
that in prison they loved and valued it even more, cherished it even
more than in freedom.”11 This experience, combined with his realization of the depth of Sonya’s love, brought about his transformation. Retributive punishment did nothing to heal his soul; but the
experience of living with dangerous, desperate men who nevertheless loved life made him whole again. This experience makes him
realize the meaning of the murders he committed: they were acts
against life itself, and thus against all human beings. In some
wholly mysterious way, this experience allows him to discover the
love of life in himself.
Let me end with a brief epilogue: a story of retribution and
penance related by my friend and colleague, Howard Zeiderman,
in an essay about the educational work he has been doing the last
fifteen years with prisoners at the maximum security prison in Jessup, Maryland. A group of prisoners were discussing a drawing as
a text:
The text was a drawing by Kathe Kolwitz, Prisoners
Listening to Music. The three prisoners depicted are
skeletal, with hollow eyes—and all seemingly gripped
by something. The session was not going very well and
I regretted trying to use a text that connected too
vividly with their situation. A number of the younger
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members were clearly repulsed by the drawing. When
I asked why a few who spoke often were silent, Larry
answered. “It’s scary looking at them. I don’t want that
to be me.” As he finished, another prisoner, Craig, a
man almost seventy years old who first served time
more than fifty years before, laughed. “You don’t understand nothing. They’re not dying. They’re gettin’
past their hungers. It’s the music that makes them
pure—like angels. Listen—when I was young down
south we had a chaplain. Every day he would play
music for us. Old music, beautiful. At first we couldn’t
listen to it. We never heard nothing like it. Sometimes
a song would last a long time, no words. But then we
started to love it. We would listen like in the picture,
and we’d remember things. And we’d cry. Sometimes
you could hear ten men cry. And sometimes the priest
would cry too. We were all together in it. But then he
retired and a new chaplain came. He was different. He
wanted us to see the doctors and counselors, the case
workers. They would ask us questions about ourselves
and make us go to classes, programs. They were working on us and the music ended. It was different. It was
them against us.” Correction, as Craig sensed, is entirely different from penance.12
NOTES
Fyodr Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1967), 64.
1
Fyodr Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), 3.
2
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 39.
5
Ibid., 49.
6
Ibid., 59.
7
Ibid., 62.
8
Ibid., 419
9
Ibid., 543.
3
4
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10
11
Ibid., 544.
Ibid., 545.
109
Howard Zeiderman, “Caged Explorers: The Hunger for Control,” The
St. John’s Review 53.2 (2012): 157.
12
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Justice in Plato’s Statesman
Eric Salem
Ordinary politicians love to talk about justice, and to go on—and
on—about all the just things they have done, are doing, or mean to
do in the future. We see it all the time—just turn on the television,
especially in an election year. But what about the genuine article,
the true politikos, the statesman who possesses genuine political
science and who practices or could practice the genuine political
art? What role does justice play in such a man’s thinking and doing
and speaking?
A selective glance at our tradition suggests that justice plays a
very large role indeed. Consider, for instance, our own founding
documents—certainly works of statesmanship of a very high order.
The Constitution bluntly proclaims in its preamble that one of its
purposes is to “establish justice.” And the Declaration declares,
among other things, that governments exist for the sake of justice—that “governments are instituted among men to secure” the
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Or consider the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s prolegomena to the Politics: his
treatment of justice is longer by far than his treatment of any other
virtue, and second in length only to his two-book treatment of
friendship—a topic that, for Aristotle, is itself deeply intertwined
with matters of justice and political life. Or to move a little closer
to our chosen topic, consider the Republic, Plato’s most famous
book about political affairs: all of Book I is devoted to justice, and
the inquiry into the goodness of justice that begins in Book II is
based on the assumption that an investigation of a well-constituted
city is bound to come across justice—because well-ordered cities,
like well-ordered souls, always contain it. In other words, all of
these texts suggest that a fairly deep connection exists between
politics and justice, and between thinking about justice and thinking about politics.
Suppose, then, we turn as novice readers to Plato’s Statesman,
which purports to be an inquiry into the nature of the statesman,
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the politikos, and the nature of his art or science, politikē. Given
the sketch we have just seen, we might expect the dialogue to contain a series of acute reflections on the relation between justice and
the true science of politics. We might even expect the Stranger
from Elea to take up again the question that Socrates had wanted
to pursue further at the end of Book I of the Republic, the “Socratic” question, “What is justice?” In fact we get nothing of the
sort. We get a strange, vast myth about the cosmos; we get an extended—some might say over-extended—account of weaving and
its attendant arts; we learn that men as herd-animals closely resemble pigs, on the one hand, and chickens, on the other. But we hear
next to nothing about justice.
To begin with, there is no extended discussion of justice in the
Statesman—no discussion of what it is or whether it’s good or bad
or anything else. As a matter of fact, justice-words, that is, words
cognate with Greek word for justice, turn up only about thirty times
in the entire dialogue. (In the Republic such words turn up more
than two hundred times in Book I alone.) What’s more, only about
half those appearances have the moral and political connotations
that we ordinarily associate with the word “justice.” In fact the
Greek word for justice, dikaiosunē, the word that is so central to
Socrates’s inquiry in the Republic and Aristotle’s inquiry in the
Ethics, does not appear in the Statesman at all. The word injustice
does turn up, once, but it refers, not to a tendency in citizens that
needs to be corrected, but to a disqualification for citizenship altogether. As for the remaining cases in the dialogue where justicewords are used with moral or political meaning, most are
disappointingly conventional, while the most interesting or promising phrases appear to come out of nowhere.
What are we to make of this peculiar state of affairs? Does
the relative rarity of justice-words in the dialogue point to a deep
divergence between the Stranger’s approach to politics and human
affairs and the approach of Socrates? Do considerations of justice
simply not play a major role in his thinking about politics? Do his
interests lie elsewhere? Or, on the contrary, is the Stranger’s thinking about politics shaped by a distinct conception of justice, but
one that leads him to employ the language of justice sparingly?
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In the end I want to suggest that the Stranger’s thinking about
politics is in fact profoundly shaped by a certain conception of justice—a peculiar one, to be sure, but perhaps no more peculiar than
the one Socrates lays out in the Republic, and perhaps not so very
different from it either. But I mean to approach this conclusion in
a rather roundabout way, by first considering seriously the possibility that the Stranger is just not very interested in justice and that
his lack of interest is reflected in his thinking about the science of
politics. My hope is that this indirect approach will force out into
the light what is distinctive about his understanding.
If the Stranger is not interested in justice, what is he interested
in? Almost any page of the Statesman—or the Sophist—gives us
the answer: the arts and sciences, including his own science or art
of division. In the Phaedrus, Socrates calls himself a lover of collections and divisions, and elsewhere in the dialogues he makes
constant use of analogies with the arts. But the Stranger goes much
further: he seems to see the whole human world as an interconnected array of always-multiplying arts, the sorting out of which
into their more or less natural divisions is one of the philosopher’s
prime tasks. Angling and sophistry, louse-catching and generalship,
doctoring and potion-making—all these arts and at least fifty more
make their appearance somewhere in the Sophist or Statesman.
The Stranger’s myth, his cosmic vision, helps us to understand
this remarkable proliferation of arts and the Stranger’s acute interest
in them. During the age of Saturn, we enjoyed a carefree life under
the care of the gods. With no regimes and no families, we lived on
the fruits that sprang spontaneously from trees and bushes, talked
with the animals, slept naked on the grass and woke up every
morning feeling just a little bit . . . younger. But that time is long
past. This is the age of Zeus. The world has grown harsh, the gods
have withdrawn, and we grow old. We have been left to our own
devices, and those devices, the first fruits of our new-age thinking,
are the arts. Men need food; the arts of agriculture and herding and
hunting (including the art of angling) must be developed. Men need
shelter from winter cold and summer sun, from the animals that no
longer like us and from . . . other men. The arts of wall-making and
house-building, shoe-making and armor-crafting, rug-making and
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wool-working must come on the scene. This list could go on: along
with needs arise desires. Every need or desire demands a new art,
and every new art demands a new sub-array of subordinate arts to
provide materials to be worked up and tools to work with.
Atop this dizzying array of arts is a kind of art of arts, an überart, if you will. For man the artisan is also man the herd animal,
and the human herd, like all herds, needs to be tended and managed. This art or science of herd management as applied to the
human herd is . . . statesmanship. Its task is neither simple nor easy.
It must rule over the other arts and sciences, deciding which ones
are to be learned and to what degree. To retain its purity of purpose,
it must keep itself separate from the arts most akin to itself, the arts
of persuasion and generalship and judging. Under certain circumstances it must engage in lawmaking. But its most difficult task
has to do with the noblest natures under its sway. Just as nature left
to itself, and permeated by the Other, seems to give rise to deception, and thus to sophistry (including the sophistry that masquerades as statesmanship), so too, human nature left to itself seems to
give rise to two distinct and opposed temperaments: courageous
natures and moderate natures. Left to themselves, these natures
tend to separate from each other and, in the end, degenerate into
self-destructive factions. To combat this most dangerous of threats,
the statesman must become a master weaver, a webmaster of the
spirit and of the body too; he must find ways to knit together the
lives of the city’s noblest natures. For only thus can the city become
and remain a self-bound, self-sufficient whole.
This would seem to be a good time to ask what place, if any,
justice has in this picture of politics and political life. The obvious
answer seems to be: a place that is important, but rather small and
decidedly subordinate. Human herd management would seem to
differ from other forms of herd management in this: all herding involves giving commands, but members of the human herd, especially in the age of Zeus, seem to need explicit commands or
prescriptions, explicit rules, to govern their communal life. These
rules, which allow men in cities to get along with one another, constitute justice. Now from the point of view of citizens, especially
artisan citizens going about their daily, commerce-driven lives,
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such rules—we call them laws—might seem to be the most important manifestation of the political art. But they are in fact only an
imperfect and secondary manifestation of that art, in part because
they are riddled with imprecision, and in part because, as we have
already seen, the first business and real work of the political art
lies in the weaving together of courage and moderation. It would
be a mistake, according to this account, to think of justice as a
virtue, just as it would be a mistake to think of justice as something
high, a criterion that the political art has to look up to as it goes
about its business. Justice is nothing high or deep or fancy; it is
nothing but the set of rules, invented by the statesman, that allow
us to lead reasonably decent lives in an unfriendly world.
Is this account of justice in the Statesman adequate? Does it,
as we say, do justice to the Stranger’s view of justice? There are
certainly a number of passages in the dialogue that lend credence
to it. For instance, at one point the Stranger makes it very clear that
the power of the judge is separate from, and sub-ordinate to, the
art of the statesman. Then he asks if the judge
has any power more far-reaching than, in matters
pertaining to contracts, that of discerning the
things ordained as both just and unjust by keeping
in sight whatever is laid down as lawful and which
it received from a law-giver king (305b).
It looks here as if justice is simply identical to the legal, as it
is defined by the law-giving king—that is, the statesman. This language of contracts also turns up a bit earlier, in the course of the
Stranger’s critique of law and its lack of precision, when he speaks
of those who “supervise the herds with respect to the just and their
contracts with each other” (294e). Once again justice seems to be
equated with the contractual obligations defined by the law—and
the baseness involved in dealing with matters of justice, its distance
from real statesmanly activity, is underscored by the re-introduction of the language of “herds.” The text of the Statesman also
lends support to the thought that justice is not a virtue: there is no
place in the dialogue where the Stranger states or even implies that
it is the statesman’s task to instill justice or anything resembling
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justice in the souls of his citizens. The closest we get is the suggestion very near the end of the dialogue that moderate natures
tend to be more just than courageous ones, but this does not seem
to be a matter of education, and in any case, “just” in this context
seems to mean “cautious and therefore inclined to follow the law.”
The meaning of “just” here is perfectly compatible with passages
that identify the just with the legal; it simply means “law-abiding.”
Are we to conclude, then, that justice has no meaning in the
Statesman other than a set of rules laid down by the statesman in
his law-making capacity, and then turned over to a subordinate
power? We might have to reach this conclusion were it not for a
handful of odd passages where the Stranger seems to be pointing
us in a different direction. Let me briefly go over three of them. In
the first, the Stranger argues that rulers in “the correct regime” can
do anything, including banishing and even killing inhabitants, “so
long as they make it better from worse and preserve it as far as
they’re able by using science and the just” (293d). In the second,
which comes just as he is beginning his critique of law, the Stranger
notes that law “could never, by having comprehended what’s most
excellent and most just, command what’s best” (294a-b). And in
the third, the Stranger claims that:
there is no error for thoughtful rulers, whatever
they do, so long as they guard one great thing, and,
by at all times distributing to those in the city
what’s most just with intellect and art, both are
able to preserve them and make better men from
worse as much as possible (297a-b).
These passages share several features in common. In all of
them, the just is linked to, and subordinated to, the good —either
the good of the citizens or the good of the city. In addition, the just
is paired with, or at least linked to, thought in some form—science
in the first passage, comprehension in the second, and intellect and
art in the third. Finally—and most important for the issue we are
considering—in all three passages the just in these passages simply cannot be identified with what is lawful or what is defined
by the law. In the first passage, the just seems to function as a
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criterion or standard at least co-equal with science; according to
the second, the just cannot be comprehended by law; and in the
third, the just arises directly from intellect and art, without the
mediation of law. Clearly then, justice or “the just” has more than
one meaning in the Statesman and in the Stranger’s mind. But exactly what does it mean in this second set of passages? For instance, what does it mean in the peculiar phrase “science and the
just”? We can’t look to the immediate context of the phrase for an
answer. In all three passages the language of justice seems to come
out of nowhere.
To answer this question we need to take a step back. I mentioned earlier that there are a number of places in the Statesman
where the language of justice is used with a meaning that is nonmoral and non-political. Let me add that, with one exception,
which I’ll get to later, every appearance of this language before the
“science and the just” passage falls into this category. Now in all
of these earlier appearances, “just” and “justly” have a specific
meaning and specific range: they are used to characterize speech
or thought; and they refer to correctness or precision or aptness of
thought or speech, as when we say, in English—as I did a little
while ago—that we want to do justice to someone’s thought or that
someone has gotten something “just right.” Now it is “precisely”
this meaning of justice that I think we must import, and are meant
to import, into the passages in question. The intellectual quality
that the Stranger prizes most in his own science of division—the
ability to divide well, to find a “part” that is also a “form” (262b263b)—is also the quality that defines or gives meaning to justice.
Thus when the Stranger says that rulers in the “correct regime”
must employ “science and the just,” “the just” is not being introduced here as an extraneous criterion that comes out of nowhere.
It rather refers to the exactness or precision of application that is
implicit in the very notion of science—in this case, the science of
statesmanship. Or again, when the Stranger faults the law for failing to comprehend what’s most excellent and most just, he is simply faulting the law’s characteristic lack of precision: because laws
are necessarily universal, they cannot help but miss what is best
here and now and must be inexact in their attainment of it. It should
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come as no surprise, then, that the Stranger keeps referring to the
“correct” or “most correct regime” where we would probably say
“best regime”—the best regime is, for him, “precisely” the regime
in which precision or correctness is the ruling principle.
There is another way to formulate this thought in the language
of the dialogue. At the very center of the Statesman there is an extended discussion of the art of measurement, and at the very center
of that discussion, the Stranger introduces, without much explanation, the phrase “the precise itself.” Why? It turns out that the very
existence of statesmanship—in fact the very existence of all the arts
that generate something—rests on the existence of something called
due measure. All the arts aim to achieve or produce some good.
Sometimes they miss the mark: they fall short of or exceed their
aims. But when they bring about the goods they aim at, they attain
what the Stranger calls “due measure.” At such moments, when
they get things just right, when they arrive at due measure, the precise itself is present. But what holds for the other arts holds for
statesmanship as well. Whenever the statesman, aiming at the
preservation or improvement of his city or its citizens, brings about
this good, he attains due measure, and in attaining due measure,
he participates in the precise itself. But if I am right in thinking
that, in at least a select number of passages in the dialogue, the just
coincides with what is correct or precise, then at such a moment
the statesman can also be said to have achieved justice. To achieve
the good is to achieve justice.
This brings me to my final point. I want to bring what I have
just said to bear on the most important activity of statesmanship:
the weaving together of courage and moderation. I mentioned a little while ago that there is one passage early on in the dialogue
where the language of justice is not used to refer to precision of
thought. It occurs in the myth. Interestingly enough, precision is
also mentioned but here refers to precision in the movement of the
cosmos. The claim is that when the cosmos is first allowed to move
on its own, it moves with precision, but over time, because of the
bodily aspect of the cosmos, it gradually winds down. Everything
beautiful in the cosmos comes from its composer, while everything
“harsh and unjust” has its source in this “fellow nursling of
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primeval nature” (273b-d). Of course this is a myth and we have
to be careful about what we extract from it. Still, I cannot help but
think that the Stranger is here positing something like a primal
principle of disorder, a principle that is always at war with beauty,
with precision of movement, with the very notion of a cosmos, that
is, an ordered whole. That he associates this principle with harshness and injustice suggests that this principle is at work in the
human world as well: the city is an attempt to found something
like a human cosmos in the face of primal disorder, primal imprecision, primal injustice. The ordinary arts that ground ordinary life
within cities are one aspect of this cosmos-formation. Each is an
attempt to bring forth due measure within some specific context;
each is an attempt to wrestle with its material’s resistance to being
given proper form. But the greatest of such attempts is the effort
of the statesman to bring forth due measure in and through his
weaving together of courage and moderation. Justice in the primary
sense, then, is not to be found in law-making or judging in accordance with law. Nor is it to be found in the accomplishing of this
or that good thing for the city. It is found right here, in the overcoming of primal injustice, primal resistance to having a city at all.
We might think of it this way: In the Sophist, the Stranger suggests
that being is not rest, or motion, or some third thing. He suggests
instead that being is the belonging together of rest and motion. But
within the sphere of politics, courage corresponds to motion and
rest to moderation. Where, then, and what is justice? It is not something present in the soul of the courageous man, nor something
present in the soul of the moderate man. Nor is it some third thing
hovering over the two. Instead, justice in the primary sense is present whenever the statesman, by thinking precisely and achieving
due measure, keeps the primal dyad from falling asunder; it is there
both in and as the belonging together, the being woven together,
of courage and moderation.
�REVIEWS
Getting to Know Kierkegaard Better
119
A Review of Richard McCombs’s The Paradoxical
Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013. 244 pages, $36.00.
James Carey
On first looking into Kierkegaard, the student who has already read
around in the history of philosophy or has limited his studies primarily to twentieth century philosophy, whether analytic or “continental,” is likely to find himself puzzled at several levels. He may
have heard that Kierkegaard is both a Christian and an existentialist, even a founder of existentialism, and he might be interested to
find out how one man can be both of these things at once. Or,
doubting that one man could be both these things at once without
being confused, he might be inclined to shrug him off. But then he
may also have heard that Heidegger was profoundly influenced by
Kierkegaard and that Wittgenstein declared him to be a “saint.” So
he sets out to get a better sense of who Kierke-gaard is and what
he is aiming at. After reading the first few pages of, say, Fear and
Trembling, he comes quickly to recognize that he is in the presence
of an original and incisive thinker. But he also encounters obscure
arguments and formulations that seem more colorful than illuminating. And sooner or later he runs up against assertions about the
relation of Socrates to Christianity that seem naïve at best, perverse
at worse. He begins to suspect that Kierkegaard, for all his undeniable brilliance, is in full control of neither his intellect nor his
imagination. After reading a relatively accessible book such as
Philosophical Fragments he might turn to Concluding Unscientific
Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (the latter book four times
the length of what it is advertised as a “postscript” to) in hopes of
finding a resolution to some of the perplexities in which the former
James Carey is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa Fe,
New Mexico.
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work left him. Instead, he finds himself by turns beguiled and exasperated by an art of writing that is both concentrated and ironic.
He is not sure whether he is being led towards the truth or being
manipulated. And if he has not done so sooner, he begins to wonder
exactly what Kierkegaard intends by presenting some of his books,
but then not all them, under pseudonyms, and in particular why one
book is presented as written by Climacus and another by anti-Climacus. Can all Kierkegaard’s books be understood as expressing
his own thoughts? Can any of them be understood as expressing
his own thoughts? Not knowing how to find an answer to these
and related questions, the student may decide at this point to postpone engaging with the full sweep of Kierkegaard’s project until
later on, more or less indefinitely later on.
Needless to say, not all who have struggled with Kierke-gaard
at some stage of their studies fit the above profile. But some—I
suspect quite a few—do fit it. After reading through one or two of
Kierkegaard’s books and probing around in a few others, they will
profit immensely by stepping back from his oeuvre and reading
Richard McCombs’s The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. Those who have read a larger number of Kierkegaard’s
books will profit immensely as well. I for one can say that there is
a not a single question I have asked myself about Kierkegaard over
the years that McCombs’s carefully argued and beautifully written
book does not answer, clearly, comprehensively, and convincingly.
The title of McCombs’s book expresses his general intention,
which is to show that Kierkegaard is a rational thinker and that he
employs paradox in the service of reason. What Kierkegaard calls
“subjectivity” McCombs calls “paradoxical rationality.” The
provocative conclusion of McCombs’s study is that paradoxical
rationality reaches its perfection not in knowledge, either theoretical or practical, but in faith. In this review I will highlight only a
few of the observations that McCombs makes en route to this conclusion.
In Chapter 1, McCombs considers evidence in favor of the
view the Kierkegaard is an irrationalist and then evidence in favor
of the view that he is a rationalist. He argues, persuasively, that the
preponderance of evidence is in favor of the latter view. When
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Kierkegaard directly or through one of his pseudonymous authors
affirms what he calls a contradiction, he means not a flat-our logical absurdity but rather “a tension or an unresolved opposition”
(13).1 And, as Kierkegaard sees it, “when the believer has faith,
the absurd is not absurd—faith transforms it” (22). Kierkegaard’s
Climacus calls the Incarnation a contradiction. But, as McCombs
points out, to show that such a thing is an irresolvable logical contradiction “one would need a thorough understanding of the
essence of God and of temporal, finite human existence” (13).
Kierkegaard is aware that this understanding is not at our disposal.
The appearance of irrationality is only feigned by Kierkegaard. It
is a pretense in the service of a pedagogical aim. “The human
model for Kierkegaard’s incognito of irrationalism is Socrates. If
Socrates ironically feigned ignorance in the service of knowledge,
Kierkegaard ‘goes further’ and ironically feigns irrationality in the
service of reason” (2). He “creates Climacus specifically to address
and appeal to philosophical readers . . . in order to find such readers
‘where they are’ and to lead them to subjectivity” (5). Where philosophical readers “are” is not simply in their thinking but in their
existing. There is, it should go without saying, more to existing
than thinking.
Near the conclusion of this chapter, McCombs offers a perceptive analysis of the limitations of Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling. This author attempts to
show to philosophical readers who regard faith as a demotic substitute for knowledge, or as a station that gets aufgehoben on the
way to absolute knowing, that genuine faith, as exemplified by
Abraham, is in fact rare, awesome in the exact sense of the word,
and more difficult to achieve than any knowledge we humans can
attain or pretend to. But Kierkegaard also subtly leads his readers
to see that Johannes de Silentio can, or rather will, only admire
faith. He will not attempt it. Faith is a task—a task that Silentio
evades (24). Faith is, moreover, not merely a task but “a difficult,
dangerous, strenuous, and painful duty, and human beings will do
virtually anything to evade such a duty” (30). In Fear and Trembling, “Kierkegaard first tries to get readers to admire the greatness
of faith, and then breaks the distressing news to them that the faith
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that they admire is an absolute duty.” Kierkegaard has “constructed
Fear and Trembling so ingeniously that interpretation of it unexpectedly and disconcertingly turns into self-examination” (31).
In Chapter 2, McCombs argues that subjectivity or paradoxical
rationality is, like all rationality, consistency. It is consistency not
just of thought, however, but of the whole person. “To be subjective means consistently to relate oneself, the subject of thinking,
to what one thinks. It is to think about life and action, most of all
about one’s own life and action, and to strive to feel, will, and act
consistently with one’s thoughts” (35). Not everyone who prides
himself on the consistency of his thinking aims at this more comprehensive consistency. For example, a person who holds in his
thinking that everything is determined—whether by the will of
God, physical mechanism, or the apparent good—and that the future is thereby fixed, nonetheless deliberates and acts, as all human
beings must, on the assumption that the future is not fixed and that
how it turns out depends in some measure on one’s choices. Such
a person is not wholly rational no matter how impressively his theory holds together qua theory merely.2 His speculative thinking,
however consistent it may be in itself, is inconsistent with his practical thinking. Kierkegaard’s subjectivity is not so much the opposite of objectivity, an inner and private domain as distinct from an
outer and public one, as it is the whole of rationality. Subjectivity
comprehends objectivity as a part, assigning it its altogether legitimate, though limited, role within a properly integrated life of reason. Subjectivity, for Kierkegaard, is integrity.
It is “Kierkegaard’s belief that thinking is unavoidably interested.”(37). Objective thinkers frequently claim to be disinterested.
But they are wrong. For objectivity is not without an interest: speculative reason (which could be called, somewhat misleadingly, objective reason) is interested in the true, just as practical reason
(which could be called, also somewhat misleadingly, subjective
reason) is interested in the good. Pursuit of the true and pursuit of
the good are two pursuits of one and the same reason.3 As McCombs later points out, interest derives from interesse, literally,
“to be in between” (155). Human reason is in between the temporal
and the eternal. It moves teleologically from the temporal toward
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the eternal, as it moves teleologically from the conditioned toward
the unconditioned and from the finite toward the infinite.
Subjective thinkers have a better appreciation of the wholeness
of reason, its teleological orientation toward both truth and goodness, than do objective thinkers. Kierkegaard suspects that many
who take pride in their commitment to objectivity use the search
for knowledge “as a way to delay or to evade ethical action” (45).
He also thinks that, “because the human will is free, the rationality
of human beings—his own included—is always precarious” (75).
This is true of speculative reason no of less than of practical reason.
McCombs speaks of the “shaky foundations” of logic and its “liability to perversion” (60). In my view, logic per se—certainly its
indemonstrable but self-evident first principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction—is sound.4 But logical principles and
rules of inference, unimpeachable in themselves, can be used to
deduce questionable conclusions from questionable premises. In
that way logic can assist one in rationalizing the satisfaction of certain desires that, unlike the desire for integrity in thought and action, are not intrinsic to reason and are often at odds with the telē
of reason. “When these desires are threatened by the strenuous requirements of ethics, they fight back with astonishing cunning and
sagacity, by co-opting the powers of logic for specious reasoning
and self-deception” (60). And So McCombs rightly recommends
“rectifying [not logic itself but] one’s use of logic” (65).
In Chapter 3, McCombs distinguishes between traditional negative theology, which he understands to be primarily theoretical,
and the negative theology of Climacus, which he understands to
be primarily practical. “Climacus thinks that if anything has priority in salvation it is or would be love and not knowledge” (87).5
This chapter contains helpful accounts of the Kierkegaardian conceptions of resignation and guilt-consciousness, and of
Kierkegaard’s arresting formulation that “to need God is a human
being’s highest perfection” (88-89; on resignation see also 106).
Of course, from the perspective of Christianity all human beings
need God. The perfection of humanity consists then not in the need,
simply, but in the recognition of the need and the follow-through
on what it ultimately entails: “reverence, awe, adoration, worship,
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or as Johannes de Silentio calls it, ‘fear and trembling’” (88-89).
We naturally desire perfect happiness; but for Kierkegaard perfect
happiness is “the good that is attained by absolutely venturing
everything” (95), for it is “essentially uncertain” (98). McCombs
concludes this chapter with a reflection on how Kierkegaard understands the relation between the good and one’s own good. There
is no “tension” between them: “one most truly loves the good by
loving one’s own good in the right way” (99).6
In Chapter 4, McCombs shows what Kierkegaard means by
simplicity. It is “translating one’s understanding . . . immediately
into action” (101). Just as McCombs discloses limitations, which
Kierkegaard intends his readers to recognize, in Johannes de Silentio’s admiration, absent imitation, of faith, so he discloses limitations in Climacus’s conception of “hidden inwardness.” Climacus
recognizes that there is something wrong with flaunting one’s efforts at becoming a Christian. But, McCombs notes, “going out of
one’s way to look ‘just like everyone else’” while “being very different from most people in one’s heart” can stand in the way of
“witnessing the truth and thus risking suffering and persecution”
(112; cf. 117-118; 124). In Chapter 5, McCombs continues the critique of Climacus he initiated in Chapter 4, with the focus now on
the limitations of indirect communication and its need to be complemented by direct communication. By expressing himself so
obliquely and paradoxically, Climacus runs the risk of detaining
the reader in the process of interpretation so that he fails to undertake the practical tasks that it is Climacus’s main intention to urge
him toward. McCombs intends this chapter as a criticism of Climacus, not necessarily of Kierkegaard. But because “Kierkegaard
never explicitly addresses some of the vices or weaknesses of indirect communication” (115), McCombs concedes that perhaps
Kierkegaard “is not adequately aware of its pitfalls and shortcomings” (117). As the chapter progresses, criticisms of Kierkegaard
himself come to replace criticisms of his pseudonymous author.
Though Kierkegaard recognizes that his position is one of faith and
not knowledge, his employment of indirect communication does
not allow much room for serious confrontation with thoughtful criticisms of Christianity. McCombs goes so far as to express a con-
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cern that if Kierkegaard not only does not know where the full truth
about Christianity lies—and no believer can claim to know—but
is actually wrong about where the full truth lies, he “bears responsibility for risking the ruination of many lives” (131). More direct,
and less indirect, communication would go a long way toward reducing this risk. It would leave the reader greater freedom to make
a responsible decision for or against faith, being more cognizant
of both the case for and the case against, in light of the very little
that we humans are actually capable of knowing beyond the
shadow of a doubt.
In the first five chapters of his book McCombs occasionally
speaks to some of the initially mystifying albeit intriguing things
that Kierkegaard says about Socrates. In Chapter 6 and 7, and also
in part of Chapter 8, he treats Kierkegaard’s interpretation of “the
figure of Socrates” thematically. McCombs makes, I think, as wellinformed and cogent a case as can be made for the coherence of
Kierkegaard’s understanding of Socrates.
In Chapter 6, McCombs shows how and why Kierkegaard
presents Socrates as embodying “climacean capacity,” which is the
capacity “to be a climber over boundaries and a transgressor of
limits” (134).7 “[T]he climacean capacity is a power of synthesizing an eternal, infinite, universal, and absolute ideal with or in the
temporal, finite, particular, and relative aspects of oneself and one’s
everyday life, which is to say that the climacean capacity is a capacity for subjectivity” (154). “Human beings seem to be finite,
temporal, particular, and conditioned animals. And yet they also
seem to be able to conceive, however inadequately, the infinite,
the eternal, and the unconditioned.” (157).8 As Kierkegaard sees
it, “Socratic ignorance is an essential component of faith and Christianity” (135). According to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the Philosophical Fragments misrepresents Socrates “as an
objective thinker, whereas he was really a subjective thinker”
(139). Climacus recognizes that “if one could not discover one’s
incapacity before God, then neither could one exist as a being who
attempts to live in time according to an eternal ideal” (147). “[T]he
god is ‘present just as soon as the uncertainty of everything is
thought infinitely’” (151).
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Whereas in Chapter 6 McCombs focuses on Kierke-gaard’s
understanding of Socrates’s ascent, in Chapter 7 he focuses on
Kierkegaard’s understanding of Socrates’s downfall. Kierkegaard
finds this downfall expressed in a striking passage from the Phaedrus. There Socrates confesses that he does not know himself.9
And so he investigates himself rather than other things in order to
find out whether he happens to be a monster (thērion) more multiply-twisted and lustful (epitethymenon) than Typhon or a gentler
and simpler animal having by nature a share in a certain divine and
non-arrogant (atyphon) allotment.10 As Kierkegaard interprets this
passage from the Phaedrus, “‘he who believed that he knew himself’ becomes so perplexed that he cannot decide between utterly
opposite self-interpretations.” This is the “downfall of the understanding.” Kierkegaard, through Climacus, suggests that Socrates
actually willed this downfall (162-163).
On first hearing, this suggestion sounds like Kierkegaardian
hyperbole. But, if the will is the appetite of reason,11 then human
reason is naturally propelled by its own appetite toward truth, including, paradoxically, the truth that human reason is not capable
of answering all the questions it naturally proposes to itself.12 In
the case at hand, Socrates’s will propels his reason toward selfknowledge; but the knowledge he attains is that he does not have
complete self-knowledge. It is in this way that Socrates wills the
downfall of his understanding. The will moves reason to the discovery and acknowledgment of its natural limits. This is not a merely
negative development, however. For “to will the downfall of reason
is to transform and perfect reason” (163). As McCombs writes in
an earlier chapter, “[T]he power of reason comes to light in the act
of becoming aware of its weakness” (69).
This transformation and perfection is not of theoretical reason
alone, but of practical reason as well (cf. 211).13 The standard interpretation of the downfall of reason is that it results in “an openness or receptivity to a divine revelation of truths that exceed the
capacity of natural reason” (164). McCombs thinks that this interpretation is correct as far as it goes. But he thinks that it does not
go far enough, for it places stress only on the theoretical consequences of the downfall. As McCombs argues, it has practical con-
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sequences as well. “The thing that falls in the downfall of the understanding is the whole human capacity to achieve the highest
human end—an eternal happiness, which includes not only joy, but
wisdom and goodness as well. Consequently, the downfall is a disavowal of the pretentions that one can become good, wise, and joyful on one’s own, a rejection of the determination to rely only on
oneself in striving for one’s highest end” (165).
The disavowal of these pretensions results indeed in an openness to revelation. According to Christianity, there is a revelation
of truths regarding action: how to become truly good through repentance, on the one hand, and through cultivating love of God
and neighbor, on the other. And there is a revelation of truths regarding being as well: that God is a Trinity of persons, without the
slightest compromise to his unity but as its perfection through the
unqualified love that unites the three persons, and that one of these
persons became incarnate in order to save us from sin and call us
toward fuller and fuller participation, through love, in the divine
nature.14 “[O]ne accepts revelation not in order to become a better
philosopher but in order to become a better person” (165).
It should be noted that Socrates’s qualification in the Phaedrus
that he does not “yet” know himself implies that he has not simply
given up on the possibility of attaining complete self-knowledge.15
Furthermore, any openness to revelation that he might have arrived
at is, in the absence of actual revelation, an openness only to the
possibility of revelation.16 But until and unless Socrates does attain
complete self-knowledge, he cannot definitively know whether all
so-called choice is merely a case of being determined by the apparent good, more precisely by the apparent best;17 or whether, instead, man is capable of radically free choice and
self-determination, including the abuse of radically free choice and
self-determination that is sin. The crucial issue, then, is whether
Socrates has any inkling of sin. Though “Climacus claims that neither Socrates nor anyone else can be aware of sin without revelation” he nonetheless “portrays Socrates as suspecting his sinful
condition” and “as suspecting that he is misrelated to the divine
owing to Typhonic arrogance” (167-168; cf. 175). Plato surely expects the reader of the Phaedrus to remember that Typhon was, as
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McCombs says, “an arrogant, violent, and defiant enemy of the
gods.” Moreover, with his hundred heads, he was “presumably not
even friendly to himself” (167). A monster like Typhon cannot be
happy.
We noted earlier that the interest of reason lies in its being between the temporal and the eternal, and that it moves teleologically
from the temporal toward the eternal. According to Kierkegaard, it
cannot reach its ultimate telos without supernatural assistance. This
assistance becomes available only when the eternal, at its own initiative, becomes temporal “in the fullness of time.” In what Christians
believe to be the historical event of the Incarnation, a synthesis of
the eternal and the temporal is achieved in deed and not just in
thought. The Incarnation is for Kierkegaard the paradox (146); it is
the absolute paradox (219).
Assuming both (1) that neither complete self-knowledge nor
complete knowledge of the whole and its ground is humanly possible, and (2) that one has heard the Gospel of Christ, Kierkegaard
thinks that only two responses to what one has heard are possible:
faith, which is not knowledge,18 and offense, which is not doubt. Offense is “a delusion of rational autonomy”—deluded because human
reason has limits and thus is not “self-sufficient.” Offense is “unhappy self-assertion”—unhappy because one asserts oneself on the
basis of what one knows, deep down, is insufficient knowledge of
oneself. In the human being there are “two elements in tension with
one another: a desire for happiness and a desire for autonomy or selfsufficiency.” These elements are incompatible, and “one or the other
of them must fall. Faith . . . is the downfall of the desire for self-assertion, while offense is the downfall of the desire for happiness”
(176-177).
In Chapter 8, McCombs further explores the consequences of
Kierkegaard’s conviction that there are no “public demonstrations of
the answers to certain crucial questions: Is there a personal God who
created and maintains the world? Does a human being have an immortal soul? Is there a best life for human beings?” (184) If by “public demonstrations” Kierkegaard means rationally accessible
demonstrations, it can be countered that there are such demonstrations, pro and contra, on these and related matters, particularly in
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medieval theology and in the reaction of modern philosophy against
medieval theology. There has indeed never been universal acceptance
of either theological or anti-theological arguments. But then there
has also never been universal acceptance, not even by the greatest
minds, of many philosophical arguments, such as, for example, the
divergent arguments regarding the scope of human knowledge (think
of Hume and Hegel), the relation of acts of thought to the objects of
thought (think of Plato and Husserl), the relationship between the
good and the pleasant (think of Kant and Mill), and the authority of
reason (think of Aristotle and Heidegger). It is likely that there is no
“public demonstration” on these matters because the public is insufficiently perceptive to follow the arguments. In considering a disagreement between great philosophers, say, the disagreement
between Locke and Leibniz on how much our knowledge arises from
the senses, one has to consider the possibility that one of the two
thinkers penetrated closer to the root of the matter than did the other.
It seems improbable that there will ever be universal acceptance of
most philosophical and theological demonstrations. But that does not
mean that these demonstrations are not rationally accessible.
That theological and philosophical demonstrations are so controverted might not be due solely to different capacities for clear
thinking. McCombs highlights Kierkegaard’s conviction that character cannot be easily separated from the quest for knowledge.
“[D]esires, fears, emotions, actions, and habits have an influence
on what and how a person thinks, or on what a person can see,
understand, know, or become aware of. In other words, some desires, habits, emotions, and actions are conducive to truth, and
some are inimical to it” (192). McCombs illustrates this claim by
referring to the limitations of Meno and Ivan Karamazov. “[T]he
deep thinker must be a spiritual knight with the strength and
courage to think terrible thoughts that others cannot endure to
think” (193). One terrible thought, of course, is that, even if there
is a first cause or ground of our finite existence, it takes no interest
in us and how we live our lives. But an equally terrible thought is
that we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we know this
to be true when we do not, and cannot, know any such thing. Both
terrible thoughts have to be explored.
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McCombs writes, “It is hard to believe that a person who
often lies to himself about his own actions and qualities, about the
actions and qualities of other people, and about his social and personal relations to other people will be honest when he tries to answer the most important philosophical questions” (194; cf. 65).
The examined life does not consist exclusively, or even primarily,
in the reading and discussion of philosophical texts. Most of all it
requires ongoing self-examination, including especially the examination of conscience that is needed to check the self-deception
that is at the root of sin, including the sin of vanity, especially intellectual vanity (cf. 215). McCombs recognizes that not all intellectual endeavors are equally compromised by corrupt character.
Corrupt character has little effect on “cognition of scientific, mathematical, and linguistic truths.” But corrupt character can pervert
“cognition of human nature and the best life for human beings”
(202). Anyone who is attempting to live a wholly rational life,
whether he is a believer or a nonbeliever, stands under an obligation of ongoing and unrelenting self-scrutiny.
On Kierkegaard’s understanding of the close connection between theory and practice, McCombs writes, “Seeing for oneself
requires acting for oneself…by one’s own self-activity, at one’s
own risk, and on one’s own responsibility. In short, autopsy requires autopraxy” (198). One gains humility, and thereby overcomes doubt through “the bitter method of trying to imitate Christ
and failing” (215). Humility is notoriously misunderstood, and
caricatured as well. McCombs corrects the common misunderstanding: “a meek and beaten-down milksop does not have the audacity to believe. . . . Honestly admitting one’s utter weakness
before God takes the greatest human strength. . . . [O]nly heroes
of the spirit have the audacity to believe . . . what pride cannot
tolerate and therefore willfully ignores: namely, a supreme being
to whom humans ought utterly to subordinate themselves” (215).
In humility, self-transcendence overcomes irrational egoism and
self-importance.
Kierkegaard’s project, like Pascal’s and Dostoyevsky’s, is obviously based on the assumption that the existence of the Biblical
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God cannot be definitively disproven. But some philosophers have
advanced arguments, not subjective but objective arguments,
aimed at definitively disproving the existence of God, especially
as one who freely reveals himself. So a non-Kierkegaardian, but
not anti-Kierkegaardian, task remains for the theologian. First to
examine these arguments dispassionately to assess their cogency;
and then, if they are found to be less than absolutely compelling,
to expose their limitations. For if a man thinks—let us assume,
thinks altogether innocently—that the concept of Christ as true
God and true man, both together, is a logical contradiction, then
exhorting him to imitate Christ is pointless. There is still a lot left
for the theologian to do at the level of objectivity.
McCombs ends his book by raising a question that some readers will have already asked themselves: has Kierkegaard merely
conscripted Socrates into his project? McCombs answers in the
negative. “[T]here are many passages in Plato’s dialogues in
which Socrates professes ignorance, self-blame, suspicions of his
own monstrosity, repentance, and in which he warns against a
self-justifying egoism that undermines truth and justice. Together
these passages seem to constitute a solid basis for a responsible
interpretation of Socrates as a thinker who willed the downfall of
his own understanding because he suspected something very like
sin” (218). McCombs supports this answer with references to the
telling texts. One might object that he has cherry picked the passages that support the Kierkegaardian interpretation of Socrates.
But all interpretations of Plato that aim at taking the dialogic form
of his teaching seriously have to come to terms with everything
that is said and happens in the dialogues, including occasional observations of Socrates’s that do not fit with preconceived notions
of what Platonism is supposed to be. The passages that McCombs
cites in support of Kierkegaard’s Socrates are not more salutary
and comforting than passages one might cite in support of someone else’s Socrates. On the contrary, they are among the most startling and disconcerting passages to be found in the entire Platonic
corpus. It is the singular, though by no means the sole, merit of
McCombs’s study that it forces many of us, just when we thought
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that we, with the assistance of our teachers and our friends, might
have finally gotten a relatively firm grasp of what Socrates is up
to, to take a fresh look at the enigmatic figure through whom Plato
presents his teaching.
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise noted, numbers in parentheses after quotations refer
to the pagination of The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard,
even where the sentence quoted is Kierkegaard’s and not McCombs’s.
2. Determinism cannot be known, definitively and beyond the shadow of
a doubt, to be true. As David Hume has shown, the proposition, “Every
event has a cause,” is not an analytic judgment. It follows a fortiori that
the proposition, “Every event has a cause outside itself,” which is the thesis of determinism, is not an analytic judgment. It can be denied without
contradiction. The thesis of determinism is not self-evident; and any attempt to demonstrate it begs the question.
3. This is also the view of thinkers as different as Thomas Aquinas and
Kant.
4. Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 71b20-35; 72a26-31; 72b19-2;
90b19-100b18; Metaphysics 1005b6-1006a10; 1011a7-13.
5. Kierkegaard seems here to be close to Gregory of Nyssa, who understands the supernatural end of man to consist not simply in a reposeful
intellectual vision of God, but in infinite and yet unimpeded progress,
progress in love especially. Gregory interprets the claim that we are called
to become partakers of the divine nature (koinōnoi theias physeōs—2
Peter 1: 3-4) to imply theosis, i.e., becoming more and more like God.
This goal, perfect love, can be infinitely approached by man, starting even
in this life, but never attained once and for all, even in the next life. Perhaps surprisingly, Kant similarly understands immortality of the soul to
consist in infinite progress. See Critique of Practical Reason Part 2, Bk.
2, Ch. 2, iv.
6. McCombs draws attention (199) to a remarkable statement made by
the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws: “Truly the cause of all errors
(aition . . . tōn pantōn hamartēmatōn) is in every case excessive friendship for oneself ” (731e3-5). If Plato is expressing his own thought here,
it is not easy to see how he could have held, as some seem to think he
held, that the good is essentially one’s own good, understood narrowly
as one’s own sweet pleasure.
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7. As McCombs notes (173), it is likely that Kierkegaard selected the
pseudonym “Johannes Climacus” (Greek, Iōannēs tēs klimakos, literally,
“John of the Ladder,” the name given to a twelfth century Christian monk
and saint, who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent) with an eye on the
“ladder of love” described in the Symposium.
8. Whatever share irrational animals have in the eternal, there is no reason
to think that they conceive of the eternal, much less concern themselves
about it.
9. Phaedrus 229e8.
10. Ibid., 229a3-a8. McCombs notes that the name Typhon can be translated “puffed up” (167). On the difficulty of complete self-knowledge,
consider the qualifier eis dynamin at Philebus 63c3.
11. Aristotle, De Anima 432b5-8 and 433a8-31; Thomas Aquinas Super
Sent., lib. 2 d. 30 q. 1 art. 3, ad 4. Summa Theologiae 1-2 q. 6, introd.; q.
8 art. 1, co.; q. 56 art. 5, ad 1; ibid., 3 q. 19 art. 2, co.; Kant, Critique of
Practical Reason, Book 1, Ch. 1, Theorem 3, Remark 1.
12. See the first sentence of the “First Preface” of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason.
13. Here Kierkegaard parts ways with Kant. Consider the qualification
in the sentence cited in the previous note: “in one [!] species of its cognition.”
14. Cf. note 5 above.
15. See pō at 229e8 and eti at 230a1.
16. An inability to refute, and hence a consequent openness to, even the
bare possibility of revelation would situate the philosopher qua philosopher in an untenable position, at least according to Leo Strauss: Natural
Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953). 75.
Cf. “Reason and Revelation” (appended to Heinrich Meier’s study, Leo
Strauss and the Theological-Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006] 150, 176-177; “Progress or
Return” (in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity,
ed. Kenneth Hart Green [Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997], 117, 131. On this crucial point, however much they otherwise differ, Strauss and Kierkegaard are in essential agreement: opposition to
faith cannot consistently be based on an act of faith, or on anything resembling faith.
17. Gorgias 466e2; Meno 77d8-e3.
18. John 20:29.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Plato’s Political Polyphony
A Book Review of Plato: Statesman. Translated by
Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2012. vii + 166 pp.
$10.95.
Gregory Recco
Continuing the work begun in their previous two translations of
Plato,* Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem have now
translated Plato’s Statesman. In addition to the translation, the volume includes an introduction, a glossary, an interpretive essay, and
two appendices. The introduction situates the dialogue in the context of Plato’s works, both dramatically and conceptually, announcing its main themes and connecting it with other
works—particularly its immediate dramatic predecessor, the
Sophist, and its thematic siblings, the Republic and the Laws. The
translation contains footnotes that provide pertinent literary or cultural background, references to other dialogues, and pointers to the
attached glossary when particularly important words or ideas first
appear. The glossary, like those in the earlier translations, is organized into meaning-clusters, groups of related or associated words
that together make up one important conceptual unit of the dialogue. The selection and discussion of these words, then, constitutes a work of interpretation—or at least the preparation of
material for such a work—and gives the translators a natural opportunity to discuss the rationale behind their English renderings
of important Greek terms. After the glossary comes a substantial
essay on the whole of Statesman, a thoughtful recapitulation and
reflection that presents a systematic and thorough survey of questions raised in the dialogue. Finally, the appendices: the first
*Plato: Phaedo (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 1998) and Plato:
Timaeus (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2001).
Gregory Recco is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
�REVIEWS | RECCO
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graphically presents an overview in word and image of the practice of weaving which forms the dialogue’s most densely intertwined “paradigm,” or model, of the work of statesmanship; the
second unravels and graphically portrays the various heuristic
“divisions” by which the Stranger investigated questions of definition in the Sophist and here seeks the politikos, or statesman.
The translation is of very high quality—a fact that will likely
not surprise readers of the team’s previous two efforts. To describe
its excellence I must make some preparatory remarks about what
a translation is, who Plato is, and how Plato ought to be translated.
And I must discuss the particularities (or rather peculiarities) of
the Statesman.
The art of translation possesses, in a particularly pronounced
degree, a feature that characterizes all arts: What directs the activity
of artists is not their own wishes and ideas, but the necessities of
the work to be done. Becoming the practitioner of an art involves
a kind of surrender to something alien, namely, the determinacies
of the product and the conditions of its production. In translation,
this relinquishment of authority is especially evident in the very
nature of the work, which consists of transplanting a thought that
belongs to someone else from its native home into the foreign soil
of another language while keeping it intact and alive. Because the
translator does not create the being of that which he translates, his
excellence consists in his ability to let the thought of another shine
forth unimpeded and unaltered.
Plato’s thought poses special challenges to the prospective
translator, because the dialogue form in which it predominantly
resides gives it a uniquely amorphous character unparalleled anywhere else in Western literature. Because of their polyphonic conversational style, the dialogues of Plato give no authoritative
indication of how they are to be interpreted, no explicit endorsement of some message, so that it is quite difficult to say just what
Plato’s thought actually is. Without some definite notion of how
to deal with this difficulty, the choices and judgments that the
translator must make run the risk of being severally ad hoc and,
taken together, inconsistent. But in the dialogues themselves Plato
is completely silent about this difficulty. Faced with this apparent
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
authorial dereliction, it is tempting to conclude with a kind of misplaced strictness that the phrase “Plato’s thought” signifies but
does not refer, as Heraclitus nearly says of the oracle at Delphi.
But this is the counsel of despair, and it leaves out the third leg of
Heraclitus’s saying: the oracle, who does not speak, but gives sign,
does not conceal. Something similar must be said of Plato. Even
cursory comparison of the dialogues uncovers themes that recur
with some frequency. Longer acquaintance reveals how generous
Plato can be to the careful reader, who discovers that the cracks
in the surface form a pattern, so to speak. The latter point deserves
fuller and more literal articulation, both on its own terms and because it is so often overlooked—which leads to bad interpretation
and consequently to bad translation.
Many of the dialogues take on the outward form of a “Socratic”
conversation, with one dialectically more experienced person taking the lead and questioning another in what seems to be a more or
less directed way, so that the latter gradually takes on views suggested by the former. But the inner truth of the dialogues is that
they are documents bearing witness to the event of thinking, paradoxically more akin to Thucydides’s record of a great event than
to Hippocrates’s scientific investigation of the causes of sickness
and health. The dialogues are not treatises of Socratic dogma thinly
disguised as conversations, but more or less dramatized presentations of what it looks like to think. I say “dramatized” because, as
I hinted above, that is where Plato’s artistry lies: this is his real
work, which is also something like the work of a translator.
Plato’s art is to show us the event of thinking, by dramatically
portraying what it looks like when it happens among human beings, in both its grandeur and its modesty. To say that thinking is
such and such, or has such and such characteristics, is perhaps a
fairly idle and undemanding pursuit, but to show it—that is, to
make manifest through a single instance the structure of intelligibility that informs it and gives it life—is an accomplishment of an
exceedingly high order. Somehow the dialogue must both be a conversation and exhibit “conversationality.” Not surprisingly, the investigation of how conversing ought to take place in order to get
at truth is one of those recurring themes that give the dialogues of
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Plato their distinctive mark. But the exhibition of thinking as such
occurs in several other, less immediate, ways. To note just one,
briefly, let me point out the structure of errancy and return, or wandering and recapitulation.
In the Statesman, as in the Sophist and so many other dialogues, the tentative answers given to the guiding questions are
forever turning up inadequate, coming unmoored as they are jostled by fresh contenders that look no less promising, even if they,
too, ultimately fall apart. This is especially evident in the bewildering multiplicity of “definitions” that fail, by the very fact of
their being multiple, to hem in or pin down the sort of men being
sought in these two dialogues. The various ways in which the dialogues can acquaint us with perplexity, and thus make us feel
thought’s errancy, are probably familiar to many readers. No less
important, however, is a dimension of thought that tends to belong
less to the one questioned than to the one doing the questioning:
to put a name to it, the dimension of redemption, of making up for
what has gone wrong by noticing how it has gone wrong. The dialogues are chock-full of bad arguments, wrong turns, and dead
ends. But these errors never just lie there. They stand out, and and
were made to stand out by their author. Plato calls on us to respond
more adequately than Socrates’s interlocutors and to consider how
an attentive and active questioner might help things move forward
from there. Giving us the opportunity to become better at thinking
is a great gift that is squandered by dogmatic interpretations (and
the translations founded on them), for they can see only the degree
to which the things said in the dialogues do not form a very compelling body of theory, even as they tantalizingly hint at one.
Brann, Kalkavage, and Salem understand quite well both this difficulty and other difficulties related to Plato’s portrayal of the
drama of thinking; their understanding guides their choices and
contributes greatly to the excellence of their translations.
In general, Plato’s artistry exists on the level of style, in the
nuances of diction and register, metaphor and allusion, that reveal
the character behind the thought, and give us something further to
think about when the resources of the argument turn out to be insufficient to answer all our questions. In the case of Socrates, this
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
is well known and acknowledged, though less so for his interlocutors: it is a commonplace to mock their “dialogue” as merely a series
of more or less undifferentiated assents. The characters in Plato who
are generally considered to be well drawn are usually the ones who
disagree, and they are considered better drawn the more vehemently they disagree with Socrates (like Callicles and Thrasymachus). The Statesman has neither of these advantages: its main
speaker is the somewhat opaque Stranger from Elea, and its main
respondent is the somewhat colorless Young Socrates. Not a very
promising circumstance for the translation that seeks to reveal a
Plato who is a master of style. It is the particular excellence of this
translation that it is able to show us a Plato who is at work in his
accustomed ways even in these changed circumstances.
The translation is above all else trustworthy. If a word or
phrase jars (such as Socrates’s having “mixed it up” with Theaetetus on the previous day [258a]), consulting the Greek reassures
(perhaps he is meant to sound relatively informal compared with
the Stranger or perhaps he wants to recall the Stranger’s mixing of
the eidē). Words whose polysemy is troublesome are rendered consistently, in a neutral and readable way that has no axe to grind.
Instead of translating most replies as “Yes, Socrates,” the translators make the responses both differentiated and differentiable, an
absolutely invaluable aid to the close reader who is keeping watch
over the fitness of the interlocutor’s responses. The Stranger’s
humor, which verges, it is no exaggeration to say, on aridity, appears in all its understated, deadpan glory. Picture the face of a very
serious old man intoning these words: “The king at least is manifest
to us as one who pastures a certain horn-shorn herd” (265d). Even
when the syntax becomes tortuous, the translation remains not only
readable, but even speakable. What is perhaps most impressive is
that the translation’s readability does not come at the cost of overly
interpretive (or inventive) construal. Heidegger said approvingly
of Kant that he left obscure what is in itself obscure. In this rendering of the Statesman, it should be said that what is puzzling in
the original remains so in translation, but because of what is said,
not because of any obscurity in how it is said. The translation’s
simultaneous readability and faithfulness (in the fullest sense of
�REVIEWS | RECCO
139
that word), coupled with its generous and thoughtful supplementary materials, strongly recommend its use for classroom study by
serious students, with or without some knowledge of the Greek. It
should also be of interest to, and useable by, any sort of serious
reader at all. In contrast to the translators’ earlier editions of the
Phaedo and the Sophist, this one clearly distinguishes the functions
of the Introduction and the Essay, placing the latter, appropriately,
after the dialogue itself. The “Essay” pithily and unpretentiously
raises questions that cut to the very heart of the dialogue, questions
about the nature and possibility of rational politics, and questions
about the very identity of philosophy. No mere “student edition,”
this; the Plato scholar, too, will find much here that advances serious thinking.
�
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T.H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Frost, Bryan-Paul
Levine, David
Burke, Chester
Kalkavage, Peter
Maistrellis, Nicholas
Salem, Eric
Carey, James
Recco, Gregory
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 53.2 (Spring 2012)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
©2012 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
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�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Contents
Essays & Lectures
Aesthetics Ancient and Modern .........................................1
James Carey
Passion and Perception in Mozart’s Magic Flute ...........38
Peter Kalkavage
Socrates, Parmenides, and the Way Out ...........................68
Judith Seeger
Rolling His Jolly Tub: Composer Elliott Carter,
St. John’s College Tutor, 1940-1942.........................97
Hollis Thoms
Reflections
Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening .............................133
Eva Brann
Caged Explorers: The Hunger for Control.....................150
Howard Zeiderman
Poetry
The Love Song of the Agoraphobic ................................177
Elliott Zuckerman
Reviews
Henry Kissinger on China: The Dangerous
Illusion of “Realist” Foreign Policy
Book Review of Henry Kissenger’s China..........................179
Joseph A. Bosco
Everything is One
Book Review of Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus ......195
David Carl
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
Aesthetics, Ancient and Modern:
An Introduction
James Carey
The phenomenon of beauty is trans-political, trans-historical
and trans-religious. Whether we are believers or non-believers, we can admire Greek temples, an archaic statue of
Apollo, Islamic calligraphy, a Gothic cathedral, Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion, Hindu architecture, Chinese landscape
painting, a Japanese tea ceremony, and so forth. Our admiration of these things need not be animated by religious belief.
To be sure, they mean incomparably more to those who believe that they are intimately connected with the sacred or divine than they mean to those who deny such a connection. But
the beautiful in art is accessible to all, the beautiful in nature
even more so. We should not be surprised, then, to find some
agreement among the greatest minds as to what beauty is.
It is often pointed out that philosophical inquiry into the
nature of the beautiful did not get designated as “aesthetics”
until the eighteenth century. The inquiry itself is not an exclusive modern concern, however. It was launched by Plato.
His most impressive attempt to shed light on the nature of the
beautiful is not to be found in the Symposium or the Phaedrus, but in the Hippias Major. The Symposium and the
Phaedrus are chiefly concerned with the erotic relation of the
soul to the beautiful. The concern of the Hippias Major is,
on the face of it, more limited: what is the beautiful?
Hippias has come to Athens on a diplomatic mission to
represent the interests of his native city of Elis. He is a well
known sophist. He plays a small role in Plato’s Protagoras
James Carey is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. A shorter version
of this essay was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Annapolis,
on September 10, 2011. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Thomas
McDonald, in whose soul were uniquely combined intellectual powers
of the highest order with rare loftiness of spirit and refinement of taste.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and he is the chief interlocutor with Socrates in another dialogue, the Hippias Minor. He has a high opinion of how
much he knows, and he boasts about it without shame. Hippias is, as one of the most careful students of the Platonic dialogues notes, “the great fool.”1 There are other fools in the
Platonic dialogues—Ion and Euthyphro come quickly to
mind. But Hippias is the greatest fool of them all. His limitations in combination with his vanity keep the conversation
with Socrates from ascending to the highest peaks of speculation. But the conversation ascends very high nonetheless,
though to appreciate this the reader has to compensate for
Hippias’s dullness by engaging his own thought with what
Socrates has to say.
There is a rather lengthy introductory exchange between
the two men. It begins with a comparison of earlier sophists
with contemporary sophists. It thereby brushes up against the
theme of wisdom, though without explicitly exploring it. Instead, the introductory exchange centers on the problem of
Hippias’s failure to make money through sophistry on his visits to Sparta, in contrast to his general success in this endeavor elsewhere. At one point, when Hippias claims to have
composed a beautiful speech about the beautiful, Socrates
says that Hippias has reminded him “opportunely” of something.2 Someone, Socrates says, has recently been throwing
him into confusion with the question, “What is the beautiful?” Socrates asks Hippias to help him find an answer to this
question. But his expression “opportunely”—eis kalon—is
not quite serious, since he has used the word kalon, the Greek
word for” beautiful,” or its derivatives seven times in the
opening exchange. Hippias himself used it once in the opening exchange, rather strangely.3 He does not, however, seem
interested in elaborating what he might mean by it, in spite
of the fact that Socrates tacitly invites him to do so by responding with a double echo of the word.4
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | CAREY
3
Unlike the conversations that Socrates has with Euthyphro and Meno in the dialogues named after them, and, in
particular, unlike the exchange at the beginning of the Republic and the ensuing conversations with Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus, Socrates
himself initiates the conversation with Hippias in this dialogue, as he also does in the Hippias Minor after being invited
to do so by Eudicus. When Socrates initiates a conversation
we must ask ourselves what he hopes to accomplish through
it, that is, why he even engages in it. And it is especially important for us to ask this question when Socrates bothers to
initiate a conversation with someone like Hippias or Ion who
is not already a friend or associate of his and whom he knows
in advance to be limited in philosophic capacity and commitment.
We might think that Socrates is not well acquainted with
Hippias. But right off the bat he appeals to Hippias’s vanity
by calling him “Hippias, the beautiful and wise” and in the
same sentence he refers to a prior encounter with Hippias.
Socrates may be alluding to Hippias’ role in the conversation
reported in the Protagoras, where he does not make a good
impression.5 Is it possible that Socrates thinks that Hippias,
in spite of his limitations, might nonetheless help him achieve
a bit of clarity regarding something about which he is admittedly perplexed?
In response to the distinctively Socratic question, “What
is the beautiful?” Hippias offers three answers. The beautiful
is a beautiful maiden, it is ornamental gold, and it is the
solemn occasion of a funeral. Socrates exposes the deficiencies of these answers. In doing so, he couches his observations in the name of a third party who is not present, someone
who, Socrates says, chastises him about his thoughts on the
beautiful (to kalon). It later appears that this person is Socrates
himself. Socrates, then, presents himself as being in conflict
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
with himself about the beautiful. And yet one of the very few
things that he says he is an expert on is erotics.6 So, given
Socrates understanding of the necessary relationship of eros
to the beautiful, we find a tension, to say the least, between
his uncharacteristic profession of expertise and his apparent
confusion about something that falls within the purview of
his expertise, to be even at the center of it.
After disposing of Hippias’s answers to the question,
“What is the beautiful?” Socrates himself suggests three answers. His first answer is that the beautiful is the fitting (or
the appropriate—to trepon).7 This leads to the question of
whether its presence causes things just to appear beautiful or
to really be beautiful. The difficulty here is in the Greek expression to kalon itself. It can mean the beautiful as we today
usually use the word, the aesthetically beautiful.8 But to kalon
can also mean the noble—moral nobility or nobility of character. In the case of the latter there can be a great difference
between being and appearance. Someone could have a noble
character without appearing so, not at first glance anyway.
Socrates himself is the conspicuous example. Nobility manifests itself most conspicuously in those situations that, as we
say, exhibit one’s character. In the case of noble laws and pursuits, the discrepancy between being and appearance is so
striking and of such contention as to lead, Socrates says, to
“strife and battle . . . privately for individuals and publically
for cities.”9 In the case of the aesthetically beautiful, the other
sense of to kalon, there seems to be no difference at all between being and appearance. It would be strange to say that
a landscape or a painting, for example, only appears to be
beautiful but is not really so.
Socrates’ second answer to the question “What is the
beautiful” is that it is the useful (to chrēsimon). And this an-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | CAREY
5
swer gets transformed into the claim that the beautiful is the
helpful (to ōphelimon).10 We can perhaps think of the noble
this way, although we can easily imagine situations in which
nobility of character does not help very much, and other situations in which it even brings physical harm to him who exhibits it. It is even less obvious how something aesthetically
beautiful, such as a statue or a sunset, is useful or helpful.
We might get the impression from his first two definitions
that Socrates is interested in debunking the aesthetically
beautiful, which sometimes gets pejoratively called the
“merely pretty.” This impression is dispelled with Socrates’
third and most interesting, definition. Here is what he says:
I think that I have just now found my way out. Observe. If we were to say that what makes us delight
is beautiful—in no way do I mean all pleasures,
but rather that [which pleases] through hearing
and sight—how then would we do in the contest?
I suppose, Hippias, that beautiful human beings at
least, but also all decorations and paintings and
pieces of sculpture, whichever ones are beautiful,
please us when we see them. And beautiful voices
and music in general, discourses and stories too,
produce this same thing, so that if we should answer that bold man [i.e., Socrates’ “critic”] this
way—“Noble one, the beautiful is the pleasant
[that pleases] through hearing and sight”—don’t
you think we would check his boldness?11
We notice a couple of peculiarities in this passage. In the
first place, there is a double chiasmus. Socrates speaks of the
pleasant that comes through hearing and sight, in that order,
at the beginning of this passage and again at the end. The
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
pleasures that come through hearing would seem to have
some primacy over those that come through sight. And yet,
in the middle of the passage, Socrates first mentions the
pleasures that come through sight, and afterwards those that
come through hearing. So, though one might infer that
Socrates holds discourses to be more truly beautiful than
sights, the passage above does not support this inference.
Beautiful discourses and beautiful sights are situated on the
same plane here.
In the second place, Socrates includes the human as well
as the non-human in that which can please through hearing
and sight. And he also includes that which pleases without
any logos in the strictly discursive sense of the word, such as
decorations, paintings, sculpture, voices, and music, and that
which does please discursively, such as discourses and stories. He thereby highlights the two senses of to kalon, as
meaning, again, both the aesthetically beautiful and the
morally noble. The morally noble, which pleases us through
a rational consideration of it, and the aesthetically beautiful,
which pleases us through sensation and presumably without
any rational consideration, are intimately connected, so much
so that, again, a single Greek word can mean both. Beautiful
human beings, in particular, can be beautiful in their looks or
beautiful in their character, or both.
We leave the Hippias Major at this point, with some regret. For we shall not follow up Socrates’ ensuing and profound distinction between two types of classes, a distinction
that no lesser a student of Plato than Jacob Klein held to be
the clue to Plato’s understanding of the eidetic duality that is
constitutive of Being itself, a theme that Klein shows is at the
heart of the Sophist and is alluded to in other dialogues as
well.12 Our regret, however, is somewhat assuaged. For Socrates’
claim in the Hippias Major that the beautiful is what pleases
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | CAREY
7
through sight and hearing induces us to reflect on similar
claims about beauty made in the greatest work on the subject
ever written, Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
The Critique of Judgment is divided into two parts, the
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and Critique of Teleological
Judgment. We confine our attention to the first part, the principal task of which is to validate the concept of taste as something that can be cultivated, something that can be good or
bad, and something that has the beautiful—and not the pleasant simply—as its primary object.
Early on Kant raises the question of whether in the judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes or follows the
judging of the object.13 One might think that this question
could be decided empirically, simply by paying attention to
the temporal sequence in which feeling and judgment occur.
But the mind moves so rapidly that the question cannot be
answered by empirical inspection alone. It can only be answered by way of an argument. Kant says that the solution
to this problem is the key to the critique of taste. He argues
as follows.
Nothing can be universally communicated except cognition (Erkenntnis) and presentation (Vorstellung), so far as it
belongs to cognition. One can report a certain sensation, say,
that buttermilk tastes good. But one cannot be sure that others
who have also tasted buttermilk will concur in this report. If
a difference of opinion emerges, that is the end of the matter.
On the other hand, an argument, say, a Euclidean demonstration, can be not just reported but universally communicated.
Anyone who sets out to prove, for example, that the base angles of isosceles triangles are equal, can expect anyone else
who is familiar with the preceding definitions, common notions, postulates, and propositions to follow the demonstration. Each step of the argument can be made clear. And if
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someone observing the demonstration discovers a flaw in the
argument, then that discovery too can be communicated. The
reason for this agreement is that, when we communicate our
cognitions to one another, what is individual about us recedes
into the background. We communicate our cognitions simply
as one rational being to another rational being. In doing so
we expect agreement; and if we find disagreement we expect
an argument of some kind in support of it.
We do not communicate our sensations to each other this
way. If I say that the room is warm, and you say that it is cold,
I do not ask you for a demonstration that it is cold. If I find a
certain dessert excessively sweet, and you don’t find it sweet
enough, we do not set out to refute each other. In a similar
way, if I experience something as beautiful, say, the slow
movement from a late Beethoven string quartet, and you hear
it as more boring than beautiful, I do not try to demonstrate
to you that it really is beautiful. An argument establishing
something as beautiful, a definitive argument compelling assent from everyone who can follow the argument, is not possible.
But in spite of this similarity, the experience of something
as beautiful is not just a feeling of pleasure either, though
pleasure is surely bound up with this experience. Kant thinks
that, unlike the feeling of pleasure, the judgment that something is beautiful is universally communicable, at least in
principle. This is possible because the encounter with something beautiful gives rise to a peculiarly harmonious interaction of the understanding, or the faculty of concepts, with the
imagination, and hence produces a state of mind (Gemütszustand) that can be communicated. There is no comparable
harmonious interaction of the cognitive faculties in the experience of something as merely pleasant, such as the scent
of patchouli or the taste of cilantro, about which there can be
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a difference of opinion that is in principle irresolvable.
In the case of a judgment of cognition proper, there is also
a relationship between the understanding and the imagination. The synthesis of the imagination is subsumed under a
definite concept. For example, two events are subsumed
under the a priori concept of cause and effect; the empirical
concept of a plate is subsumed under the pure concept of a
circle; an individual dog is subsumed under the general and
empirically derived concept of a dog. Such subsumption
under a definite concept Kant calls a determinative judgment.
This kind of judgment determines the object as this or that
definite kind of thing. It fixes the object, establishes its
boundaries as it were, and thereby renders it intelligible. The
result is a definite cognition.
In the judgment of something as beautiful, however, the
synthesis of the imagination is not subsumed under a definite
concept. The harmonious interaction of the cognitive faculties that is initiated by the presence of a beautiful object Kant
calls “free play” (freies Spiel). The resultant state of mind can
be universally communicated because it is formed by a free
play of cognitive faculties that we all possess. On the other
hand, this harmonious interaction, precisely as free play, does
not give rise to a definite cognition (ein bestimmter Erkenntis). It is only what is required for cognition in general
(Erkenntnis überhaupt).
That this state of mind is communicable, even universally
so, does not by itself imply that it is actually communicated.
For the latter, taste is also required. And taste is developed
primarily by cultivating a habit of attention to the formal relationships that are present in beautiful objects. These relationships, precisely as formal, cannot be apprehended
through sensation alone—as pleasure can—but must be apprehended by specifically cognitive faculties. And yet, be-
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cause here the imagination is not simply subordinated to the
understanding and placed in its service, but harmoniously and
freely interacts with the understanding, a feeling of pleasure
necessarily arises, as always happens in play.
A judgment that proceeds, not determinatively and by
way of subsuming a particular object (in the broadest sense
of the word) under a given definite concept, but by finding a
universal concept for the particular object is what Kant calls
a reflective judgment. In the investigation of nature determinative and reflective judgments are sequentially made. But
in the experience of an object as beautiful only a reflective
judgment is made, though in reading a work of literature in
particular, determinate judgments prepare the way for the reflective judgment that the work is beautiful. The universal
concept “beautiful,” the predicate of the reflective judgment,
“This object is beautiful,” is an indefinite concept. It refers
only to the way the individual object has of animating the
cognitive faculties into free play.14 The effect of this free play
is a pleasure that we expect everyone who has taste to feel.
To Kant’s argument that, in the encounter with a beautiful
object, the feeling of pleasure is consequent to and founded
on the judging of the object as beautiful, and not vice versa,
one might object that he has only shown what the sequence
could be. He has not shown what the sequence must be. But
Kant would respond that only this argument accounts for the
phenomenon of aesthetic enjoyment. For we do not call all
the things that please us “beautiful”—not by a long shot.
There would, however, be no reason not to do so if pleasure
precedes and founds the judgment that the object is beautiful.
Kant’s argument also makes sense of how one can distinguish between good taste, educated taste so to speak, and bad
or uneducated taste. Most of us recognize that our taste is
more refined now than it was when we were younger. The
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broadening experience of attending to the formal relations
present in beautiful objects enables us to note, appreciate,
and, as a consequence, delight in them. Again, these formal
relations cannot be apprehended by sensation alone, as is the
case with pleasures that are not mediated by judgment and
the cognitive principles that make judgment possible. And
yet, because no definite cognition is involved in a pure judgment of taste, we cannot actually demonstrate that an object
is beautiful, however perfect its formal articulation. What we
say by way of communicating the satisfaction we take in a
work such as the Adagio of Beethoven’s “Hammerclavier”
Sonata or Josquin Desprez’ “Déploration de la Mort de Jehan
Ockeghem” to someone whose musical taste we think is cultivated or susceptible of cultivation, is “Just listen to this.”
Or, in the case of painting by, say, Vermeer, “Just look at
this.”
A beautiful object does not consist of formal relations
alone. It has a material element as well, such as shades of
color or volume of sound. Unlike form, this material element,
which gives rise to what Kant calls the charm of sense, is not
communicable. Two individuals might possess an equally developed and refined appreciation of the formal relations in a
Bach fugue. But one of them prefers to hear a given fugue
played on the piano rather than on a harpsichord, whereas the
other prefers exactly the opposite. The timbre of a harpsichord and the timbre of a piano belong to the matter of the
music. For that reason, the extent to which one pleases more
than the other lies entirely within the domain of individual
preference. But the motivic, melodic, tonal, and structural elements belong to the form of the music. It is these formal relationships that stimulate the free play of the cognitive faculties
and thereby allow for universal communicability.
Formal relations are best apprehended at a distance. We
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can experience little in the way of formal relations through
the sense of touch, and only a little more through the sense
of taste and the sense of smell. Our sense of smell, unlike our
senses of touch and taste, can, of course, apprehend things at
a distance. If it were more developed in us humans we might
be able to smell formal relationships. But as it is, we cannot
do so, certainly not as readily as we can through sight and
hearing. It should not be surprising, then, that we rarely if
ever speak of a tactile sensation, however pleasant it may be,
as beautiful, and the same is true of an excellent meal or a
fine wine. We might say that the layout of a meal is beautiful,
or that the color of a wine is beautiful. But on tasting these
things we do not say, “What a beautiful flavor!” We say instead, “What a delightful flavor!” and maybe even “What a
lovely flavor!” Someone might decide to say “What a beautiful flavor!” just to show that it is possible to do so. But this
is not how we typically speak, however pleasant we may find
tactile, gustatory, and olfactory sensations. The reason seems
to be—and this is what Plato caught sight of—that any formal
relations we might apprehend through touch, taste, and smell
are almost infinitely vague in comparison to what we can
hear in a piece of music or see in a painting, to say nothing
of what we can apprehend in a work of literature.15
There is a further sign that Plato and Kant are right in
their agreement that the beautiful pleases through sight and
hearing uniquely. In the case of touch, taste, and smell, the
pleasure is felt right on the skin, and right on the gustatory
and olfactory organs. One feels a pleasure in or on the organs
of sensation, granted that it can also be quickly suffused
throughout one’s body as a whole. This is not the case regarding the pleasures associated with sight and hearing. On looking at a beautiful painting one does not experience a pleasing
sensation on the eyeball. Nor on hearing a beautiful piece of
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music does one experience a pleasing sensation in the ear.
Regarding music in particular, we can enjoy it up to a
point just by remembering it. A talented and well trained musician can imagine and delight in music he has never heard
before just by reading through a score as though it were a
book. Beethoven composed his greatest works when he was
stone deaf. Schubert did not live to hear a single one of his
symphonies performed. Brahms is reported to have said,
partly in jest but not entirely so, that when he wanted to hear
a really fine performance of the Marriage of Figaro he would
light up a cigar and stretch out on his couch. Many composers
refuse to compose at the piano. They want their compositions
to originate in the imagination, not in their fingers, not even
in their ears.
The distance that separates what is visible and audible
from our eyes and ears enables us to apprehend the visible
and the audible with a measure of detachment. To be sure, a
light can be so bright that it causes a pain in one’s eyes, and
a sound can be so loud that it makes one’s ears hurt. But,
again, the intensity of a light or a sound pertains to sensory
matter, not to form. Form, as such, causes no pain in the sensory organs, and the pleasure it gives rise to does not occur
there but somewhere else. It occurs in the mind.
Kant argues that the satisfaction associated with the experience of the purely beautiful is disinterested. He has been
famously taken to task on this point by Nietzsche.16 If Nietzsche
read the Critique of Judgment, he did not possess the patience
to read it carefully; for Kant very early in that work explicitly
says that “a judgment about beauty, in which the least interest
mingles, is quite partial and no pure judgment of taste.”17 A
judgment of taste can indeed be interested, but to that extent
it cannot be a pure judgment of taste. The judgment of a beautiful human form, for example, is an aesthetic judgment, but
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it is not entirely disinterested. Kant recognizes this, though
Nietzsche seems to think it undercuts Kant’s thesis. Even
when the beautiful is combined with the good, it cannot, according to Kant, be the object of a pure judgment of taste;
and the same is true of what he calls “the ideal of beauty.”18
In Plato’s Symposium Socrates relates Diotima’s saying
dictum that “eros is not of the beautiful. . . . It is of engendering and bringing to birth in the beautiful.”19 However we are
to understand this, Plato seems to recognize, as Kant does,
that eros, being about as interested as interested can be, for
that very reason cannot have the beautiful, simply, as its real
object. The antecedent disinterested contemplation of the
beautiful may well give rise to a consequent interest in, even
a desire for, a certain non-contemplative relation of oneself
to the beautiful, a relation of engendering and bringing to
birth in it. Still, what eros is of is not the beautiful. Instead,
Diotima says, “eros is of the good’s being one’s own always.”
Diotima seems to be saying that, though the good can be
one’s own, the aesthetically beautiful cannot be one’s own.
The delight you take in contemplating the beautiful object in
no way detracts from the delight I take in it. Quite the opposite. Your delight enhances my delight.
The experience of pure beauty gives rise to a disinterested
satisfaction not simply because beautiful sights and sounds,
unlike pleasant tactile sensations, flavors, and odors, are mediated by distance, but because they are thereby also mediated by judgment. The satisfaction bound up with the merely
pleasant, on the other hand, is immediate. No act of judgment
is needed to enjoy the pleasing sensation of a cool breeze on
a hot day. An irrational animal can enjoy tactile sensations as
easily as a human being can. When we call a flower “beautiful,” we do so because of how it looks, not because of how it
smells. After all, one can, and often does, call a flower beau-
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tiful without ever smelling it. One does not, however, call a
flower beautiful without seeing it, however pleasant may be
the scent that comes wafting through the window. The assessment of how a flower looks, of how it is shaped and articulated, is made in an act of reflective judgment, which occurs
so naturally and rapidly that we rarely realize that we are even
making a judgment.
Because the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is consequent to and founded on the judgment that the object is
beautiful, this pleasure bears an analogy to, without being
simply identical with, the pleasure we take in contemplating
moral nobility. As Kant argues, we do not do what is morally
right because of the pleasure that doing so gives rise to. For
we would not experience any pleasure in doing what is
morally right unless we thought that acting this way was good
in itself, regardless of whether it gave rise to more pleasure
than pain or the reverse. Any reduction of moral nobility to
pleasure seeking is as morally obtuse as a reduction of the
admiration of moral nobility to pleasure seeking.20
The remarkable affinity between the pleasure taken in the
beautiful and the pleasure taken in the morally good leads
Kant to speak of beauty as the symbol of the morally good.
Aesthetic education, though by no means a substitute for
moral education, can nonetheless facilitate moral education.
The cultivation of taste elevates one above enjoyment of the
coarser and more immediate pleasures to those refined pleasures that are mediated by judgment. The pleasure that one
takes in contemplating the aesthetically beautiful is then analogous to the pleasure that one takes in contemplating exemplars of moral nobility, and to the pleasure that one can also
take in establishing a measure of integrity in one’s own character. Kant says:
Taste makes possible, without too violent a leap,
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the transition (as it were) from the charm of sense
to habitual moral interest, because it represents the
imagination in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding, and so teaches us
to find even in objects of sense a free satisfaction
apart from any charm of sense.21
Thomas McDonald puts this matter well when he speaks
of a teleological function of aesthetic education. It is conducive to developing “a susceptibility to rational determination immanently, working from within and from beneath,
[such] that one’s practical moral determinations not always
be imposed from without or from above.”22 That there is but
one Greek word, kalon, for both the aesthetically beautiful
and the morally noble is not a linguistic accident.23
To return briefly to the Hippias Major, that to kalon
pleases through sight and/or hearing holds true of the morally
noble as well as of the aesthetically beautiful. Moral nobility
can be seen in an act and heard in a speech. Obviously it cannot be touched, tasted, or smelled. Now, Socrates sees that
this formulation, though true and highly significant, describes
a beautiful object only in terms of its effect. He is interested,
however, in more than the effect that the beautiful object has
on the subject. He is also interested in what causes the beautiful object to be beautiful. If we say that the cause of the
beautiful object is itself the beautiful—a possibility that
Socrates briefly entertains—then we are not saying very
much: the beautiful is the cause of the beautiful; cause and
effect are the same. And yet if the cause and the effect are
different, but both are somehow beautiful, we find ourselves
confronted with the so-called “third man” problem: there
must be some third “beautiful” in which the beautiful as cause
and the beautiful as effect both participate; and then some
fourth “beautiful” in which all three participate; and so on ad
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infinitum. The question of what causes an object to be beautiful is a real question. Socrates does not answer it.
Kant, however, does answer this question. The cause of
the beautiful in art—we are not speaking now of the beautiful
in nature—is genius. Kant does not use this word the way we
do. For him it does not necessarily denote someone with an
exceptionally high intelligence, as intelligence is commonly
understood. Newton, he says, is not a genius, and Kant would
certainly not call himself one. Genius names a kind of mysterious spirit that is at work within the artist, assuming that
he is a great artist.24 According to Kant, only an artist can
possesses genius. Newton notoriously moves from one assertion to another without supplying the intervening steps that
logically connect the one with the other. But Newton can fill
these steps in. With much more labor than it cost him we can
fill them in as well. Newton can justify each step in his
demonstrations. If we understand his demonstrations we can
do the same.
Kant maintains that the case is different with the artist
and his art. Mozart, for example, cannot explain why the interval of a sixth at just this point in a melody is exactly the
right interval, and not, say, a fourth. Michelangelo cannot explain how he visualized a captive within an uncut block of
stone, or why he decided to paint the newly created Adam
just as he painted him. The great artist must of course possess
a communicable knowledge of the elements of his craft. And
these elements are teachable. Mozart could teach counterpoint, and Michelangelo could teach the techniques of sculpture and of representing perspective in two dimensions. But
Mozart could not teach anyone, no matter how technically
proficient he was at mastering the rules of counterpoint and
harmony, how to write a “Jupiter Symphony,” or even a comparatively simple but beautiful melody like “La ci darem la
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mano” from Don Giovanni, or the even simpler but equally
beautiful melody from The Magic Flute, “Drei Knäbchen,
jung, schön, hold, und weise.” (The latter melody, in B-flat
major, begins implausibly with five F’s in a row followed by
five D’s in row, and then three B-flats in a row—and yet, for
all its simplicity, I daresay there is nothing more beautiful in
opera.) Similarly, Michelangelo could not teach anyone how
to sculpt a masterpiece comparable to his “David.”
Kant says that to the extent that an artist is animated by
genius he cannot articulate the rules by which he produces
his works of art.25 Genius presupposes technique, but it is not
identical with technique. Genius is an altogether mysterious
force that even the artist cannot account for. Brahms once
said that when he was a young man melodies came to him
while he was polishing his shoes.
This attitude of the artist toward the sources of his inspiration is a familiar one and millennia old. An unnamed goddess is invoked in the third word of the Iliad; an unnamed
muse is invoked in the fourth word of the Odyssey. In Plato’s
Ion, Socrates makes a number of comic observations about
the pretentions of rhapsodes, poets, and soothsayers. While
we are laughing at them, however, we should not overlook a
remarkable observation he also makes that is not so comic:
A great indication [that the god is speaking
through these people] is Tynnichos the Chalcidean, who never made any poem whatsoever
that would be worthy of remembering, but then
[made] the paean that everyone sings, just about
the most beautiful of all lyric poems, simply (or
artlessly—atechnōs) as he himself says, “a discovery of the muses.”26
How did Tynnichos manage to do this? Socrates does not
say. One might say that Tynnichos was visited by genius. If
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so, it was a brief visit. Beethoven, who was in a position to
know, held that genius is always prolific. Beethoven may
have had Bach in mind. He once said, “Bach ought not to be
called Bach (German for “brook”) but Meer (German for
“ocean”).
What is the ultimate source of the beautiful in art? The
twentieth-century German philosopher Max Scheler gave a
blunt and characteristically provocative answer to this question. “The artist is merely the mother of the work of art. God
is the father.”27 So direct a theological answer to this question
is not the only one. Leo Strauss, hardly an unqualified admirer of the fine arts as distinct from the liberal arts, and
highly suspicious of aesthetics, writes in a letter, “[O]nly the
moderns are so crazy [as] to believe that ‘creation’ of a ‘work
of art’ is more worthy of wonder and more mysterious than
the reproduction of a dog: just look at a mother dog with her
puppies . . . .” It is not clear what crazy moderns Strauss has
in mind. Kant, for one, would grant that nature, prodigal in
its production of the beautiful and sublime, is more worthy
of wonder than any work of art. But also worthy of wonder
is the process of artistic production. Strauss recognizes this,
and continues his sentence as follows: “. . . and the force, by
means of which Shakespeare conceived, felt, and wrote
Henry IV, is not Shakespeare’s work, but [is] greater than any
work of any man.”28
Kant is not averse to a theological account of artistic genius, but he is determined, as always, to keep theology at
arms length until compelled by his argument to bring it into
the picture. He entertains the possibility that what is at work
in genius is nature. “Genius is the innate talent of the mind
(ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.”29 A
bit later Kant says:
In science . . . the greatest discoverer differs only
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in degree from his laborious imitator and apprentice, but he differs specifically from him whom
nature has endowed for beautiful art. . . . The artist
is favored by nature. . . . [Artistic] aptitude (Geschicklichkeit) cannot be communicated; rather, it
is imparted to every [artist] immediately by the
hand of nature; and so it dies with him, until nature endows another in the same way, who needs
nothing more than an example to let the talent of
which he is conscious work in a similar way.30
The way nature works is mysterious. After Mozart died a
lot of attention was directed toward turning his son into “another Mozart.” It did not work. The boy had a very good ear,
and he was taught the nuts and bolts of composition, but he
lacked genius. He was not one of nature’s favorites.
In the above passage Kant indicates that artistic activity,
which cannot be reproduced, can be a way in which artistic
activity gets, not exactly reproduced but further produced,
assuming that talent is present and technique has been mastered. The artwork of an earlier artist can serve as an example
to a later one—not to be copied of course, but to be emulated.
Beethoven’s great piano concertos are not copies of Mozart’s,
not even structurally. But they were in large measure inspired
by Mozart’s concertos. Artistic inspiration is, to be sure, occasioned not only by examples of artistic masterworks.
Beethoven wrote the “Molto Adagio” of his E minor string
quartet under the direct inspiration of the night sky.
The literary critic Eric Heller reports that the great physicist Werner Heisenberg was once speaking with a small group
of English research students on the difference between humanistic studies and scientific pursuits. A grand piano was in
the room, and after the discussion Heisenberg, who was a
highly accomplished pianist, improvised on it a bit. He then
played, beautifully, a Beethoven sonata. When Heisenberg
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finished, he said to those present, “If I had never lived, someone else would have discovered the Uncertainty Principle.
For this was the solution of a problem that had emerged from
the logical development of physics and had to be solved in
this and no other way. But if there had never been a
Beethoven, this sonata would not have been composed.”31
Kant’s claim that genius is an endowment of nature is
problematic. He labored at length to ground and validate the
post-Aristotelian, non-teleological, mathematico-mechanical
concept of nature in his first Critique and in the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science. Kant construes nature in
these works as simply the complex of phenomena standing
under architectonic laws prescribed to it a priori by the human
understanding. It is hard to see how nature, so construed,
could be the source of anything so inscrutable as artistic genius. The post-Kantian rise of a putatively non-teleological
biology has the effect of making genius all the more inscrutable. One might say that the force that produced, say,
Schubert’s final piano sonatas, his Ninth Symphony, his
Grand Duo for four hands, and his great string quintet (the
last three works all composed in C major, incidentally) was
just a rare and transient anomaly, like a black swan. But this
claim does not adequately account for the taste by which we
are able to appreciate these works, and this taste is not anomalous at all. It is not easy to see how taste for beauty, or even
the capacity for such taste, could have gotten naturally selected for enhancing the survival prospects of the human
species. For, again, the satisfaction bound up with our experience of the beautiful is the effect of a disinterested judgment. The cognitive faculties that are set in free play by the
presence of the beautiful can certainly be placed in the service
of our biological needs. But does their free play serve these
needs? It is one thing to assert that it does. It is something
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else to make sense of this assertion. The nature that gives rise
to genius can hardly be the nature of modern natural science.
It is something whose inner workings in the case of genius
are essentially veiled from view—from the view of the scientist and from the view of the artist as well.
The activity of artistic genius is as mysterious as its ultimate source. Kant understands this activity to be one that is
productive of what he calls, almost paradoxically, “aesthetic
ideas”:
[B]y an aesthetic idea I understand that presentation (Vorstellung) of the imagination that occasions much thinking, yet without any definite
thought, i.e., any concept, being adequate to it, a
presentation that speech, consequently, cannot
completely compass and make intelligible.32
In spite of the last clause, Kant understands poetry to be
the art form that is most impressive in its production of aesthetic ideas. Intelligibility, according to Kant, is constituted
through the understanding’s imposition of concepts on intuitions that have previously been synthesized by the imagination.33 This activity of our understanding is highly selective.
Only a portion of what the imagination has previously synthesized in intuition gets attended to. For us to understand
something, much of the material that the imagination synthesizes has to be passed over and disregarded. It suffices to
think of the controlled experiment, in which the scientist deliberately attempts to eliminate everything from consideration
that is extraneous to the experiment itself.
In the case of writing poetry, something quite different
happens. Kant says that there the imagination “is free to furnish unsought, over and above . . . agreement with the concept, extensive undeveloped material for the understanding,
material which the understanding did not take into consider-
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ation in its concept.”34 Though this activity of the imagination
is not in the service of the understanding’s constitution of an
object, and hence not in the service of acquiring knowledge,
it is still, as Kant says in the preceding quotation, “for the understanding.” In the first place, this activity “quickens the
cognitive powers.” That’s the element of free play, assuming
genius in the artist and a cultivated taste in his audience. But
in the second place, this activity, in the case of poetry especially, provides a kind of “nourishment” for the understanding. “[T]hrough his imagination [the genius] gives life to his
concepts.”35 Let us consider a few lines of poetry to see how
imagination furnishes material for the understanding that is
deliberately ignored by the understanding in its purely cognitive endeavors and typically overlooked in ordinary experience by those of us who are not geniuses.
The rejected lover says, in a poem by Fulke Greville:
Cynthia who did naked lie
Runs away like silver streams;
Leaving hollow banks behind,
Who can neither forward move,
Nor if rivers be unkind,
Turn away or leave to love.36
Banks of a river exposed by receding water are gray,
grassless, and pitted. Warped roots of nearby trees protrude
at random. They are desolate, and anyone can see this. But
to connect this sight with the condition of a lover who has
been abandoned and can neither follow his love nor cease
loving her is the work of genius. It is the production of aesthetic ideas.
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman attends to the phenomena
of nature with all his senses, though he finds little consolation
for grief even in its splendors:
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But not for him those golden calms succeed
Who while the day is high and glory reigns
Sees it go by, as the dim pampas plain,
Hoary with salt and gray with bitter weed,
Sees the vault blacken, feels the dark wind strain,
Hears the dry thunder roll, and knows no rain.37
Thomas Hardy, with a sensibility as cultivated as Greville’s and Tuckerman’s to “undeveloped material normally
passed over,” writes of how others may remember him after
he has died:
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dew-fall hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
“To him this must have been a familiar sight.”38
We are accustomed to speak of such things as Hardy’s
“dew-fall hawk” and “wind-warped upland thorn” as poetic
images. But this is an imprecise way of speaking, for they are
not images of anything else. They are the bird and the branch,
not visibly present in this room to be sure, but surely, in their
own way, present in the poem.
In these passages we can see how the imagination provides the understanding with material for, as Kant puts it,
“much thought”—not the kind of thought that is at work in
scientific research and philosophical enquiry, but thought directed to features of human experience in which we take an
interest as mortal beings and not as minds only. Kant understands the taste for beauty to be something unique to man, to
a finite but nonetheless rational being, an animal possessing
both sense organs and intellect.
Beauty is a sensible phenomenon. It is a spatial or temporal phenomenon, or both spatial and temporal. It is for this
reason that, for Kant, the term “aesthetic” can designate fea-
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25
tures or statements regarding the beautiful and sublime as
well as space and time themselves. In fact, the different art
forms can be ordered in terms of how they work with space
and time. Painting is the most spatial and least temporal of
the arts. A painting can be seen all at once, assuming that it
is not excessively large or curved like a cyclorama. The time
involved in the apprehension of its composition is minimal.
In the case of sculpture more time is required, for one must
move around it to take all of it in. In the case of architecture,
yet more time is required, not only because buildings are
larger than statues, but also because one must enter them as
well as walk around them. In the case of dance we observe
spatial figures themselves move through time. This is true of
theater and also of film, where we must also apprehend
speech. Speech fills time and takes time to understand. In poetry and literature in general the spatial relations referred to
occur only in the imagination of the reader.39 Music is at the
opposite end of the scale from painting. Spatial relations are
absent, though they can be imagined. The formal relations in
music are temporal. And all these different forms can be combined, most comprehensively in opera. Wagner intended his
gigantic music dramas to be unities of all the art forms.
The various art forms can, of course, make man himself
their theme. Kant speaks of the possibility of representing
man at his height in a section of the Critique of Judgment entitled the “The Ideal of Beauty.” The following sentence from
the Critique of Practical Reason can serve as an introduction
to it. There Kant says:
The [moral] law should obtain for the world of
sense, as a sensible nature (as this concerns rational
beings), the form (Form) of an intelligible world,
i.e., the form of a supersensible nature, without
interrupting the mechanism of the former.”40
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It is our consciousness of the moral law that causes us to
regard other human beings to look like something more more
than obstacles to be gotten around or targets of sexual appetite, and causes them to manifest themselves not as things
at all but as persons. The very looks of the phenomenal order
are modified, indeed ennobled, by our consciousness of obligation. In the expression of the human being before us, in
the pressing out of his interior rationality and intrinsic worth
to the surface of his countenance, we behold an end-in-itself
that our consciousness of the moral law commands us not to
treat as a mere means to the attainment of our private ends.
In his treatment of the ideal of beauty in the Critique of
Judgment Kant makes two important distinctions. The first
is between idea and ideal. “Idea properly means a rational
concept [a concept of reason], and ideal the representation of
an individual being, regarded as adequate to that idea.”41
The distinction between idea and ideal is the fundamental distinction governing Hegel’s aesthetics. For Hegel
the idea is the whole dialectically interrelated system of
rational concepts, which he attempts to explicate in his
Science of Logic. According to Hegel, art attempts to make
the idea, which is truth in its purity, immediately present
to sensible intuition. The attempt is never fully successful,
for what it aims at is impossible. Art according to Hegel
necessarily falls short of philosophy. The ideal is for him
only an ideal. On the other hand it really is ideal. The ideal
would be (per impossibile) that the idea be intuitively
present, right there in front of us, rather than accessible
solely through discursive, laborious, and largely abstract
thought, as Hegel argues it must be.
According to Kant, however, the great artist is more
successful at presenting the ideal than Hegel supposes.
The unconditioned, for Kant, is not so much a comprehen-
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27
sive system of speculative concepts as it is a practical law.
And it is possible to depict a human being as governing himself through this law. Kant makes a distinction not only between the idea and the ideal but also between the aesthetical
normal idea and the ideal. The aesthetic normal idea is the
visible archetype of the species, whether of man or of some
other species. It exhibits regularity and perfect fitness of form
to function, whether of man or animal. The ideal, on the other
hand, “makes the purposes of humanity, inasmuch as they
cannot be sensibly presented, the principle for judging of a
figure [Gestalt] through which, as their phenomenal effect,
those purposes are revealed [offenbaren].”42 According to
Kant, this ideal can be represented only in the human figure,
and it is an expression of the moral.
The visible expression of moral ideas that rule
men inwardly can, to be sure, be taken only from
experience; but to make their connection with all
that our reason unites with the morally good in the
idea of the highest purposiveness—goodness of
soul, purity, strength, peace, and so forth—visible
as it were in bodily expression (as the effect of
what is internal): all that requires a union of pure
ideas of reason with great imagination even in him
who wishes only to judge of it, still more in him
who wishes to present it.43
If we leave aside specifically religious art, with its own
complications and profundities, and limit our attention instead to secular art, two candidates for the ideal of beauty in
painting immediately suggest themselves. One is a portrait
by Rembrandt. But Rembrandt’s portraits, though in the
finest instances surely representing “moral ideas that rule
men inwardly,” do not take their departure from the normal
aesthetic normal idea. Quite the contrary, the individual in
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his individuality is represented—warts and all, as we say. His
face is not the ideal type of our species. A better candidate
for the ideal of beauty is Michelangelo’s sculpture of Lorenzo
de Medici, Il Penseroso (Fig. 1). This
sculpture does not represent the Duke of
Urbino as he really looked, and probably
does not even try to represent him as he
really was. The task of making a statue of
Lorenzo for the de Medici tomb seems to
have served as the occasion for Michelangelo to present, on the foundation of the
normal aesthetic normal idea but rising
Fig. 1:
above it, the ideal of the beautiful as the
Michelangelo,
visible expression of “all that our reason
Il Pensoroso
unites with the morally good in the idea of the highest purposiveness.”
The interest, essentially practical, that we take in the ideal
of the beauty as Kant understands it, that is, as the visible expression of moral nobility, keeps the judgment pertaining to
this ideal from being a purely aesthetic judgment. The same
can be said of the interest we take in beautiful poetry. Poetry,
however so beautiful it may be, to the extent that it treats of
human concerns, cannot be the object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction, and our judgment of it is not a pure judgment of taste. And yet Kant ranks poetry as the highest of the
arts. And so we are led to an unexpected conclusion: loftiness
of beauty and purity of beauty are not identical.
Although the primary focus on of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is on the beautiful, its secondary focus is on
the sublime. Kant thinks that the beautiful exists not only in
art, but in nature as well, in flowers, gardens, landscapes, and,
of course, in the human figure. Though what Kant has to say
about natural beauty is intriguing, we have restricted our at-
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29
tention to what he has to say about beautiful art because of
its connection with genius and aesthetic ideas. We turn now
to his account of the sublime, for it too has a relation to the
moral, though one quite different from that of the beautiful
to the moral.
Whereas the beautiful is characterized by phenomenal form,
the sublime in nature is characterized by phenomenal formlessness. Kant divides the sublime into the mathematical sublime
and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime appears
as vastness: a towering mountain, a view from its summit, the
ocean in a still calm, and, most strikingly of all, the celestial
vault on a clear night. The dynamical sublime appears as power:
a cataract of water, flashes of lightening, a violent hurricane,
the ocean in full tumult. We take a certain pleasure in beholding
such things, though only when we behold them from a safe vantage point. If they place us in imminent peril, we are too frightened to take pleasure in them. But why, even if we are not
threatened, do we take any pleasure in them at all?
Kant’s answer to this question is remarkable. The mathematical sublime requires us to recognize that our physical
being is, by comparison, infinitesimally small, and the dynamical sublime requires us to recognize that our physical
being is infinitesimally weak. But at the same time the sublime leads us to recognize that in our moral being we are elevated above the whole phenomenal order. For nothing, no
threat of extinction, not even extinction itself, could cause us
to freely betray our moral principles. Some force of nature,
even a drug, could wreak such havoc on our nervous system
as to impair or even destroy the rationality that is the origin
of our moral principles. But as long as we possess our rationality, and hence our will,44 no external force or threat of force
can compel us to abuse our freedom.
The sublime in art is similar to the sublime in nature. The
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
sublime in art, however, cannot be
formless. For then it would not be
art at all, but a mess. In sublime
art, form is placed in the service of
representing vastness and power.
An example of the mathematical
sublime in art would be that part
of the façade of Saint Peter’s
Cathedral that was designed by
Michelangelo (Fig. 2).45 An example of the dynamical sublime in art
would be the first movement of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, especially that point at which, the
Fig. 2: Michaelangelo,
development having been brought Façade of St. Peter’s Cathedral
to pitch of intensity, the hushed D
minor opening is recapitulated in a blazing and thundering D
major, but in first inversion with an F-sharp in the low bass,
as though the very cosmos were exploding, or fully displaying itself for the first time.
We said earlier that the satisfaction bound up with the
judgment of taste is, according to Kant, disinterested. It is to
that extent unlike both the satisfaction one takes in the merely
pleasant and the satisfaction one takes in morally good—as
different as these latter two satisfactions most definitely are
from each other. The beautiful pleases, but it is not the merely
pleasant. And, though the beautiful can serve as the symbol
of the morally good, it is not the morally good. Nor does a
cultivated taste imply moral nobility, though an aesthetic education can, as we noted, facilitate the task of a moral education.
Aristotle says that the beginning of philosophy is wonder, especially regarding the causes of things. But, he adds,
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31
we must end in the opposite and the better state, not with
wonder about the causes of things, but with knowledge of
the causes. Knowledge is better than wonder.46 And Aristotle
seems to think that we really can know something about ultimate causes, even if we know them, not as they are essentially and in themselves, but only as the ultimate cause or
causes of what we are familiar with, of what is close at hand,
of what is not first in itself but first for us.
Kant does not think that even this attenuated knowledge
of ultimate causes is available to us. Wonder is not only the
beginning of philosophy. It is itself a kind of end, an end not
replaced by knowledge. Wonder is present in our aesthetic
experience of the beautiful and the sublime, and in a different way it is present in our moral experience as well. Wonder
is bound up even with the longed for, indeed a priori assumed, discovery of special empirical laws of nature and
their interconnection, which is not accomplished by the
human understanding’s a priori prescription of architectonic
laws to a nature in general.47 Like aesthetic experience in
general, wonder is possible only for a finite though rational
being.
Kant speaks of the wonder that emerges from the accomplishment of reason, both speculative and practical, in an impressive passage that occurs near the end of the Critique of
Practical Reason. Part of the first sentence was inscribed on
his tombstone. It is well known and frequently quoted. But
the whole passage should be better known. If the ancient
philosopher Plato often seems to be the most poetic of
philosophers, the modern philosopher Kant often seems to
be the most prosaic. And yet the passage at the end of the
Critique of Practical Reason, which can serve as a conclusion to this introduction to aesthetics, shows that there was
more poetry in Kant’s soul than one might have guessed
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solely from working one’s way along the “thorny paths” of
the Critique of Pure Reason:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe (Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht) the more often and more steadily reflection
occupies itself with them: the starry sky above me,
and the moral law within me. . . . The former begins at the place I occupy in the external world of
sense; and it broadens the connection in which I
stand into an unbounded magnitude of worlds beyond worlds and systems of systems and into the
limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their continuance. The latter begins
at my invisible self, my personality and exhibits
me in a world that has true infinity, but which is
perceptible only to the understanding, a world in
which I recognize myself as existing in a universal
and necessary (and not only, as in the first case,
contingent) connection, but thereby also in connection with all those visible worlds. The former
view, of a numberless mass of worlds, annihilates,
as it were, my importance as an animal creature,
which must give back to the planet ([itself] a mere
speck in the universe) the matter from which it
came, the matter which is for a short time provided with vital force, we know not how. The latter, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth
as that of an intelligence through my personhood,
in which the moral law reveals a life independent
of all animality and even of the whole world of
sense—at least so far as it may be gathered from
the purposive destination assigned to my existence
through this law, a destination that is not restricted
to the conditions and limitations of this life but extends into the infinite.48
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NOTES
Leo Strauss, Letter of February 26, 1961 to Helmut Kuhn, in The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2:1978, 23.
2
Greater Hippias Major 286c5
3
282d6. Cf. fn. 1 in the Greater Hippias, translated by David Sweet in
The Roots of Political Philosophy, edited by Thomas Pangle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 307.
4
At 283a1 and a9.
1
Protagoras 314b10-c8; 337c7-338b2: “meta de ton Prodokon Hippias
ho sophos eipen” ff. Cf. fn. 17 of in Sweet’s translation of the Greater
Hippias, 307.
6
Symposium 177d79-810.
7
Greater Hippias Minor 293e5.
8
The later coinage of the term “aesthetics” emerges for a reason. There
is a special connection between aesthesis, the Greek word for “sensation,”
and beauty. The beautiful, and the sublime too, are present in sensory experience, even if something super-sensible shines through them. For this
reason the expressions “the aesthetically beautiful” and “the morally
noble” can both be used to translate the two distinct but related senses of
the expression to kalon.
9
294d1.
10
295c3 and; d9; 296e2. Note the introduction of power (or that which is
powerful, to dynaton) at 295e5, and the grouping of the helpful, the useful, and “the power to make something good” at 297d4.
5
Hippias Major 297e4-298a8.; Cf. Phaedrus 250d1-e1.
12
Greek Mathematics and the Origin of Algebra, translated by Eva Brann
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968), 79-99.
13
Immanuel Kant, Werke in Zehn Bänden, hereafter Werke, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981),
Band 8, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 295-298. (English translation, Critique
of Judgment, translated by J. H. Bernard, (New York: Haffner Press,
1951), 51-54. Pagination for in this translation will hereafter be given immediately following the German pagination and separated from it by a
slash. I have made some alterations in the translation in the interest of
greater literalness.)
11
14
The concept beautiful is nonetheless predicated of the object; it is not
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
predicated of the subject. But, for Kant, it is predicated of the object only
because of what it occasions in the subject. And yet the object would not
occasion this effect were it not, in itself so to speak, already characterized
by perfection of composition, simplicity of means and richness of effects,
radiance and mutual illumination of whole and parts or, in the language
of Thomas Aquinas, integritas, consonantia, and claritas (Summa Theologiae 1, Question 39, Article 8, corpus). Kant’s argument in the Critique
of Judgment does not presuppose the particulars of the case he makes for
the a priori constitution of nature via transcendental subjectivity in the
Critique of Pure Reason. On the contrary, beautiful objects, just like special empirical laws of nature, are not deducible from the architectonic
laws of a nature in general that he argues are prescribed to it a priori by
the human understanding. The exact source of the special laws of nature
as such is as mysterious as the exact source of beauty. It remains a problem that, though taken up again in the “Introduction” to the Critique of
Judgment, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and in
the Opus Postumum, is never fully solved by Kant. “For who can entirely
draw out from nature her secret?” Werke, Band 8, 316/70.
15
In the case of a really fine wine, one goes so far as to speak of structure,
balance, and bouquet, borrowing terms from architecture and floral
arrangements. Still, one does not call the taste of the wine, but only its
looks, beautiful. The same can be said of fine pipe tobacco. It may look
beautiful in the tin, but no one says that it tastes or smells beautiful.
Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 6.
17
Werke, Band 8, 281/39.
18
Ibid., Werke, 311/66; 314/69. We shall consider the ideal of beauty
below.
16
Symposium 206e1-207a3.
Cf. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953), 128.
19
20
Werke, Band 8, 462-463/200.
22
From “Thoughts on Kant,” a Friday-night lecture given at St. John’s
College, Annapolis, in the spring of 1979. This lecture, which Mr. McDonald delivered from notes, was recorded, and each library on the two
campuses of St. John’s has a compact disk of it. I listened to the lecture
more than once in gearing up to write the present essay, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding Kant’s project
in its full scope.
21
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“Shakespeare wrote at a time when common sense still taught . . . that
the function of the great poet was to teach what is truly beautiful by means
of pleasure.” Allen Bloom and Harry Jaffa, Shakespeare’s Politics
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 6. Kant would say
that this formulation (whether or not it is what common sense taught in
Shakespeare’s time, which one can doubt) gets the relationship between
beauty and pleasure exactly backwards. The function of the great poet is
to teach what is truly pleasant by means of beauty, inasmuch as the truly
pleasant—more precisely what is pleasant to a rational animal as such—
presupposes the recognition that what is under consideration is aesthetically beautiful, or, for that matter, morally noble.
23
Werke, Band 8, 417-420/160-163. This spirit can be thought without
contradiction as being divine in origin.
24
Werke, Band 8, 406-410/151-153.
Ion 543d7-10.
27
Quoted by Gershom Scholem in “Revelation and Tradition as Religious
Categories” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, (New York: Schocken
Books, 1971), 303.
28
Letter of August 20, 1946, to Karl Löwith. The force that Strauss speaks
of in this clause cannot be easily distinguished, in the case of the genius,
from the “creation” to which he refers, within quotation marks, in the preceding clause.
25
26
Werke, Band 8, 405-406/150.
30
Werke, Band 8, 408/152.
31
Eric Heller, “The Broken Tradition: An Address,” in The Age of Prose,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 31.
29
Werke, Band 8, 413-414/157.
“Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are
blind” (Critique of Pure Reason B 75, Werke, Band 3, 98). “An object is
that in whose concept the manifold of a given intuition is united” (ibid.,
B 137, Werke, Band 3, 139). “It is one and the same spontaneity, which
[in the synthesis of apprehension] under name of the imagination, and [in
the synthesis of apperception, under the name] of the understanding,
brings combination into the manifold of intuition” (ibid., B 162 note,
Werke, Band 3, 155).
34
Werke, Band 8, 417/160.
35
Werke, Band 8, 423/165-166.
32
33
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
From Number 56 in “Caelica,” Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited
by Thom Gunn, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 85.
36
From Sonnet 5 of the First Series, 1854-1860, in The Complete Poems
of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited by N. Scott Momaday, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 5.
37
From “Afterwards,” in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, edited
by James Gibson, (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 553. Particularly fine
studies on the poetry of Greville, Tuckerman, and Hardy, among others,
can be found in Yvor Winter’s Forms of Discovery (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1967).
39
On the quite different, even opposed, ways in which great poetry and
great painting stimulate the imagination, see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s
magnificent study, Laokoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry
(1766).
38
Werke, Band 6, 156.
41
Werke, Band 8, 314/69. Compare Critique of Pure Reason B 595-598.
For Kant, an aesthetic judgment in the strict sense is singular (Werke,
Band 8, 293-294/49-50). The individual per se is not the concern of science. (Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 81b8: there is no scientific knowledge, no epistēmē, of singulars—though for a possible exception to this
general rule see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1, Question 1, Articles 2-8). But the individual per se is very much the concern of fine art.
One reason why Plato so frequently gets called a “poet” is that he presents
his teaching through the voices of flesh and blood individuals, Socrates
chief among them. Dostoyevsky goes somewhat further in this direction:
“[T]he image of the [Dostoyevskian] hero is inseparably linked with the
image of an idea and cannot be detached from it. We see the hero in the idea
and through the idea, and we see the idea in him and through him. . . . [W]hat
is important is not the ordinary qualifications of a person’s character or actions, but rather the index of a person’s devotion to an idea in the deepest
recesses of his personality.” Mikail Bakhtin, “The Idea in Dostoyevsky,”
in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, (edited and translated by Caryl
Emerson in Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 87. Cf. infra, fn. 44.
40
Werke, Band 8, 315/70.
Werke, Band 8, 318/72.
44
“Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being
has the capacity to act according to the idea (Vorstellung) of law, i.e., ac42
43
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37
cording to principles, [and so has] a will.” Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in Werke, Band 6, 41.
45
See Ralph Lieberman, “Bramante and Michelangelo at St. Peter’s,” The
St. John’s Review 40.1 (1990-91), 1-38. Our Fig.2 is Fig. 37 in Lieberman’s article. He submits it in support of the following perspicuous observation: “Michelangelo’s predecessors at the church, even the most
gifted of them, could merely build big; he solved the problem of St.
Peter’s because he could think big” (35-37).
Metaphysics 982b11-21; 983a12-20. Cf. Plato, Theaetetus 155d1-8.
47
Critique of Pure Reason B 164-165; Critique of Judgment inerke, Band
8, 260- 267/17-25. Cf. fn. 14 supra.
46
48
Werke, Band 6, 300.
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38
Passion and Perception in
Mozart’s Magic Flute
Peter Kalkavage
Mozart leads us deep into the realm of spirits. Dread
lies all about us, but withholds its torments and becomes more an intimation of infinity.
—E. T. A. Hoffman on Mozart’s
Symphony No. 39
This essay is an excursion into the world of Mozart’s Magic
Flute. My focus will be the aria “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd
schön,” “This image is enchantingly beautiful.” One of the
most exquisite love songs ever written, it occurs early in the
opera and is sung by Prince Tamino as he gazes upon a likeness of Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night and
Tamino’s destined Other.
Mozart’s final opera, written in the last year of his short
life, is a musical meditation on large themes: love, friendship,
marriage, the human and the divine, world-order, virtue and
vice, light and darkness, lust, resentment, vengeance, illusion
and disillusionment, hardship, despair, trials, death, and reconciliation—all this in the context of a bizarre fairy tale that
is by turns solemn, light-hearted, homiletic, dire, ceremonial,
and slapstick. The Magic Flute is a magical work that reflects
on magic, especially the magic that is music. It offers us a
perfect opportunity to examine the elements, principles, and
causes of musical phenomena in an admirably distilled and
lucid form.
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This essay
was first delivered as a lecture at Thomas Aquinas College on 11 November 2011.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | KALKAVAGE
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The Magic Flute has been called Mozart’s “Masonic
opera,” and so it is. Mozart was a serious Freemason. So was
his librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, at whose Viennese theatre the work was first produced and who was the first to play
the birdman, Papageno. The opera—or rather Singspiel, “play
with songs”—is filled with the ideals, symbols, terms, rituals,
and numerology of Freemasonry.1 The Masonic Three is especially prominent: three flats in the key signature, Three
Ladies, Three Boys, Three temples, and, of course, three
tones in the major triad, which Mozart celebrates in the middle of the Overture and throughout the opera.2 The sovereign
Three is the major triad, which Mozart highlights in various
ways throughout the opera. I say all this now because the Masonic influence, though pervasive, will not be my concern. I
want to focus instead on the power—and, as I hope to show,
the wisdom—of Mozart’s music.
Part One: The Story
The plot of the Magic Flute is strange, to say the least, and
often confusing. Since it may be unfamiliar to some of you,
I will go through it briefly.
Our story begins with Prince Tamino, lost in the dark
wood of C minor and pursued by a giant serpent.3 He carries
a bow but no arrows. Three Ladies who work for the Queen
of the Night slay the serpent and give Tamino a portrait of
the Queen’s daughter, which causes the prince to fall in love
and to express his feeling in the aria we are about to examine.
By this time, he has heard Papageno sing his lusty birdcatcher song. The Queen majestically appears. She tells a sad
story about her daughter’s abduction by Sarastro, and sends
Tamino on a mission to rescue Pamina from this fiend.
Tamino is given a magic flute, and Papageno, now Tamino’s
sidekick, is given silver chimes. The flute inverts the dark
passions of its listeners: its magic turns sadness to smiles,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
cold-heartedness to love. Flute and chimes will protect the
two friends, who are also assigned guiding spirits: Three
Boys who are said to be “young, beautiful, gracious, and
wise.”
In the next scene, we meet Pamina. Her cruel treatment
at the hands of the slaves and the Moor Monostatos (“he who
stands alone”) suggests that Sarastro is indeed a villain and
tyrant. Papageno arrives ahead of Tamino. He and Pamina
become fast friends, as the birdman tells her about his longing
for a mate and the young prince who is on his way to rescue
her. The princess and the birdman sing a graceful 6/8 duet in
E-flat major. It is an ode to marriage. “Man and Woman,
Woman and Man,” they sing, “reach unto divinity.”
This brings us to the Finale of Act I. Having arrived at
the stronghold of Sarastro,Tamino enters the Temple of Wisdom and meets a priest, who tells him he will never achieve
the reward of love and virtue while he burns with death and
vengeance. The priest disabuses Tamino of his false opinion
about Sarastro, who rules in this Temple. Tamino is told that
many of his questions must for now remain unanswered. One
thing he does learn: Pamina is alive.
His spirits renewed, Tamino plays his flute, as wild animals gather and listen, their impulses tamed by the flute’s
warbling. Papageno and Pamina arrive, but before they find
Tamino, Monostatos and the slaves arrest them. Papageno
plays his silver chimes and, for the moment, charms his
would-be captors. Then Sarastro enters, as the chorus sings:
“Hail, Sarastro! He it is to whom we joyfully submit!” Pamina, resolved to tell the truth, confesses her guilt. She gives
Sarastro two reasons for her escape: the Moor’s lustful advances and the sweet sound of her mother’s name. Sarastro
cuts her off. Her mother is a proud woman, he says: a man
must guide Pamina’s heart. Monostatos drags in Tamino, and
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he and Pamina see each other in person for the first time.
Monostatos thinks he has earned a reward but is brutally disappointed. Sarastro sentences him to seventy-seven strokes
on the soles of his feet. As Monostatos is led off, the chorus
resumes its song of praise. Tamino and Papageno are then
taken to the Temple of Probation to be purified.
Act II begins with Sarastro’s prayer to Isis and Osiris. He
asks the deities to send the spirit of wisdom to the young couple, along with patience in the upcoming trials. If Tamino and
Pamina succeed, they will have proved themselves worthy of
one another and of acceptance into the priesthood. The male
hegemony will be transformed through marriage. It will incorporate Woman into the ruling class—a bold move on the
part of Mozart and Schikaneder, since women were not allowed to become full-fledged Freemasons.4
Tamino and Papageno go through the first trial together.
They resist the temptations of the Three Ladies, who now appear in their true, demonic form. Meanwhile, the Queen of
the Night comes to Pamina and is similarly unmasked. She
gives Pamina a dagger and commands her to murder Sarastro.5 “The vengeance of hell,” she sings, “boils in my heart.”
If Pamina refuses, her mother will cast her off forever. After
the Queen leaves, Monostatos enters. He has heard everything about the planned murder and blackmails Pamina, who
can save herself and her mother only by yielding to his lust.
When Pamina refuses, Monostatos says: “Then die!” As he
raises the dagger to kill her, Sarastro enters and holds him
back. He dismisses the Moor and reassures Pamina with an
aria that is warm, regal, and deep-sounding. Pamina need not
fear that Sarastro will take vengeance on her mother. In these
sacred halls, he says, vengeance is unknown, and the spirit
of friendship and forgiveness reigns supreme.
Tamino and Papageno must again endure a test: this time
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they must remain silent in the face of all temptation to speak.
Papageno has a comic interchange with an old woman who
brings him water. She is about to reveal her name when a
thunderclap calls her away. The Three Boys come on the
scene and hand Tamino and Papageno their instruments. The
flute attracts Pamina, who arrives to find her beloved sad and
silent. She takes this as a sign that Tamino no longer loves
her. She sings of her despair in a deeply tragic aria, which
sadly mimics the lilting 6/8 rhythm of Pamina’s marriage
duet with Papageno.6
Sarastro tells Tamino that two “dangerous trials” remain.
Pamina is summoned, only to be separated from Tamino, who
goes off to face the test alone. Meanwhile, the old woman returns to Papageno and gets him to promise marriage, at which
point she is magically transformed into Papagena—a female
Papageno! But when Papageno tries to embrace her, she is
led away by an official who tells her that Papageno is not yet
worthy of her. Papageno and Pamina are now paired once
again, but in contrast to their duet, in which they sang joyfully
about the blessings of marriage, this time they sing separately
about their loneliness and despair. Both attempt suicide, but
they are stopped by the Three Boys, who rekindle Pamina’s
hope by informing her that Tamino is waiting for her.
Tamino prepares for his first dangerous trial, thinking that
he must go it alone. He hears Pamina’s voice. “Tamino, stop,”
she calls, “I must see you!” The two Men in Armour—who
gravely warn Tamino about the need to be purified by the
four elements, and to conquer the fear of death—switch to a
jolly tune once Pamina shows up. They tell the pair to enter
the Temple hand in hand. Pamina vows never to leave
Tamino’s side and to face whatever hardships come their way.
“I myself will lead you,” she says, “love will guide me.” She
urges Tamino to play his flute, so that by the power of music
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they may “walk joyfully through death’s dark night.”7 After
they endure the tests of fire and water, the chorus greets them
with a song of triumph.
The scene shifts to Papageno. After preventing his suicide, the Three Boys remind Papageno about his magic
chimes. The chimes play, and Papagena appears. The pair
sing a courtship duet suited to their birdy nature. They take
turns repeating the opening syllable of their names—“Pa, pa,
pa”—in a musicalized rendition of panting. They sing about
all the offspring they plan to have.
But a menace looms. Monostatos, the Queen, and the
Three Ladies march on the temple, supported by a threatening
accompaniment in the key of C minor. Thunder and lightning
defeat them, and they are plunged into “eternal night.” The
scene then shifts to the Temple of the Sun, as Sarastro stands
on high, and Tamino and Pamina appear dressed in priestly
vestments. “The sun’s rays,” he says, “drive away the night,
destroy the stolen power of the hypocrites.” At the end, a jubilant chorus hails the two initiates and offers thanks to Isis
and Osiris. “Strength,” they sing, “conquers and crowns, as
a reward, beauty and wisdom with an eternal crown.”
Part Two: The Unfolding of a Song
We love music because of how it makes us feel. We listen to
some works more than others because we want to experience,
again and again, the feelings they stir in us. But feeling is not
primary in music, nor is it always the reason why we listen.
Sometimes we listen to a piece of music because we wish to
hear a quality or perfection that is present in it. The reason
for listening is an active, even strenuous, contemplation
through which we participate in, and unite with, the life and
shape of the musical object—not the emotion the object
arouses.8 Our feelings, in any case, are grounded in, and
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prompted by, what we perceive in the tones; they are rooted
in what is there in the phenomenon we call music. As we now
turn to Tamino’s aria, I shall make the attempt to say what is
there.
Tamino’s aria is inspired, as we know, by an image of
Pamina, or, as we might call it, given Tamino’s fervent devotional response, an icon. The image is said to be magical,
but it surely needs no magic beyond Pamina’s likeness to enchant the young prince, who sings as if caught up in a dream.
The words to his song are as follows:
This image is enchantingly beautiful,
such as no eye has ever seen!
I feel it, how this divine portrait
Fills my heart with new emotions.
I cannot name this,
yet I feel it here burning like fire;
Could the feeling be love?
Yes, yes, it is love alone!
O, if only I could find her!
O, if she were standing before me!
I would, warm and pure . . . what would I?
Enraptured I would press her to this burning breast,
And forever would she be mine.
Tamino’s words trace out a progression in three stages: first,
he admires a divine image; second, he asks whether the feeling it inspires in him, and which at first he cannot name, is
love, but then affirms that it must be love; and third, he wonders what he would do if the beloved were standing before
him, concluding that he would press her to his breast, and she
would be his forever.
Tamino is doing more in this song than expressing his
feelings. He beholds his inner state and makes it an object of
reflection. He wonders at the power of the magical object that
he perceives and his passionate response to it. He does not
immediately identify his new emotion with love but rather
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reaches that conclusion through inner dialogue and questioning. Mozart’s music perfectly expresses the stages of Tamino’s
response, the meaning of his words, and the motions of his
soul.
The music that accompanies these words is one of
Mozart’s greatest love songs. Young listeners are sometimes
put off by the aria, as if embarrassed by Tamino’s heart-onthe-sleeve outpouring of feeling. It is easy to be condescending toward Tamino, who is young, naïve, and not very bright.
He lacks irony.9 His aria, nevertheless, towers above immature judgment and puts it to shame. As a musical object, a
work of art, the song is gorgeous, brilliant in its shadow play,
and deep. It is also truthful—a faithful rendering of the
human soul in one of its most profound shapes. Do we want
to know what it is like for a young, noble soul to experience
romantic love for the first time? If so, then we should immerse ourselves in the aria—in what tones can tell us about
love.
My musical starting-point is the observation that “Dies
Bildnis” is a precisely formed, perfectly balanced whole.
Tamino is agitated and confused. But his music, though passionate, is restrained, stately, and inward-sounding.10 It expresses his awareness, not just his feeling. The music critic
and writer of tales E. T. A. Hoffmann once said that Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven all had the musical virtue of “Besonnenheit.”11 The word means something like rational awareness, sensibleness, being in one’s right mind. Tamino’s aria,
with its beautiful melding of feeling and form, passion and
restraint, is a superb example of this virtue.12
The song is in E-flat major—the solemn, heroic key of
the opera—and has a moderately slow, two-beat measure. It
is scored for strings, clarinets, bassoons, and French horns
(no flutes or oboes). Their sound is like a warm glow ema-
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nating from Tamino’s heart. The aria is in a truncated version
of sonata form. It follows the usual tripartite structure of the
sonata—exposition, development, and recapitulation—inasmuch as its key-area plan goes from tonic to dominant and
then back to the tonic; but there is no repeat of the opening
theme as is customary in the sonata. Unlike song-form, which
is also tripartite, the sonata emphasizes the progressive, forward-moving unfolding of musical ideas. Circularity is
achieved, but only at the end. Along the way, the tones move
in a linear, arrow-like trajectory.13
The opening sound: a tender statement of the E-flat major
triad spelled out in dotted rhythms and played by the strings.
Clearly, the singer we are about to hear—unlike Papageno,
with his bouncy bird-catcher song—is noble. Tamino’s first
utterance is a leap on the words “Dies Bildnis,” “This
image”—a rising major sixth from scale degree 5 up to scale
degree 3 (B-flat up to G). This tonal leap expresses an event
in Tamino’s soul, the passionate wonder inspired by Pamina’s
likeness.14 When his sentence is spoken in German, the accent
is on “schön,” “beautiful”—“Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd
schön.” Mozart’s melody shifts the accent to “Bildnis,”
“image,” leaving no doubt that for Tamino the focus is on
what he sees, on the source and cause of his surging passion.15
After the inspired leap from 5 to 3, the melody gently descends by steps, pausing on degree 4 (A-flat), an unstable degree that tends downward toward 3. The musical phrase
corresponds to the first phrase of the sentence: “This image
is enchantingly beautiful.” As Tamino moves to the second
part of his sentence—“as no eye has ever seen”—he sings a
second rising sixth—from 4 up to 2, A-flat to F. He then descends by steps to 3, the tone to which his earlier 4 was pointing. Whereas the first phrase landed on a tone that was
unstable and “wanted” to move, the second complements the
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first and brings it to rest. The two phrases, thanks to the postponement of the move from 4 to 3, form a single phrase—
not two sets of tones but one coherent movement composed
of two sub-movements.16 The entire phrase is bounded by an
octave that extends from the high 3, to which Tamino leaps,
to the low 3, to which he descends by step.
Mozart’s musical language is that of tonal harmony. This
means that the music is firmly grounded in a tonal center, the
tone to which all the other tones point, and has a background
or underpinning in the movement of what we call “chords.”
We can say that this movement is an accompaniment to the
melody, but it is more precise to say that the harmony is the
structured movement that interprets the melody and reveals
its depth.17 Harmony is present in the two-part phrase we have
just examined. The harmonic movement is from the I chord,
or tonic, to the V7 chord, or dominant seventh, and back again
to I—a musical oscillation. This works because the instability
and tension of the V7 chord has a precise direction: it points
unambiguously to the I chord, in this case the E-flat major
triad. And so, we can regard Mozart’s opening two-part
phrase as the cooperation of melody and harmony, or rather
as the unity of two simultaneous kinds of tension that beget
movement: the melodic tension of individual tones and the
harmonic tension of chords. It is possible to argue that these
directed tensions and their various relations to one another
are the primary object of musical perception, that to listen to
music, at least in the tradition of tonal harmony, is to perceive
not pitches per se but forces—dynamic qualities that manifest themselves in and through pitches and hold the piece
together.18
After the opening phrase, which goes harmonically from
I to V and back again, the tones open up and move forward.
This effect is due largely to the harmony, which, having so
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far confined itself to I-V7-I, now moves to the IV chord, or
subdominant, a chord that signals the “away” move in a tonal
journey, as well as a certain leisureliness and lessening of harmonic tension. Tamino moves from the picture to his inner
state: “I feel it, I feel it, how this divine portrait fills my heart
with new emotions.” As he says “I feel it, I feel it,” he sings
appoggiaturas on “feel”—B-natural to C, then A-natural to
B-flat. Appoggiaturas are leaning tones, unstable tones on
strong beats, which briefly delay the arrival of a main tone
in the melody. The effect is an increased expressivity, an inflection perfectly suited to Tamino’s word “feel.” The accompaniment echoes the heartfelt leaning tones: as Tamino leans
into his feeling, the entire string section leans as though in
sympathy with him.
Right after his appoggiaturas, Tamino speaks of his heart,
“Herz,” and the new emotions that have been aroused in it.
He expresses an outburst on “Götterbild,” “divine portrait,”
with a second dramatic leap, this time from B-flat up to Aflat, the highest tone of his song. The interval, a minor seventh, is an even bigger leap than his opening sixth. The
melody here outlines part of the V7 or dominant-seventh
chord. The music does not resolve this tense chord, which
points to the tonic, but rather stresses it and lingers on it.
When the tonic chord finally arrives, it is not the end of
the previous phrase but the beginning of a new one. Now past
his initial outburst, Tamino retreats to a calmer, more inward
mood as he completes his sentence: “fills my heart with new
emotions.” The accompaniment is measured and lovely, like
the gentle strumming of a guitar: bass note, chord / bass note,
chord. The harmony takes us on a little musical journey, as
the melody above begins and ends on scale degree 1, that is,
E-flat. The sequence of chords here—I6, IV, I6/4, V7—arouses
the expectation that the tense V7chord will resolve to the
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tonic, which would fit with the E-flat, or scale degree 1, in
the melody. But this does not happen. When Tamino sings
his E-flat on “füllt,” “fills” (which in German closely resembles “fühlt,” “feels”), the harmony subverts the expected closure. It interprets this E-flat as part of a dissonant diminished
seventh chord based on A-natural. The tones seem to have
gone off course.
We have here a so-called deceptive cadence: we expect
the cadence to reach its end, but the harmony takes a detour
at the last minute and puts instability (in this case, extreme
instability) in place of stability. This creates tension and the
need for continued movement—for a repeat of the formula
that will finally reach its destination. This is in fact what happens. The unexpected and darkly passionate diminished-seventh chord is an applied dominant (or secondary dominant).
This is a dominant that tenses toward a chord other than the
tonic, in this case, to the V7 chord of E-flat: a B-flat dominant
seventh chord. As Tamino rises up stepwise to his E-flat on
“fills,” the tones fill the measure with a mounting passion.
On this word, three kinds of musical tension unite in a single
chord: deceptive cadence, applied dominant, diminished seventh chord. Tamino’s unassuming E-flat in the melody does
not reveal the depth of the word he sings or of the passion it
expresses. But the harmony does: it interprets Tamino’s Eflat and releases in it an unexpected possibility.19 This harmonic inflection of a melodic tone recalls what Wagner said
about harmony in general: that it is “the first thing that fully
persuades the feeling as to the emotional content of [the]
melody, which otherwise would leave to it something undertermined.”20 The more we perceive the structure and detail of
this flawless movement of tones when Tamino first sings the
word “fills:—this marriage of melody and harmony—the
more intimately we move with it, know it for what it is.21
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Right after the deceptive cadence, the first violins, as if
inspired by Tamino, sing rising phrases that form a gentle
two-part wave: up and down, higher up and down. Their
tones outline the degrees of the B-flat7 chord, to which the
diminished-seventh chord was pointing. With this move, the
tones regain their direction in the musical journey.
The dominant seventh chord spelled out by the first violins gently leads Tamino to repeat his sentence, this time with
musical closure. Again he sings his passionate rising sixth
from B-flat to G on the words “mein Herz,” “my heart,” and
then goes even higher—to his A-flat. He ends his phrase with
a smooth 3→2→1. The harmony here traverses a complete
cycle or journey, at the end aligning itself with Tamino’s Eflat: I, ii6, I6/4, V7, I. I observe in passing that this conventional
symbolism, which is admittedly useful for analysis, conceals
the true phenomenon, which is not a succession of separate
tone-stacks but rather a continuous movement of closely related phases: starting-point (I), stepping away (ii6), preparing
to point back (I6/4), pointing back (V7), and being back (I).22
Moreover, the cadence formula is not tacked on but grows,
as if organically, from what has come before. Not a device
that merely stops movement, it is a true telos, the gratifying
completion of Tamino’s opening 16-measure period.
Throughout my discussion I have emphasized musical
tension. Indeed, the Greek word for tone, tonos, derives from
the verb tenein, to stretch or strain. Tonal music makes sense,
even to the untutored ear, because we directly perceive the
continuity and the whole formed by the interrelation of musical tensions. Precise expectations are aroused, postponed,
and ultimately fulfilled. Tonal harmony may thus be characterized as erotic, as constituting a musical universe animated
by a desire or longing that is present in the tones themselves.23
That is perhaps why the tones can arouse longing in the per-
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ceptive-passionate listener. In the tones we hear the strains
of our souls: the music gives them coherent shape and represents them as objects for our contemplation.24
Right after his opening 16-measure period, Tamino
pauses, as clarinets in gentle thirds take us into a new section
of the exposition. Here the music changes key from E-flat to
B-flat, from I to V. This is a standard move for a sonata-form
piece in a major key. But it is not an imposition of a prefabricated abstract schema. It is rather an organic, natural continuation of musical movement. I and V are intimately
related: they are neighbours on the circle of fifths. Also, V is
the harmonic degree that points to I. Finally, in the music of
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, V functions as a sort of
counter-pole—an opposite that competes with I for tonal supremacy.25 In our present case, we should note, above all, how
E-flat is dislodged and B-flat established as the new tonic.
The upper clarinet goes from G to F, that is, from 3 to 2 in E
flat, and then repeats the F. Had it gone from G to F and on
to E-flat, the key of E-flat would have been maintained:
3→2→1. It is the emphasis on 2 that subtly begins to move
the harmony from I to V. It blocks the move to E-flat as scale
degree 1, and begins to set up F as degree 5 of our new key,
B-flat. The appearance among the tones of A-natural, scale
degree 7 in the B-flat scale, solidifies this move.
Earlier, Tamino sang his appoggiaturas and the orchestra
followed. Now the reverse happens. The upper clarinet introduces a new musical strain, which Tamino follows, as if inspired by it. “I cannot name this,” he sings, “yet I feel it here
burning like fire” (“Dies Etwas kann ich zwar nicht nennen;
doch fühl ich’s hier wie Feuer brennen”). In imitation of the
clarinet, Tamino begins on his high G (now scale degree 6)
and descends stepwise. His gently undulating phrase ends
with a leaning tone (C-sharp leaning into D) on the word
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“nennen,” “name.” He then repeats the phrase, with a slight
variation, on the words “yet I feel it here burning like fire.”
The harmony is simple: oscillation between the tonic (now
B-flat) and the dominant (now F).
A brief transition in dotted rhythms, played by clarinets
and bassoons, takes us to Tamino’s first question, which he
stresses by singing it twice: “Could the feeling be love?”
(“Soll die Empfindung Liebe sein?”) Both phrases end on
tense chords: the first on an applied dominant (the V7 of V),
the second on the dominant of B-flat (an F major triad). This
harmonic tension—this upward-tending interrogative gesture—is reflected in the melody. Tamino’s first utterance of
his question outlines the B-flat triad and ends on an E-natural,
a tone foreign to B-flat (the F at the top of the triad becomes
a leaning tone to the E). His second utterance begins with a
downward leap from G to B-flat (the inverse of his opening
sixth) and ends on the unstable scale degree 2. The E-natural
with which Tamino ends the first utterance of his question is
especially affecting: “Could this feeling be love (“Liebe
sein”)?” The chromatic E-natural (highlighted by the preceding F as leaning tone), the applied dominant of which it is a
part (C7), and the florid notes of the first violin all sound as
though a light were beginning to dawn, as though the question “Could this be love?” was more than just a question. The
anticipation of the answer is heightened by the brief interlude
played by the clarinets. Their rising phrases in dotted rhythms
give Tamino his cue. His “Ja, ja!” completes the sequence of
upward melodic gestures.
Tamino answers his question: “Yes, yes, it is love alone,
love, love, it is love alone.” He utters the word “Liebe,”
“love,” four times in all—three times with an expressive leaning tone and once with a climactic flourish called a “turn.”
At the end of his first phrase (right after “Ja, ja!”), Tamino
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sings a straightforward 3→2→1 (D→C→B-flat) on the word
“allein,” “alone” or “only.” But the harmony undercuts the
stability of his final B-flat with a deceptive cadence. Instead
of V→I, we get V→VI, where VI is a minor chord. Musically, this is a subtle way of extending the phrase and producing the need to move on. Also, the minor VI adds a gently
dark inflection and fervor to the word “allein.” But the deceptive cadence may also suggest, in this case, that Tamino’s
certitude is doubtful, that he is still in the dark about what he
is feeling, just as he is ignorant of what it really means to
love.
As Tamino repeats his sentence (“It is love alone”), he
dwells on “Liebe” and makes it into its own musical phrase
in three parts: first a leap that gently descends by step, then
this same phrase repeated, and finally an embellished ascent
to a high G. The chord on this G is a dramatic diminished
seventh chord that points to the F major triad, the V of B-flat.
Both melody and harmony are at this point up in the air, begging for resolution. The eighth-note rest that follows heightens the suspense. After the rest, tension is released, as Tamino
completes his sentence: he drops more than an octave to an
F and proceeds by step to B-flat, scale degree 1, this time supported rather than undercut by the accompanying harmony.
The cadence, embellished by a turn played by the first violins,
brings the section to a close. It provides the release that the
preceding deceptive cadence had postponed.
We now enter the development or middle section of the
aria. I think you will agree that although not much time has
passed, much has happened. We have perceived the unfolding
of a musical idea that expresses the unfolding of Tamino’s
enraptured soul: music has given us access to the soul that
words alone cannot give. That the tones are embarking on a
new large section of the piece is signalled by a pronounced
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shift to quicker rhythms in the accompaniment. The tonal
drama now has more forward momentum. Up to this point,
it has been pretty much a matter of beautiful phrases in starts
and stops. This new section as a whole, this middle of the
aria, is the point of maximum tension—the crux of the tonal
drama. As we put ourselves into this extended moment of
mounting tension, we are unsure of where the tones will go.
How will the tones end this section and lead into the recapitulation? How will the recapitulation resolve all the tensions
that have built up in the course of the song?
The quicker rhythms in sixteenth- and thirty-second notes
are played by the strings. The winds enter with a recurring
pattern of syncopations or offbeat rhythms. Underneath this
dense rhythmic complex, the bass viols provide support with
a persistent B-flat in sixteenth-notes (a so-called pedal point).
They are the quickened pulse and heartbeat of this part of
Tamino’s music. Mozart brilliantly adds yet another rhythmic
element that heightens tension: he has the first violins surge
upward in thirty-second-notes grouped in quick pairs, followed by a rapid succession of appoggiaturas. These leaning
tones then take over and become the principal theme of the
violins. They are like little flutters of the heart produced by
heightened expectation. All the rhythms together form a complex musical image of the surging yet reflective passion that
leads Tamino to his second, more pressing question: “O, if
only I could find her! O, if only she were standing before me!
I would, warm and pure . . .what would I?”
The melody here begins as a stepwise ascent, which
Tamino then repeats, from B-flat, that is, scale degree 1, to
the high A-flat. Could this A-flat be hinting that we are already on our way back to the home key of E-flat major, or is
it just part of an applied dominant? When Tamino sings the
A-flat to complete his sentence “O, if only I could find her,”
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he outlines three-fourths of the dominant seventh chord that
points to E-flat (the pitches he sings are A-flat, F, and D). But
the harmony does not go to E-flat. The tones seem to be
caught in a region of harmonic indeterminacy, which is highlighted as Tamino repeats the same phrase with the same harmony. As he approaches his second question, he breaks the
pattern and sings a perfect fourth from C up to F on “ich
würde” (“I would”), then another perfect fourth from B-flat
up to E-flat on “würde” repeated. The repetition alone suggests that Tamino is suspended in mid-thought by the indeterminacy of his feelings and intentions. His melodic
indeterminacy is echoed and strengthened by the accompaniment, which here plays mysterious, dusky sounding measures with a flurry of chromatic appoggiaturas. When Tamino
sings “warm and pure,” he uses a warm-sounding G-flat on
“warm.” The harmony interprets this G-flat as part of a diminished seventh chord on A-natural, scale degree 7 of Bflat. This chord points to the B-flat major triad. The tones
seem to have found their direction, their tonal center, in scale
degree 1 of B-flat. But as Tamino now utters his second question (“what would I?”), he ends his phrase by falling a major
sixth from F down to the A-flat an octave below the A-flat
we heard earlier. The gesture is an anticlimax, coming as it
does after Tamino’s three dramatic rising phrases: two ascents
to A-flat and one to G-flat. The gesture suggests a momentary
deflation—rising confidence that is suddenly at a loss. The
low A-flat blocks the reassertion of B-flat as key. It is part of
a B-flat7 chord, the dominant seventh of E-flat major, our
home key. Tamino’s question “What would I?”, melodically
a deflating fall from F to A-flat, finds a fitting harmonic expression in an upward gesture of incompleteness—an unresolved V7 chord that leaves this entire section of the aria
hanging.
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The intense anticipation that has built up is further emphasized by the full measure of rest that follows. It is the
longest, most dramatic pause in a song full of pauses. The
soundless measure is no mere absence. It is an active nonbeing—the tense non-being of eros, that greatest and most
potent of all human tensions, the tension music seems
uniquely suited to express.
Once again, the orchestra leads the way, as the bass viols
play a constant E-flat in sixteenth notes and the violas play
an oscillating figure called an Alberti bass in thirty-second
notes. This confirms that the B-flat7 on which Tamino’s question ended was indeed the V7 of E-flat. We have returned to
the home key, and the recapitulation has begun. In this final
section of his song, Tamino, with rising self-confidence, answers his second question: “I would press her to this burning
breast, and forever would she be mine.” The harmony is refreshingly determinate. We know where we are—firmly
planted in E-flat major—as the harmony oscillates repeatedly
between I and V7. We are hearing a tonal homecoming.
Tamino’s melody is straightforward: first, a little melodic
wave that starts on a B-flat and rises to E-flat through an appoggiatura on F—“ich würde sie” (“I would her”)—then the
same melodic phrase repeated—“voll Ent-zü-cken” (“enraptured” or “utterly thrilled”). His next phrase, which begins
similarly, introduces a pattern of skips and ends on a chromatic D-flat: “an diesen heißen Busen drücken” (“press to
this burning or heated breast”). The E-flat to D-flat on
“drücken,” “press,” captures the act of pressing. This chromatic tone tenses forward. It conspires with the tones in the
accompaniment to form a I7 chord, that is, the E-flat major
triad with D-flat as a destabilizing seventh. The I7, which interprets and deepens Tamino’s D-flat, is an applied or passing
dominant that pushes into the final phrase of the aria: “und
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ewig wäre sie dann mein,” “and forever would she be mine.”
Tamino repeats this final phrase five times in all, three
times with the upbeat “und” (“and”) and twice without. The
phrases without the “und” have greater urgency and are allowed to begin on the crucial word “ewig,” “forever.” The I7
chord on “drücken” tends toward an A-flat triad, the IV
chord, or subdominant, in E-flat major. But as Tamino moves
to his first utterance of “and forever would she be mine,”
Mozart substitutes the ii6 chord, which plays the same role as
IV in the harmonic cycle—the moment of stepping away and
preparing for the dominant. Why the substitution? No doubt
because the ii chord, being minor, has greater warmth. On
this ii6 chord, which lasts an entire measure, Tamino sings a
smooth ascent to his high A-flat. He then drops to D, scale
degree 7 in E-flat, by way of a leaning tone. The first violins
second this lovely melodic phrase. The D is part of the chord
played by the strings: the V7 of E-flat. The music pauses on
this tense dominant chord.
Then, something familiar returns: the calm measured
phrase from the exposition, where Tamino sang the words
“fills my heart with new emotions.” The first appearance of
this phrase ended with a deceptive cadence on a diminished
seventh chord (on the word “fills”). Mozart repeats that cadence here. But whereas in the exposition Tamino ended his
second phrase serenely on scale degree 1, here, at the corresponding moment, he bypasses the E-flat and leaps to a high
G on “mein.” This is the measure in which phrases with
“und” switch to phrases without it. This change quickens the
movement of the song. It also produces an elision on the
tones G, E-flat, and C that allows Tamino to combine “mine”
and “forever” in the single phrase “mine forever.”
Tamino goes on to stress the degrees of the E-flat major
triad in a smoothly flowing phrase that seems destined to land
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on a low E-flat, that is, scale degree 1. But at the last moment
he leaps from low F (scale degree 2) to the G a ninth above
on the word “mine”— and then overtops the G with an A-flat
on “ewig.” This is the most dramatic moment in the aria, as
Tamino intensifies his previous elision, his musicalized,
heartfelt dream of eternally possessing his beloved. Tamino
sounds very heroic and confident here. He sings his signature
G a lot, as though this single tone, scale degree 3, embodied
the whole of his passion. When he gets to the last restatement
of his phrase, the melody emphasizes the tones of the E-flat
major triad. He leaps, for one last time, to his signature G—
this time, significantly, on the word “sie,” “her.” This G is
not a stable degree of a chord but an appoggiatura tending toward F, scale degree 2. Tamino, in other words, does not
merely stress the pronoun that refers to Pamina with a high
note; instead he puts his whole heart into the word and leans
toward his beloved. Having reached high G, the tones now
descend to E-flat, scale degree 1, by step, with the assistance
of D, that is, scale degree 7: 3→2→1→7→1 (“sie dann
mein”). A straightforward cadence affirms closure: IV, I6/4,
V7, I.
The entire orchestra ends the piece with a brief, noblesounding coda composed of two complementary phrases. The
phrases are the tonal expressions of the two complementary
sides of Tamino’s nature, as it is revealed in the aria: the first
heroic and forte, the second tender and piano, a recollection
of the fervent E-flat chords with which the song began.
So ends my journey through Tamino’s aria. I have tried
to be faithful in speech to what is there in the tones. I have
not, of course, captured all that is there. No one could.
Mozart’s music, like all great music, is inexhaustible, and
every act of listening brings new discoveries. I have tried to
present the aria as a wondrous object—a time-structure—that
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comes to us and is welcomed by our musically receptive
souls. This time-structure “speaks” to our passion and our
perception, just as the enchanted portrait, a visual or spatial
form, “speaks” to the soul of Tamino.
I have placed special emphasis on tonal tension, and on
directed tension as the possible ground of coherence and
unity in tonal music. To listen to Tamino’s aria—his strain of
musicalized longing—is not just to hear coherence from one
moment to the next. It is to hear the tension at work in the
whole: in the overall form that unfolds in time, by analogy
with organic growth. The exposition is an ordered accumulation of tension. The development section extended and
heightened that tension; it expresses Tamino’s point of maximum anticipation and perplexity. Of all three sections, it is
the one that most has the character of an arrow. The recapitulation takes us home, reaffirms E-flat as the central key, recalls part of the music from the exposition, and brings the
whole time-structure to perfect balance and resolution. It does
all this by accumulating its own tensions, with which the
tones move swiftly and urgently to a satisfying close.
To listen perceptively to the aria, to hear what is there, is
demanding. It takes effort and study. I would like to suggest
that behind all the complexities, a simple scheme prevails.
The melody, as we know, begins with a rising sixth to a G,
scale degree 3 of E-flat major. The entire piece may be heard
as the attempt by 3 to reach 1 through the intermediation of
2: G→F→E flat. Recall that the first key change came about
because the first clarinet played 3→2→2 rather than 3→2→1.
This facilitated the transformation of 2 in E-flat into 5 in Bflat. The rest of the piece—key changes and all—exploits and
further develops this move to 2.26 The completion of the move
3→2→1 in the overarching scheme takes place only at the
end, only after the recapitulation has affirmed E-flat, not
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merely as the key of the final section but as the governing
tone of the entire aria. Only at the end of the journey do we
really have the beginning.
Part Three: Wisdom
My account of Tamino’s song would be incomplete if I did
not talk about Pamina, the enchanting object of Tamino’s
love. Pamina is the focal point of the opera. Of all the “good”
characters, she endures the greatest and most prolonged sufferings: her mother’s absence, the stern tutelage of Sarastro,
the violent advances and blackmail of Monostatos, and the
revelation of her mother as a demon bent on a murder Pamina
herself is ordered to commit. Finally, she suffers despair over
what she thinks is lost love, and is almost driven to suicide.27
Pamina is also an exalted figure in the opera. It is she who
most embodies what is new about the new order. It is she, a
virtuous woman, who gives the lie to all the negative things
said about women in the opera. Sarastro told her that a man
must guide her heart. This is true, in a sense: Tamino gives
Pamina’s heart its proper object and bearing. But in the last
two trials, it is Pamina who guides Tamino, as love guides
her. Finally, it is Pamina who reveals that the magical vocation of music is not to gain power over others, or merely to
amuse oneself, but to ward off the fear of death.
When Pamina joins Tamino for the final trials near the
end of the opera, the two face each other in more than the obvious sense. They now see each other clearly for the first
time. There is mutual recognition. This recognition is mirrored, or rather enacted, in the complementary phrases the
lovers use to sing each other’s names: “Tamino mine! O what
happiness!” “Pamina mine! O what happiness!” The string
of monosyllabic German words that the lovers sing to each
other—“O welch ein Glück”—is both simpler and more con-
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crete than this English translation. A more accurate rendering
is: “O what a stroke of good fortune!” Tamino and Pamina
are not referring to a subjective state or feeling, but to an
event, to something wondrous that has just happened and that
presents itself to their perception: the arrival and the presence
of the beloved. The phrases they sing are two halves of a little
musical circle or period in F major. When Pamina sings
Tamino’s name, she does so with a rising major sixth—the
same interval with which Tamino’s soul rose up in response
to Pamina’s image. But this is not mere repetition. The sixth
at the beginning of Tamino’s aria was the sound of passion
that aspired but did not know itself. It had shadows. Pamina’s
sixth is different. It is pure, luminous, and rationally aware.
It has “Besonnenheit,” and in more than the strictly musical
sense.28 Pamina’s sixth is the enlightenment and perfection of
Tamino’s. It is the sublime moment in which passion, now
perceptive, finds its purpose.
When Tamino first responded to the magic that was Pamina, his love was mediated by an image. He asked himself
what he would do if the beloved were standing in front of
him. That moment has arrived, for here stands Pamina, not
as image but as solid reality. Tamino’s first rush of love was
itself a kind of image and dream, a first step in the soul’s journey from erotic striving and heroic aspiration, through painful
disillusionment and trials, to the moment of enlightenment,
when images are seen for what they are, and when the lover,
having transcended mere feeling, now grasps what love really
is. Pamina is the Other in and through whom Tamino can
know himself as the man who loves Pamina, not as a possession but as partner. He can see who he is in the eyes of the
beloved because the sound of her rising sixth, as she sings
his name, shows him how. Her sixth, her love in musical
form, is his unfailing guide.
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Pamina is more than Tamino’s beloved, more than a symbol of virtuous womanhood (her mother in redeemed form),
more even than the first Woman Ruler of a new order based
on marriage and reconciliation. She is Tamino’s wisdom, and
the wisdom—and true magic—of Mozart’s Magic Flute.
NOTES
1. For an exhaustive study of the Masonic elements in Mozart’s opera,
see Jacques Chailley, The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera, trans. Herbert
Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1971). Chailley finds Masonic meaning
even in the number of notes used in individual phrases. His analysis
makes the plot more coherent but ultimately distracts us from Mozart’s
music.
2. Chailley makes the interesting observation that there were originally
five Ladies, in keeping with the Masonic number for the Female, and that
this was reduced to three due to “necessities of casting” (109-110).
3. “[T]he key of C minor throughout Die Zauberflöte is nearly always
connected with death or the threat of death.” From Erik Smith, “The
music,” in Peter Branscombe, W. A. Mozart: Die Zauberflöte, Cambridge
Opera Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130.
4. During Mozart’s time there existed ancillary Masonic lodges that accepted women—so-called “Lodges of Adoption”—but the members of
these lodges were barred from the loftier honors and duties open to men
(Chailley, 74-79).
5. The Queen explains that killing Sarastro is the only way she and her
daughter can retrieve the “seven-fold Circle of the Sun,” which Pamina’s
father, at his death, gave Sarastro. She recalls, resentfully, that the father
wished to give the magical object to the “manly” care of Sarastro and refused to entrust it to “your woman’s spirit.” In the Queen’s resentful mind,
the murder of Sarastro will topple the dominance of the Male and assert
the supremacy of the Female.
6. Pamina’s aria is in G minor, the key her mother used to tell the story
of her daughter’s abduction. It is also the key Papageno will use when he
prepares to commit suicide. Charles Rosen observes the following: “In
all of Mozart’s supreme expressions of suffering and terror—the G minor
Symphony, Don Giovanni, the G minor Quintet, Pamina’s aria in Die
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Zauberflöte—there is something shockingly voluptuous.” The Classical
Style, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), 324-5.
7. It is here that Pamina reveals the history of the flute, which her father
carved, amid thunder and lightning, from the heart of a thousand-yearold oak.
8. See Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, translated by Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986). Hanslick famously attacked
the “aesthetics of feeling”: “to induce . . . feelings in us is not the task of
music or of any other art. Art first of all puts something beautiful before
us. It is not by means of feeling that we become aware of beauty, but by
means of the imagination as the activity of pure contemplation” (4). Unfortunately, Hanslick’s dichotomy makes it impossible to understand the
musical bond between feeling and contemplation, or, in the terms of this
essay, between passion and perception.
9. Kierkegaard (or rather one of his personae) criticizes Tamino, who
compares poorly with Don Giovanni, Mozart’s fully developed embodiment of music as eros: “As a dramatic character, Tamino is completely
beyond the musical, just as in general the spiritual development the play
wants to accomplish is a completely unmusical idea” (“The Immediate
Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic,” in Either/Or, translated by Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols. [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987], Vol. I, 82.) The Magic Flute is musically deficient, it would
seem, because “the whole piece tends toward consciousness,” that is, toward the clear daylight delineation of good and bad, or the ethical. It celebrates marriage, which “is absolutely unmusical” (ibid., 83). In these
assertions, Kierkegaard (or rather his alter ego) seems unaware of the
subtly dark, erotic side of the noble characters in Mozart’s fairy tale. See
note 3 above.
10. Ingmar Bergman’s film portrays Tamino accurately as he sings this
aria. The actor gazes lovingly at the picture and, at one point, presses it
to his heart. The singer performs the song not as though he were seeking
the admiration of an audience, but as an internal, musical-erotic meditation. Even his high notes, which sound properly heroic, retain this inward
quality.
11. Hoffmann defends Beethoven against the charge that he doesn’t know
how to control himself as a composer: “In truth he is fully the equal of
Haydn and Mozart in rational awareness, his controlling self detached
from the inner realm of sounds and ruling it in absolute authority.”
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(“Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, edited by David Charlton, translated by Martyn Clarke [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989], 98.) Mozart’s own affirmation of this
virtue appears in a letter to his father. Explaining his reasons for a certain
key change in the Abduction from the Seraglio, Mozart writes that just as
“passions whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of
exciting disgust,” so too “music, even in the most terrible situations, must
never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must
never cease to be music.” (The Letters of Mozart and his Family, translated and edited by Emily Anderson [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966],
Vol. II, 769).
12. The Queen, too, in her most hysterical moments, sings in a way that
is orderly, lucid, and musical. She is always a pleasure to hear. In Mozart’s
universe, even the Queen exhibits “Besonnenheit”—though, admittedly,
she pushes the envelope.
13. For the authoritative treatment of sonata form, see Charles Rosen,
The Classical Style (cf. note 4 above). For a revealing account of “circle”
vs. “arrow,” see Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay
on the Origins of Musical Modernity, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007. Berger argues that whereas the music of Bach presents time
as a self-enclosed, circular image of eternity (“God’s time”), that of
Mozart affirms an arrow-like progression that imitates “the temporal disposition of events” (179). Circle and arrow are central metaphors for Victor Zuckerkandl, who stresses the arrow-like movement of counterpoint.
He acknowledges, however, that the classical sonata combines “chain”
(arrow-like succession of phrases) with “circle”: “The whole [of a movement] is symmetrical: A—B—A; but within each section [exposition, development, recapitulation] the chain principle is dominant” (Victor
Zuckerkandl, The Sense of Music [Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1959], 96).
14. It is tempting to compare Tamino’s rising major sixth with the most
famous rising sixth in all of music—the minor sixth at the very beginning
of Tristan and Isolde. What do these sixths show us about the nature of
eros? Do they point to two different kinds of erotic love? Or are they two
sides of the one passion we call eros?
15. For a fuller discussion of Mozart’s shift of accent in the Magic Flute,
see again Erik Smith’s essay in Branscombe, Magic Flute, 120-124 (cf.
note 2 above).
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16. Hanslick stresses the perception of movement in music in his famous
definition of music’s content: “The content of music is tonally moving
forms” (The Beautiful in Music, 29). He does not, however, speculate on
the cause and nature of this movement.
17. On harmony as the third dimension of depth, see Victor Zuckerkandl,
The Sense of Music, 171-179. Throughout this essay, I use the term
“chord” loosely and without much reflection. It is in fact not easy to say
what a chord is, and hence what it means for harmony to be the movement
of chords. At one point in his discussion, Zuckerkandl asks: “Where is
the chord?” He answers: “the chord is not in the tones but, in a sense,
above them, more immaterial than the tones themselves” (ibid., 184). This
leads him to the fascinating assertion that a chord is “something like an
idea—an idea to be heard, an idea for the ear, an audible idea.”
18. The theory of tones as “dynamic qualities” is that of Zuckerkandl,
who develops the theory in three amazing books: The Sense of Music,
Sound and Symbol, and Man, the Musician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, 1956, and 1973 respectively).
19. It is worth noting that a deceptive cadence is not a sudden, disruptive
shock, but rather a musical surprise that makes sense to the ear. The reason is that the unanticipated chord has at least one tone in common with
the chord we expect. In the most common deceptive cadence, the V7 chord
goes to VI, which has two tones in common with the I chord. In the present case, the deceptive chord—the diminished-seventh chord built on Anatural—has in it the two tones common to I and VI (C and E-flat), but
adds the destabilizing tones A-natural and G-flat. That this tense unexpected chord arrives so naturally, and just as naturally leads to the V7 of
the key of E-flat, points to the marvelous fluidity and ordered freedom of
harmonic movement.
20. Wagner on Music and Drama, selected and arranged by A. Goldman
and E. Sprinchorn (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964), 214.
21. The psychologist Géza Révész writes the following about the musical
listener: “He is able to follow the composer’s intentions, even at times to
anticipate them. It is also characteristic of the musical person to sink himself into the mood of the music, and achieve a relation to it that has an effect on his whole spiritual being. He experiences the art work so inwardly
and so profoundly that he feels as though he were creating it” (Introduction to the Psychology of Music [New York: Dover, 2001], 133-134).
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22. One especially problematic aspect of the usual chord notation is that
it implies but does not emphasize the motion of the bass. The various
“positions” of triads—root, first inversion, second inversion, etc.—are
really ways of composing a bass line. In the present case, where the
chordal progression is I6, IV, I6/4, V7, vii5/6 of V, V7, the bass has a beautifully continuous ascent: G to A-flat to B-flat to B-flat repeated to C to D,
and finally to the E-flat, the root of the E-flat triad that begins Tamino’s
complementary phrase and the harmonic progression that culminates in
the perfect cadence to the 16-measure period. A good way to hear this
bass line, this voice in its own right, is to sing along with it.
23. Zuckerkandl, following the music theorist Heinrich Schenker, calls
this Tonwille, the will of the tones.
24. Schopenhauer is perhaps the only philosopher who attempts to explain
the intimate connection between music and the human self, and to explicate the classical idea according to which music is a form of imitation.
Music, he argues, is a copy of the will that is the source of all representation. This will, to which we are tragically enslaved, is an urge or desire
that is incapable of being satisfied. In music, we hear this urge as pure
striving detached from particular objects. This removal of determinate
objects permits us to enjoy the pleasant, aesthetic contemplation of the
tragic source of all things, and of ourselves. Through this enjoyment, we
gain momentary refuge from the suffering and curse that is human life.
See The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne
(New York: Dover, 1969), Vol. I, 255-267, and Vol. II, 447-457.
25. See Charles Rosen on this point: “The greatest change in eighteenthcentury tonality, partly influenced by the establishment of equal temperament, is a new emphatic polarity between tonic and dominant, previously
much weaker” (Rosen, The Classical Style, 26). I have borrowed the term
“counter-pole” from Zuckerkandl, who uses it to characterize the role of
scale degree 5 in the major scale (The Sense of Music, 26).
26. The “history” of F in the piece tends to support my suggestion: the
initial emphasis by the clarinet at the first key change, the continued emphasis of F in the melody that follows, the peak of Tamino’s “Ja, ja!” and
the appoggiaturas that follow, the Fs that appear in various roles in the
development, and the appoggiatura Fs at the beginning of the recapitulation, which lean temptingly to E-flat, as if asking other tones to help it
make a final convincing close. (The harmonic move from II to I occurs
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in the second Act, where the key of F major, with which the Act begins,
returns right before the E-flat Finale.)
My suggestion about 3→2→1 as the underlying structural principle
derives from Heinrich Schenker’s notion of the Urlinie or “primordial
line.” See his Free Composition, translated and edited by Ernst Oster
(New York: Longman, 1979), 3-9.
27. Branscombe notes another important aspect of Pamina’s suffering:
“Without the advantage accorded to Tamino and Papageno of knowing
about the trials to be undergone, she survives her own trials”
(Branscombe, Magic Flute, 217).
28. Pamina shows her capacity for straight speech when Sarastro appears
at the end of Act I. Papageno anxiously asks her in C minor: “My child,
what now shall we speak?” The harmony intensifies his anxiety with the
extremely tense augmented sixth chord, an applied dominant to the V on
which the question hangs. Pamina responds with a soothing move to C
major: “The truth, the truth, even if it were a crime.” Charles Rosen observes that when Pamina sings “the truth,” “the music takes on an heroic
radiance unheard in opera before then” (Rosen, Classical Style, 319).
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Socrates, Parmenides, and the
Way Out
Judith Seeger
Before I begin, I would like to warn you that you must not
expect this lecture to present a definitive interpretation of
Plato’s Parmenides. Indeed, I am so far from being an expert
on Plato that I am somewhat amazed to find myself here behind the podium, where experts usually stand on Friday
nights. Furthermore, the Parmenides is perhaps one of Plato’s
most difficult dialogues—a fact that, curiously enough, gives
me comfort, for I have yet to hear or read an unambiguously
persuasive interpretation of it. In any case, as you know, the
lecture itself is only part of these Friday-night events. If I succeed in opening a discussion in which we all can participate
and learn, then I will have accomplished something. My goal,
you see, is modest.
The talk will consist of the following sections. First, I will
summarize the story for you, drawing your attention to the
character of the interlocutors as it is revealed through their
words and through the narrator’s observations. I will explore
in particular the character of young Socrates, and I will also
give some attention to Plato’s portrayal of Parmenides as
compared with what we know about the philosopher Parmenides. Then, I will consider the fundamental questions
raised by the dialogue, which are, I believe, put most succinctly: “What is philosophy?” and “Is philosophy possible?”
Finally, I will suggest that the dialogue not only raises these
questions, but also answers them favorably, though in such a
Judith Seeger is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture
was originally delivered on January 20, 1995.
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way that we are forced to look beyond the words themselves
and compelled to pursue the answers. That is, we are invited
to engage in philosophy ourselves.
I don’t remember where I was when I first read every dialogue of Plato’s, but I do remember where I was when I first
read the Parmenides. The year is 1990. It is the afternoon of
the day before seminar. I am sitting in my living room on the
dark blue loveseat between two windows. My back is to the
west wall, and, looking up, I can follow the sun’s slow sinking by observing the lengthening patches of brightness (cold
brightness, because it is a January afternoon) on either side
of me. They stretch toward the opposite wall, then reach and
start to climb it. Dust motes, drifting lazily in the sunbeams,
begin a crazed dance as the furnace fan kicks on. When the
fan goes off, the dance subsides.
Do you get the impression that I was having trouble concentrating on my reading? Actually, it was maddening. When
I reached the end of the assigned reading (which is partway
through Parmenides’ argument for the existence of the One,
after which we jump directly to the final statement) and managed, out of respect for the other dialogues in the volume, not
to pitch the book against that same wall the sunlight was
climbing, I was convinced that I had just read a very old joke,
which I was possibly the first one ever to “get” (for otherwise
why would we be wasting our time reading it?), but which
wasn’t really very funny. I was relatively new to philosophy.
But it seemed to me that Plato had been pulling our collective
leg for a long time.
That seminar conversation, and the one the following
year, when I read the dialogue for the second time, helped a
little; but neither one dispelled my conviction that the dialogue was, at best, seriously unbalanced, a feeling which became only more acute when one of my seminar co-leaders
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dismissed the last sentence of the dialogue as “nonsense.”
Parmenides concludes (in R.E. Allen’s translation): “Then let
this be said, and also that, as it seems, whether unity is or is
not, both unity and the others are and are not, and appear and
do not appear to be, all things in all ways, relative both to
themselves and to each other.” To which young Aristotle, who
has been Parmenides’ chosen interlocutor during the exercise,
replies “very true” (166c). Recall, also, that this particular
Aristotle, as we are deliberately told in the dialogue, later became one of the Thirty Tyrants, whose crimes Socrates speaks
about in the Apology (32d).
So Parmenides’ display of dialectical fireworks in the second part of the dialogue seems to be nonsense, and possibly
dangerous nonsense, to boot, if someone who is as thoroughly persuaded by it as young Aristotle seems to be grows
up to be a tyrant so ruthless as to try to implicate innocent
men, including Socrates, in the murder of other innocent men.
(Cf. Republic 537e-539d, on the dangers of teaching dialectic
to young men). Nonetheless, Parmenides’ dialectical exercise
follows an impressive presentation of young Socrates in the
beginning of the dialogue. Plato shows us what appears to be
Socrates’ first, sincere, if perhaps somewhat naive, account
of the Forms. And he shows us Socrates exploring one of the
difficulties raised by the concept of Forms: the so-called
problem of participation. Thus, a fundamental tenet (perhaps
the fundamental tenet) of Socratic and Platonic thought is
paired with what appears to be closely reasoned gobbledygook. This presents us at the outset with a formidable
dilemma. The Parmenides, like many other Platonic dialogues, but perhaps more blatantly than most, seems to have
a split personality, to be composed of two parts that fit together uneasily at best.
The problem of unity in this dialogue, then, part of which
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is at least ostensibly about the One, is striking, even on the
level of its organization. Questions arise which, like the problem of participation itself, will simply not go away. What is
the nature of this exercise Parmenides calls a “devious passage through all things” (136e), without which he claims the
mind cannot attain to the truth? How are we to read it? There
are several possibilities. One is that Parmenides’ tedious
“gymnastic,” with its nonsensical conclusion, is so far from
being a legitimate means of searching for truth that we might
read it as Plato’s example of exactly what not to do if you
want to pursue philosophy. The sort of reasoning we scornfully call logic-chopping comes to mind. In this reading, Parmenides is the consummate sophist, who can manipulate
words to mean anything he wants, with the inescapable outcome that ultimately they can mean nothing at all. If this Parmenides is really supposed to represent the philosopher by
that name, the sense of such an interpretation would be that
the older man has not only been displaced but has also been
made to discredit himself. He becomes an old fool, who
would be dangerous if we were foolish enough to take him
seriously.
There are, nonetheless, problems with this reading. It
does not take into account the care Plato apparently lavished
on this dialogue, or the respect with which Socrates seems to
regard the older philosopher. Parmenides claims that the exercise he performs regarding the One is necessary for
Socrates’ philosophic maturation; and young Socrates, so far
as we know, remains present and attentive throughout (although at least a few of the members of my preceptorial on
Parmenides thought that surely he must have silently departed—at least, that is what they would have done). It seems
not unreasonable to suppose that Socrates is learning something necessary, and before we decide that this necessary
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something is how not to proceed, the dialogue deserves a
closer look. So let us return to the first part of the dialogue to
examine its setting and characters and try to determine who
this Socrates is, who this Parmenides is, what the one might
have to learn from the other, and what we might have to learn
from it all.
The part of the dialogue before Parmenides begins his exercise comprises only a bit more than a third of the entire
piece. It is immediately evident that the dialogue is set in a
“present” which is very remote from the conversation among
Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides that it recounts. Though we
are given no date, we may assume that all the participants in
the original conversation are dead, including Socrates, if only
because, had Socrates been alive, Cephalus, who is the firstperson narrator of the entire piece, would certainly have gone
directly to him rather than to a man who had acquired the
conversation second-hand. In the “present” (which is itself
actually a “past” recounted by the primary narrator to unnamed listeners who become us, the readers), Cephalus and
some of his fellow-citizens who are interested in philosophy
have come to Athens from Clazomenae in Ionia. They have
made this journey because they have heard that someone in
Athens has memorized that long-past conversation, and they
would like to hear it. This Cephalus, by the way, is not the
Cephalus of the Republic, a man who, you will recall, was
not sufficiently interested in philosophy even to stay in his
own home when Socrates was brought there (331d), much
less to go out of his way to seek out a dialogue from the distant past.
The opening scene of the Parmenides is, nevertheless,
reminiscent of the beginning of the Republic, both in the
name of its narrator and in the first sentence, which recalls
Socrates’ narration of his descent into the Pireaus. Cephalus
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begins, “When we arrived at Athens from our home in Clazomenae, we met Adeimantus and Glaucon in the Agora”
(126a). Unlike Socrates in the Republic, Cephalus is not
forcibly detained by eager questioners. Instead, Glaucon and
Adeimantus (who are those once-young men of the Republic)
welcome him cordially, and he tells them he has come to ask
a favor. He would like for them to take him and his friends
to their half-brother, Antiphon (who is also Plato’s halfbrother), who, he hopes, may be persuaded to recite from
memory the conversation held by Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides that Antiphon learned from a student of Zeno’s
named Pythodorus, who was present at that encounter many
years ago. Antiphon—who was once sufficiently interested
in philosophy, if not to practice it, at least to memorize an exceedingly complex conversation—is now more interested in
raising horses. The others come upon him instructing a smith
how to make a bit. At first, Antiphon is reluctant to comply
with their request, for reciting the conversation will be, as he
says in words later nearly echoed by Parmenides himself, an
arduous task. But he finally allows himself to be persuaded
to perform, as Parmenides will later in the dialogue (and did,
earlier in time).
Since Antiphon was not present at the conversation he is
about to relate, he gives his listeners Pythodorus’s account.
As Pythodorus told it, Zeno and Parmenides once came to
Athens for the Panathenaia festival, and stayed outside the
walls in Pythodorus’s house. Parmenides was elderly at the
time, quite gray, and distinguished-looking. Zeno was about
40 years old, tall and handsome. It was said that Zeno had
been Parmenides’ favorite; the suggestion is of an erotic relationship. We do not know the age of young Socrates, but
the dialogue emphasizes that he was very young, though
older than Parmenides’ interlocutor Aristotle. Socrates, at the
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beginning of Pythodorus’s account, has been listening to
Zeno read a treatise, of which we readers hear nothing, for
Pythodorus had heard the treatise before, and, evidently not
caring to hear it again, enters the house with Parmenides only
after Zeno has finished reading. Socrates asks Zeno to read
the beginning again, and Zeno does; but the second reading
serves only to emphasize the utter unimportance of Zeno’s
text, for the narrator does not give it to us, even though he is
now present. We hear instead only Socrates’ summation of
it, which is this: “If things are many, then it follows that the
same things must be both like and unlike, but that is impossible, for unlike things cannot be like or like things unlike”
(127e). Zeno agrees that this summary is accurate, and
Socrates presses on: “Now, if it is impossible for unlike things
to be like and like things unlike, it is also impossible for there
to be many things; for if there were, things would undergo
impossible qualifications. Isn’t that the point of your arguments, to contend, contrary to everything generally said, that
there is no plurality? And don’t you suppose that each of your
arguments is a proof of just that, so that you believe that you
have given precisely as many proofs that there is no plurality
as there are arguments in your treatise? Is that what you
mean, or have I failed to understand you?” (127e). It appears
that Socrates is baiting Zeno, suggesting that he has become
mired in the contradiction of providing many arguments to
prove that there is no such thing as many. But Zeno, again,
graciously concedes that Socrates’ estimation of his work is
correct. Since innuendo did not work, Socrates now attacks
outright. Addressing not Zeno but Parmenides by name, he
accuses Zeno of saying much the same thing as Parmenides
himself while misleading his readers into thinking he is saying something different. Parmenides remains silent, and again
Zeno, clearly stung, replies, but quite mildly considering that
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he has just been accused of a kind of cheating. He protests
that this particular treatise was, in the first place, the work of
a young man written in a spirit of controversy, not of an older
man zealous for reputation, and, in the second place, that it
was stolen from him and published without his consent.
Though the effect of these disclaimers is less to enlighten us
than to cause us to wonder why he is reading the discredited
treatise of his youth now that he is older and presumably
knows better, Zeno continues to agree that Socrates did not
misrepresent his thesis. Parmenides, meanwhile, makes his
presence increasingly felt by saying not a word.
Socrates has tried both innuendo and direct accusation in
what appears to be an unsuccessful attempt to draw first Zeno
and then Parmenides into discussion. He plunges on. The paradox of unity and multiplicity raised by Zeno has a simple
solution, Socrates claims. The answer is the Forms, which
exist alone, by themselves. If someone could demonstrate to
him that Forms could change, that would be amazing,
Socrates asserts. But it is not at all remarkable that other sorts
of things should share contrary characteristics. Socrates uses
himself as an example. In order to say that he is many, that
is, partakes of multitude, all anyone would have to do would
be to consider his front, his back, his upper body, his lower
body, and so on. If, on the other hand, someone wanted to
say that he partakes of unity, that person would need only
consider him one of the seven—but remember that only five
are named—present at this particular conversation (129d).
With regard to the changeable things we perceive, plurality
and unity depend, in effect, on how you look at them. There
is no genuine paradox in this, only a manipulation of language. The tone of Socrates’ speech is aggressive. He seems
to be implying that Zeno is either a liar or a fool.
I have tried to capture something of Socrates’ tone in this
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summary. He has, of course, expounded his opinions at much
greater length than I just have. If you were reading it your
impression would likely be that this brash young man has indeed gone too far: he’s smart all right, but he is also rude and
offensive. That is, evidently, the feeling the reader is supposed to have, because suddenly we are recalled to Pythodorus, who, Antiphon says, expected Zeno and Parmenides
to become angry, and was surprised when instead they
glanced at each other from time to time as Socrates spoke and
smiled as if in admiration. Now, for the first time, Parmenides
speaks, and his words reveal that young Socrates, in flailing
away at Zeno, has been, in effect, setting himself up. Young
Socrates is about to meet his master.
First, Parmenides blandly commends Socrates on his talent for argument; then he asks if he himself was responsible
for the distinction between Forms and the things that partake
of them. Parmenides does not give Socrates time to reply to
this question, so I suppose we do not really know the answer.
Instead, he immediately becomes more specific. Is there, he
asks Socrates, a likeness apart from the likeness we possess?
Is there One? Is there Many? “Of course.” Then what about
the just, the beautiful, the good, and all such things? “Yes.”
Then are there Forms for such things as man, fire, and water?
Socrates has no answer. Within three simple exchanges, Parmenides has reduced him to a state of perplexity, that condition of ignorance which is discomfiting to say the least,
because anyone who is aware he is in it also knows that he
must escape from it, and there is, at least as far as Socrates
can see at this point, no way out.
This is a most important moment, for it is evidently the
first time that Socrates has realized that he is in the state to
which he will later try to reduce all those with whom he
speaks. The force of this image of aporia, recalling Zeno-
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phon’s use of it in the Anabasis (III.1.11-13), is of a desperate
need to escape from imminent danger, to find a pathway to
safety where none is apparent. If Parmenides had stopped
here he would have accomplished quite a lot, but he is not
yet finished with young Socrates. What about certain other
things, he asks, vile and worthless things, like mud, dirt, and
hair? At first Socrates seems to have returned to firm ground.
Not at all, he answers, in his previous assured manner. That
would be impossible. But then he stumbles a bit, driven to
face the abyss, I think, both by the questions of a man he
clearly respects and by a characteristic honesty as remarkable
as the intelligence and talent for argument he has already
demonstrated. “Still,” young Socrates says, “I sometimes
worry lest what holds in one case may not hold in all, but
when I take that stand, I retreat, for fear of tumbling undone
into depths of nonsense. So I go back to the things we just
said have characters, and spend my time dealing with them”
(130d). This is no way to escape from aporia. It may very
well be that there is a significant difference in kind between
justice, say, and hair, but a simple assertion of that difference
is not sufficient to make it so, and Socrates knows it. He is in
this position, Parmenides says, because he is still young and
philosophy has not yet taken hold of him. When he is older
and more experienced he will despise none of these things.
Now he still pays too much attention to what people think.
This reply is problematic for a sympathetic reading of
Parmenides, if it implies that he considers mud, dirt, and hair
equal in kind to justice, beauty, and the good. I do not think
that he does, if only because he calls them particularly vile
and worthless, but we will consider this further when I explore the question of who this Parmenides is. Whatever the
reading, it is clearly not Parmenides’ intent here to explore
what sorts of things have Forms. Rather, simply by raising
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the question, he has done this bright young know-it-all the
immense favor of reducing him to a state in which he has
been forced to admit perplexity and doubt, a state which we
know (because we have read dialogues in which the older
Socrates partakes, dialogues that were composed before this
relatively late one) is absolutely necessary for him to recognize if he is to understand that he is in danger and must search
for a way out—that is, he must pursue philosophy. At this
point in young Socrates’ education, concentrating on such
ideas as justice, virtue, and the good is a retreat, in so far as
it represents a failure to face the real dilemma inherent in the
notion of Forms. Furthermore, Socrates has confessed that
fear of falling into nonsense has caused him to turn away
from questions that had occurred to him before his encounter
with Parmenides. Parmenides, then, has forced the young
man to admit, first, that, despite his intellect and talent for argument, he is in a perilous situation; second, that he must
search for a way to escape from this danger; and, third, that
his fear has led to intellectual cowardice and laziness.
Whether there actually is a possible way of escape remains
to be explored, and this is the question to which Parmenides
immediately turns his attention.
Assuming with Socrates that Forms exist even though we
are not yet sure which of the things we perceive has a Form,
Parmenides directs the conversation to the problem of sharing. This in turn raises the dilemma of participation, which,
in its most general expression, has to account for the relationship between the Forms and the things that partake of them.
The effect of this conversation will be to reduce Socrates
once again to perplexity, and it will lead to a difficulty that is
more fundamental than the question about which of the things
we perceive partake of Forms. Parmenides readily agrees
with Socrates that there are unalterable Forms, but, through
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questioning, he compels Socrates to admit (and readers to
see) that if we cannot discover a relationship between the
things we see and the Forms—that is, if we cannot find a way
to escape from deceptive change into the reality of the absolute—there can be no knowledge and, hence, no philosophy.
How, Parmenides asks Socrates, can there be any relationship between the things we see and the Forms of which
they partake? More specifically, how can a Form be at once
in itself and in the others (that is, the things that partake of
it) without being separate from itself? Socrates has an ingenious solution to this problem: It might be like a day, he says,
which is in many places at once yet not separate from itself.
“Very neat,” replies Parmenides, flattering the young man,
“you mean like a sail spread over many persons at once.”
“Perhaps,” responds Socrates, apparently sealing his doom
in the discussion, since a sail really does not seem to be like
a day at all. Unlike a day, it is a material object, capable of
being cut into pieces, a characteristic Parmenides will exploit
in his refutation of the idea. Why does Socrates accept the
substitution? Is he being polite? He wasn’t very polite to
Zeno, but he obviously has more respect for Parmenides. Did
he succumb to the older man’s flattery? For whatever reason,
Socrates, perhaps with some reluctance, accepts the sail in
place of the day. Parmenides then raises the paradox of divisibility, with an argument that irrefutably concludes, to put
it briefly, that other things cannot partake of Forms either as
parts or as wholes. Next he raises the difficulty of infinite
regress. Using largeness as an example, he obliges Socrates
to agree that when we look at a number of things that are
large we believe there is the same Form of largeness in all of
them, and thus believe that Largeness is one. But then don’t
we need yet another largeness by which that one largeness
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can appear large, and then another, and another? The search
for the last largeness will never end. Socrates, trying to escape from this infinite regress, suggests that Forms are
thoughts (noēma, a word that is rare in the Socratic dialogues); but Parmenides parries that for a thought to be true
it must be a thought of something that is, and Socrates, if he
is not to be trapped in relativism, is compelled to concede.
Perhaps, then, he replies, the Forms exist in nature as paradigms, which other things resemble and imitate. But if this
is so, Parmenides counters, the Form must resemble the object that resembles it, in so far as that object resembles it, and
thus a third “entity” is called into being: that by participation
in which like things are made like. Again we are faced with
an infinite regress, a hall of mirrors.
All of these arguments, none of which Socrates can refute, lead to what Parmenides calls the greatest difficulty of
all: If we maintain that the Forms are separate, independent
beings, we are in danger of having to concede that they cannot be known, and the consequence of that is that there is no
way out of our difficulty. Aporia becomes absolute; philosophy is impossible. If this is our condition, Forms may or may
not exist; if they exist, they may have their nature relative to
themselves, and the things we perceive may have their nature
relative to themselves. But if the Forms and the things among
us have no relationship to each other, Parmenides and
Socrates agree that we can have no knowledge of truth. Put
another way, we cannot know any of the Forms because we,
by our nature, cannot partake of absolute knowledge. The
gods, on the other hand, by their nature, would have absolute
knowledge, but that would make no difference either to us or
to them, for if there is no connection, no path, between the
transient and the absolute, the gods could know our world no
more than we could know theirs, and we all might as well go
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raise horses.
This is not to say that Parmenides has given up. He asserts twice (133c and 135d) that there are ways out of this
dilemma, which are open to people of wide education and
ability who know how to seek them. Further, Socrates clearly
possesses the considerable natural gifts that will allow him
to seek a way out, and perhaps eventually to teach others to
do so. Parmenides knows this because he heard Socrates discuss these questions with young Aristotle the day before, and
he observed his noble and divine impulse toward argument
(logos), as well as his refusal to discuss problems in terms of
visible objects, appealing instead always to absolutes. The
problem is that Socrates is trying too soon, before he is properly trained. He must exercise and train himself in an art that
the many call idle talk if the truth is not to escape him. Parmenides approves of Socrates’ attention to the things that are
rather than the things that merely seem to be. But he claims
that Socrates lacks rigor; he must learn to examine the consequences that follow from each hypothesis, for example,
“should you hypothesize if likeness is, or if it is not, what
will follow on each hypothesis both for the very things hypothesized and for the others, relative to themselves and relative to each other” (136a). The same procedure must be
followed for anything that may be hypothesized as being and
as not being, and as undergoing any other affection whatever.
Before looking at the exercise in more depth, let us return
to several questions raised in the segment of the dialogue I
have just summarized. I would like, in particular, to explore
the characters of young Socrates and of Parmenides, as they
are presented in the dialogue, and the problem of participation as it is framed here, with the consequences it has for the
pursuit of philosophy.
Let us look first at Socrates. Much is made in the dialogue
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of the fact that he is young. Parmenides has remarked upon
his youth, and Pythodorus, too, as quoted by Antiphon, observes that he was very young. He seems in his interchanges
with Zeno to be exhibiting some of that controversial spirit
of youth to which Zeno, speaking of himself, alludes.
Socrates’ attacks on Zeno show that he has mastered argument; but his remarks are glib and aggressive, the over-confident assertions of someone who (in a contrast that could not
be more striking with the older Socrates) knows it all. Young
Socrates, a sort of philosopher warrior slashing away with a
sword of words, does not hesitate to take on the leading
philosophers of the day. Though it is not used, the word thumos (in the sense of spirit, heart, will) comes to mind. And,
as we have seen, both Zeno and Parmenides are delighted.
This is surely not because of the easily-avoided swipes
Socrates is taking at Zeno in his apparent wish to replace him
in the great man’s affections, but rather because of his eager
desire for logos and his conviction that there are absolutes.
Socrates is a young man of great gifts in dire need of a lesson
in directing those gifts if he is to find the true way of philosophy. And who better to give the lesson than Parmenides?
I know that this is a tricky question, for the character of
Parmenides in this dialogue is problematic. Respected commentators have argued that this Parmenides cannot be intended to be the philosopher by that name because the real
Parmenides could not possibly have spoken in the way this
Parmenides does; but I, at least at this point in my study, am
compelled to follow the more direct route of believing that
Plato meant this Parmenides to represent the great philosopher, while, of course, writing the character to suit his own
purposes.
Many of you probably have not read Parmenides’ poem
on being, and I do not have time here to give more than the
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briefest of summaries of a work which is very hard to summarize, both because of its inherent difficulty and because it
has survived only in widely scattered fragments and quotations which have been stitched together, leaving great gaps.
Parmenides of Elea would have been born around 515 BCE,
if we use Plato’s dialogue (about whose date, of course, we
can only conjecture) as a way of estimating his birth date. He
wrote a poem in the archaic hexameters of Greek epic poetry
whose first-person narrator is a youth of great thumos who
has undertaken a sort of mystic journey. Well-guided horses
pull the youth in a chariot whose axle glows and whistles
with heat along a wide road leading out of darkness into light.
Maidens, identified as daughters of the sun, escort him along
the road and through a mighty doorway into the abode of a
goddess. The maidens then persuade the goddess to give the
youth two accounts, one of which has been called the Way
of Truth and the other the Way of Seeming.
The Way of Truth states that being is and non-being is
not, and that only being can be thought or learned. Being has
certain characteristics, which the goddess lists for the youth:
It is ungenerated, imperishable, whole, single-limbed, untrembling, complete, indivisible, changeless, held in limits
by the chains of justice. Most mortals, she continues, do not
realize that only being is knowable; instead they wander, twoheaded, lost along the well-trodden but misdirected way,
thinking, mistakenly, that they can name and know opposites.
This mistaken way is the Way of Seeming, and its relationship to the Way of Truth is not completely clear in the poem.
What is clear is that being is one and absolute (though finite)
and that it can be truly known, while non-being, as it does
not really exist, cannot be known or even thought.
Now this is not quite the doctrine that Parmenides upholds in the dialogue. The Parmenides of the dialogue does
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still maintain the fundamental principle of the poem, namely,
that only absolute being can be known. Nonetheless, by accepting without question Socrates’ notion of Forms, he has
allowed multiplicity into being. So if the Parmenides of the
dialogue is the Parmenides of the poem, he has changed at
least part of his understanding of the nature of being. Furthermore, in the dialogue he raises that fundamental difficulty
which young Socrates has apparently not considered fully,
namely, the relationship of Forms to the things of this world.
This difficulty, as Parmenides sees it, has two parts. One part
is the question of which things in our world participate in
Forms, and the other concerns the nature of that participation.
The Parmenides of the dialogue is very concerned with the
relationship between seeming and being, a relationship which
is truly problematic in the poem, where, after stating that only
being can be known, the goddess provides a surprising
amount of information about seeming things, particularly
heavenly bodies and sex. Remember that we have no way of
knowing how much of the Way of Seeming has been lost, and
its reconstruction is particularly difficult because the fragments are so short and puzzling. If there is any connection
between the Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming in the
poem, we have to devise it ourselves; it is not given to us. In
fact, we have already seen that the poem tells us as plainly
as it tells us anything that one way is true and the other is
false.
So the poem and the dialogue concur that only being is
absolute and knowable, but in the dialogue we have a Parmenides who, unlike the author of the poem, has, in the first
place, accepted a plurality of absolutes (that is, the Forms)
and who, in the second place, considers the relationship between those absolutes and seeming things to be of utmost importance. Furthermore, he engages in an exercise that takes
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the form of dialectic, an interchange of a sort entirely absent
from the poem, whose young man remains silent, listening
(in a way reminiscent of Socrates’ encounter with Diotima in
the Symposium) to the teachings of the goddess.
These are three undeniably significant differences between the Parmenides of the poem and the Parmenides of the
dialogue. Our conclusion might be that these are different
men. It seems more fruitful to say that Plato has taken the
fundamental questions raised by Parmenides in the poem and
pushed them in the direction he felt they had to go if the approach to knowledge was to be anything other than a
metaphorical journey leading to a mystical vision. Who better
than the great philosopher himself to give his blessing to such
an enterprise, and to anoint young Socrates as the spirited
youth, the young hero, capable of pursuing it, if only he can
summon the courage to undertake such an arduous task? The
dialogue, in effect, resurrects the venerable authority and has
him declare, with Zeno’s approval, that Socrates is his true
heir.
Parmenides passes his legacy to Socrates in five ways.
First, the great philosopher who first asked the question
“What is Being?” has accepted the Forms as the answer to
that question. Second, he has repeatedly complimented young
Socrates on his ability and divine inclination toward logos.
Third, Parmenides has, by his questioning, forced Socrates
to recognize that he is in a state of aporia, by raising the question of the status of such things as mud, dirt, and hair—which
the author of the Way of Truth could never have valued any
more than Socrates ever will. Fourth, he has shown the young
man a possible way out of his aporia by instructing him in
the method that he will later adopt, that is, dialectic. And,
fifth, he has given him a demonstration of the courage that
young Socrates showed he lacked when he admitted he was
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afraid to face the possibility that mud, dirt, and hair might
partake of Forms.
Parmenides demonstrates courage to Socrates when he
allows himself, despite a fear that he voices several times, to
be persuaded to undertake the exercise of exploring the consequences, both for the One and for the others, of the existence and of the non-existence of the One. This is the most
difficult part of the dialogue to read. I have already raised one
possible interpretation: that the exercise is intended to
demonstrate how not to proceed if we are seeking truth. The
consequence of this reading, however, is that Parmenides becomes a buffoon, and I do not believe the dialogue supports
that contention any more than do later mentions of the
philosopher in the Theatetus, where Socrates, an old man
himself, refers to the nobility of Parmenides’ “reverend and
awful figure” during the encounter we are discussing (183e),
or in the Sophist, where, even though Father Parmenides is
killed by his own Eleatic follower, Socrates remembers the
magnificence of the arguments he employed in that long-ago
meeting (217c). Even allowing, as we must, for the possibility of irony, it is not at all clear what purpose would be served
by making a buffoon of the philosopher who first conceived
of being as unchanging and as capable of being known. More
consistent with the raising of Socrates into true philosophy
is the reading that makes Parmenides into a revered elder,
aware of his own limitations, but still able to inspire a spirited
youth to carry on the journey that, for an old man like himself, has become just another run around the track. No longer
a youth pulled by well-guided horses, but rather like an old
horse himself, Parmenides is nonetheless capable of recognizing a worthy heir and guiding him to pursue philosophy
along the correct route.
As I have observed, the novelty of the dialogue with re-
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spect to Parmenides’ poem as far as the practice of philosophy is concerned is the introduction of dialectic. Parmenides
in the dialogue has already shown a dialectical bent uncharacteristic of the poem in his questioning of Socrates. This
questioning is suggestively juxtaposed with Zeno’s reading
of an old essay—an essay that the author himself, when challenged, repudiates. And when Parmenides agrees to perform
his exercise, it is dialectical rather than expository; that is, it
is unlike the teaching of the goddess in Parmenides’ poem.
He then chooses the youngest one present, that is, young Aristotle, to be his interlocutor, giving three reasons. First, the
youngest will give least trouble; second, he will be most
likely to say what he thinks; and third, his answering will give
the older man a chance to rest. The first and third reasons indicate that Parmenides’ primary interlocutor in this exercise
will really be himself. This locates his demonstration of the
method closer to exposition than to dialogue. But the second
reason is interesting insofar as it recalls Socrates’ demonstration with the slave boy in the Meno; like the slave, who has
no reason to hold back from Socrates’ questioning, young Aristotle possesses a kind of pure outspokenness, a kind of fearlessness, that tends to be smothered by conventional thought
as a person ages. We can see that even the gifted young
Socrates has already fallen prey to convention if we read the
“perhaps” with which he accepts Parmenides’ substitution of
a sail for the day as a grudging acceptance of a substitution
he does not really admit. Whether he is being polite or he is
responding to the flattery Parmenides has just lavished on
him, Socrates, who contradicts Zeno so freely, seems unable
to contradict the admired older man.
The exercise itself is extremely difficult to read and understand, but it is carefully organized. (This is a feature that
is not evident in the truncated seminar assignment). Par-
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menides has said that he will consider the consequences both
for the One and for the others of the hypotheses both that the
One is and that it is not (135e-136c and 137b). I will repeat
the tangled conclusion he reaches:
Then let this be said, and also that, as it seems, whether
unity is or is not, both unity and the others are and are not,
and appear and do not appear to be, all things in all ways,
relative both to themselves and to each other (166c).
It is, as I said earlier, possible to read this as a demonstration
that nonsense is the only possible outcome of this particular
method of reasoning. In contrast, some commentators have
claimed that Parmenides’ exercise has indeed answered the
questions of participation that he raised in the first part of the
dialogue. Constance Meinwald, for example, argues ingeniously that it is possible to make sense out of the final statement, essentially (though, of course, this follows a complex,
book-length argument) by reading the verb esti, “to be” as
existential in some occurrences and predicative in others.1
According to this reading, the exercise would have explored
the possible pitfalls of language in general, and of that troublesome verb in particular. I would like, however, to argue
for a third interpretation. I believe that Parmenides has answered the questions he has raised, but that the answer is so
deeply buried that its very hiddenness begs to be explored.
Let us begin to do this by looking at the organization of the
argument in the light of Jacob Klein’s “Note on Plato’s Parmenides.”2 As its title suggests, Klein’s piece is no more than
a brief observation. The concern of the note is the “indeterminate dyad,” mentioned by Aristotle in the Physics and
Metaphysics.3 Aristotle’s contention is that the indeterminate
dyad was the substitute for the single “unlimited” or “indeterminate,” and, further, that this dyad consisted of “the Great
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and the Small.” Aristotle observes that the indeterminate dyad
is never explicitly mentioned by Plato. Klein believes, however, that there is a clear, if oblique, allusion to it in the Parmenides, specifically in Socrates’ apparently casual remark,
following Pythodorus’s observation that “many” others came
with him to hear Zeno’s reading. I mentioned earlier that
there were, in fact, seven men present at this conversation,
of whom only five are named. Parmenides also calls our attention to the group, without, however, numbering it, when
he agrees to engage in his laborious pastime. Klein suggests
that this equation of “many” with “two” is deliberate, and
that it is a veiled but unmistakable reference to what Aristotle
called the indeterminate dyad. Klein continues:
Zeno’s lecture (composed in his youth) was meant to show
that the consequences which flow from the assumption of
multiplicity in this world are even more absurd and ridiculous than the consequences which flow from the derided
Parmenidean assumption that “the One is” (128d). The
thesis of multiplicity, in Zeno’s presentation, seems to
imply the absence of unity, just as Parmenides’ assumption
divorces the One entirely from any multiplicity. It is noteworthy that, in the dialogue, Parmenides himself unfolds
before his listeners—young Aristotle acting as his dialectical partner—the contradictions involved both in the assumption and in the rejection of the “One” as the one and
only archē. There is an imbalance between Zeno’s thesis
and Parmenides’ performance: the denial of multiplicity is
not subjected to any scrutiny. What is lacking is a discussion of the consequences which flow from an explicit rejection of the many (cf. 136a).
Instead we are led by Parmenides and Aristotle to the
threshold of the insight that the root of the contradictions
concerning the “One” taken by itself is precisely the nonadmittance of another archē responsible for the “Many”
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and correlated with the “One.” The dialectic of the “One”
cannot avoid bringing this other archē, the “Other,” into
play. But its role within the framework of the dialogue is,
as it were, illegitimate. Still, its power is there, conspicuously, though silently present. The two undetermined men
in the audience represent it. They embody the elusive “indeterminate dyad” itself. This is their mimetically ironic
role.4
The structure of Parmenides’ exercise supports Klein’s
interpretation. Precisely what is lacking is what Klein has
called scrutiny of the denial of multiplicity. The structure of
the exercise is relatively simple.5 With one exception, it is divided into four sections, which follow Parmenides’ stated
plan. Two segments of the exercise consider (each one in two
parts) the consequences for unity and for the others if unity
exists. The other two (also each in two parts) consider the
consequences for unity and for the others if unity does not
exist. The opening argument, however, stands alone. Parmenides’ initial assumption is that the One is not Many. Of
course, young Aristotle agrees, for if anything is obvious, it
is that one is not many. Nevertheless, the outcome of this assumption is disastrous. Parmenides concludes that if the One
is not Many “then it cannot be named or spoken of, nor is it
an object of opinion or knowledge, nor does anything among
things which are perceive it,” and young Aristotle concurs
that none of those things can be true of unity (142a). Well, if
the One is not not-Many, does it then follow that the One is
Many? This is the balancing argument, which is missing. It
seems so absurd. There is no way in our everyday language
that the one can be many. There is no speakable way out of
this perplexity. And this is perhaps the crux of the indeterminate dyad, the manyness in the one that cannot be named but
which must somehow exist if we are to be able to link the
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Forms with the things of this world, that is, to practice philosophy. There is, then, a missing argument (and it could not
be otherwise, for the argument cannot be made with language
as we know it)—a fact that becomes apparent only when we
step back from the words and look at the structure of Parmenides’ exercise. This missing argument, necessarily absent,
is the one for the indeterminate dyad, the multiplicity within
the One, to which the presence of two unnamed men in the
first part of the dialogue points.
Let us look briefly once again at the principal questions
that the dialogue has raised and, I believe, answered. The first
is “What is philosophy?” In this dialogue Socrates is located
firmly within the Parmenidean tradition with respect to the
question of the nature of being: Only unalterable being is true
and knowable, and the philosopher seeks to know the truth,
that is, being. The second question—“Is philosophy possible?”—is no less important for human beings who would
seek to know. For if there is no way out of our perplexity—
and there is no way out unless the things we see can be related
to the things that are—then we are trapped in the world of
change, and the questions that philosophy raises are inaccessible to us. This is the difficulty with which Parmenides is
principally concerned in this dialogue; and the dialogue
shows us, if we know how to look at it, that there is a relationship between the things that are and the things that seem
to be. There is, in other words, a way out. That way is what
Aristotle called the indeterminate dyad, the multiplicity
within the One, and it must be sought in the dialogue as a
whole.
Let us return to the puzzling last sentence of the dialogue.
What are we to make of the stupendously unsatisfying conclusion to Parmenides’ exercise? If it is true that the dialogue
is seeded on various levels with covert allusions to the un-
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named and unnamable indeterminate dyad, the nonsensical
end of the dialogue may be a truly thumping clue that there
is a meaning here, and that the actual words are not where it
is to be found. This is a reading that takes us outside the text,
where we meet Socrates, who is, as it were, “in on it,” for he
is the one who alludes to the indeterminate dyad by mentioning that there are seven men present. Would Plato be capable
of performing such a trick—for our benefit, of course? I think
so. There is duality everywhere you look in this dialogue; and
furthermore, it is a duality that by its very ostentatiousness
implores us to attempt to forge a simple unity of it. Plato does
not coddle his readers, for one of his points is that philosophy
is hard work. We must be alive to the difficulties of reading
at every level of his intricately composed mimetic texts.
In conclusion I would like to recall a conversation I had
during a paper conference with one of the students in my Parmenides preceptorial, Adrienne St. Onge. She was troubled
by what she feared was an implication that only the young
had the spirit necessary to pursue philosophy. The initiate in
Parmenides’ poem is, after all, a young man, and in the dialogue, the point is made again and again that Socrates, the
spirited one, is very young. Zeno, a member of the generation
before Socrates, is frozen in time. Rereading old, repudiated
treatises, he is going nowhere. Indeed, if the significant difference between youth and age is the difference between zeal
for controversy and zeal for reputation, there is nowhere to
go. Parmenides, a member of the generation before Zeno’s,
provides an example that is not much better, comparing himself both to an aged lover and to an old racehorse reluctantly
running around in circles—that is, once again, going
nowhere. But as we talked we began to realize that this is the
beauty of the posthumous setting. Cephalus has come to
Athens because of what Socrates later became. And we read-
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ers know what Socrates became because we have read dialogues written earlier, but situated later in his life. We know
that Socrates never lost his desire for philosophy. We know
that he never confused truth with mud. Plato contrives to have
the venerable philosopher anoint and assist his heir, and what
that heir has become we already know.
Still, the “present” of the dialogue is troubling. It is true
that men have come from Clazomenae to hear the conversation, but the state of philosophy after Socrates’ death seems
perilous. I doubt that we ever expected Glaucon and
Adeimantus to become philosophers; but Antiphon, who in
this dialogue is the closest link to Socrates’ time, is shown
instructing a smith to make a bit for a horse. I can’t help but
read this as a discouraging allusion to the well-guided horses
pulling the young man’s chariot toward the light of truth at
the beginning of Parmenides’ poem. Antiphon is not a man
of philosophical desire or spirit. The text, as he recites it, is
trapped in time, as dead as Zeno’s treatise.
So is it only exceptional people who can become philosophers? We have Socrates, who surpassed his mentors, and
Plato, himself, who by implication may have surpassed
Socrates. But now what? The dialogue assures us that philosophy is possible, but it does not suggest that it is easy. On
the contrary, the philosopher must possess unending desire,
unusual intelligence, and divine devotion to truth. This is all
the more reason to wonder if Plato deliberately planted in his
dialogues hints that would not be accessible to the many,
those who despite everything and will always persist in traveling the wide and well-trodden, but wrong, way. Plato will
not do our work for us, for if he did we would not be moved
to philosophy. Both in this dialogue and more explicitly in
the Phaedrus, he warns us of the danger of dead texts. To
have meaning, the writing must somehow live. For more than
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two thousand years we have been trying to tease meaning out
of Plato’s texts, and the Parmenides has been among those
most resistant to our efforts. Manifestly, Plato would not expect such endeavors to lead everyone to philosophy, but insofar as our search for meaning has led us to seek a way out
of our perplexity, we have engaged in the only philosophy
Parmenides and Socrates (and, I think, Plato) would agree is
real: the living search for a path to knowledge.
NOTES
Constance Meinwald, Plato’s Parmenides (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991).
1
In Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 285-87.
2
3
For references see Klein, 285.
4
Klein, Parmenides, 287.
I owe a debt of thanks to a student, Darcy Christ, for making this
clear to me.
5
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Elliott Carter at St. John’s College
Tutor, 1940-1942
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Rolling His Jolly Tub:
Composer Elliott Carter,
St. John’s College Tutor,
1940-1942
Hollis Thoms
Away went he out of town towards a little hill or
promontory of Corinth called (the) Cranie; and
there on the strand, a pretty level place, did he roll
his jolly tub, which served him for a house to
shelter him from the injuries of the weather.
—Rabelais
Elliott Carter, now one of America’s foremost living composers, was a Tutor at St. John’s College from 1940 to 1942.
This was a turbulent time both for the College and for Carter.
The College was still in the process of phasing out the “old”
curriculum and was trying to establish the “new” Great Books
curriculum. Then, just after the last students under the old
regime were graduated in 1941, World War II began to coopt
college-age men for the war effort. In Carter’s life, his recent
marriage, together with the lingering effects of Great Depression, made it imperative for him to secure an academic
position. At the same time, he was transforming his compoHollis Thoms is a composer and researcher from Annapolis, Maryland,
who received the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts degree from St. John’s
College in 2006. Many thanks are due to individuals at St. John’s who
facilitated research for this paper: Chris Nelson, President; Catherine
Dixon, Library Director; Cara Sabolcick, Public Service Librarian, Daniel
Crowe, Registrar; Jacqueline Thoms, Assistant Registrar; Eric Stoltzfus,
Music Librarian; and Mark Daly, Head of Laboratories. Thanks also to
Dr. Philip Allen, who edited the first draft.
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sitional practice, casting off traditional influences, and moving
in a radically new musical direction. The story of Carter’s
time at St. John’s is the story of two interlaced experiments:
the College’s experiment in higher education, and Carter’s
experiment in finding his vocation as a composer.
Elliott Carter, 1908-1940
Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. was born in New York on December
11, 1908 to lace-import businessman Elliott Cook Carter, Sr.
and his wife Florence, née Chambers. The young Elliott was
intended to succeed his father at the lace-import firm. As he
grew, however, his musical talents and interests led him away
from business and toward a career in music. The elder Carter
was openly contemptuous of such an impractical scheme
(Wierzbicki 2011, 5-6). But Clifton J. Furness, music teacher
at the Horace Mann School where Carter studied from 1920
to 1926, recognized and encouraged his student's talent. He
took the teenage Carter to avant-garde concerts, exposing him
to new music by composers such as Bartók, Ruggles, Stravinsky, Varèse, Schoenberg, and Webern. And he introduced him
to many New York musicians and composers, including
Charles Ives, the eccentric millionaire businessman and experimental composer. Ives often invited Carter to join him
and his wife in their Carnegie Hall box for performances by
the Boston Symphony, which, under the leadership of Serge
Koussevitzky, commissioned many new works by living
composers. Ives became a musical and intellectual role model
for Carter (Wierzbicki 2011, 7-9).
The distance between the younger Carter’s ambitions and
his father’s continued to grow during these years. When
Carter was sixteen in 1925, his father took him along on a
business trip to Vienna, where all his attention was focussed
on trying to acquire all the currently available scores of
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Schoenberg and Webern. Carter remembers going with his
father to a performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring,
which the father summed up with “Only a madman could
have written anything like that.” Yet that performance was
one of the experiences that inspired the young Elliot to become a composer (Edwards 1971, 40, 45).
So, contrary to his father’s wishes, Carter decided to
study music at Harvard. Ives wrote a letter of reference in
which he pointed to Carter’s artistic instincts:
Carter strikes me as rather an exceptional boy. He has
an instinctive interest in literature and especially
music that is somewhat unusual. He writes well—an
essay in his school paper—“Symbolism in Art”—
shows an interesting mind. In don’t know him intimately, but his teacher in Horace Mann School, Mr.
Clifton J. Furness, and a friend of mine, always
speaks well of him—that he’s a good character and
does well in his studies. I am sure his reliability, industry, and sense of honour are what they should
be—also his sense of humor which you do not ask
me about (Schiff 1983, 15-16).
He intended to major in music at Harvard in the fall of
1926, but lasted only a semester in that program. He remained at Harvard, however, but opted to spend his undergraduate years working on a degree in English literature. The
Harvard music department was not to his liking, since it
would have nothing to do with the new music in which
Carter was interested. Carter said that he “would have been
glad if somebody at Harvard had explained to me what went
on in the music of Stravinsky, Bartok and Schoenberg, and
had tried somehow to develop in me the sense of harmony
and counterpoint that these composers had” (Wierzbicki
2011, 11).
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Carter enjoyed his English literature experience, but, as
with music, he went further than the traditional literature offerings, which stopped with reading Tennyson. He preferred
reading more avant garde authors such as Gerard Manley
Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, T. S.
Elliot, e. e. cummings, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence,
Gertrude Stein, and others. In addition to studying classics,
philosophy, and mathematics, he also studied German and
Greek—which, in addition to his fluency in French, made
him quite proficient in languages. Carter spent his undergraduate years pursuing the broadest possible education, for he
saw music not merely as a technical study, but as an art form
embedded in and intimately connected with the liberal arts.
He, did, nonetheless, participate in more traditional musical
activities during his time at Harvard, taking instruction in
piano, oboe, and solfeggio at the Longy School. He sang
tenor in the Harvard Glee Club and in a Bach Cantata Club.
He also spent time studying the scores of the past masters,
taking full advantage of the vast holdings of the Harvard
music library (Wierzbicki 2011, 15-19).
Carter’s youthful interest in the new music can be seen
in the repertory of works he performed with his old music
teacher Clifton Furness in a joint piano recital in Hartford,
Connecticut on December 12, 1928: the program included
pieces by Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Arnold Schoenberg, Francis Poulenc, Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco
Malipiero, Henry Gilbert, Charles Ives, Eric Satie, Paul Hindemith, and George Antheil (Schiff 1983, 15).
After Carter graduated, he went on receive an MA in musical composition at Harvard, because, when Gustav Holst
came as a visiting composer and Walter Piston returned from
studying in Paris, there was a new interest in contemporary
music at Harvard, so that Carter felt more at home in the al-
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101
tered the musical environment. Piston recommended that
Carter go to study with the well known teacher of composition Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique de
Paris, and Carter did so from 1932-1935. Carter’s fluency in
French made Paris a natural choice; and because both Piston
and Aaron Copland, whom Carter knew and admired, had
studied with her, he felt that it was a reasonable thing to do
(Wierzbicki 2011, 20-21).
Despite persistent financial worries while in Paris—his
father did not approve of the plan and cut his allowance in
half, though his mother continued to supplement the allowance—Carter thrived as a student of Boulanger, whom he
remembers with admiration for the way she illuminated both
the past and the future of music:
The things that were most remarkable and wonderful
about her were her extreme concern for the material
of music and her acute awareness of its many phases
and possibilities. I must say that, though I had taken
harmony and counterpoint at Harvard and thought I
knew all about these subjects, nevertheless, when
Nadia Boulanger put me back on tonic and dominant
chords in half notes, I found to my surprise that I
learned all kinds of things I’d never thought before.
Every one one of her lessons became very illuminating. . . . Mlle. Boulanger was a very inspiring teacher
of counterpoint and made it such a passionate concern
that all this older music constantly fed me thoughts
and ideas. All the ways you could make the voices
cross and combine or sing antithetical lines were
things we were involved in strict counterpoint, which
I did for three years with her—up to twelve parts,
canons, invertible counterpoint, and double choruses—and found it fascinating.” (Edwards 1971, 50,
55. Emphasis added.)
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Then also, when I was studying with Mlle. Boulanger
I began for the first time to get an intellectual grasp
of what went on technically in modern works. I was
there at a time when Stravinsky, who was of course
the contemporary composer she always admired
most[, was also in Paris]. . . . The way she illuminated
the details of these works was just extraordinary to
me. . . . I met Stravinsky, because he used to come to
tea at Mlle. Boulanger’s. . . . [W]hat always struck
me every time I heard Stravinsky play the piano—the
composer’s extraordinary, electric sense of rhythm
and incisiveness of touch that made every note he
played a “Stravinsky-note” full of energy, excitement
and serious intentness” (Edwards 1971, 51, 56. Emphasis added.)
Boulanger’s attitude toward music matched his own: in
his daily lessons, composition as a craft was combined with
composition as in the context of the liberal arts. Carter spent
three years studying with Boulanger, and as a result of her
tutelage, he gained both the musical craftsmanship and the
self-confidence to produce compositions that he considered
worth preserving. It was only “after Paris” that Carter “could
begin to compose” (Wierzbicki 2011, 24).
After his return from Paris, Carter immersed himself in
musical activities, groups, and composing, first in Boston and
then in New York. He wrote a number of choral works including one called “Let’s Be Gay,” a work for women’s chorus and two pianos based on texts by John Gay. It was written
for, and performed by, the Wells College Glee Club in the
spring of 1938, which was led by his friend Nicolas Nabokov,
who was to figure again in Carter’s career a few years later
(Wierzbicki 2011, 25).
The Great Depression made it impossible for Carter to
find a secure job, but he was able to become a regular con-
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103
tributor to Modern Music, a journal that had been founded in
1924 as the house organ of the New York-based League of
Composers. In the process of writing thirty-one articles and
reviews for the journal, he gained familiarity with current
compositional activity in New York, and he developed the
skills of a professional music critic (Wierzbicki 2011, 26-27).
In addition, he was hired as a composer-in-residence for
the experimental ballet company Ballet Caravan, formed in
1936 by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Carter had met in Paris. In
that same year, Carter wrote the piano score of a ballet for
the company, called Pocahontas, which premiered in 1939.
In June of 1940 the New York Times announced that an orchestral suite drawn from the ballet had won “the Julliard
School’s annual competition for the publication of orchestral
works by American composers.” This prestigious award finally launched Carter’s career as a composer at the age of 31
(Wierzbicki 2011, 27).
Shortly before the premiere of Pocahontas, on July 6,
1939, Carter married Helen Frost-Jones, a sculptor and art
critic, whom he met through his friend Nicolas Nabokov.
With the possibility of a family now on the horizon, Carter
redoubled his efforts to find employment. At Aaron Copland’s suggestion, he applied in the spring of 1940 for a
teaching position at Cornell University. Cornell was actively
considering him, but the school was not in a hurry to hire.
Carter, on the other hand, wanted a position for the fall. So
instead he accepted an offer to teach music, mathematics,
physics, philosophy, and Greek at St. John’s College in Annapolis (Wierzbicki 2011, 28).
The offer from St. John’s was also due to Carter’s friend
Nicolas Nabokov, who recommended Carter after himself
turning down the offer of a position for 1940-1941. In a letter
to Stringfellow Barr dated June 22, 1940, Nabokov ex-
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plained, first, that he could not accept the position for that
year because his wife was expecting a child and, since they
lived in Massachusetts, it would be too inconvenient to move
or to commute between the arduous new job and his family;
second, that the compensation offered at St. John’s College
was not adequate for him to take care of his new family; and
third, that he could not in good conscience leave Wells so
soon before the beginning of the fall term.
In declining the position, Nabokov recommended a substitute: “Mr. Elliott Carter of whom I spoke to you the other
day and more extensively to Mr. Buchanan would in my opinion fit perfectly into the St. John’s place of education. . . . Mr.
Carter as you will see from his curriculum vitae and the enclosed articles is a very thorough, serious and reliable man
and I recommend him to you very highly. . . . [H]e is very
anxious to undertake the job.” He suggested that Carter could
substitute for him for during the coming school year, and then
Nabokov himself would come to St. John’s the following
year. Nabokov did indeed arrive at St. John’s the following
fall to take over the teaching of music; but Carter did not
leave. Instead he spent a second year at St. John’s teaching
Greek, mathematics, and seminar (Nabokov 1940).
Carter’s decision to accept the position at St. John’s could
not have been easy to make. He was just beginning his career
as a composer, trying to develop a distinctive creative voice
in challenging financial circumstances, which were made
even more challenging by his recent marriage. This was certainly a turbulent time in his life.
He was to join the St. John’s community at a turbulent
time in its own history. The college had recently launched an
educational experiment unprecedented in American higher
education, the success of which was far from certain. The
prospect of teaching at the third oldest college in the nation
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105
(the direct predecessor of St. John’s, King William’s School,
was founded in 1696, after Harvard in 1636 and William and
Mary in 1693) might have seemed a more stable position than
anything the young composer could find in New York, but he
would soon discover a great deal of unstable dissonance in
the community he was to join.
St. John’s College in 1940: Turbulence
In 1937, St. John’s College found itself at a crossroads. In addition to a severe financial crisis, the physical plant was in
deep disrepair. A weak Board of Governors and Visitors had
appointed three new Presidents within nine years in an attempt to find someone who could remedy the situation. All
three had failed, however, and the College had lost its accreditation status with the Middle States Association of Colleges
and Schools. Demoralized faculty members were leaving.
(See Murphy 1996 and Rule 2009 for the facts in this section.)
The stronger members of the Board decided to take drastic action. They named Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, who had long been involved in attempts
to revive the liberal arts, to chair the Board. The Board also
hired two colleagues of Hutchins’ from the Committee on
Liberal Arts at Chicago as President and Dean, Stringfellow
Barr and Scott Buchanan. Their charge was to effect a complete transformation from a traditional college curriculum to
a radically “old” Great Books curriculum. There would no
longer be the traditional options leading to specialized degrees; the faculty would no longer teach only in their areas
of expertise, but in all areas of the curriculum; the college
would no longer participate in intercollegiate sports; there
would no longer be fraternities on campus.
Instead, the completely renovated curriculum, known as
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the “New Program,” consisted of two seminars (discussion
groups) per week on one of the books on the prescribed reading list, five tutorials (small classes) per week in mathematics, five language tutorials per week, at least one three-hour
laboratory period per week, and at least one formal lecture
per week. (Barr 1941, 44.)
In order to effect the change, the New Program was
phased in over a four-year period. Students entering in the
fall of 1937 were allowed to choose which curriculum they
would pursue. Thereafter, all incoming freshmen entered the
New Program. Carter arrived in the 1940-1941 school year,
the last year of the unsettled transitional period, at the end of
which the last graduates under the old curriculum were
awarded their degrees alongside the first graduates under the
New Program. By Carter’s second year, 1941-1942, the New
Program had completely replaced the old curriculum.
Clearly, the board was taking a risk by instituting such an
innovative and untried curriculum, and the risk paid off
slowly. On 1937 there were twenty freshmen who entered in
the New Program; in 1938, forty-six; in 1939, fifty-four; and
in 1940, when Carter arrived, there were ninety-three. The
total number of students held steady at around 170 during the
first four years, so the transition seemed relatively painless
from the enrollment point of view. But the exodus of faculty
members continued, since quite a few were not prepared to
give up their specialties to become co-learners along with
their students in an environment of cooperative learning in
all the liberal arts.
In his quarterly report to the board of April 1939,
Stringfellow Barr described the sort of student and the sort
of tutor that would thrive in the New Program. The students
would have to be able to think clearly and imaginatively, read
the most diverse sorts of material with understanding and de-
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107
light, distinguish sharply between what he knows and what
is mere opinion, have an affinity for first-rate authors and an
aversion to second-rate authors, derive great pleasure from
exercising his intellect on difficult problems, and desire to be
a thoughtful generalist rather than a highly proficient specialist. The tutors, on the other hand, would have to transcend
divergent intellectual backgrounds, be clear expositors, imaginative artists, and cooperative fellow seekers, know how to
teach and learn through discussion, and, above all, be intellectual treasure-hunters.
For unquestionably, the treasures our authors had
written were for our generation partially buried. We
needed men who wanted to help our students dig
them up. The best that we could do, the best indeed
that could be done, was to call for volunteers, volunteers for the treasure hunt, remembering for our comfort that this treasure hunt has never wholly ceased
during the intellectual history of our Western civilization (Nelson 1997, 52-59).
When Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan recruited Elliott Carter they were looking for a “treasure hunter.” They
found in him a kindred spirit who transcended intellectual
narrowness, thought clearly, and was an imaginative artist.
Their relationship continued long after all of them had left
St. John’s. Years later, in 1962, when Barr was invited to
nominate Elliott Carter for an honorary degree at Rutgers
University, Carter replied from Rome in a letter that testifies
to their enduring friendship. (Barr was affectionately called
“Winkie” by his close friends. Carter, 1962.)
Dec. 18, 1962
Dear Winkie —
I am sorry to say that I will not be back in New York
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until July — I do thank
you very much for thinking of me in connection
with the honorary degree
from Rutgers but again I
must beg off — to my sorrow — because as usual
my work seems to have
taken over and dictated
the plan of my life for me
— and I must stay here
until I finish my Concerto
— Merry Xmas and
Fig. 1: Letter to Scott Buchanan
Happy New Year to you (St. John’s College Library Archive,
and Tak [?] — And thanks
Barr Personal Papers, Series 2,
Box 10, folder 20)
for the suggestion Sorry
not to be able to accept it —
Affectionately, Elliott
1940-1941: Tutor and Director of Music
In the college catalogue of 1940-41, Carter was listed as
Tutor and Director of Music (St. John’s College Catalogue
1940-41). His responsibilities included supervision of the entire music program. According to the college newspaper, The
Collegian, which ran a long article in October about the upcoming year’s music program, Carter would plan and schedule a series of six concerts by visiting artists; he would give
a lecture the week before each concert to discuss the works
on the program; he would organize and direct student instrumental ensembles to appear in recitals and accompany the
Glee Club; he would conduct the Glee Club, which was to
rehearse three times per week and give numerous recitals during the year; he would lead a music discussion group on Saturday mornings for interested students; he would lead a
counterpoint, harmony, and composition class for interested
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students; he would supervise concerts of recorded music four
times per week; he would prepare the music room in the late
afternoon each day for students to listen to recorded music
(The Collegian, Oct. 19, 1940).
Carter seems to have taken to these duties enthusiastically, if the pictures in the 1941 St. John’s College Yearbook
give any indication. In the faculty section of the yearbook
there is a picture of Carter working assiduously at his desk,
and in the Glee Club section there is a photo of him directing
the singers with deliberation. The yearbook also provides a
positive evaluation of Carter’s work with the Glee Club over
the year:
The aims of the Club are primarily to foster competent group singing (not necessary concert competency), to gain a better understanding of choral music,
and . . . to let the ear hear what the voice does. To date
the criticisms received from the two mid-winter
recitals give encouragement to the feeling that the
Glee Club is headed in the right direction. Studies,
scholarship work, and talents turned toward other
interests have naturally
taken their toll of the initial
roster, but there still remains a group large
enough to work with the
music under consideration.
The members are from the
three lower classes, which
means that their return next
fall will leave only the task
of inducting freshmen and
learning new songs; this is
Fig. 2: Carter’s four-part setting
indeed a strong incentive
of “St. John’s Forever”
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for the club’s continuation and success (St. John’s
College Yearbook, 1941, 30).
And the work Carter did with the music program was indeed quite varied. For instance, on Saturday, December 20,
1940, the Glee Club performed, at the request of Scott
Buchanan, on the St. John’s College monthly radio broadcast
from WFBR in Baltimore. On that occasion they sang “St.
John’s Forever,” arranged especially by Carter for the broadcast. (A copy of this arrangement can be found in the St.
John’s College Music Library.) They also sang at “Miss
Alexander’s Christmas Party” on December 18. And Carter
assisted in making the musical arrangements for the end-ofterm variety show That’s Your Problem, which showcased the
vaudeville talents of both students and tutors (The Collegian,
Nov. 13 and Dec. 13, 1940).
When the first performance of the year’s concert series
was announced, The Collegian took the opportunity to explain the purpose of the lectures that Carter would give in
preparation for each concert:
While Mr. Carter plans to discuss primarily the program for each concert, the entire lecture series will
form a course in music appreciation. As Mr. Carter is
himself a talented musician, the course affords a
unique opportunity in musical education (The Collegian, Nov. 1, 1940).
The Collegian also reviewed each concert, and while the performances were sometimes panned, sometimes praised, there
was no criticism of Carter’s work in organizing the series and
lecturing on the pieces performed.
Things went less swimmingly with some of Carter’s other
duties. The counterpoint, harmony, and composition class
that had been announced in October was “on the verge of collapse” at the start of the second term because of waning at-
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tendance. The Saturday morning music discussion class was
considered to be “somewhat irregular”; nevertheless, in January the group had just finished an analysis of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and was starting to study Beethoven’s
Diabelli Variations (The Collegian, Jan. 31, 1941). In February it was announced that, “at the request of a small group
of students,” Carter would be offering a new class in eartraining and sight-singing on Saturday mornings (The Collegian, Feb. 14, 1941).
Taking into account the addition of this new class,
Carter’s teaching schedule for his first year at St. John’s
looked like this:
Elliott Carter’s Teaching Schedule, 1940-41
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
4-6
Sunday
Music
discussion
and ear
training
10-12
2-3
Saturday
Counterpoint
Music
Music
Room
Room
Music
Room
Music
Room
Counterpoint
Music
Music
Room
Room
Recorded Glee
Music
Club
Recorded
Music
Glee
Club
Glee
Club
6-7
7-8
Recorded
Music
In addition to his teaching hours, it seems that Carter was
responsible for writing several manuals relating to musical
studies during the fall 1940 term. Not surprisingly, he authored a “Manual of Musical Notation” explaining how to
read and write music, which was no doubt intended for the
use of students in his various music classes. But his name is
also attached to several manuals of musical studies that were
part of the Freshman Laboratory curriculum: “Musical Intervals and Scales,” “The Greek Diatonic Scale,” and “The Just
Scale and Its Uses” (Schiff 1983, 336). Another manual exists
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for a fourth laboratory unit called “The Keys in Music,”
which, though unsigned, must also have been devised by
Carter, because the musical examples are written in his distinctive musical script. (All the documents mentioned in this
paragraph can be found in the St. John’s College Library
Archives.)
All these manuals demonstrate Carter’s understanding of
the integration of music with the rest of the curriculum of the
New Program. The “Manual of Music Notation,” for instance, likens music to language, and musical notation to linguistic writing systems.
Musical notation is the method used to represent
graphically the patterns of sound which are the basis
of music. Like the writing which represents the language of words, it serves man to overcome his lapses
of memory by maintaining a more permanent record
and aids him in the transmission to other men of the
work of his mind as well in art as in thought.
The simplest kind of notation of music sounds indicates in a general way the prolongation or shortening
of the vowels of words and also the rise and fall of
the voice while it is sounding them (Carter 1941, 1.)
The comparison between music and language was a favorite notion of Scott Buchanan’s, and Carter seems to have
agreed with him. It is likely that the two discussed the matter
before Carter wrote this manual. There is a record from this
period of Buchanan’s thoughts on music—a three-page outline of the topic “Music” dated November 8, 1940 that shows
clear parallels to Carter’s formulation. The first page of the
outline contains these notes (Buchanan 1940, 1):
Voice—noise
Words
3 Dimensions of Words
Pitch
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113
Time
Accent-Rhythm
Other Dimensions
Expression
Music Without Words
Measurement and Words
Verbal Analogies
Figures of Speech
Metaphor
Simile
Analogy
Allegory
It appears that the two men were in agreement that music is
one of the writing and reading disciplines in the liberal arts
tradition, and that this view needed to be expressed somehow
in the New Program.
If Carter’s music-notation manual links the study of
music to the study of language, his laboratory manuals even
more clearly link it to the study of mathematics and physics.
In 1939-1940, the year before Carter’s revision of the music
element in the laboratory program, there was only one music
laboratory exercise during the entire year, and the text of the
manual for that exercise was a mere five pages that described
the design of a simple, two-string sonometer (sounding
board), gave instructions for duplicating Pythagoras’ experiments on musical ratios, provided directions for creating various musical scales, and posing questions to be answered in
laboratory reports. Carter’s four laboratory units brought the
total number of manual pages devoted to musical topics up
to sixty-eight, and the experiments he devised demonstrate a
wide-ranging knowledge of early music theory and mathematics. The lessons covered Pythagoras’ experiments, Euclid’s division of the canon, the music of Plato’s Timaeus,
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and Kepler’s notions of the musical relations among the planets; he had the students create eight- and thirteen-string
sonometers to explore the discovery and historical development of musical intervals, modes, scales, melodies, harmonies, and chord progressions from the most ancient
tunings through the experimental temperaments of the
Baroque and early Classical period to modern equal temperament. (The sonometer
in the accompanying
photo is located in the
St. John’s College
Music Library.)
Moreover, these
lessons were coordinated with the readings that students
were doing in matheFig. 3: Carter’s Sonometer
matics tutorial and seminar. According to the teaching schedule, the Freshman music
laboratories would have occurred during the fifteenth through
the eighteenth weeks of the school year, that is, probably in
December and January. These units therefore would have followed previous laboratory studies of physical phenomena
dealing with rectilineal angles, areas, weights and measures,
light, lenses, and circular motion, and mathematical studies
of polygons, simple ratios, compound ratios, and simple
quadratic equations.
Virgil Blackwell, Carter’s personal assistant, calls the two
years at St. John’s the “lost years,” because they have not
been much discussed by Carter’s biographers. He also told
me that Carter had a good laugh when he saw the image of
the sonometer I had sent via email (personal communication,
Nov. 6, 2011); he remembered that “the students made the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | THOMS
115
sonometer” (personal communication, Nov. 8, 2011). These
remarks indicate that Carter approached the teaching of the
music laboratories in the participatory, exploratory, experimental spirit of the New Program. He and his students would
investigate the most complex concepts of tuning by means
of the sonometers they built with their own hands, by applying bridges, weights, rulers, wires, nails, rubber mallets,
bows, and resin to manipulate string lengths in an effort to
discover the mathematical underpinnings of the auditory phenomena.
While Carter thus set the foundations for the mathematical study of music at St. John’s, his initial designs began to
be modified in the very next school year. Since the program
of study at the college has always been under continuous revision, the music labs too went through changes over the
years, until Carter’s original contributions were all but forgotten. His four laboratory exercises lay neglected in the library archives, together with the drawings of the eight- and
thirteen-stringed sonometers. The seventy-year old sonometer, discovered some years ago in a basement storage room,
was tucked away as a curious relic in a corner of the music
library, its purpose and origin unknown.
1941-1942: Tutor of Greek, Mathematics, and Seminar
In the 1941-42 school year, Carter’s friend Nicholas Nabokov
arrived at St. John’s to take over the duties of Director of
Music. Nabokov expanded the music program considerably.
While the Glee Club continued, he added two new vocal
groups: a chamber choir and something called the “Vespers”
group. He also started a chamber ensemble and a community
orchestra.
Since Carter had relinquished his responsibilities to
Nabokov, he then took on the regular teaching schedule of a
tutor at the College. Initially it was difficult to determine ex-
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116
actly what he taught during his second year. After seventy
years, the original records of teaching schedules and tutor assignments had been lost. But the current Assistant Registrar
at St. John’s, Jacqueline Thoms, recently discovered some
ledgers detailing all the classes attended by each Senior in
the graduating class of 1945 during their four-your career, together with the names of their tutors. By compiling the
classes that these students attended during their Freshman
year, it was possible to identify the classes Carter taught during the 1941-42 school year, and the number of students in
each of his classes (Ledger 1941-42).
This research confirms the facts that were already known
about Carter’s teaching that year. He taught Freshman Greek,
Freshman Mathematics, and his four Freshman Laboratory units
when they came up in December or January. In addition, he coled a Freshman Seminar with fellow tutor Bernard Peebles.
Elliott Carter’s teaching schedule 1941-42
Monday
9-10
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Tuesday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Wednesday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Thursday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Friday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
10-11
11-12
Mathematics Mathematics Mathematics
Tutorial
Tutorial
Tutorial
9 students
9 students
9 students
Mathematics Mathematics
Tutorial
Tutorial
9 students
9 students
12-2
Laboratory
Freshman
Exercises 15-18
2-5
5-8
8-10
Seminar with
Peebles
18 students
Seminar with
Peebles
18 students
Although Carter’s responsibilities as Director of Music
were no doubt heavy, his responsibilities as a tutor were even
heavier. In addition to facilitating discussion in his Greek and
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ESSAYS & LECTURES | THOMS
Mathematics tutorials, he also had to set up, prepare, and lead
the laboratory exercises for the students. All these classes also
required him to read and respond to short papers and reports,
and to devise and correct occasional quizzes. In his Seminar
he had to complete the extensive required readings from the
Great Books, moderate the two-hour long seminar discussions twice a week, read longer papers, and conduct oral examinations. In addition, he also would have spent considerable
time advising students individually on their classwork, and
helping them to write, revise, and complete the required essays.
One can get an idea of the sheer amount of reading Carter
had to do for seminar alone from the schedule of readings
from the 1940-41 school year, which would not have changed
much during the following year:
September 26
September 30
October 3
October 7
October 10
October 14
October 17
October 21
October 24
October 28
October 31
November 4
November 7
Homer, Iliad, 1
November 11 Aeschylus, Choephoroe, Eumenides
Homer, Iliad, 2-4
November 14 Plato, Charmides, Lysis
Homer, Iliad, 5-10
November 18 Plato, Symposium
Homer, Iliad, 11-16
November 21 Herodotus, History, 1-2
Homer, Iliad, 17-24
November 25 Herodotus, History, 3-5
Plato, Ion, Laches
November 28 Herodotus, History, 6-7
Homer, Odyssey, 1-8 December 2 Herodotus, History, 8-9
Homer, Odyssey, 9-16 December 5 Plato, Gorgias
Homer, Odyssey, 17-24 December 9 Plato, Republic, 1-2
Plato, Meno
December 12 Plato, Republic 3-5
Plato, 3 works
December 16 Plato, Republic, 6-7
Plato, Phaedo
December 19 Plato, Republic, 8-10
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Christmas Vacation
January 6
January 9
January 13
January 16
January 20
January 23
January 27
January 30
February 3
February 6
February 10
Plato, Cratylus
Plato, Phaedrus
Sophocles, 2 works
Aristotle, Poetics
Sophocles, 2 works
Euripides, 3 works
Plato, Parmenides
Plato, Theatetus
Plato, Sophist
Hippocrates, 4 works
Hippocrates, 5 works
February 13
February 13
February 20
February 27
March 3
March 6
March 10
March 13
March 17
March 20
Plato, Philebus
Plato, Timaeus
Aristotle, Categories
Aristotle, Prior Analytics
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Thucydides, History, 1-2
Thucydides, History, 3-4
Thucydides, History, 5-6
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118
Spring Vacation
March 31
April 3
April 7
April 10
April 14
April 17
April 21
April 24
April 28
Thucydides, History, 7-8
Aristophanes, 3 works
Aristophanes, 3 works
Aristotle, Politics, 1-4
Aristotle, Politics, 5-8
Plutarch, 5 works
Plutarch, 3 works
Nicomachus, Arithmetic 1
Nicomachus, Arithmetic, 2
May 1
May 5
May 8
May 12
May 15
May 19
May 23
May 26
May 29
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Euclid, Elements, Bks. 5, 10, 13
Aristarchus, Sun and Moon
Aristotle, Physics, 1
Aristotle, Physics, 2-3
Aristotle, Physics, 4
Archimedes, Works (unspecified)
Lucian, True History
(Barr Buchanan Series III, Curriculum in Motion, December 1940,
Box 2, Folder 25, St. John’s College Library Archives)
As we have seen, Carter’s remarkable education prepared
him well for his duties as a tutor at St. John’s. Nevertheless,
the new experience of teaching Freshmen, the pace of the curriculum, and the many hours spent meeting individually with
students must have kept him extraordinarily busy.
1940-1942: Elliott Carter, Composer
According to Virgil Blackwell, Carter says that his choral
work In Defense of Corinth was written during his time at St.
John’s College, and that he began working on the sketches
for his Symphony No. 1 immediately after leaving the college,
when he and his wife moved west to Arizona and New Mexico. Both works relate to our consideration of Carter’s career
at St. John’s.
In Defense of Corinth for speaker, men’s chorus and
piano four hands, was commissioned by the Harvard Glee
Club and performed by them on March 12, 1942, with G.
Wallace Woodworth conducting (Schiff, 329). The work has
many similarities to Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Schoenberg’s
Moses and Aaron, and Orff’s Carmina Burana. It is based on
a passage from “The Author’s Prologue” to Book Three of
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (14951553). The text could be construed as a satirical commentary
on militarism and a mockery of war-hysteria. Carter’s work
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | THOMS
119
was composed close to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on
December 7, 1941. The satirical attitude toward war displayed in the piece did not, however, carry over into Carter’s
personal life: he attempted to enlist in military service as soon
as the United States entered hostilities, as did many of his St.
John’s students over the next few years. Because he had terrible allergies, however, he was rejected for active duty on
health grounds. Eventually, from late 1943 until June 6, 1944
he worked as a musical advisor for the U. S. Office of War
Information (Wierzbicki 2011, 29).
Whatever his personal political feelings, Carter’s In Defense of Corinth is a musical metaphor for his situation as
composer in a world made mad by war. The work is divided
into three distinct sections. In the first section, a speaker and
male chorus use the spoken narration, speech-song, and full
singing of a speaker and male chorus join with a four-hand
piano accompaniment to build up musical textures in imitation of the building up of the Corinthian war effort against
Philip of Macedon:
Everyone did watch and ward, and not one was exempted from carrying the basket. Some polished
corslets, varnished backs and breasts, cleaned the headpieces, mail-coats, brigandines, salads, helmets, morions, jacks, gushets, gorgets, hoguines, brassars and
cuissars, corslets, haubergeons, shields, bucklers, targets, greaves, gauntlets, and spurs. Others made ready
bows, slings, crossbows, pellets, catapults, migrains or
fireballs, birebrands, balists, scorpions, and other such
warlike engine expugnatory and destructive Hellepolides. They sharpened and prepared spears, staves,
pikes, brown bills, hailberds, long hooks, lances, zagayes, quarterstaves, eesleares, partisans, troutstaves,
clubs, battle-axes, maces, darts, dartlets, glaives,
javelins, javelots, and truncheons. They set edges upon
scimitars, cutlasses, badelairs, backwords, tucks,
rapiers, bayonets, arrow-heads, dags, daggers, mandou-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
sians, poniards, whinyards, knives, skeans, shables,
chipping knives, and raillons. . . . Every man exercised
his weapon. (Rabelais 2004, 265.)
Accompanying this relentless concatenation of weaponry, the
musical elements continue to pile up, steadily getting louder,
sharper, more percussive; the voices progress to confused
speaking and shouting, reaching a climax in pure noise.
Fig. 4: In Defense of Corinth holograph score
(Library of Congress, ML96.C288 [Case])
The brief second section is a quieter setting in which the
main character, Diogenes, seeing everyone around him so
hard at work making war while he is not employed by the
city in any way, contemplates what he should do. Surely this
must reflect Carter’s state of mind at the time: unable to join
the war effort because of his allergies, he finds himself surrounded by young men, including his students, preparing for
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | THOMS
121
and leaving for war. Like Diogenes, he must have been contemplating his situation, and what he should do next.
In the third section Diogenes, in a moment of sudden
awakening, is roused and inspired by the war effort going on
all around him. He leaves town, goes toward a little hill near
Corinth called Cranie,
and there on the strand, a pretty level place, did he roll
his jolly tub, which served him for a house to shelter
him from the injuries of the weather: there, I say, in a
great vehemecy of spirit, did he turn it, veer it, wheel
it, whirl it, frisk it, jumble it, shuffle it, huddle it, tumble it, hurry it, jolt it, justle it, overthrow it, evert it, invert it, subvert it, overturn it, beat it, thwack it, bump
it, batter it, knock it, thrust it, push it, jerk it, shock it,
shake it, toss it, throw it, overthrow it, upside down,
topsy-turvy, arsiturvy, tread it, trample it, stamp it, tap
it, ting it, ring it, tingle it, towl it, sound it, resound it,
stop it, shut it, unbung it, close it, unstopple it. . . . And
then again in a mighty bustle, he . . . slid it down the
hill, and precipitated it from the very height of Cranie;
then from the foot to the top (like another Sisyphus
with his stone) bore it up again, and every way so
banged it and belabored it that it was ten thousand to
one he had not struck the bottom of it out. (Ibid.)
This text is set with hocket imitation and short fugue-like segments, piling the words on top of one another, so that the result is quite similar to the raucous first section. And also like
the first section, it undergoes a steady crescendo until it
reaches a thundering climax.
At this point, the final section begins. The narrator speaks
the last few lines quietly:
When one of his friends had seen, and asked him why
he did so toil his body, perplex his spirit, and torment
his tub, the philosopher’s answer was that, not being
employed in any other charge by the Republic, he
thought it expedient to thunder and storm it so tempes-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tuously upon his tub, that amongst a people so fervently
busy and earnest at work he alone might not seem a loitering slug and lazy fellow. (Ibid.)
It is not too far-fetched to imagine that Carter may have seen
himself in the role of Diogenes, and that composing this wild,
raucous piece was Carter’s way “tormenting his tub” in order
to avoid being seen as doing nothing while everyone around
him was consumed by the war effort. There is certainly no
doubt that the atmosphere on campus after the declaration of
war resembled the situation in Rabelais’ Corinth. The preparations for the war were both pervasive and intrusive. There
were military exercises on campus, information poured in
about military employment opportunities, new classes appeared on the mechanics of gasoline engines and the electronics of radio devices (The Collegian, various issues from
1942). Periodic lectures about the causes and progress and
status of the war were offered, and a rash of military enlistment by the students so depleted enrollment that by the war’s
end there war great concern that the St. John’s might have to
close its doors. In Defense of Corinth certainly reflected the
conditions that surrounded Carter while he composed the
work, and no doubt reflected his inner state as well.
Carter’s second major work of 1942 is his Symphony No. 1,
which he completed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about six
months after leaving St. John’s. In the sketches for this work,
which are housed at the Library of Congress along with holograph score and the revised score from 1954 (Carter 1942),
it seems that Carter is again playing the role of Diogenes tormenting his tub; this time, however, the tub is the Symphony.
The 184 pages of sketches show beating, battering, slicing,
compressing, enlarging, twisting, and transforming of apparently innumerable musical ideas from all three movements
in the finished piece. There is an explosive vitality combined
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | THOMS
123
Fig. 5: Sketches for Symphony No. 1
(Library of Congress ML96.C288 [Case])
with a restless energy in the musical handwriting, which
seems almost thrown onto the pages in instants of creative
inspiration.
What is more, this material is not limited to musical notations. The sketches fall into ten categories: 1. Fragments of
one to many lines, some crossed out; 2. single-line drafts
worked out and developed; 3. two-part piano reductions of
sections in progress, for playing at the piano; 4. fair copies
of two-part part piano reductions, including one of the entire
first movement, 5. reductions of three to five parts, for working out complex ideas; 6. larger orchestral reductions with
instrumentation noted; 7. full-score drafts with instrumentation noted; 8. verbal notes, such as “add a few dotted
rhythms” or “avoid too many accents on the first beat”; 9.
letter designations for the various motives and themes, such
as “A,” “B,” “C,” and so forth; 10. verbal notes on the se-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
quential organization of musical elements within a section.
Out of all these disparate elements, Carter fashioned an
elegant, hand-copied full score of 149 pages on December
19, 1942. In this pre-xerox, pre-computer era, it must have
taken a considerable amount of time just to write out such a
meticulous manuscript. And if one adds to that the amount
of time that was clearly devoted to beating the tub while inventing, revising, discarding, reworking, drafting, and redrafting the thousands of sketches, it seems plausible to think
that Carter began working on the symphony while still at St.
John’s. Blackwell, however, indicated that Carter was “adamant”
about the fact that he began working on the piece only after
leaving St. John’s. If that is correct, then the explosive creative
energy displayed in the sketches suggests that his compositional urge had been suppressed by his intellectual and instructional responsibilities at St. John’s, so that once those
responsibilities were lifted, his musical imagination was able
to generate ideas profusely.
The Symphony No. 1 is a Janus-faced work, looking backward toward the influence of slightly older contemporaries
like Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copland, but also
forward toward traits that would become characteristic of
Carter’s style—cross-accents and irregular groupings of
rhythms, interplay of tonal centers, fluidity in the shaping of
musical motives, a transformational approach to motivic development, evocative orchestral coloring (particularly in the
use of woodwinds), and simultaneous balancing of dissimilar
ideas (Schiff 1983, 117-121). The Symphony already shows
the continuous ebb and flow from sparseness to complexity,
from delicacy to brutality, from quietness to cacophony, from
simple textures to convoluted contrapuntal intricacy that
would appear fully developed in his masterpiece, the Concerto for Orchestra of 1969. One can see in the sketches and
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hear in the music that 1942 was a time of compositional turbulence for Carter. He must have been bursting with competing ideas from old and new sources, all pushing him toward
discovering his unique artistic voice. Whatever attractions
the undeniably novel environment of St. John’s held for him
as a curious, intelligent, inquisitive, and liberally educated
thinker, he must have felt that, in his heart, he was essentially
meant to be a composer. What else could he do but leave, so
that the potential composer within him could become actual?
Epilogue: Elliott Carter, Composer and Liberal Artist
In the years just after leaving to pursue his composing career,
Carter wrote two essays that relate to his tenure as a tutor at
St. John’s. The first, “Music as a Liberal Art” (Carter 1944),
which was written only two years after he left the college,
discusses the decline of music as a liberal art in America. Citing the fundamental importance of musical training in Plato’s
Timaeus and Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics, Carter laments
the fact that music has become a specialized and technical
discipline, divorced from the connection it once had to the
other liberal arts. At St. John’s, however, he says, “music has
actually been taken out of the music building. It is no longer
the special study of the specialist, of the budding professional. Instead it is examined in the classroom, seminars, and
laboratories, in an effort to give it a working relationship with
all other knowledge” (Carter 1944, 105). After describing in
greater detail the relations between music, mathematics, philosophy, and physics in the St. John’s curriculum, Carter
maintains that
[w]hen the student sees the interconnection of all these
things, his understanding grows in richness. And since
today no widely acepted esthetic doctrine unifies out
though on the various aspects of music, such a plan at
least conjures up the past to assist us; it helps to raise
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the various philosophical questions involved. In one
way or another these questions must be considered, for
it is not enough to devote all our efforts to acquiring
the technical skill essential to instrumentalists, composers, and even listeners. There must be good thinking
and good talking about music to preserve its noble rank
as a fine art for all of us, and the college is one of the
logical places for this more considered attitude to be
cultivated. (Carter 1944, 106).
As we have seen, Carter’s view of music education was
deeply attuned to the experimental approach being taken at
St. John’s. This alignment must have made his teaching in
the New Program a meaningful and rewarding experience for
him, and this article is evidence of how highly he regarded
the method of musical studies at St. John’s.
The second article, “The Function of the Composer in
Teaching the General College Student” (Carter 1952), reveals
a second aspect of Carter’s understanding of music as a liberal art. While it is certainly true that reconnecting music to
the other liberal arts provides students with a more profound
understanding of music than specialized musical instruction,
it is also true that connecting the other liberal arts to music
provides students with a more profound understanding of
their own inner life than specialized instruction in any discipline. In this article, Carter discusses the difference between
the “outer-directed” man, whose primary focus is on adapting
his inner life to the demands of society, and the “inner-directed” man, who primary focus in on adapting the demands
of society to his individual conscience and imagination. Both
the teaching scholar and the teaching artist, according to
Carter, are trying to “preserve that liveliness of the individual
mind so important to our civilization” (Carter 1952, 151). But
they go about it in different ways.
On the one hand, the teaching scholar of the general
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music student aims for the “all-embracing, the dispassionate
view of his subject” and “tries to find a harmonious and rationally explicable pattern in the past and present.” By contrast, the teaching artist is “only occupied with those aspects
of music most important to him as an individual”; his goal as
an artist is to create unique artworks that can move his audience and possibly shift societal demands. In short, he teacher
treats music objectively, the artist, subjectively. This basic
difference in attitude toward the subject gives rise to a difference in emphasis that marks the gulf between teaching
scholar and teaching artist: the scholar highlights the “pastness of the past,” and communicates to students the impassive
historicity of the subject matter, whereas the artist highlights
the “presentness of the past,” and communicates to students
the pliability of the past as material for the reshaping powers
of the creative individual. Carter admonishes higher education for its preference for teaching scholars, who give students “scraps of information” about the past; he praises the
teaching artist for “constantly trying to find a more powerful
method of making his students more culturally alive,” by reshaping the past into a living and vital present (Carter, 1952,
153-154). At present, Carter emphasizes,
we have got to help our students to realize that to enjoy
the arts creatively and imaginatively will be far more
rewarding to them as individuals in terms of stimulating vividness of thought and feeling, quickness of understanding, and ingeniousness in dealing with new
problems—far more rewarding than the mere passive
enjoyment which most mass-produced entertainment
invites (Carter 1952, 155).
The contemporary serious composer must be able to engage
students in the “presentness of the past,” must be able to absorb the musical past, sublimate its essence, and recast it into
new shapes that speaks movingly to the present while at the
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same time embodying what was most enduring in the music
of the past.
At this point in the article, Carter once again describes
the music program at St. John’s. Because the college wanted
to move away from the teaching scholar’s approach to music
toward a teaching artist’s point of view, “they called in a composer on the hunch that he would grasp the idea more than
other members of the musical profession, and a plan was
worked out from which it was hoped that students of widely
different musicality could make contact with art” (Carter
1952, 156). It was hoped that students might attain “esthetic
awareness” by studying music under the guidance of a composer, who could help the students see beyond the “pastness
of the past” to the “presentness of the past” by showing them
music history and the masterworks of the great composers
through the contemporary lens of his actively creative perspective.
But the teaching artist is not limited to exhibiting his
works to his students. On the one hand, by means of his compositions, the teaching artist “can give life to and express all
those things which, at best, he can but poorly indicate with
words.” On the other hand, “sometimes verbal teaching, that
is, the articulation of the principles and ideas he strives to
embody in his works, is a valuable part of his development
as a composer; and in this case he can be a useful member of
the academic world” (Carter 1952, 158). In this last circumstance, the artist can bring his students along into the internal
aspect of his creative process, and possibly stimulate them to
develop their own creative powers.
In this essay, as in much of his music, Carter seems to be
trying to hold together two complex and somewhat contradictory themes. It is simultaneously true not only that the
composer is the best teacher when he is writing music and
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indirectly teaching others, but also that his students, and the
composer himself as well, also benefit from his talking about
music and directly teaching others. The two truths conflict.
The working composer must be somewhat solitary; he must
spend time away from others pursuing his personal creative
projects. The teaching composer must engage in communal
life; he must bring “presentness to the past” by speaking with
others about listening to, performing, and creating music. For
the teaching artist, this counterpoint of competing activities
can enrich and deepen his creative life. But no one can do
both at the same time.
For Carter, his two years at St. John’s as a teaching artist
seem to have stimulated his already intense creative drive—
so much so, that he found it necessary to stop teaching in
order to focus on his art. Over the years, he has returned to
the role of teaching artist often, giving innumerable workshops, coaching prospective composers in academic and nonacademic settings, lecturing and writing essays about music
education for academic audiences. One could argue that it
was Carter’s decision to join the faculty at St. John’s that provided the opportunity for him to become an extraordinary
teaching artist, and that it was his decision to leave St. John’s
that provided the opportunity for him to create the many enduring artworks through which he could reach an ever widening circle of students with his teaching. Without both coming
and going from St. John’s, Elliott Carter could not have become Elliott Carter.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blackwell, Virgil. 2011. Personal email messages to and telephone conversations with the author in November.
Buchanan, Scott. 1940. “Music,” three-part handwritten note dated November 8, at Harvard University Libraries, MS Am 1992, No. 1547.
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Carter, Elliott. 1941. “Manual of Music Notation.” St. John’s College Library Archives.
———. 1942. Sketches for Symphony No. 1, Library of Congress Performing Arts Manuscripts, ML96.C288
———. 1950. The Defense of Corinth. Library of Congress Performing
Arts Manuscripts, ML96.C288
———. 1944. “Music as a Liberal Art,” Modern Music 22:1, 12-16.
Reprinted in Else Stone and Kurt Stone, The Writings of Elliott Carter
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 105-109.
———. 1952. “The Function of the Composer in Teaching the General
College Student,” Bulletin of the Society for Music in the Liberal Arts
College 3:1, Supplement 3. Reprinted in Else Stone and Kurt Stone, The
Writings of Elliott Carter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977),
150-58.
———. 1962. Personal letter to Scott Buchanan. St. John’s College Library Archive, Barr Personal Papers, Series 2, Box 10, folder 20.
The Collegian. (St. John’s College newspaper.) Various issues, 19401941, 1941-1942. Maryland State Archives, St. John’s College Special
Collection, MSA 5698.
Edwards, Allen. 1971. Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Ledger 1941-42. Large format class ledger. St. John’s College Registrar’s
Office Archives.
Murphy, Emily A. 1996. “A Complete and Generous Education”: 300
Years of Liberal Arts, St. John’s College, Annapolis. Annapolis, Maryland:
St. John’s College Press.
Nabokov, Nicholas. 1940. Letter to Stringfellow Barr, June 22, 1940. St.
John’s College Registrar’s Office Archive.
Nelson, Charles. 1997. Stringfellow Barr: A Centennial Appreciation of
His Life and Work, 1897-1982. Annapolis, Maryland: St. John’s College
Press.
Rabelais, Francois. 2004. Five Books Of The Lives, Heroic Deeds And
Sayings Of Gargantua And His Son Pantagruel, translated by Sir Thomas
Urquhart and Peter Motteux. Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing.
Rule, William Scott. 2009. Seventy Years of Changing Great Books at St.
John’s College. Educational Policy Studies Dissertations. Paper 37.
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/eps_diss/37
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Schiff, David. 1983. The Music of Elliott Carter. New York: DaCapo
Press.
St. John’s College Catalogue 1940-41. St. John’s College Registrar’s Office Archives.
St. John’s College Yearbook, 1940-1941, 1941-1942. St. John’s College
Library Archives.
Stone, Else and Kurt. 1977. The Writings of Elliott Carter: An American
Composer Looks at Modern Music. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Wierzbicki, James Eugene. 2011. Elliott Carter. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
OTHER RESOURCES LOCATED AT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
In the St. John’s College Library Archives
Photo of Elliott Carter at desk
Musical programs from 1940-41
Carter’s Five Laboratory Manuals :
“Musical Intervals and Scales” (Laboratory Exercise 15, 1940)
“The Greek Diatonic Scale” (Laboratory Exercise 16, 1940)
“The Just Scale and Its Uses” (Laboratory Exercise 17, 1940)
“The Keys in Music” (Laboratory Exercise 18, 1940)
“Manual of Musical Notation” (1 March, 1941)
In the St. John’s College Music Library
Carter’s sonometer
Carter’s four-part setting of “St. John’s Forever”
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Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening
Eva Brann
I imagine that on Parents’ Weekend there might be some parents attending this once weekly occasion when the college assembles to hear
a lecture. By its very name, a lecture is read—but read out loud, delivered in the writer’s voice. Thus, the sequence goes: I thought, I
wrote, I read, I speak. Although this is the principal way of teaching
at institutions of higher education, it is a curious one. Here at St.
John’s, we show our respect for the possible profit we might derive
from it by requiring our students to come to a lecture every Friday
night—just when, elsewhere, it is prelude-time to party night. And we
express our suspicion of lecture-hearing by asking students to listen
to a lecture—but only once a week. So this one weekly hour of just
sitting and listening is mandatory, and about as enforceable as a
mandatory evacuation before a storm. (This simile appears here because this lecture was written in the dark during Hurricane Irene.)
The attendance that we do take utterly seriously is presence in
class—seminar above all. In seminar, no speeches are delivered. Instead we talk, in turn, to one another. So rather than call my lecture
“Speaking, Writing, Reading, Listening,” I have substituted “Talking”
for “Speaking.” Talk seems to denote a more conversational, almost
social mode of speech, less formal, more spontaneous, more participatory. And yet our seminar is a mandatory, scheduled class, with prescribed texts. Is that a setting for talk?
So I would like to think in public about our modes of being together, about the how and what of this college as a community of
learning. Since we, the tutors, collude with our students in making
them a little impatient with being talked at, I’ll sneak around that resistance, which I share. I’ll snaffle their good will (old books on rhetoric called this formal beginning of a speech the captatio benevolentiae,
This lecture was delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis on the Friday
of Parents’ Weekend, November 4, 2011. Eva Brann is a tutor and former
Dean of the College.
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“the capture of benevolence”) by speaking about talking itself and
what it entails.
Your children, our students, will probably have told you now and
then that parents don’t know anything. Freshmen, on the other hand,
know everything. They are fresh, unimpaired in spirit—and also, perhaps, somewhat fresh in a now obsolete meaning of the term: cheeky.
Sophomores know a little less; their class name means “wise fools,”
as their knowledge of Greek will tell them; it is a combination of
Greek sophon, “wise” and moron, “foolish.” Juniors and the college
elders, the seniors, have reapproached their parents and become almost perfect in ignorance.
I am, in fact, being serious. The members of this community of
learning are not ashamed to own up to their own ignorance; indeed
we think better of this thoughtful confession than of a profession of
expertise. It’s why the teachers here call themselves “tutors,”
guardians of learning, rather than “professors,” authorities of knowledge, and it is why our students are to some degree our fellow-learners. Thus we are apt to think of even the most positive, content-replete
learning as a specification of our ignorance. It’s a fancy way of saying
that all our learning starts and ends in questions— a point to which I
will return as we go along. So this acknowledged ignorance is not
false humility, but a confident, even competent, way to conduct a college. Yet, of course, sub specie aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity,” as the philosophers say, we are, as limited beings, all
equal—equally diminutive before the infinitely distant ultimacies we
long for. This is cause enough for some personal modesty and even
occasional dejection.
I’ve been saying “we,” meaning the college of students and tutors.
Now I’ll mean mainly the tutors when I say that, although there’s
probably nothing we all agree must be true, there is something we all
agree must be done. Some of us, perhaps even most, think that the
Appearances before our senses bespeak a Being behind them; some
of us suppose there is a Ground in which all nature is rooted; and some
of us believe there is a realm of Divinity above us. Others see no reason to agree to any of these. But we all agree that, in regard to our ignorance about matters of most persistent importance to human beings,
we are close to our students, and that we are therefore guardians of
learning rather than transmitters of doctrine.
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We have a model for this unteacherly mode of teaching, presented
to us in the writings of Plato: Socrates. Not all of us, particularly freshmen, take to him. He describes himself now as a gadfly, stinging a
sluggish horse into wakefulness, now as a demon mediating between
earth and heaven (Apology 30e, Symposium 202d, ff.). So he is both
irritating and elusive. One moment he argues like a sophist, that is to
say, a trickster of the intellect; another moment he intimates his most
genuine relation to truth. He is both bully and benefactor. So when he
declares, often and insistently, that he is ignorant, we must suspect
irony. “Irony,” eironeia, is the Greek word for dissembling, pretending
to be what one is not. What then is this Socratic ignorance, which in
some of us engenders trust precisely by causing dis-ease?
We’ve all come across genuine inarticulate cluelessness, truly
dumb ignorance—though I think it is fairly rare in human beings. Socratic ignorance, on the other hand, is anything but dumb; it talks, and
that makes all the difference. For example, in the first philosophical
work our students read together, Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates
blames himself for knowing “nothing at all” about human excellence
(71b). That is why he can genuinely ask: What is it? But look what
this question involves. First of all it is an admission, actually an assertion, of self-knowledge. People who ask, know what they lack.
They know what they don’t know. Acknowledged ignorance is important knowledge about ourselves.
And second, it is a very precise negative knowledge of what we
are asking after. The word “comprehend” comes to mind; it means
“to get, to enclose, in one’s grasp.” Human thinking is wonderfully
prehensile. It can get at, wrap itself around, something it does not yet
really “get” in the sense of “understand.” In this dialogue, Meno is
Socrates’ “interlocutor,” which is learned Latin for “conversational
partner.” I use the term here because Meno—who, as we know from
other sources, was as bad a man as you’ll never want to meet—can’t
really be a partner, and certainly not a participant, in the sort of searching conversation Socrates cares about. In fact he tries to forestall such
talk by producing a clever argument. He has the clever ignorance that
defines human badness for Socrates. This obstructionist argument
turns that very wonder of question-asking, which I’ve described as
our ability to wrap our thought around what we haven’t yet got, into
an obstacle: If you know something why would you ask about it? If
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you’re ignorant of it, how would you recognize it if you did get it?
Socrates has a reply that has resonated down through the ages; it
bears on the essential character of talking, and I’ll come to it soon.
Meanwhile, there’s a third aspect to questions, shown in their very
asking. We ask ourselves in inner speech, but in the world, and in that
little world, the seminar, we ask each other. This asking presupposes
a sort of trust: the trust that we will be comprehended and met halfway
by our fellow learners. For a question is a sort of appeal: “Share my
perplexity; help me.”
A fourth trait of asking is one that Socrates, who claims to know
so little, claims to know for sure: To inquire, to seek by questions, to
search for what one does not know—that makes us better, braver, less
lazy than giving in to Meno’s clever sophism (86b-c).
And finally a fifth feature, which sounds odd but is central. I
know of only one subject in which Socrates claims outright to be an
expert: He says of himself that he “knows nothing else than matters
of love” (Symposium 177d). There are in the dialogues several examples of a wonderfully illuminating word-play: love, eros, and questioning, erotesis, sound very much alike (Symposium 199d, Phaedrus
234c); they are almost homonyms. The love in which Socrates is an
expert is the longing for knowledge, the “love of wisdom” which is
the English translation of the Greek word philosophia. But this longing, this pressure of desire is exactly what you might call the question-feeling. It transfigures apparently insoluble problems into
beckoning mysteries, where by a mystery I mean an ultimate problem
that attracts energizing reverence rather than dispirited resignation.
Our students’ much misused word “awesome” applies here, for once.
Thus genuine asking is the expression of a desire. For Socrates—
and for all of us—such question-desire is always close to real human
love. In fact Socratic love has a great penumbra of intermingling
loves, among them the affectionate delight that elders feel for the
young, the fond respect that colleagues—at their best—feel for one
another, and, best of all, that lifelong care which develops between
students who have spent many a night talking together. It’s a tutor’s
delight to hear the selfless admiration in the voice of a student who
tells of having found such a partner—admiration together with a very
proper and surely life-long pride in having accomplished such a
friendship. Here is half a line from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which, in
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Beethoven’s setting, our Freshman Chorus often sings:
Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein. . .
One who’s managed the great fortune
To become a true friend’s friend . . .
such a one is entitled to join in this ode to joy.
Schiller has it just right: Friendship is an effortful accomplishment
resting on great good luck. This school is its propitious setting: In the
talk that is a questioning, friends are found.
Aristotle, Plato’s true—that is to say resistant—pupil says
brusquely: “[Socrates] asked, but didn’t answer, for he claimed not to
know” (On Sophistic Refutations, 183b7).
Now ironic Socrates is surely unsettling, but no-nonsense Aristotle is often more so. Does he mean it? If I take him at face value,
then he is certainly wrong. Socrates does answer, probably always,
though often not in explicit words. His questioning doesn’t lead to the
levity of easy skepticism.
He does often begin by “questioning.” Light-minded talk about
higher education tends to fall into two camps. One camp thinks that
this education happens when authorities pour expertise into mostly
recalcitrant pupils. The other camp thinks this education occurs when
academics incite all too willing students to “question,” that is to test,
with the implicit intention of refuting, received wisdoms. Socrates
often does begin by showing that people’s opinions are wrong-headed
or incoherent, and, above all, not their own thought but some received
doctrine confidently proclaimed to the world but negligently adopted
within the soul. That is questioning in the somewhat hostile sense; it
is “interrogation.” But it is only done in order to clear the decks for a
second, more gracious question-asking, by which what ordinary people are really after is confirmed. Socrates is a horsefly to the lazy, to
wake them up, but a winged love-god to those ready to be impassioned.
I said Socrates gives answers. About present human life he proposes himself as a model that says to us, “Live to learn, and learn to
leave life, to be dead” (Phaedo 61c ff.). What he means, I think, is
this: Devote some of your time every day to reaching for what is behind, beneath, above the world we live in. Here many thoughtful peo-
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ple part company with him—and our students often do, understandably. About ultimate things he offers only working conjectures and
hypotheses, which he leaves to his companions to take up. And indeed
that is what happened; the thinking generations took him up. Alfred
North Whitehead—it figures here that an emigrant to America is
speaking to you—says that “the European philosophical tradition . . .
consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Process and Reality, Ch.1,
Sec.1)—and that means largely Socrates as Plato pictured him speaking. I am about to leap into that two and a half millennia-long footnote
for help in thinking more precisely about our kind of talking.
Each seminar starts with a question, asked by a tutor. Framing
seminar questions is the one expertise a tutor might be said to develop.
Such a question might well have much thought behind it, but it shouldn’t be an invitation to guess the tutor’s pet theory. It could be a wideopen admission of puzzlement, but it shouldn’t be mushily vague. It
might take off from an inconspicuous but significant detail of the text
but it shouldn’t run the conversation up the creek of a side issue.
Why start with a question rather than, say, a tutorial interpretation? A question is, of course, the very embodiment of a teaching
mode devoted to eliciting thought rather than delivering thought-products. The reason lies in the five features of question asking I’ve mentioned, the most pertinent of these being that questions solicit
responses by evincing trust in the willingness and ability to respond
in those addressed in the question mode.
What then is responsive talk? Here I’ll go into the footnote mode.
In the Middle Ages, certain thinkers developed the notion of “intentionality.” In fact it had come to Europe through the Arabic philosopher Avicenna (c. 1000 C.E.). Most good ideas have their comeback
time, and intentionality has been brought back in modern times. It’s
probably not wrong to say that its beginning is in Socrates’ passion
for this question: What is it that is knowable in our ever-changing, illusion-rife world, and how is it that words can convey what things
are?
Intention is both a characteristic of thinking and a capability of
speaking (where it is called “imposition”)—one that we can ascribe
to nothing else in the world or out of it. Its meaning is the action of
“stretching towards,” of reaching for something. Its descriptive name
is “aboutness,” the action and the result of something laying itself
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about, of “comprehending” something. Perhaps words show more of
the stretching, reaching-toward motion, while thoughts are more like
embracing, enclosing structures.
Take an example of what intentional aboutness isn’t: a wrapped
gift. The gift paper is distinguishable from the box of nougats—and
so you can unwrap the candy—but it’s also of the same kind, material
stuff. What you can’t do is put the gift-wrap about your affectionate
wishes, as you can’t wrap your sentiments around the nougat—except
poetically. Now think a thought. Let’s not be particular about its exact
nature—whatever we mean when we say that we have something in
mind—an object, a relation, an idea, an interpretation—any thoughtthing. Then ask yourself, Can I unwrap my thinking from the thought?
When I say that I am thinking a thought, is my thinking separable
from the thought? Or it is rather that thinking (that is, a form of the
verb for which thought is the noun), is the same as the thought, so that
when I think of something, intend it, attend to it, my mind becomes
that thing? Do thinking and thought become one? If that’s what happens, then which element wins out—the mine-ness of my thinking or
the object-ness of the content? Do I taint it with my prejudices, do I
rectify it to my standards, or do I let it be what it is? When I think, it
is often about a material object in a worldly environment. What aspect
of things comes to or into my mind—a mental, quasi-visual image,
some ideal essence, or just their use? In what way, as I attend to the
world of objects, do they tend toward me? When my talk is for real—
that is, when it is about something—how do I begin? How do I get
my thoughts to collect themselves in words? Or does my acquired language in fact produce the mental state that feels like thinking, and by
its very grammar give me the sense that there are mental objects? How
are my words about objects? Do these offer labels that present themselves for me to read off insofar as I know the vocabulary of the world,
or do my words tend out from me to the objects, throwing from my
mind an ideal sort of lasso, a thinking-noose, that will cast itself about
them and snaffle them in a mental shape suitable for my mind?
This long litany touches the Socratic mysteries, which, I have
said, he started on their way along with some conjectured elucidations.
Not that, after all, it matters much who began. These questions, at
least, are now ours.
Questions about thinking and speaking must surely be central to
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the education of human beings, who, as even animal ethologists are
willing to admit, are the only animal that can ask questions rather than
solicit reactions. But my main point here was to establish one sure
thing about talking—that it has the capacity of aboutness, which turns
out to make a piece of life like the seminar possible to begin with.
Now in the world at large there is much talk that has the aspect
of serious, even sophisticated, meaning but that, like many a hard-tocrack nut, has no kernel. So too, in the seminar, there is twaddle—
quite a lot of it.
Twaddle has in fact a sort of squatter’s right in the seminar. Concern for spontaneity and respect for potential make us leery of suppressing it too soon. I can think of three kinds of seminar twaddle.
Some among us are so eager to capture attention that they utter words
before they have collected a thought. Others are so abashed by the insufficiency of their speaking that they go on for quite a while after
they have finished; in the hope of amending their fault they make it
worse. This happens to us all and is easily fixed. We just have to become aware of it, as we do of any minor habit.
The third kind of twaddle goes much deeper. All worthwhile activities have their specific nullifications, and twaddle is the negation
of intentional talk. It is the consequence of a curious negative ability
that human beings have: the ability to fashion well-formed sentences
that express none of their own thinking, but that sound comfortably
explanatory. Here is an inevitable example from the first freshman
seminar: Why is Achilles so unassuagably angry when Agamemnon
takes his woman away? Student answer: Because he feels dishonored,
and “in the culture of that time honor was important.” Tutor’s overt
follow-up question: What do you know more about, the culture of the
time of Homer’s epics (this time happen to be a fictional composite
of times) or about Achilles? Tutor’s suppressed internal question: How
did this most murky of notions—culture—come to seem like a handy
explanatory principle to generations of students? Equally silent answer: Because Socrates’ notion of opinion is so right. We all share in
the remarkable inclination to find satisfaction in surrendering our
minds to enticing terms of thought without reaching for the intended
thought itself. “Culture” is the most perfect cover-all, the universal
wet-blanket for glimmers of penetrating thought.
A somewhat impatient tutorial response to twaddle is thus, What
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are you talking about? And generally, what are we talking about in
seminar?
Books. We prepare for seminar by reading assignments, and then
we bring our readings to class. For my part, I don’t care how the readings are delivered. If students find graven stone tablets their medium
of choice, let them bring those, or if e-books, let them bring those,
provided they don’t get diverted and distracted by appended applications, and provided they can find their place. After all, one reason we
center seminar on books is so that we may all be on the same page.
Let me interrupt myself here for an observation. Our faculty recently had a long discussion about the question: Should e-books be
permitted in seminar? We sensibly decided to leave it up to the tutors.
In last year’s freshman seminar I was expecting an invasion of electronic tablets. Not a one of them appeared. Word was that upperclass
members were discouraging them as not in our spirit. The world’s
opinion is that the young thrive on novelty; the truth as I’ve experienced it is that, having found a place to cherish, they become its radical conservatives. I have much sympathy. The material book—be it
of papyrus, parchment, paper—has, besides its sensory pleasures, one
great advantage: it’s all there at once in real space. This is a handy
representation of one important characteristic of a text: it’s an all-present whole; it exists simultaneously with itself.
And now that I’ve used the word “text” let me explain this slightly
pretentious term. I use it, first, because it is broader than “book,”
which is usually composed of words. But we read, in a broad sense,
also compositions of notes (musical scores) and books containing
more diagrams and symbols than words (mathematical texts).
Moreover, “text” reminds us of two etymologically related words:
“textile,” a woven fabric, and Greek techne, “skill, craft.” Books are
artfully crafted, carefully coherent artifacts.
Well, not all books. The tutors of this college are pretty much at
one in thinking themselves not so much entitled as obligated to discriminate between great books and lesser books. St. John’s College
is, unpopular though that term may be with terminally egalitarian
souls, a great books school. Let me say right away that the not-sogreat but good books, as well as the mediocre ones, and even the outright shoddy stuff—all these have their saving graces. The best policy
is to read some of everything. (When I was a little girl I developed
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for a while a passion for reading product labels, especially the fractured instructions written by people for whom English was a second
language.)
But together we read great books, because, to use a gross
metaphor, these are the ones you can sink your teeth into, the ones
that stick to your ribs. There are statable criteria for them, of which
I’ll mention the ones most pertinent to the life of the seminar: Great
books are usually self-sufficient, so that no background information
or annotation is absolutely necessary to getting absorbed in the text;
the best context for them is another great book—perhaps, but not necessarily, its chronological predecessor.
Second, a great book, approachable as it is on one level the first
time around, is inexhaustibly new, so that on opening it a fifth time
you ask yourself, “Could I have read this before? Where was I, to miss
so much?”
Third, such books are endlessly artful—sometimes beautiful from
shapely depth and something ugly with significant contrivance.
And fourth, great truth-seeking texts of reflection are full of imagination and great imaginative works of fiction are full of reflection.
The former present universals corroborated by particular instances,
the latter represent particulars coruscating with universal application.
Thus philosophy and fiction go hand in hand. Take, for example that
famous first sentence of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike;
each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What is it but an
applied version of Aristotle’s dictum in the Nicomachean Ethics:
“There are many ways of going wrong but only one way which is
right” (1106b28)?
So such texts are what seminar talk appears to be about. To prepare for seminar we all read the same book—students for the first, tutors for the umptieth time. Reading is, for us, a silent, solitary activity.
I say “for us”; Augustine in his Confessions (c.400 C.E.) tells with
amazement how his beloved bishop, Ambrose, read. As his eyes
moved down the page, “his heart sought out the meaning but his
tongue remained silent” (VI, 3). It was an inestimably great revolution,
this inward relocation of the written word, which, among other things,
made possible summary reading both divorced from and unconcerned
about precise wording. We are the heirs of this revolution.
This preparatory reading we do is a curious business, then. New
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readers actually mouth the words; more mature ones read silently but
subvocalize the text laryngeally; others let the writing glide directly
into the mind. They get the thought, but see rather than hear the words.
They register whole sentences through the eyes and turn language, the
business of the tongue, into sight-seeing, the work of the eyes. However they do it, they now have in their minds and hearts the words and
thoughts of someone else.
Our texts, then, are writings, for the most part. And surprise, surprise! Books are written before they are read. How does writing come
about? Here is how I do it myself and imagine it for others: Writing
comes after talking, in two ways. First, in my own personal history I
learned to speak way back, effortlessly, but to write later, with difficulty. I also know that in the larger history of human beings, writing,
especially the kind that records the sound of speech, alphabetical writing, did not, in fact, come to Greece until the late eighth century
B.C.E. (where in my early years as an archaeologist I had a chance to
publish some of the earliest graffiti—that is, scratched letter-words).
Second, before and as I write, I talk to myself, because speech is the
concretion of thought; it collects its misty pressure into concise sentences and utters them in sensory shape. It’s often said that the primary
purpose of speech is “communication.” The evidence seems to me
otherwise. I imagine that most of us say to ourselves in the course of
our day hundreds of words for every word we say to others. Speech
certainly begins that way. Listen to what students of child development call “jargoning,” that sweetest, most melodious gibberish of late
infancy, which issues from a lonely crib. Whether it is the antecedent
of adult twaddle or carries mental meaning no one knows.
This internal speech is what we write down. In “paper conferences” with students tutors can’t do better than to persuade them that
it is this talk with themselves that they ought to record, without dulling
rectification in the interest of a risklessly pompous formality. An author—the word means an originating “augmentor”—is a recorder of
an inner speech that improves upon the banal ordinariness of a relaxed
inner life by saying something original, either in the sense of “neversaid-before” or in the sense of going to the origin of things—or both.
This is practically a definition of what the authors of our great books
accomplish. They are the masters of pouring thought into the mold of
inner speech and of turning that mold out onto the expectant paper.
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I must add here that, although you’d scarcely believe it, both
claims—that books have authors and that speaking comes before writing—have been disputed in the later part of the last century. The former claim, that there is no originating authorship, is disputed because
whatever is said has been pre-shaped by predecessors and will be reshaped by readers. The latter claim, that writing precedes speaking,
is disputed on the ground (too sophisticated for presentation here) that
writing has a character more original than speech and in fact, subsumes it.1
Reading presupposes writing, and writing poses at least two dangers. The one I’ve just touched on is that in the interest of liberating
our students from being possessed by the opinion of others we in fact
subject them to four years of others’ very powerful opinions. Another
way to put this is that even—or especially—the devoted study of
books is not direct thinking, immediate aboutness. It runs the danger
of producing a commentator’s soul. I mean that to study books is not
quite the same as to think about things; it is to be attending to a secondary sort of aboutness. By thinking in a primary way I mean appropriating the cry of early modern scientists: “To the things
themselves!”—without mediating texts.
The other danger, really the complement of the first, is set down
in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. Socrates tells approvingly of an Egyptian king who refused the gift of writing because, he said, those who
put trust in writing will learn to forget how to go into themselves to
recollect the truths within. Writing will then turn out to be no medicine
for memory, but merely a reminder (272c ff.). Writing is external
memory; we call on it to remind us now and then of baggage we do
not care to keep always with us. Whatever is readily accessible as a
filed record becomes storable stuff, a bit of fractured fact, related to
living thought as a cellophane-wrapped fish filet is to a frisky live
fish. It becomes information, which is as apt to wreck as to rectify
judgment. I think this is an up-to-date version of Socrates’ misgivings
about writing. However—you might call this Platonic irony—this
condemnation of writing is delivered to us in the most ravishing piece
of philosophical writing I know of, the work that drew me into phi1
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967),
Chapter 2. Derrida, the author of both claims, at one point instituted a suit
for plagiarism. Imagine!
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losophy as a graduate student. Evidently Plato thought of a way to
overcome the rigidification of writing—by incorporating conversation
into the text. We extend this trick by incorporating books into a living
dialogue, the seminar.
How do we then mitigate these drawbacks? Well, we get together,
come out of studious privacy, to talk with each other. In universities,
“seminar” means an advanced study group under the leadership of a
professor. Papers are written, read, and discussed. It is a place of
earnest, highly disciplined speech. Our seminars are serious, but perhaps not earnest, or at least not dead earnest, but live earnest—lively.
Walk through our corridors on seminar nights, and if you don’t hear
hilarity issuing from behind this or that door, you may conclude that
we’ve turned into the sitting dead, like the ancestral mummies the
Incas brought out to sit at their feasts. For laughter is the explosive
expulsion of breath that follows from having one’s equanimity pleasantly pinpricked by an acute incongruity—the result, in other words,
of a startling insight.
Laughter is the grace note of our seriousness. To be sure, the
books lie before us, well used, even marked up (which is why we
should buy, not borrow, seminar books), and they are the first focus
of our attention. But that is also a misapprehension. Books, texts, are
occasions, not ends. We don’t live in but through books. That formulation would be mere verbiage, were there not a way of study that
stays strictly with the text and in it. For instance, in graduate study,
say, in English or philosophy, all the student’s effort is really invested
in the text. The goal is to know the text accurately, to be acquainted
with scholarly opinions about it, to work out its arguments in detail,
all the while setting aside questions of truth-telling and personal illumination.
We encourage a different kind of reading—more direct, and if
you like, somewhat naïve. Because the author wrote about or expressed something, we feel entitled to pass through the text to that
something. We find it plausible sometimes to ask “What did the author
have in mind?” and sometimes “Does this representation agree with
our experience of life?” and sometimes “Can I corroborate this claim
in my own thinking?” Not that we ignore the literal words in their artfulness—not at all—but we regard them as a sort of come-on to catch
and hold us to the text until it gives up its meaning.
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Let me give an example from the freshman seminar that was
going on while I was writing this lecture —a wonderfully lively seminar. We asked: “Do the Homeric gods, in all their irresponsible levity,
look the same to Homer as to his heroes, does he have access to a view
of Olympus, transmitted to him by the Muses, that none of his humans
have?” We asked: “Is it in accord with our experience that gentle,
thoughtful Patroclus is transformed into a wildly impetuous warrior
just by wearing Achilles’ armor?” We asked: “Can we follow Socrates
in his claim that truth already lies in us and can be retrieved, ‘recollected,’ as he says, by the right questions?”
So to sum up our sort of reading: We pay careful attention to details for the sake of the text’s—the author’s—intentions, and we pay
attention to these for the sake of world and life. That effort requires
skills, namely, the arts of reading in the broad sense, the liberal arts.
We have the corresponding tutorials, where we practice dealing with
thought-laden words in the language class and with thought-structured
symbols in the mathematics class. We add to these the latest of the
liberal arts to appear on the scene, the art of making nature speak in
numbers; for that we have the laboratory class.
I’ve now talked in turn about talking, reading, writing. Now
comes the high point: listening. Among the boons of living within a
study program like ours—one that is stable and changes, though
steadily, yet slowly—is that truly new experiences can come to us tutors. For our students, it’s all new anyhow. By contrast, when so-called
innovation, that is, deliberate variation, is the universal background,
we may indeed be stimulated by novelty—the ever-diminishing frisson accompanying continual variety—but we can scarcely experience
newness, which is the poignant sensation of a substantial accession—
a real expansion of our psychic holdings. Under the influence of continual novelty our mind, as Shakespeare so tellingly puts it, “Like to
a vagabond flag upon the stream, / Goes to, and back, lackeying the
varying tide, / To rot itself with motion” (Antony and Cleopatra,
1.4.45-47).
Thus it was that through our way of acquiring truly new insights,
I belatedly discovered a philosopher—as it happens the very first one
whose writings we have. He was born around 540 B.C.E. I had often
glanced over, but had never made my way into, his sayings. He thinks
in aphorisms, that is, terse revelations. The most enticing one of these
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begins in this way:
Listen not to me but to the logos . . . (Heraclitus, D50).
Logos is one Greek work all our students are apt to have something
to say about. It had dozens of uses and more than one central meaning:
word, speech, saying, thinking, reason, ratio. Heraclitus’s saying goes
on to tell us what we must, in turn, say when we listen to the Logos,
the Logos with a capital L. This Logos is the principle that governs
everything, and it has something to say to us. I won’t go into the entirety of the world-informing thought that the Logos utters to Heraclitus, but I’ll attend to the first part of it. I think it has, and is meant
to have, several meanings—a fact that governs many of Heraclitus’s
sayings and makes reading him so pleasurably difficult. One of these
sayings, the one just quoted, is, as it were, made to be the principle of
our seminar. I’ll retranslate it:
Listen not to me but to my intention.
The civility of the seminar, expressed in our addressing one another by last names together with the honorific Ms. or Mr., goes much
deeper than a mere form of address. It makes for respectful distance.
It means listening past personalities to the thought-gist of our speaking. It enjoins us to try to hear what our fellow speakers intend us to
hear, even if we have to hear past the words they are actually, and
perhaps ineptly, saying. Of course, we take in each other’s looks, mannerisms, gestures. It is, after all, through these that the human being
to whose intention we are to listen appears to us. Of course, the “me”
Heraclitus wants us to listen past is unavoidably up front. We all, particularly tutors, whose business it is to form impressions of the candor,
seriousness, and preparation of speakers, observe the physical façade.
Any student who imagines that tutors don’t know, by such observations, whether they’ve done their seminar reading or are improvising—be it brilliantly, be it twaddingly—is living in cloud-cuckooland. The tutors’ version of Heraclitus’s injunction is the prospective
principle of hopeful pretense: Listen for the intention, for what the
speech is about, listen to all the speeches extendedly and intently, until
they are about something; help students frame what they mean or find
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out what they intended to say by evincing a staunch faith (even against
all evidence) that they did mean or intend something. What is for Heraclitus a call to hear the speech of Thought—capital T—itself, is for
us a pedagogic principle: Give respect even before it is due, so that it
may become due. Advise students with tacit benevolence as Hamlet
does his mother with demonstrative bitterness: “Assume a virtue if
you have it not” (Hamlet, 2.4.162). For Aristotle teaches that virtues
are acquired by being practiced before they are truly possessed (Nicomachean Ethics 1103a-b).
So also should students listen to each other in the Heraclitean
mode: Suppress animosities and aversions, go for the significant gist
in one another’s talk. The question “Did you mean . . . ?” is helpful
respect made audible.
After all, the seminar was intended to bring us out of the isolation
of studious reading and the rigidity of recorded, written speech, and
to introduce responsiveness into the life of learning. The underlying
hypothesis here, which we hold to through thick and thin, is that to be
human is, given a chance, to be intelligent. Now intelligence has this
feature, one that has been the millennial preoccupation of thoughtful
people: What we each think with is our very own intelligence—which
makes us interesting to one another—and that what the intellect is
about is common to us all—which makes it possible for us to hear one
another to begin with.
In my hurried summary of the liberal arts and the tutorials devoted
to them I left out the music tutorial and the chorus. Among the Greeks,
music stands near the apex of the liberal arts; it is the prime mode of
praising God for the Hebrews; and it stands close to theology for certain Christians. (See, e.g., Plato, Republic 530d ff.; Psalm 33:3;
Luther, “On Noble Music”). Our president recently put music at the
center of his convocation address, and then, to confirm his words, the
college sang. For as we are rightly called a talking college so we are
surely a music-making community. As words are to our thoughts, so
is music to our feelings. Without music our program would be radically incomplete; we would be neglecting the affective root of our nature, our sensibility, and our passions. We have been called a severely
intellectual college, and this could be an accusation rather than a compliment, if we did not also have a place in the program for cultivating
the very sense, hearing, that both takes in linguistic utterances ad-
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dressed to the intellect and also hears tonal structures calling to our
passions. In the music tutorial we learn how passions are informed by
number, not by the merely quantitative but by the wonderfully qualitative mathematics of tones in a scale. Moreover, we consider how
sounds and words respond to each other, and we attend to a relation
of sensation and thinking which we expect to carry over into all our
learning—that tenacious thinking is replete with feeling, that steady
passion is contoured by thought, and that the sensory surface itself,
be it conduit or last stop, is deeply questionable.
And finally, in Chorus, we are the singing college. In talking we
face toward each other and speak to each other, turn and turnabout,
vice versa—that is the very meaning of con-versa-tion. But we sing
with rather than to each other, and we do it mostly not in turn but simultaneously. We are together in the presence of something we are at
once hearing and doing, receiving and producing; we are absorptive
and responsive, listening to ourselves and to our fellow choristers. It’s
like hearing a heavenly lecture, for that’s how I imagine the angels
listen.
And that is the end of this merely earthly lecture, addressed to the
parents over our student’s heads, so to speak, but really meant for
them. So thank you all for listening.
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Caged Explorers:
The Hunger For Control
Howard Zeiderman
To achieve happiness and freedom you must desire
nothing else but what is entirely in your control—
and that is only your own thoughts and opinions.
—Epictetus, The Manual
The letter’s return address had a name, the letters MHC, and a number
next to it. I had no idea what it meant, but it was obvious from the
carefully lettered envelope and handwritten letter that great effort was
spent preparing it. The letter was a strange and bold request. It would
lead me to the gates of the Maryland House of Corrections, a high
medium/maximum security facility, the flagship of seven prisons surrounding a place in the Maryland landscape called Jessup, only a few
miles from Fort Meade, the home of the National Security Agency.
My first contact with the Maryland House of Corrections had occured sometime earlier, when I had received a request for some Touchstones materials to be distributed during an information fair at a
prison. Twice a year, the organizations that assist prisoners arrange
some contact with their families, and the many self-help programs
that are designed to encourage prisoners present their information in
a large activity area. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, violence prevention programs, parenting advice, various Christian and Muslim ministries, and even the Junior Chamber of
Commerce send representatives with brochures. Touchstones is a program originally designed for pre-college students of all backgrounds
to overcome their passivity and enable them to collaborate and explore. It uses short seminal texts to initiate discussions in which students transform their thinking and their behavior toward others and
themselves. Since at that time my work with Touchstones was primarily in schools, I sent the first high school volume of texts along with
Howard Zeiderman is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, and President
of the Touchstones Discussion Project. This account is dedicated to the memory of Brother Robert Smith, who wished that it be shared with the St. John’s
College community.
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the accompanying guide explaining how leaders should utilize these
materials. I thought nothing of this until two months later when I received the letter.
The letter was from Marvin, a prisoner serving, he said, “life plus
30.” The language was simple and direct. “Dear Professor,” the letter
began, “I’ve been looking at your books. They’ve been in the Legal
Clinic office for a while. Two days ago I started reading them. First I
was confused. But now I see how the leader’s guide can help you run
the meetings. But we need someone to help us get started. Would you
come meet with us? I talked to a few of the guys. We all think this
would be good here. Nothing they give us here makes any sense. But
last night six of us were sitting around. I read out loud the story about
the old man asking for his dead son back. And we talked about it. We
were thinking about it. How brave the old man was to face his son’s
killer and what pain he felt.” I was startled as I read his account of a
text in our Volume I—a text from Homer’s Iliad, in which the old king
Priam begs the young warrior Achilles for the return of the dead body
of his son Hector. He went on to say he hoped we could talk about
how such a program might work in a prison.
Though I was stretched in my commitments with Touchstones’
efforts in public schools, with my normal teaching at St. John’s, and
with an executive group of investment bankers, CEOs, lawyers, and
journalists up in New York, I couldn’t think of a sufficient reason to
say no. In addition, I knew of a pilot program that had been tried at
the New Mexico State Penitentiary, where the ghastly riot had occurred in 1981. I was intrigued by the idea of working with prisoners,
and I had hoped we could find a location closer to home
Each type of group we work with is unique. Each group brings
specific talents to the program as well as specific needs. Each new effort is therefore a collaboration. The program that Marvin reviewed
was designed for high school students, both for the gifted and for those
who couldn’t read. For that reason, it was a good first step. It seemed
wrong not to answer the request.
But in spite of my desire, I was hesitant. I was influenced by what
the media reported about prisoners. I had the images of countless
movies and memories of the hostages at Attica in my imagination. I
remembered the atrocities, the disembowelments, at the New Mexico
prison outside of Santa Fe. I’m afraid I must admit that often in the
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early days I went into the prison because I couldn’t think of a way to
avoid going in without embarrassing myself. So in September of 1995,
I took the thirty-minute drive to Jessup and entered a vast structure
that from a distance looked like an ancient nineteenth-century Liverpool textile mill, but on closer inspection was revealed to be a fortress
designed to keep two worlds entirely separated from one another. It
was a Tuesday evening when I crossed the barriers of double steeland-glass doors and razor wire to meet the nine men who would embark with me on the exploration of a world that none of us knew
existed. I was reminded of Plutarch’s description of England as seen
by the Romans before they crossed the water from Gaul: a land that
existed only in myth and legend. Over the next two years we would
take the first steps together into unknown territory.
I would later realize that my entry on that day was remarkably efficient. My name was listed on a count-out document at the first control booth and I was moved quickly through sets of double doors
where I saw chains, handcuffs, and shotguns in a glass-enclosed watch
area. I walked nervously past interrogation rooms and holding cells
to what was called the Main Control Area: a large, cubical, steelbarred enclosure filled with guards. Unlike other such enclosures in
the prison, this one contained the only exit to the outside world. A corrections officer announced through a loudspeaker that we were leaving
the cage—which, ironically, was the Main Control Area—and entering the actual prison. We were now on the inside, surrounded by tiers
of cells and the sound of the movement of a thousand men. I was escorted by a guard up a flight of stairs past a hundred men descending
from their cells. At moments I was lost in the crowd, but with great
effort I moved upstream through the confusing mass of people. After
a brief and nervous wait at a landing, a metal door opened into a large
space, perhaps thirty by seventy feet, in which another guard sat at a
small desk.
The meeting took place in a small room at the edge of this large
activity area where we would eventually hold all our sessions, amid
the 100-decibel noise of the prison and the rival claims for space of
the Nation of Islam and the Jessup Jaycees. Around the open area were
a number of these rooms, allocated to the use of various prisoner organizations. There was the writer’s club, the prisoner newspaper, the
Colts—a sports club whose allegiance now focused on birds—Orioles
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and Ravens—instead of horses. There were the rooms for AA and NA,
and the fifteen-by-ten-foot area where men who had expressed themselves through crime now used brushes and paints. We met in the room
of the most important prisoner organization—the Legal Clinic. This
was where the men came for advice from other more experienced prisoners on how to represent themselves, since, whether guilty or innocent, their previous defenses had rarely warranted the name.
It was significant that we met here, since this was where prisoners
most felt the distance between themselves and the world outside the
walls. This was where they experienced most acutely their helplessness in the subtle labyrinth of our society’s legal system. Five of the
men I met were the high priests of this order. They were the officers—
present and past—of the Legal Clinic. They held the keys to helping
others at least attempt to control their futures. The four others were
equally important. They were presidents of other prisoner organizations. These were all older men, men who had somehow survived the
years of indignity and abuse and isolation. The youngest was in his
late thirties, and all but one were serving at least one life sentence,
whereas most were serving multiple such sentences either concurrently or in succession. These were men for whom prison was to be
their world and not merely an interlude before reinserting themselves
into ours.
I was clearly nervous as I entered, and they had me sit in a part of
the small room where I was no longer seen by the guard in the main
area. The meeting began awkwardly. I thought they knew what they
wanted from my visit, but in fact some were only vaguely aware of
why they were meeting. Marvin began by having us go around the
room and state who we were. I said I was a teacher, and others spoke
briefly about themselves. They never said it explicitly, but each said
enough for me to infer that I was sitting with nine men convicted of
murder, in a small room concealed from a guard. When we finished,
Marvin took the lead again. “Why don’t you tell us about the program,” he said in a voice filled with suspicion. I had thought that he
would be my ally in this alien world but his tone was distant, as if he
now wished to appear that he had played no part in my coming into
the prison. From the introductions, it became clear that half were invited to this meeting to hear about the program for the first time. I
could see a couple of the men whispering to one another and even
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heard one ask—to no one or to all—why I was there. Rather quickly
the roles had become reversed. Instead of being asked to come to respond to their request, it seemed that I had to convince them that they
should become involved.
I could feel control slipping away from me. Perhaps it was implicitly a test to see if one more white volunteer could offer something
they really wanted, or perhaps it was an exploration they were undertaking to find out what they needed. When they asked me to describe
the program, I did a very poor job. I kept speaking in ways that were
either too abstract or too rudimentary. I hoped to interest them in probing the conceptual presuppositions and biases of our culture though I
didn’t describe it in quite those words. Such an exercise hardly moved
them, however, since their incarceration incorporated the presuppositions and biases of our culture. Of all the men I met in prison, very
few asserted their innocence. Yet most felt that they were political
prisoners—prisoners on account of our country’s politics stretching
back to the very origins of the European conquest of the New World.
They didn’t offer this as an excuse, but merely reported it as a fact.
They saw their crimes as pretty much along the lines of infractions
against their masters on the plantations. Nor were they particularly
engaged by the prospect of increased skills. The skills they needed
were quite specific, and it wasn’t clear how Touchstones could help
them overturn a conviction.
While I was speaking, becoming more uneasy as I felt their eyes
glued to me, a short, heavily tattooed prisoner interrupted. “These
guys,” he said, referring to the authors of the texts in the collection
he had in his hands, “are all white.” I was taken aback by his claim.
In regard to the specific volume I had sent in, he was correct. I again
started trying to explain that this program was very different from
classes they had in school and that the Eurocentrism of this particular
collection of texts wouldn’t affect what we discussed. But they looked
skeptical. The meeting seemed to be going nowhere until Marvin
looked up from fingering the book of readings. “It could help us think
for ourselves,” he said calmly. “That’s something they can’t control.”
Immediately, I could see their faces change as if they finally heard
something that might be useful or even important. “You think that?
Say more,” said Lee, the president of the Legal Clinic whose great
knowledge earned him the respect of everyone in spite of a terrible
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stutter. “Yeah, it’s like when we talked about that dead guy. That Trojan. And you asked us how we would mourn a friend. There was no
one to tell us who was right and what to say. We were all thinking.” A
few of the most senior nodded agreement and the others—even the
tattooed critic—seemed to concur. That remark finally penetrated to
the core of their concerns. Perhaps Marvin had sensed this in the description of the discussion format. Perhaps these experts in the omnipresence of arbitrary control sensed an opportunity for the first time
to undertake the pure act of thinking. Perhaps my own inability to supply an answer allowed them the leisure to determine what they needed.
In their eyes, I was no longer a professor or a teacher of the kind they
had previously experienced. I was merely a technician who could help
them create the structure through which their own thought would take
shape.
“Thinking for yourself” was not an offhand expression for them.
Within that phrase was lodged the full intensity of their suffering. In
prison, all control and initiative was stripped from them. After one session in which we discussed a passage from Martin Luther King’s Letter
from Birmingham City Jail and why we need the stability of laws,
Eddie, a lifer who had served 25 years, took me aside out of the hearing
of the others. “Here you’ve got to be careful. Yeah, even you. They
change the rules every day. And they never tell you. That way they
control all of you.” To supply the desperate need they felt to establish
a realm in which they were not entirely passive, they had two options.
He took me further aside as if to confide a great truth about his life.
“We try to fight it. We work out with weights in the yard or in the gym.
That way we at least control how we look. Or we control the fags and
the slaves.”
A rigid hierarchy of keepers and kept transects the prison. The
keepers tell the kept what to do, how to act, and what to think. The
thoughts of the kept are as imprisoned as their bodies, since the constant pressure of others establishes a tyranny that overrides the distinctions between guard and prisoner. Control in its rawest form flows
everywhere in the prison, and it was their horror at this that these men
felt our programs might transform. The task was now clear: to go
about establishing the conditions for prisoners to reassert their freedom, their ability to become human again, by bestowing significance
on their lives through the mere act of thought.
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By the end of the meeting certain things had been settled. I had
committed to coming in every Friday evening for two hours, though
we never had that much time. Security always dictated how long it
took to enter. Sometimes I would be held in a control area for an hour
only to be told the paperwork couldn’t be found. This was always exasperating; however, when I once complained to the group about it,
they just laughed. Roderick, one of the older prisoners, explained,
“We were hopin’ it would happen. It’s good for you. It’ll help you understand something about here.” From then on I sometimes even savored the delays, because they revealed in a trivial and temporary way
what the prisoners experienced continually. I began to grasp what it
meant to be no longer a person but only a thing. These men had no
control over their lives. I too felt that lack of control every time I entered the facility. It was as if I had entered another world in which I
had no standing and no say about what might happen to me. It was a
separate world, dimly lit, and chaotic. Anything could happen in those
dark passageways as I walked past the correctional officers and groups
of prisoners. My only security was the hope that it wasn’t worth their
effort to interfere with me.
Control as it is implemented and experienced in our prisons is a
uniquely modern construct. In contrast to ancient prisons, our prisons
reduce prisoners to beasts through control and dehumanization. Although ancient prisons were dark and oppressive places where vermin,
neglect, and disease dominated, prisoners were not dehumanized.
Those vast ancient structures held people of various sorts, often in accommodations that suited their relative rank. Prisoners still retained
respect, and, in some cases, the accoutrements of their position in society. The ranks the prisoners held were part of them and could not be
stripped from them whatever their crime or infraction. This began to
change as religion and science struggled for our souls. Prisons, in a
temporary compromise, became penitentiaries, places where fallen
human beings would do penance and assert their humanity again.
These prisoners were not yet considered fundamentally different from
those who would confess their sins in prayers during church services.
The distinction was only that they required a more intense regimen of
prayer in places where there were fewer distractions from the work
of their salvation. As religion lost its primacy to scientific technology,
however, the penitentiary became the house of correction.
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Some of the group, a few who had served over forty years in prisons in many different states, could actually remember this change.
Once, when we were considering a drawing as a text, we suddenly
heard the story first-hand. The text was a drawing by Kathe Kolwitz,
Prisoners Listening to Music. The three prisoners depicted are skeletal, with hollow eyes—and all seemingly gripped by something. The
session was not going very well, and I regretted trying to use a text
that connected too vividly with their situation. A number of the
younger members were clearly repulsed by the drawing. When I asked
why a few who often spoke were being silent that evening, Larry answered. “It’s scary looking at them. I don’t want that to be me.” As he
finished, another prisoner, Craig, a man almost seventy years old who
first served time more than fifty years before, laughed. “You don’t understand nothing. They’re not dying. They’re gettin’ past their
hungers. It’s the music that makes them pure—like angels. Listen—
when I was young down south we had a chaplain. Every day he would
play music for us. Old music, beautiful. At first we couldn’t listen to
it. We never heard nothing like it. Sometimes a song would last a long
time, no words. But then we started to love it. We would listen like in
the picture, and we’d remember things. And we’d cry. Sometimes you
could hear ten men cry. And sometimes the priest would cry too. We
were all together in it. But then he retired and a new chaplain came.
He was different. He wanted us to see the doctors and counselors, the
caseworkers. They would ask us questions about ourselves and make
us go to classes, programs. They were working on us and the music
ended. It was different. It was them against us.” Correction, as Craig
sensed, is entirely different from penance.
This is one reason why the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic, one of the most powerful Touchstones readings for any group,
is especially fertile in a prison. The status of the modern prison as its
own self-enclosed world became explicit during a discussion about
this text. It is the story of people who are themselves prisoners in a
barely illuminated cave, and who believe that the shadows they see,
cast by objects that move behind them, are reality. Eight weeks into
the program I decided use this text to encourage the prisoners for the
first time to speak explicitly in the group about their own situations
as prisoners. For a while they argued about details of the allegory, but
finally Thomas, a serious and highly intelligent prisoner, moved the
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discussion to their own reality. He started to consider how a freed prisoner from Plato’s cave who saw the reality outside would communicate, if he were to reenter the cave, with those who were still
underground. To make his point about the difficulty of communication, he began to describe his own return to prison. “When I came
back in,” he said, “I thought I’d find my old friends, and I’d talk to
them. But I couldn’t. Nothing I said made any sense. I had to learn a
new language.” Ken, who had been silent, agreed. “Nothing here
makes sense out there. Nothing you would do out there works in here.
It’s like going from earth to Pluto. They make us into aliens, animals,
and then they wonder why we end up coming back to the barn.”
It was into this highly controlled and dehumanizing space that I
had entered in response to an appeal from nine lifers attempting to
reestablish themselves as men who had committed crimes rather than
as members of a separate species, a criminal class. Like the priest who
played the music and cried with his prisoners, perhaps like Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima crying for himself as much as for them, I was
joining them on a journey we would have to undertake together.
Soon, the nine men decided to involve another ten so we would
have a group of about twenty. They had to explain our goal to the others as best they could. The goal was a rare one in the prison. I would
undertake to turn over control of the program to them so they could
spread the program throughout the facility. In short, I wasn’t—like
other teachers or volunteers—coming to do something for them.
Rather, I would try to make it possible for them no longer to need me.
That is what all teachers want, but here it was essential that they not
feel indebted to me. The program would only work if they felt it was
also theirs—that they had collaborated in its creation. However, I
knew that it would be as difficult for me to surrender control to them
as it would be for them to accept it. I created the program they would
learn. I felt I knew better than they what would work and what structure was best. Yet to succeed I would have to enable them to collaborate with me actively in shaping the program for prisons. I was
worried that I might not be able to achieve this act of surrender. And
would they be able to forget who I was and allow me to be involved
without feeling I was judging them, that I was the expert and therefore
in control of the situation? Here we were touching on some of the
deepest issues of our culture, issues that pervaded both the prison and
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also our own lives—questions about the need for control, the fear of
surrender, and the very ownership of one’s words.
Every discussion group confronts the same set of barriers to a
genuine collaborative activity. There are always initially the issues of
control, power, and expertise. This initial stage is followed by competition among groups or individuals—in other words, factions—who
struggle with each other to assert dominance. The next barrier is the
problem of listening without imposing our own thoughts on one another. After overcoming these impediments, there is the effort one
must make to evolve a type of leadership and responsibility that is
shared among all the participants. These issues raise the most complex
human problems and questions irrespective of culture. The culture determines how the group approaches these problems, but not what the
barriers are.
In addition to these problems, there are others that characterize a
group as a unique collection of people immersed in a specific institutional or social environment. These problems concern all of us in some
measure, but specific groups face certain peculiar problems that pervade their lives and their circumstances. They have special expertise
in dealing with the particular problems they must continually face,
problems that the rest of us share to a lesser and more occasional extent. They can therefore become a resource for us all as they struggle
in the discussion environment to overcome the barrier that uniquely
affects them and shapes their lives. The prisoners had their own specific and complex needs, needs that centered on the issue of control
and their attempt to overcome the passivity imposed by their violent
and arbitrary environment. They had a hunger for control. But in order
to create a genuine group, they would have to transmute this desire
into a form that enabled them to surrender control in its customary
forms. It was with regard to such issues that they could most clearly
be a resource for others.
Prisoners also certainly need the intellectual skills and the skills
of cooperation to better equip them to enter society as employable
people. The needs expressed by these prisoners, however, had a different urgency. These nine men were to spend their lives in prison,
and their needs dealt not with the future but with the environment in
which they all lived. Their needs were threefold.
The first involved the fact that MHC, like all prisons, was over-
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crowded. There was a certain freedom of contact and movement simply because there was not enough space to keep prisoners separated.
This mobility, of course, increased the possibility of collisions among
prisoners or gangs of prisoners. Through spreading Touchstones in
the prison, the men aimed gradually to change the environment where
they all lived. A modest success was recounted one evening after one
of the discussions. We had just discussed the opening scene of Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the “invisible” narrator collides with a
white man and comes close to killing him. During the session they
had mostly considered their prejudices, their assumptions about one
another. But near the end of our time, Alan, a white man, spoke up
more personally about James, a black man who sometimes attended
our sessions. “This happened yesterday. I was on line at lunch, carrying my tray. James was in front of me. Don’t know how, but I bumped
into him. His lunch fell. Three months ago he would have hit me hard,
maybe killed me. But he didn’t, and we cleaned up the mess. And
other people gave him some of their food. That’s never happened here
before.” Lee, one of the leaders, seemed to speak for all of them, when
he commented on this incident. “They try to make us savages. And
before we started talking to one another, we used to believe them.” In
short, their startling goal was to humanize their world—a world in
which they were viewed, and viewed themselves, as barely human.
Their second need involved a peculiar paternal attitude toward
the younger men. These men were old timers, men who had survived
years of abuse and indignity from guards and other prisoners. They
knew how to remain alive. They were the wisest of the wise. Each of
them was unique, and the only image that captured their stature for
me was a comparison with the Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad: Ajax,
Sarpedon, Patrocles, Achilles, and Hector. These men hoped to influence the young ones, seventeen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, who came
for two or three years and then graduated, as if they had attended a
college course in how to commit crimes. These young felons never
grasped that they too might spend their lives behind these walls. The
group of lifers felt that speaking directly wouldn’t work. They hoped
that their words would carry more weight after having worked together in these more neutral, though important, discussions.
The third need was the one that affected each of them most intimately. It wasn’t just a matter of their environment or a concern for
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those who would follow the paths these men regretted having themselves pursued. Rather, it was the sense that they too, even in these
hostile and precarious and dehumanizing conditions, were capable of
contemplating the deepest issues that confront all of us. This became
vivid to me and to them one Friday evening. The text was a short passage by Kant on morality. He claims that we are moral only when we
act from duty and not because we want to. Most of the group considered him crazy. They gave example after example of helping others—
family, friends, even enemies—because of pity or affection. Finally
Sam interrupted. “You guys really don’t get it. He’s saying that what
you’re talking about is only like eatin’ when you’re hungry. That’s no
big deal. It’s only when it’s hard, when it hurts, and you do it anyway
that you can respect yourself. Then you know you’re a man.” As he
spoke, I and others nodded in agreement. The intensity of Sam’s
thought, exploring an idea that no one had been able to consider, enabled me and others to take Kant’s claims more seriously. In these
sessions they felt they could finally exercise control over their own
thoughts—they could, as Sam did, think for themselves. This they
sensed would once again make them fully human in their own minds
and capable of respecting themselves as well as others.
The task that we set ourselves was to create a group of about ten
discussion leaders, each of whom would eventually be able to conduct
groups for other prisoners. The ultimate aim for the men was to involve as many prisoners as possible in the programs and to make these
discussions part of the ongoing life of the institution. In addition, a
collection of texts was to be selected and tried out for use both in this
prison and possibly in others as well. In this program and the other
programs I have designed, the texts are understood as tools, as touchstones. Though they are sometimes—like the Kolwitz drawing—specific to particular groups, most texts selected, like Ellison’s or Kant’s,
touch so deeply on our habits, our expectations, and our past cultural
and historical inheritance that they are useful for a wide variety of
groups. In the case of the prison population, we needed to determine
which texts would enable the participants to consider the issues of real
concern to them. At the same time, the process should not force them
into areas that they would only want to approach in their own time.
So it became necessary both to explore the problems these leaders
would face and to understand why certain kinds of texts were used.
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In other words, for the men to learn to lead a group, they would have
to grasp, to a certain extent, the underlying structure of the program.
The men in the group were therefore a core of nine who had committed to the project together with a varying group of others who
would join only as participants. These latter were sometimes known
to the other participants, though prisoners sometimes appeared for one
or two meetings who were not known to the main participants. In certain cases we knew that prisoners were asked to attend in order to inform prison officials and to monitor what was happening. I never
knew who these other occasional participants were. I never knew if
they were sent to disrupt the session, either by another prisoner organization that objected to what was happening, or by the prison administration, or simply by another prisoner who might be angry at one
of the participants or upset by the idea of changing the status quo of
the institution. Uncertainty is built into the nature of the discussion
process, and these visitors exacerbated the uncertainty surrounding
our work. This ongoing uncertainty also made it clear to me that, in a
real discussion, no one is ever in control. Both participants and leaders
are dependent on one another. And consequently a genuine discussion
cannot be an event that is isolated from the environment or culture or
organization in which it occurs.
The first stage of our work was to give the men the experience of
genuine discussion. I used texts from the Touchstones series, nine
graduated volumes ranging from works for third- and fourth-graders
up through high schoolers and beyond. These volumes, especially
those of the middle and high school series, are also perfectly suitable
for adults. In a school setting, the volume a group uses is rarely a function of reading level, since the program can be done orally, but is
rather a matter of experience with discussion. In high schools, our
goal during the first year of participation is for the participants to understand each stage of the process itself and, after twenty to twentyfive sessions, to begin conducting the classes themselves. This became
the model for our prison group. Each session was filmed, the video
was copied, and one of the copies was returned to the men. A typical
session would involve my passing out a text which was read aloud,
followed by preparatory individual and small-group work. The whole
group would then reunite, and I would lead the discussion. This would
last about fifty to sixty minutes. Then I would break the discussion,
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and for the last thirty minutes we would analyze what had occurred.
This was the procedure we followed week after week. Often the
analysis of the discussion process would revert to the text or revive
the topic of the main discussion. Once, after a discussion of the short
essay “About Revenge” by Francis Bacon, one of the prisoners named
James interrupted an argument between two very assertive men about
whether there had been dominance in the session. “Hey,” he asked in
an innocent tone, “did anyone take revenge during the meeting?” For
a few moments no one responded, though a number of eyes turned to
Michael, the man James had seemed to address. Then Lee acknowledged that he had been tempted to respond to what he had taken as a
slight—but didn’t. Finally, Michael spoke up. “I did. What Vaughn
said rubbed me wrong and I thought he knew that—so I went at him.
It was stupid.” The group then recurred to the text on revenge: Michael
and Lee discussed how they had reacted in different ways, why one
tried to get even while the other didn’t, and how they felt about their
actions.
This sort of event was common in the post-discussion analysis
sessions. The process of the discussion freqauently echoed the text.
In order for this to happen, texts must be selected that exemplify the
structures and attitudes of our society and institutions. The discussion
then becomes a unique kind of cultural exploration, in which the presuppositions of the culture can be made visible, and new forms of
thinking and behavior can be explored.
The entire history of slavery was continually present in the prison.
Jessup, like most American prisons, is filled primarily with black
men—the descendants of slaves once again in something very like
slave quarters. Not only are their cramped cells and chains reminiscent
of slavery, but, as the states increasingly involve prisons in various
commercial enterprises, we are once again witnessing the use of what
is essentially slave labor. The entire drama and stage setting of incarceration duplicates the four hundred year history of slavery on this
continent. Slavery and the complete lack of control over one’s decisions, one’s future, and one’s life were clearly the issues that should
be probed by these men. They have an expertise that the rest of us
don’t have and yet sometimes need in our own lives—an expertise in
surviving while facing the passivity imposed on us.
It is part of the aim of these discussions ultimately to enable the
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participants to discuss the most vital and volatile issues. But no one
is prepared to undertake this without the skills that the program develops. It is only quite late in the process that texts are dispensed with
and topics themselves confronted. When that occurs prematurely, the
result is mere conflict, or a series of monologues. It requires great discipline to undertake a genuine discussion of what one cares deeply
about. Thus, though slavery was at least one of the main concerns of
this group, its discussion as a topic would not occur until much later.
We would approach it through the mediation of specific texts until the
group became more skilled. Every group has certain issues like this,
and these will come up in the process itself, in the experiences the
group has in their lives, and in the institutional structure within which
they live.
I therefore selected texts at various stages which would push aspects of the issue of slavery to the surface. The choice of a passage
from Epictetus’s Manual was a first attempt. The passage is a terse
statement of stoicism, a very abstract claim about slavery and freedom
which holds that we are all enslaved, and that only by desiring what
is completely and entirely in one’s control could anyone be free.
Epictetus goes on to claim that only our thoughts and opinions are entirely in our control. This, he argues, is because all people for whom
we might feel love or affection and all property we possess or desire
could be lost through some unpredictable event. The discussion of this
text occurred about two months into the program.
The group was large that Friday night—about thirty—so the
shape of the arrangement of chairs had departed far from from the
customary circle into a very elongated ellipse. The configuration of
the chairs often plays a key role in a discussion, since everything in a
format like this has significance. I wanted to modify the shape of the
ellipse and make it more uniform but I hesitated. I always felt I should
accept the circumstances that presented themselves in the prison as
much as possible. Whether one manipulates the seating arrangement
depends on the setting, the group, and the leadership role. Leading a
discussion is not a uniform task. There is not one model that all must
adhere to in every situation. The goals remain the same across groups
of the same kind but how one achieves them can vary considerably.
I was at pains to make few demands on the situation and on the
men in it. I didn’t wish to be perceived as part of the organizational
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structure that moves them from place to place. When a prisoner would
run the group, he would exercise much more control and direction
than I did. It makes sense for that approach since he needs to demarcate himself as an expert in the initial phases whereas I wanted to minimize that status. This is the great issue confronting this effort to create
a genuinely collaborative activity. People want an expert who will
take control and yet wish to be free of that very desire. So the question
is how one should share leadership and authority. That of course is a
problem that will face all of us in every aspect of life. These discussions therefore are a laboratory in which the new directions to be pursued in our society can be explored and worked out.
I sat on the long side of the ellipse where I could best see all the
men. Many of them were new. There were three foci to the discussion.
One group was led by a large man named Karem, who sat at one of
the endpoints of the major axis—a dominant place in such a configuration. Karem agreed with Epictetus. He contended that the prison had
enslaved his body but his mind was free. He argued that they couldn’t
enslave that. “No one can chain my mind,” he boasted. “Though my
body is locked in this sewer, my mind can roam everywhere.” He
spoke in such a forceful way that many men, in spite of themselves,
agreed. Kevin, on the other hand, violently disagreed. The officers
didn’t just control his body. By controlling that, they controlled him.
They determined when he could move and where he could be. And
these decisions controlled his life, his desires, his thoughts, and his
dignity. While Karem held that he still felt free, Kevin vividly described what had happened to all of them—a need to urinate while
waiting somewhere in the prison. “And,” said Kevin, “they take their
damn time. They know what’s happening. They can read our faces,
and we’re forced to humiliate ourselves. They turn us into children or
animals.” Kevin went on to claim that such an indignity can happen
at any moment, and that to deny one’s feelings about it is not to be
free but rather to be less than human.
Karem tensed at this point. It was as if someone had said the
words that exactly characterized the situation all of them were in, and
which they were all striving to change by their own efforts. Sometimes
it is difficult to lead a discussion because what is said grips everyone
with the reality of the lives of some of the participants. Even with experienced leaders, when a discussion becomes intensely personal to
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the participants, it is difficult for the leader to focus on the long-range
goals of the project. Here I was listening to a discussion of Stoicism
by people who weren’t merely speculating and imagining what it
would be like to practice it. These were people whose very survival
and sanity often depended on their living that way. Some people in
that room were in fact stoics and could speak to Epictetus as if they
were colleagues. on the same path. Others knew well the temptation
of stoicism; perhaps they had tried it and abandoned it.
It is this aspect that gives such power to discussions that are designed to use text and experience to echo one another. This productive
tension between the experience of the group and the text reveals how
such discussions differ radically not only from education in the traditional sense—in which an idea or text is explored and but also from
therapy—in which what is at issue is the experience of the particular
participant. In discussion, personal experience is mediated by a text
that is often the seminal source of a concept or institutional structure;
yet, because of the difference betwwen text and personal experience,
the participants can view themselves from a distance. In fact, this very
issue itself came up in the discussion on Epictetus and soon became
the main focus. One of the men—Eddie, a former Black Panther who
was a lifer but always proclaimed his innocence—brought this home
to all of us. “None of us are free. We’re all enslaved,” he said, breaking
into a brief moment of silence between Kevin and Karem. “And not
just those like us in prison. Yeah, we’re held in place by bars and wire,
but that’s not all. Our minds themselves are enslaved. And not just
ours, Howard’s too and everyone out there. Our thoughts aren’t our
own. They’re just the ones we grew up with. How can we be free when
how we think is our prison?”
This took everyone aback. Everyone realized this was an important thought that we would have to continually consider and struggle
with. Eddie’s remark defused the tension between Karem and Kevin
by revealing how this issue of our slavery was the struggle we all had
to face. The men bounced all these ideas around as if they were in a
three-sided tennis match. No one changed an opinion, but each gave
the others the chance to speak. And this session was decisive for the
group because they finally recognized, as Eddie implied, that I had
nothing more to offer on this subject than they had, and in fact less.
After an hour I broke off the discussion so we might evaluate what
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had just happened.
In order to encourage people to emerge briefly from the prisons
in which Eddie claimed we were all captive, I wanted the men to
spend time with prisoners they didn’t know. I asked the men to count
to four and get into small groups according to number. That would effectively separate friends from one another, and I instructed them to
consider what they felt were the strong and weak points of the discussion. When these groups reported their analyses, most of the groups
agreed. They felt there had been a presentation of views but no discussion. As Vaughn said, “no one changed an opinion, and no one
looked at what they themselves were saying. We were just stating our
minds.” But Thomas responded: “That isn’t so terrible. At least we
could finally say what we really thought. And the rest of us listened
even if we didn’t react. That was important. Others listening—we get
some dignity that way,” he claimed. A number of men agreed.
But then Karem, who had been listening with a clear expression
of discomfort, interrupted. “But that means you need others to be free.
And how could this Epictetus be right about being free in your
thoughts when we need one another for our own self-respect? And
don’t you need self-respect for freedom?” It was there in the metadiscussion that the real discussion finally occurred. It was when they
had made the claims of stoicism visible to themselves in their very
activity that they could seriously consider the implications. The discussion did in fact act as an experiment for discerning new forms of
activity.
There was no official status in my position, and the men received
nothing for their participation. There was nothing concrete they would
gain. I therefore had no power to bestow anything obviously useful
or valued in that environment. The men came because they were allowed to think. The excitement of thinking and knowing that they too
were capable of this activity drew them into the group. They weren’t
here to learn from a book but to explore, together with me, both themselves and this new terrain we were bringing into being. Discussion
is possible only when there is no agenda. I had no agenda in terms of
the conclusions we would reach or the paths we would take, though I
clearly had a goal. I wanted to tailor the program to this institution.
This meant I would try out texts, and explore the means by which I
could turn over the responsibility for the program to these men. Often
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they would ask me about our other programs and I would tell them
about the possibilities and the difficulties we faced in the program
with Palestinians in Gaza, or indentured children in Haiti, or CEOs at
the Harvard Club, or middle school students, or senior citizens, or
plebes at the Naval Academy, or my students at St. John’s. I think it
was very important to these men to realize that what they were doing
was identical in some of its fundamental principles with attempts
being made throughout the world by people who were willing to risk
high levels of uncertainty to undertake the effort to change themselves.
It was the start of a sort of community where, we—there in the
bleak activity area of a nineteenth-century prison, in the third floor
private meeting room at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, in senior citizen centers, and in Haitian churches—were taking steps to explore a
world which, though continuous with strands of all of these disparate
worlds, nonetheless revealed glimpses of other forms of life and new
ways of being and thinking. It happened sporadically, but often
enough to hint at the outlines of a new possibility. The men knew that
they were exploring in an unfamiliar territory of human experience.
The trips to space were not the successors of the trips of Columbus
and Magellan. Those early explorers needed to change their fundamental conception of their world in order to make room for what they
saw. The astronauts merely solved the comparatively trivial problem
of how to get from one visible and relatively known place to another,
though the scale of their journey was immense. The problem we faced,
on the other hand, was not going from here to there, but from now to
then. It was exploration into a future that would no longer be a consequence of our pasts.
These men serving life sentences for serious crimes felt part of
the small bands of people making these journeys, and they sensed they
were bringing a perspective that was uniquely theirs but necessary to
all the others. This sense, I think, caused them to hae some respect for
me, in spite of the fact that I was merely one more among them—although I knew a bit more than they did about sketching a rough map
of our explorations, and had an instinct for recognizing apparent harbors that were only the temptations of sirens. Neither I nor they, however, could give a detailed account of this new terrain. Sometimes I
thought we were on solid ground and in a familiar region, when suddenly the ground would open up and I found myself, as in the con-
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ventional dream, falling endlessly with nothing to grab onto. And then,
just as suddenly, the scene would change, and I could see that we were
in a bucolic valley and the sense of falliing had been an illusion. I constantly had to seek my bearings along with the men, and that made
vivid the reality of our mutual dependence.
Up to this point I had led the discussions, selected the texts from
the Touchstones series, and designed the meeting format. But since
our goal was for the core group to develop the skills necessary to lead
discussions with other prisoners, I knew at some stage I would have
to turn over the responsibility to them. I must say I kept postponing
the step. I kept worrying that I hadn’t communicated enough to
them—and this remained a concern despite my understanding that one
cannot prepare for every eventuality in any complex activity, let alone
in a genuine discussion, which, if properly engaged in, changes from
moment to moment with a life of its own. Nonetheless, I also recognized that these were merely excuses I was using in order to avoid
surrendering control, and I was finally able to overcome my resistance
because of what the prisoners were able to do. We were approaching
the stage of the program in which the group must begin to observe
and judge itself.
In all the programs I have developed, the text, the experience of
the participants, and the dynamical issues arising in the process all interpenetrate and echo one another. To prepare the way for self-judgment and self-criticism of the group we first discussed a worksheet
that asked the men questions about how they judged others on first
meeting them. They were asked if they did so at first glance by clothing, by posture, or by eye-contact. In a prison, judging correctly at
first meeting is very important: one needs to be able to distinguish between a newcomer who poses a threat and one who does not.
Two men sharply disagreed on the best way to make such judgments. Idrus asserted it was by the person’s posture, whereas Eddie
focused on the eyes as the most revealing trait. This exchange went
on for a few minutes, and we could see Eddie becoming increasingly
impatient. Idrus was wearing dark glasses and Eddie, annoyed, finally
said what he had been thinking: “What’s behind those glasses?” In response Idrus tensed, started to rise, but then remained seated and
replied. “You’ve known me here for twenty years and you’ve never
seen that.” The moment was explosive and I quickly moved to the text
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for that day to re-establish control. They reconsidered this issue of
self-observation and self-judgment by discussing two self-portraits of
Rembrandt, one in which he concentrates on his eyes, and another in
which he elaborates his clothing while the eyes are in almost impentrable darkness. The discussion got past that moment of tension to
consider how Rembrandt had changed the manner in which he depicted himself.
The next week, Idrus—the prisoner who had shaded his eyes for
twenty years—came to the session without his dark glasses. We were
all stunned. All of us spoke haltingly as the session began, hardly able
to absorb the momentousness of his action. He had taken such a monumental step that I felt I should follow suit. I immediately changed
what I had planned for the session, and resolved that I would surrender
control to the group the following week. To begin that process immediately, I decided to explore with them what we would discuss in the
next session; that is, I began encouraging them to think through the
issues involved in leading a group.
A discussion leader always comes to a session with a goal. The
goal can be a topic that is essential for the group discuss, or a problem
the group must overcome—such as dominance by a few—or an opportunity for the group’s development, or a part of the text that seems
particularly important. The leader might well have to surrender this
goal immediately if it becomes clear that the group will not go along
with it, or that they are ready for a different goal. In this case it was I,
the group’s leader, who was finally ready for something more significant.
After almost a year of hesitation, I was finally ready to collaborate
with them, to surrender control. I therefore asked them to consider
what topic we as a group should discuss. For an hour they suggested
various subjects but the main one was “What is God?” Some claimed
that this was far too personal and sensitive too discuss, others claimed
that the group was capable of attempting it. Some then claimed it
wouldn’t be a discussion where one might change one’s mind. Instead
they would simply state their opinions, indifferent to what the others
might say. But in spite of their reservations, they were willing to attempt it. At the end of the session we chose a text that we could use
to focus our exploration, a selection in a Touchstones volume: the
story of the sacrifice of Isaac from the book of Genesis. The session
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171
had been so penetrating in examining what constituted a discussion,
what role texts can play in channeling the exploration, and how to
avoid having it turn into an empty ping-pong match of quotations and
scattered opinions, that I also decided the next session for the first
time would be led by one of the prisoners.
I could have chosen any of the group, but Michael volunteered.
A thirty-five-year-old prisoner, he had been serving a life sentence
since the age of fourteen when he was sentenced as an incorrigible
offender. Michael began quietly. He asked: “What sort of God would
make such a request?” There was silence for a few moments and then
first Eddie and then Thomas and then Lee all plunged into the discussion to shed light on the mystery of God’s purposes. For ninety minutes, Michael led a discussion on the difference between sacrifice and
murder and the role of God in our lives with a group of men all of
whom had either committed murder or were at least convicted of it.
And they identified even more closely with Abraham. As another of
the prinsoners, Vaughn, pointed out, “We here must constantly ask
ourselves just what Abraham must have asked himself during that
three-day trip to Mt. Moriah: why me, God, why me?” Though there
was a text, it was impossible to tell whether this was a textual or nontextual discussion. They had finally achieved that intermediate point
in which the distinction breaks down. The following week we spent a
good part of the session discussing what had occurred and whether
their expectations were satisfied. Had it been possible to discuss these
subjects or were they simply presenting monologues? Everyone
agreed that their worst fears had not materialized. In fact, the discussion was a great surprise even to those who expected that we would
be able to pursue it. As one of the men said, “It was like a wheel, it
just moved round and round.”
These men were discussing the issue most personal to them—the
murder of another human being. Yet they had the discipline to depersonalize their own experience and allow others to participate in a discussion. They could surrender control of what was most intimate, and
yet at the same time they never made it an abstract discussion. They
were able to fuse a textual exploration with one in which their own
experience lent credibility to their comments.
The session on the sacrifice of Isaac was a decisive moment for
the group. It was a great success, far greater than I or they or anyone
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could have imagined. They felt that with some advance preparation
one of them had been able to conduct a session. It was in fact a session
on a topic—what is God?—that most felt they wouldn’t be able to
handle. But even more, it was a discussion of the very crime for which
they were serving life sentences. The discussion was thoughtful and
probing, without self-pity and without avoidance of self-examination.
Once we began this process we decided to continue. The next week
we decided we would have another leader and would go in rotation
until each of the nine men had practiced with this group. This was a
major step. I also thought it was better to allow the leader to know in
advance and for him to be able to select the text and the approach.
The next volunteer was Vaughn, who had played a very strong role in
the last discussion. Michael, who had led the discussion, had the best
sense of how to keep himself out of the way. I knew others would have
more difficulty.
It is always a challenge to lead a group. Leading has little to do
with whether you enjoy discussions yourself. In fact often the worst
leaders are precisely those who want to be participants. However,
there is no one model for conducting a discussion. One has to discern
one’s strengths and determine how to use them in the new environment. Vaughn’s great strength as a participant would in fact, I expected, cause him problems as a leader. There was great seriousness
and intensity in Vaughn. In a discussion he often took the group to
new levels by his passionate thinking about a problem. In the Abraham
discussion, when the discussion was becoming fragmented, Vaughn
focused it on what we all knew we should talk about. He imagined
Abraham during those three days journeying with Isaac. He uttered
what everyone in the group was asking about Abraham and about
themselves, “God, why me, why me?” It was Vaughn who could suddenly transform a meandering route into one of deep engagement. As
one prisoner at a different prison said of a discussion on the Iliad, at
some point it left the streets of Troy for those of Baltimore. Vaughn
could effect that translation too. But this very power could also cause
problems.
It is wonderful when a participant deepens a discussion. But when
a leader does it, the group can become dependent on his enthusiasm
or it can become defensive and even go into opposition. A leader must
show that he respects others and feels that the issues they have raised
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are serious. Vaughn, however, was not generally attentive to the needs
of others in the group. He was not vain at all, but simply so engaged
by the question or topic that he would lose a sense of where the others
in the group were in their thinking. Each of the men had different
kinds of issues they would have to face as leaders, but Vaughn’s was
one of the most difficult. He would have to subordinate his own ideas
and help others to bring out theirs. He would have to surrender control
of the content and focus on his responsibility to others. If anyone had
to learn service it was he. My difficulty at the time was that I had to
let him choose the text.
What he selected startled me, and and was even more troubling
than the fact that he would lead the discussion. It was a piece by an
eighteenth-century ex-slave about what owning slaves does to the
slave owner. In one sense it was potentially useful because it at least
took a perspective that the group would not immediately relate to, but
would have to infer. But because it touched so directly on the topic of
slavery, it seemed beyond the ability of this group—much more so
than the question about God. I was amazed that this was the text chosen, yet I had resolved that I would do nothing to change it. They had
to learn to select texts for a specific group at a specific time in their
evolution and this was at least a start. And I had to learn to surrender
my position and become a participant in the group. Though I was convinced that the discussion would fail, I hoped we could analyze it afterward in order at least to decide why it failed. The analysis would
present an opportunity to explore the role of texts and how one selects
them.
I decided I would sit next to Vaughan, thinking that I might be
able to control, at least to some extent, how much he spoke. Though
the previous week had been so disciplined, this discussion collapsed
within moments. The first question took us far from the text into a
dispute about why white people enslaved black people. All the issues
surrounding enslavement and abuse came up immediately, and the
group could hardly sustain any exchange at all. Within minutes I
sensed that we were near an abyss. The few white men in the room
tried to speak, but were not taken seriously. Some got up and left the
circle, angry at what was happening. Most eventually returned and sat
down again, however, since there was no place else for them to go.
Even the others began to attack one another. All the alliances that had
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developed over time broke down. I felt I had no idea where we were
going, no idea whether the group could hold together for the hour or
whether I would have to break it off if they allowed me. At that moment I was certain that all the effort of the past year had been wasted,
and the apparent progress had been an illusion. The session became
electric when a prisoner nicknamed “Shaka” said that in 1975 he was
born a slave in Baltimore and his life would be devoted to becoming
free. I remained silent, unable to speak after my one contribution was
ignored.
After an hour, Vaughn suddenly broke off the conversation, saying we had to move on. I was relieved that we had all survived this
experience, and was ready to pack up and depart feeling that I had
failed in this entire effort. But before I could close out the session, in
a very steady voice Vaughn asked each person to reflect on the activities of the previous hour—what were the strong and weak points, was
it a discussion, was it a success or a disaster, and how could it have
been improved? I was startled both at what Vaughn had attempted at
this stage and also at how the men responded. They were very circumspect and considerate in their comments. Both the white prisoners
and the black prisoners spoke calmly about what had transpired, and
they were even able to discuss the reason why some had felt compelled to leave the circle. At the end of the main discussion I hadn’t
expected that we could ever revive the discipline they had attained
the previous week. But during the analytical conversation everything
changed. The men began to reflect on other aspects of the issue once
they no longer felt that they were expected to defend their respective
races.
After about fifteen minutes during which they considered how
Vaughn had conducted the session, someone abruptly broadened the
issue. Stuttering, Lee asked whether anyone had ever tried to enslave
someone in the prison, or even whether that had happened during the
discussion. There was a long silence and I could see many moving
nervously in their chairs. Finally Thomas acknowledged both. And
within moments, as if finally given the freedom to speak openly, all
entered the discussion as if they were no longer just the victims but
also the perpetrators. They began to describe the complexity of their
emotions as slave owners. They recounted how when they first enslaved someone on the tiers they felt a power and sense of victory.
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175
They no longer felt imprisoned but human again. But then they began
to feel the enslaved person to be a burden. Instead, only the free prisoners interested them. Their slaves were servile, willing to say or do
anything they felt would ease their lot. These men here, all of whom
were acknowledging themselves as slavers, wanted respect. They said
they didn’t want it from their slaves but from others—from one another. All felt that the moment they enslaved someone his respect was
worthless and their own self-respect diminished. And others would
not respect them for such pointless conquests. After their first moment
of euphoria, they said they felt debased and less human. And they
began acting that way. It was through reflecting on themselves and
their discussion that the text Vaughn had chosen was finally explored.
As I drove back to Annapolis that evening, I finally had occasion
to reflect on what I had just experienced. In the prison I had encountered the genuine reality of a critical section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—the section on Lordship and Bondage. Unlike the
obscure and illusive abstractions in the Phenomenology, the prisoners
had actually lived through the failures described so speculatively by
Hegel. They too, as Hegel points out about all of us, felt the deep and
fundamental urge to be recognized as human, to be acknowledged as
beings who were different from the rats and insects that populated
their world. And they struggled for this even in their most heinous
acts. These men, enslaved by their past and by their world, used others
in their attempts to break free; they tried to display their humanity
through acts of conquest; they were willing to die in order to assert
themselves as lords over a cell block or over a part of the yard. And
in the moment of success, in the moment of attaining complete control
over a space and its inhabitants, they acknowledged feeling their sense
of themselves slipping away into emptiness. In addition, the very men
whose submission and recognition was meant to guarantee their own
mastery and control showed to them the futility of seeking that recognition. By succumbing, the vanquished prisoners showed that they
couldn’t appreciate what the victor truly was, and therefore couldn’t
offer genuine acknowledgement and recognition. And so the victors
began to recognize themselves as slaves even in their moment of conquest. In Hegel’s story of the progress of human consciousness toward
complete self-awareness, the master who conquers is a dead end. The
story continues through the trials and struggles of the slave. And it is
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self-discipline that points the way to Hegel’s all too joyous conclusion
at the end of what he called the path of despair.
Here too was despair, here in these yards and in the echoing corridors—and yet these men had showed a self-discipline that I hadn’t
expected of them. They had gone farther than I could have imagined,
farther than I could go myself. They no longer needed a text to mediate
themselves. For a brief hour, they had raged about their pain and anger
and humiliation, and then, in a remarkable display of self-awareness,
they reflected objectively on their own strengths and weaknesses.
Though the road they had taken was not directed toward Hegel’s auspicious culmination of history, their exercise of self-discipline had
nonetheless revealed the path to the self. As Shaka—who considered
himself a slave even though he had been born in 1975—said, it was
in these discussions that he found his voice for the first time. These
men had attained more than anyone could give them, something that
any act of bestowal would itself destroy. These men had to find their
own voices. They had to surrender the idioms of their age and class
and race and gender, and for the first time risk hearing themselves.
Together they had to break free from the prison that, as Eddie pointed
out, they and I and all others inhabit. These prisoners thanked the discussions for making that possible. Perhaps that was true, but it was
also true that they had created the discussions. The discussions weren’t
there waiting for them. And suddenly I realized what it meant for me
to surrender control. The most that I had been able to do was to set
the stage for acts of courage that I could admire, but might never have
the privilege to display. I left the prison realizing that for a brief moment I had seen, in men confined to cells for their entire lives, a
degeree of mutual respect and recognition—of freedom—that the rest
of us rarely achieve.
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POETRY
The Love-Song of the Agoraphobic
Elliott Zuckerman
O sing a song
of standing alone
on the steppes of central Asia
and celebrate when thinly dressed
the stark surrounding white
of arctic ice.
Tell me these are Patagonian seas
and I’ll sing louder.
Have you noticed that the deck-chairs
tame the ship-board
by cutting off the terrible full circle?
Every market-place
is emptiness.
I cannot count the ears
of the endless rows
in the Iowa of my imagination.
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�REVIEWS
179
Henry Kissinger on China:
The Dangerous Illusion of
“Realist” Foreign Policy
A Review of Henry Kissinger’s On China.
New York: Penguin, 2011. 608 pages, $49.95.
Joseph A. Bosco
Henry Kissinger, an avid student and admirer of the “realist” statecraft
of Machiavelli, Metternich, and Mao, is viewed (not least by himself)
as the archetypical practitioner of Realpolitik in America’s foreign
policy establishment. His latest memoir, On China, describes how he
and Richard Nixon established American relations with the People’s
Republic of China in 1971-72, after nearly a quarter-century of mutual
isolation, suspicion, and hostility. He touts the China opening as
demonstrating the putative success of their “pragmatic” and “non-ideological” approach, and he makes the case with his customary erudition, aplomb, and Churchillian use of the English language. The book
is also a richly detailed account of the personal and sometimes philosophical interactions among the four key players: Nixon, Kissinger,
Mao Zedong, and Zhou-En-lai.
In an earlier book, Kissinger wrote that the China initiative
“marked America’s return to the world of Realpolitik.”1 Despite
China’s horrific human rights record and aggressive behavior since
the Communists took power in 1949, Washington sought rapprochement, convinced that it was “central to the establishment of a peaceful
international order and transcended America’s reservations about
China’s radical governance.”2 Kissinger can justifiably claim at least
partial results in one important objective of the strategy—relations
with Moscow: “[T]he Nixon Administration managed to create a
major incentive for Soviet moderation” that led to a brief period of
detente and a series of strategic arms control agreements,3 though it
Joseph A. Bosco served as China country desk officer in the office of the Secretary of Defense, 2005-2006, and previously taught graduate seminars on
China-Taiwan-U.S. relations at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
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was soon followed by one of the most fraught periods in Soviet-U.S.
relations.
But pursuit of the other immediate goal sought by the NixonKissinger diplomacy—China’s cooperation in terminating the Vietnam War on “honorable terms” for America—ended in ignominious
failure. “We made the withdrawal of our military forces from Taiwan
conditional on the settlement of the Vietnam war.”4 Kissinger blames
the outcome in Vietnam on Congress’s unwillingness to enforce the
Paris Peace Treaty. He says that he and Nixon foresaw Hanoi’s “massive violations” of the Treaty, but he signed it nevertheless because,
if necessary to ensure compliance, the use of air power to enforce the
agreement was never ruled out, either in the minds of members of the
Nixon Administration or in its public pronouncements.5 Obviously,
Hanoi was not deterred by the administration’s warnings that “we will
not tolerate violations of the Agreement.”6 As North Vietnam’s main
army forces poured over the 17th Parallel into the South, the Treaty
collapsed along with South Vietnam. Kissinger earned a Nobel Peace
Prize for having negotiated the agreement along with North Vietnam’s
Le Duc Tho, who declined the Prize.
Hardheaded realism requires that the overall China engagement
policy be examined over the long-term. Did it attain the peaceful international order Kissinger described as its goal? In this regard, the
results of Kissinger’s Realpolitik with China—which Nixon enthusiastically endorsed but also regarded as a “strategic gamble”—may
well be judged as one of the greatest miscalculations in American
diplomatic history.
Kissinger, of course, does not see it this way. He seems still to
revel in the momentous negotiations that shook the world, even
though its aftershocks grow increasingly ominous as time goes by.
The Shanghai Communiqué, drafted by Kissinger and Zhou En-lai,
was the seminal document in the new Sino-U.S. relationship. It clearly
stated the premise of the U.S. position: “[I]mproving communications
between countries that have different ideologies . . . lessen[s] the risks
of confrontation through accident, miscalculation, or misunderstanding.”7
Kissinger looks back with satisfaction over the ensuing four warfree decades, during which he continued to play influential roles—
often simultaneously—as a successful commercial entrepreneur in
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181
China and as an unofficial strategic adviser to both the American and
Chinese governments. His personal longevity, intellectual vigor, and
ongoing involvement in international affairs have enabled him to consult on an intimate basis with each of the four men who have led China
since the creation of the People’s Republic (and now with Xi Jinping,
the designated fifth-generation leader), as well as with the eight American presidents who have largely carried out Kissinger’s policies. “Despite occasional tensions . . . [i]n the forty years since [the Communiqué]
was signed, neither China nor the United States has allowed the issue
[of human rights] to interrupt the momentum of their relationship.”8
Yet during that period the United States and China have experienced their third Taiwan Strait Crisis; several dangerous clashes at
sea; the EP-3 incident; two separate nuclear threats against American
cities by Chinese generals; Beijing’s undermining of American objectives on nonproliferation, on North Korea, and on a range of rogue
state issues; and China’s creation of an alternative development model
that violates international standards of accountability, transparency,
and good governance. Kissinger’s massive volume does not do justice
to these events, where it mentions them at all. To demonstrate how
far U.S.-China relations have progressed since the historic opening,
Kissinger writes: “Nixon had to overcome a legacy of twenty years
of American foreign policy based on the assumption that China would
use every opportunity to weaken the United States and to expel it from
Asia.”9 He gives short shrift, however, to China’s contemporary demands, backed by their historically unprecedented military strength,
that the U.S. curtail its activities in international waters like the Taiwan
Strait, the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the South China Sea.
He sees Chinese “triumphalist” rhetoric as unreflective of official Chinese policy and merely a hypothetical danger. At a recent meeting
with South Korea’s defense minister, which occurred too late for inclusion in On China, the chief of the People’s Liberation Army’s general staff, General Chen Bingde “issued an unusual and caustic tirade
against . . . America’s hegemonic attitudes toward other countries.”10
Such Chinese accusations are not unusual, never having disappeared
despite Kissinger’s rosy assessment of the achievements of the Shanghai Communiqué. Given the longevity of such Chinese views of
Washington’s motives, coupled with China’s economic and military
surge, it is no wonder that, thirty years after his historic opening,
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Nixon worried, “We may have created a Frankenstein.”11 Kissinger,
however, remains untroubled over his role in establishing and perpetuating the framework for U.S.-China relations, and unconcerned about
what that undertaking has produced. James Clapper, the Director of
National Intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2011
that China now presents “the greatest mortal threat” to the United
States.12
On China, together with the author’s extensive promotional interviews for the book, may well be Kissinger’s last concerted attempt
to establish a favorable historical record for the landmark oopening
to China. It is certainly a vigorous defense of Realpolitik in the crucible of U.S.-China relations. But even on its own realist terms the
book ultimately fails in its mission of vindication. This is partly because the story is not over and indeed is worsening as China’s economic and military power continue to grow. But the evidence of
long-term strategic failure is now sufficient to conclude that Nixon’s
strategic gamble has already failed—nearly a half-century after the
opening, the two powers should not still be seriously contemplating
scenarios for going to war with each other. But we are.
The issue that had always stymied Sino-U.S. relations until the
Nixon-Kissinger overture was the status of Taiwan. As Kissinger approvingly recalls, Washington initially lost interest in Taiwan after
Mao’s Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949, during which
the U.S. remained on the sidelines. “Having conceded the mainland
to Communist control and whatever geopolitical impact this might
have, it made no sense to resist Communist attempts to occupy Taiwan.”13
Secretary of State Dean Acheson and General Douglas MacArthur
effectively reflected that thinking in late 1949 and early 1950, when
they publicly delineated U.S. strategic interests in Asia and excluded
both Taiwan and South Korea from America’s security perimeter. In
his book, Kissinger criticizes Acheson’s National Press Club statement
in January, 1950: “To the extent deterrence requires clarity about a
country’s intention, Acheson’s speech missed the mark.”14 Actually,
Acheson was, if anything, too clear in indicating, as MacArthur had
done a month earlier, that Washington did not intend to use military
force to defend Taiwan or South Korea. No wonder, then, that Kim
Il-sung, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong thought they had a U.S. green
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light to pursue aggressive unification. But after North Korea’s attack
on South Korea converted hypothetical danger to stark reality, a
shocked foreign policy establishment changed its perception of the
Asian Communist threat: “When American policymakers came faceto-face with an actual Communist invasion, they ignored their policy
papers.”15 President Truman mobilized a United Nations defense of
South Korea and sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent a Chinese attack there, frustrating Mao’s openly stated intentions
to do just that. As Kissinger put it regarding the Korean War, “The
United States did not expect the invasion; China did not expect the
reaction.”16
After the war ended in a military and negotiated stalemate, President Eisenhower signed Mutual Defense Treaties with both South
Korea and Taiwan in 1954. The U.S. military presence maintained the
peace for the next decade and a half. Nevertheless, Kissinger expresses disdain for the sterile Sino-U.S. impasse over the island’s status that kept the two governments isolated from each other during that
period: “China would discuss no other subject until the United States
agreed to withdraw from Taiwan and the United States would not talk
about withdrawing from Taiwan until China had renounced the use of
force to solve the Taiwan question.”17 At that point Nixon and
Kissinger entered the scene wielding the sword of Realpolitik. They
cut the Gordian knot—simply acceding to China’s position. Washington informed Beijing that the Seventh Fleet—the primary obstacle to
a Chinese attack on Taiwan—was leaving the Taiwan Strait forthwith
and all American forces would be withdrawn from Taiwan in stages.
The fact that these commitments were made even before the start
of the official Sino-U.S. dialogue violated one of the Nixon-Kissinger
realist admonitions against making advance concessions and appearing overly eager to please. “We have a tendency to apply our standards
to others in negotiations. We like to pay in advance to show our good
will, but in foreign policy you never get paid for services already rendered.”18 As Nixon instructed his adviser, “We cannot be too forthcoming in terms of what America will do [by saying] we’ll withdraw,
and we’ll do this, and that, and the other thing.”19 But U.S. actions
had already conveyed the impression that Washington craved the rapprochement far more than did Beijing. Any fair-minded realist would
have to say that this impression weakened American negotiating lan-
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guage, strategic clarity, and deterrence in perpetuity. As Kissinger
takes justifiable pride in noting repeatedly, seven subsequent administrations have followed the Nixon-Kissinger approach. For more than
four decades, consequently, Beijing has taken full advantage of that
Western indulgence, deriving the benefits from the international system while enjoying wide latitude in its domestic and international behavior.
Kissinger has presented confusing, and even contradictory, accounts of the origin of the Sino-American “understanding” on Taiwan
established during Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao. In On China,
he writes: “[A]fter decades of mutual recrimination over Taiwan, the
subject in effect did not come up” except for some sarcastic banter
about Chiang Kai-shek.20 A few pages later, he reaffirms that “Mao
had omitted any substantive reference to Taiwan.”21 To bolster this
point, Kissinger reports his own conversation with Mao a year after
the Nixon meeting: “[T]o remove any element of threat Mao explicitly
delinked the issue of Taiwan from the overall U.S.-China relationship.”22 Although Mao warned that he did not believe China and Taiwan would be able to effect a peaceful transition,23 as far as
China-U.S. relations were concerned, “Mao made his principal
point—that there were no time pressures of any kind.”24 Mao also told
him, “I say that we can do without Taiwan for the time being, and let
it come after one hundred years.”25 Kissinger explains that Mao actually had two principal points of equal importance: First, “that Beijing
would not foreclose its option to use force over Taiwan—and indeed
expected to have to use force someday.”26 Second, “for the time being
at least, Mao was putting off this day.”27
Kissinger’s account of the Mao-Nixon the discussion in On China
is consistent with Nixon’s own description of the meeting in his 1978
memoir.28 Inexplicably, however, Kissinger told the story quite differently in two books he wrote between Nixon’s Memoirs and his own
On China. In 1979 and again 1994, Kissinger put Mao’s talk of delay
in Taiwan’s demise not in a one-on-one meeting with him, but in
Mao’s meeting with Nixon, at which Kissinger was also present:
“[T]he Chinese leader wasted no time in assuring the President that
China would not use force against Taiwan: “We can do without them
for the time being, and let it come after 100 years.’”29 In these earlier
accounts, Kissinger saw Mao’s statement to the President as a mani-
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festation of large-minded statesmanship: “Mao asked for no reciprocity for the assurance America had been seeking for twenty years.”30
Whichever version is accurate, Kissinger’s perception that Mao
was making a major unilateral concession is astoundingly innocent.
Nixon and Kissinger had already given Mao the quid for his quo—a
commitment to withdraw U.S. forces on and near Taiwan. Indeed,
they had already given Mao much more. Kissinger remarks that
“Nixon and his advisers . . . deemed diplomatic contact with China
essential” and, as early as 1969, had publicly committed the United
States to defend China’s independence against a Soviet attack—a
unique security guarantee from an American president to a hostile
Communist government.31 Moreover, Kissinger did not even seem to
regard Taiwan as a strategic bargaining chip. He once expressed bemused incredulity to Mao that China would wait so long to take Taiwan: “Not a hundred years,” he remarked. Mao responded: “It is hard
to say. Five years, ten, twenty, a hundred years. It’s hard to say.”32 Despite the shifting target dates, Mao’s comments about Taiwan consistently made clear that China would use force to take it: “[W]e are
going to fight for it.”33 So, Nixon and Kissinger, the two hardheaded
practitioners of Realpolitik, knowingly traded a concrete action China
wanted—permanent U.S. withdrawal from Taiwan—for a vague and
temporary expression of the action Washington had sought—China’s
commitment not to use force against Taiwan. It is worth noting that
on none of the occasions when Mao affirmed China’s intention to attack Taiwan did Kissinger raise any question or objection. Nor did he
suggest that the United States would feel compelled to defend Taiwan
on the basis of its “interest in a peaceful settlement” as stated in the
Shanghai Communiqué. Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, and Zhou, who might
be called the Gang of Four Realists, all understood that American public opinion and the U.S. Congress would not tolerate abandonment of
Taiwan to Communist China at that time. After a decent interval, however—in Nixon’s expected second term—the deed would be done.34
China would get its “full meal.” While Nixon shared wholeheartedly
in that original Realpolitik cleverness, his view significantly evolved
as Taiwan itself moved from dictatorship to democracy; unlike
Kissinger, he concluded that democratic Taiwan is now permanently
divorced from Communist China. (See discussion below.)
On China suffers from surprising historical inaccuracies and glar-
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ing omissions on some pivotal events in China-U.S. relations.
Kissinger recounts the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, which began in July
1995 when China fired missiles toward Taiwan to protest a U.S. visit
by Taiwan’s appointed president, Lee Teng-hui. China then conducted
military exercises in the Strait during the period leading up to Taiwan’s
parliamentary elections in December. Chinese officials, clearly intent
on avoiding North Korea’s 1950 miscalculation, put the crucial question directly to their American counterparts during a November visit
of Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye: How would the U.S.
respond if China attacked Taiwan? Here was an ideal opportunity for
supposedly realist Washington to provide the strategic clarity and deterrent message Kissinger found lacking in Acheson’s Press Club
speech.
But Nye, even as he cited that earlier Korean experience, answered equivocally: “We don’t know and you don’t know; it would
depend on the circumstances.”35 Understandably wary of signaling an
Acheson-style green light, Nye erred in failing to red-light China’s
ambitions by a plain commitment to Taiwan’s defense. Instead, he
gave China a yellow light—what came to be known as “strategic ambiguity”—and it worked for that moment as China decided to proceed
with caution for the time being. When asked the same question by
American interviewers weeks later, Defense Secretary William Perry
enthusiastically adopted Nye’s statement, and it has been Washington’s official stance ever since. Curiously this pivotal incident does
not appear in On China, and neither Nye nor Perry is mentioned in
the book. Equally surprising is Kissinger’s failure to note the extraordinary threat conveyed by a Chinese general to an American scholar
at that time: “You care more about Los Angeles than about Taiwan.”36
Within a month of Nye’s statement, the Nimitz carrier group
passed through the Strait—the first such transit in the 23 years since
Nixon had removed the Seventh Fleet. After China protested, Washington explained that this passage was merely a weather diversion,
not a warning or a signal of commitment to Taiwan’s defense—
thereby undermining the impact of “the most significant American
show of force directed at China since the 1971 rapprochement.”37
Kissinger fails to note the missed deterrent opportunity for the United
States: having sent the ships through the Strait, it could have reminded
Beijing matter-of-factly that no U.S. explanation or Chinese indul-
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gence was required for the exercise of America’s freedom of navigation rights in international waters.38
Kissinger’s account also misstates the date and context of the
Nimitz Taiwan Straight passage. He places it not in December 1995,
when it actually occurred, but three months later in March 1996, prior
to Taiwan’s first presidential election, when China tested the U.S.
again by resuming its missile firings across the Strait. On that second
occasion in March, President Clinton deployed both the Nimitz and
the Independence to the area. But when Beijing threatened a “sea of
fire” if the ships entered the Strait, they changed course and avoided
the Strait. As a result, Washington’s attempt to signal deterrence was
trumped by Beijing’s message of counter-deterrence. This compounded the garbled strategic signals in December. A former senior
U.S. official who had been in office at the time later described the
1995-96 confrontations as the Clinton administration’s “own Cuban
missile crisis,” and said they had “stared into the abyss.”39 Kissinger
uses similar language to describe the crisis: “Approaching the
precipice, both Washington and Beijing recoiled.”40 But his failure to
note the mismanaged U.S. messaging during this critical period is surprising given his lifelong career focus on the roles of ambiguity and
clarity in international diplomacy generally and in the famously complex and nuanced U.S.-China relationship in particular.41
Nor does he remark on the significant lessons China learned from
the tense episode. According to subsequent Defense Department reports on China’s military power, after 1996 Beijing resolved to develop the capacity to deter or delay U.S. intervention in any future
Taiwan crisis. It has done so by deploying a formidable arsenal of
“area denial” and “anti-access” weapons, including advanced attack
submarines and the world’s first ship-killing ballistic missiles.
Kissinger takes no notice of these ominous developments. Nor does
he mention the existence of the congressionally mandated Pentagon
reports on China’s dramatic military advances.42
On China also ignores President George W. Bush’s abortive attempt in 2001 to restore the clarity of America’s commitment to Taiwan’s security that prevailed from 1950 until the Nixon opening to
China in 1972. The president said he would do “whatever it took” to
defend Taiwan now that it had become a democracy.43 Shocked China
experts within and outside the administration scrambled to walk that
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statement back, restoring the ambiguity of the earlier, presumably
safer policy. But it was the attacks of September 11, 2001 that put the
Taiwan issue on the back burner as Washington managed to convince
itself that Beijing was now on the same side with the U.S. in the war
on terrorism, counter-proliferation, and even controlling North
Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
Notwithstanding Kissinger’s omissions and historical errors, On
China offers an illuminating account of the similarities and differences
between Kissinger and Nixon on China policy. The two clearly agreed
on the compromises and ambiguities that enabled the China opening.
They also agreed that their successors should continue the engagement
policy because abandoning it would entail seriously adverse consequences. They parted company, however, over the future of Taiwan
and the attendant prospects for Sino-U.S. conflict.
Nixon recalled how “the Shanghai Communiqué negotiated by
Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai brilliantly bridged the differences
between the two governments.”44 But he also wrote:
Realistic reappraisals of U.S. relations with Taiwan,
and of the relations between the governments in Beijing and Taipei, are overdue. . . . The situation has
changed dramatically since then. . . . China and Taiwan publicly have irreconcilable differences. The
separation is permanent politically, but they are in
bed together economically.45
He advocated that the two sides simply accept their mutual dependency, and he also recommended that the United States strongly support
Taiwan’s membership in international economic organizations. He
exhorted Washington to “begin extending to Taiwan government officials the diplomatic courtesies that the leaders of one of the world’s
major economic powers deserve.”46 And he expressed optimism for a
long-term peaceful outcome: “The Chinese will not launch a military
attack against Taiwan as long as Beijing knows such an attack would
jeopardize their relations with the United States.”47
Kissinger assesses the situation differently. He still believes, as
Nixon did, that the “ambiguous formula” he inserted in the Shanghai
Communiqué was masterful: “ambiguity is sometimes the lifeblood
of diplomacy.”48 Unlike Nixon, however, Kissinger believes that
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China will use force against Taiwan unless it accepts “peaceful reunification through peaceful means,” as Premier Wen Jiabao put it to
President Bush in December 2003.49 But Kissinger recalls a 2001 conversation with President Jiang Zemin, in which he mentioned the possibility of military action against Taiwan. Kissinger took the remark
seriously enough that he “felt obliged to reply to this threat of force”
by saying, “In a military confrontation between the U.S. and China,
even those of us who would be heartbroken would be obliged to support our own country.”50 Kissinger did not predict that the U.S. would
in fact defend Taiwan, and he makes clear in his book that he doubts
it will: “The crucial competition between the United States and China
is more likely to be economic and social than military.”51 Given the
state of Sino-U.S. economic interdependence and the dramatic increase in China’s military power, it is unlikely Kissinger would find
a U.S. defense of Taiwan more palatable today than it was in 1949,
when the PLA was a lot weaker. This is why he has publicly urged
Taiwan to exercise the “peaceful” option and come to terms with Beijing before China feels compelled to resort to force. This is also the
reason Kissinger warns Washington about continued arms sales to Taiwan: “It would be dangerous to equate [China’s] acquiescence to circumstance with agreement for the indefinite future.”52 Nixon believed
that war over Taiwan could be avoided by self-interested Chinese selfrestraint; Kissinger believes that peace can be assured only if Taiwan
and the United States accept Taiwan’s unification with China—
thereby consummating the deal he made with Zhou En-lai in 1972.
“[The] series of ambiguities [that] sustained much of normalization
for forty years . . . cannot do so indefinitely.”53
It may be that Kissinger has fallen victim to the ancient realist
principles he admires in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, teachings that anticipate Realpolitik in emphasizing “subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.”54 This sort of approach
involves “building a dominant political and psychological position,
such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion,”55
for “strategy resolves itself into a psychological contest” that sometimes requires “subterfuge and misinformation.”56 Like Sun Tzu,
“Mao believed in the objective impact of ideological, and above all,
psychological factors.”57 Mao and Zhou applied these principles
adeptly in their interactions with Nixon and Kissinger, and their suc-
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cessors have continued the tradition. For example, despite his dissatisfaction with Washington’s continued arms sales to Taiwan, Deng Xiaoping skillfully managed his relations with Washington so that, as
Kissinger concedes, “the People’s Republic achieved another decade
of American assistance as it built its economic and military power.”58
Kissinger also uses On China to warn against too much emphasis
on China’s human rights record. Once called “the American Metternich,” Kissinger espouses the realist position that national interest
must be based on seeing the world as it is, not as we would like it to
be, and certainly not with an over-emphasis on human rights and democratic values (which he calls crusading moralism) important as they
are to America’s national identity. The best way to influence China
on human rights, he informed Fareed Zakaria in a recent televised interview, is to leave it to himself and a few others who have earned the
trust and confidence of China over the years and can broach the subject in private rather than embarrassing its leaders in public. But the
record of the past forty years reveals that his realist approach has proved
to be decidedly unrealistic. That is because, contrary to Kissinger’s
teaching, the counterpoint to realism is not always idealism or excessive morality. Clearheaded pursuit of the national interest can also be
clouded by sentimentality, wishful thinking, illusion, grandiosity, even
self-delusion. Kissinger long ago convinced himself that he and Chinese leaders shared a hard-nosed pragmatism based on mutual selfinterest. “I could not have encountered a group of interlocutors more
receptive to Nixon’s style of diplomacy than the Chinese leaders.”59
He was comfortable in his assumption that the Chinese perceived their
own self-interest as he believes he would have seen it if he were in
their place. So he constantly projected onto Beijing his views of their
self-interest. It is a variation of a phenomenon Kissinger often decries:
American diplomats sometimes contracting what has been called clientitis. They become the policy captives of the countries to which they
are posted and end up advocating that government’s views to Washington instead of the reverse. But Kissinger, with characteristic intellectual complexity, takes clientitis to a new level. He sympathetically
presents to his American audience not merely the official Chinese position, but also his own imaginary conception of what the Chinese position would be if they were as rational as he is. Kissinger has written
that in “our opening to China . . . [o]ur objective was to purge our for-
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eign policy of all sentimentality.”60 It may be that he and Nixon only
replaced one form of sentimentality with their own, though Nixon,
unlike Kissinger, apparently recovered his perspective enough to predict a future Taiwan free of Chinese Communist domination.
Some passages in On China suggest Kissinger’s knowing psychological susceptibility to China’s advances. Kissinger fully recognizes how “Chinese statesmen historically have excelled at using
hospitality, ceremony, and carefully cultivated personal relationships
as tools of statecraft.”61 His chapter on the history of China’s relations
with the outside world contains an interesting passage from the Han
Dynasty: “For those who come to surrender, the emperor [should]
show them favor [and] personally serve them wine and food so as to
corrupt their mind.”62 A few hundred pages later, Kissinger describes
the lavish banquets his Chinese hosts bestowed on him—and includes
in his book a photograph showing Zhou En-lai using his chopsticks
to place food on Kissinger’s plate.
Whether Kissinger has been beguiled and seduced by a series of
Chinese leaders, or has merely invested so much of his life in vindicating the original flawed Sino-U.S. understanding that he can no
longer deviate from his own orthodoxy, the consequences are the
same. Or perhaps the explanation for Kissinger’s vulnerability to Chinese influence is more geostrategic and less psychological. Intellectually and professionally, Kissinger’s, and Nixon’s, strong anti-Soviet
background doubtless predisposed them to align the United States
with China, Moscow’s chief adversary at the time. (“The enemy of
my enemy is my friend.”) Kissinger probably exaggerated his own
neutrality when he described the debate within official national security and foreign policy circles over which way American policy should
tilt. He recalls that there were “Slavophiles,” “Sinophiles,” and those
who advocated Realpolitik. “Not surprisingly,” he writes, “I was on
the side of the Realpolitikers.”63 Richard Nixon’s seminal thinking on
the need to open relations with China was set forth in his October
1967 article in Foreign Affairs, in which he wrote: “[W]e simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there
to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors.”64
When, in 1994, Kissinger reviewed the consequences of his approach to China, he concluded that “[t]he certitudes of physical threat
and hostile ideology characteristic of the Cold War are gone.”65 But
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three years earlier, Deng Xiaoping—supposedly the un-Mao, who had
already ordered China’s military to “shed some blood”66 in Tiananmen
Square—gave fair warning of what lay ahead for the world: “hide our
capacities and bide our time.”67 Given the present state of Sino-U.S.
relations, the danger of conflict over Taiwan, North Korea, the South
China Sea, Beijing’s essentially subversive role on proliferation and
third world governance, and a myriad of other issues, it is fair to ask:
Who are the true realists?
As he again surveyed China-U.S. relations recently in the context
of increasing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea and elsewhere, Kissinger warned: “Care must be taken lest both sides analyze
themselves into self-fulfilling prophecies.”68 The problem is that there
has been too little reflection and fresh thinking in the West regarding
Communist China’s long-term motives. We are now being forced, belatedly, to reexamine long-held premises and assumptions. Kissinger’s
On China provides abundant evidence of the reasons why reassessment
is needed—now more than ever.
NOTES
1. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994), 724.
2. Henry Kissinger, On China, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), 447.
3. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 719.
4. Kissinger, On China, 249.
5. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 696.
6. Ibid.
7. Joint Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China and the United States
of America, February 28, 1972, reprinted in Richard Nixon, Speeches, Writings, Documents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 225.
8. Kissinger, On China, 272.
9. Ibid., 216.
10. Miles Yu, “Inside China,” The Washington Times, July 20, 2011.
11. William Safire, “The Biggest Vote,” The New York Times, May 18, 2000.
12. Testimony of James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, before the
Senate Intelligence Committee, March 10, 2011.
13. Kissinger, On China, 119.
14. Ibid., 125.
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15. Ibid., 129.
16. Ibid., 132.
17. Ibid., 159.
18. The Diane Rehm Show, Interview with Henry Kissinger, WAMU-FM,
April 7, 1994. Emphasis added.
19. Kissinger, On China, 266.
20. Ibid., 258.
21 Ibid., 279.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., emphasis added.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 280.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset
and Dunlap, 1978), 561-564.
29. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 1062; and Diplomacy, 727. Emphasis added).
30. Ibid.
31. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 723-724.
32. Kissinger, On China, 307.
33. Ibid.
34. Kissinger, On China, 271. “[Nixon’s] intention, he affirmed, was to complete the normalization process in his second term.”
35. Joseph Nye, The Boston Globe, February 7, 1996, 6.
36. William Perry, The New York Times, January 24, 1996, 1.
37. Ibid., 476.
38. After China complained about a Strait transit by the Kitty Hawk in 2007,
Admiral Timothy Keating, the Pacific Commander, replied: “We don’t need
China’s permission to go through the Taiwan Straits. It is international water.
We will exercise our free right of passage whenever and wherever we choose
to.” “Sino-American Showdown in Taiwan Strait: Chinese Navy Confronted
USS Kitty Hawk,” Global Research, January 16, 2008. Kissinger does not
mention the incident.
39. Off-the-record Washington speech by a former U.S. official.
40. Kissinger, On China, 477.
41. Kissinger is decidedly ambiguous on the role of ambiguity in statecraft,
at least as it is practiced by others. Critical of Acheson’s lack of deterrent
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clarity in 1950, he takes great pride in his own “one China” formulation in
the Shanghai Communiqué, which could be a model of ambiguity as “the
lifeblood of diplomacy.” But then he criticizes President Reagan’s Third
Communiqué on Taiwan arms sales because it “is quite ambiguous, hence a
difficult roadmap for the future.” Kissinger, On China, 383.
42. See, e.g., Annual Report to Congress: The Military Power of the People’s
Republic of China, 2005, Office of the Secretary of Defense.
43. David E. Sanger, “U.S. Would Defend Taiwan, Bush Says,” The New York
Times, April 26, 2001.
44. Richard Nixon, Beyond Peace (New York: Random House, 1994), 133.
45. Ibid., 134. Emphasis added.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Kissinger, On China, 356.
49. Ibid., 492.
50. Ibid., 484.
51. Ibid., 525.
52. Ibid., 385.
53. Ibid., 356. To Chinese readers of Kissinger’s book, the title words On
China may look very much like “One China.”
54. Ibid., 23.
55. Ibid., 26.
56. Ibid., 29.
57. Ibid., 101.
58. Ibid., 386.
59. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 726.
60. Kissinger, White House Years, 191.
61. Kissinger, On China, 237.
62. Ibid., 21. Emphasis added.
63. Kissinger, White House Years, 182.
64. Richard Nixon, “Asia After Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, 46.1 (1967): 121.
65. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 835.
66. The New York Times, June 4, 2010, 1.
67. “Deng Initiates New Policy ‘Guiding Principle,’” FBIS-CHI-91-215,
quoted in Kissinger, On China, 438.
68. “Avoiding a U.S.-China Cold War,” Henry A. Kissinger, The Washington
Post, January 14, 2011. See also “Our Fraught Place with China,” Joseph A.
Bosco, The Weekly Standard, January 21, 2011.
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Everything is One
A Review of Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus: The First Philosopher of the West on
Its Most Interesting Term. Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2011. 160 pages, $16.95.
David Carl
The Greeks had but one word, logos, for both speech and
reasoning; not that they thought there was no speech
without reason, but no reasoning without speech; and the
act of reasoning they called syllogism, which signifieth
summing up the consequences of one saying to another.
—Hobbes, Leviathan I.iv.14
What is the relationship between what we say and what we think, or
how we think? In her new book Eva Brann demonstrates that these
questions are among the oldest (and most interesting) questions taken
up by Western philosophy, and that they find their origin in the Logos
of Heraclitus. This Logos, however, is not initially something spoken,
but something heard, and much hinges on the content and the nature
of Heraclitus’s hearing.
What Heraclitus heard was the Logos, for the Logos speaks (is a
Speaker) and the philosopher is one who hears. Heraclitus is “that
aboriginal listener to the Logos” (87).* But this is the beginning of the
mystery, not its solution; and teasing out the implications, the ambiguities (or ambivalencies), the paradoxes and possibilities of what the
Logos says is the primary task of Ms. Brann’s book. How exactly did
he hear what the Logos said? To whom or what was he listening? How
did he learn to hear so well? And how will he share, across the centuries, the timeless truth of what he heard?
Brann begins her account of Heraclitean hearing by introducing
us, by means of an analysis of Raphael’s School of Athens, to the figDavid Carl is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
*
Page numbers in parentheses refer to Eva Brann’s Heraclitus.
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ure of Heraclitus, and briefly relates the history of logos, as distinct
from the Heraclitean Logos. She then turns her attention, over the
course of four closely reasoned pages, to a detailed consideration of
a two-line fragment from Heraclitus’s lost treatise known as On Nature, D-K 50:1
To those hearing not me but the Saying, to say the same is
the Wise Thing: Everything [is] One. (16)
Through consideration of etymological detail informed by an imaginative intimacy with the history of Western philosophy and literature,
an understanding of this fragment emerges which highlights the stakes
of Heraclitus’s hearing: the Logos is a “Wise Thing,” and it is wise
for us to have knowledge of it “since it governs the relation of all
things to everything” (19). As we will see, the key word in this understanding is “relation.”
Seeing as Hearing
In the next sections of her book, Brann leads her reader towards an
appreciation of how the Logos both embodies and reveals the unity
“of all things to everything.” She first shows us that Heraclitus is particularly interested in the within and without of the cosmos, and that
he looks within in order to understand the without: “no one has ever
listened harder to the Logos within!” (87). This is not an unconscious
mixing of metaphors: this looking that is a form of listening is part of
the essential doubleness of Heraclitus’s thinking—a doubleness which
is as apparent in his form and style as it is in the content of his writing.
Brann’s discussion of fragmentation (“his inherent fragmentariness
entails a certain philosophical completeness” [93]), metaphor, and
Heraclitean punning is illuminating in this regard.
Twenty-five hundred years after Heraclitus composed the writings
we know as his Fragments, Wallace Stevens observed that “[t]he
world about us would be desolate except for the world within us,”2
and “it is a violence from within that protects us from a violence from
without.”3 Brann shows us that this salutary tension between the
within and the without, together with Stevens’ notion of violence, is
essential to the way Heraclitus listens to the Logos. Indeed, as we will
see, salutary tension is at the heart of Heraclitus’s understanding of
the cosmos.
His hearing will constantly merge with metaphorical forms of see-
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ing, for Heraclitus pays a great deal of attention to the physical world
around him. (“[O]f what there is sight, hearing, learning—these I
honor especially” [75].4) Moreover, the Logos he hears “is not audible
to the ears but to the soul” (76), nor is the cosmic Fire he sees visible
to the physical eye. For Heraclitus the eye and the ear are both
metaphors for forms of knowing, namely, listening and seeing. There
is deliberate, salutary tension in a mixed metaphor, and the harmony
at the core of Heraclitus’s view of nature is driven by tension—the
kind of tension that goes into stringing a bow or tuning a lyre. This is
why Heraclitus says that “[a]ll things come to be by strife” (106).5
Because of this strife, wrestling is another illuminating metaphor
in Heraclitus’s “tautly vital, twangingly alive, strainingly static cosmos”—a cosmos “locked in inimical embraces” that displays “a mode
of being that is a harsh, ever-unfulfilled striving” (90). On the way toward understanding how Heraclitean harmony (“there is a Unity relating Everything and All Things” [18]) arises out of this notion of
strife and tension, Brann treats us to insightful observations about Heraclitus’s relationships with Aristotle, Parmenides, Pythagoras and the
Milesian “proto-physicists”; she discusses the importance of metaphor
and ratio (“the Greek name for ratios is logoi, and logoi are the cosmic
unifying relations” [124]); she interprets Heraclitus’s notion of Fire
(“that pervasive quasi-material that allows all the elements to enter
into quantitative ratio-relations with each other” [44]); and she delves
into the etymological details of Heraclitus’s Greek in a revealing and
delightful way that is free of pedantic stodginess.
Ratios and Fire are both ways of putting things into relation with
one another. Relation “bonds two terms without merging them” (38),
and this is the key to understanding Heraclitus’s notion of the Logos.
Brann’s claim is a radical one, startling and yet compelling: she suggests that Heraclitus not only pondered what made “the multifarious
world one” (perhaps an inevitable question for a philosopher), but also
went on to posit that The Logos (as distinct from logos) was “all at
once the relater of all relations, beyond and within them, a maker of
the world-order and himself that order, a world governor, and also the
world—a doer, a sayer, and perhaps himself a listener” (42). Thus
Brann reveals the extreme possibilities of a Heraclitean “world-order,”
an order that is coherent and unified—a (contentiously) harmonious
and beautiful order—but also mysterious and enigmatic, for “non-
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sensory logoi govern the sensory world” (43). It is consequently an
order that demands a careful listening. But how do we listen to the
non-sensory? By developing the faculty that is capable of hearing
what Thinking itself has to say, both to us and about itself.
At this point Heraclitus sounds like something of a mystic. But
Brann’s book grounds Heraclitus’s thinking so firmly and compellingly in the context of musical ratio, chemistry, and physics that
the potential vagaries of mysticism are firmly left behind (“I don’t
think so ultimately uncompromising a philosophical physics ever
again comes on the scene” [89]). More importantly, Brann shows us
how Heraclitus’s thought transcends such distinctions as “mystic/rationalist” or “poet/philosopher” by taking us behind the screen of such
divisions. “One : Everything” [21] is the ultimate expression of the
Heraclitean philosophy. Heraclitus speaks to us from a time before
the distinctions between philosophy, science, and religion had been
so starkly delineated. For Heraclitus, investigating the cosmos was
the work of an entire human being, and understanding it required an
understanding of how “One : Everything” makes sense. This understanding requires us to grasp the relationship between the human and
divine as well as between man and nature. Thus Brann’s book ranges
through discussions of painting, sculpture, music, mathematics, theology, poetry, philosophy, and physics to reveal the prismatic aspect
of Heraclitus’s thought. It is not mysticism, but a way of thinking that
precedes the division between mysticism and rationalism. It is not science, but a mode of inquiry that antedates the schism between science
and philosophy.
Fire
Not surprisingly, in Brann’s account Fire is the key to the Heraclitean
system. What is surprising is how coherent a picture of the cosmos
Brann reveals behind the enigmatic darkness of Heraclitus’s fragments. Aristotle may have called him, “the obscure one,” but for
Brann the Heraclitean view is unified and eminently comprehensible
because it is rational. And because it is rational, it is measurable. The
measurability of everything is at the heart of Brann’s radical interpretation of Heraclitean unity, and it is Fire which makes this possible:
“Fire enables the Logos to inform the cosmos with the most determinate relationality thinkable, that expressed in number-ratios” (63). For
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a long-time reader of Heraclitus, this claim hits like a stunning revelation. Suddenly the possibility of a coherent Heraclitean system
emerging from those “darkly oracular sayings” (68)—sayings that
Socrates claimed it would require a Delian diver to understand6—
seems not only possible, but positively inevitable. Through her discussion of ratio and measure Brann carries us down to the bottom of
Heraclitus’s dark sea, and she reveals the hidden treasures buried
there.
Brann’s account of the Heraclitean notion of fire has something
in common with the following lines from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia:
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within
us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too
little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres,
and to burn like Sardanapalus, but the wisedom of funerall Laws found the folly of prodigall blazes, and reduced
undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein
few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a
mourner, and an Urne.7
Browne would have agreed with Brann’s description of fire’s double
nature “as being one element among elements and as acting like a
principle through them all” (69). Again we see in “One : Everything”
a union of poetic imagery and suggestiveness with a deep philosophic
insight into the nature and workings of the cosmos.
Other revelatory (and controversial) statements in Brann’s book
include the claims that he is the first philosopher in the West as well
as the first physicist (that is, the first to give an account of the conservation of matter); that he is the “discoverer of transcendence” (99);
that scholars have deformed a central aspect of Heraclitus’s thought
be replacing the ratio aspect of his thinking with various forms of the
copula “is,” thereby misunderstanding the importance of relation to
the Logos; and that he is not the infamous and perplexing philosopher
of flux many of us have long considered him to be—especially those
of us who formed an early impression of Heraclitus from our encounters with Nietzsche.
Tension vs. Flux
Brann’s argument that Heraclitus is not a relativist is easy enough to
accept. That he is also not the enigmatic philosopher of flux, however,
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is a more disconcerting, but equally well-supported thesis of Brann’s
book.
Brann does not resolve all of Heraclitus’s “paradoxes and contradictions” (68), nor would she care to; for paradoxes are “the expressions precisely adequate to his world-order” (86). Moreover,
“Heraclitus speaks paradoxically because that is how the world is”
(88). Paradox is a form of verbal and logical tension—and tension,
for Heraclitus, is the source of harmony. Tension is “Heraclitus’s most
remarkable physical notion” (78), and this notion replaces the more
familiar notion of Heraclitus’s flux. It is tension that makes the fundamental ratio “One : Everything” cohere. Brann explores the idea of
this unifying tension through discussions of war and wrestling, music
and harmony, punning, paradox, and metaphor.
In a consideration of the way in which Heraclitus uses metaphor
(helpfully set out in contrast to the way Homer uses metaphor), Brann
observes that “Heraclitean aphorisms are meant to be unsettling”
(71)—but not therefore unintelligible. Unlike Homer’s often consolatory or comforting metaphors, Heraclitus employs metaphors that
highlight the “antagonistic opposition” (72) of his terms. Understanding how Heraclitus’s metaphors express this antagonistic opposition
helps us to comprehend the role that tension-dependent harmony plays
in the overall ratio-based ordering of the cosmos. (The famous image
of stringing the bow and the lyre in D-K 51is a perfect example of
this sort of metaphor.)
The cosmic ordering based on the ratio “One : Everything” is the
touchstone to which Brann’s book constantly returns. However far her
reasoning or examples wander, she always comes back to this fundamental way of understanding how tension holds the Heraclitean account of the cosmos together, and how the “pervasive mutuality of
force is the principle of oneness—of coexistence in a force-community” (79).
“The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.”8
And at times the book does wander far, but it is a wonder-full wandering. Brann’s book, divided into five sections of unequal lengths,
considers the figure of Heraclitus, the history of logos, Heraclitus’s
unique Logos, the afterlife of the Logos, and the Soul of Heraclitus.
Along the way, and especially in the “afterlife” section, there are brief
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but fruitfully provocative accounts of Euclid, Homer, John the Evangelist, Nicholas of Cusa, Descartes, Galileo, Newton (she calls Newton’s Third Law “the dynamic formulation of Heraclitus’s world”
[79]), wrestling, war, Hegel, Baudelaire, Heidegger, the coining of
money, logic, Force, matter, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Zoroaster, Plotinus, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, co-author of The Federalist
James Madison.
Brann’s claim that Madison’s theory of faction (developed in The
Federalist, No. 10) is Heraclitean and that therefore “the Founders’
classical liberalism . . . honors the Heracliteanism of the world” (121)
may be the most delightfully audacious moment in the book. Yet she
presents her case with such calmly reasoned grace that even her most
spectacular suggestions seem obvious. It had never occurred to me,
before reading Brann’s book, that there was such a thing as “the Heracliteanism of the world,” and certainly not that it found expression
in the Founding Fathers’ notion of liberalism. But her argument presents us with convincing reasons for both hypotheses.
In the “afterlife” chapter, Brann considers not so much the disciples of Heraclitus as those figures who have contributed to the ongoing development of the Heraclitean Logos, figures like Plato, Aristotle,
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Madison. I would like to briefly consider another such figure here—an author who may never have read a word
of Heraclitus and yet whose work seems to express in twentieth-century terms the “Heracliteanism of the world” that Brann reveals in the
works of earlier writers and thinkers.
The connection with Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was suggested to me by a footnote in which Brann says that Heraclitus was
one who “declined to travel—except within himself” (151). I was reminded of a passage from Pessoa’s mysterious prose work The Book
of Disquiet. Pessoa refers to himself as a “nomad in my self-awareness”9 and exhorts his reader to be “the Columbus of your soul.”10
And he also wrote of the Logos: “there are also, in prose, gestural
subtleties carried out by great actor, the Word, which rhythmically
transforms into its bodily substance the impalpable mystery of the universe.”11 Pessoa’s “great actor” is a descendant of Heraclitus’s Logos,
performing the Heraclitean act of transforming “impalpable mystery”
into “bodily substance.” Even the fundamental ratio “One : Everything” finds expression in Pessoa’s writing:
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And so, in order to feel oneself being purely Oneself, each
must be in a relationship with all–absolutely all–other beings, and with each in the most profound relationship possible. Now, the most profound relationship possible is that
of identity. Therefore, in order to feel oneself being purely
Oneself, each must feel itself being all the others, absolutely consubstantiated with all the others.12
Reading this passage in light of Brann’s emphasis on relationality as
the key to understanding Heraclitus’s view of the cosmos one is reminded of D-K 10: “Out of everything one and out of one everything”
(56).
One and/or Many
One of the most intriguing parts of Brann’s book is her account of the
relationship between Parmenides and Heraclitus—a relationship that
will be characterized by tension, and thus ultimately be more Heraclitean in its nature than Parmenidean. These thinkers are usually understood as presenting us with a clear choice: being or becoming.
Brann’s reading is more nuanced, and if her book deprives us of the
romantic notion of Heraclitus as the wild philosopher of chaos and
flux and the bête noire of formalists, systematizers and the methodologically hidebound (“the picture of Heraclitus as the philosopher of
ultimate instability, of radical mutability, is just ludicrous” [100)]),
then she gives us something much richer in return.
By rejecting the picture of Heraclitus as “a fluxist all the way
down” (102) and as a “philosophical whirling dervish” (104), Brann
allows his thinking to enter into provocative relation with that of Parmenides. Brann places Heraclitus and Parmenides “into a time-and
space-indifferent dialectic” (102). While Heraclitus will appeal to
those who “are gripped by the strife-locked unity of the physical cosmos” (102) his view is nevertheless no longer presented as an either/or
alternative to Parmenidean being. Instead Brann poses for us what
may well constitute the most interesting question of Western philosophy: What is the relation between Logos and Being? Tracing the
forms that this question has taken in epistemology, metaphysics,
ethics, and aesthetics over the past 2,500 years would be a massive
undertaking, but Brann opens the question up for us in a few pages,
starting with the provocative claim that “Being is largely mute sub-
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stance, Logos mostly talkative relationality” (103). Brann finds common ground for Heraclitus and Parmenides in the claim that “they
both see the same, a Whole, an All, a One, and search out its nature”
(104). The nature of this “One” is different for each of them, but the
fact that they are both intent on searching out the nature of what is
and how it is unites them in a common philosophic endeavor.
Whether what is is Being itself or the tension-unifying Logos
(“the Logos works in self-opposing ways” [106]) is a millennia-old
philosophical question. By analyzing brief passages from the two writers and focusing on their uses of pan, “all,” and panta, “everything,”
Brann reintroduces her reader to the timeless immediacy of philosophical investigation.
Soul
Throughout her book, Brann reveals Heraclitus as psychologist,
philosopher, poet, proto-chemist, and physicist (“the first modern scientist” [46]). In the unity of these various modes of inquiry the fundamental ratio of the Logos, “One : Everything,” is embodied in his
own work. Brann constantly revisits Heraclitus from the different perspectives that characterize his work: the human side, the cosmic side,
and the divine overview that unifies the immanent and transcendent
aspects of the first two perspectives.
The final chapter of The Logos of Heraclitus sums up, steps back,
and takes a swing at what, along with Logos and Being, may be the
most perplexing of Western philosophic categories—that of Soul.
Brann’s distinction between logos—what, at the human level, is
“the more or less thoughtful utterance of our mind and its mindfulness”—and Logos—“which is divine but perhaps not a nameable
deity” and which “governs and pilots the cosmos” (123)—reminds
us that in terms of the ordered relations that constitute and govern
the cosmos it is the Logos “as cosmic fire” that makes sense of the
“One : Everything” relation, even when it comes to understanding
the relation between the human and the divine. Even here some form
of rigorous measurement is possible.
At the end of her book, Brann returns to her thesis that “Logos is
both nature and its language, and it expresses itself in measures”
(125). All ratios are forms of measurement, and measurement is an
essentially scientific way of approaching the cosmos. She raises the
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question that has been looming since we first heard of Heraclitus’s
enigmatic hearing: “how does Heraclitus himself come to know and
understand this language?” (126). In exploring this question, Brann
suggests an answer to the question, “What is the soul?” Her answer
begins with D-K 101: “I searched myself.” Heraclitus’s searching
ranges across the dual realms that Stevens referred to as “the world
about us” and “the world within us,” because for Heraclitus there is
no understanding that does not encompass and unify these worlds.
There can be no distinction between outer and inner; harmony requires
tension, but not chaos; unity requires conflict, but not dissolution.
“Heraclitus walks the ways of his soul, which are boundless,” and
Brann is our guide on this exploration of “the never-ending ways of
an enormously capacious inner place” (126). She offers us a conception of the soul as “a mirror of the cosmos”; yet the journey she leads
us through remains mathematical and grounded in measurement (“this
world soul is a concatenation of compounded ratios” [127]), so that it
avoids the abyss of vague mysticism. There is no flabbiness in this
inner journey. If Heraclitus is to remain a mystical thinker he will have
to do so on the most rigorous of terms, and only by unifying mysticism
with a scientific account of the cosmos—another unifying tension in
Heraclitus’s thought.
Personal Knowing
Heraclitus’s accomplishment—the most radical form of fulfilling the
Delphic injunction to “know thyself”—is open to anyone. Unlike Parmenides, he was not specially chosen to be a unique human passenger
in a god’s chariot. Heraclitus’s conveyance is not a magic carpet; it is
rigorous introspection aimed both at self-knowledge as a form of cosmic awareness and at cosmic understanding as a form of self-knowing.
This is serious thoughtfulness, engaged, sustained, and maintained.
Thoughtfulness by means of the Logos is available to anyone, as Heraclitus says in D-K 113: “Common to everyone is thinking.” Brann
points out the pun on xynon, “common,” and xyn nooi, “with mind,”
that appears in several of Heraclitus’s fragments (129-30). In D-K
107, he excludes only those with “barbarian souls” from participation
in this common cognition, for they are “the speechless souls of those
who are incapable of hearing and agreeing with the Logos and of employing logoi, rational expressions” (76).
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Brann’s investigation of Heraclitus is witty, personal, insightful,
and scholarly; but she remains on guard against the pitfalls of traditional academic scholarship. She is right to interpret D-K 40 as saying
that “heaps of learning lead to knowing everything and nothing. It
drowns out the Logos” (27). And she is also right to approach Heraclitus as she does: as a fellow eavesdropper and co-conspirator in his
investigations rather than as a stuffy academic parading out an impressive knowledge of Greek grammar and the Western tradition to
show us how much she has read. Brann’s book does not drown out
the Logos; it strives to clear a space for its greater resonances. Her
take on Heraclitus is a personal one, and therefore an intimate and revealing one. The Logos of Heraclitus shows us by example how to be
“keenly and extensively observant” (27), and leaves us, as inspired
and excited readers, to determine for ourselves the quality and nature
of what we see and what we hear.
There is an overarching perspective from which “human beings
have the life of divinity within them” (136). “Gods may always have
some touch of mortality in their nature and humans may become immortal in time” (82). This is the most inclusive perspective that Brann
reveals to the reader, a perspective from which the paradox of fathoming man’s relation to the divine and the relation of divinity to the
human are equally puzzling, and equally necessary to our own fullest
self-understanding. Attaining this perspective is the task of the Heraclitean philosopher, the person determined to understand how “everything is one.” But Brann does not rest content with mere understanding.
The final fragment to which she turns her attention completes the
bridge between saying (a form of the logos) and doing (a form of
being). “What does it mean to do true things?” she asks (138). This is
the note on which Brann chooses to end her book, the note that completes the hearing of Heraclitus, who learned how to listen to the cosmos. But he learned to listen in order to do what? That question
remains to be taken up by the reader.
NOTES
1. The fragments of Heraclitus’s text, which survive mostly in the form of
quotations in the works of later authors, were compiled and numbered in Die
Fragmente der Vorskratiker, translated by Hermann Diels, edited by Walter
Kranz, Vol. I (Berlin: Weidman, 1903; reprint of 6th ed., Munich: Weidman,
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1992). This book has become the standard text for citing the fragments, which
are usually referred to by “D-K number”; for instance, the passage cited here
is known as D-K 50.
2. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1942), 169.
3. Ibid., 36.
4. This is Brann’s translation of D-K 55.
5. Brann’s translation of D-K 8.
6. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. Robert Drew
Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925; reprint with an introduction by Herbert Strainge Long, 1972), II.22.
7. Thomas Browne, Hydrotaphia, Urne-Buriall; or, A Brief Discourse on
the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk (London: Henry Brome, 1658),
80-81.
8. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (New York:
Penguin, 2001), 112.
9. Pessoa, Disquiet, 101.
10. Ibid., 400.
11. Ibid., 198.
12. Fernando Pessoa, Always Astonished, translated by Edwin Honig (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 30.
�
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Pastille, William
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Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Carey, James
Kalkavage, Peter
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 54, Number 1 (Fall 2012)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
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�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Contents
Essays & Lectures
The Dispassionate Study of the Passions ..............................1
Eva Brann
On Biblical Style .................................................................17
Tod Linafelt
What is the Surface Area of a Hedgehog?...........................45
Barry Mazur
Some Reflections on Darwin and C. S. Peirce ....................87
Curtis Wilson and Chaninah Maschler
Poem
The Laws of Physics .........................................................124
Marlene Benjamin
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
1
The Dispassionate Study
of the Passions
Eva Brann
Plato’s dialogue Gorgias ends with a long speech culminating
in a rousing cry by an aroused Socrates. He is speaking to
Gorgias’s student Callicles about his swaggering opinionatedness and their common uneducatedness. The words he uses
are neanieusthai, ‟to act like a youth,” to behave like a kid,
and apaideusia, ‟lack of teaching,” ignorance. And then he
concludes with a condemnation of Callicles’s whole ‟way of
life”—tropos tou biou—‟to which you summon me, believing in it”—hōi su pisteuōn eme parakaleis. esti gar oudenos
axios, ō Kallikleis—‟For it is worth nothing, Callicles!” My
fine 1922 edition of the Gorgias by the classicist Otto Apelt
rightly translates the address O Kallikleis, jingling in the Gorgian manner with parakaleis, as ‟My Callicles,” for there is
a curious, straining intimacy in Socrates’s peroration.1 The
rest is silence. It is a favorite question of mine to ask our
freshmen at St. John’s College, who all read this dialogue,
what happened that night at home, when Callicles was, perhaps, by himself.
Now some of you may have heard of the late Seth Bemardete, a student of Leo Strauss and a brilliant classicist at
New York University. In our youth we traveled together, and
Seth once imparted to me the following wild conjecture.
‟Plato,” it was said, was a nickname given to him because
of his broad shoulders.2 His real name was Aristocles: Callicles, Aristocles—he of noble fame, he of good fame; kalos
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was
presented to the graduate students of the School of Philosophy at the
Catholic University of America on March 30, 2012.
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k’agathos was the Greek way of denominating what Chaucer
calls ‟a verray parfit gentil knicht,” a good and noble knight,
a perfect gentleman.3 So Plato represents himself in this dialogue as a noble yet rudely unregenerate youth in his moment
before conversion, a conversion accomplished by a usually
imperturbable Socrates impassioned to speak, for once, extendedly and hotly.
Do I believe this clever combination of clues? Not really.
Plato was, after all, of good family and a writer of tragedies
before Socrates captivated him, and the swaggering surly
youth Callicles has little of the high-bred, suave poet about
him, a poet who was, moreover, probably already philosophically involved when he met Socrates.4
Nonetheless, this anecdote about a conjecture seems to
me thought-provoking. Here, for once, Plato permits us to
see the spectacle of rational Socrates in a passion, un-ironic,
touched to the quick—surely this is not a mere mean anger
at being dissed by a Gorgiastic know-it-all.
Many of you are already teachers, though perhaps young
in comparison to Plato (b. 427 B.C.E.) when he wrote the
Gorgias (c. 387 B.C.E.). He was probably forty, and his
Socrates (b. 470) was probably about the same age at the dramatic date of this dialogue (shortly after 429, the year of Pericles’s death, which is mentioned as a recent event in 503c).
You will have experienced the unbalancing sense that the
stakes are high and souls are to be pierced and that passion,
or an exhibition of it, is in order. It is, to be sure, a wonderful
question about the nature of passion whether deliberate
demonstrativeness or disciplined reticence, either in the
speaker or the listener, does more to nourish it or to dampen
it, and how spontaneity and artfulness play into the effect.
But we do know that Aristotle believed Socrates’s display in
the Gorgias was effective. He tells of a Corinthian farmer
who was inspired by his reading of the dialogue to leave his
vineyard to its own devices, to join the Platonic circle, and
henceforth to make his soul the ‟seedbed,” that is, the seminar, of Plato’s philosophy.5
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
The Gorgias is, therefore, a good reference for beginning
to talk about the affects as an object of study. Not merely because it documents, so to speak, that people concerned with
the soul have in fact plenty of temperament—be it sober
Socrates or meek Jesus (e.g., Matt. 21:12, Jesus wreaking
havoc in the temple)—and that they don’t leave their affect
at the entrance to their inquiries or preachings. I don’t, of
course, mean the little negative furies that Socrates calls
‟eristic,” the eruptions of the contentious desire to win arguments, but I’m thinking of a large positive passion.
So this is where I zero in on my particular problem for
this talk. I have read my way through a tiny fraction of the
huge mass of contemporary writing on the emotions. I’ve
come away with the cumulative—documentable—impression that there is a thoroughgoing misapprehension about a
putative pagan rationalism and a supposed Western tradition
for which it is held responsible and which breaks out with insidious virulence in the Enlightenment. This view owes
something, I suppose, to Nietzsche’s brilliantly skewed portrait of the ‟despotic logician,” Socrates, the monster with
the ‟one, great Cyclopean eye,” in whom “the lovely madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed.”6 The attribution of
monocular Cyclopeanism—i.e., vision without depth, carrying with it the charge of despotic sobriety—implies thought
unravished by beauty. All this imputed to a man who thought
that our soul contained a world that we could recover by
going within,7 and believed that true poetry requires a
Dionysiac frenzy inspired by the Muses, one cognate in kind
to the philosophical longing for beauty!8 All this ascribed to
a man who, attending a drinking party, bathed for once and
wearing shoes, slyly paints a verbal picture of Eros that is in
fact a self-portrait—Socrates looking at himself from a distance and recognizing the unwashed and unshod god!9
So much for the picture of Socrates the rationalist. And
something similar holds for Aristotle the intellectualist. His
great work, the founding book of institutionalizable philosophy (since it pre-sets the problems to be solved in Meta-
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physics III), begins with an appetite, a root passion, which,
in the form of the desire to know, is humanly universal and
culminates in a passionate portrait of the ultimate object of
appetition. This ultimate object is a divinity that attracts,
without returning, love—an object that satisfies, that fulfills,
by its mere actuality, by its unadulterated energeia (Metaphysics II; XII.7), as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94:
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
unmoved . . .
except that the pure energeia of the divinity is the very opposite of the practically complete inertia of those unaffectable
human objects of attraction, these beautiful but hyletic lumps
of mere resistance that the speaker of the poem is excoriating.
Would it be too much to claim that this is the difference
between the philosophical Greeks and the God-regarding Hebrews, more significant than Homer’s anthropomorphic polytheism, which is in any case more characteristic of the poets
and the people than of the philosophers? I mean the lack of
reciprocity between adoring human and worshipped divinity:
The Socratic forms are great powers (Sophist 247e), but even
when they come on the comic stage in visible shape—which
they do in Aristophanes’s Clouds where they appear as
wordily nebulous beings, as shaped mists—they don’t do a
thing for their summoning worshipper, Socrates. In fact they
abandon him to possible suffocation in his thinkaterion—the
play leaves this uncomic outcome open—and exit satisfied
with their ‟temperate” performance (Clouds 269, 1509). The
Aristotelian divinity, Nous, is similarly unresponsive, an object of uninvolved attraction. The God of the Jews, on the
other hand, is beneficently or banefully involved with his
people, and when a certain Jewish sect grows into a great religion, He becomes caring outreach itself, namely, Love (e.g.,
Exodus 20:1-6, I John 4:8, 16).
Why am I dwelling first on the pagans and on the Chris-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
tians in talking to you about the study of the passions, when
the contemporary writers on the emotions simply drown out
these earlier voices by their volume? It’s not that I have much
faith in the explanatory power of chronology or in those longitudinal studies by which a genetic history is attributed to
ideas, and which tend to develop more arcane information
than illuminating depth. I can think of a half-dozen reasons
for my distrust, which there is no time to set out at the
podium, though we might talk about the implied historicism
of such studies in the next few days. Moreover, it is probably
less necessary at a Catholic university than at any other to try
to induce respect for the tradition. There is, however, a particular way in which I think that emotion studies should begin
with, or pick up at some point, the great ancient and medieval
works—of the latter, above all, Thomas’s ‟Treatise on the
Passions,” which he placed in the very center of the Summa
Theologiae, for this monk knew—God knows how—everything about human passion.
I think these pre-modern works should be studied for their
shock value, for the news they contain for us. Such a reading,
a reading that places them not in the bygone superseded past
but in a recalcitrantly unfashionable present, requires a difficult and never quite achievable art, one that graduate students
should certainly be eager to acquire: first, the art of summing
up, with some credibility, what a philosopher is really and at
bottom about (I don’t mean ‟all about,” a hand-waving locution, but the compact gist of his intention); and second, the
art of discerning how the particular part on which you mean
to focus is, or fails to be, properly derivative from that central
intention. Then, opposing gist to gist and consequence to consequence, there will emerge a coherent and discussable
schema both of the general notions that preoccupy the
denizens of modernity willy-nilly and of the sophisticated
twists that studious scholars and trendy intellectual elites
have given them. Approached in this way, emotion studies
seem to me as necessary to our self-understanding as any subject can be—necessary to us as human beings with a contem-
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porary affectivity.
So now let me give you some, perhaps vulnerably sweeping, observations about more recent emotional studies, particularly in English-speaking lands. The groundbreaking
works for us were English; I will name Errol Bedford (1956)10
and Anthony Kenny (1963).11 But the American father of this
field is Robert Solomon with his book The Passions (1976).12
The Solomonic beginning and its consequences are full
of oddities. (I am avoiding the harsher term ‟self-contradictions.”) The thesis of the book is ‟to return the passions to
the central and defining role,” snatched from them by
Socrates, and ‟to limit the pretensions of ‘objectivity’ and
self-demeaning reason that have exclusively ruled Western
philosophy, religion, and science” since his days.13
Well, I guess we’ve read different works of Western philosophy. But now comes a surprise. How will this salvation
from two and a half millennia of despotic rationalism be
achieved? We must recognize that ‟an emotion is a judgment.”14 Of course, this dictum runs into difficulties concerning the meaning of non-rational judgments. Indeed, Solomon
eventually accepted that his claim is actually a cognitive theory. As such, he says rightly, it has ‟become the touch-stone
of all philosophical theorizing about emotions.” He could, in
any case, hardly escape this cognitivist denomination, since
it turns out that we become responsible for our emotions by
adopting this very theory of cognitive emotion. For as the
theory works its way into our unconscious volitions, it will
become true, and our emotions will indeed be as much in our
control as our judgments;15 so control is what it’s—after all—
about.
The Stoics are the moderns among the ancients. Their
cognitive theories, the first truly representational theories, are
more future-fraught than any others in antiquity that I know
of; they dominate modernity until Heidegger’s Being and
Time. The Stoics are hard to study, because the deepest of
them, belonging to the so-called Early Stoa, exist only in
fragments. But we have an extended text on Stoic passion
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
theory, the third and fourth books Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. Some of you, who have read the work, will recognize
that the modern dictum ‟an emotion is a judgment” is pure
Neostoicism. Neostoicism has, in fact, dominated modern
emotion studies. One major work in this vein is Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
(2001).16
But how strange! The Stoics meant to reduce emotions
to mistakes, to diseases, to pathologies, of judgment. An emotion is a false appraisal, a perturbed opinion about what matters: an ‟upheaval of thought.” It is a deep and complex
theory underwritten by the Stoics’ fearless physicalism, their
notion of a material substratum, the pneuma, on whose
ground the psychic capacities can morph into one another.
But there is no question that, taken summarily, rationality
trumps affect. How odd, then, that modem theories so largely
save the emotions from rationalism by rationalizing them.
And I’ll list associated oddities.
First is the pervasive fear for the emotions, the sense that
we moderns have suppressed and demeaned them, that they
need saving. What teacher of the young (as scholars by and
large are) or observers of the world (as some of them may
be) could possibly think that that was what was troubling the
nations, cities, neighborhoods!
Second is a curtailed sense of thought in the West. I think
I’ve given some prime examples of the interpenetration of
thought and affect, even of the primacy of appetition in the
human soul in antiquity. When the ancients fight the passions
it is because they are so alive, experientially alive, to the
meaning of the word pathos, ‟suffering,” and the effect of its
licensed reign, its invited tyranny. It is really, I think, a modern idea of emotion that is at work here, among our contemporaries, one which pits its softness against hard reason.
Inherited Enlightenment terminology indeed conveys this
sense that our passions are attenuated, all but quelled by reason. The pivotal figure here is Hume. In his Treatise of
Human Nature, the term ‟passion” begins to be displaced by
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‟emotion.” He uses both, mostly interchangeably. But emotion is the word of the future. Solomon’s book is entitled The
Passions, but the key word inside is ‟emotions.” Your own
conference called for papers on ‟Emotion.”
‟Emotion” derives from e-movere, Latin for ‟to move
out.” The significance of this substitution of emotion for passion is powerful. Ancient pathos, passion, was an affect emanating from an object; the object elicited the responsive
affect, from the outside in. Modern emotion comes from inside out; it emphasizes expression; subject prevails over object. It is the Romantic worm eating its way out of the
Enlightened apple.
At the same time, the non-affective, the rational part of
the subject becomes mere reason. Hume, famously, says:
‟Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey
them.”17 He can say that because Humean and enlightened
reason is not deeply affective, not driven by love, and so its
relation to emotion may indeed be one of subservience, standoff, or finally, enmity. I need hardly add that with this transformation of the appetitive, longing, loving, intellect into
manipulative, instrumental, willful rationality, philosophy
loses its proper meaning and becomes a profession. My brush
here is broad, but, I think, it has some good overlap with the
case. So my second oddity is the severely foreshortened view
of the capabilities of passionate thought.
Now a third curious notion, the oddest one of all: the unreflective launching of an enterprise which is, on the face of
it, like embarking on a destroyer with the idea of going swimming. The vessel of war displaces, cleaves, churns up the element, but, absent a shipwreck, the sailor stays dry. So the
student of emotion banishes perturbations, analyzes wholes,
whips up terminology, and, unless melancholy seizes him,
sails high and dry over the billowing depths of feeling, with
much solid bulkhead keeping him from immersion in the element to be apprehended. This not very elegant simile is just
a way of expressing my surprise at the fact that emotion stud-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
ies tend to precipitate themselves into a dispassionate subject
without much thought about how such a subject can come to
be—about how emotion can be subjected to thought without
being denatured in the process.
Here, incidentally, lies, it seems to me, the best reason
why cognitive scientists, and those philosophers who like to
be on solid ground, are by and large physicalists and might
well regard the Stoics as their avatars.18 What matter-and-itsmotions has in its favor in emotion studies is that in this spatial form the different motions of the mind appear not to
occlude each other; spatio-temporal events, laid our in extension and sequence, have patency. However, since cognitive
brain studies, including the emotion research, depend on prior
conceptualization and introspective protocols, it is hard to
think of them as independent of a philosophical phenomenology.
Therefore, in the unavoidable preparatory philosophical
exploration, the perplexity of thinking about feeling remains
a vexing one, the more so since it appears to me to be a variant of the greatest quandary, now and always: How is thinking about any form of our consciousness even conceivable?
How is it—or is it, indeed—that thought about awareness
does not collapse into a union, as does ‟thinking of thinking,”
the noēsis noēseōs of the Nous?19 How can we know that
thought about itself or its fellow internalities does not transform its object out of its true being?
Just this latter eventuality makes emotion studies problematic. Study does have its own affect, one of the most interesting in the list of feelings, namely, interest itself. The
word—from interesse, ‟to be in the midst of”—signifies what
student parlance calls ‟being into it.”20
To study is to bring to bear received learning and native
analytic and combinatory capacities on a determinate object.
If study is of a high quality, it is preceded and accompanied
by its opposite, leisure—free time for meditating or musing,
during which original questions rise up and take shape. But
the business itself focuses on problems such as Aristotle first
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set for himself and left for his successors. Nowadays it’s the
dissertation advisor’s job. Now all the questions become formulated as demands for reasoning, and under reasoning all
things turn to reason—as under studious production all thinking turns to footnoted paper-writing.
It is indeed curious that this fact is not more of a perplexity to students of the emotions. Yet on second thought, it is
perhaps not so surprising that emotion studies seem so desiccated—perhaps they are not really more so than serious
scholarship ever must be. Robert Browning has his lovingly
respectful students sing at the “Grammarian’s Funeral”:
Learned we found him.
Yea, but we found him bald, too, eyes like lead,
Accents uncertain:
‟Time to taste life,” another would have said,
‟Up with the curtain!”
This man said rather, ‟Actual life comes next?
Patience a moment!
Grant I have mastered learning’s crabbed text,
Still there’s the comment.”
Here is the picture of interest raised to the pitch of passion. There is a sort of pure, dry, professional love (Browning’s grammarian’s passion was for Greek syntax, the
particles in particular) that can capture the loving admiration
of students. I know this from my own student days. But I
doubt that it suits philosophy, and, in particular, philosophizing about the emotions. Here another poem expresses our
condition more aptly: Wordsworth’s ‟The Tables Turned.” It
begins:
Up! up! my Friend and quit your books;
and this is its seventh verse:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
To be sure, there are now less intrusive ways of getting
inside Nature. Yet the conceptualizing of feeling will ever
and always be an abstraction in the basic sense—a removal,
a drawing away, from life. And in respect to the affects, this
sort of abstraction is doubly dubious. For in ordinary abstraction, the concept incarnate in concrete things is, by a specifically human cognitive operation, separated off from them.
But it is simply a premature, a prejudicial notion that the affects ‟stand under” (to use Kantian diction) abstractable concepts in the same way as do things.
It might follow that to view as problematic the dispassionate, studious study of the affects—be they impositions
from without or stirrings from within—is a sine qua non for
beginning rightly. I think it does follow.
There are early bonuses. I’ll give you in turn a suspicion,
a conjecture, and a figure. The suspicion is that we really are
partite beings, so that our affective and our thinking capacities are terminally distinct, structurally and dynamically heterogeneous. The conjecture is that it is this very disjunction
in their being which makes possible their conjunction in
thought and action, their effective complementarity. Here I’ve
written a sentence that I don’t even quite understand as I’m
reading it to you, and yet I have some faith in it. Finally, my
figure is that our affective capacities lie deeper in our nature
than our reflective powers.
To be sure, neuroscientists also say that certain brain
structures expressly subserving the emotions are located
deeper within the brain and appeared early in evolutionary
history, but that is not dispositive: What is biologically primitive might, after all, not be humanly primary. What I mean,
rather, is that affectivity has a certain abysmal, incomprehensible character that makes it feel—I don’t know how else to
put it—submersed; affects touch us (‟to feel” is related to the
Latin palpare, to pat) in intimate, that is, ‟innermost” regions,
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while articulable thought-activity intends, ‟stretches toward,”
emerges, towards comprehension of objects. We might be
constitutionally bipolar, extended between emotional depth
and thoughtful height. Perhaps an original question might be
formulated from this figure. It is something we could discuss
later, if you like.
Wordsworth’s lines imply that the murderous dissection
is performed on a lovely, living object. I must tell you that
emotion studies sometimes—too often—read as if they were
carried out on a latex-injected corpse that suffers every cut
with supine springiness. This is, as I’ve tried to show, a partly
inevitable result of making affectivity a ‟subject,” a thing
lying still under thought, literally ‟thrown under” its wheels.
Nonetheless, I feel tempted, by way of an ending, to say
how I think we can mitigate the dilemma, for if we can’t think
about our feelings, we’ll come apart. I’ll try to be practical.
First, then, you can’t study emotions at even the kindliest
advisor’s prompting. They are a subject that requires experiential urgency, some pressure for the relief of confusion. In
brief, you not only have to be a feeling being—as are we
all—but also a being enticingly oppressed by the enigma of
emotionality, the arcanum of affectivity. Some topics are well
approached in the brisk spirit of pleasurable problem-solving.
Not this one, I think.
Second, listen to what Socrates says in the Apology. He
does not say, as is often reported, that ‟the unexamined life
is not worth living.” What he really says is, I think, something
stronger: that such a life is ‟not livable for a human being,”
ou biōtos anthrōpōi (38a), is not a possible life, not a lived
life. That is what the -tos ending of biōtos signifies: ‟livable
or lived.” He means, I think, that experiences, passions
among them, that are not internally re-viewed, introspectively
re-lived, are in effect unlived—an unexamined experience is
not yours. A nice corroborating illustration comes in Thomas
Mann’s Magic Mountain, whose hero—meant to be a paradigm of simple humanity—engages in an introspective discipline he calls regieren, “ruling, regulating,”—in short,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
13
digesting, appropriating his affects and images.21 For as experimental emotion research requires protocols drawn from inner
experience, so conceptual emotion studies cannot do without
introspection. And unlike egocentric self-analysis, which is a
spontaneous sport, disciplined self-inspection is an art learned
by practice. So now I seem to have contravened everything I’ve
just said, which was that feeling is choked by thinking.
Here, then, is my last attempt at being practical about our
problem as students: how to keep feeling before ourselves while
bringing thought to bear on it. Or, more learnedly put: how to
turn what is, regarded in itself, the most subjective element of
our being, perhaps our very subjectivity itself, into an object. (I
will get myself into a word muddle here, unless I remind you
that before the eighteenth century “subject” meant just what we
now call “object”—for example, the being that arouses passion,
and we still use it in this way, as in “the subject to be studied.”
But by means of an inversion that is only partial, “subject” is
now used for the host of the emotion rather than for its object,
and “subjective” signifies a feature of emotional affect.)
Deliverance from the quandary of objectifying the essentially subjective seems to me to come from our great representational faculty, the imagination. Mental images are summoned
by feeling, arouse feeling and are, famously, affect-fraught, feeling-laden. There are those who deny that we have analogue images before an inner eye, but they are in retreat. The cognitive
scientist Stephen Kosslyn (the prime defender of mental analogue images),22 lay persons in general, and most students of
the imagination are convinced by their own inner experience of
imaginative vision and its affectivity—and what claim could
possibly override such personal, one might say, eye-witness
knowledge? (I might add here that the very latest neuroscience
seems, though incidentally, to clinch the argument for mental
visuality; mental images are directly machine-retrievable.23)
These affect-laden sights can indeed be held in mind, and
thinking can turn to them, play over them, study them. So, it
seems to me, emotion studies require an imaginative life. Here
is a practical consequence: Your profession requires you to read
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scholarly articles, but your mission needs you to read works of
fiction, particularly novels. For these not only stock your minds
with visualizable scenes of passion on which to dwell while you
think, they also school you in the adequately expressive diction
with which to articulate what you discovered. For, my fellow
students, if you speak of feeling either in flabbily pretentious or
technically formalizing diction, your papers will be worth—
well, next to nothing.
NOTES
1. Platons Dialog Gorgias, ed. Otto Apelt (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1922),
166. This is the very end of the dialogue, at 527e.
2. Debra Nails, The People of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 243.
3. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Middle-English edition, Prologue, l. 72 (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 5.
4. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book III, Chapter 5, “Plato,” trans. R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library 184 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925).
5. This anecdote is found in a fragment from Themistius in the so-called
Akademie-Ausgabe of Aristotle’s works edited for the Prussian Academy
of Sciences by Immanuel Bekker (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1870), 1484b. The
fragment is translated in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, Vol. 12
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 24. The story is translated in its original
context in Robert J. Penella, The Private Orations of Themistius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 122.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, section 14: “das eine große
Zyklopenauge des Sokrates . . . in dem nie der holde Wahnsinn künstlerischer Begeisterung geglüht hat.”
7. Plato, Meno, 81c.
8. Plato, Phaedrus, 245a, 249d.
9. Plato, Symposium 203d.
10. Errol Bedford, “Emotions,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
LVII (1956-57), 281-304.
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15
11. Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion, and Will (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1963).
12. Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life
(New York: Doubleday, 1976).
13. Solomon, The Passions, xiv.
14. Ibid., 185.
15. Ibid., 188ff.
16. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
17. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), 2.3.3. Emphasis
added.
18. See, for example, Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 275.
19. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII, Chapter 9.
20. See Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 4 vols. (New
York: Springer, 2008), Volume I, Chapter 10, “Interest–Excitement,” 185202.
21. In Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Chapter 6, “Of the City of
God and of Evil Deliverance.”
22. See, for example, Stephen Kosslyn, Image and Brain: The Resolution
of the Imagery Debate (Boston: MIT Press, 1996).
23. Francisco Pereira et al., “Generating text from functional brain images,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5 (August, 2011): Article 72.
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�ESSAYS & LECTURES
17
On Biblical Style
Tod Linafelt
The western tradition has not focused much attention on the
literary style of the Bible. Although it is true that the classical
literary critic Longinus (or “Pseudo-Longinus”), writing in
the first century C.E., makes a brief but famous reference to
the opening lines of Genesis in his treatise On the Sublime,1
the context for the reference is his treatment of “greatness of
thought” rather than any strictly literary qualities. More typical of pre-modern literary attitudes toward the Bible is Augustine’s judgment that biblical literature exhibits “the lowest
of linguistic style” (humillimum genus loquendi), and had
seemed to him, before his conversion, “unworthy of comparison with the majesty of Cicero.”2 Of course, readers have
not traditionally gone to the Bible in search of literary artfulness but rather for its religious value—that is, primarily as a
source for theology or for ethics. For Augustine, as for so
many religious readers after him, the Bible’s theological
truths and ethical teachings won out over its literary art or
lack thereof.3 But the fact is that the Bible—and my concern
here is more particularly with the Hebrew Bible or Christian
Old Testament—presents to the reader distinctly literary narrative and poetic works that both demand and reward expressly literary attention. Not only can we speak about the
literary style of the Bible, then, but we can and ought to speak
more precisely about its narrative style or poetic style, since
biblical narrative and biblical poetry each work with a very
different set of conventions and techniques—with different
Tod Linafelt is professor of biblical literature in the Theology Department
at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
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literary toolkits, we might say. Reading the Bible “as literature,” then, means more than just close reading, as it is often
understood. It also means becoming familiar with and attending to the distinctive and specific workings of narrative texts
and poetic texts. It seems clear that the ancient authors were
very much aware of the differing conventions and possibilities associated with narrative and with poetry, respectively,
and that their audiences would have responded differently to
these two primary literary forms. The better we understand
these forms, the better readers we will be.
I. ANCIENT HEBREW NARRATIVE
One must admit that Augustine was not entirely wrong. It is
hard to deny that from a certain angle the Bible is among the
most “unliterary” works of literature that we have. Working
as it does with a very limited vocabulary and often repeating
a word several times rather than resorting to synonyms, biblical Hebrew narrative exhibits a style that can seem simple,
even primitive, in comparison with the classics of world literature. (Things are very different with biblical poetry, as we
will see below.) Its syntax too seems rudimentary to modern
ears, linking clause after clause with a simple “and” (what
the linguists call parataxis) that reveals little about their syntactical relation, instead of using complex sentences with subordinate clauses (hypotaxis). Notice, for example, the dogged
repetition of “face” and the run-on syntax in the following
very literal translation of Genesis 32:21 (where Jacob is sending ahead of him a very large gift to his estranged brother
Esau, in hopes that Esau will be placated over Jacob’s earlier
stealing of his blessing): “For he said, ‘Let me cover his face
with the gift that goes before my face and after I look upon
his face perhaps he will lift up my face.’” Although modern
translations tend to obscure these features, even in translation
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one is bound to notice the paucity of metaphorical description, the brevity of dialogue, the lack of reference to the interior lives of characters, the limited use of figural
perspective, and not least the jarring concreteness with which
God is sometimes imagined to be involved in human history.
Many of these features are elements of biblical literature’s
economy of style, or essential terseness. We may compare,
for example, Homer’s use of sometimes startling metaphors
in describing a scene with the practice of biblical authors (all
of whom are essentially anonymous), who by and large avoid
such elaborate figurative language. Contrast this description
in the Iliad (16.480-85, Fagles’ translation) of the death of a
single, obscure Trojan charioteer:
Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone,
ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail,
hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea,
some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook4
with the blunt recounting in Genesis 34 of the massacre of
an entire city by two of Jacob’s sons: “Simeon and Levi,
Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and came against the city
unawares, and killed all the males. They killed Hamor and
his son Shechem with the sword” (Gen 34:25-6). This brief
passage is typical of the tendency in biblical narrative to
avoid description of any sort, metaphorical or otherwise. The
principle applies, with some exceptions of course, not only
to physical description—so that we are rarely told what either
objects or people look like—but also, and more importantly,
to the inner lives, thoughts, and motivations of characters in
the narratives. It would be a mistake, however, to take this
economy of style as an indicator of the Bible’s essential sim-
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plicity or primitiveness as a work of literature. In fact, it is
primarily this terseness that lends biblical narrative its distinctive complexity as literature.
In beginning to think about the workings of biblical
narrative one could do no better than to read Erich Auerbach’s
“Odysseus’ Scar,” the opening chapter of his book Mimesis,
in which he compares biblical narrative style with Homeric
epic style.5 Auerbach offers the first and best modern articulation of how the austere terseness of biblical narrative is not
just the absence of style but is in fact a distinctive and profound literary mode in its own right. Auerbach describes Homeric style as being “of the foreground,” whereas biblical
narratives are by contrast “fraught with background.” In other
words, in the Iliad and the Odyssey both objects and persons
tend to be fully described and illuminated, with essential attributes and aspects—from physical descriptions to the
thoughts and motivations of characters—there in the foreground for the reader to apprehend. But with biblical narrative such details are, for the most part, kept in the background
and are not directly available to the reader. So, as noted
above, we are very rarely given physical descriptions of either objects or people in the biblical narrative.6 What do
Adam and Eve look like? We do not know. Abraham? Sarah?
Moses? We do not know. As Auerbach puts it in his comments on Genesis 22, where God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, it is unthinkable that the servants, the
landscape, the implements of sacrifice should be described
or praised, as one might expect in Homer: “they are servingmen, ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet.”7 Occasionally a certain quality is ascribed to some
person or object: we are told that Eve perceives that the tree
of knowledge is “a delight to the eyes” (Gen. 3:6), and likewise we are told that Joseph is “handsome and good-looking”
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(Gen. 39:6). But as a rule such minimal notations are given
only when necessary to introduce some element that is important to the development of the plot. In the present cases
the attractiveness of the tree of knowledge leads, of course,
to the eating of its fruit (But what kind of fruit? We are not
told, the long tradition of the apple notwithstanding), and
Joseph’s attractiveness leads, in the next verse, to the sexual
aggression of Potiphar’s wife, and thus indirectly to Joseph’s
imprisonment. And even here one notices that we are not told
what it is that makes the fruit lovely to look at or what exactly
makes Joseph so beautiful.
Beyond a lack of physical description in the biblical stories, descriptions of personal qualities are also largely absent.
That is, characterization is rarely explicit, but rather must be
teased out of the narrative based on what characters do and
say (on action and dialogue, in other words, rather than on
direct evaluation by the narrator). The presentation of Esau
and Jacob in Genesis 25 illustrates this nicely. We are told
that Esau is “a man skilled in hunting, a man of the field” (v.
27), but the essential characterization of Esau as impulsive
and unreflective, indeed almost animal-like, is conveyed by
action and dialogue. Thus, coming in from the field to discover that his brother Jacob has prepared a stew, Esau inarticulately blurts out, “Let me eat some of that red, red stuff,
for I am famished” (v. 30). Robert Alter notes that Esau “cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for stew
(nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as
(literally) ‘this red red.’”8 And then, after agreeing to trade
his birthright to Jacob in exchange for some of the stew,
Esau’s impetuous, action-oriented character is suggested by
the “rapid-fire chain of verbs”: “and he ate and he drank and
he rose and he went off.”9 The character of Esau is starkly
contrasted in the story with the character of Jacob. If Esau is
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all instinct and action, Jacob is all calculation and deliberateness. The stew is prepared and waiting for the return of Esau
from the field, and one cannot fail to notice the businesslike
manner in which Jacob first suggests, and then demands formal confirmation of, the trading of the birthright: “And Jacob
said, ‘Sell now your birthright to me.’ And Esau said, ‘Look,
I am at the point of death, so why do I need a birthright?’ And
Jacob said, ‘Swear to me now’” (vv. 31-33). These initial
thumbnail characterizations of Esau and Jacob will be
fleshed-out further two chapters later, in Genesis 27, where
the blind Isaac is deceived into bestowing his blessing on
Jacob rather than the intended son Esau. The elaborate ruse
carried out by Jacob with the invaluable help of his mother
Rebekah, in which he impersonates Esau, confirms his calculating ambition even as it adds outright deceit to his resume
of character traits. Jacob will become a consummate trickster
as the story proceeds—though he will also, as an elderly man,
be tricked by his own sons (ch. 37)—but he is never actually
described by the narrator as tricky or deceptive, in the way
that Odysseus is described repeatedly in terms of his resourcefulness or Achilles in terms of his rage, for example,
but instead has his character revealed by what he says and
what he does. Esau, for his part, will play a lesser role in the
narrative that follows, although his reappearance in Chapter
33 is striking and in some ways unexpected, but both his inarticulateness and his utter lack of calculation are revealed by
his response upon hearing that Jacob has stolen his blessing:
“he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry and he
said to his father, ‘Bless me, me also, Father’” (v. 34); and
again, a few verses later, “‘Do you have but one blessing my
father? Bless me, me also, Father.’ And Esau lifted up his
voice and wept” (v. 38). By not directly revealing the qualities of character of the actors in the narrative, the narrator
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puts the onus of interpretation on the readers, who must work
out on their own—albeit with hints given—what they think
of these characters. To repeat, this is not the absence of characterization, but is a certain mode of characterization, and in
fact a fairly complex mode at that.
We may best see the complexity of this mode of characterization, and indeed of the Bible’s economy of style more
generally, when it comes to the inner lives of the characters.
Readers are often used to having access in one form or another to the thoughts, feeling, and motivations of the characters about whom they read. Again, Auerbach on Homer:
“With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even
passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they
speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it.
Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but
it seldom takes place wordlessly.”10 And so, for instance, the
tragic death of Hector at the hands of Achilles near the end
of the Iliad (in book 22) has devoted to it, in the Greek, fourteen lines of lament by Hector’s father, seven lines by his
mother, and fully forty lines by his wife Andromache. We
may compare this with the brief notations of grief in biblical
narrative. On the death of Sarah: “And Sarah died at KiriathArba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham
went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her” (Gen. 23:2).
On the death of Moses: “And the Israelites wept for Moses
in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning
for Moses was ended” (Deut. 34:8). One might object that
since both Sarah and Moses had lived long and fruitful lives
their deaths lack the tragedy of noble Hector being cut down
in his prime over the affairs of his less-than-noble brother
Paris, so that their deaths inspire less intense expressions of
mourning. But even with more obviously tragic deaths we
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see in biblical narrative the restraint of the narrator, who acknowledges the grief of the survivors but refrains from allowing them full expression of it. We noted above, for
example, Jacob’s response to what he takes to be evidence of
the death of his young, beloved son Joseph: “A vicious beast
has devoured him, Joseph torn to shreds!” (Gen. 37:33). In a
scene that seems intended to characterize Jacob as an extravagant mourner, the narrator goes on to describe Jacob as rending his clothes and donning sackcloth and refusing to be
comforted by his other children: “‘No, I shall go down to
Sheol to my son, mourning.’ Thus his father bewailed him”
(37:35). Yet even here the few scant lines in Hebrew do not
come close to matching the sixty lines of direct lament over
the death of Hector, not to mention the extended scene in
Book 24 of the Iliad where Hector’s father Priam goes to the
tent of Achilles to beg for the return of his son’s much-abused
corpse.
Consider also the notoriously ambiguous story in Leviticus 10 of the burning Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron.
The reader is told that the two young priests brought “strange
fire” or “alien fire” (‘esh zara) before the Lord, “and fire
came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they
died before the Lord” (10:2). Moses very quickly offers a sort
of cryptic theodicy, cast in verse form, in the face of the
shocking event: “This is what the Lord spoke, saying,
‘Through those near me I will show myself holy / and before
all the people I will be glorified’” (10:3). No more laconic
response could be imagined, both to the death of the young
men and to Moses’ extemporaneous theologizing, than that
attributed to Aaron: “And Aaron was silent.” Surely we are
to imagine Aaron’s grief as real and deep—indeed, a few
verses later Moses forbids Aaron and his other sons to go
through the public rituals of mourning while they are conse-
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crated for service in the temple (10:6-7)—and yet all we are
given is his silence. Unless one imagines this silence to indicate a complacent assent to what has just been witnessed, the
narrator gives us, to borrow from Auerbach again, “a glimpse
of unplumbed depths.” It is, in short, a silence that is “fraught
with background,” a silence that demands interpretation on
the part of the reader. Is Aaron feeling pure shock? Overwhelming sadness? Anger at God? Confusion or despair? Is
his silence a rejection of Moses’ statement of God’s intent?
And if so, on what basis? The fact is that we are given no access whatsoever into the inner life of Aaron, and because we
do not know what he is thinking we also do not know what
motivates his silence.
It is with regard to this latter issue, the question of character motivation, that we may see the importance of recognizing the distinctively terse mode of biblical narration. As I
noted above in considering the story of Jacob and Esau, the
narrator reveals very little about the inner lives of characters,
instead reporting mainly action and dialogue, what the characters do and what they say. If we are given little or no access
to the thoughts and feelings of the characters about whom we
read, then it follows that the motivation behind what they do
and say is also largely obscure. The importance of this obscurity of motivation can scarcely be overstated for any literary reading biblical narrative, since it more than anything
else is what gives the literature its profound complexity as it
forces the reader to negotiate the many possible ways of
imagining the characters’ inner lives. Let me try to justify this
claim with reference to the literature itself.
A classic example of the ambiguity of character motivation in the Bible may be seen in Genesis 22. In a story that
has never failed to engage the imagination of interpreters ancient and modern, God commands Abraham to take his son
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Isaac and sacrifice him as a burnt offering. Although a few
chapters earlier we have seen Abraham challenge the justness
of God’s decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, here
Abraham says nothing in response. Instead, there is the narrator’s terse report: “So Abraham rose early in the morning,
saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him,
and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and
set out and went to the place in the distance that God had
shown him” (vv. 3-4). Abraham’s silent obedience here is
often taken to be motivated by an untroubled and unquestioning faith in God, which, depending on one’s perspective, may
be seen positively as an expression of ultimate piety, or negatively as an expression of unfeeling religious fanaticism. But
both interpretations fail to recognize the fundamental literary
convention of the refusal of access to the inner lives of characters. The fact that we are not told of Abraham’s inner, emotional response to the demand that he slaughter his son does
not mean that he has no inner, emotional response. Surely we
are to imagine that he does, but rather than describing it for
us or allowing Abraham to give voice to it the narrator leaves
us guessing as to what that response might be and thus also
as to his motivation for his actions. Now, it is possible to fill
that gap left by the narrator with an inner calm that reflects
absolute faith, but it is equally possible to imagine that Abraham is feeling anger, disbelief, and even disgust. (With God
for demanding the slaughter? With himself for not protesting?) And however one fills the gap of Abraham’s inner life
initially, surely it is complicated by Isaac’s calling out to him
in v. 7, “Father!” and by the plaintive question that follows,
“The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a
burnt offering?” It is precisely because we do not know what
Abraham is thinking or feeling that his brief response to
Isaac’s question (“God will see to the lamb for the offering
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my son,” v. 8) takes on a deeply ironic double meaning. On
the one hand, it may be read as a ruse, if not an outright lie,
to deflect any suspicions that may be dawning on the son; on
the other hand, it may be read as a straightforward statement
of faith that a sheep will indeed be provided. It may even be
the case here that the author makes use of the ambiguities of
Hebrew’s seemingly rudimentary syntax in order to signal
the potential irony to the attentive reader. For there is no
punctuation in the Hebrew text and one may also construe
the syntax to mean: “God will see to the lamb for the offering:
namely, my son.”
To go back to Abraham’s initial response to Isaac, we
may see how what at first instance looks like wooden repetition may in fact be a subtly modulated use of a key word or
theme. When God first calls out to Abraham to begin the
episode, Abraham’s response is “Here I am”; when Isaac calls
in the middle of the episode, on the way to the place of sacrifice, Abraham’s response is, once again, “Here I am, my
son”; and when, at the climactic moment when the knife is
raised over the boy, the angel of Lord calls out “Abraham,
Abraham!” (22:11) his response is again “Here I am.” In each
case the single Hebrew word hinneni, “here I am” or “behold
me,” is repeated by Abraham. To substitute a synonym for
the sake of variety, as for example the JPS Tanakh does in
translating the second occurrence as “Yes, my son,” is to lose
a concrete expression of what is certainly a central theme for
the story, namely the anguished tension between the demands
of God and the ethical demands of another human being
(Abraham’s own child no less!). Surely every ethical impulse
demands that Abraham not kill his son, and yet precisely this
is what God demands that he do. He responds “Here I am”
to both God and Isaac, and yet he cannot be fully “there,”
fully present, to both equally. It is only with the third, very
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late, repetition of “Here I am” that the tension is resolved and
Abraham is no longer caught between these opposing demands on his loyalty. One might say that Abraham’s threefold
response provides the underlying armature for the story,
marking in a classically Aristotelian way the beginning, the
middle, and the end. Although the single word hinneni is literally repeated each time, it acquires a new depth of meaning—and certainly a new tone—with each repetition. And to
the end of the story it remains the case that we are never quite
sure what Abraham is thinking as he first travels in silence,
then responds to his son, then binds and raises the knife, and
finally sacrifices the ram instead.
If we do not know what motivates Abraham in Genesis
22, it is also the case that we do not know what motivates
Isaac to make his enquiry as to the whereabouts of the sheep
or what he is thinking as his father binds him and lays him
on the makeshift altar. But by this point we are not surprised
by this fact, since we have begun to see that the biblical authors make use of this convention in order to allow for depth
of character and depth of meaning. It is perhaps somewhat
more surprising to note that this convention applies to God
too, who is, after all, a character in these narratives as well,
and so the literary art of biblical narrative has distinct theological implications. What motivates God to demand the sacrifice of Isaac? The narrator refuses to tell us, though for any
reader, religious or not, this must certainly be a compelling
question. We are told that “God tested Abraham” (22:1); but
this does not give us an answer to our question. The sense of
the word “test” (Hebrew nissah) is something like “trial” or
“ordeal,” and so God decides to put Abraham through an ordeal, presumably to test his mettle. (A comparison with the
opening chapters of Job is apt.) But why, and to what end? Is
it to find out how strong Abraham is under pressure? To see
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whether he values his son more than he values God? Does
God genuinely learn something new about Abraham, about
humanity, or about God’s self through this test? (“Now I know
that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me
your son, your only son” [22:12].) Without knowing what
motivates God or what God is thinking as the knife is raised,
we cannot finally even know whether Abraham has passed
or failed the test. Most readers assume that he has passed, but
a few have dared to suggest that God wanted not blind obedience from Abraham but bold resistance—after all, such resistance was honored when Abraham argued on behalf of
Sodom and Gomorrah—and that in failing to argue with God,
Abraham failed to show the strength of character that God
hoped to see.11 This reading may seem to go against the grain
of the narrative, especially in light of 22:16-17: “By myself
have I sworn, said the LORD, for because you have done this
thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son: That
in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply
your seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is
on the sea shore.” But the fact that such a reading is nonetheless possible—if only just—witnesses to the profound but
productive ambiguity of Hebrew literary style, which exploits
to great effect its distinctive economy of style.
There is very much more that could be said about the literary art of Hebrew narrative, especially about the patterns
or structures that authors and editors have used to construct
both individual stories and larger blocks of material, but before moving to consider poetry, I want to point out one final
way in which the literary and the theological are bound together. I mentioned at the beginning of this essay the jarring
concreteness with which God is sometimes imagined in the
Bible as active in the world: God walks in the garden of Eden
and enjoys the evening breeze; God shows up at the tent of
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Sarah and Abraham to promise them offspring; God destroys
Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea; God inscribes with God’s
own hand the tablets of the covenant at Sinai; and in the final,
poignant scene of the Torah at the end of Deuteronomy, God
buries Moses after allowing him a vision of the promised land
that he is not finally to enter. But if the Hebrew literary imagination is relentlessly concrete in its workings, including its
imaginings of God, it does not follow that it is without craft
or nuance. In fact, divine agency and human agency are almost always imagined in these narratives as being inextricably but ambiguously bound together in such a way that
neither agency is autonomous or effective in and of itself.12
And so, God announces to Rebekah in Genesis 25 that the
elder of her twins (Esau) will serve the younger (Jacob); but
two chapters later, when the time has come to deliver the
blessing to the proper son, God has apparently left the matter
to Rebekah to work out, which she does with great effectiveness (see ch. 27). In Genesis 50, Joseph may declare to his
brothers, who had sold him into slavery thirteen chapters and
many years earlier, that “Even though you intended to do
harm to me, God intended it for good”; but the story also suggests that it is largely his own wits and talent, rather than any
supernatural intervention, that allows him to survive and
prosper in Egypt.
Even in the Exodus story, where God’s salvific power
seems more tangible than anywhere in the Bible, the divine
plan requires human agents for implementation. And so, after
a flurry of first-person active verbs by which the Lord resolves to liberate Israel from slavery (“I have seen . . . , I have
heard . . . , I have come down to rescue . . . , I will bring them
up [3:7-8]), God shifts unexpectedly to the second person,
saying to Moses, “And now, go and I will send you to
Pharaoh, and you will bring my people the Israelites out of
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Egypt” (3:10). Moses quite naturally responds, “Who am I,
that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring out the Israelites from Egypt?” God’s answer is telling with regard to
the interdependence of divine and human agency: “I will be
with you” (v. 12). Who is it that liberates Israel—God or
Moses? It is both. But even that answer is too simple, since
the liberation of Israel requires not only the cooperation of
God and Moses but of Israel as well. Thus, Moses dutifully
announces to the enslaved Israelites God’s plan to liberate
them, which is again stated in a surge of first-person verbs:
“I will take you out . . . , I will rescue you from bondage . . . ,
I will take you . . . , I will be your God . . . , I will bring you
to the land I promised” (Ex. 6:6-8). The response? “They did
not heed Moses because their spirits had been crushed by
cruel slavery.” The point would seem to be a sociological one:
that the people cannot be liberated before they are ready, and
after generations of bondage and hard labor it will take more
than promises to get them ready. Only after seeing the very
real power of Pharaoh broken by repeated plagues are the Israelites able to summon the energy to come out of Egypt.
Pharoah himself is also a locus for this fundamental tension—in this case it is paradoxical—between divine sovereignty and human agency. On the one hand, God claims
responsibility for “hardening” Pharaoh’s heart so that he refuses to allow Israel to leave (Ex. 7:3; 14:4); but on the other
hand, Pharaoh is said by the narrator to have hardened his
own heart (8:11, 28). At other times a passive voice is used,
so that Pharaoh’s heart “was hardened” or “became hard”
(7:14; 8:15; 9:4)—thereby leaving the agency behind the
hardening unclear. This shifting of agency allows the narrative to retain a sense of God’s sovereign activity in history,
while at the same time affirming the moral culpability of
Pharaoh, whose repeated failure to fulfill his promise of free-
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ing the Israelites represents rather realistically the psychology
of a tyrant. Logically, we readers may want to know, Which
was it? Did God harden Pharaoh’s heart, or did Pharaoh
harden his own heart? But the story refuses to settle the question, giving us a “both/and” that reflects a pronounced trend
in biblical narrative to render not only the inner lives of both
humans and God, but also creation and history itself, as unfathomably complex and finally unresolvable mysteries.
II. ANCIENT HEBREW POETRY
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,”
Emily Dickinson once wrote, “I know that is poetry.”13 Dickinson was, of course, somewhat more than averagely tuned
in to the effects of poetry. In truth, poetry—even great poetry—often fails to take the top of one’s head off, and even
sometimes goes unrecognized as poetry. There is no more
striking example of this than the Bible, which contains a distinctive body of poetry that has been, for two thousand years,
only rarely and inconsistently represented on the page in the
form of verse rather than prose. Though some passages are
lined out in the ancient and medieval manuscript traditions,
these include not only ones that we would now recognize as
poetry but also lists of names that are clearly not poetry (in
the same way that the phonebook is not poetry just because
it is lined out). And printed Bibles from Guttenberg on, until
the twentieth century, represent most of the poetic sections
of the Bible as blocks of text indistinguishable from prose.
The question of whether biblical poetry even exists has
been around since ancient times, and it has been exacerbated
by the fact that our primary models for what counts as poetry
are drawn from the highly metrical verse found in classical
literature. Already in the first century C.E., Jewish intellectuals like Philo and Josephus, feeling the need to defend their
cultural heritage in terms of Greek and Roman ideals, went
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looking for iambs and hexameters in the Torah. And they
were followed in this task by later Christian writers such as
Origen (in the early third century) and Jerome (in the fourth
and fifth centuries), who also assumed that if poetry existed
in the Bible then it must exist in metrical form. The search
for meter in biblical literature has been revived on occasion
in the modern period as well, but it has never amounted to
much, for the simple fact that ancient Hebrew verse is not
metrical. This lack of conformity to classical standards—as
well as to virtually all poetry in the West until the nineteenth
century—has no doubt been a major factor in the tradition’s
lack of appreciation for biblical poetry, but so has the Bible’s
status as religious literature. Attention to literary form has
been a low priority for interpreters of the Bible, eager as they
have been to move to the content or the meaning of any given
passage. There has been very little allowance in biblical interpretation for the possibility that, as Wallace Stevens puts
it, “poetry is the subject of the poem.”14
A major breakthrough in understanding biblical poetry
came with Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of
the Hebrews, first delivered in association with Lowth’s chair
in poetry at Oxford and then published in 1753. Lowth’s most
lasting contribution, for good and ill, was his identification
of parallelismus membrorum, or parallelism of lines, as the
primary structuring principle of ancient Hebrew verse.
“Things for the most part shall answer to things, and words
to words,” Lowth writes, “as if fitted to each other by a kind
of rule or measure.”15 From Psalm 114, for example:
The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.
Or from the Song of Songs:
Love is strong as death,
jealousy harsh as the grave.
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Notice how “mountains” matches “hills,” and how “rams”
matches “lambs.” And notice the strict parallelism of
“love//jealousy,” “strong//harsh,” and “death//grave.” Lowth
admitted that many lines of biblical poetry did not display
the same equivalence of terms that we see here, but nonetheless the recognition that lineation was based on the matching
of two or three short lines in a couplet or triplet form, which
did not depend on meter, opened the way for more sustained
attention to such poetry as poetry, rather than just repetitioussounding prose.
For 200 years after Lowth nearly all attention to biblical
verse was on this phenomenon of parallelism, and most especially semantic parallelism (or parallelism of meaning),
which too often was reduced to the idea that the second or
third line in a couplet or a triplet simply restates the basic
idea from the first line. But recent scholarship has shown that
the relationship between lines is more intricate and more interesting than this. Adele Berlin, Michael O’Connor, F. W.
Dobbs-Allsopp and others have shown that that parallelism
involves not only semantic features but also grammatical,
syntactical, and phonological patterns (generally not apparent
in translation), and that there are complex syntactical constraints that underlie the ancient Hebrew poetic line, which
are not in the end reducible to “parallelism.”16 Moreover,
Robert Alter and James Kugel have shown that even when
the relationship between lines looks to be semantically parallel at first glance, there is often a subtle dynamism in which
the second line moves beyond the language or imagery in the
first by making it more concrete, more specific, more intense,
or more emotionally heightened.17 Thus, in the matched lines
quoted above from the Song of Songs: jealousy is a more specific emotion associated with love; harsh heightens and intensifies the connotation of strong; and the grave serves as a
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concrete symbol of death.
Beyond the question of line structure, however, the cluster of other features that typify biblical verse has mostly been
overlooked by scholarship of recent decades. But one can get
a much richer sense of the distinctive workings of biblical
poetic style by recognizing these features—features that can
be seen more clearly when compared with the workings of
biblical prose narrative. As we saw above, ancient Hebrew
authors developed a prose style that was especially suited for
narrative (or storytelling) and that prefigured in important respects the style and techniques of both modern novelistic fiction and history-writing. Virtually all other long narratives in
the ancient world—from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Babylonian Enuma Elish to the Canaanite epics to the Iliad and
the Odyssey—take the form of verse, reflecting the oral origins of the epic genre. By casting their stories in the form of
prose, biblical authors pioneered a “writerly” form of narrative that did not depend on the rhythms of oral poetry and
that allowed for the development of a genuine third-person
narrator, whose voice could be distinguished from the direct
discourse attributed to characters within the narrative. It also
allowed for a depth-of-consciousness and an opaqueness in
its literary characters, so that, as we saw above, readers are
seldom told what characters are thinking or feeling at any
given moment, even though it is often vitally important to
characterization and to plot development.
Stylistically, however, biblical poetry works very differently. There are in the first place the formal differences that
mark the poetry as verse (instead of prose): not only lineation,
but also a compressed syntax that tends to drop particles and
pronouns in order to achieve the conciseness of the poetic
line. (Unfortunately, such syntactical structures are mostly
invisible in translation.) And biblical poetry is, to borrow
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Terry Eagleton’s vague but appropriate characterization of
poetry in general, much more “verbally inventive” than biblical prose narrative.18 The terse, straightforward style of biblical narrative means that it tends to avoid elevated diction or
figurative language. But the poetry is filled with figurative
language, from the mostly conventional imagery found in the
psalms, for example, to the more inventive imagination of
the book of Job, to the double entendres of the Song of Songs.
Thus, the troubled fate of the psalmist is, often as not, imagined in terms of “the pit” that threatens to swallow or “the
flood” that threatens to overwhelm; and God is imagined as
a “rock,” a “fortress,” or a “shield.” As the suffering Job
imagines blotting out the day of his birth, he both personifies
and eroticizes it, imagining night longing for day which, in
his counterfactual curse, never arrives:
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it long for light in vain,
and never behold the eyelids of morning. (Job 3:9)
Later, Job imagines God’s enmity toward him in terms of the
ancient grudge between God-as-creator and the chaotic force
of the personified Sea:
Am I the Sea, or the Dragon,
that you set a guard over me? (7:12)
Answering Job, thirty chapters later, God returns to this
image, but redefines and re-personifies the chaotic Sea not
as an enemy combatant but as an infant to be nurtured:
Who is it that contained the Sea
as it emerged bursting from the womb?—
when I clothed it in clouds,
and swaddled it with darkness. (38:8-9)
The Song of Songs, erotic poetry set in the alternating voices
of two young lovers, prefers a lush, bodily-based array of
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metaphors. For example, the male voice proclaims:
Your breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that feed among the lilies. (4:5)
Or this, from the female voice:
Like an apple tree found in the forest
is my beloved among the youths;
I delight to sit in his shade,
and his fruit is sweet to my taste. (2:3)
If line structure and other formal markers are enough to
establish the presence of verse in the Bible, they still do not
tell us much about its use or function. Again, a comparison
with biblical prose is instructive, since one of the most striking features of biblical poetry is that it is relentlessly nonnarrative. Once ancient Hebrew culture had developed the
flexible prose form that gets used for recounting stories, both
long (e.g., Genesis, 1 and 2 Samuel) and short (e.g., the books
of Ruth and Esther), it seems that verse was reserved for more
specialized, highly rhetorical uses. For example, the prophets
are most often represented as casting their messages in poetic
form. Note the parallelism and figurative language in, for example, Amos’ well-known cri de coeur,
Let justice roll down like the waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream. (5:24)
This familiar parallel structure is combined with hyperbole
and a striking visual imagination (both very much lacking in
biblical narrative, though common in the ancient epic tradition)19 in the prophet Isaiah’s utopian vision of the future:
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. (11:6)
Verse also seems to have been the preferred form in ancient
Hebrew, as in so many languages, for the aphorism—the
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pithy and often didactic observation on the nature of the
world—which, like poetry more generally, aims for a maximum of meaning in a minimum of words. The book of
Proverbs is filled with such aphorisms in verse form, such as,
A soft answer turns away wrath;
a harsh word increases anger. (15:1)
For more skeptical versions of such aphorisms, one can turn
to the book of Ecclesiastes, as in
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is never filled . . .
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing. (1:7)
or
With much wisdom comes much grief;
to increase knowledge is to increase sorrow. (1:18)
But one of the most interesting uses of biblical verse is
as an early form of what will later go by the name of “lyric
poetry,” that intensely subjective, non-narrative and non-dramatic form that has dominated modern poetry at least since
Wordsworth. This early form of lyric foregrounds two final
characteristics of biblical poetry, both of which further distinguish it from biblical prose narrative. First, biblical poetry
is invariably presented as direct discourse, the first-person
voice of a speaking subject (a precursor of the modern “lyric
I”). Again, ancient Hebrew narrative separates the third-person narrator from the dialogue spoken by characters, which
is grammatically marked (by expressive forms and deictics,
to use the technical terms) as direct discourse, whereas the
narrator’s voice is not.20 Biblical poetry is also marked in this
way; it is, in other words, always presented as if it were dialogue. So, for example, the biblical narrator will never be represented as speaking in poetry, but characters can be, as in
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the deathbed blessing of Jacob near the end of the book of
Genesis or the Song of Deborah in the book of Judges.
The second way that biblical lyric poetry distinguishes itself from narrative is in its willingness to give access to the
inner lives of its speakers. If biblical narrative trades in
opaqueness of characterization, biblical poetry fairly revels
in the exposure of subjectivity. When biblical authors wanted
to convey feeling or thought, they resorted to verse form. Obvious examples of this formal preference include poetic
books like the Psalms and the Song of Songs, where the expression of passion, whether despairing or joyful, is common.
We find also in narrative contexts briefer poetic insets that
serve to express or intensify emotion. Take, for example,
Jacob’s reaction to the bloodied robe of Joseph, which as
Alter has pointed out is rendered as a perfect couplet of Hebrew poetry: hayya ra’ah ‘akhalathu / tarof toraf yosef (“A
vicious beast has devoured him, / torn, torn is Joseph!”).21
The book of Job serves as an example on a much larger scale.
It begins in the narrative mode and gives precious little insight into Job’s thoughts or feelings. But when the story
moves to Job’s anguished death wish (“Blot out the day of
my birth, / and the night that announced, ‘A man-child is conceived’”), narrative gives way to the passionate but finely
modulated poetic form of chapter 3, followed by many chapters in verse containing Job’s impassioned defense of his integrity.22
T. S. Eliot’s pronouncement that “when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not
another thing” might seem like a truism, but it’s a sentiment
that sometimes needs repeating.23 This is especially true when
it comes to considering the poetry of the Bible, which has so
often been treated precisely as “another thing”—traditionally
as theology or as ethics, but more recently, under the guise
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of literary criticism, as narrative. By the latter, I mean that
even in recent “literary approaches” to the Bible, critics often
look for things like plot or characterization in biblical poetry,
categories more appropriate to narrative texts. But biblical
poetry is, in both the simplest and the most complicated ways,
poetry. To consider a biblical poem as poetry is to pay attention to its line structure, to its status as direct discourse, to
the sort of speaking voice it presents, to its diction and imagery, and to its willingness to express inner thought and
emotion as biblical narrative rarely does. It is, in other words,
to attend not only to what the poem means but also to how it
means.
NOTES
1. Longinus, On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell, in Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M.
Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 470: “Similarly,
the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man—for he understood and expressed God’s power in accordance with its worth—writes at the beginning of his Laws: ‘God said’—now what?—‘Let there be light,’ and there
was light; ‘Let there be earth,’ and there was earth.”
2. Confessions, VI.v and III.v, respectively.
3. So for example, C. S. Lewis, The Literary Impact of the Authorized
Version (London: The Athlone Press, 1950), 4: “There is a certain sense
in which ‘the Bible as literature’ does not exist. It is a collection of books
so widely different in period, kind, language, and aesthetic value, that no
common criticism can be passed on them. In uniting these heterogeneous
texts the Church was not guided by literary principles, and the literary
critic might regard their inclusion between the same boards as a theological and historical accident irrelevant to his own branch of study.” It is
not as clear as Lewis suggests that literary principles played no role in
the formation of the biblical canon; but even if one conceded the point
that does not mean that literary qualities are absent from the Bible, as this
essay endeavors to show.
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4. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1991), 426.
5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (trans. Willard R. Trask; Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1953), 3-23.
6. This contrasts with non-narrative cultic or liturgical prose texts where,
for example, we are given quite detailed descriptions of the tabernacle
and its furnishings; see, e.g., Exodus 25-27.
7. Ibid., 9.
8. Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1996), 129.
9. Ibid., 131-32.
10. Auerbach, Mimesis, 6.
11. Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends (New
York: Summit, 1976), 93-94; Danna Fewell and David Gunn, Gender,
Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1993), 52-54.
12. In a related vein, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New
York: Basic, 1981), 33-34, who writes of the dialectic between “God’s
will” and “human freedom.” For Alter, the “refractory nature” of human
freedom is imagined primarily as working against God’s will, whereas to
my mind that is not always the case.
13. Emily Dickinson, Letter 342a (to Thomas Wentworth Higginson), in
Selected Letters (ed. Thomas H. Johnson; Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 208.
14. Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems
(New York: Knopf, 1937), 22.
15. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, translated from the Latin by G. Gregory (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), 205.
16. M. O’Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1980); Adele Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp,
“Poetry, Hebrew,” New Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 4
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006).
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17. James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and its History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Alter, The Art
of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic, 1985).
18. Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 25.
19. This visual quality is what Aristotle might refer to as enargeia (Poetics
1455a; Rhetoric 1410b) or “vividness.” So also Demetrius, On Style, 209220. On enargeia in classical poetry, see Egbert J. Bakker, “Mimesis as
Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter,” Poetics Today 20:1
(1993), 11-26, who ties it to the nature of orally performed epic; also Andrew Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993). On vividness in epic poetry more generally, see Suzanne
Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); and in classical
history writing Andrew D. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek
Historiography,” Transactions of the American Philological Associaton
123 (1993): 353-377. This quality of vividness, present also in biblical
Hebrew poetry, is largely absent in biblical Hebrew narrative.
20. On this phenomenon, see Robert Kawashima, Biblical Narrative and
the Death of the Rhapsode (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004), ch. 3.
21. Alter, Genesis, 215.
22. Chapters 1 and 2 and then 42:7-17 of the book of Job take the form
of prose narrative, but the long central section of the book in 3:1-42:6 is
in verse form. Modern scholarship has mostly taken this as an indication
of different authors (though recent years have seen a rethinking of this),
without recognizing that the shift in literary form can be understood as
motivated by the differing literary resources offered by Hebrew prose and
Hebrew poetry. By convention, verse form allows the necessary access
to Job’s inner life in a way that prose does not, and it also allows for the
sometimes extravagant figurative language that we find in the poetic section of the book.
23. T. S. Eliot, Preface to the second edition of The Sacred Wood: Essays
on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1928), viii.
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45
What is the Surface Area
of a Hedgehog?
Barry Mazur
Well, I don’t know the answer to the question of the title and
no hedgehog will be harmed, or even mentioned again, until
the very end of my lecture.
Eva Brann suggested tonight’s lecture might address the
question, What is area? I’m delighted to do this, and I’m delighted to be here, and to be among people—you, the St.
John’s community—with whom it will be such a pleasure to
contemplate this question.
In this lecture I’ll discuss the concepts of
• area—how it is familiar to us, and how when we
push it to the limit we get some surprises;
• length—since, at least at first impression it is a
more primitive “prior” concept— seemingly simpler than area;
• proportion—crucial to the understanding of both
length and area;
• invariance—as a way of characterizing length and
area;
• quadrature—as a crucial “format” for expressing
profound area relationships in geometry.
And I’ll conclude by alluding to Archimedes’ wonderful “mechanical method” in which he transmutes the problem of
computing area into the problem of computing something
akin to weight1 and thereby achieves the quadrature of the
Prof. Barry Mazur is the Gerhard Gade University Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. This was the annual Steiner Lecture, delivered on Friday 30 September 2011 at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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parabola. This offers us a glimpse of the power of analogy,
and the use of the thought-experiment as already practiced in
ancient mathematics.2 It also gives us the opportunity to touch
in passing on broader issues in mathematical thought such as
analogy, heuristic, paradox, invariance, and something I’ll
call characterization (a version of axiomatization).
1. AREA AS FAMILIAR
We all know what the word area signifies. It often refers to a
territorial cordon, as in restricted area or hard-hat area or
even area studies. It sometimes comes as a number, but always with a unit attached, such as square miles, square feet,
square inches, acres, or if it’s a bed area you’re interested in,
you can ask for it to be King-size or Queen-size, or a size of
lesser nobility.
Fig. 1
If you want to approximate the area of the enclosed shape in
Fig. 1 on a grid with a mesh of one-foot by one-foot squares,
you might count the number of one-square-foot patches that
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comprise a union of squares that completely cover the figure
(in the above case it is 81) and count the number of onesquare-foot patches that the figure covers completely (in the
above case it is 39). Then you know that the area of the figure
in units of square feet is squeezed between these two numbers; that is, the area is smaller than the first number (or equal
to it), and bigger than the second. In the above case, we
would have
81 square feet ≥ area of figure ≥ 39 square feet.
If you want a better estimate, do the same thing with oneinch by one-inch squares.
If any of us were asked to calculate the square-footage of
this auditorium we’d come up with some figure or other, confident that we could refine it to any degree accuracy required.
And you may be painfully aware of the area of your dorm
room. So, what else is there to say?
Fig. 2
2. HOW GOOD ARE YOU AT COMPARING AREAS?
I’m not very good. Here’s an example. The area of the two
shaded triangles in Fig. 2 are equal.
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I know this thanks to Proposition 37 of Book I of Euclid’s
Elements. All of you either know that proposition now, or will
after your freshman year. This is the proposition that says that
triangles with the same base and height have the same area.
Proposition 37 of Book I will be a recurring theme in my lecture; it is a marvelous piece of mathematics that demonstrates
many things, including the maxim that to be profound and to
be elementary are not mutually exclusive virtues.
But if I simply compared those figures visually—without
either explicitly remembering or somehow “internalizing”
Euclid’s proposition—I would probably grossly underestimate (if that’s a possible phrase) the area of the spiky triangle
in comparison with the seemingly fat one. In a sense, then,
Euclid’s proposition–embedded in my central nervous system
as it is—has improved (a tiny bit, not much) my ability to
make off-the-cuff judgments and rough comparisons. Our native intuition, combined with a data bank of geometric experiences, determines our effectiveness in making judgments
about all sorts of attributes belonging to objects that we see.
I’m guessing that our eyeball comparisons are more reliable
in relation to straight-line lengths than in relation to curved
lengths,3 and much more reliable than our ability to estimate
area and volume, given the variety of possible configurations.
In teaching Euclid’s Elements, one often emphasizes “logical
thinking” as the great benefit that students take away from
learning geometry. But I also see a type of pre-logical—if I
can call it that—or intuition-enriching benefit as well. This
is hard to pinpoint, but it comes out as a general sharpening
of faculties in regard to thinking about, guessing about, negotiating, comparing, and relating geometric objects.
Such a benefit is very different from the other valuable
reward just mentioned—that is, being able to actually argue
the proof of Proposition 37 of Book I by making the elegant
construction shown in Fig. 3.
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Fig. 3
To continue our review of how good our intuitions are, let’s
pass to a slightly deeper basic geometric comparison authored by Archimedes that astonishes me now just as it must
have astonished Archimedes’ contemporaries. We will get
into this in more depth later on,4 but consider the following
striking way of recreating the area of any circle: the area of
any circle is equal to the area of a right-angle triangle defined
by the property that the two of its sides making the right angle
have lengths equal to the radius of the circle, and to the length
of the circumference of the circle, respectively. (Fig. 4)
Fig. 4
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Here, as in the previous example, I “see” it not visually (if
this can be said), but only with the help of my memory of its
proof. (I will say more about this below).
Let us push a bit further. The two examples we’ve just
reviewed are examples of nicely enclosed, finite figures. We
are even poorer in intuition when faced with planar figures
(no matter how smooth and simple their boundaries seem to
be) that “asymptote” off to infinity. It may be quite difficult,
even if given long chunks of such a shape, to extrapolate and
guess by eyeball alone whether it extends out to a figure with
infinite area or finite area.
For example, consider Fig. 5, which was drawn as accurately as possible. I wonder whether you can guess if the area
bounded by the blue curve or the pink curve has finite area.
My point is that there’s no reason why you should be able to
do it no matter what talents of visual acuity you may possess.
Fig. 5
But, just in case you are wondering, if you continued tracing the curved regions ad infinitum in the manner smoothly
begun by the sketch—meaning that the pink curve is the
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graph of the function y = 1/x and the blue curve is the graph
of the function y = 1/x2—then the (infinite) red-bounded region happens to have infinite area while the (infinite) bluebounded region has finite area. As a side issue, many calculus
students are amazed to find that if you “construct” an infinite
“trumpet” by rotating the red curve of the above figure
around the x-axis, then its surface area is infinite, even though
the volume it subsumes is finite. To put it in colloquial, but
misleading, terms: you can fill this trumpet with a finite
amount of paint, but you need an infinite amount of paint to
paint it.
This phenomenon illuminates much, especially for people
who know calculus, and could be the subject of a question
following the lecture. But I won’t dwell on this; I mention it
as a hint that there are things to dwell on here.
3. PUSHING TO THE LIMIT
You might wonder what is to be gained by asking questions
about infinite area versus finite area, or by considering the
concept of area in various extreme contexts. Mathematics
often does that sort of thing: it is a useful strategy to examine
a concept when it is brought to its limit, in the hope that the
strains inflicted on the concept will reveal important facets
of it that would be hidden in less stressful situations. If you
push a concept to its extreme border, you may see things that
would otherwise be overlooked if you remain in the comfortable zones. For example, you can learn what its precise borders are. Some of the most beautiful mathematics—and the
deepest—has emerged by seeking the extremes.
The issue we have just addressed, areas of infinitely extended regions, can be broadened, for it raises the question:
exactly how many subsets of the plane deserve to have a
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well-defined area? Do all subsets have a reasonable notion
of area?
4. AREA AS PARADOXICAL
To get the blood circulating, let’s contemplate something that
is evidently impossible: Can you
(1) take a square S in the Euclidean plane, cut it (say,
with a scissors) into four pieces A, B, C, D of equal
area—so no two of these pieces overlap, and the four of
them cover the square?
In standard notation:5
S = A ! B ! C ! D;
(2) and now can you throw away two of the pieces (say
C and D) and move the other two (A and B) around by
Euclidean motions to get congruent shapes Aʹ, Bʹ in the
plane so that these two pieces cover the exact same
square again, i.e.,
S = Aʹ ! Bʹ ?
The answer, of course, is No, you can’t do this. Certainly not
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if the concept of area has the properties that we expect to
have. By “properties” I’m referring to these two self-evident
axioms:
(1) the area of a union of non-overlapping figures is
the sum of the areas of each of the figures; and
(2) the area of a figure is preserved under Euclidean
motion.
For if you could do this, then our two formulas for S displayed above will give contradictory answers to the question,
What is the area of S?
With this in mind, consider the following strange fact
about spherical rather than Euclidean geometry. Let S be the
surface of a ball (that is, what mathematicians call the twodimensional sphere). There is a way of separating S into four
sets A, B, C, D, no two of which overlap, such that each of
these sets are—in an evident sense—congruent to any of the
others. (This means that, for example, there is a way of rotating the sphere that brings A precisely to the position that
B occupied (before that rotation)—and similarly, there are
ways of rotating the sphere to bring A to B and to C and to
D. Nevertheless, you can throw two of them away (say, C
and D) and find a way of rotating the sphere so that A is
brought to a set A′ and a (different) way of rotating the sphere
so that B is sent to a set B′ and these maneuvers have the
strange property that A′ and B′ together cover the sphere; i.e.,
S = A′ ! B′.
This is called the Banach-Tarski Paradox. Despite first appearances this is not actually a paradox although there is indeed a subtlety lurking in the way in which I worded things.6
It is merely a para-dox, that is: something contrary to expected
opinion.
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I brought this apparent paradox up not to confuse you but
rather to point out, at the very outset, that
• even though area is a concept we tend to feel perfectly
at home with, to get closer to its essence is to appreciate more keenly its complexity, and so
• in our discussion about area we had better start from
the very beginning, by noting that
• despite its reputation for having what are called
“proper foundations,” mathematics doesn’t seem to
have a “beginning.”
5. LENGTH IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Nevertheless, let’s begin with something seemingly a bit simpler than area: plain old lengths of straight line-segments. I
say “seemingly” because as often happens in mathematics,
the simpler-seeming concept (in this case, length) contains,
in a more visible form, lots of the essential aspects of its complicated companions (e.g., area and volume).
We all know what is meant when someone says “a ten
foot pole.” This is a relative statement, comparing the pole
to some foot-long ruler, and claiming that we can lay ten
copies of our measuring device onto the pole, covering it
completely with no overspill or overlap. Usually, of course,
the speaker of this phrase has something on his mind other
than this length-measuring thought-experiment.
In slight contrast, when we are told that the circumference
of this cup is eight inches long and we want to verify this directly, we must set aside our rigid, calibrated, ruler and use
something like a tape-measure, wrapping it around the rim
of the cup.7 Of course, there is also a well-known indirect
way of verifying this measurement which starts by using our
rigid ruler to calculate the diameter of the cup—but this indirection already involves a certain amount of mathematical
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experience with π.
In even greater contrast, when we are told that the star
cluster NGC 1929 within the Large Magellanic Cloud (a
satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way shown in Fig. 68) is
179, 000 light-years away from us, other measuring devices
are required, and—given relativistic issues—what distance
means is already a subtle business.
Fig. 6
6. EQUALITY [OF LENGTH] IN EUCLID
The concept length occurs—in a somewhat cryptic form—
early in the Elements. It appears as mēkos in the definition of
line (Def. 2):
A line is breadthless length.
The concept reappears as diastēma (translated often as distance but meaning, more specifically, interval or gap) as
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something of a surprise. Euclid slips it into the discussion in
Book I in the definition of circle (Def. 15), which is described
as—and I’ll put it in modern vocabulary—a figure bounded
by a curve the points of which are equidistant from a given
point.
Thanks to this definition and the ability we have—given
to us by Postulate 3—of drawing a circle with any center and
any radius, we can begin to construct many line segments
that, in Euclid’s terms, are “equal” (meaning, are of equal
length). Even better, we are supplied with tools for establishing equality. Euclid wastes no time making use of these tools:
the very first proposition (Proposition 1 of Book I, see Fig.
79) goes straight to the task of constructing, on any line segment, an equilateral triangle, that is, a triangle in which all
three sides are “equal.” And we’re off and running, at least
as far as understanding equality of length goes.
On the facing page you see it in its full glory, ending with
a triumphant hoper edei poiēsai—i.e., “as was to be constructed.”
When later mathematics takes on the issue of length,
things proceed quite differently from the way Euclid proceeded. Modern mathematics throws a spotlight on transformations in a way that ancient mathematics did not.
Nowadays, as we introduce a new concept or new type of
structure, often—at the same time—we make explicit the
types of transformations or mappings between exemplars of
this structure that we are willing to consider (or rather, that
we are willing to allow). These allowed transformations are
the ones that respect the inner coherence of the structure we
are studying. In Euclidean geometry, the allowed transformations are the mappings of the Euclidean plane onto itself
that preserve the notion of congruence. They consist of rotations about points in the plane, translations, and also those
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transformations that can be viewed as the composition of a
“flip,” (that is, a symmetry about some straight line) with a
translation or rotation. In one of the modern formats, the concept of Euclidean length and the collection of the allowed
transformations of Euclidean geometry are yoked concepts,
working in tandem:
• The allowed transformations are precisely those transformations that preserve length of all line-segments,
while
• two line-segments have equal length if and only if
there are allowed transformations bringing any one
of them onto the other.
In effect, these notions—“length between points in Euclidean geometry” and “the transformations that preserve Euclidean geometry”—are yoked, chicken-and-egg style, in that
each can be used to begin the discussion and characterize
(that is, explicitly determine) the other. Think of it this way:
We could invoke each of these concepts to provide the vocabulary for a system of axioms in a geometry, and the other
concept would then be one of the many features of that geometry. You can have length as your basic concept and stipulate
the transformations that preserve your geometry to be those
that preserve length, or you may start with the stipulation of
transformations of your geometry and derive length as one
of its invariants—in effect, deriving the entire geometry from
its group of symmetries. (The second viewpoint represents a
celebrated shift of emphasis, known as the Erlangen Program.) But there is also an important difference of mood between “axiomatization,” which sets up a theory starting from
one direction or the other, and presenting things in a balanced
way, where each concept “characterizes” the other.
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7. PROPORTIONS
Length is, at bottom, a relative concept: that is to say, “length
compared to what?” is a bona fide question. What are the
units? Inches? Feet? Miles?10 That is, when we deal with
length, we are dealing—unavoidably—with a proportion.11
This puts us in the mood of Euclid’s Book V, a work that
deals exclusively with proportions among magnitudes.
Say we are interested in the length of our ten-foot pole P.
We compare it to our one-foot ruler F, we might emphasize
the proportional aspect of length by recording the answer
symbolically this way:
(*) P : F “=” 10 : 1
I’ve put quotation-marks around the equality sign to emphasize that it is indeed a serious abbreviation of thought, turning
what began as an analogy (P is to F as 10 is to 1) into an
equality (the relationship that P has to F is the relationship
that 10 has to 1)—turning an as into a straight is. This is a
curious transition. The older notation for equality sign in quotation marks is a double-colon,
(**) P : F :: 10 : 1,
capturing equally well, I believe, the “as” aspect of the relationship. That a proportion of lengths is interpretable as a
proportion of numbers may well be self-evident, but that it is
an interpretation is worth bearing in mind.
The legacy of the Pythagoreans offers us yet another interpretation for the versatile notion of a proportion of lengths:
As the length is to the length,
So the heard tone is to the heard tone.
After this discussion it is safe to remove the quotation
marks in formula (*) displayed above, and write
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P/F = 10/1.
We thereby see arithmetic in geometry (that is, by going from
left to right in the above equation). In other words, we have
an “arithmetic” (of proportions of straight line segments) that
mirrors “ordinary” arithmetic (of ratios of numbers). For example, you can add proportions of lengths of line segments:
A· − − − − − − ·B· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·C
D· − − − − − − ·E
AB/DE + BC/DE = AC/DE
and multiply proportions of lengths of line segments:
A· − − − − − − ·B
C· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·D
E· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·F
AB/CD × CD/EF = AB/EF
and we have a natural interpretation of inequalities between
these proportions. These behave formally “just like fractions,”
as the notation indicates, and we have a veritable algebra of
geometrical proportions.
8. COMMON MEASURES, AND UNCOMMON MEASURES
All this makes perfect, and natural, sense and conforms to
the most elementary basic ideas we have about arithmetic as
long as we treat proportions of lengths that “admit a common
measure.”
That is, imagine that you are given two intervals,
A· − − − − − − ·B
C· − − − − − − − − − − − − ·D
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and you know that there is a certain unit measure, say given
by another interval EF,
E· − − ·F
such that AB and CD are measured by (whole) number multiples of EF. For example, say AB is seventeen EFs long and
CD is four hundred ninety one EFs long; so we may write:
AB/EF = 17/1 and CD/EF = 491/1.
We then say that EF is a common measure for the line segments AB and CD. And, in this particular case, we then comfortably write
AB/CD = 17/491.
But the fun, as I think you all know, is already there at
the very outset of geometry for one of the most fundamental
of geometric proportions—that between the diagonal and the
side of a square
the diagonal AC / the side AB
—was shown to have no common measure,12 and nevertheless
the proportion AC/AB (alias √2/1) was still regarded as a genuine object of study, with the consequence that it forced us—
by the analogy between proportions of lengths and proportions
of numbers—to extend our very idea of what it means to be a
number. It is worth thinking about what it means for geometry
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to guide us in our evolving concept of number.
For all this is a beginning of one of the great analogies,
arithmetic ↔ geometry,
in which each profoundly influences the other. This type of
thinking goes against a view held by Aristotle (a view often
referred to as purity), namely:
We cannot, in demonstrating, pass from one genus to another.
We cannot, for instance, prove geometrical truths by arithmetic.13
9. THE UBIQUITY OF “ANALOGY” IN MATHEMATICAL THOUGHT
In the previous section we have been working through the
idea that straight line segments stand in relation to each other
“just as” numerical quantities stand in relation to each other;
that is, we are now faced with—as we’ve mentioned—one
of the primordial analogies between geometry and arithmetic.
That this “just as” relation is an analogy and not a direct
equality takes some convincing. A curious phenomenon occurs with many mathematical analogies once they get embedded in our thought. If A is seen to be analogous to
something else, B, there is the impetus to think of A and B
as, somehow, special cases of, or aspects of, a single more
encompassing C; and somehow to rethink the analogy as
equality. This switch is a form, but not the only form, of abstraction that is indigenous to mathematical sensibility. Versatile switching of viewpoints is one of the reasons for the
power of a mathematical frame of thought. This replacement
of a pair of analogous contexts for a single encompassing
context occurs so often that people with experience in mathematics have this type of thought engrained in them as second
nature.14
As I mentioned, replacing the two parts of an analogy by
a common generalized concept is powerful and occurs often
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in mathematics, but in other contexts of thought it might seem
a strange thing to do. One rarely does this kind of generalizing with analogies and metaphors that occur in literature:
when thinking about the metaphorical comparison in
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
do we conceive of a more general entity that encompasses
“thee” and “summer’s day” as instances?
10. LENGTH AND STRAIGHT LINE SEGMENTS
You may have noticed that, although I’ve gone on at some
length, I never defined straight line segment. Now, you can
postpone talking about straight line segments if you phrase
things in terms of distance. That is, for any two points P and
Q on the Euclidean plane, if you have a notion of the distance
between P and Q—denote it by dist(P, Q)—you can pick out
the points on the straight line segment between P and Q as
precisely those points X such that
dist(P, Q) = dist(P, X) + dist(X, Q).
But the ancients seem not to have defined straight line segment this way. Euclid’s definition (Def. 4 of Book I) is elegantly enigmatic:
A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself.
This is reminiscent of Plato’s definition of a straight line segment as “whatever has its middle in front of its end” (Parmenides 137e). Here, Plato seems to be taking his straight
line segment up to his eye to view it as you would look
through a telescope, noting that the only thing he sees is its
endpoint. In effect, a straight line is a line of sight.15 A much
later take on the matter defines a straight line segment with
endpoints P and Q as the unique curve joining P and Q such
that among all curves joining P and Q it is the one having
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the shortest length.16 But to make sense of this you must
know, at the very least, what it means for a curve to have a
length. Hence . . .
11. LENGTHS OF SMOOTH CURVES
Nowhere in Euclid’s Elements is the length of a curve that is
not a straight line, or polygonal, segment discussed. The first
nonpolygonal curve whose length was considered (in the
texts that I know) is the circumference (called the perimeter)
of a circle, as studied in Archimedes’s The measurement of
the circle.17 And there the length of the circumference of a
circle enters the mathematical discussion in the context of the
elegant statement about area18 that we have already briefly
discussed in Section 2.
Here it is as Proposition 1 of Archimedes text:
Proposition 1: Every circle is equal to a right-angled
triangle, whose radius [R] is equal to one of the [sides]
around the right angle while the perimeter [i.e., circumference T of the circle] is equal to the base [of the
triangle].
This is proved by approximating the circle by a regular polygon with a large number of sides, and arguing appropriately.
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This is an amazing theorem, of course, but the more specific
reason I’m mentioning it is that it exemplifies the general rule
that the computation of the length of any curvy curve depends—perhaps very indirectly—on relating it to the length
of approximating polygons. This is (quite directly) Archimedes’s method here. He makes use of a result about polygons analogous to Proposition 1, where the polygons in
question will be made to approximate the circle. For a slightly
more extensive sketch of Archimedes’s argument, see the Appendix, Section 20 below.
12.
LENGTHS
OF
CRINKLY CURVES
It has been said that there
is no way to measure the
length of the coastline of
Scotland.
It is just too crinkly,
and the length you find
yourself computing depends on how fine a grid
of measurements you
make—the result getting
longer and longer as the
measurements
grow
finer. Mathematicians
can easily model such an
effect, the most famous
construction being something called the Koch snowflake.
This is a closed curve obtained by taking the limit of an infinite sequence of crinkle-operations. Start with an equilateral
triangle and on an interval one-third the size of each side construct a small equilateral triangle. Here are the first few stages:
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At each stage you are faced with a longer curve, and in the
limit, you have seemingly contained a curve within a finite
region that is so crinkly so as to have—in effect—infinite
length.
13. WHAT IS AREA?
We’ll be interested primarily in the areas of figures in the Euclidean plane. Given our discussion of length it won’t be a
surprise to learn that we will be dealing, again, with proportions; in this case, the proportion of (the area of) one figure
to (the area of) another. Nor will it be much of a surprise to
find that just as straight line segments played a fundamental
role in all discussions of length, so too polygonal figures will
play such a role in our treatment of area.
Euclid is again very helpful here. The first time he discusses area, it is—in his vocabulary— parallelogramatic
area: Proposition 34 of Book I tells us that the diagonal of a
parallelogram bisects the (area of) the parallelogram. He fol-
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lows this up with the propositions (including the beautiful
Proposition 37 I’ve alluded to already) stating that two triangles with the same base and height have the same area, as do
two parallelograms with the same base and height.
And once we have these tools, we are in good shape to
deal with areas of polygonal figures. We can even go further,
as we saw in Section 11 above with Archimedes’s proof that
transforms the area of a circle into the area of a triangle by
means of polygonal figures. (As I’ve said, we will discuss
more in the Appendix, Section 20 below.)
14. AREA AS AN “INVARIANT”
Here is an exercise: make a (short) list of “axioms” that (you
guess) characterizes the concept of ratios of areas for a large
class of (plane) figures. You’ll surely include a number of
basic properties of the intuitive concept of area as hinted at
in section 4 above. But let me start the game by insisting that
one of your axioms be this:
Axiom of Invariance under Euclidean motions:
If A, B are a pair of plane figures for which you
have defined the ratio
area of A / area of B
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(or, for short, A/B) and if A′ is the image of the
figure A under a Euclidean transformation, then
we have the equality:
area of A / area of B = area of A′ / area of B
This is worth thinking about, but this is just a start, and
note that in your personal “theory of area,” part of the chore
is to make precise exactly what class of figures you are going
to be assigning a well-defined area. This might be a bit of
fodder for discussion following the lecture. This exercise was
solved elegantly and in somewhat astounding generality before World War II by the Hungarian mathematician Alfréd
Haar.
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15. SHEARS AND SIMILARITIES
Given a well-working “theory of area,” certain properties will
follow as consequences. For example, here are two basic features—two further invariance properties for the concept of
area.
(1) Shears
By a horizontal shear transformation let’s mean a transformation of the Euclidean plane to itself that keeps every
horizontal line in place, but moves it by a translation that is
dependent on the “height” of that line above the x-axis. That
is, for any point (x, y) in the plane it keeps the y-coordinate
fixed but allows the x coordinate to change by a rule:
x ↦ x + F(y)
where F(y) is some civilized (e.g., continuous) function of y.
This type of motion of the plane keeps all lines parallel to the
x-axis intact, but translates them by different amounts depending on their height. By a general shear transformation
let’s mean an analogous transformation, but with respect to
lines parallel to any fixed line: the line needn’t be the x-axis.
The area of figures is preserved by shears!
Now we’ve actually seen examples of this in our previous discussion: think of Proposition 37 of Book I of Euclid’s Elements. One way of revisiting the content of Proposition 37 is
to note that any two triangles with the same base and same
height can be brought one to another by a shear.
The three-dimensional version of this (where the question
is about volume rather than area) is sometimes referred to as
Cavalieri’s Principle, and is illustrated, for example, by the
following picture, where Cavalieri’s Principle would state
that the two stacks of coins on the next page occupy the same
volume.
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(2) The behavior of area under similarity transformations.
If
• A and A′ are in the class of figures for which you have defined the ratio
area of A / area of A′
and if
• P, Q are points in the figure A with P′, Q′ the corresponding
points in the similar figure A′,
then the square of the ratio
length of PQ / length of P′Q′
is equal to the ratio
area of A / area of A′
This square relation tells us that we are dealing with a twodimensional concept.19
Dimensionality as a concept opens up a host of marvelous
questions to explore, not the least of which is the grand idea,
initially due to Hausdorff, that the full range of possible geometric figures admits a continuous gamut of dimensions—
not just dimensions 0, 1, 2, 3, . . .
That such strange figures possessing non-whole-number
dimensions may have some bearing on questions in the nat-
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ural sciences, economics, and finance—let alone pure mathematics—is the energy behind Benoît Mandelbrot’s wellknown fractals.20
16. I NVARIANCE
AS FEATURE ;
I NVARIANCE
AS CHARAC -
TERIZATION
I have been alluding to the invariance properties of length
and of area. Here is a summary and comparison.
Euclidean Length and the collection of Euclidean motions
suit each other’s needs perfectly:
• The (Euclidean) concept of length is invariant under the
Euclidean motions (i.e., translation, rotations, symmetries
about straight lines, and compositions of these). That is,
these transformations preserve Euclidean distance.
• Any distance relation between points that satisfies certain
natural axioms and that is invariant under any Euclidean
motion is (after appropriate rescaling of its values) equal
to the (Euclidean) concept of length.
• Moreover, any transformation that preserves length between any two points in the plane is a Euclidean motion.
In contrast to length, the invariance properties of (Euclidean) concept of area is stranger:
• The (Euclidean) concept of area is invariant under Euclidean motions, of course— but it is also invariant under
a much greater collection of transformations. For example, any of the shear transformations we have discussed
in the previous section (Section 15) preserves area.
• But as for characterizing this concept by invariance properties, things go the other way: area is characterized (up
to a mere change of scale) by its invariance under translations alone—that’s all the invariance you need invoke
to pinpoint this concept!
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It is quite fitting, then, that Euclid inserts his Proposition
37 in Book I, very early in his discussion of area: the proposition is, of course, a critical tool in establishing the simplest
arguments regarding area—but from a modern perspective,
it also points to one of the deep properties of the concept visà-vis invariance: there is a huge collection of transformations—far more of them than just Euclidean motions—that
preserve area.
17. CLASSICAL QUADRATURE PROBLEMS
The phrase quadrature of . . . loosely refers to the problem
of finding the area of . . . , which usually means expressing—
as some simple numerical ratio—the proportion of the area
of one figure to another figure.21 First, here is a simple example related to Euclid’s Proposition 37 in Book I of the Elements that we discussed earlier, and whose proof can be
found by putting together propositions in Book I of Euclid’s
Elements:22
Proposition: Let P be a parallelogram and T a triangle, such
that P and T have the same base and the same height. Then
P : T = 2 : 1.
This proposition follows the format of what I’ll call a
“Classical Quadrature Problem,” which I want to mean to be
a statement that the proportion of areas (or lengths, or volumes) of two geometric figures, all described entirely in clear
general geometric terms,23 is equal to a specific numerical
ratio.
There are quite a number of classical problems that fit
this mold, that is, problems expressing the proportion of the
areas of two figures, or volumes of two solids (described in
general terms) in terms of specific rational numbers. For example, Proposition 10 of Book XII of Euclid’s Elements tell
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us that
the ratio of the volume of a cone to a cylinder
that have the same base and the same height
is 1 : 3.
This “1 : 3” reoccurs as the ratio of the volume of a conical solid built on any base to the cylindrical solid built on
the same base, and of the same height. The earliest text I
know that “explains” the “1 : 3” in this more general context
is Arithmetica Infinitorum by John Wallis, who did his work
before the full-fledged invention of Calculus; for the people
who know Calculus, this is an exercise.24
As with much of Archimedes’s work there are stories that
surround it. In one of his treatises,25 Archimedes showed that
the ratio of the volume of a sphere to that of
the cylinder that circumscribes it is 2 : 3.
and according to legend, this being his favorite result, he had
it engraved as a sculpture for his tomb.
The most intriguing, and thorny, of the ratios of elementary areas or volumes are the proportion relating the area of
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a circle to that of the square that circumscribes it, and the proportion relating the volume of a sphere to that of the volume
of the cube that circumscribes it. The story of the many attempts to understand these ratios leads us in interesting directions. For example, Hippocrates of Chios in his attempt to
square the circle studied classical quadrature problems relating the areas of lunes (which are figures consisting of the
outer portion of a small circle when superimposed on a larger
one, as in the figure below26)
to areas of triangles constructed in relation to those lunes. He
proves, for example, that the area of the lune (defined as the
region between E and F in the figure above) is equal to the
area of the triangle ABO. His results, however, go significantly beyond this.27
18. WEIGHING AREA
A famous example of a classical quadrature problem is
Archimedes’s “Quadrature of the parabola” and this is dealt
with in not one, but two of his treatises in quite different
ways:
• Propositions 14-16 of The quadrature of the parabola, and
• Proposition 1 of The Method.
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The aim is to “find” the area of a segment of a parabola
bounded by a chord.
We know, of course, that this means finding a proportion
between the red area of the above kind of figure and the area
of some other figure.
This problem is especially illuminating in that Archimedes
offers two approaches to it. The method in The quadrature of
the parabola is via exhaustion, i.e., approximation by polygons—which is a method similar to the one we have already
seen in the Measurement of the circle. This actually does
prove what he wants. But the more curious method is the one
that he himself refers to as a mechanical method—a mode of
reasoning to which he does not give the full authority of
proof: it’s an example of a heuristic28—perhaps the first example of such a not-quite-a-proof of which we have any
record.
A major tool Archimedes uses in this heuristic is his famous “law of the lever,”29 which proclaims that if weights W
and w are placed on the plank that is the lever, at opposite
sides of the fulcrum but at distances D and d from the fulcrum
respectively, then the lever will balance if and only if
D·w=d·W
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“Now what in the world does this have to do with area?” you
might ask. The answer is that Archimedes is engaged here in
an ingenious thought-experiment, where the rules of the game
are dictated by some basic physical truths, and the link to
area (he will also treat volume problems this way as well) is
by a profound analogy. In the figure below, imagine the point
K as the fulcrum of a lever. The plank of the lever is the line
segment HK. Archimedes will construct a triangle FAC deployed onto the plank as shown, and will be weighing (yes,
weighing) the parabolic segment P by weighing in a laminar
manner each line in the parabolic segment parallel to the diameter of the parabola against corresponding lines in the triangle FAC placed at an appropriate distance (at H) on the
other side of the fulcrum. Archimedes is thinking that you
can view the parabolic segment and triangle as swept through
by a continuum of line segments, and the area of these figures
is somehow distributed as slivers dependent on the varying
lengths of these line segments. So he uses his “law of the
lever” to find the balance, thereby concluding his heuristic
argument.
We can discuss this at greater length after the lecture if
you like, but here—a bit more slowly—is a recap of what
I’ve just said, broken up into the steps that Archimedes uses.
In the figure below, which is taken from one of the diagrams for Proposition 1 in the traditional text for The Method,
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the chord is AC and the parabolic arc we are to study is the
curve bounded by A and C. We are interested in the area of
the parabolic segment—let us call it P. Specifically, P is that
region bounded by that chord AC and the parabolic segment
that joins with it. For this task, the figure will give us all the
constructions necessary.
(1) The lever and fulcrum: We are going to weigh things
and balance thing so we need some apparatus. Don’t
mind that it is on a slant; but the straight line through C
and K is going to be our lever, and K will be our fulcrum.
(2) The tangent line: We draw the line CF through C tangent to our parabolic arc at C (I’ll say what F is in a
moment).
(3) Let D be the bisector of AC and construct a straight line
through D parallel to the diameter of the parabola. (Para-
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bolas do have well defined “diameters.” In simple English,
if we draw the full parabola, rather than the piece of it as
occurs in the above figure, the diameter is that straight
line piercing the parabola around which the parabola is
symmetric: in other words, flipping about the diameter
preserves the parabola.) This straight line will intersect
CF at a point that we’ll call E, and the parabolic arc at a
point B. So we can call the line ED.
(4) The basic triangle: Draw the lines AB and BC to form
the basic triangle ABC (which I’ll also call T).
(5) Note that T sits neatly in the parabolic segment P.
Clearly the area of P is bigger than that of T, but how
much bigger? The upshot of this proposition, after
Archimedes finishes proving it, is that we get an exact relationship, namely, P : T :: 4 : 3.
(6) Laminating by lines parallel to the diameter: The line
ED is parallel to the diameter. In the figure above, you
find a couple of other labeled lines parallel to the diameter: MO, and FA. What Archimedes wants to do is to think
of the family of all lines that are parallel to the diameter
and how they slice the figure as they sweep across it.
(Think of them as forming a moving family). We will
refer to any member of that family (and there are finitely
many of them!) as a laminar slice. In a moment we will
be slicing two figures by the lines of this family.
(7) The big triangle: This is FAC, built with edges the line
FA parallel to the diameter and the chord AC. Simple
geometry shows that FAC : T = 4. So, thinking of the formula above, we want to prove that P : FAC = 1 : 3.
(8) Weighing slices on the balance beam: Archimedes
hangs the big triangle FAC from its center of gravity, W,
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on the balance bar HK, as indicated in the figure. He then
considers laminar slices of it, comparing them to laminar
slices (by the same line parallel to the diameter) of the
parabolic segment ABC. He proves that to put each laminar slice of the big triangle FAC in equilibrium with the
corresponding slice of the parabolic segment ABC you
have to “hang” the laminar slice of the parabolic segment
ABC at the point H on the other side of the fulcrum. This
uses, of course, his law of the lever.
(9) Weighing the figures themselves: He then says that he
has hung the parabolic segment at point H and the big triangle at point W and, again, the law of the lever gives the
proportions of their areas.
There is a great amount of geometry that one can learn
by considering this result. First, note that we do indeed have
here an example of what I described as a “classical quadrature
problem” in that (a) we specified each of our figures merely
by generic prescriptions (take any parabolic, and cut it with
any chord, etc.), and (b) we asserted that the proportions of
these figures are given by a fixed rational ratio (4:3). That
alone deserves thought.
You might wonder: how many other interesting generic
geometric proportions can one come up with that have a fixed
rational ratio? Or, perhaps, a fixed ratio involving, say,
surds?30
What is gripping here is how we, using Calculus, could
immediately convert into a genuine theorem what Archimedes
does with his “method,” and how a dyed-in-the-wool Euclidean could also come to terms with this by offering an appropriate menu of axioms and common notions. Each of these
revisions of Archimedes’s work—via Calculus, or via appropriate axioms—would have the effect of reframing
Archimedes’s mechanical analogy by encompassing it with
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something non-analogical that has, perhaps, the authority to
explain more. And yet for me, the lesson offered by The
Method lies—to return to the issue of purity I mentioned previously in Section 7 above—in the unconstrained impurity
of the ideas behind it. The Method works on the strength of a
correctly guiding, but nevertheless difficult to justify, analogy
combining previously disparate intuitions that had originated
in somewhat different domains—the experience one has with
a certain weighing apparatus and the intuition one has via Euclidean geometry.
This type of thinking (working with profound analogies
and relating them to, or turning them into, equalities) is today,
as it was in Archimedes’s time, the source of much of the
most powerful mathematics.
19. HEDGEHOGS AGAIN
We have largely talked about areas of figures in the plane,
except for our excursion in the spherical geometry with the
Banach-Tarsky Paradox. This deserves more discussion,
which I hope will happen in the upcoming conversation period.
20. APPENDIX: SKETCH OF A PROOF OF ARCHIMEDES’ MEASUREMENT OF THE CIRCLE.
To describe Archimedes’s argument succinctly, we need some
vocabulary. Define the radius of a regular polygon to be the
length of a line interval that is obtained by dropping a perpendicular to any side of the polygon from the center N of
the regular polygon. Define the perimeter (or circumference)
of a polygon to be the length of its perimeter, i.e., the sum of
the lengths of the sides of the polygon. If the polygon is a
regular M-gon, then the circumference is M times the length
of any side.
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Here is “my” version of Proposition 1 for regular polygons,31 which is analogous to Archimedes’s Proposition 1 for
circles:
Archimedes’s Proposition 1 adapted to regular
polygons: The area subsumed by a regular polygon
is equal to the area subsumed by a right-angled triangle for which the two right-angle sides are of lengths
equal to the radius and the circumference (respectively) of the polygon.
In contrast to the actual Proposition 1 of the Measurement of
the Circle, this “polygon-version” of Archimedes’s Proposition 1 is now nicely within the scope of Euclidean vocabulary; its proof is within the scope of Euclid as well.
Some comments:
(1) Both this “polygon-version” and Archimedes’s Proposition 1 deal with a right-angled triangle whose base is
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the circumference and whose height is the radius of the
figure to which this triangle is being compared. One
could rephrase these propositions by omitting the requirement that the triangle be right-angled.
(2) A visual proof of this polygonal proposition can be
effected simply by cutting and “straightening out to a
line” the perimeter of the polygon, and then arguing that
this paper-doll figure has the same area as the triangle
displayed below.32 (In the figure below we illustrate this
with a 3-gon, otherwise known as a triangle, which produces, when cut-and straightened-out, the three triangles
in a line labeled A,B,C. Each of these triangles have the
same area as the three triangles that make up the large triangle in the lower figure, which has as base the perimeter
and as height the radius.) This relies only the fact that the
area of a triangle depends only on its base and height.
NOTES
1. Since you read Archimedes’s On the equilibrium of planes in Freshman
Laboratory, this may not come as a complete surprise.
2. I am grateful to Paul Van Koughnett who drew most of the figures, and
to Paul Dry for helpful and incisive comments about early drafts of these
notes.
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3. Straight-limbed geometry;
In her arts’ ingeny
Our wits were sharp and keen.
From “Mark Antony,” a poem by John Cleveland (1613-1658). See The
Best Poems of the English language: From Chaucer through Robert
Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 154-55.
4. A sketch of its proof is in the Appendix, Section 20 below.
5. The ∪ (“cup”) notation means “union.” That is, if X and Y are sets, then
X ∪ Y is the set whose members are either members of X or members of
Y or members of both X and Y.
6. For people who are familiar with group theory, a fairly complete description of what is going can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox.
7. A delightful book that discusses calculations of this sort, and of more
theoretical sorts, is John Bryant and Chris Sangwin, How Round is Your
Circle? Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011.)
8. The composite image in Fig. 6 was created by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The X-ray component was produced by NASA/CXC/U.Mich./
S.Oey; the Infrared component by NASA/JPL, and the optical component
by ESO/WFI/2.2-m.
9. Fig. 7 is drawn from Euclid’s Element of Geometry, an edition of the
Greek text with new English translation by Richard Fitzpatrick (Austin:
Richard Fitzpatrick, 2007), 8.
10. Two cowboys:
A: “My ranch is so big I can ride Old Paint from morning to night
and still not cover it.”
B: “I know exactly how you feel. My horse is like that too!”
11. This issue is taken up by Kant from a slant perspective. (That’s typical
for Kant.) In Book I, Sections 25 and 26 of The Critique of Judgment, in
discussing what he calls the mathematical sublime, he points out that in
comprehending in our imagination a specific magnitude (say, this pole is
ten feet long) one is engaging in two acts, of different natures: there is
the mathematical one of counting a number of feet (and comprehending
that act of counting) and then there is the essentially aesthetic one of comprehending—or internalizing in some way or other—what a foot is. From
Kant’s perspective, then, considering a proportion, per se, is an act that
extracts the purely mathematical aspect of “comprehension of a magni-
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tude” from the underlying, and otherwise unavoidable, aesthetic aspect:
comprehending the unit. Of course, it is the latter that interests him.
12. At least if we insist that both intervals be measured by a whole number
of multiples of the chosen “common measure.”
13. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 75a29-75b12.
14. Here is an important example of this that originated over a century
ago, and is everywhere to be seen in modern mathematics: numbers are
analogous to functions. There are whole branches of mathematics
where these concepts are treated as not merely analogous, but as particular exemplars of a larger encompassing concept.
15. See, for example, the marvelous essay on this subject in Euclid: The
Thirteen Books of the Elements, ed. Thomas Heath, 3 vols. (Mineola, New
York: Dover Publications, 1956), 165-69.
16. This property distinguishes straight line segments as geodesics in
modern terminology.
17. For source material, various translations, commentary, and more related texts, please go to:
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k53966
(which is on the “Teaching” page of my web site).
18. That the ratio of the area of a circle to the length of its circumference
is a simple expression in terms of its radius is what is behind the beauty
of Proposition 1. This is a phenomenon that proliferates in higher dimensions; e.g., the ratio of the volume of a sphere to its surface area is, similarly, a simple expression in terms of its radius. This is worth pondering.
19. But neither of the above “invariance properties” need be, nor should
be, included as axioms, for they will follow from your list of axioms (if
you’ve formulated them correctly).
20. See Benoît Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982).
21. Quadrature is the basic topic in the oldest existent Greek text, that of
Hippocrates of Chios.
22. Or better, by doing it yourself.
23. This is admittedly a bit vague, but I hope the examples convey the
kind of problem I’m referring to.
24. Hint: ∫ x2 dx = ⅓ x3 when evaluated over the interval 0 to x.
25. On the Sphere and Cylinder I.
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26. This figure can be found online at:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Lune.svg
27. I think that there are truly interesting (entirely mathematical, not historical) issues that lurk in this, and it is one of my plans to understand it
in depth.
28. This is especially fitting since it comes from the pen of the celebrated
shouter of “Eureka,” which derives from the same root.
29. There is an extensive earlier tradition of discussion about equilibrium
and disequilibrium on a balance, and on the action of levers of all sorts.
For example, this observation from Part Seven of Aristotle’s On the motion of animals: “A small change occurring at the center makes great and
numerous changes at the circumference, just as by shifting the rudder a
hair’s breadth you get a wide deviation at the prow.” I want to thank Jean
de Groot for conversations about this; I look forward to her forthcoming
commentary on Aristotle’s Mechanics.
There is also, to be sure, an extensive later tradition on this topic—
notably, Ernst Mach’s marvelous critique of the “law” itself, in the Introduction and first few chapters of his wonderful book The Science of
Mechanics (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1919.)
30. That is, square roots. This is not an idle question.
31. I say “my” version because, even though it is—in my opinion—implicitly invoked in Archimedes’s text, it isn’t dwelt on.
32. I’m thankful to Jim Carlson for this suggestion.
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ESSAYS & LECTURES
Some Reflections on Darwin
and C.S. Peirce
Curtis Wilson and Chaninah Maschler
Introduction
On a Saturday morning in the mid-1950s, I attended a St.
John’s faculty seminar on a selected reading from Darwin’s
Origin of Species. What chiefly remains in memory is an
overall impression: the discussion was halting and desultory,
failing to get airborne. In those days the available edition of
the Origin was the sixth and last (1872); compared with the
first edition of 1859, it suffers from excessive backing and
filling, Darwin’s attempts to answer his critics. Yet, even had
our text been from the sprightlier first edition, I doubt our
discussion would have got off the ground. After one spell of
silence a senior tutor spoke up to ask: Isn’t it [Darwin’s theory]
just a hypothesis? The implication, I thought, was: Can’t we
just ignore the whole idea?
The short answer to that second question is: we can’t, because Darwin’s theory is the grand working hypothesis (yes,
it’s a hypothesis!) of biologists everywhere, and as aspirant
generalists at St. John’s, we need to seek out its meaning. The
search can be exhilarating as well as disquieting.
Major features of Darwin’s theory are contained in his
phrase “descent with modification through natural selection.”
The descent of present-day organisms from organisms of preCurtis Wilson was a long-time tutor, and twice Dean, at St. John’s College
in Annapolis. Sadly, he passed away on 24 August 2012, shortly after this
article was completed. Chanina Maschler is tutor emerita at St. John’s
College in Annapolis. The Introduction, in the form of first-person reminiscences, was written by Mr. Wilson. Part 1 is by Ms. Maschler. The last
three parts were worked out by the two authors jointly.
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ceding generations is obvious; Darwin requires us to keep
this fact in focus. The offspring inherit traits from their parents, but some variation occurs. Since far more offspring are
produced than can survive and reproduce, the variants best
suited to surviving and reproducing are the ones that win out.
Relative to a given environment, the surviving form will be
better adapted than the forms that failed. Darwin saw this
process as leading to diversification of kinds, or speciation,
as indicated by the title of his book, On the Origin of Species.1
Darwin opened his first notebook on “Transmutation of
Species” in July, 1837. In a sustained effort of thought from
1837 to 1844, he constructed the theory. The empirical evidence consisted chiefly of the biological specimens that he
had observed and collected during his tour as naturalist
aboard H.M.S. Beagle, from Dec. 27, 1831 to Oct. 2, 1836.
(This voyage was sent out to chart the coasts of South America and determine longitudes round the globe; taking along a
naturalist was an after-thought of the captain’s.)
At the beginning of the Beagle voyage, Darwin was a few
weeks short of his twenty-third birthday. So far in his life he
had had no clear goal. Enrolled in medical school at age sixteen in Edinburgh, he dropped out, unable to endure seeing
patients in pain. His father (a physician, skeptical in religion)
then sent him to Cambridge with the idea that he might fit
himself out to become a country parson, but young Darwin
found the course of study uninteresting. He completed the
A.B. degree, but later acknowledged that his time at Cambridge was mostly wasted. A chance by-product of it was a
friendship with John S. Henslow, the professor of botany.
Henslow it was who arranged Darwin’s being offered the post
of naturalist on the Beagle. Darwin’s father flatly rejected the
idea at first, but Josiah Wedgewood, young Darwin’s maternal uncle, persuaded him to change his mind.
In hindsight, we can say that young Darwin was ad-
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mirably suited to his new post. From boyhood he had been a
persistent collector of a variety of objects, from stamps to
beetles. As a naturalist he would prove to have an unstoppable drive toward theoretical understanding, seeking to connect the dots between his numerous observations. The voyage
of the Beagle, proceeding first to the coasts of South America
and the nearby islands, could not have been more aptly
planned to yield observations supporting the theory that he
would develop. The observations were chiefly of three types.2
Fossils from South America were found to be closely related
to living fauna of that continent, rather than to contemporaneous fossils from elsewhere. Animals of the different climatic zones of South America were related to each other
rather than to animals of the same climatic zones on other
continents. Faunas of nearby islands (Falkland, Galapagos)
were closely related to those of the nearest mainland; and on
different islands of the same island group were closely related. These observations could be accounted for on Darwin’s
theory; on the opposing theory of fixed species they remained
unintelligible.
But why the uproar over Darwin’s Origin, and why does
it still today produce uneasiness? It is not merely that it appears contrary to the creation story in Genesis. As John
Dewey put it in 1910:3
That the publication of the Origin of Species marked an
epoch in the development of the natural sciences is well
known to the layman. That the combination of the very
words origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt
and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in
the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand
years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change
and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands
upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the
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forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species
introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound
to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
More recently Ernst Mayr has characterized Darwin’s
new way of thinking as “population thinking,” and the mode
of thinking prevalent earlier as “typological thinking”:
Typological thinking, no doubt, had its roots in the earliest
efforts of primitive man to classify the bewildering diversity of nature into categories. The eidos of Plato is the formal philosophical codification of this form of thinking.
According to it, there are a limited number of fixed, unchangeable “ideas” underlying the observed variability,
with the eidos (idea) being the only thing that is fixed and
real, while the observed variability has no more reality than
the shadows of an object on a cave wall. . . .
The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically
opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist
stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world.
What is true for the human species—that no two individuals are alike—is equally true for all other species of animals and plants. . . . All organisms and organic phenomena
are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind
of organic entities, form populations, of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation.
Averages are merely statistical abstractions, only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and
of the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion,
while for the populationist, the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking
at nature could be more different.4
Mayr’s abruptly nominalist “take” on the nature of
species is not required by Darwin’s theory, nor do all biolo-
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91
gists espouse it.5 One thing the theory does require is a new
attention to individual differences. Species may result from
processes that are fundamentally statistical, and yet be real.
For young Darwin, gentleman naturalist, noting individual
differences came naturally. His curiosity about connections
may also have been natural to him, but he developed it into a
powerful drive toward unifying theory.
Before coming to St. John’s in 1948, I had taken undergraduate courses in zoology and embryology in which Darwin’s theory was referred to; I accepted the theory as established. An
occasion for reading Darwin’s Origin had not arisen. On becoming a St. John’s tutor, I immersed myself chiefly in problems of the laboratory on the side of physical science, to
which my interests inclined me and for which my more recent
graduate studies in the history of science to some degree prepared me.
In multiple ways, during my early years at St. John’s, I
took my cue from Jacob Klein. My admiration for him was
unbounded. I respected him for his scholarly knowledge,
shrewdness, and sharp discernment. It was he who drew the
College community out of its 1948-49 leadership crisis and
communal slough of despond in the wake of Barr’s and
Buchanan’s departure, and he did so single-handedly and
spiritedly. During his deanship (1949-1958), he gave the College a new lease on life, a new stability, and an incentive to
move forward: testing, selecting, and improving the Program.
Our debt to him is incalculable.
As dean, Mr. Klein in the opening lecture each year undertook to address the question of what we were doing here,
what liberal education was. It was with trepidation, he told
us, that he addressed this question. Typically, his lecture took
a Platonic turn, as when he described the metastrophē, or turning round, of the prisoner in the cave of Plato’s Republic. The
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former prisoner had to be brought to recognize that the shadows he had previously taken for truth were in fact only images of conventional images. Getting at the truth was a matter
of penetrating beyond that scrim of images.
During the academic year 1954-55 I was co-leader with
Mr. Klein (“Jasha” as we tutors called him) of a senior seminar. On one evening the assignment was from Darwin’s Origin—this was perhaps the only place in the program where
Darwin’s theory was addressed in those days. I recall nothing
of the discussion, but at its end Jasha asked the students: Did
they consider Darwin’s book important to their lives? One
after another they replied with a decisive “No!”—a flood of
denial.
Though failing to lodge a protest, I thought the indifference to Darwin a mistake, and I was disappointed by Jasha’s
standoffishness with respect to it. My opinion was reinforced
in conversations I had at the time with Allen Clark, a Ford
Foundation intern at the College in the years 1954-56.6 Clark
had done graduate studies at Harvard on American pragmatism, reading widely in the writings of C.S. Peirce, William
James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the Harvard-educated
Spanish émigré George Santayana. He was especially attracted to the writings of Peirce, who had been both a working scientist and a close student of philosophy, and had set
himself to making philosophical sense of natural science.
Peirce had embraced Darwin’s theory and interpreted it.
Attempting to catch up with Clark in philosophy, I began
reading such writings of Peirce as were readily available.
These were two collections of essays, the earliest assembled
by Morris R. Cohen under the title Chance, Love, and Logic,
and a later one due to Justus Buchler, The Philosophy of
Peirce. There were also the six volumes of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, published by Harvard Uni-
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93
versity Press in 1931-35 under the editorship of Hartshorne
and Weiss, but these were formidable, leaving the inquirer
puzzled as to where to get a leg up or a handhold.
My enthusiasm for Peirce was challenged one summer
evening in the later 1950s. During an informal discussion of
a Peirce essay at Jasha’s home, Jasha took exception to
Peirce’s “Monism,” the doctrine that the world is made of a
single stuff. Jasha saw this doctrine as contradicted by the intentionality of human thought. What was that?
The doctrine had been put forward by the Austrian
philosopher Franz Brentano in 1874.7 According to Brentano,
to think is to think of or about something. Analogously, to
fear or hope entails that there are objects (Jasha sometimes
called them “targets”) of these modes of consciousness. Their
objects need not be existents in the empirical world. I can
think of a unicorn, or imagine riding like Harry Potter on a
broom stick, or fear an imagined bogeyman in a closet.
Brentano therefore spoke of “intentional inexistence,” meaning that such an object is somehow contained in the thought
(cogitatio à la Descartes!) of which it is the object. Brentano
sought to make Intentionality definitive of the mental. He
concluded that mind, because of its intentionality, is irreducible to the physical.
Edmund Husserl, one of Jasha’s teachers, had been a student of Brentano. For Husserl, Brentano’s idea of intentionality became the basis of a new science which he called
Phenomenology. Husserl followed Brentano in treating intentionality as coextensive with the mental, and in asserting
the impossibility of a naturalistic explanation of intentional
acts. Jasha’s rejection of Peirce’s Monism, I am guessing,
stemmed from his acceptance, at least in part, of Husserlian
philosophy.8
Jasha may have been unaware that what he regarded as
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Peirce’s Ontological Monism was an application of the
maxim Do not block the road of inquiry. Dualism, as Peirce
saw it, drew a line in the sand; naturalistic explanations were
guaranteed to be impossible beyond this line. The line in the
sand inevitably becomes a dare.
But I was still far in those days from understanding how
the various parts of Peirce’s thinking held together—or failed
to. A major difficulty with the Cohen and Buchler collections
and with The Collected Papers was that they did not present
Peirce’s papers in their order of composition. The editors did
not sufficiently appreciate that Peirce’s ideas developed over
time. Throughout his life, Peirce’s thought (like science as he
understood it) was a work in progress.9 When he died in 1914
he had not completed any single major work. During his last
active decade, however, he succeeded in resolving certain
major difficulties in his earlier philosophizing. A chronological edition of his work—published papers, lectures, and unpublished notes and correspondence—has now been
undertaken by Indiana University Press. Of these post-1950
developments I was made aware only recently. And their full
import did not dawn on me until encountering a book by the
Chairman of the Board of Advisers to the Peirce Edition Project, Thomas Short. It is Peirce’s Theory of Signs.10
Parts 1 and 2 of our essay provide an account of Peirce’s
pragmatism and of his progress from Kantian idealism to scientific realism. In Parts 3 and 4, with the help of Short’s
analysis, we shall indicate how Peirce accounts naturalistically for the emergence of intentionality and conscious purposefulness in the course of evolution.
Part 1. Peirce and Pragmatism
Peirce is the man through whom the word “pragmatism” enters upon the world scene as a philosophic term. According
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to his own recollection,11 confirmed by the report of his friend
William James,12 this happened in the early 1870s, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amongst a group of young Harvard
men, who used to meet for philosophical discussion. Later in
the 1870s the opinions Peirce had defended viva voce were
issued in print in two articles, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877)
and “How to Make our Ideas Clear” (1878).13 The first of
these two essays prefigured what Peirce would in the course
of a life-time come to say about science as an enterprise of
ongoing inquiry rather than a collection of upshots of investigation.14 The second was sent into the world, as the title indicates, as advice on how to go about gaining greater
intellectual control over one’s ideas than is furnished by the
ability correctly to apply, or even verbally to define them.
The advice runs as follows: “Consider what effects, which
might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the
object of our conceptions to have. Then our conception of
these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
Note that the first person plural is out front. Also, that conceiving remains irreducible!
Peirce never became a full-time professor. Not even at
Johns Hopkins, where John Dewey was briefly a student in
his logic class. But just about every major American author
in professional philosophy—William James, Josiah Royce,
John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, C.I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars—acknowledges being profoundly indebted to Peirce’s
teachings, pragmatism being one of these.
Pragmatism is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine any truth of things. It is merely a
method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of
abstract concepts. All pragmatists of whatsoever stripe will
cordially assent to that statement. As to the ulterior and indirect effects of practicing the pragmatistic method, that
is quite another affair.15
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Some of the Cambridge friends whom Peirce initially
persuaded to try bringing a laboratory scientist’s “let’s try it
and see” approach to bear on the study of “hard words,” particularly those used in metaphysics, suggested that he call
what he was offering “practicism” or “practicalism.” No,
Peirce responded, he had learned philosophy from Kant, and
in Kant the terms praktisch and pragmatisch were “as far
apart as the poles.”16 Praktisch belongs to the region of
thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can make
sure of solid ground under his feet. Pragmatisch expresses a
relation to some definite human purpose. “Now quite the
most striking feature of the new theory [is] its recognition of
an inseparable connection between rational cognition and
human purpose.”17
Here are two more statements of what pragmatism
amounts to:
I understand pragmatism to be a method of ascertaining the
meanings, not of all ideas, but only of what I call “intellectual concepts,” that is to say, of those upon the structure of
which arguments concerning objective fact may hinge. Had
the light which, as things are, excites in us the sensation of
blue, always excited the sense of red, and vice versa, however great a difference that might have made in our feelings,
it could have made none in the force of any argument. In
this respect, the qualities of hard and soft strikingly contrast
with those of red and blue. . . . My pragmatism, having
nothing to do with qualities of feeling, permits me to hold
that the predication of such a quality is just what it seems,
and has nothing to do with anything else. . . . Intellectual
concepts, however, the only sign-burdens that are properly
denominated “concepts”—essentially carry some implication concerning the general behavior either of some conscious being or of some inanimate object, and so convey
more, not merely than any feeling, but more too than any
existential fact, namely, the “would-acts” of habitual behavior; and no agglomeration of actual happenings can ever
completely fill up the meaning of a “would be.”18
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Again,
Pragmaticism19 consists in holding that the purport of any
concept is its conceived bearing upon our conduct. How,
then, does the Past bear upon conduct? The answer is selfevident: whenever we set out to do anything, we “go upon,”
we base our conduct on facts already known, and for these
we can only draw upon our memory. It is true that we may
institute a new investigation for the purpose; but its discoveries will only become applicable to conduct after they
have been made and reduced to a memorial maxim. In
short, the Past is the sole storehouse of all our knowledge.
When we say that we know that some state of things exists,
we mean that it used to exist, whether just long enough for
the news to reach the brain and be retransmitted to tongue
or pen or longer ago. . . . How does the Future bear upon
conduct? The answer is that future facts are the only facts
that we can, in a measure, control. . . . What is the bearing
of the Present instant upon conduct? . . . There is no time
in the Present for any inference at all, least of all for inference concerning that very instant. Consequently the present object must be an external object, if there be any
objective reference in it. The attitude of the present is either
conative or perceptive.20
Part 2. Peirce’s Transition from an Initial Idealism
to Scientific Realism
As Peirce has told us, he learned philosophy from Kant. Yet
from the start there was one Kantian doctrine he could not
stomach: the doctrine of “things-in-themselves” (Dinge an
sich) somehow standing behind the objects we meet with in
experience—inaccessible beings of which, Kant says, we
must always remain ignorant. In papers of the late 1860s,
Peirce insisted that all of our cognitions are signs, and that
each sign refers to a previous sign:
At any moment we are in possession of certain information, that is, of cognitions which have been logically de-
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rived by induction and hypothesis from previous cognitions which are less general, less distinct, and of which we
have a less lively consciousness. These in their turn have
been derived from others still less general, less distinct,
and less vivid; and so on back to the ideal first, which is
quite singular and quite out of consciousness. The ideal
first is the particular thing-in-itself. It does not exist as
such.21
According to Peirce at this stage, all thoughts are of one
or another degree of generality, each referring to an earlier
thought, and none immediately to its object. Only if a cognition were immediately of its object, could it be certain, hence
an intuition. Our lack of intuition, as thus argued by Peirce,
was his initial ground for rejecting Descartes’ Cogito, ergo
sum. The real, as Peirce conceived it at this time, was an ideal
limit to a series of thoughts, a limit to be reached in the future:
The real . . . is that which, sooner or later, information and
reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore
independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very
origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits.22
Peirce here conceived all conceiving as in an infinite sequence of thoughts, stretching backward toward the non-existent
thing-in-itself (an external limit) and forward toward the real, to
be achieved at some future time (a limit located within the
thought sequence). A consequence was that any individual, considered as an “it” other than the universals true of it, is unreal.
With this consequence of his late-1860s theory of knowledge, Peirce was uncomfortable. If the aim is to get outside one’s
head and find a purchase on reality, it is indeed disastrous.23
Peirce at last found a way out in his “The Fixation of
Belief” of 1877:
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To satisfy our doubts . . . it is necessary that a method
should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by
nothing human, but by some external permanency—by
something on which our thinking has no effect. Such is the
method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis . . . is this:
There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect
our senses according to regular law. . . .24
In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Peirce combined the hypothesis of real things on which our thinking has
no effect with his earlier notion of indefinite progress toward
human knowledge of the real:
Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic
views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a
force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. . . . The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed
to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth,
and the object represented in this opinion is the real.25
In the years 1879-1884, Peirce was a part-time lecturer
in logic at the Johns Hopkins University, and he and his students O.H. Mitchell and Christine Ladd-Franklin (independently of Frege in Germany) introduced quantifiers into
predicate logic and the logic of relations. Thus the familiar
universal and particular propositions of Aristotelian logic,
“All S is P,” “Some S is P,” come to be replaced by
(x)(Sx ⊃ Px) [read: For all x, if x is S, then x is P], and
(Ǝ x) (Sx·Px) [read: There is an x such that x is S and x is P],
where we have used a notation now standard. Note that the
“x” denotes an individual in whatever universe of discourse,
fictional or real, we have entered upon, without any presumption that the essence of this individual is known to us. In relational logic, which is needed for mathematics, indices are
crucial for representing dyadic, triadic, n-adic relations, e.g.,
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Rxy (read: x bears the relation R to y). All our thinking, according to Peirce in the 1880s and later, is laced with indexical elements, tying discourse to the world we’re in. The
index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” Like such words
as “here,” “now,” “this,” it directs the mind to the object denoted.
The discovery of the nature and indispensability of indices led to a vast extension of Peirce’s understanding of
signs and significance (the science of semeiotic he was seeking to build). An index is anything that compels or channels
attention in a particular direction. The act of attention responding to an index does not have to be a component of a
thought. For instance a driver, on seeing a stoplight go red,
may brake automatically without thinking; he thus interprets
the red light as a command. Therefore the effect of a sign, in
triggering an interpretation, need not be a thought; it can be
an action or a feeling. The extension of semeiotic to nonhuman interpreters is now in the offing, as will become apparent
in Part 4 below.
At the same time, Peirce has burst out of the closed-in
idealism of his earlier theory of knowledge. The result is what
we may call Scientific Realism.
Part 3. Anisotropic Processes
Just twelve years after the first copies of Origin of Species
landed in the U.S.A., Peirce wrote:
Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The same thing had been done in a widely different
branch of science, the theory of gases. Though unable to
say what the movements of any particular molecule of a
gas would be on a certain hypothesis regarding the constitution of this class of bodies, Clausius and Maxwell [had
been able, eight years before the publication of Darwin’s
immortal work], by the application of the doctrine of prob-
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abilities, to predict that in the long run such and such a proportion of the molecules would, under the given circumstances, acquire such and such velocities; that there would
take place, every second, such and such a number of collisions, etc.; and from these propositions [they] were able
to deduce certain properties of gases, especially in regard
to their heat relations. In like manner, Darwin, while unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in any individual case will be, demonstrates that in
the long run they will adapt animals to their circumstances.26
Thus Peirce took explanation in both statistical mechanics
and Darwinian natural selection to be statistical. He meant,
Short argues, irreducibly statistical, and not mechanistic.27
Analyzed logically, a mechanistic explanation starts from a
particular disposition of certain bodies at some time, and by
applying general laws of mechanics, gravitation, chemistry,
electromagnetism, or other general theory, derives the particular disposition of these bodies at a later time. “Particular”
here is opposed to “general.” The explanations of Celestial
Mechanics are of this kind. The celestial mechanician, starting from the positions and velocities of the bodies in the solar
system at one instant, and assuming gravitational theory,
computes the positions and velocities of these bodies at a later
instant. If we should propose to ourselves a similar calculation for molecules of a gas confined in a container, we would
find it impracticable. The number of molecules is too large
(in a cubic centimeter of gas at one atmosphere of pressure
and 0°C. that number is about 2.7 × 1019, or 27 quintillion).
Ascertaining the positions and velocities of all these molecules at a specified “initial” instant is humanly impossible.
Moreover, the motions are not governed by a single law like
gravitation, but involve collisions of the molecules with each
other and the walls of the container; these introduce discontinuities that are difficult to take into account.
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But the crucial conclusion is this: even if such a computation were possible, it would not yield the conclusion for
which statistical mechanics argues. Statistical mechanics
seeks to establish that notably non-uniform distributions of
molecules in the gas will in time be replaced by a more uniform distribution, with reduction in the spread of velocities
amongst the molecules. The statistical argument invokes
probability.
How to understand probability in this context is by no
means settled, and we shall give only a rough indication of
the type of solution that is believed necessary.28 Consider a
system of n molecules of gas contained in a volume V. Let V
be divided into a large number m of equal cells, m being less
than n (if n is in quintillions, m could be in the millions or
billions). If the molecules were distributed with perfect uniformity throughout V, then each cell would contain n/m molecules. This distribution is a particular microstate—an
extremely special one, hence unlikely. We would expect that,
in most imaginable distributions, the numbers of molecules
in different cells would be different. To take this likelihood
into account, consider microstates in which the number of
molecules in all cells falls within the range n/m ± e, where e
is much less than n/m. Let the class of all microstates thus
characterized be called C, and let the complementary class,
or class of all microstates in which the number of molecules
in some cells falls outside the range n/m ± e, be called Cʹ′.
In the work of the earlier theorists, distinguishable microstates compatible with the overall energy of the gas were
assigned equal probabilities, since no reason presented itself
for assigning different probabilities to different microstates.
Later theorists sought grounds other than “equal ignorance”
for assigning probabilities to microstates. Whatever the mode
of assigning probabilities, the outcome must show the gas
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progressing from less uniform to more uniform distributions,
both spatially and with respect to the spread of velocities. For
that is the empirical result: a quantity of gas under high pressure, when let into an evacuated chamber, spreads out
through the chamber and is soon more homogeneously distributed, with a uniform temperature and pressure lower than
the original temperature and pressure.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics extends this kind
of reasoning to all natural systems. It says that in any closed
system the processes have a direction: they progress toward
greater homogeneity and reduced capacity to do mechanical
work.29 For processes that are directional in time, Short uses
the term anisotropic (a-privative + iso, “equal” + tropos, “direction”). Anisotropic processes are defined by the type toward which they progress. We shall see that there are
anisotropic processes other than those that instantiate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. All such processes, however,
differ from mechanical processes, which proceed from a particular configuration to a particular configuration.
Whether the universe is a closed system we do not know,
but everywhere in the observable world we see the effects of
the Second Law, the “degradation of energy.” Nevertheless,
we also see that new forms of order, though improbable,
sometimes emerge. They are produced in open systems that
absorb energy from, and discard unused matter and energy
to, the environment. Ilya Prigogine has described such forms
of order, calling them “dissipative systems.”30 Locally, in the
newly created form, the second law appears to be violated,
but if account is taken of the exhausted fuel and other waste
materials ejected to the environment, the second law is found
to hold. Higher forms of order come to be at the expense of
a decrease in order elsewhere, an increase in homogeneity
and a lessened capacity to produce novelty.
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The first coming-to-be of living forms in the universe presumably occurred in the manner of Prigogine’s “dissipative
systems.” Such is the hypothesis generally accepted by scientists today. Living systems differ from the cases studied by
Prigogine in their greater complexity and in having the capacity to self-replicate. In 1953 the graduate student S.L.
Miller under the guidance of H.C. Urey circulated a mixture
of methane, ammonia, water vapor, and hydrogen through a
liquid water solution, and elsewhere in the apparatus continuously passed an electrical discharge through the vaporous
mixture. After several days the water solution changed color,
and was found to contain a mixture of amino acids, the essential constituents of proteins. Since then, most if not all of
the essential building-blocks of proteins, carbohydrates, and
nucleic acids have been produced under conditions similar to
those obtaining when the Earth was young (the atmosphere
needs to be free of oxidizing agents such as oxygen). The sequences of conditions and chemical pathways by which these
building-blocks may have been assembled into a living cell
remain matters of speculation.
Darwin’s evolutionary theory, taking the existence of living things as given, goes on to show how, chiefly but not
solely by means of natural selection,31 biological evolution
can occur. Our little word “can” here goes to signal what
Nicholas Maistrellis calls “the highly theoretical, and even
speculative character” of Origin chapter 4, dedicated to expounding that and how Natural Selection “works.”
We should not expect a series of examples of natural selection designed to win us over to his theory on purely empirical grounds. Even if Darwin had wanted to proceed in
that way, he could not have done so, for such examples do
not exist—or at least were not known to Darwin. . . . Notice
that all the examples of natural selection in this chapter are,
as Darwin repeatedly acknowledges, imaginary ones.32
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Contemporary readers of Darwin have sometimes become so blasé about the shocking idea that order may emerge
out of disorder that they don’t notice how subtle, complex,
and distributed the over-all argument of Origin is. We have
found C. Kenneth Waters’ “The arguments in the Origin of
Species,” along with the other essays included in Part 1: Darwin’s Theorizing of The Cambridge Companion to Darwin,
particularly conducive to waking us up.
Peirce wrote, in A Guess at the Riddle (1887):
Whether the part played by natural selection and the survival of the fittest in the production of species be large or
small, there remains little doubt that the Darwinian theory
indicates a real cause, which tends to adapt animal and
vegetable forms to their environment. A remarkable feature
of it is that it shows how merely fortuitous variations of
individuals together with merely fortuitous mishaps to
them would, under the action of heredity, result, not in
mere irregularity, nor even in statistical constancy, but in
indefinite progress toward a better adaptation of means to
ends.33
A little later in this same manuscript Peirce sums up the basic
idea of Darwinian selection as follows:
There are just three factors in the process of natural selection; to wit: 1st, the principle of individual variation or
sporting; 2nd, the principle of hereditary transmission . . . ;
and 3rd, the principle of elimination of unfavorable characters.34
Darwin and Peirce lacked the benefit of a workable theory of inheritance. Nothing like our genetics was available
to them. We today single out genetic make-up as the causally
significant locale of “sporting,” And Peirce’s phrase, “elimination of unfavorable characters,” is replaced in more recent
neo-Darwinian formulations by the phrase “relative reproductive success,” meaning, the having of more numerous off-
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spring. The process is statistical: If one variant of a species
has more numerous offspring than do others, and if in addition these offspring survive to reproduce, the original variant,
possessed of one or more genetic alleles (alternative forms
of a gene), is more successful in propagating its genome to
later generations.
The hypothesis of Natural Selection confers little in the
way of predictive power. Its chief value is to provide a posthoc explanation of what has occurred. For example, visual
acuity is crucial to the survival of both predators and prey.
Evidently predators are better off with eyes in the front of
their heads as they pursue prey, and potential prey are better
off with eyes on the sides of their heads to detect predators
coming from any quarter. Another example: Flowers evolved
as a device by which plants induce animals to transport their
pollen (hence sperm) to the egg cells. The evolutionarily
older plants had been pollinated by the wind. The more attractive the plants were to an insect, the more frequently they
would be visited and the more seeds they would produce.
Any chance variation that made the visits more frequent or
made pollination more efficient offered immediate advantages.35
We can only guess at the detailed processes by which such
adaptations have been brought about. What Darwin gives us
is a heuristic for research, not a set of biological laws.36 Partly
on this account, because Darwinian explanation does not fit
the model of explanation in mechanics, it has taken a long
time before philosophers of science became willing to award
a comparable degree of intellectual dignity to Darwinian as
to Galilean and Newtonian science. The books listed in the
Bibliography appended to Maistrellis’s Selections help overcome the physics envy that stands in the way of appreciating
Darwin. Particularly helpful have been Sober’s persevering
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efforts to clarify and show the interconnections amongst the
fundamental concepts of Fitness, Function, Adaptation, and
Selection, while steadily reminding us of the ineliminably
probabilistic character of most of the theorizing of modern
evolutionary biology.
One of Sober’s helps into the saddle is his distinction between selection for and selection of:
Selection-for is a causal concept. To say that there is selection for trait T in a population means that having T
causes organisms to survive and reproduce better (so having the alternative(s) to T that are present in the population
causes organisms to survive and reproduce worse). In contrast, to say that there is selection of trait T just means that
individuals with T have a higher average fitness than do
individuals who lack T.37
Here is an illustration of the contrasting terms being put to
use:
Worms improve the soil, but that does not mean that their
digestive systems are adaptations for soil improvement;
rather, the worm gut evolved to help individual worms survive and reproduce. The benefit that the ecosystem receives is a fortuitous benefit—a useful side-effect
unrelated to what caused the trait to evolve. The gut’s ability to extract nutrition for individual worms is what the gut
is an adaptation for.38
To balance our earlier quotation from Maistrellis stressing
the not strictly empirically encountered character of Darwin’s
examples in his chapter about natural selection-at-work, notice that Sober feels quite comfortable about urging against
the philosopher Jerry Fodor, a critic of Darwinism, that “biologists often think they have excellent evidence for saying
that agricultural pests experienced selection for DDT resistance, [or] that there has been selection for dark coloration in
moths.”39
Short adopts Sober’s selection of/selection for contrast
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and, integrating it with Peircian ideas of explanation by final
causes, adapts it to new uses. The context is as follows. He
asks us to distinguish four kinds of physical process:
Mechanical processes that proceed from one particular
configuration to another and are reversible.
The processes described by statistical dynamics, which
are anisotropic and result in an increase in entropy and disorder.
The non-equilibrium processes studied by Prigogine,
which are also anisotropic, but produce open systems that
have increased order and diminished entropy. The dissipative structures can sustain themselves in the given environment for a time. Living things, we assume, are of this
kind—complex open systems that metabolize and have an
apparatus for replicating themselves.
With living things, a third sort of anisotropic process
comes into play: Natural Selection, the selection of characteristics for types of effect that conduce to reproductive
success.40
Given living things and their struggle for existence, given
heritable variability, given phenotypic features that in a given
state-of-its-world enhance a creature’s relative chance of producing fertile offspring, a new kind of directional process
comes into being, natural selection. And with it, the possibility of purpose comes on the scene.
Not that anything is a purpose or has a purpose in biological evolution before the actual occurrence of a mutation
that happens to be selectively retained because of some advantage that it confers. Only at that time, that is, when a
feature is selected for its effect, does the effect, say visual
acuity, become a purpose. There was no purpose “visual
acuity” or “adaptedness” or “survival” hanging around
waiting for an opportunity. But once eyes with adjustable
lenses become a feature of mammals, then it would only
be mechanicalist prejudice that could keep us from saying
that eyes exist for the purpose of seeing.41
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Sober’s polar terms selection of/selection for are perhaps
worked harder and a little differently than they were previously:
It is because lenses and focusing increase visual acuity that
genetic mutations resulting in lenses and focusing were retained in subsequent generations; in fact, that happened in
independent lines of animal evolution. The selection in
those cases was for the visual acuity and of concrete structures (or the genes that determine them) that improved visual acuity in specific ways. . . . The of/for distinction is
relative to the level of analysis, but the object of ‘for’ is always an abstract type and the object of ‘of ’ is always
something genetic or genetically determined, hence concrete. . . . As the type selected-for is essential to explanation
by natural selection, such explanation is like anisotropic
explanation in statistical mechanics [in that] both explain
actual phenomena by the types they exemplify. Hence it is
not mechanistic. . . . It is qua adaptation—hence in that aspect—that [an adaptive feature, say S] is explained by natural selection. S could also be explained, had we knowledge
enough, as a product of a complicated series of mechanical
events. But, then, S’s enhancing reproductive success
would seem a surprising coincidence, a bit of biological
luck. S’s being an adaptation would not be explained.42
The “aptness” of organisms is one of the facts of life
that the Darwinian program of explanation seeks to account
for. Having had some success in this explanatory endeavor,
we easily forget that there is no guarantee that evolution
will bring about an increase in complexity or intelligence
or other quality that we admire. Overstatement here, Short
warns us, is common, and disastrous.43 Notice too that natural selection was not itself selected, and therefore does not
have a purpose. It just occurs.
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Part 4. The Emergence of Intentionality and
Conscious Purposes
Cleverly joining Peircean reasoning to the more recent formulations of neo-Darwinian theory, Short’s Theory sketches
a narrative that strives to make intelligible the eventual emergence of the possibility of deliberately produced tools and
self-controlled action out of advantageous anatomy and biologically useful animal behavior. Here one must go slow and
notice that it is as the world comes to hold new kinds of entity
that new kinds of explanation become applicable.44 Short is
not reducing biological explanation to chemical explanation.
Nor will he assimilate human discourse to animal signaling.45
The last three chapters of his book are given over to exploring the implications of applying Peirce’s ideas of sign-action
(= semeiosis) to distinctively human language, thought, and
life. But unless we work from the bottom up, there is no explaining of emergents.
“Working from the bottom up” means for Short that he
must develop so general an account of Peirce’s semiotic triad
Sign-Object-Interpretant that it will be applicable both to
infra-human sign-interpretation—end-directed animal responses to stimuli—and, duly amplified, to distinctively
human life and thought. For Short, this behaviorist interlude
is in the service of Peirce’s Synechism:46 If successful in his
defense of Peirce’s ways, he will have warded off both Cartesian dualism and Reductionism.47
Among social animals, group behavior is determined by
mechanisms that cause one individual to respond to another.
A forager bee, for instance, having located nectar, returns to
the hive and there exhibits what look like dances. The bees
in the hive react to these dances as signaling the direction and
distance in which the nectar will be found. Ethologists have
instructed us that there is an immense variety of animal be-
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haviors that operate as though they were intended as communicative signs. By what criteria one determines the intendedness
of a bird- or monkey-cry the emission of which tends to result
in fellow-birds or fellow-monkeys reacting with behavior that
makes sense for the creatures in question (e.g., escaping in
an appropriate way from a certain kind of predator, or overcoming reluctance to approach more closely) has been a topic
for ethological investigation. But every parent is familiar with
the fact that infant wailing and screaming is not, in the earlier
phases of its life, an expression of the infant’s intention to
rouse its protectors. Yet when the infant is a little older its
jealous brother may justly complain: “She is not crying for a
reason. She’s crying for a purpose!”
We have deliberately introduced the word “intend” in its
ordinary sense before returning to the topic of intentionality
in Brentano’s scholastic and technical sense. (Unhappiness
about the lack of a non-dualist treatment of Intentionality was
what initially motivated our exploration of Short’s book on
Peirce’s semeiotics.) Unlike many semioticians, Short follows in Peirce’s footsteps by beginning with interpretive behavior, not with the sending of signs.48 This permits him to
take off from responses. For instance:
The deer does not flee the sudden noise that startled it, but
a predator; for it is to evade a predator that the deer flees.
The instinct to flee is based on an experienced correlation
of sudden noises to predators; the correlation is weak, but,
unless the deer is near starvation, it is better for it to risk
losing a meal than to risk being one. If no predator is there,
the deer’s flight is a mistake, albeit justified. Mistaken or
not, the flight interprets the noise as a sign of a predator.
A response is not merely an effect if it can be mistaken. It
ranks as an interpretation.
In what manner and measure this idea of mistake is available to infra-human animals is a hard question. When the dog
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that was, in some human observer’s estimation, “barking up
the wrong tree,” corrects itself and, redirecting its bark to the
neighboring tree, glimpses the spot where the cat in fact now
is, does the dog think to itself, “Now I’ve got it right”? Consider two other examples of interpretive responses, both reported by the ethologist Niko Tinbergen: male sticklebacks,
during the breeding season, tend to adopt a “threat posture”
toward potential rivals.
When the opponent does not flee . . . the owner of the territory . . . points its head down and, standing vertically in
the water, makes some jerky movements as if it were going
to bore its snout into the sand. Often it erects one or both
ventral fins.49
Tinbergen’s Plate I is a photo of a Stickleback exhibiting this
posture to its own reflection in a mirror! We know this fish is
making a mistake. Does he?
Lorenz reports . . . an incident which demonstrates the
power of [some varieties of Cichlid] to distinguish between
food and their young. Many Cichlids carry the young back,
at dusk, to a kind of bedroom, a pit they have dug in the
bottom. Once Lorenz, together with some of his students,
watched a male collecting its young for this purpose. When
it had just snapped up a young one, it eyed a particularly
tempting little worm. It stopped, looked at the worm for
several seconds, and seemed to hesitate. Then, after these
seconds of “hard thinking,” it spat out the young, took up
the worm and swallowed it, and then picked up its young
one again and carried it home. The observers could not
help applauding.50
The antelope that fled from a lion that wasn’t there, the stickleback that threatened a rival that wasn’t there, did they interpret something heard, something seen, as to-be-run-from,
to-be-ousted? Their behaviors, while in error in the particular
cases, were appropriate. And this holds true whether or not
these individual animals “knew what they were doing.”
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Something like this is, we take it, what Short meant when he
wrote: 51
The purposefulness of interpretation accounts for the significance of that which is interpretable. In particular, as
that which has a purpose may fail of its purpose, the purposefulness of interpretations accounts for the possibility
that what is signified is not. Because what is signified
might not be, significance exemplifies Brentano’s idea of
intentionality, which he defined as having an “inexistent
object,” i.e., an object that is an object independently of its
existing. Brentano asserted that intentionality is unique to
human mentality, but the argument of [Short’s] book is that
sign-interpretation occurs independently of conscious
thought and, hence, that Peirce’s semeiotic applies to phenomena well beyond human mentality. Thus it provides for
a naturalistic explanation of the mind. But that is possible
only if purposefulness can occur without consciousness.
Peirce’s doctrine of final causation c. 1902 provides a defense of that assumption. For it identifies causation with
selection for types of possible outcome, regardless of
whether that selection is conscious. And it does so consistently with modern physics and biology.52
But the question that arose when we considered the dog
that eventually managed to bark at the cat is still with us: The
dog, in our judgment and in fact, “corrected itself.” And we
know that learning, in the sense of an individual’s behavior
being shaped “for the better” by its experience, is a constituent of the lives of very many (all?) animals. But did the
dog know that it corrected itself? Consider Lorenz’s much applauded Cichlid father, which had its worm and its baby too.
Mustn’t it have had some sort of “inner representation” of the
alternative courses of conduct between which it chose?
We seem at last to have reached the question of when and
how conscious purpose, planning, and self-control emerge.
Short’s entire book, not just the chapter bearing the name
“Semeiosis and the Mental,” is in pursuit of it. Given that
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Peirce regarded thought to be internalized discourse, and that
an individual’s power of discourse is a skill that could not
have been acquired had that individual’s “instinct to acquire
the art” (as Darwin put it) not been activated in the course of
apprenticeship to speakers, Short and Peirce are clearly right
that “the capacity to think for oneself and to act in despite of
society is . . . social in origin.” He adds: “Individual autonomy and varied personality are further examples of the irreducibility of new realities to their preconditions.”53 Among
such “new realities” are not only new means to accomplish
existing purposes but also new purposes.
Because Short, under Peirce’s tutelage, is wholehearted
about accepting the Reality of purpose and purposiveness and
is unembarrassed about following Darwin in naturalizing
man, his investigation of how purpose can and has become
“emancipated” from biology has real content.54
Conclusion
We have seen that, according to Peirce, both statistical mechanics and Darwinian natural selection entail anisotropic
processes, defined by the type of result they lead to. The
“population thinking” that Darwin and later biologists introduced into biology was aimed at accounting for the emergence of biological types or species. The new thinking
differed from the typological thinking of pre-Darwinian times
in that the types or species arose in time.
Among the virtues of Short’s presentation of Peirce is that
he gives a sufficiently detailed description of Peirce’s Categories (in Ch.3) for readers to be supplied with opportunity
to become persuaded that Peirce’s trinitarian categorial
scheme accommodates Individuals and Kinds as mutually irreducible. Here is, however, not the place to exhibit or argue
the point.
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Why was the reception of Darwin at St. John’s so lukewarm in earlier days? The theoretical physicist’s impatience
with fussy descriptive details such as are dwelt on in Origin
(and must be by natural historians) was probably a contributing factor; and one that would have been exacerbated if the
assigned selection from Origin was pedagogically haphazard.
But vague apprehensions about the moral and philosophical
import of Darwin’s theory may have contributed more heavily to avoiding serious intellectual engagement with it.
Darwin himself anticipated this reaction. He explains (in
the Introduction to Descent of Man) that it was in order not
to stand in the way of the reading public’s making fair trial
of his general views that he allowed himself just one tiny
paragraph, on the final pages of Origin, that makes direct
mention of man:
In the distant future . . . psychology will be based on a new
foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown
on the origin of man and his history.
Twelve years later, in Descent of Man, the scope of Darwin’s intellectual ambition is made manifest. In Ch.3 he takes
on Kant:
“Duty . . . whence thy original?” . . . As far as I know, no
one has approached [this great question] exclusively from
the side of natural history.
So “approaching it,” Darwin writes:
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree
probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed
with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire
a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.55
His plan is to show how, granted the rest of our mental at-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tributes and the world’s make-up, the human species does
better with than it would without morality. Otherwise morality (sense of duty, conscience) and the instruments for its acquisition and maintenance could not have become “selected.”
But isn’t there something topsy-turvy about an explanation that subordinates, as means, something better, namely a
creature competent to have a sense of duty, to an end less
good, namely, mere comparative fitness for producing fertile
offspring? The complaint, we urge, limps, because it fails to
register that when something is fruitful and multiplies or fails
to, it is as a creature possessed of certain attributes that it
does so. Darwin freely ascribes sociability, intelligence, and
emotions (sympathy, jealousy, ennui, curiosity, courage, maternal affection, and so forth) to, for instance, domestic animals.56 Nevertheless, he reserves morality for human beings:
As we cannot distinguish between motives, we rank all actions of a certain class as moral, when they are performed
by a moral being. A moral being is one who is capable of
comparing his past or future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity;
therefore when a monkey faces danger to rescue its comrade, or takes charge of an orphan monkey, we do not call
its conduct moral. . . . It cannot be maintained that the social
instincts are ordinarily stronger in man than, . . . for instance, the instinct of self-preservation, hunger, lust. . . .
Why, then, does man regret . . . and why does he further
feel he ought to regret his conduct? . . . Man, from the activity of his mental faculties, cannot avoid reflection. . . .
Whilst the mother bird is feeding or brooding over her
nestlings, the maternal instinct is probably stronger than the
migratory; but . . . at last, at a moment when her young ones
are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrived at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases to act, what an agony of remorse each bird
would feel if, being endowed with great mental activity, she
could not prevent the image continually passing before her
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
117
mind of her young ones perishing in the bleak north from
cold and hunger. At the moment of action, man will no
doubt be apt to follow the stronger impulse. . . . But after
their gratification, when past and weaker impressions are
contrasted with the ever enduring social instincts, retribution will surely come. Man will then feel dissatisfied with
himself, and will resolve with more or less force to act differently for the future. This is conscience; for conscience
looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind
of dissatisfaction which, if weak, we call regret, and if severe remorse.57
Darwin seems to have come upon Aristotle late in life and
recognized a soul-mate in him. He would, we believe, have
been in delighted agreement upon reading Aristotle’s observation in History of Animals, Book 1, 488b24, that we are the
only creatures capable of deliberating (bouleutikon):
Many animals have the power of memory, and can be
trained, but the only one that can recall past events at will
(dunatai anamimnēskesthai) is man.
Where are we then? Conscience, says Darwin in the
opening sentence of Descent of Man, Ch.3, is the chief mark
of distinction of the human race. Conscience cannot come
into existence or operate without the power of recollection.
The power of recollection (though no texts come to mind
where anyone of our three authors says this expressly) depends upon the power to learn and employ not just a communicative medium but an articulate language.58 Beings of
this sort, Peirce the logician will come to argue ever more
strenuously as he ages, are capable of acting not just in a motivated way, but in accordance with an ideal:
Every action has a motive; but an ideal only belongs to a
line of conduct which is deliberate. To say that conduct is
deliberate implies that each action, or each important action, is reviewed by the actor and that his judgment is
passed upon it, as to whether he wishes his future conduct
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
118
to be like that or not. His ideal is the kind of conduct which
attracts him upon review. His self-criticism followed by a
more or less conscious resolution that in its turn excites a
determination of his habit, will, with the aid of sequelae,
modify a future action; but it will not generally be a moving
cause to action.59
Permit us to conclude with an anecdote. A recent movie
presented a small group of adults with the situation of a male
high-school teacher accepting seduction by one of his beautiful girl-students. Ever intent on discussing la difference, one
of the men in the group of movie watchers asked “Do you
blame the teacher?” “Yes,” was the answer, “because although it may indeed be true that it is harder for young men
than for young women to resist sexual arousal, the teacher
knowingly entered upon a profession that he could foresee
would present him with such situations as he was now in. He
should, taking advantage of the human power of imagination,
have rehearsed inwardly how he would act if the world presented him with an opportunity that he should turn down.”60
With Peirce’s help, and instructed by Short, we hope to
have shown in this essay that nothing in Darwin interferes
with acknowledging the emergence of organisms competent
to entertain and criticize ideals. This is the kind of organism
we human beings are.
NOTES
1. According to Ernst Mayr in his One Long Argument: Charles Darwin
and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991), what later authors think and speak of
as “Darwin’s Theory” is a combination of four or five strands—evolution
as such, common descent, multiplication of species, gradualism, and natural selection.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
119
2. See Ernst Mayr’s Introduction to Charles Darwin, On the Origin of
Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1972), xii.
3. John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (New York:
Henry Holt, 1910).
4. Ernst Mayr in Evolution and Anthropology (Washington: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1959), 2; also given in Mayr’s Introduction to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile, xix-xx.
5. See Elliott Sober, “Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism,”
Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Elliott Sober, (Boston:
MIT Press, 2001).
6. In the seminar described at the beginning of this essay, Clark was the
sole participant to speak up in defense of Darwin’s theory.
7. In his book Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Leipzig:
Duncker und Humblot, 1874).
8. Jasha spoke with admiration of Husserl’s repeated efforts to start all
over again from the beginning, in formulating the archai of philosophy.
Husserl’s notion of sedimentation in the sciences—our tendency to take
earlier achievements for granted—was a theme that Jasha took up in his
studies of the origins of algebra and of the work of Galileo. Seeking to
understand Jasha’s Husserlian antecedents, I read a good deal of Husserl
during the years I was reading Peirce. A lecture I gave in September, 1959,
was based on Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil.
9. The importance of this fact was first established by Murray Murphey,
in The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1961.)
10. Thomas L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge: Cambridge Universty Press, 2007). I was introduced to this book by Chaninah Maschler.
11. The Essential Peirce, edited by the Peirce Edition Project, 2 Vols.
(Bloomingdale, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), Vol. 2, 400. In
further references to this publication will be abbreviated to EP.
12. Ibid., 516.
13. These articles are reprinted in EP, Vol. 1, 109-123, 124-141.
14. Thomas L. Short, in a forthcoming second book about Peirce, gives
a detailed defense of this Peircean understanding of the sciences.
15. EP, Vol. 2, 400. Italics added.
16. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Of the Canon of Pure
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Reason,” A800 = B828 ff. Kant there explains, “By the practical I mean
everything that is possible through freedom.”
17. EP, Vol. 2, 333.
18. Ibid., 401.
19. Peirce eventually (as here) made the name of the -ism ugly, “to keep
it safe from being kidnapped.” Consider what Peirce writes about how his
thinking does or doesn’t differ from that of William James, EP, Vol. 2, 421.
20. EP, Vol. 2, 358f. For a lucid brief description of Peirce’s later “subjunctive” version of pragmatism, one which acknowledges that “modern
science . . . is practice engaged in for the sake of theory,” see Short,
Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 173, second paragraph.
21. EP, Vol. 1, 52.
22. Ibid.
23. For other difficulties with his theory in the 1860s, see Short, Peirce’s
Theory of Signs, ch. 2.
24. EP, Vol. 1, 120.
25. EP, Vol. 1, 138-139.
26. EP, Vol. 1, “The Fixation of Belief,” 111; for the square bracketed
emendations, see ibid., 377.
27. Cf. EP, Vol. 1, 289f.
28. See Paul Ehrenfest and Tatyana Ehrenfest, The Conceptual Foundations of the Statistical Approach in Mechanics (New York: Dover, 1958.)
29. Cf. EP, Vol. 1, 221.
30. Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980). See also Stuart A. Kauffman, “Antichaos and Adaptation,”
in Scientific American, August 1991, 78-84.
31. See the concluding sentence of the potent last paragraph of Darwin’s
Introduction to On the Origin of Species. Gould and Lewontin, in their
famous protest against unrestrained Adaptationism (“The Spandrels of
San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist
Programme,” in Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Elliott
Sober, [Boston: MIT Press, 2001]), cite this sentence and add an approving reference to George. J. Romanes’s essay “The Darwinism of Darwin,
and of the Post-Darwinian Schools” (in The Monist 6:1 [1895], 1-27).
Romanes would join Gould and Lewontin when they write: “We should
cherish [Darwin’s] consistent attitude of pluralism in attempting to ex-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
121
plain Nature’s complexity” (82).
32. Selections from Darwin’s The Origin of Species: The Shape of the Argument, ed., Nicholas Maistrellis (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2009), 43.
33. EP, Vol 1, 200. For a correction of this overly cheerful scenario of inevitable progress see, e.g., Elliott Sober, “Selection-for: What Fodor and
Piattelli-Palmarini Got Wrong,” 11. This essay is available on the internet
at the following URL:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/Fodor%20and%20Piatelli-Palermini%20april%209%202010.pdf
34. EP, Vol. 1, 272. Cf. Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile,
127.
35. Helena Curtis, Biology (New York: Worth, 1979).
36. Equally important, perhaps, is the inspiration of Darwin’s intellectual
attitude—omni-observant, persevering, sober—to which Maistrellis calls
attention.
37. Elliott Sober, The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).
38. The example stems from Williams via Elliott Sober and David Sloan
Wilson, “Adaptation and Natural Selection Revisited,” in the Journal of
Evolutionary Biology 24 (February 2011), 462-8. In this article, the authors are “revisiting” George C. Williams’s book on adaptation in order
to make sure the world knows that the book was a landmark in the development of evolutionary theory.
39. Elliott Sober, “Fodor’s Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism,” in Mind and
Language 23 (February 2008), 43. (Bubbe meise is Yiddish for “old wives’
tale.”) This article is also available on the internet at the following URL:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/fodor's%20bubbe%20meise%20published.pdf
40. When Herbert Spencer attempted to explain evolution on mechanical
principles, Peirce countered that the endeavor was illogical. See EP, Vol.
1, 289. Among Peirce’s arguments was this: the law of conservation of
energy implies that all operations governed by mechanical laws are reversible. Whence follows the corollary that growth is not explicable by
those laws, even though they are not violated in the process of growth.
41. Private communication from Thomas Short, March 19, 2012.
42. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 130. Italics in last sentence added.
43. Ibid., 145
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
44. Ibid., 144-145.
45. As Allen Clark wrote in a manuscript never published (“The Contributions of Charles S. Peirce to Value Theory,” 4), “No philosopher . . .
would be less inclined than Peirce to minimize the tremendous importance of the transformation that occurs when inquiry [or any other adaptive behavior] rises from the unconscious to the conscious level. For it is
at this second stage that man transcends the animal faculty of merely responding to naturally given signs, those perceptual clues furnished by nature; he begins to make signs, and to respond to signs of his own making,
and thus learns to provoke his own responses.”
46. “Synechism is Peirce’s doctrine that human mentality is continuous
with the rest of nature,” writes Thomas Short in his exchange with the
critics of his book, “Response,” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society 43 (Fall 2007), 666.
47. Ibid. Dewey’s essay of 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (Psychological Review 3 [July, 1896], 357-370) is offered in the
same, perhaps Hegel-inspired, spirit of synechism. (This article is available on the internet at the following URL:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Dewey/reflex.htm.) But a more instructive
comparison would be between Thomas Short’s account of Peirce and the
life-long work of James J. Gibson, for instance, The Senses Considered
as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1979.).
48. See Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 156f.
49. Niko Tinbergen, Social Behavior of Animals, Methuen’s Monographs
on Biological Subjects, Vol. 1 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1953), 9.
50. Ibid., 45. The following anecdote of Darwin’s in his chapter comparing the mental powers of lower animals with human mental powers seems
to be to the same effect: “Mr. Colquhoun winged two wild ducks, which
fell on the opposite sides of a stream; his retriever tried to bring over both
at once, but could not succeed; she then, though never before known to
ruffle a feather, deliberately killed one, brought over the other, and returned for the dead bird.” Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 48.
51. Further clarifying remarks on Intentionality are given by Short in
Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 174-177.
52. Elliott Sober, “Fodor’s Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism,” 669.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
123
53. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 147.
54. Ibid., 148.
55. Darwin, Descent of Man, 71.
56. See Charles Darwin’s 1872 book Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
57. Darwin, Descent of Man, Ch.3, 88-91.
58. Ibid., Ch.2, 54.
59. EP, Vol. 2, 377. Survey the Index to EP, Vol. 2 under “self-control.”
60. The answer is inspired by Peirce’s report of his childhood memory of
his younger brother’s having prepped himself in imagination for preventing the spread of a small fire. See EP, Vol. 2, 413.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
124
The Laws of Physics
Marlene Benjamin
In Memoriam
People say that the Laws of Physics
Are immutable,
Beyond the reach of hopes and dreams,
Immune to wishes,
And entirely indifferent to desire.
They say that the Laws of Physics
Are as solid in their abstractness as the materials
Whose movements they describe,
Whose broad encompassing axioms
Place with near precision all heavenly bodies,
All rocks and debris,
All breathing creatures—even us,
With all our singularity—
Within the vastness of this complicated
And wholly relational world,
Measuring all places with a confidence
In basic principles (as if some genius had bestowed upon
them personality)
The rest of us admire but so rarely can attain.
There is beauty in the Laws of Physics,
The beauty and elegance of those simple Euclidean equations
I struggled over long ago,
The amazing loveliness of a singularly striking accomplishment.
Marlene Benjamin is Associate Professor Emerita at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, and now lives in California. She is currently working on a
book entitled The Catastrophic Self: Philosophy, Memoir, and Medical Trauma.
�POEM
125
And yet this question haunts us:
Why should we not believe as Greeks believed?
Why should we not believe
That what we now call myths are really legends,
Embellished, we agree, yet legends nonetheless . . .
Why should we not have the confidence with which the
Greeks were blessed,
And take some tales of ordinary people, whose lives were touched
By strange and unexpected happenings, as legends of our own,
So that the Laws of Physics or Biology
Or of all the Natural Philosophies
Were not, as we believe, constraining,
But rather showed us ourselves as god-like,
Whose dreams inscribe upon the world what pleases us,
Able, like Athena, come full blown out of Zeus’s head
To enact the Laws of Physics to suit ourselves?
Then would you come walking back
To family and friends,
But especially, most especially, to wife and daughter;
All your molecules and atoms shaped perfectly again
Into your singularly recognizable form,
Striding purposefully and with that grin of yours
And, as on any ordinary day,
There would you be,
Arriving home,
Whole and un-bloodied,
Back into the life you should be living still.
�
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Sachs, Joe
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 52, number 2 (Spring 2011)
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William Pastille
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Frank Hunt
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John Van Doren
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Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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�Contents
Essays
Reading Landscapes: Maternal Love in
Classical Tamil Poetry ....................................................1
Anne David
The Tocquevillean Moment ................................................19
Wilfred M. McClay
On Seeing Aspects ..............................................................45
John Verdi
Reflections
Full Fathom Five: A Tutor’s Sea Change ...........................73
Louis Petrich
Reviews
John Verdi’s Fat Wednesday:Wittgenstein on Aspects ........83
Eva Brann
Paolo Palmieri’s A History of Galileo’s Inclined Plane
Experiment and its Philosophical Implications............91
Curtis Wilson
�1
ESSAYS
READING LANDSCAPES:
MATERNAL LOVE IN
CLASSICAL TAMIL POETRY
Anne David
Pu!an"#$!u 2781
The old woman’s shoulders
were dry, unfleshed,
with outstanding veins;
her low belly was like a lotus pad.
When people said
her son had taken fright,
had turned his back on battle
and died,
she raged
and shouted,
“If he really broke down
in the thick of battle,
I’ll slash these breasts
that gave him suck,”
and went there,
sword in hand.
Turning over body after fallen body,
she rummaged through the blood-red field
till she found her son,
quartered, in pieces,
and she rejoiced
more than on the day
she gave him birth.
This poem was composed nearly two millennia ago in
Tamil Nadu, South India. It belongs to a corpus of more than
Anne David is an alumna of St. John’s College and the University of Chicago, and is
currently a research scientist at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced
Study of Language, where she works on South Asian Languages.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
two thousand exquisite, tightly constructed lyric verses written in the Tamil language. Tamil is one of the two classical
languages of India; the other is Sanskrit. Along with Greek
and just a handful of other languages, Tamil has among the
longest continually attested written traditions in the world,
one that began around the second century before the
Common Era, when literature flowered in South India in the
form of these lyric poems of love and war.
They are called the Cankam2 poems, from the belief that
they were composed at a legendary center of art and learning, a Cankam, that was patronized by the south Indian
kings. What we now call the Cankam period of classical
Tamil extended until about the fifth century CE. We have
well over two thousand of these poems, ranging in length
from three lines to about eight hundred, probably only a
fraction of what was actually composed. They were preserved on palm leaf manuscripts, which are susceptible to
humidity, fire, and insects; and because of their largely secular and often erotic content, they have also been subject to
human negligence and even malice. We also have a contemporaneous grammar, the Tolk"ppiyam, which describes
both the language of the poems and the elaborate semiotic
and aesthetic system on which their descriptions draw.
There were about four hundred poets, of whom some two
dozen were women; though still small, this proportion is
unusually high among classical corpora.3
The poem above depicts a mother’s elation when she
learns her role in society has been fulfilled because her son
has died with honor in battle. Her triumph is underscored by
the stunning image of her standing in a blood-soaked field
of bodies. Vivid portraits of battlefields are common among
the Cankam poems, where setting is integral, and they are
often depicted through metaphors of other landscapes:
agrarian, desert, sea.
ESSAYS | DAVID
3
Classical Tamil poetry has two genres. Poems of
romance and eros are classified as akam, meaning ‘inside,
interior’, while poems on all other subjects are called
pu!am, meaning ‘outside, exterior’. Akam poems address
our inner life, the life of heart and home. Pu!am poems
address all aspects of public life: they praise kings, recount
battles, sing of famine and death, lament the dire poverty of
poets.
Manifest in the Cankam works is a tension between
these two worlds—public and private, political and domestic. We gain insight into both kinds of poem, their
language of landscape, and the tension between them, when
we examine the one female character who, in Martha
Selby’s words, “may cross the membranous boundary between akam and pu!am,”4 who alone has been given a voice
in both genres—the Mother. We see the mother as a
powerful voice in both the akam and pu!am poems, facing
two kinds of maternal loss: that of her daughter to a young
man and that of her son to the warpath. While prominent in
the akam poems, the mother is a rarer character in the
pu!am world; nevertheless, she is fiercely present in a small
pu!am sub-genre on mothers and warrior sons.
The civilization that produced this exquisite lyric poetry
of love, war, and kingship was suffused with savagery. At
the turn of the first millennium of the Common Era, South
India was dominated by three great dynasties reigning over
many smaller leaders—a world of kings and chieftains who
patronized the arts and waged brutal wars against each
other. Poetry served as a vehicle of patriotic persuasion.
Through the voices of the pu!am poets, the ancient Tamilians glorified courage and ferocity. They regarded death in
battle as a moral obligation, and as the greatest of honors.
One pu!am poem, spoken by a mother, is a lyrical list of
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
societal duties: her duty is to bear sons, the father’s duty is
to make them noble, the blacksmith’s to furnish them with
arms, the king’s to exemplify good conduct—and the son’s
duty is to make war.5
In other verses we hear how the bodies of stillborn sons
and the elderly male dead were slashed with swords so that
they too might carry the honor of battle-wounds into the
afterlife. One poem describes a frenzied hero on the battlefield thus: “Like an elephant in chains, he is hindered only
by the guts that are entangling his feet.”6 Still other poems
describe a post-victory ritual in which the conquerors build
a hearth of severed heads, then boil the remains of the vanquished dead. And there are poems like the one above
whose common theme is the prideful, bloody-minded mother of a slain warrior.
But the pu!am anthologies also include poems celebrating life, poems about hospitality, drunkenness, the joy
of fatherhood. So we see in this literature a society struggling with this universal human dilemma: how do we live
well and raise happy families in a world filled with peril?
And in these poems, no figure embodies the conflict between a desire for domestic tranquility and an ethic that
glorifies slaughter more than that of the king. Kings are
central to the pu!am poems. They are vital to the world they
rule. One poem says, “Rice is not the life of this world nor
is water the life! / The king is the life of this world!”7 A king
was expected to be brave and ferocious against the enemy,
but kind and magnanimous to his people.
George Hart has talked about the Tamil king as the
mediator of sacred power: the modern Tamil word for
temple, k%yil, is etymologically ‘place of the king’, and the
indigenous Tamil word for ‘god’, i!aivan (literally, ‘he who
is highest’) originally referred to the king.8 The king’s
ESSAYS | DAVID
5
power extended both to taking and giving life; his control
over the sacred depended on his ruling justly.9 Likewise, the
fertility of his land and the well-being of his people depended on his maintaining that connection to the sacred.
So these violent warrior kings are also praised as loving,
nurturing givers of life: the king is called the life-breath of
the kingdom;10 other poems liken him to the sun. And he is
explicitly compared to a mother: an adoring subject is
drawn to the powerful king “like a child that runs to suck his
mother’s flawless breast.”11 The two landscapes of his kingdom—martial and agrarian—often merge into one, as fields
of battle are likened to fields of harvest. The poems startle
with metaphors of soldiers tilling the earth with their spears
and piling up haystacks of corpses, or of an elephant’s head
rolling along the soil “like a plow.”12 Even the warrior with
enemy guts entangling his feet is compared in the next line
to a mother cow defending her calf, as he fights for his comrade.
The family is in some ways a mirror of the kingdom.
Like kings, women were also regarded as vessels of sacred
power, power that was no longer benevolent if they cast off
their chastity and domestic virtue within marriage, just as
royal sacred power was harmed by kingly vice.13 And just as
a virtuous king brought prosperity to his people, a virtuous
wife brought fortune and fertility to her family. Where a superior king is compared to the sun, a wife who has produced
a male child is said to “light up the house” like a lamp.14
The family appears most frequently in the akam poems,
which are love poems composed under the guidelines of an
intricate and highly structured rhetorical system. The poet
always speaks in the persona of one of the characters in a
generic love story: a young woman or her lover, her friend
or his friends; her mother or nurse; occasional passersby; or,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in the poems that take place after marriage, the husband’s
mistress. Each poem depicts one of five stages of love, as
well as certain moods, emotions, and situations that are
characteristic of those stages.
No one is ever named in the akam poems; the characters
are all types, abstractions of the sort of people commonly
caught up in any tale of young, romantic love. (Pu!am
poems always identify kings and eminent personages by
name; for that reason they are more useful for dating the
poems.) The hero and heroine are known simply as the
talaivan and talaivi, the ‘main man’ and ‘main woman’.
This anonymity emphasizes the universality of the events
and emotions depicted in the poems.
Each poem is a single soliloquy, spoken to one of the
other characters or sometimes to the world at large—never
to us. We, the audience, are always in the role of eavesdropper. The focus is usually on the woman’s experience of
love; the most frequent speakers are the heroine and her
girlfriend confidante. Common themes are her grief, anxiety, suffering, and most of all her helplessness in the absence
of her lover. The poems make it clear, however, that her
helplessness arises from societal constraints; hers is not an
emotional or physical helplessness. She has to stay put most
of the time: we see her confined by village gossip, parental
control, and later, motherhood.
Paradoxically, it is these akam poems that are most imbued with representations of the objects of the outer world.
Highly stylized rules associate the exterior landscape with
the interior landscape of human passion. Such associations
transform the different Tamilnad landscapes—desert and
seascape, wilderness and paddy, mountain and plains—into
an entire poetic language, where all the plants, animals, and
human beings not only connote, but often denote the emo-
ESSAYS | DAVID
7
tions and situations that engulf their two young lovers.
Here’s an example:
Ku!untokai 35615
A man who wears a hero’s anklet
keeps her safe as she hurries
through scant, dry lands
where the shade shrinks and dies.
At the bank of a scorched pool,
she sips at muddy, steaming water.
Where does she find the strength,
this girl, soft as a sprout,
with her tiny, curving bracelets?
She had refused even to touch milk,
mixed with fine puffed rice
in a bowl clad in blushing gold
that I’d held out for her,
saying that it was too much.
There are three important elements in this lyric vocabulary. The first is landscape, of which there are five types.
This poem’s landscape is p"lai, the wasteland, which conveys a theme of hardship and separation. The second key
element is the native constituents of that landscape: flora,
fauna, local people, and gods. These two elements—the
landscape and its denizens—constitute the setting and
evoke the third element, the mood or situation. So when a
love poem mentions stagnant water, midday heat, lizards,
cactus, or bandits, the experienced reader recognizes the
desert wasteland, and knows that the situation here is elopement—two young lovers are enduring danger and deprivation for the sake of being together.
The speaker is the young heroine’s mother or wetnurse.
There are several of these desert elopement poems in which
the mother reminisces about feeding milk to the daughter
now lost to her. Typically she contrasts the girl’s youth and
delicacy with the hardships she is surely suffering in the
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
8
barren waste where the couple has fled. In all five akam
settings, the mother of the young lovesick heroine worries
for her daughter’s safety, happiness, and reputation:
Ainku!un$!u 37916
United with the man
with the gleaming white spear,
is going through the forests
where herds of bull elephants roam
on dew-covered slopes
sweeter to her
than the pleasure
of a good marriage
in the company of her dearest friends,
I wonder?
The forests, elephants, and dew-covered slopes tell us
that this poem’s landscape is kurinji, the cool, wild hillcountry, the setting for premarital love and secret midnight
trysts. These kurinji poems, of course, tend to be the most
sexual of the poems, although the eroticism is implied
through proxies; for instance, her lover’s gleaming spear.
The roaming herds of bull elephants also suggest uncontrolled male lust; the mother is implying a contrast between
what her daughter has chosen and a “good marriage,”
approved by those who truly care for her. (Most comparisons
in Cankam poetry are by implication. Subtlety is the norm.)
In the pu!am poems, we see the mother of a young
warrior grumbling about her loss of control over him:
Pu!a#"n$!u 8617
You stand against the pillar
of my hut and ask:
Where is your son?
9
ESSAYS | DAVID
I don’t really know.
This womb was once
a lair
for that tiger.
You can see him now
only on battlefields.
But more often she has lost him utterly, in poems exhorting mothers to proper pride and joy at his brave death. The
message: it was her duty to produce him and her culminating duty to give him up to war. But these are highly sophisticated poems, and as the exterior and interior landscapes of human life speak to each other in them, there are
sometimes signs of ambivalence towards the desirability of
death on the battlefield.
Earlier I alluded to a pu!am poem that lists people’s duties—the mother bears sons, the father teaches them nobility, and so on—ending with the son’s duty to make war. That
poem is more complicated, however, than I suggested.
Whereas everyone else gets one duty and one line of verse,
the son’s battle-duties are several and take up two lines: the
mother enjoins him to wage war with his shining sword, kill
enemy elephants, and come back home, not seek death in the
field. In a similar vein, a mother defiantly rejoices at the safe
return of her son as she recounts the warriors’ ritual drink
before battle:
Pu!a#"n$!u 28618
Like white goats, the young men surrounded him
and a cup was passed above the heads of many
to my son and yet it did not lead to his
being laid out on a legless bed
and covered with a pure white cloth.
And in another poem, we see a mother beholding her
badly wounded son, who has been laid out on his shield. As
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
10
he denies that he can feel the arrow in his flesh, she remembers his childish fear when she had once scolded him for not
drinking his milk. These lines directly recall the bereft
mother of the akam poems who compares her daughter’s
stoicism in the desert with her childish distaste for milk.
This allusion in the mouth of the mother bending over her
wounded son suggests that she is not proud, but grieving
and bewildered.
A marvelous intersection of interior and exterior landscapes occurs in the following pu!am poem about a slain
warrior’s garland:
Pu!a#"n$!u 27819
The chaste trees, dark-clustered,
blend with the land
that knows no dryness;
the colors on the leaves
mob the eyes.
We’ve seen those leaves on jeweled women,
on their mounds
of love.
Now the chaste wreath lies slashed
on the ground, so changed, so mixed
with blood, the vulture snatches it
with its beak,
thinking it raw meat.
We see this too
just because a young man
in love with war
wore it for glory.
So a warrior has been killed—killed so brutally that the
wreath he wore on his head looks to a vulture like bloody
flesh. This powerful poem uses the image of leaves in
several ways to blend akam and pu!am themes. First, the
poet invokes the landscape of akam poems by reminding us
that nocci leaves, used here as battle attire, also cover young
ESSAYS | DAVID
11
women’s sexual parts. Those leaf garments were believed to
protect chastity,20 and elsewhere in the poems, the image of
destroyed garlands and other plants can signify that a sexual
act has taken place.21 We have a similar metaphor in English: the blood on the leaves suggests here the deflowering
of a virgin, reminding us of the akam mother’s worries for
her daughter’s virtue. Further, the leaves of the nocci tree are
a common motif in akam poems, where the mother of the
lovesick heroine remembers her little girl in happier times,
playing by a nocci tree.
So again a pu!am poem about a wounded young warrior
invokes an akam poem about a nostalgic mother grieving for
her lovelorn daughter. This is how the Cankam poems speak
to one another. To an audience steeped in this imagery, the
mixing of akam and pu!am through the juxtaposition of a
bloody battle wreath with images of happy little girls and
chaste, bejeweled young maidens would be both obvious
and jarring.
All these poems gainsay the poems that glorify combat,
extol ferocious kings, and speak of inflicting sham warwounds on males who die in peacetime. Moreover, they
challenge the implicit injunctions on mothers to desire and
celebrate the death of their sons in battle.
With this in mind, let us look at one last poem:
Pu!a#"n$!u 29522
There, in the very middle
of battle-camps
that heaved like the seas,
pointing at the enemy
the tongues of lances,
new-forged and whetted,
urging soldiers forward
with himself at the head
in a skirmish of arrow and spear,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
cleaving through
an oncoming wave of foes,
forcing a clearing,
he had fallen
in that space
between armies,
his body hacked in pieces:
when she saw him there
in all his greatness,
mother’s milk flowed again
in the withered breasts
of this mother
for her warrior son
who had no thought of retreat.
This poem is by Auvaiy!r, one of the two most famous
of the Cankam poets, and one of the few women among
them. Auvaiy!r also wrote the poem of the mother rejoicing
that her son has not come back on a cloth-covered bier, so
we have some idea where her sympathies lie. On the
surface, this poem seems yet another portrait of the proud
mother of a dead war hero. If we examine this joy more
closely, however, we will find that the poem suggests a different theme.
Let us look first at the prosody. This poem is full of the
sound of grief. Tamil poetry uses internal rhyme: in the transcription of the poem provided in the appendix, you can see
that the poet has a quadruple internal rhyme in lines four,
five, and six, and further, that the vowel sound in that
rhyme—/ai/—is frequent throughout the poem. (An unscientific sur-vey of a few nearby poems of similar length
shows that the sound /ai/ occurs about 30 percent more
often in this poem.) You can also see that its long-voweled
counterpart /!i/, a much rarer sound in Tamil, occurs three
times, and the long vowel /!/ seven times—also higher
counts in comparison with other poems. A common Tamil
ESSAYS | DAVID
13
interjection for grief and pain, still used today, is the word
aiy%, which contains /ai/. Even cross-linguistically, these
three sounds, /ai/, /!i/, and /!/ are onomatopoeic sounds of
wailing.23
Now let’s turn to the poem’s diction. The other poems
depicting proud mothers of dead sons all use the word
ci!uva# for ‘son’. Outside of those poems, this word is a
relatively uncommon locution for a ‘boy-child’; its literal
meaning is ‘little one (male)’. It is otherwise used sentimentally to refer to actual little boys. So the battle-death
poems are actually describing a mother’s joy at seeing her
“little one’s” body scattered all over the battlefield. Here
sentimentality has turned maudlin. Auvaiy!r has taken care
to avoid this tone by pointedly not using the word in her
poem. I say “pointedly” because first, everyone else uses it,
and second, because it would have been more metrically
suited to the line. Her choice of vi&alai ‘youth’ over ci!uva#
‘little boy’ means that the final syllable must be long by
position rather than by nature, because in Tamil prosody, /ai/
is considered short.
Let us look next at the imagery. The poem begins with
the word ‘sea’ (ka&al) and ends with the word ‘mother’ (t"y).
The oncoming armies are twice likened to the rising, heaving ocean, while the mother’s breasts are initially described
as v"&u ‘withered’—a word associated with the desert. But
then her breasts begin to spring or flow, and after that, to
gush or surge, like the wide, swelling, deep sea. The word
used to describe her son’s body, citai ‘scattered’, refers elsewhere in the poems to sand on a beach. So the mother starts
out like a desert and then, as the poem culminates, she
becomes like the ocean, which reclaims scattered sand as it
surges forth.
Linking an ordinary human being with vast and
powerful landscapes such as the desert and the sea is almost
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
unheard of in the language of these poems. People are
frequently compared to things in the landscape, especially
animals: young men are often likened to tigers or elephants,
young women to does, flowers, or ripe fruit. But integral
parts of the landscape are reserved for the king, who is
compared, for example, to the sun. We are reminded again
that both the king and the virtuous mother are vessels of
sacred power. Her flowing milk is a further reminder of this,
because mother’s milk has sacred powers; indeed, husbands
are portrayed as fearful of being touched by it.
So this breastfeeding imagery itself, rather than conveying the standard image of a joyful, patriotic mother, supports
an interpretation of this poem as iconoclastic. For if the conventional reading is the only one, then this female poet is
taking liberties with the biology of maternal love. The old
mother’s breasts spurting forth milk at the sight of her dead
son portrays the let-down reflex that all nursing mothers
know. It is triggered inexorably in mothers by their baby’s
cry, and powerful sense-memories of it linger years after
weaning. The image is first of all an allusion to other
Cankam portraits of grieving mothers nostalgic for the longgone days of milk-fed little ones. This mother is neither
pleased nor proud her son has died. Furthermore, any mother knows that the maternal let-down reflex is not accompanied by joy or pride, but by anxiety for the baby, together
with an intense desire to soothe the infant, and to banish its
hunger, sadness, fear, or pain. As her grief cries out in the
sounds of the poem, this mother’s despair amplifies her
sacred powers in response to a futile wish to succor her lost
son.
The raging mother of our first poem is certainly not a
weak or passive figure as she echoes her son’s war deeds,
rampaging through corpses on the battlefield, sword in hand.
But in her violent mania and ultimate joy, she is complying
ESSAYS | DAVID
15
with society’s expectations. In contrast, all the authorial
choices of this last poem—weaving the sounds of grief
throughout the verse, rejecting histrionic clichés, attributing
uncharacteristic primal powers to the mother—suggest that
it is a subversive rejoinder to Pu!an"#$!u 278 and the other
poems that share its bellicose theme. While a sanguinary
attitude towards maternal loss prevails in the pu!am genre,
the mother’s anguished voice in this poem and a handful of
others offers a compelling counterweight to the glorification
of war those poems celebrate.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
16
ESSAYS | DAVID
17
NOTES
APPENDIX: TRANSCRIPTION OF Pu!a"#n$!u 295
1
Translation in Ramanujan 1985, 182.
Pronounced sung-gum. Sometimes transliterated as Sangam.
3
Dr. Stephanie Nelson, private communication.
4
Selby 2000, 101.
5
Pura 312.
6
Pura 275; Hart’s translation in Hart and Heifetz 1999.
7
Pura 186; Hart’s translation in Hart and Heifetz 1999.
8
Hart 1975, 13.
9
Hart 1975, 15.
10
Pura 186.
11
Pura 379, Hart’s translation in Hart and Heifetz 1999.
12
Hart 1975, 32; Hart and Heifetz 1999, xix; Pura 19, 342.
13
Hart 1975, 93ff.
2
ka"al
SEA
ki#ar-nt-a$$a
vent-u
BE.HOT-CVB
t("u
CROWD
ka""%r
v!y
EDGE
ukai-ttu
DRIVE-CVB
varu-pa"ai
COME-ARMY
i"ai.p-pa"ai
MIDDLE-ARMY
n!ppa&
MILITARY CAMP
RISE-PTCP-LIKE
MIDDLE
va"i-tt-a
v'l
SHARPEN-PST-PTCP
e)u
RISE
tar-%u
GIVE-CVB
p()n-tu
PASS.THROUGH-CVB
a)uva-ttu
DEEP.SEA-OBL
ci*appu"ai.y-!#an
SUPERIORITY-POSSESSOR
talaippeyar-i
SPEAR APPROACH-CVB
tura-ntu
DRIVE-CVB
e*-i
SHOOT-CVB
v!yppa"-a
FIND.A.WAY-INF
citai-ntu
BE.SCATTERED-CVB
m!&pu
GLORY
ka&-"u
SEE-CVB
DESTROY-CVB
v'*!k-iya
BE.SEPARATED-PTCP
aru#-i
REJOICE-CVB
mulai
%*-i
BREAST
FLOW-CVB
cura-nt-a$a
WITHERED
oo"-!
p%"kai
vi"alai
t!y-kk-'.
STRENGTH
YOUTH
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
3PL:
CVB:
DAT:
EMPH:
INF:
OBL:
NEG:
PST:
PTCP:
third person plural
converb
dative
emphatic
infinitive
oblique
negative
past tense
participle
BATTLE
vila+k-i
v!"u
FLEE-NEG
ñ!"pi$
GUSH-PST-3PL
MOTHER-DAT-EMPH
14
15
Pu!a 314; Aink 405.
Translation in Selby 2000, 194-5.
16
Translation in Selby 2000, 193.
17
Translation in Ramanujan 1985, 184.
18
Translation in Hart and Heifetz 1999, 168.
19
Translation in Ramanujan 1985, 186.
20
Hart 1975, 93.
21
Hart 1975, 172.
22
Translation in Ramanujan 1985, 183.
23
These three sounds are highlighted by red type in the transcription
of the poem.
REFERENCES
Hart, George. (1975). The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and
their Sanskrit Counterparts. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hart, George and Heifetz, Hank. (1999). The Four Hundred Songs of
War and Wisdom. (Translation) New York: Columbia University
Press.
Ku!untokai. (1983). A classical poetry anthology edited with
commentary by U.Ve. C!minataiar. A&&!malainakar: A&&!malai-pPalkalai-k-Kalakam. [In Tamil].
Lehmann, Thomas. (1994). Grammatik des Alttamil. Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag.
�18
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Lehmann, Thomas and Thomas Malten. (1992). A Word Index of Old
Tamil Ca(kam Literature. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Mahadevan, Iravatham. (2003). Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. (= Harvard Oriental Series 62)
Chennai: Cre-A and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University.
Pu!a#"n$!u, Vol. I (1962) and Vol. II (1964). A classical poetry
anthology edited with commentary by Auvai Cu. Turaic!mi-p Pillai.
Fourth ed. Chennai: South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing
Society.
Rajam, V.S. (1992). A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry.
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
Ramanujan, A.K. (1985). Poems of Love and War: From the Eight
Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil [translation
with commentary]. New York: Columbia University Press.
Selby, Martha Ann. (2000). Grow Long Blessed Night: Love Poems from
Classical India. (Translation) New York: Oxford University Press.
Selby, Martha Ann. (2003). Circle of Six Seasons: A Selection from Old
Tamil, Prakrit and Sanskrit Poetry. (Translation) India: Penguin.
Shanmugam Pillai, M. and David E. Ludden. (1976). Ku!untokai: An
Anthology of Classical Tamil Love Poetry. (Translation) Madurai:
Koodal Publishers.
Tamil Lexicon. (1982). Madras: University of Madras. 6 vols.
Zvelebil, Kamil. (1973). The Smile of Murugan on Tamil Literature of
South India. Leiden: Brill.
ESSAYS
19
THE TOCQUEVILLEAN
MOMENT
Wilfred McClay
I am delighted and honored to be back at St. John’s again,
and to have the privilege of addressing this community of
which I feel so enduringly a part, a community built around
a great shared enterprise: the serious reading and re-reading
of old books. Returning to the College is always a pleasure
because it is a return to my intellectual and moral roots, and
to the themes that have preoccupied me ever since I graduated. Few things are more renewing, more rejuvenating.
I find that the word “rejuvenating” is particularly apropos, provided that you understand what I mean by it. I am
not using it as one does when talking about taking a pleasant stroll down memory lane, waxing sentimental about the
past. I am using it in its original etymological sense of
“being made young again.” Returning to the College can be
rejuvenating in that sense because of something that you
tend not to realize when you are a student here (although you
might catch a glimpse of it), but that becomes much clearer
with the passage of time. As you get older, you come to see
that the deep appeal of old books is not only that they are
wiser than us, but also that they are younger than us. Let me
explain this seeming paradox. The word “archaic” is generally used as a pejorative meaning “out-of-date” or “obsolete.” But as every Johnnie knows, the word comes from the
Greek arch', which refers not only to the antiquity of things
A lecture delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland on 12 November
2010. Mr. McClay is an alumnus of St. John’s and Professor of History at the
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he holds the SunTrust Bank Chair of
Excellence in the Humanities.
�20
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
but also to their foundational character. An arch' is a deep
spring from which all else emanates. The truest form of
“archeology” would not be merely a search for what is older,
but a search for what is primary, for what is closest to the
origins, for what undergirds and sustains us, even if sometimes it is buried or otherwise hidden from our sight.
Hence at St. John’s “the shock of the new” has never
been the specialty of the house. After all, the shock of the
new can be had any hour of the day, and indeed can hardly
even be avoided in today’s world. In fact, expressing one’s
admiration for the shock of the new has become so routine
that it has acquired the aspect of a solemn bourgeois obligation. I have even read letters of recommendation from staid
dissertation advisors who praise their doctoral students for
having written “highly transgressive” doctoral dissertations.
I am not sure what that means. But I am confident that it is
not really very shocking. Instead, what you seek and savor
here at St. John’s is the shock of the old, that electric and
uncanny sense of communion, across space and time, with
countless others who have shared our human condition. And
that can be very shocking indeed, because it is so often a
strange and unpredictable encounter, an interplay between
what is familiar and what is unfamiliar.
Let me give an example of what I mean. In the 1930s,
journalist Rebecca West and her husband described their encounter with remote Yugoslav tribesmen who still sang and
recited oral epics in the Homeric fashion. These bards recounted actions that “must have been made a million million
million times since the world began,” but in each new telling
seemed “absolutely fresh.” Thus, when one reads in the Iliad
of a man drawing a bow or raising a sword, “it is,” West
wrote, “as if the dew of the world’s morning lay undisturbed
on what he did.”1 An “archaic” book, such as the ones upon
ESSAYS | McCLAY
21
which you lavish your attention here, draws its abundant life
from its greater closeness to the origins of things.
I deviated somewhat from the true path by becoming a
historian—but not really very much. I never aspired to be a
prodigal son. Indeed, from the very beginning I appreciated
the fact that my tutelage at St. John’s would keep me safe
from the worst temptation of my field, which is to reduce
ideas, writers, and artists—and more or less everything else
worthwhile—to being nothing more than a product of their
context. In that sense, I remember a moment in my
graduate-school days at Johns Hopkins in which it became
clear to me that I would always be different from my
historian peers in firmly rejecting such reductionism. It was
a seminar on a paper dealing with the art and life of El
Greco, and I was stopped short by a casual, slightly apologetic comment from the distinguished paper giver: “Of
course, the point of studying El Greco so closely is for the
insight it affords into the Toledo in which he lived.” I realized in a flash that, of course, he was entirely wrong. In fact,
he had it precisely backwards. So far as I was concerned, the
point of studying Toledo was the insight it gave one into the
life, and ultimately the work, of El Greco. Having come so
firmly to that conviction, I have stuck to it ever since. And
the firmness of that conviction is something I almost certainly owe to St. John’s. The study of history, for me, should
always strive not to reduce ideas but to dramatize them, to
put them up on the stage of life and put them into motion, to
make vivid the ways that certain extraordinary individuals
have wrestled with the conditions of their existence and
have attempted to order them and make sense of them—
with a view to how we might do the same.
I have tried to follow that pattern in these remarks on the
great French writer Alexis de Tocqueville. His work can
certainly be read profitably without very much reference to
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
22
the particulars of his life. But the work takes on even greater
importance, I believe, when understood dramatically, as an
instance of precisely the sort of wrestling that I have just
described. My title, “The Tocquevellean Moment,” refers to
a moment that he both described and experienced. It is the
moment of profound social transition, in which entire ways
of life are in the process of being transformed inexorably,
but in which also the precise manner, character, and extent
of the transformation are yet to be determined. In what
follows, therefore, it will be both useful and valuable for me
to mingle historical and biographical elements with my
discussion of Tocqueville’s ideas.2
*****
Tocqueville (1805-1859) was one of the most eminent
European social and political thinkers of the nineteenth
century, and is still regarded today as an incomparable
analyst of the prospects and pitfalls of modern democracy.
He was the child of an aristocratic French family, some of
whose members had suffered death or devastation as a result
of the French Revolution. Consequently, he was haunted all
his life by the fear of revolutionary anarchy, and by the
specter of ideological tyranny that such a sweeping social
revolution leaves in its wake. But such fears never led him
to advocate the wholesale restoration of the pre-revolutionary French social order. He was an aristocrat at heart, but he
was never a reactionary. Instead, those fears led him to look
closely at the change that was coming, in hope of finding a
way to direct it toward a more felicitous end.
A concern with the characteristics of modern democracy
is the guiding preoccupation of his Democracy in America
(1835-40), the work for which he is best known among
American readers.3 It was, of course, the product of a visit.
ESSAYS | McCLAY
23
Tocqueville was only twenty-six years old when, accompanied by his friend and sidekick Gustave de Beaumont, he
came to America in 1831.4 He was ostensibly being sent
here on official business for the French government, to study
the American prison system. But that was a ruse and a
pretext. In reality, he came to America intent upon “examining, in detail and as scientifically as possible, all the mechanisms of the vast American society which everyone talks of
and no one knows.”5 Tocqueville was extraordinary in the
extent of his ambitions, as in everything else, and it is clear
that he always intended to write a large and groundbreaking
book about America, which he hoped would make his reputation and launch a successful political career.
After touring the country for nine months, he returned
home with a bushel of notes and a head full of ideas. The resulting book, Democracy in America, which would be published in two successive volumes in 1835 and 1840, turned
out to be perhaps the richest and most enduring study of
American society and culture ever written. If one were permitted to read only one book on the subject, Democracy in
America would almost certainly be one’s best choice, even
more than a century and a half after its initial publication.
In this book, Tocqueville envisioned the United States as
a nation moving in the vanguard of history, a young and vigorous country endowed with an extraordinary degree of
social equality among its inhabitants, and without any feudal or aristocratic background to overcome. In America, he
believed, one could see embodied, in exemplary or heightened form, the condition toward which all the rest of the
world, including France, was tending. In America, which
was the only example the world then afforded of a large republic, one could gaze upon “the image of democracy itself,
of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions.”
And having so gazed, one could perhaps take away lessons
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that would allow leaders to deal more intelligently and
effectively with the democratic changes coming to Europe.6
He was firmly convinced that the movement toward
greater social equality represented an inescapable feature of
the modern age, a hard fact to which all future social or
political analysis must accommodate itself. There would be
no going back. Indeed, one could say that the one great idea
in Tocqueville’s writing was this huge sprawling historical
spectacle, the gradual but inexorable leveling of human
society on a universal scale, a movement that he identified
with the will of God, so pervasive and so unstoppable did it
seem to be. Even those who try to impede it or reverse it end
up contributing to it all the more. Listen to his description:
Everywhere the various incidents in the lives of peoples
are seen to turn to the profit of democracy; all men have
aided it by their efforts: those who had in view cooperating for its success and those who did not dream of
serving it; those who fought for it and even those who
declared themselves its enemies; all have been driven
pell-mell on the same track, and all have worked in
common, some despite themselves, others without
knowing it, as blind instruments in the hand of God.
The gradual development of equality of conditions
is therefore a providential fact, and it has the principal
characteristics of one: it is universal, it is enduring,
each day it escapes human power; all events, like all
men, serve its development.7
The entire book, he confessed, was written “under the
pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul,
produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution. . . . To
wish to stop democracy would then appear to be to struggle
against God himself.”8
*****
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25
Aristocracy’s day was done, then, however lamentable that
fact might seem to those who shared Tocqueville’s background. He accepted equality as a modern condition, even if
he never warmly embraced it. For although Tocqueville was
a keen analyst of democracy’s unlovely or dangerous features, he insisted that the most effective response to them
was not sullen withdrawal, but the development of a “new
political science,” designed not to reverse democracy’s progress, for that would be futile, but instead to refine democracy’s crudities and counter its pathologies.9
The book, then, was no mere work of travel literature,
and in fact, the narrative elements of the book are probably
its least interesting parts. Instead, Tocqueville was sketching
out a philosophical framework for the understanding of democracy, and for that reason, arguably deserves to be considered alongside such political philosophers and theorists
as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Marx. It would be a stretch, I
believe, to call him a philosopher himself, since he was
neither systematic nor comprehensive, and left largely
unexamined many of the traditional objects of philosophical
inquiry. In fact, the book’s relatively casual style of organization is part of its appeal for many present-day readers; you
can pick it up almost anywhere, and profitably read a short
chapter in complete isolation from the book as a whole.
But one should not be misled by that casualness.
Tocqueville was interested in far more than the relatively
narrow subject of American democracy in its political
forms. He argued that a democratic regime would manifest
its effects in every facet of human life: not merely in procedural and institutional ways, but also in family life, in literature, in philosophy, in manners, in language, in marriage, in
mores, in male-female relations, in ambition, in friendship,
in love, and in attitudes toward war and peace. It was not
just the outward forms of democracy that concerned him. He
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was an especially acute analyst of democracy’s innermost
effects, finely attuned to the ways in which a society’s political arrangements are not matters that merely skate on the
surface of life, but are in fact influences that reach deep
down into the very souls of its inhabitants.
He accomplished this analysis, mostly in the book’s
second volume, by contrasting the different forms assumed
by each of these phenomena in aristocratic societies and in
democratic societies. Those two terms, “aristocratic” and
“democratic,” represented for him what are sometimes
called “ideal types” because, although they are generalizing
abstractions that rarely occur in anything approaching their
pure state, their sharpness and coherence make them highly
effective as analytical tools.
For Tocqueville, an aristocratic society was one governed by a small, privileged class, a society that insisted on
the necessity of social hierarchy grounded in the authority of
tradition; a society in which one’s status was ascriptive,
assigned at birth, retained for life, and bound up in the identity and place of one’s family; a society in which families are
permanent fixtures in the social firmament; a society in
which there was a permanent diversity of types and classes
of persons.
In the ideal democratic society, however, matters are
quite different. There one finds a general “spirit” of equality;
the people are sovereign and the right to vote is widely extended; hierarchies are disestablished and any legal status or
privilege extended to the well-born few is abolished; rights
are universal, or tending toward universality, as is literacy
and access to education; families are comparatively weak
and mutable, even ephemeral; there is a constant pressure
toward the dispersion of inherited wealth, aided by laws that
break up large estates and large fortunes; and there is a
resulting tendency toward social and economic leveling,
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ESSAYS | McCLAY
together with a fading of class distinctions—all leading to
universal sameness and homogeneity.
Although the two volumes of the Democracy differed in
significant ways, taken together they presented a coherent
and memorable image of a distinctively democratic American social and individual character. Tocqueville’s America
was a strikingly middle-class society: feverishly commercial
and acquisitive, obsessively practical-minded, jealously
egalitarian, and restlessly mobile—a constant beehive of
activity. Tocqueville saw many things to admire in this
energetic, bumptious democracy, but also much to fear.
Chief among the dangers was its pronounced tendency
toward individualism. Tocqueville saw in America the peril
that citizens might elect to withdraw from involvement in
the larger public life, and regard themselves as autonomous
and isolated actors, with no higher goal than the pursuit of
their own material well-being. He acknowledged that in a
modern commercial democracy, this was a particularly
strong possibility, since self-interest would inevitably come
to be accepted as the chief engine of all human striving. But
where then would the generous and selfless civic virtues
needed for sustaining a decent society come from? How
could the individualistic Americans of the 1830s prevent
self-interest from overwhelming all considerations of the
public good, and undermining the sources of social cohesion?
*****
Before trying to answer that question, it will be helpful to
flesh out more fully Tocqueville’s understanding of individualism. It differed in subtle ways from what generally goes
by that name. It was closer to what today might be called
privatism, a complete withdrawal from public life and
society at large in favor of almost exclusive involvement
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with a small personal circle of family and friends. As such,
it was quite distinct from the age-old vice of egoism or
selfishness. It was not merely a prevalent emotion or
passion, but a settled, more or less consciously held attitude
in the moral outlook of Americans.
In aristocratic societies, things were different. Families
remained in place for centuries. Every man remembered his
ancestors and anticipated his descendants, and strove to do
his duty to both. Paternal authority was formidable. And yet
such families were not private enclaves set apart from a
larger public world, but crucial and visible elements in the
makeup of society as a whole. The different classes of
society were distinct and immobile, and citizens occupied a
fixed position in the social pecking order, with tight bonds
to those in their same social niche. So enmeshed was the
individual person in this comprehensive social order that it
was literally nonsensical to imagine him or her apart from
it—as implausible as swimming in the air, or breathing
beneath the waves.
In democratic societies, however, where the principle of
equality dictated a more generalized and fluid sense of
connection, such duties and fixities were lost. Tocqueville
describes this new condition hauntingly in one of the most
unforgettable passages in the Democracy, conjuring the
specter of an individualism carried to its barren logical limit:
In democratic peoples, new families constantly issue
from nothing, others constantly fall into it, and all those
who stay on change face; the fabric of time is torn at
every moment and the trace of generations is effaced.
You easily forget those who have preceded you, and
you have no idea of those who will follow you. Only
those nearest have interest. . . . Aristocracy had made of
all citizens a long chain that went from the peasant up
to the king; democracy breaks the chain and sets each
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link apart. . . . As conditions are equalized, one finds a
great number of individuals who . . . owe nothing to
anyone, they expect so to speak nothing from anyone,
they are in the habit of always considering themselves
in isolation, and they willingly fancy that their whole
destiny is in their hand.
Thus not only does democracy make each man
forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants from
him and separates him from his contemporaries; it
constantly leads him back toward himself alone and
threatens finally to confine him wholly in the solitude
of his own heart.10
One should add, too, that the prospect of this atomized
condition, in which families, neighborhoods, communities,
and all other forms of intermediate human association are
rendered weak and listless, leads Tocqueville to express, at
the book’s conclusion, a fear of democratic despotism, an
all-embracing “soft” tyranny which relies upon dissolving
the bonds among its members, and their consequent inability to act together as citizens, to smooth the way toward
a massive bureaucratic state that would rule over every feature of their lives.11
*****
So we return to the question that we left dangling a moment
ago. How does a democratic society, in which all the formerly reliable defenses against anarchy and anomie have
been lost or removed, still find a way to order itself, and
produce the kind of virtuous behavior and commitment to
the common good that is required for it to be cohesive,
successful, and free? Or to phrase the question in a slightly
different way: Can a society in the grip of a massive and
inexorable change nevertheless find ways to import into the
new order some of those things that were most estimable in
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the old, while leaving behind the elements that were either
pernicious or inadequate? Does great historical change require that the slate be wiped entirely clean? Or is there a way
that the best of the past can be carried over into the present
and future?
This is, it seems to me, a question of the first importance
to those of us who believe so fervently in the importance of
reading old books. And it is also a question that provides the
optimal opportunity to explain more fully what I mean by
“the Tocquevillean moment.” It is the moment when an old
order becomes conscious of the imperative to give way to a
new one—and the particular dilemma that this change
presents to thoughtful individuals, like Tocqueville, who
seem destined to ride the crest of a monumental transformation knowing full well both what is passing and what is
to come. The Tocquevillean moment makes two contradictory demands: first, that it is essential to accept the inevitability of sweeping changes, however difficult that acceptance may be; and second, that it is equally essential to find
ways of incorporating into the emerging new order that
which was wisest and best in the passing order, no matter
how much the new order may resist.
This way of looking at things makes several important
assumptions. It assumes the fact of contingency, and the
possibility of free and meaningful choices. Tocqueville was
emphatically opposed to any and all forms of determinism,
partly because they sapped the will and extinguished the
spirit of liberty, and partly because they simply failed the test
of truth. All is not foreordained, and there are clearly better
and worse ways of managing the transition to democracy.
The outcome depends upon the ways in which change is
directed, and that in turn depends upon the prudential
judgment of wise and skilled leaders.
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31
Let me make what I am saying clearer by offering another example of what I am calling “the Tocquevillean
moment” taken from outside Tocqueville’s work and his
immediate context. A similar moment of profound political
and social transition is described with great vividness in
Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard.12 The
book relates the story of a proud Sicilian prince, Don Fabrizio, who is thoroughly steeped in a venerable and traditional
social order at whose apex he stands, but who must nevertheless find a dignified way to accept and yield to the winds
of change. When the Risorgimento, the movement for
Italian national unification, intrudes upon his island world,
he is surprised to discover that his well-born, talented, and
ambitious young nephew Tancredi has decided to sign on
with the revolutionaries, who have set their sights on the
overthrow of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and its replacement by the Kingdom of Italy. Why, the Prince wonders, would a young nobleman like Tancredi desert his king
and stoop to make common cause with a ruffian like Garibaldi and his mob of redshirts?
But Tancredi is moved by more than a young man’s hotblooded desire to be in on the Big Event. He also has a persuasive explanation for his choice. Change was inevitable.
But without the participation of the older elite classes, the
nationalist movement could well be taken over or supplanted by something immensely more destructive, a radical
republicanism that would sweep away every vestige of the
life that the Prince had known. “If we want things to stay as
they are,” said Tancredi, “things will have to change. D’you
understand?”13
And yes, the Prince did come to understand, and the
book is about his gradual and methodical accommodation to
the new order, albeit one laced with intense melancholy and
regret, and occasional doses of cynicism. That process of
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accommodation culminates in his embrace of a marriage
between Tancredi and the beautiful daughter of Don
Calogero, a man of lowly birth, who had made himself into
a wealthy landowner and influential businessman, and who
was a strong supporter of the nationalists. Don Calogero
perfectly embodies the emerging democratic order in all its
callowness and vulgarity. The very idea of linking his family
to Don Calogero’s was a change that the Prince’s ancestors
would never willingly have contemplated, and it was certainly a change that the proud Prince would rather not have
had to make. But he recognized that there was much good
that could be salvaged in some areas, if only he were willing
to make a strategic retreat in others. Such a union would
allow him to retain his social authority and the prestige of
his house, and along with it the commitment to refinement
and culture that were the distinguishing mark of his class,
since Don Calogero and his offspring would now have an
equal stake in the perpetuation of these things. Some things
changed, precisely so that other things could stay the same.
This story neatly encapsulates what is meant by “the
Tocquevillean moment.” It involves discerning those cases
in which change is inevitable and accepting that inevitability, while also recognizing the possibility of carrying over
what is essential or desirable—just as Aeneas fled from his
ravaged Troy with his household gods and with his father
Anchises on his shoulders, carrying the most precious relics
of the past with him as he struggled toward the founding of
something new and unprecedented.14 It involves recognizing that the change can occur in many ways and understanding that, within certain limits, many things are possible.
There is no one way for history to flow. So much is contingent and uncertain. So much is up to us.
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33
Many of Tocqueville’s contemporary readers failed to
see this aspect of his work. In particular, the reception of the
second volume of the Democracy was a tremendous disappointment to Tocqueville. Reviewer after reviewer criticized
the book, or praised it only blandly. Evidently its ambitiousness, its scope, and its abstractness put them off. Only John
Stuart Mill, whom Tocqueville had come to know during a
visit to England, seemed to grasp the book’s intentions. His
long and careful review of the book brought forth a grateful
letter from Tocqueville, one that showed how deeply the
book’s poor reception had stung and frustrated him.15
Another letter Tocqueville wrote to an uncomprehending
French reviewer is worth quoting at length, because it offers
a remarkably clear explication of Tocqueville’s goals and
beliefs, and tells us much about the dilemmas that an intelligent and high-minded political Frenchman faced in his time.
We do not know for certain whether this letter was ever received, or even sent. But it is as clear a statement as Tocqueville ever provided of precisely what he was up to with the
Democracy:
I cannot help expressing to you the painful impression
[your review] has made on me. It does not do justice to
the most important point, the principal idea, the
governing thought of the work. . . .
I had become aware that, in our time, the new social
state that had produced and is still producing very great
benefits was, however, giving birth to a number of quite
dangerous tendencies. These seeds, if left to grow
unchecked, would produce, it seemed to me, a steady
lowering of the intellectual level of society with no
conceivable limit, and this would bring in its train the
mores of materialism and, finally, universal slavery. I
thought I saw that mankind was moving in this direction, and I viewed the prospect with terror. It was essen-
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tial, I thought, for all men of good will to join in
exerting the strongest possible pressure in the opposite
direction. To my knowledge, few of the friends of the
Revolution of 1789 dared point out these very frightening tendencies. . . . Those who saw them and were not
afraid to speak of them, being the sort of men who
condemned in one fell swoop the entire democratic
social state and all its elements, were more likely to
irritate people than guide them. The intellectual world
was thus divided into blind friends and furious
detractors of democracy.
My aim in writing [my] book was to point out these
dreadful downward paths opening under the feet of our
contemporaries, not to prove that they must be thrown
back into an aristocratic state of society . . . but to make
these tendencies feared by painting them in vivid
colors, and thus to secure the effort of mind and will
which alone can combat them—to teach democracy to
know itself, and thereby to direct itself and contain
itself.16
It would be hard to imagine a fuller expression of what
I am calling the Tocquevillean moment, the moment when
social change arrives at a crossroads, and awaits further
direction. Two things are particularly worth noting. First,
Tocqueville’s words make clear how uncomfortable he felt
having to choose between the hard-right monarchism of his
aristocratic friends and the hard-left republicanism of his
democratic ones; neither of these options, he believed,
offered hope for the preservation of liberty—and the preservation of liberty was, for Tocqueville, the highest and most
fundamental of political goods. Second, the letter gives the
lie to those critics who attribute to Tocqueville a fatalistic
view of democracy as inevitable decline, a view reflective of
his ingrained elitism. It simply wasn’t so. For one thing,
Tocqueville had the asceticism that most great thinkers
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35
share, the ability to think against his own sentiments in the
pursuit of the truth. But more importantly, he always wrote
with the idea of contingency, and of the freedom of man’s
will, firmly in mind. The Tocquevillean moment is a
moment of decision—a decision conditioned and structured
and hedged about by large social changes, but a consequential decision nonetheless. In this respect, Tocqueville’s
view was dramatically different from that of his younger
contemporary Marx, for whom the relationship between
large structures and individual action was hopelessly
muddled. Tocqueville was an ardent foe of any and all determinisms, and he would never have countenanced the view
that his writings discredited democracy in toto.
Indeed, a fundamentally Christian view of man’s freedom was at the heart of Tocqueville’s vision. As he wrote at
the very end of the second volume of the Democracy:
I am not unaware that several of my contemporaries
have thought that peoples are never masters of themselves here below, and that they necessarily obey I do
not know which insurmountable and unintelligent force
born of previous events, the race, the soil, or the
climate.
Those are false and cowardly doctrines that can
never produce any but weak men and pusillanimous
nations. Providence has not created mankind entirely
independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, a
fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but
within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so too
with peoples.
Nations of our day cannot have it that conditions
within them are not equal; but it depends on them
whether equality leads them to servitude or freedom, to
enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery.17
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The Tocquevillean moment calls forth all the capacities
we possess for coming to terms, not only as individuals but
also as citizens and societies, with that fatal circle.
*****
Now we can give a fuller answer to our long-dangling
question: How did Tocqueville believe that the Americans of
his day had managed to counter the dangerous aspects of
democracy and create a relatively free and vibrant society?
He identified a number of factors. First, he gave credit to the
pervasive influence of religion in American life, noting to
his astonishment the numerous ways in which American
religion supported democratic values and free institutions.
Such a development seemed particularly surprising, coming
as it did at the very time when educated Europeans were
abandoning religious faith and practice, in the mistaken
belief that the “spirit of liberty” was incompatible with the
authoritarian “spirit of religion.” Tocqueville’s visit to
America convinced him that the opposite was true. In
America, religious beliefs and institutions restrained selfassertion in ways that made the exercise of freedom more
stable and more effective. Although religion took no direct
or official role in governance, it was, he declared, “the first
of [Americans’] political institutions,” for all Americans
regarded it as indispensable to the maintenance of republican government.18
Tocqueville was always deeply concerned about materialism, connecting acquisitive materialism—the unrestrained
desire to possess more and more things—with philosophical
materialism—the belief that the soul is perishable and only
matter truly exists. As a social philosopher committed both
to the power of free will and to the ideal of self-rule,
Tocqueville found the deterministic implications of philosophical materialism intolerable, and condemned it force-
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37
fully as a “dangerous malady of the human mind.”19 Fortunately, he believed, the Americans had so far proven
resistant to its temptations. But without the countervailing
force of religion, and in particular, without a belief in the
moral responsibility of an immortal soul, democratic institutions could easily be overwhelmed by their own tendency
to beget an uncontrolled passion for physical gratifications.
And there were other factors that he believed countervailed against democracy’s dangers. Tocqueville applauded
Americans for their talent in forming voluntary associations,
and for their federal institutions, both of which tended to
disperse pow er and encourage the involvement of citizens
in the activity of governing themselves—and both very
much in contrast to the centralizing tendencies of French
politics. “Local freedoms,” he wrote, “which make many
citizens put value on the affection of their neighbors and
those close to them, therefore constantly bring men closer to
one another, despite the instincts that separate them, and
force them to aid each other.”20
As this description implies, such a scheme did not depend upon selflessness. Indeed, the axiomatic principle that
made effective political and social association in America
possible, he believed, was the principle of self-interest rightly understood or well understood (l’intérêt bien entendu). To
ask an American to do virtuous things for virtue’s sake was
quite possibly to waste one’s breath. But the same request
would readily be granted if the prospect of some personal
benefit could be shown to flow from it. The challenge of
moral philosophy in such an environment, then, was demonstrating repeatedly the ways in which “private interest and
public interest meet and amalgamate,” and how one’s
devotion to the general good would therefore also promote
his or her personal advantage. Belief in that conjunction—
belief that one could do well by doing good—was exactly
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what Tocqueville meant by the “right understanding” of
self-interest.21
The prevalence of this belief could be seen in the characteristic forms of moral discourse Tocqueville encountered in
America. In the United States, he wrote, “it is almost never
said that virtue is beautiful. They maintain that it is useful
and they prove it every day.” They do not care about virtue
for its own sake, but are completely convinced that it is in
the interest of every man to be virtuous.22
Tocqueville was quite willing to accept this deal in much
the same spirit that the Prince accepted Don Calogero. After
all, the Tocquevillean moment involves making a calculation, whereby the transition into the new democratic order
could be effected with the least possible loss of what was
precious and estimable in the old ways. “I shall not fear to
say that the doctrine of self-interest well understood seems
to me of all philosophic theories the most appropriate to the
needs of the men in our time,” because self-interest was
destined to “become more than ever the principal if not the
unique motive of men’s actions.”23
Hence, it was imperative to educate citizens to understand this. “Enlighten them, therefore,” wrote Tocqueville,
“at any price; for the century of blind devotions and instinctive virtues is already fleeing far from us, and I see the time
approaching when freedom, public peace, and social order
itself will not be able to do without enlightenment.”24
Lamentable as the loss of these older virtues seemed to be,
their loss was not the end of the story for Tocqueville. The
American example made him hopeful that there might be
ways for the principle of self-interest to be so channeled,
hedged about, habituated, and clothed as to produce public
order and public good, even in the absence of older and
more venerable motives.
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*****
“Enlighten them, therefore, at any price.” Éclairez-les donc
à tout prix. Or, as the older Phillips Bradley translation
expressed it, “Educate them, then.” This exhortation brings
us full circle, back to where I began in reflecting on what is
being done here and now at this particular college. For
whatever else we may believe about the applicability of
Tocqueville’s ideas to the present day, and there is a lot of
room for debate there, we can be in no doubt that he was
right in his emphasis upon education. But not just any kind
of education. He is talking about liberal education, in the
strictest sense of the term, meaning an education that is
designed to make men and women capable of the exercise of
liberty, and of doing so within the context of the particular
society in which they find themselves. Such an education is
likely to require a serious and sustained encounter with old
books.
Modern Americans are likely to assume that the value of
such an education is mainly contemplative. And I say this
without any hint of disparagement. Many of us believe that
an education aimed at contemplative truth is a very high and
worthwhile endeavor. I don’t think I need to make that case
here at St. John’s. But I do want to argue that such an education also commends itself on very practical grounds, for
reasons that seem to me quite thoroughly Tocquevillean.
For, to borrow from the very words Tocqueville used in his
letter to his French critic, liberal education is the kind of
education that seeks to teach democracy to know itself, and
thereby to direct itself and contain itself. Such an education
can help equip us to negotiate, with both intelligence and
wisdom, the multitude of Tocquevillean dilemmas that are
presented to us by our times—changes that are too formi-
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dable to be resisted entirely, but at the same time too fluid
for us to refuse the challenge of influencing their direction.
This only serves to underscore the profound importance
of that process I described at the beginning, the process
whereby we pass on to the present and to the future the most
worthy and enduring elements of human ages that have
passed or are passing away. This is why the theory of strict
historicism is so wrongheaded and impoverishing, because
it denies us that very benefit by demanding that everything
be perpetually bound to its immediate context—as if every
cargo had to remain forever in the hold of the ship that transported it, and as if no child could ever make his parent’s
legacy into something of his own.
When, for example, we accord Plato’s Republic our high
respect as a great text warranting a lifetime of study, this
does not imply that we approve or ignore the many defects,
cruelties, and inequities of the Athenian society in which it
was produced—let alone that we prefer such a society to our
own democracy. We do not study the Republic merely for
what it tells us about Plato’s Athens. We study the Republic
partly, and far more importantly, because its criticisms of
democracy remain enduringly valid and troubling—and
because in reading it, we are teaching our democracy to
know itself better, thereby contributing to its ennoblement.
It is neither elitist nor ahistorical for us to seek to perpetuate,
not a way of life that is past or passing, but the things in it
that remain estimable and enduringly valuable.
There is much reason for hope, then, in this vision of
things. And yet, to be faithful to Tocqueville, I have to end
on a somewhat more somber note. Tocqueville was himself
prone to melancholy, and worried that the task of democracy’s ennoblement would prove too difficult, too exacting,
and too exhausting to perform. There is always in his work
the sense of an uphill challenge, with the issue very much in
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41
doubt. And it does not take much imagination to find, in his
description to his French critic of the “downward paths
opening under the feet of our contemporaries,” a description
that applies very much to our own democracy today.
But what remains still, both in Tocqueville and in the
present day, is the imperative of freedom. Remember his
words at the end of the Democracy: “[Providence] traces, it
is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave;
but within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so too
with peoples.”25 It is hard at any given time to know where
our containing circle is drawn, and we are just as likely to
err in presuming to cross over the line as we are in shying
away from it out of timidity and fear. Yet Tocqueville clearly
thought the danger of the latter outweighed that of the
former, and that we have far more power to shape our lives
and our destinies than we allow ourselves to believe. That is
why the Tocquevillean moment is, at bottom, an occasion
for the exercise of the profoundest human freedom.
It is not an unlimited freedom, of course. But what could
such a thing mean? What, after all, is a radically unconditioned state, other than a state of utter randomness and
inconsequentiality? “To live without let or hindrance would
be life indeed,” observed George Santayana, “Yet there is a
snare in this vital anarchy. It is like the liberty to sign
cheques without possessing a bank account. You may write
them for any amount; but it is only when a precise deposit
limits your liberty that you may write them to any purpose.”26
No, the difficult and complex freedom of the Tocquevillean moment is precisely the sort of freedom for which we
humans were made, and it provides the opportunity for our
finest qualities to flourish. The fatal circle is also the ground
of our freedom, the horizon that gives focus and purposefulness to our efforts. History may delimit our choices, but
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it does not dictate what we should do with what is set before
us. For that, Tocqueville asserted, we must look to ourselves. It is bracing but encouraging counsel.
NOTES
1
Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through
Yugoslavia, 2 vols. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009), 1044.
2
The reader who is interested in knowing more about Tocqueville’s life
and times can consult two excellent English-language biographies:
André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, translated by Lydia Davis with
Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988); and
Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2006).
3
De la Démocratie en Amérique is the book’s French title, a title that
conveys far better than its English translation the fact that Tocqueville’s
greater interest was in “democracy” rather than in “America.” I have
used the scrupulously literal and reliable recent translation by Harvey C.
Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and all quotations and page numbers
refer to that text. I confess to retaining a fondness for the often more
graceful (if less accurate) translation by Phillips Bradley, based on the
Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen, published by Alfred A.
Knopf in 1945 and still widely available, which was generally considered the standard English translation until being supplanted by the
appearance of the Mansfield/Winthrop edition. There are other worthy
English translations in circulation, including a most welcome bilingual,
French-English, historical-critical edition edited by Eduardo Nolla,
translated by the distinguished Tocqueville scholar James T. Schleifer,
and published in four volumes in 2010 by Liberty Fund.
4
On Tocqueville’s journey, see George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and
Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938).
5
Tocqueville to Eugène Stoffels, Paris, February 21, 1831, cited in
James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,
second edition (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), 3. Schleifer’s
book is a meticulous and fascinating account of the book’s composition.
6
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 13.
ESSAYS | McCLAY
7
43
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 6-7.
9
Ibid., 7. Here I acceded only reluctantly to the Mansfield/Winthrop
translation of une science politique nouvelle as “a new political science,” which is literally accurate but seems to me to run the considerable
risk of being conflated with the use of the term “political science” as the
name for a particular academic discipline that did not exist in Tocqueville’s time. The Bradley/Reeve/Bowen translation, “a new science of
politics,” is less literal but seems less liable to that confusion.
10
Ibid., 483-4.
11
Ibid., 661-73.
12
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, translated by Archibald
Colquhoun (New York: Pantheon, 1960); originally published as Il
Gattopardo (Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1958).
13
Ibid., 40.
14
Cf. Aeneid, Book 2, 624-804.
15
Mill’s review, which appeared in October 1840 edition of the
Edinburgh Review, is described in Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography,
274-5.
16
This unpublished letter written by Tocqueville to Sylvestre de Sacy is
in the Tocqueville family archives but has been translated and quoted at
length in Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, 272-3. Brogan also refers to
this same item, characterizing it as a “blistering letter” which “it is to be
hoped that he sent,” given the fact that “here, in a couple of sentences,
he expresses the central concern which drove his investigations . . . and
explains why posterity has argued over them ever since.” See Brogan,
Tocqueville, 368-9.
17
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 675-6.
18
Ibid., 280.
19
Ibid., 519.
20
Ibid., 487.
21
Ibid., 500-503.
22
Ibid., 501.
23
Ibid., 503.
24
Ibid.
25
See note 17.
26
George Santayana, Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty,
Society, and Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 241.
8
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45
ON SEEING ASPECTS
John Verdi
Introduction
If philosophy, which seeks to encompass all of being in
thought, has a question as its source and its guiding principle, that question might be, What is there? To this question
we can give a disarmingly simple and obviously true answer: What is there? Everything. There are particles and
waves, brains and consciousness, nations and peoples, Hamlet and Hamlet, and on and on. There is . . . everything. The
“everything” answer—which in the end may show itself to
be the only true universal answer available to us—delegates
to various disciplines and modes of thinking the task of determining what there is, each in its own way. The physicist,
the psychologist, the historian, the poet: each receives his
share, with perhaps nothing left over for the philosopher.
Somewhat like Meno’s paradoxical question to Socrates
about the futility of seeking either what one does or what
one does not know, the “everything” answer tries to silence
philosophy at it source.
But we philosophers retain the belief, perhaps even the
conviction, that in spite of everything the effort to comprehend the unity of things is still worthwhile. Philosophy’s
subject matter is precisely not one thing among many others,
but rather the interrelatedness of all that is. We philosophers
believe that the fundamental questions—beginning with the
question, What is there?—can continually bring into light
the inexhaustible being of things and can place us, as thinkers, squarely in its presence. The essence of these questions
is to open up possibilities and to keep them open. This is
John Verdi is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This essay was first
presented as a lecure on 28 October 2005.
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why there is philosophy in life. In this essay I would like to
show, in a very preliminary way, how the concept of aspects, and especially our experience of seeing aspects, can
help us think about being, and about the meaning of philosophy’s opening question, What is there?
We can turn to Aristotle for an entry into the idea of
aspects. In On Memory and Recollection, he raises a question about what goes on when we remember something. For
Aristotle all perception involves an image of some kind,
present right now, in the soul. He call such an image a phantasma. The question of how the past can be present is the
problem of memory. Aristotle writes:
[I]t is clear that one must conceive the sort of thing that
comes about in the soul as a result of sense perception
. . . as something like a picture (z%graph'ma), the active
holding of which we assert to be memory. . . . But if
what goes on in the case of memory is of this sort, does
one remember this experience or the one from which it
came about? For if it is this one, we would not
remember any of the things that are absent, but if it is
the earlier one, how, while perceiving this later one, do
we remember the absent thing that we are not
perceiving (450a25-31, 450b13-16).
So if what I have now is a present image, a phantasma, how
is it that this image can be of the past?
To overcome this impasse Aristotle distinguishes phantasmata from eikones, that is, images from representations
or likenesses. (We see this also in Plato’s Sophist [240b12c2], and passim throughout the Republic.) He says:
For example, the picture drawn on a tablet is both a
picture (z%on) and a likeness (eik%n), and one and the
same thing is both of these, although what it is to be
these two things is not the same, and it is possible to
behold it both as a picture and as a likeness; so too one
ought to conceive of the image that is in us as being
ESSAYS | VERDI
47
itself something in its own right, and as being of something else (450b21-26).
We can say that the memory image I have of something I
experienced in the past can display at least two aspects, depending on whether we see it simply as a phantasma, that is,
as an image fully present in its own right at this moment, or
as an eikon, a reminder or pointer to something else—something that may in fact no longer even exist.
One reason, then, for investigating the seeing of aspects
is that we might come to understand how it is possible for
something absent to be represented by something present.
Put in broader terms, how can one thing stand for another
and be its representative? In the broadest terms, we might
ask how anything comes to have meaning at all.
I have had another, more personal, reason for getting
involved with aspects. Some years ago I had occasion to
read and discuss Augustine’s Confessions both in one class
during the summer and in another class the following fall. I
was profoundly moved by these encounters with Augustine,
who at the time he was writing would have been about the
same age I was while reading. I felt certain that if I were to
read the book yet again soon after I would begin to see
things in the world—things I hadn’t seen before or had
stopped seeing long ago. I felt sure I would experience some
sort of change, both in what I would see and in the way I
would see it. Whether it was from prudence or cowardice—
I still don’t know—I did not pick up the Confessions again
until years later. But my near encounter with conversion left
me wondering what conversion is and how it comes about.
I’ve come to suspect that conversion, whether religious or
otherwise, sudden or gradual, toward or away from, has the
power to change what one sees in the world—perhaps even
to change one’s answer to the question, What is there?
Whether I come to see the world as “charged with the grandeur of God,” as Hopkins says, or I say along with Words-
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48
worth that “the things which I have seen I now can see no
more,” in either case, my world becomes different.
This essay is in three parts. In the first part, I will look at
some pictures and discuss some of the apparently simple
phenomena associated with aspect-seeing. In the second
part, I will present the beginnings of an account of aspects
and their significance to the question of what there is. In the
last part, I will examine a painting by Caravaggio, The
Calling of St. Matthew. There is also one joke in the essay.
49
ESSAYS | VERDI
This is the duck-rabbit.
Figure 3
Part One: Ducks and Rabbits
This is a duck.
We can see the duck-rabbit either as a duck or as a rabbit. When we see it as one or the other we are seeing one or
the other of its aspects. When we see it first as a duck and
then as a rabbit, we experience a change of aspect. It is also
possible that a person might never see anything but a rabbit
in the picture. That person could be said to be seeing the
rabbit aspect continuously (PI, 194).
Here is another example of aspect-seeing and change of
aspect.
Figure 1
This is a rabbit.
Figure 2
Figure 4
Figure 4 is called the Necker cube. Look at it for a moment. Do you notice a change in the cube while you are
looking? Most people will see the cube jump, seeming for a
while to have its front side pointing down to the right, and
then for a while to have its front side pointing up to the left.
If you’re still not seeing this change of aspect, you might be
helped by Figure 5, in which the two ways of seeing the
cube are emphasized by dots.
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50
Figure 5
First imagine the black dot as closer to you than the
white dot. Then reverse this relationship and try to imagine
the white dot as closer. Now look one more time at the original cube. Even with the assistance of the dots, there may
still be some people who do not see the cube jump between
aspects.
Consider next Figure 6. How many cubes are there? The
correct answers are six or seven, depending on which aspect
one sees while counting—six if the black squares seem to be
on the tops of the cubes, seven if they seem to be on the
bottoms. Those who can count only six or only seven may
be helped by the additional drawings in Figure 7.
Figure 7
Figure 6
The paradoxical quality of these examples lies in the
awareness that what is seen has not changed at all, and
nevertheless what is seen is quite different. In what does this
difference consist? If I asked you to draw what you saw in
both instances, and you were to represent both by exact
copies—and wouldn’t those be good representations?—no
change would appear, because the copies would be congruent (PI, 196). If I see the duck-rabbit as a duck, I might
ESSAYS | VERDI
51
point to other pictures of ducks, and say that I’m now seeing
something like that. This, however, is not a description of
what I see, but rather an expression of it.
These simple examples raise once again the question,
What is there? What is seen are contraries: rabbits that are
not rabbits, corners both closer and not closer, cubes both
six and seven. These apparent contradictions can lead us
into a dialectical inquiry. In Book XII of the Metaphysics
Aristotle suggests that dialectic begins not from what there
is, but from contrary assumptions about what there is (1078
b25). The object of our concern itself opens a road of
inquiry for us, and coaxes us along the path (984a17-20).
If the difference between what is seen before the change
of aspect and what is seen after it did not lie in some sense
in the object I was looking at, we might be tempted to think
that our eyes and heads are responsible, that something has
changed in us. While the new aspect seems to appear suddenly out there, we nonetheless feel that we must have had
something to do with it. The image on my retina, the way my
eyes follow the figure, the organization of impulses in my
brain: any one of these might be the source of the change of
aspect. But the fact remains that what I see is still out there.
Seeing an aspect is not like having a hallucination, because
it is a true seeing of something that is, even if we can’t all
see it simultaneously, and even if some of us may never see
some aspects of things. Furthermore, I am not aware of what
is going on in my eyes and brain while aspects change. So,
while these physiological events may be causally related to
my experience, they necessarily fail to get at what I mean by
change of aspect and what I mean by seeing aspects. Neither
a physiological account of aspect-seeing, if one could be
provided, nor any other causal account can satisfy us any
more that Socrates was satisfied by the causal accounts of
Anaxagoras. In the Phaedo, Socrates tells his friends that
Anaxagoras at first seemed to say that “Mind puts the world
in order and is responsible for all this” (97c), but in the end
he assigns only physical causality to things. Socrates says
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that Anaxagoras was like someone who gives an account
based on the relationship of bones and sinews to explain
why Socrates is sitting in prison awaiting death, rather than
providing the account that Socrates himself finds most
convincing: “Since the Athenians judged it better to condemn me, so I for my part have judged it better to sit here
and stay put and endure whatever penalty they order” (98de). The physical account fails to answer the question of what
Socrates’ time in jail means, just as a physiological account
would fail to tell us what our seeing of aspects might mean.
Consider now what happens when I contemplate a face,
and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that
the face has not changed, and yet I see it differently. I have
noticed an aspect of the face (PI, 193). The aspect is not a
part of the face as is the nose, nor a part as is its color or
shape. And yet I see the resemblance of this face to another;
I do not infer it or reason it through. I am struck by a similarity I had not before noticed, as if the being of the resemblance asserts itself, and I cannot help but see it. What is it
suddenly to notice what has been there all the time? Or has
it really been there all along? Perhaps it has come into being,
or perhaps I have been thrust into its presence. Or consider
the case of meeting someone I have not seen for years; I see
him clearly but fail to recognize him. Suddenly I know him,
and I see the old face in the altered one. I believe I would
paint a different portrait of him, if I could paint, now that I
have seen the old in the new. Is this a special sort of seeing?
Is it a case of both seeing and thinking, or an amalgam of the
two? (PI, 197.)
Seeing an aspect or change of aspect is not like seeing an
optical illusion. Optical illusions, such as those shown in
Figure 8 through Figure 10 appear to be what they are not.
In the case of the two diagonal lines of Figure 8, ab and bc,
it appears that ab is greater than bc, but in fact they are of
equal length, as a measurement would show us. In the illu-
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ESSAYS | VERDI
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 10
sion of Figure 9, all the vertical lines are parallel to one
another, as are all the horizontal lines, which we could determine by placing a straightedge against them, or looking at
them close up. And in the illusion of Figure 10, the squares
labeled A and B are actually the same shade of gray. Some
kind of light meter might help to show this, even though we
cannot see it. Many optical illusions are understood when
we learn something about how the eyes and brain work. An
optical illusion is a kind of trick that can be of value in understanding how we see, in the causal, physiological sense.
The questions raised by illusions are limited, and their answers tend to bring an end to wonder. Aspect-seeing is of
interest precisely because it is a kind of seeing whose concept is not explicated through physiology, not because we
don’t yet know enough about the eyes and brain, but because it is not a concept whose place in our thinking can be
made any clearer through such an approach.
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55
Figure 11
In the image of Figure 11, those who do not see a
change in aspect will be helped by something I am about to
say. This picture is of interest because it demonstrates that
speech can encourage a shift in aspect that might not otherwise occur. If speech can play a role in aspect-seeing, and if
what someone says can affect what we see, then there might
be some connection between speaking and seeing. Figure
11 represents the letter E.
Now here is a more complex image. To most people, the
image in Figure 12 seems to lack any unity. That may be
because it is upside down. If we turn it right side up as in
Figure 13, some people will see something they did not see
before. Most of the rest will be helped by a verbal description to see something like a late medieval representation of
Jesus.
Figure 12
Figure 13
The upper margin of the picture cuts the brow, so the top of
the head is not shown. The point of the jaw, clean-shaven
and brightly illuminated, is just above the geometric center
of the picture. A white mantel covers the right shoulder. The
upper sleeve is exposed as the rather black area at the lower
left. Do you see it now? Some people never see it, but for
those who do, dark marks have become human eyes, and
blobs of black and white have become an expressive human
face. How did that happen and why might it be important?
Part Two: The Being of Aspects
The distinctive mode of being characteristic of aspects is in
question here, and in particular we are now asking the question, What is there? The pictures we have examined so far
have engaged us in a form of dialectic and have brought us
to some kind of impasse. It is the peculiar characteristic of
our relationship to pictures that we see into them the very
objects they depict. We regard the picture, the drawing, or
the photograph as we regard the object itself, and so in a
sense we see what is there and what is not there simultaneously, in much the same way as, in Aristotle’s account of
memory, we recall things by considering a present image as
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pointing to the past. In a picture we see lines, shapes, paints,
colors; but we also see ducks and rabbits.
If we had in front of us the
original of this portrait of Descartes by Frans Hals, we would
be able to see brush strokes and
paint thicknesses. But our description of this canvas as a
portrait of Descartes will include
elements that do not belong to a
description of the picture as a
purely physical object. Descartes’s eyes look out at us; we can
study the expression on his face
and wonder what it reveals about Figure 14
him. In this paint-covered canvas we see a human being. (It
is perhaps not surprising to learn, then, that in Greek, the
same word, z%on, does double duty for both “living thing”
and “picture.”)
The reason that we hang pictures on our walls at all, I
think, is because we can see into a picture the very thing of
which it is a picture. We also hang snippets of text (PI, 205).
There is, of course, also a sense in which Descartes is not
really there in the picture. The dual nature of aspects—that
what we see both is and is not there—allows the picture to
make a demand on us and to ask us the question, What is
there? Our seeing itself is made questionable. By raising the
question of being, the aspects of the picture also raise the
question of truth. What is true about a picture?
The kinship between pictures and aspects may be put
this way: An aspect of something—that is, what I can see it
as—is what it can be a picture of, or more generally, what it
can stand for or represent: the image I now see can represent, or be seen as, an image of the past; the triangle I draw
on the chalkboard can represent the triangle of the proposition I am demonstrating. I see the duck-rabbit as a duck
57
ESSAYS | VERDI
when it is placed in a field of pictures of ducks. It can be a
picture of a duck. In a field of pictures of rabbits, I see it as
a rabbit. It can be a picture of a rabbit. You could imagine
the image in Figure 15 appearing in several places in a
book.
Figure 15
In the text surrounding the different appearances of the
figure, a different object could be under discussion in each
case: here a glass solid, there an inverted open box, there a
wire frame, there three boards forming a solid angle. We see
the illustration now as one object, now as another (PI, 193).
What we seem to be doing in these various cases is both
seeing and thinking—seeing because I have an illustration
in front of me, thinking because I am guided by the description to see it as one thing or another. It may take something
like imagination or a conscious act of interpretation to see
the drawing as now this, now that. When, by contrast, I view
the portrait of Descartes or see the duck-rabbit in a field of
duck pictures, I needn’t consciously engage the imagination.
And yet I am still inclined to say that imagination—or is it
thought?—suffuses itself throughout my seeing in all these
instances.
When aspect-seeing does not involve the sort of interpretation necessary to see the schematic solid as many different objects, it is more like ordinary seeing in this way:
when I see the duck-rabbit as a duck, my seeing is immediate and non-inferential—though it is still full of mind in
some way. In seeing the duck, I do not draw a conclusion
from a line of reasoning, such as “This must be a duck because all the others are ducks.” It could be said that mind
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reaches through the world of my knowledge and experience
to give shape to my sight. This is not to say that aspectseeing is two things, thinking and seeing, any more than
playing a piece of music with expression involves both the
playing and the expression. Rather, our seeing is one form
that thought takes in our lives, and it is only in a world of
thought that there can be aspects (RPP I, 1029). We have
thinking eyes and we see thinkingly. In De Anima, Aristotle
shows that all aesthesis, all perception, tends towards a universal, even if every sense has its own specific field, so that
what is immediately given is not universal. The fact is that
we see particulars in relation to something universal. We see
not merely a white patch, but a man. Merleau-Ponty, in his
book The Phenomenology of Perception, restates Aristotle’s
position, giving it a linguistic turn. He says that “language
intervenes at every stage of recognition by providing possible meanings for what is in fact seen, and recognition
advances along with linguistic connections” (131). In this
sense, seeing can be a direct and immediate grasp of the
meanings of things.
Can there then be a connection between a pathology of
mind and a pathology of seeing? What would it be like to be
aspect-blind? What would the world of the aspect-blind person be like? The eyesight of such a person would not be defective in any ordinary sense, but he would be unable to see
a picture jump from one aspect to another. He would not, for
example, see the Necker cube switch from first pointing
down to then pointing up, though he might be able to reason
that the existence of two aspects is a possibility. Furthermore, he might be blind to the expression on a face. He
might not see the picture face of Descartes as proud or pious
or cheerful, though he might be able to learn to deduce from
its features that it expressed these characteristics. In general,
his attitude toward pictures would be quite different from
that of a person who is able to see aspects (RPP II, 49). It
might be like the attitude most of us have toward a blue-
ESSAYS | VERDI
59
print: it needs to be figured out. He would not see motion in
the picture of a runner, though he would know that the picture was meant to represent motion. Aspect-blindness would
be akin to lacking a musical ear.
Oliver Sacks, in the title case study of his book The Man
Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, describes a distinguished
professor of music, Dr. P., who gradually loses the ability to
recognize faces and even quite ordinary objects. On first
meeting him, Sacks doesn’t understand why he has been referred for treatment, because he seems normal. Sacks then
opens for him a copy of National Geographic and asks him
to describe some of the pictures in it. Sacks writes:
His responses here were very curious. His eyes would
dart from one thing to another, picking up tiny features,
individual features. . . . A striking brightness, a color, a
shape would arrest his attention and elicit comment—
but in no case did he get the scene-as-a-whole. . . . He
never entered into relation with the picture as a
whole—never faced, so to speak, its physiognomy. He
had no sense whatever of a landscape or scene (10-11).
While he could recognize abstract shapes, such as the five
regular solids, he could identify a face only if he could find
in it some distinctive feature, from which he could draw the
conclusion that this must be so-and-so’s face. Nor could he
any longer identify the expressions on faces. He could see
the features, but could not see the face. As Sacks writes:
It wasn’t merely that he displayed the same indifference to the visual world as a computer but . . . he construed the world as a computer construes it, by means
of key features and schematic relationships. The
scheme might be identified . . . without the reality being
grasped at all (15).
There is also the case of young man named Schneider,
who suffered a brain injury during World War I. He was
studied by the psychologists Kurt Goldstein and Adhemar
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Gelb. In most respects Schneider appeared to be quite
normal, with undiminished language ability, intact intelligence, and adequate visual acuity. But Goldstein and Gelb
discovered that Schneider was unable to identify certain
words and objects when they were exposed briefly on a
special viewing apparatus called a tachistoscope, a device
that displays images for a specified length of time. If letters
or pictures were shown him with their contours obscured or
their interiors marked by cross-hatching, he was unable to
recognize them. Even the difference between straightness
and curvature escaped him. The doctors eventually learned
that he could read words and recognize objects and pictures
only through a series of slight head and hand movements,
which could be frustrated if several lines led away from a
single point.
Away from the laboratory and out in the real world,
Schneider managed to find his way around only by using
cues to deduce what things were. He was able to distinguish
a tree from its shadow because the shadow was darker. He
could distinguish men from vehicles because men were
narrow and tall, whereas vehicles were long and wide.
Merleau-Ponty says that he had lost “the symbolic function”
(123). For him the world no longer had any physiognomy,
no characteristic look or feel. Schneider had also lost the
ability to see things as representations, and consequently
could no longer wonder, for wonder is possible only when
we can see in something both that it is and that it is not. He
could himself no longer recognize the power of images to
express meaning and to point beyond themselves. MerleauPonty remarks that “it was through his sight that mind in
him was impaired” (126). It seemed that mind no longer
informed his eyes. The best his eyes could do was to send
information about what was in front of him to his mind,
which would then reason about what there was. In a sense,
his eyes could no longer see.
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These pathological cases suggest that there exists a deep
connection between aspect-seeing and meaning. The human
world—our world—is full of meanings. Pictures, words,
objects point away from themselves and towards other
things through an endless web of connections. Meaning
arises and spreads out through our recognition of the fundamental interconnectedness of things, the unity of being. In
this regard, aspects are themselves meanings, and as such
they belong, I would suggest, to human experience. Neither
beasts nor gods see aspects, at least not as fully as we do.
Animals for the most part appear to be unable to see something as something else. A dog might mistake a stick for a
bone, but it cannot see the stick as a bone. The Homeric
gods seem to live in a world almost devoid of representations except for language. They do not create representative
works of art for themselves, though Hephaistos does make a
shield for Achilles (Homer, Iliad, 18: 478-608). Do they
delight in poetry or music? Do they find meanings in the
objects of the world? Perhaps they simply see what truly is
and stand in no need of the suggestiveness of art. All this is
merely to say, in slightly different words, what Diotima says
in the Symposium: The gods do not philosophize (204a1).
The condition of aspect-blindness also suggests a
connection between aspects in general and what we might
call “experiencing the meaning of a word” (PI, 214). What
would you be missing if you never could experience the
meaning of a word—if, for instance, you could not feel that
a word loses its meaning and becomes mere sound when it
is repeated ten times over? A word has a familiar physiognomy; it arouses a feeling that it is an actual likeness of
its meaning. We manifest these feelings by the way we
choose and value words and by the care we take to find the
“right” word. The meanings of words are like the aspects of
visual representations: a sentence can resemble a painting in
words; an individual word in a sentence can resemble a picture (PI, 215).
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As an example, consider the two ideas “fat” and “thin.”
Would you be inclined to say that Friday was thin and
Thursday fat, or the reverse? Which one feels right to you?
Here “fat” and “thin” are not metaphors. Someone who does
not understand what is being asked here would be at a loss—
but not because he did not understand the primary meanings
of the four words. In fact, it is just because he does understand these meanings that the question might seem like
nonsense to him. These people exhibit a kind of meaningblindness, or perhaps meaning-myopia, as most of us do to
some degree. For these people, “finding the right word”
often involves thinking things through, figuring them out,
rather than listening for the right fit. They might have a hard
time appreciating poetry and certain kinds of humor, especially puns. This reminds me of a cartoon I once saw, showing a man in a business suit with a briefcase, standing in his
kitchen presumably after a long day at the office (or in the
classroom), with something like a scowl on his face. His
wife cheerfully asks: “Did you have a nice day, dear?” To
this he responds: “Of course I did. You told me to, didn’t
you?” The humor turns in part on our grasping at once the
dual aspects of the expression “Have a nice day,” usually
meant as a hortatory subjunctive, but grammatically equivalent to an imperative. (But I know it’s impolite to explain
jokes.)
Part Three: The Calling of St. Matthew
Seeing different aspects and experiencing multiple
meanings play important roles in our understanding and
appreciation of visual art, music, and literature, especially
poetry. Consider the representation of King William in
Figure 16 and imagine that we have the actual painting in
front of us.
We can see this image in at least three ways. That is, we
can see at least three of its aspects. First, we can see it as a
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ESSAYS | VERDI
Figure 16
physical object. It is a canvas nearly eight feet high and five
feet long, surrounded by a frame of wood, rather heavy,
covered with paint of different colors and thicknesses,
applied probably by different brushes with different strokes
by Sir Godfrey Kneller sometime in the late seventeenth
century.
Second, we can see it as what we might call a geometrical object. We can focus on its composition, on how the
shapes and colors blend or contrast, on which lines point in
which directions, and on how our eyes are guided through
the picture by its geometrical and optical qualities. Finally,
we can view it as a portrait of King William III. We can
study his facial expression and his posture. We can notice
his eyes looking down at us, and his left hand encircling the
handle of his sword while it gently holds his cloak. We see
his power; perhaps we can see his justice. Our seeing of the
painting as King William is continuous. We don’t see it now
as King William, now as paint on canvas, though one might
make an effort to do so. But no effort is needed to see it as
a representation of a living human being.
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Figure 17 shows another painting, The Calling of St.
Matthew by Caravaggio. It was painted around 1600 and hangs
in a small corner chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi
in Rome.
Figure 17
It is about eleven feet on each side. On the other two walls
of the sanctuary hang two other depictions by Caravaggio
from the life of St. Matthew. It is impossible to view this
painting head-on without entering the sanctuary, so most
people see it at an angle from the left, as shown in Figure
18.
As we know from Scripture, the painting is a representation of a conversion, that is, a turning. Levi (the pre-conversion name of Matthew) becomes Matthew—and the world
ESSAYS | VERDI
65
changes for him. He sees what he had not seen before.
Caravaggio’s painting attempts to reveal this moment of
conversion, or what we might call a sudden change in
aspect. We can examine the painting under three or four
aspects.
In its aspect as a physical
object, the painting is a large
square. Caravaggio has applied the
paint thinly to the canvas, using
only a small number of colors. A
very close inspection would reveal
brush strokes that to the trained eye
could indicate the size of the
brushes Caravaggio used, and perhaps even the haste or care with
which the paints were applied.
When we consider the geometrical aspect of the painting, we see
Figure 18
that it is divided into two parts. The
standing figures on the right form a vertical rectangle; those
gathered around the table on the left, a horizontal block or
triangle. The two groups are separated by a void that is
bridged by a pointing hand. There is a grid pattern of verticals and horizontals that serve to knit the picture together:
the window, the table, the finger of the bearded man sitting
at the table, a stool, a line running up the wall in the upper
left. The contrast of light and shadow serves to guide our
eye across the painting from right to left.
When we turn out attention to the content aspect of the
painting, we notice that the setting seems ordinary, unremarkable. Perhaps it is a room in a tavern or, if the scene is
outdoors, a courtyard. And yet, even if we did not see it
hanging in the chapel, we might see at once that it is a religious painting. The languid, pointing hand of Jesus commands assent in a way that might exceed mere human
authority. The light streaming in from the right over the head
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of Jesus draws our attention to his face and hand. There is
also an urgency and a dignity about the painting that suggests there is other work to be done than counting money.
Some people might come to see this as a religious painting
only with help from cues—for example, the halo over the
head of Jesus. Others will recognize this aspect right away.
It is perhaps only or largely through created images and
words that the divine becomes picturable, and so enters the
world. Religious paintings, therefore, play a special role in
revealing the power of pictures in general to disclose what
there is.
The bearded tax-gatherer, Levi, is seated at a table in the
center of a corolla consisting of himself and four others,
perhaps his assistants. Coins litter the table, and the
hunched-over figure on the left appears to be counting some
of them. The group is lighted by a source at the upper right.
Jesus, his eyes veiled in shadow, with a halo hinting at his
divinity, enters alongside Peter. A gesture of his right hand
summons Levi, who is surprised by the intrusion of these
bare-footed men, and perhaps dazzled by the sudden light
from a just-opened door. Levi draws back and gestures
toward himself, as if to ask, “Who, me?” while his right
hand remains pressed onto some coins. The two figures to
the left are so concerned with counting money that they are
oblivious to the arrival of Christ, and so symbolically deprive themselves of the opportunity he offers for salvation.
The two boys in the center do respond, the younger one
drawing back as if to seek Levi’s protection, the older, with
his sword hung conspicuously, leaning forward somewhat
menacingly towards Peter, who seems to freeze him in place
with a finger. For the moment captured in the picture, no one
does anything. In another second, Matthew will rise up and
follow Jesus and his world will be forever different. The
painting captures the very moment of Matthew’s turning.
This brief account of the painting is much like what you
would find in many art books, and has been an accepted
version for many years. It is both revealing and compelling.
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67
But we know that there a fourth aspect to this painting,
along with its being a physical object, a geometrical object,
and a representational object. The painting is itself derived
from a representation in words, a Gospel story. Here are the
accounts of Matthew’s calling from his Gospel, and also
from the Gospels of Mark and Luke. First Matthew:
As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called
Matthew sitting at the tax office; and he said to him
“Follow me.” And he rose and followed him (Matt.
9:9).
Mark writes:
And as he passed on, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus
sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, “Follow
me.” And he rose and followed him (Mark 2:14).
And Luke:
After this he went out, and saw a tax collector, named
Levi, sitting at the tax office; and he said to him,
“Follow me.” And he left everything, and rose and
followed him (Luke 5:27-28).
The accounts are bare and simple, merely hints of what
might have taken place. What strikes us, however, is what
the stories do not say. No account suggests that Matthew
hesitated or questioned before leaving his collection table
when summoned by Jesus. Of course, Caravaggio’s understanding of the story may be that it is fully human to doubt
and question and ask, so that, despite the Gospel narrative,
the bearded man sitting at the table, whose finger points
questioningly, almost unbelievingly, is very likely Matthew.
But if this is not the case, if his own finger is not pointing at
himself, who is Matthew? Jesus does not seem to think that
he’ll need to stay long to answer questions, because his foot,
seen in the lower right, is already turned to leave. Is it clear
at whom Jesus is looking and pointing? If we follow the arc
of his finger, is it not met by the body of the hunched-over
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young man, whose back curves up and whose head leans
towards Jesus? His eyes are the only ones of the five at the
table that are not illuminated by the bright light from the
right. We are drawn toward both pairs of shadowed eyes—
the young man’s and those of Jesus—not because they are
focal points of lines of light, or because they are centrally
placed. They are human eyes in shadow and they beckon us
because we want to know who they belong to and what they
imply. If the young man is Matthew—and I offer this with
many reservations—then the painting depicts a turning or
conversion without hesitation, without questioning, without
delaying at Kierkegaard’s stage of infinite resignation before
arriving at faith (Fear and Trembling, 46)—an unexpected
and undeserved grace. It is a conversion that Matthew experiences as a sudden change of aspect, for which no preparation was required, or even possible.
We take interest in works of art such as Caravaggio’s
Calling of St. Matthew in part because they seem to affirm
their own being, even while they exist as representations.
They compel us to wonder about how true they might be.
But because the unity of a work of art is never completely
and simply given, that is, because it requires our seeing and
talking to bring it continuously into being, it questions us
and engages us in dialectic, much as great books can do. As
we talk about—and with—a work of art, it may reveal to us
its aspects, which can be thought of as its possible unities,
and therefore its possible modes of being as an object and as
a representation.
In music we also recognize the importance of aspecthearing in the instructions given on how to listen or how to
play. Not merely “louder,” “softer,” “faster,” “slower,” but,
as Wagner does in Tristan und Isolde, “ever more animated,” or “with elevation,” or “with enthusiasm.” Tchaikovsky asks the pianist to play the opening theme of his first
piano concerto with “much majesty.” Instructions like these
must make sense; they must click in some way. When I am
ESSAYS | VERDI
69
told to hear these measures as an opening theme, how am I
to obey this order? I might be able to be taught exactly why
this other theme is a variation on the opening, but unless I
hear it as one, I will remain deaf to some aspect of the
music. Instructions like: “Think of it as a march, then you
will play it right,” or “You must hear this section as a
response to that one,” or “Hear this as in the Phrygian mode,
then you will get the ending”—these ways of guiding are
common and useful and not metaphorical. They can bring us
to hear aspects and not merely to reason our way to them.
As for poetry, I feel I have little insight. We might perhaps improve our reading of poetry by paying more attention to the experience of a word’s meaning. The tempo, too,
at which one reads a poem seems to be as important as it is
in music, and may be analogous to the distance at which one
views a painting. There may be a reading speed at which a
poem is most at home, most itself. I don’t know how one
comes to hear what this tempo would be, or how exactly the
tempo affects the life of the poem, but I am pretty sure that
some people possess this sense as much as others possess a
sense for the right tempo of a piece of music. Perhaps studying music helps one’s reading of poetry. I think also that
someone who knows the meter of a poem hears it differently, and would read it differently, from someone who does
not know the meter. If we think of the poem as a living
thing, we’ll understand that hearing its integrity requires that
we attend to the aspects of both meter and tempo.
The ability to experience the meanings of words plays a
critical role in appreciating metaphors and similes. There are
what may be called “secondary” senses of words, which can
be used and understood only if the primary meaning of a
word is already understood. If I say, “For me the vowel ‘a’
is red,” I do not mean “red” in a metaphorical sense, because
I could not express what I want to say in any other way than
by means of the idea “red” (PI, 216). A secondary sense is
something like an aspect, and those who are deaf or insen-
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sitive to secondary meanings will be less able to get into a
poem and feel their way around in it. They might of course
still learn to analyze, how to recognize to some degree what
the poem is saying and how, but they won’t be able to hear
the poem in the same way as those to whom secondary
meanings are alive. “Sorrow is like a leaden gray sky” is
either heard and acknowledged or else analyzed into submission. A poem can awaken a secret life in ordinary words
that seem used up, exhausted of meaning. Since we find
much of our experience to be equally ordinary and unremarkable, a poem can help us see new aspects of our experiences, by calling into question our usual ways of describing
them.
Let me close with the suggestion that coming to see new
aspects—and thus perhaps to answer the question What is
there? differently—is a central part of one’s experience
while a student at St. John’s, and can remain so throughout
life. Conversations can provide occasions for changes of
aspect in both our seeing and our thinking, as long as we
keep in mind that not every question requires an answer. In
seminar we all make the effort to understand why others say
what they say. We also ought to try our best to see what they
see. Questions are often requests that we look at things
differently, and that we try to find the maximum amount of
common ground with others.
And finally, I must return again to that writer I cannot
escape. When St. Augustine, in tears and almost in despair,
hears the voice of a child while he sits in the garden, he
takes the voice as a command from God to open the first
book he comes across and to begin reading. He hears the
voice as a command and he obeys it. When he later leaves
the garden, the world he enters is completely different for
him, and yet nothing in it has changed. We can imagine that
he hears the voice the way he does because he has received
grace. Perhaps such graces grace our own lives too, and—
who knows?—perhaps we can come to see the duck-rabbit
as a paradigm for the miracle.
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REFERENCES
PI
PP
RPPI
RPPII
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
(London: Routledge, 2002).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology, Volume I (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology, Volume II (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980).
Howard Gardner, The Shattered Mind (New York: Vintage, 1976).
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Edna H. Hong and
Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962).
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York:
Harper and Row, 1970).
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REFLECTIONS
73
FULL FATHOM FIVE:
A TUTOR’S SEA CHANGE
Louis Petrich
I send my hearty greetings to the community of St. John’s College
from the Caribbean island of Bonaire (part of the Netherlands
Antilles, 50 miles north of Venezuela), where, after seven years as
a tutor, I am privileged to be spending my first sabbatical. There
is no place I prefer to St. John’s for finding my satisfaction in this
life. I don’t need to specify its forms—you know them. But you
must also know what one American writer said after he found his
calling and happiness at a pond outside Concord, Massachusetts:
“Thank Heaven, here is not all the world.”
I am exploring and learning the ways of another world—the
underwater world. I wish I could show this world to you. Maybe
then it would not seem puzzling that I would choose to dive these
warm coral reefs for a whole year rather than immerse myself in
all those good, non-Program books I have collected over the
years, but never have time to read at the College. I could show
you some photos that I have taken of the marine life in the
southern Caribbean, including one of a unicorn filefish (Aluterus
monoceros), which is almost as rare here as a unicorn. But I don’t
think you would be that impressed. Rareness by itself does not
signify beauty, or even inspire wonder. So let me instead try to put
into words an impression of what my island life is like.
It is strange for me to make this effort, since one of the
pleasures I take in diving everyday—often twice, and usually
with my wife or eleven-year old son as a partner—is not having
to talk much about it. We have gained that pleasure with
experience. During the dive, we may point at special things or
exchange a few hand signals, and in an emergency we can bang
on our tank and hope for immediate attention. But otherwise,
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He sent this open letter
to the college community from his sabbatical during the 2009-2010 academic year.
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diving delights me as a speechless activity of beholding the
myriad forms of life and their busy behaviors. To call them
“fantastical” is no exaggeration. Were it not for the limited supply
of air and the loss of body heat over time, I am not sure that my
activity of beholding would come to an end. The bulk of these
lines were written during an extended interval on the surface,
which is necessary to allow the nitrogen absorbed under pressure
to escape from my blood and tissues before I can safely return to
the deep, where I would otherwise linger and marvel as if present
at the fifth day of Creation—and that day were enough.
On the surface, Bonaire is not sublime. It is a small and
simple island, about five miles wide and twenty-four miles long,
shaped like a crescent, and home to about fifteen thousand
people—Antilleans, Dutch, and foreign residents like me. There
are no traffic lights on the island, no stop signs, no buses, no horns
blowing except to say “hello,” no theaters or cinemas, no long
stretches of white sandy beaches packed with oily sunbathers (the
beaches are rocky), no hotel or restaurant chains, no malls—
nothing, really, worth shopping for (the island produces only
salt)—and no fall, winter, or spring. There is always a breeze to
satisfy the windsurfers and kitesurfers and to make the hot sun
feel dry and light. Parrots squawk and some fifty other species of
birds sing at dawn to wake us up. Iguanas warm themselves on
the rocks, while wild donkeys and goats go marauding through
the dusty yards and fields, where our bare feet have acquired
calluses. Our hair has grown longer and lighter-colored,
toughened by the salt of the turquoise sea, which is never far from
view. Pink flamingos by the hundreds paint themselves on inner
landscapes, wherever the water pools. The capital of the island,
Kralendijk, can be traversed in about five minutes—a fact that has
led many a cruise ship passenger to wander off in conspicuous
confusion, looking for things that Bonaire simply does not have.
We point them back toward their ships and their buffets. What
Bonaire does have, most emphatically, is the freest and easiest
diving in the entire world, on healthy coral reefs that can be
reached from shore after a five- to ten-minute snorkel from almost
any point on the island. The surrounding sea, down to 250 feet, is
REFLECTIONS | PETRICH
75
a protected national park. Fishing is forbidden. Divers must pay a
park entrance fee and pass a buoyancy control test before being
permitted to dive. No gloves allowed. The reefs and animals may
not be handled, but they may be watched very closely, at any hour
of the day or night, according to one’s interest and pleasure.
The biologists I have met all testify that there is no place on
earth where a person can have such unmediated access to abundant animal life as one finds on Bonaire. Perhaps, they tell me, the
species count in tropical jungles is similar, but the jungles do not
offer free and easy access. In just the first minute of a descent to
forty feet, I have learned to identify thirty species on average (and
that’s just the fish)—one species every two seconds. My son
Louie can do better, since his vision is still acute at all distances.
If we were to include the coral and the other invertebrates and the
aquatic plants, the species count would double. This abundance of
life satisfies a passion that is not only taxonomical. O Lord, how
manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all: the
earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein
are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts
(Psalm 104: 24-25).
Bonaire’s “things creeping innumerable” are mostly small
(under a foot in length) or medium-sized (up to three or four feet).
Yes, there are leviathans out there: the whale shark (up to fiftyfive feet), the great hammerhead shark (twenty feet), and the
goliath grouper (eight feet), but these creatures are very rarely
sighted on Bonaire’s reefs. (Once I did encounter a goliath
grouper, also known as a “jewfish.” At first I thought he was a big
boulder. He was sleeping on the bottom at 106 feet and barely
budged when I poked him in the side. If he had felt that his meal
were being threatened, he might have charged me like a bull.
Some scripture commentators say it was a goliath grouper that
swallowed Jonah. I cannot dismiss the claim.) So I dive with a
magnifying glass in hand, very slowly, becoming one with the
seeing of my eyes. Ideally, a gentle current carries me, and my
muscles do no work except to turn my head, point my glass, and
breathe. I feel no gravity so long as I remain neutrally buoyant, a
state I maintain by proper breathing, as fish do by adjusting the
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volume of their air bladders.
To be free of gravity several hours a day, every day, has
become for me almost a need. I think this is one reason I see quite
a few obese scuba divers. They have discovered the only earthly
dispensation from having to carry their bodily burden. I wonder,
when I observe my large fellow humans, why the first forms of
life to emerge from the sea would have given up their freedom to
be oppressed by weight. When my air is running low and I make
my exit to shore, the first several steps on the sloping rocky coast
under the renewed pull of gravity are very difficult to take. I have
to concentrate on how to walk; otherwise, I would tumble, and the
surf would dash me on the rocks. This has happened more than
once. This forgetting how to walk, especially with all that extra
scuba gear to carry on my back, poses the most likely peril of
daily multi-diving.
Yet the physical pleasure of freedom in diving is only secondary. The primary pleasure lies in learning to recognize all those
“somethings” in the water as the very things that are imitated and
described in my field books. The impression of random motion by
innumerable, nameless forms of life begins to make sense as I
learn to see the fish “perform their parts” time and again. My
eyes, instead of darting around to be entertained by colorful
shapes in motion, come to rest on the actions of one fish, or on the
distinct parts of a fish, until the essential aspects, which are often
inconspicuous, acquire meaning. A tiny line under the gills, a pinhead spot next to the eye, the height of the dorsal fin, or some
other precise marking, contour, or motion—which the fish somehow read reliably—can mark the difference between two species.
As I become more acclimated to their element, as my body’s
vibrations become unobtrusive to their senses, the fish let me get
closer. Slowly they reveal more of their forms and purposes, and
if they could talk, I almost believe they would tell me their names.
Then, perhaps, I could do without the imitations.
Until then, let us imagine a six-foot long, green moray eel,
thick as a young pine tree. Its jaws, lined with razor-sharp teeth,
keep opening and closing—an ominous sight even to those who
know that by this action the moray moves water through its gills
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77
to breathe. This is not a threatening gesture, the books say. (Why
can’t it be both threatening and respiratory?) I approach very
slowly, head-on, to stare into its face. If you touch its tail, the
moray, feeling “mugged,” may turn round, bite, and not let go
until its teeth have ripped off whatever they have seized.
Approached from the front, however, they hold steady and
breathe ominously, not recognizing me as either prey or predator.
But if the moray sees his green reflection in my camera apparatus,
he may poke his snout into the housing. In this way, while he gets
acquainted with a puzzling stranger, I get an extraordinary photo.
I have also seen one divemaster scratch a green moray under the
gills; the moray appeared to enjoy this, as if he were being
cleaned by a little sharknose goby.
I save my scratching for creatures who breathe with their
mouths shut. Who would have thought that if you scratch a
hawksbill turtle vigorously on its shell—especially on the underside—he will spin round and round, driven wild with the pleasure
of it? I have done this only a few times. The turtle conservationists of the island (who tag, track, and protect the endangered sea
turtles) patrol assiduously for trespassers on the turtle breeding
grounds, for turtle chasers, and for turtle ticklers. Not all turtles
are brave enough to defy this mafia and submit to the tickling, and
only a few divers even know about this secret pleasure.
The Caribbean reef octopus is said to be a “curious” animal;
some even pronounce him “intelligent.” Not because he changes
his colors, instantly and dramatically, to camouflage himself
against any background or to intimidate his opponents. Many reef
fish and creatures change their colors as admirably as he does.
(How do they change so expertly, I wonder? And do any of them
have a “true” color?) The reef octopus appears curious and keen
because you can see him take various objects with one or more of
his eight arms, bring them under his head, and, after a period of
scrutiny, either discard them or carry them back to his den, where
he breaks mollusks open to eat. Reaching out to take various
things in hand (or in arm) for further investigation and possible
eating looks a lot like what the more intelligent animals do.
I put my metal tank banger within reach of the octopus, to see
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if he will take it under his head to test its nature. He grabs it with
three arms and starts to glide off toward the protection of a
crevice. I want that tank banger back. It’s mine. I kick hard to
chase the octopus, while reaching out with one arm, hoping he’ll
drop the banger. He turns entirely white, blows himself up to
twice his former size, and extends his eight arms in a circle
around his body, hovering above the banger. I keep at a respectful
distance and estimate my chance of winning a tug of war with this
inky octopus over a fourteen dollar tank banger. That is what
intelligent animals do. I decide to let him keep it.
I said earlier that diving is primarily a visual, not a tactile
experience. But now I find it necessary to say this differently.
When I take my four-year old daughter, Abigail, down to fifteen
feet on my spare regulator hose, and we swim around the bottom
together for forty-five minutes, she wants to touch everything she
sees. I have to teach her what to avoid by holding her back with
my hands. She learns the hard way, too. Once, having picked up
a pink, fuzzy, caterpillar-like thing, she signaled me urgently to
surface. “My fingers are burning, daddy,” she cried. “When will
they stop?” “In a short while,” I replied. “You picked up a fireworm.” She sometimes surprises the flounders—overconfident in
their camouflage—with a poke from her finger: “They’re slimy,
daddy, and their eyes are funny.” (She likes to talk about all her
doings.) She tirelessly turns over rocks to uncover urchins and sea
stars; and she enjoys picking up sand to drop on the heads of
parrotfish as they busily scrape up algae. “They drop sand on us
when they poop, so it’s only fair,” she says. All her instinctive
touching of things is how we get to know those things better: we
have learned by the reactions of sea creatures to our touch how
stunningly changeable they are, and how thoroughly they associate being touched—being known—with being eaten.
Most predators on the reef swallow their prey whole (sharks
and barracudas being two notable exceptions). But if a piscivore
happens to take a fish in the wrong position for swift swallowing,
it will pitilessly bash on the rocks whatever protrudes from its
mouth, until it can safely let go to swallow its prey again—whole.
It has to perform the bashing very quickly, because the other
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predators will notice the commotion and try to seize the halfswallowed prey from its mouth, devouring whatever pieces they
can. Feeding happens so quickly that one seldom sees it performed at all. The reef may thus give an impression of a peaceful
commingling of hundreds of species, who are content, for the
most part, to observe one another. But the reason that the little fish
live among the corals is to hide, and the reason that the bigger fish
cruise the corals is to hunt the littler ones—and hide from even
bigger ones. If the corals do not tell the whole story, they tell at
least the deadly part of it that Darwin says is difficult but necessary for us to bear in mind constantly if we are to understand “the
face of nature.”
I like the reefs no less for their quiet pitilessness, and in fact
I like them all the more for bringing into focus the ultimate
concerns of the poetry that I could have been studying on this
sabbatical:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
—W.B. Yeats
Yet it is not always easy to pass by these scenes coldly while
riding the warm currents of the Caribbean. On moonless nighttime dives, it is pitch black in all directions, save where my divelight is pointed—at the red squirrel fish and cardinal fish, the most
common night-hunters. I love their vibrant red colors and black
eyes—overly large in order to admit the scant rays of stars that
barely penetrate the deep. Suddenly, a six-foot-long silvery tarpon
swoops across my right shoulder, brushing his caudal fin against
me. Then there is another one, shooting forward from directly
below my chest, with a sharksucker attached to his side. They are
using my light to hunt.
They have used me thus hundreds of times, but my heart still
quickens when hungry creatures as big as I swim past me, abruptly and intimately, from out of the darkness. I join the party of the
hunter, coldly shining my light on the sleepy ocean surgeonfish
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(whom I don’t much care for), and I watch the tarpons try to
swallow them up before they slip away into the recesses of the
coral. The tarpons’ mouths open widely, creating an audible
suction that draws their prey from a foot away into their maws,
quicker than I can see. A jolt of satisfaction passes when they
catch their prey—or rather, when we catch our prey. Questions
arising from my partisan participation in this sea hunt intrude on
my breathing and my buoyancy. When the jaws of death open
wide for me, will I slip away into a dark, secret place for all time?
Or will a light be held to mark my drawing into that sudden,
irresistible openness?
The night-prowling tarpons always make a big impression on
divers, but they are nothing compared to the little longfin damselfish, three inches in length, that spend their lives (up to ten years)
aggressively guarding a patch of algae the size of a doormat. If I
get within a few feet, they’ll charge directly into my mask or nip
at my hands. It feels like a little pinch. You can see them routinely
drive away fish ten times their size, because no one likes being
nipped at incessantly; and besides, there is always some place else
to go on the reefs for food or shelter. If the damselfish were as
large as the fish they attack, the reefs would not be swimmable. I
thank the Creator for making the most aggressive animal in the
Caribbean so small.
One of the highlights of my diving sabbatical occurred during
the two coral spawning periods, a week after the full moons of
September and October. The reefs became cloudy with gametes,
released in unison at night by hosts of invertebrates. The touchme-not sponges emitted their seed like smoke from chimneys.
The always-recumbent tiger tail sea cucumbers stood up vertically and spewed forth stuff that looked like breath in cold air.
The star corals released their little balls of DNA nonstop, like
bubbles from a carbonated beverage. This sea of fecundity staggered the senses. It went on for three successive nights, while
most of the fish that would have eaten the gametes slept. I felt awe
to see how these creatures beat the bad odds of the ocean by
means of a coordinated, all-out emptying of themselves, twice a
year.
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81
Fish are spawning all the time, though it takes patient observation to notice it. In the late afternoons, you may spy peacock
flounders gliding three feet off the bottom like Frisbees, risking
their lives to signal a readiness to mate. When the male and
female Frisbee-flounders come together like two hands in prayer,
they shoot up toward the surface and release their gametes near
the top of the water column, where the gametes’ predators are
least abundant. Then they separate and return at once to the
bottom, making themselves indistinguishable from the sand or
rocks. Those four seconds of jetting upward look so unlike the
behavior of flounders that I wonder if this joint activity is when
they are most at-work-being-themselves, or most possessed by
something outside themselves. As my daughter, innocent of philosophy, would say, “It’s freaky, either way.”
Each evening at dinner we watch the sun set over the Caribbean from our seaside patio dining room. We look for the proverbial “green flash” at the very instant of the sun’s disappearance
below the horizon. We have yet to see it. To be honest, more often
than not these passing days, we forget to look. Some of the old
and experienced divers I have met have grown tired of looking for
new things on the reefs, and don’t seem to think it is worth the
effort anymore to go deep. Of our “brave new world, that has such
creatures in it,” they would say (if they knew their Shakespeare),
“’Tis new to thee.” Can we not find ways to keep this world new?
When we have our diving friends to dinner, we sometimes
find it pleasant to play a game of “sea charades.” The children
start it off by acting like their favorite fish. Even the tired, old
divers enjoy the renewed experience of not quite knowing what in
the world they’re looking at: Abigail wiggling around on her back
is . . . a fairy basslet, which can swim belly up; Louie sticking out
his stomach and pulling at his nose in the corner is . . . a sharpnose
puffer that inflates itself when there is no escape. When it’s my
turn, I go to the refrigerator and take out the most unappetizing
leftover I can find and eat it. I am . . . an angelfish, which has
evolved to eat certain things that no other fish will eat (sponges)
because they taste bad. In fact, I have adapted myself to occupy
this niche in our family, as a matter of economy. But to see the
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familiar things in life as tasteless leftovers is not a fine, or even
fitting, use of either our senses or their things. Let it always be
worth the effort, I pray, to go down deep, again and again, into
this world of sensuous things. That is the simple meaning of this
sabbatical, put into words.
I was afraid at one time that by revealing my free and easy
occupations in this “Divers Paradise” (the official motto of the
island), I would cause there to be sent a “messenger of Satan” to
molest my breathing and my buoyancy. That messenger has long
since come to the occupants of the air-breathing world, even here
on Bonaire; but not even the omnipresent internet together with
all its beeping, vibrating, pocket-sized accomplices can reach me
underwater—yet. So then, as my surface interval comes to a
close, I end these impressions of my island life without fear of the
new or the old, but with gratitude for the existence and easy availability of this underwater world that is not all the world, and with
praise to the College for granting its tutors this time of rejuvenation to keep us up with youth and its joys—and in touch with
things of beauty and wonder. Fare you well, as to the elements of
the isle I go free, unwearied, changed, to see things rich and
strange.
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FAT WEDNESDAY
John Verdi, Fat Wednesday:Wittgenstein on
Aspects.
Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010, xii + 296
pages.
Book Review by Eva Brann
I’ll reveal my own predilections and aversions up front: I trust
Socrates—without completely believing him—and I distrust
Wittgenstein, without thinking him completely wrong. In fact,
I’m in some respects terminally puzzled by both, but more so by
Wittgenstein, whose main book, as John Verdi tells us on the first
page of Fat Wednesday (the title will be explained below and has
a purely coincidental relation to “Fat Tuesday,” Mardi Gras),
contains 784 questions of which only 110 are answered, and 70 of
those wrongly—on purpose. Now 744 unanswered questions
seems to me an overplus of perplexity; I am especially sensitive
to such erotetic overload (from erotesis, “question”), since I have
heard it said of our college that we accept students who know
nothing and graduate them now knowing that they know nothing.
So I was a grateful member of a faculty study group on this
question-laden work, the Philosophical Investigations, which
John Verdi led in the spring of 2009, as he was writing his own
book, with the resigned calm of a man who does believe in this
author and is, for that very reason, unwilling to proselytize. Under
his guidance and in conversation with my colleagues I learned a
lot, enough to formulate two judgments. One concerned the
reason for my near-constitutional incomprehension of Wittgenstein’s project: he is the only non-fiction writer I know whose
outlook on life is systematically—and rousingly—askew of mine.
The other judgment was that Verdi’s book would likely be a most
trustworthy introduction to this strange thinker’s upending of all
that seems humanly sensible. And so it proved.
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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In Fat Wednesday, Verdi approaches Wittgenstein through
two notions central to his later thinking: aspect-seeing and experiencing the meaning of words. The first three chapters explicate
these, while the last two introduce Verdi’s own development and
applications of these two topics. So his book introduces us both to
Wittgenstein and to the world his work implies. It seems to me
that, considering Wittgenstein’s relentless the-proof-is-in-thepudding attitude toward human mentation, this organization is
faithful to Wittgenstein’s intention, since it shows what one can
do with his way of seeing and speaking.
What then is aspect-seeing and why is it crucial to Wittgenstein? Such “seeing” is based on an ineradicable ambiguity: one
shape, objectively self-same, is seen alternately in one way and in
another. Since such ambiguity arises primarily in the absence of
context, deliberately devised drawings instigate it best. The most
famous of them (Verdi illustrates several) is the “duck-rabbit,” a
figure showing two forked protrusions, devised to look now like
a duck’s open bill, and then again like a rabbit’s laid-back ears.
The picture is one, but the aspect “goes about hither and thither”
(Verdi points out that this is the etymology of the word ambiguity), so that we cannot help “seeing” the picture flip between
resembling a duck and resembling a rabbit. This raises the question, What is resemblance?
Here I confess that I have two misgivings of my own about
Wittgenstein’s project. One is that aspect-seeing is not a novel notion, as Wittgenstein seems to suggest, but is related, rather, to an
old, old question—the one-over-many problem in metaphysics,
where it is precisely the aspect (a fair translation of eidos, that is,
looks or form) that is one, and the appearances, the phenomena,
that are many. (So why, incidentally, does Wittgenstein write as if
philosophical investigation began with him?) The other misgiving, less born of irritation, is that I have little faith in basing inquiry on special and devised cases, which are essentially distinct
from the ideal cases that I would rather look to. These ideal cases
may go fuzzy at the edges, but are probably substantial at the
center. But then, it is just this center that, as Verdi confirms, Wittgenstein wishes to attenuate.
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Wittgenstein’s aim is to establish the centrality of resemblance: family resemblance is to replace essence. Verdi [12]*
quotes Wittgenstein’s account of this point:
[F]or the various resemblances between members of a
family . . . overlap and criss-cross in the same way.
[W]e extend our concept . . . as in spinning we twist
fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not
reside in the fact that some fibre runs through the
whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres
(Philosophical Investigations, §67).
So we are not to ask, What do the phenomena to which we
naturally give one name have in common? Instead, we are to look
for a sequence of resemblances; the first and last of these must
perforce be quite unlike each other or there will be, after all, a
thread of sameness. In the old ontology (set out in Plato’s Sophist)
resemblance or likeness is sameness conjoined with otherness.
But, true to his program, Wittgenstein does not engage in nailing
down centralities but in clarifying concepts: “Conceptual (linguistic) questions ground casual questions, not the other way
around” [5].
(This is the late Wittgenstein. I want to take the opportunity
here to express a personal fascination. Wittgenstein recanted—
how deeply is a matter of debate—his early Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, a hard-edged view of a world consisting of logically connected facts exactly pictured by our language, which is
similarly structured, so that reality is explicable by a logical
analysis of language. To me it is an absorbing question whether
there are systematic differences between thinkers who develop by
absorptive tweaking and those whose maturity comes through
degrees of self-refutation. Is the latter a mark of unflagging vigor
or of suspect instability?)
The crucial word of Verdi’s sentence is in parentheses: Wittgenstein seems to equate the terms conceptual and linguistic. A
concept is not, as we were brought up to think, a cognitive entity.
*
Page numbers in brackets refer to Fat Wednesday.
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As resemblance was construed anti-essentially, so concept is
understood anti-cognitively—if cognition is thought of as an
internal eventuation: Conceptual questions do not ask for interior
states discerned by introspection, but demand observation of the
external phenomena of linguistic usage—just enough such observation to discern how people actually use words. This notion
establishes the transition from Verdi’s first chapter, “The Aspects
Family,” to the second one, “Aspects and Words.”
“Seeing,” for example, has two uses [25]. One use can be
accompanied by pointing to the picture of the ambiguous duckrabbit. But pointing is not possible for the second use, for a duckrabbit is not a this, but rather it flips from a this to a that. Something similar holds for any seeing of resemblance. You can’t point
to a resemblance, though you can point it out, that is, make useful
observations in words.
Wittgenstein means something much more radical than to say
that words can be useful. He invites us to “think of words as
instruments characterized by their use” [44]. In fact, the analogy
is to a toolbox; the “functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects” (Philosophical Investigations, §11).
Here are my misgivings on this point. This way of analyzing
language should depend not only on a receptive ear for the phenomena of speech, but on conceding our fellow human beings’
primary competence to know what they mean. I have long had my
doubts about Wittgenstein and his language-analytical progeny in
regard to the first point. As for the second, there is little doubt that
Wittgenstein means to correct my sense of which meanings are
acceptable and to control my claim that overt words express
interior events, that I often have a thought or feeling for which I
subsequently labor to find the word, and moreover, that this
language is really only residually private, because I cherish a faith
(and, finally, what else is there?) that human souls, with all the
particularity that embellishes their being, are ultimately alike—
even when they willfully plead ultimate diversity. Or to express it
in the relaxed logical mode of real thinking: we have our privacies
in common. These opinions of mine are questioned in form, but
proscribed in effect, by Wittgenstein.
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Privacy and sociality are central issues for Wittgenstein, since
we operate, he thinks, with words as if we were playing languagegames. These games are governed by socially established rules
that we must learn; the rules tell me what the words, the gamepieces of language, do and what moves are permitted, just as the
rules of chess govern that game. “One would not say,” as Verdi
neatly puts it, “‘I know what a bishop does. Now tell me what it
really is’” [45]. It is a neat formulation because it raises the
question-hackles. Does it mean “would not” or “should not”? I for
one would ask, meaning I might like to think about, “What, really,
is a lusory bishop, a piece of ecclesiastic anthropomorphism (like
a nautical nun-buoy)? What causes its possibility, beyond its
being enmeshed in a game?” Can I be talked out of that predilection?
The rest of Verdi’s second chapter fleshes out, in lucid detail,
Wittgenstein’s disabling of the “what is it?” question—not in
terms of an argument against it, for that would be an admission of
its admissibility, but by the circumscription of an alternative way
of being in and with our world. It is a way that consigns the inner
human being to terminal opaqueness, for which it then compensates by undertaking a persistent and critical analysis of behavior,
both gestural and linguistic. This way of abstemious philosophizing has at least one tremendous virtue: it raises our sensitivity to
how we learn and what we say [106]. In particular, it attunes our
ears to distinguishing how people speak before misguided ratiocination has tempted language into useless utterance.
Here Verdi stops to consider the very condition I touched on
before, that there might be a real division among people’s experiences, and that some people might be “aspect-blind.” In the third
chapter, he considers a group of true pathologies that afflict
patients with the inability to see ambiguities. They are literalists
of vision and language, and so miss crucial aspects of the world.
They lack experiences of meaning.
“Fat Wednesday” itself is an example of such an experience
[150]. “Fat” here is not a metaphor, since there is no sensible relation of obesity to Wotan’s Day. Unless it seems perfectly nonsensical to you, it will evoke a meaning, an “emergent” meaning. I
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think of it as a meaning-aura, a strong one for me. For in the Nazi
Germany of my childhood, Wednesday was the day of mandated
one-pot suppers (the resultant savings to be dropped into the collection can of a visiting storm-trooper)—and one-pot meals tend
to be greasy. This “secondary meaning,” this emergence, is a
startling development since it seems to be an overt intimation of
interiority. As words have emergent meanings, so aspects can
emerge; the inside will be outed.
Emergent meaning governs the fourth chapter, “Aspects and
Art.” It begins with a reflection on a portrait of Descartes by Franz
Hals, a reflection addressed to the basic ambiguity of all pictureviewing: that there is, in one aspect, a piece of canvas with
splotches of paint that we can point to, and in another, a likeness
of something, here the man, that we can’t reach by following the
laser line from our index finger. (I might point out here that this
analysis of physical images was an abiding preoccupation of
Husserl, his student Fink, and Sartre, but I also want to retract my
complaint about Wittgenstein’s willful aboriginality. Much better
not to be too entangled in conceptual indebtedness!)
Here Verdi puts his Wittgensteinian sensibility to work on objects ranging from paintings (Verdi “sees” some arresting alternative aspects in well-known works) to music, to—and here it becomes wonderful—wine tasting, in the section entitled “Emergent
Meaning and Wine.” Verdi plucks out, from notes on wine tasting
in Wine Spectator Magazine, a group of enologically descriptive
words that are candidates for emergence, including “velvety,
chewy, taut” [201]. He observes that these terms of praise can’t be
metaphorical. Who wants to run his tongue over something
velvet-like? Instead the words carry emergent meanings, which
are shared by other people and, he implies, widen our sensibility.
If I don’t get it, I am (non-pathologically) aspect-blind. If I do, “I
can better make my way in the world of wine-tasting and describing” [203].
The last chapter, provocatively entitled “Ethics and Aesthetics are One,” is a real culmination. It considers the discovery of
new science as a form of aspect-shift, and the letting-be of others’
religion as a form of aspect-seeing. The latter case exemplifies the
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chapter title. Verdi is as far as possible from the despicable central
European aestheticism that once permitted murder by day if only
the nights were spent listening to Schubert Lieder. Doing right
and seeing multivalently are one, to be sure, insofar as we must
be aesthetically (that is, sensorily) adroit in order to be ethically
(that is, morally) good. The former is not, however, so much a
condition for the latter as it is the same with it—an attitude
realized in a skill. Both are our very own; both are acquired by
attentive learning. Verdi calls this disposition “active tolerance”
[259]. Just as he is far removed from mere aestheticism, so too is
he worlds apart from the essentially disrespectful, because inattentive, tolerance of “I’m OK, you’re OK.” Active tolerance is a
subtle, sophisticated version of the ability to see both—or even
many—sides of an issue. Where Socrates says, “Virtue is knowledge,” Verdi’s Wittgenstein says, “Ethics is aspect-seeing,” an
ingrained appreciation of alternate possibilities and the respect
that goes with it.
Let me indulge in a final cavil, then, one which I’ve already
intimated. Wittgenstein’s probing, pushing, and pulling feel to me
like a clearly offered and cagily retracted condemnation: statements of absolute value are respectfully denominated nonsense
by him [242]. So is Verdi’s deeply liberal conclusion still Wittgenstein, or has it become more Verdi? If the latter, I would, at
risk of paining him, take Verdi over Wittgenstein anytime.
If Wittgenstein has got under your skin, or if you want him to,
read this book.
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MONSTER AM I
Paolo Palmieri, A History of Galileo’s
Inclined Plane Experiment and its
Philosophical Implications
Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press,
Forthcoming, 2011, 220 pages.
Book Review by Curtis Wilson
The project of this book, Palmieri tells us, emerged slowly, in
close relation with the attempt to reenact certain of Galileo’s experiments, in particular the inclined plane experiment. Galileo’s
adventure with balls rolling down inclined wooden beams was
not a single event to which a date can be assigned, nor yet a set of
operations described in sufficient detail to admit of mere copying.
It was a sequence of explorations lasting nearly a lifetime, involving difficulties and puzzles that Galileo struggled to resolve, with
less than uniform success. A love affair, Palmieri calls it.
Our author seeks to touch the very nerve of Galileo’s endeavor. He challenges the assumption—beguiling to some Galileo
scholars—that armchair philosophy can plumb the complexities
that Galileo met with in the inclined plane experiment. He seeks
to put himself in Galileo’s actual problem-situation, with its puzzles on both the experimental and the theoretical side. Experimental work and theoretical explanation, carried on in tandem,
pose questions of each other. The result, Palmieri reports, is liberating: the experimenter-theoretician-scholar probes more feelingly, with a new intensity. He becomes a participant in a revolutionary endeavor.
The earliest writings we have in Galileo’s hand appear in
Volume I of the Edizione Nazionale under the title Juvenilia,
which was assigned by the editor, Antonio Favaro. He took them
to be a compilation from unidentified sources (they remain unidentified today). Their late-medieval character is striking. Paragraphs frequently begin with Advertendum quod. . . (“It is to be
Curtis Wilson is Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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noted that. . .”), a scholastic verbal tic implying that the following
sentence is accepted on authority. Is our scribe a mere copyist?
Palmieri detects indications to the contrary. In places Galileo
appears to be paraphrasing or summarizing; here and there he
leaves blank spaces as though for later comment or elucidation.
Included in the Juvenilia is a discussion of “the intension and
remission of forms,” a much-treated topic in scholastic discussions from the fourteenth century to at least the early sixteenth
century. It concerns increase or decrease in the intensity of a
quality. The hotness or hardness of a body may vary from point to
point or from instant to instant at a point. There is no evidence that
the fourteenth-century schoolmen attempted actually to measure
such variations, but they introduced language for describing them
as measurable secundum imaginationem. One of the qualities thus
dealt with was the speed of a moving body.
To the uniform variation of the intensity of a quality, the
schoolmen applied a special rule, now dubbed “the Merton rule”
after the Oxford college where it seems to have originated. It
states that a quality varying uniformly in intensity over a spatial
distance or interval of time is equivalent to the unvarying or
uniform quality of the mean degree stretching over the same
extension, spatial or temporal. Suppose, for instance, that the
hotness of a body varies uniformly from two degrees at one end
of the body to eight degrees at the other, the degree being an
imagined unit of intensity. This “latitude of form” was said to be
equivalent to a uniform hotness of five degrees from one end of
the body to the other.
Applied to the intensity of motion or speed, the Merton Rule
was interpreted as saying that the distance traversed in a motion
uniformly accelerated from an initial to a final speed was equal to
the distance traversed in a uniform motion having the same
duration and the mean speed of the accelerated motion. Compare
this with the crucial first proposition of Galileo’s treatise “On
Naturally Accelerated Motion” in the Third Day of his Two New
Sciences (1638)—do not both come to the same result? The
Merton Rule is not mentioned in the Juvenilia or in any of Gali-
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leo’s writings. Nevertheless, a number of historians of science,
Pierre Duhem and Marshall Clagett prominently among them,
have concluded that Galileo’s theorem was a redaction of the
Merton Rule.
The jury, Palmieri objects, is still out: no evidence has yet
turned up to show that Galileo actually encountered the medieval
enunciation of the Merton Rule. Palmieri suggests that such influence as the medieval discussion may have had on Galileo was
likely indirect, through the Geometry of Indivisibles (1635) of his
friend Bonaventura Cavalieri. The trajectory of Galileo’s thinking, Palmieri urges (following Favaro), is best determined from
his writings and the experiments he sought to carry out.
At the very time Galileo was writing the Juvenilia, and thus
becoming acquainted with the scholastic conception of the natural
world, he was also annotating Archimedes’ On Sphere and Cylinder, a strict deduction of mathematical consequences from premises. The analytical thrust of Archimedean thinking, Palmieri
believes, peeps through the text of the Juvenilia. Galileo sweats to
understand the medieval four-element physics of the sublunary
realm, and how all qualities are to be derived from the four “prime
qualities” or “alterative qualities,” hot, cold, dry, and wet. Are
motive qualities and speeds grounded in this fundamental Aristotelian ontology? The question is not explicitly addressed in the
Juvenilia, but shows itself in Galileo’s De motu, dating from ca.
1590.
The De motu, Palmieri observes, is polemical. Galileo denounces his teachers for the way they teach. When introducing the
elements of physics, they bring in Aristotle’s other works, quoting
from De anima, De caelo, or Metaphysics, as though their pupils
already knew everything or else will accept all on faith. Galileo
pledges to proceed differently, following the mathematicians in
advancing solely by deductive steps derived from explicit premises.
A central question posed in the De motu is: How do the
weights and speeds of the same body, descending along planes
differently inclined but of equal elevation, differ? By considering
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the forces needed to equilibrate the weight on the different planes
as weights applied to a lever, Galileo shows that the forces are inversely as the lengths of the planes. (Unbeknownst to Galileo at
the time of the De motu, this same result had been given in the
thirteenth-century Scientia de ponderibus attributed to Jordanus
de Nemore.)
Galileo in the De motu also attempts to deal with the question
of why a falling body accelerates. The body’s heaviness is a virtus
impressa (impressed force) that acts downward. Were it acting
alone, Galileo assumes that it would produce a constant speed of
fall. But to this impressed force downward, Galileo adds an
accidental lightness or levity, imparted to the body when we raise
it from the earth. When we release it, its motion downward accelerates because the impressed lightness exhausts itself over time.
The downward acceleration is thus explained in terms of the Aristotelian qualities of heaviness and lightness, with the important
additional assumption that the accidental lightness decays with
time. Galileo is here entangled in the fundamental ontology and
categories of the Juvenilia, along with a misconception, widely
accepted up to the time of the publication of Descartes’s safari,
Principles of Philosophy, that every velocity has to be maintained
by an impressed force. How did he free himself—as he unquestionably did—from the medieval mindset and its stultifying questions?
Palmieri proposes that certain life-worldly learning experiences—among them, finding how to make glass goblets sing and
brass plates howl—taught Galileo a lesson about the fine structure of nature. By patiently repeated experimentation, the young
Galileo learned how to attend to and control the fine detail of
what happens in the production of these effects. The beginnings
were in the workshop of his father, Vincenzo Galilei. During the
1580s, Vincenzo, a professional lutist, engaged in musicological
controversy. Opposing the Pythagorean claim that numerical
ratios are the cause of musical intervals—that the ratio 2:1 is the
cause of the octave, the ratio 3:2 the cause of the fifth, and so
on—he claimed that these intervals are to be determined by the
ear alone. One of his prime exhibits was the singing glass, a
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goblet containing water which, on being struck, gave forth a
musical tone. The pitch depended on the amount of water. Years
later Galileo Galilei in his Two New Sciences told of a further
result, not previously reported: the goblet could be set singing if
its rim were stroked with a wet finger-tip. Concomitantly, a standing wave was produced on the surface of the water. Sometimes
the tone shifted up an octave, at which moment the number of
waves per unit length in the standing wave doubled.
Palmieri—apparently the first among Galileo commentators
to do so—has replicated this experiment. Success requires practice, and it is best to begin with a large goblet (Palmieri used a
brandy snifter). One must rub the rim rhythmically, while repeatedly wetting the finger and watching for the evanescent wave
pattern. The wave pattern is more readily produced in the brandy
snifter than in a smaller goblet, but Palmieri found it possible to
obtain Galileo’s result also with the latter.
The howling brass plate is another of Galileo’s experiments
that Palmieri has replicated. As Galileo reports in the Two New
Sciences, while scraping a brass plate with a chisel to remove
stains, he found himself producing sounds. Sometimes they were
musical tones, and in such cases the chisel left evenly spaced
marks on the plate. On one occasion two tones sounded in succession, forming the interval of a fifth. In the two sets of marks
formed on the plate, the numbers of marks per unit length were as
3 to 2. Getting these results was helped by a bit of practice, but
was easier than obtaining the standing wave in the glass goblet.
A correct interpretation of these experiments presupposes the
physics of sounding bodies, which Galileo himself lacked as have
some of his recent commentators. A sounding body vibrates predominantly with certain frequencies that depend on the shape and
mechanical properties of the material. These frequencies are the
body’s “natural modes” of vibration. For a body of regular and
relatively simple shape, the predominant frequency modes are
harmonically related, e.g. as octave or fifth, etc. The vibrations
are reflected from the boundaries of the body, and the reflected
waves, combining with the original train of waves, form a standing wave pattern. For a given speed of propagation (which is de-
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termined by the medium), the wavelength is inversely as the frequency, and thus the wavelengths of two standing waves have ratios inverse to the integral numerical ratios of the corresponding
natural modes. The natural modes therefore account for the emergence of the Pythagorean ratios in these two experiments. By
confirming Galileo’s experimental results, Palmieri has put them
beyond doubt. They form a beautiful early confirmation of the
theory of natural modes.
Important as this conclusion is, it is a different point that
Palmieri aims primarily to make. Galileo’s experimental results
are obtained only with patient attentiveness to the fine structure of
experience. They yield an experience in which hearing, touching,
and seeing are integrated—a holistic experience. Such experience
can direct consciousness away from false expectations and
toward new facts. This kind of learning, Palmieri proposes, assisted Galileo in liberating himself from the medieval mindset with
its pre-established categories.
What about the inclined plane experiment? Here also, besides
the visual sight of a ball rolling down the plane, a complex of
other sensory data is offered—sounds, vibrations that can be
sensed through skin and bone as well as the ear, changes in sound
as a bronze or wooden ball descends along the wooden track. Did
Galileo attend in a focused way to these effects? We know only of
the cases already cited, in which he focused on the details of
experimental happenings with attentiveness and care. In the Third
Day of the Two New Sciences, in the section On Naturally
Accelerated Motion, he focuses on the kind of acceleration that
nature employs for descending bodies—on this, its consequences,
and not on causes. The latter question as posed by the schoolmen
has been set aside:
[W]e decided to look into [the properties of this kind
of motion] so that we might be sure that the definition
of accelerated motion which we are about to adduce
agrees with the essence of naturally accelerated motion.
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97
It is this that he is now seeking the essence of—naturally accelerated motion itself.
Galileo’s adoption of this new focus, Palmieri believes, could
have been triggered by the very intensity of the auditory and
vibratory experience of the ball rolling down its inclined track. To
receive this nonvisual experience as fully as possible, Palmieri
placed his forehead in contact with the underside of the beam
serving as inclined plane, and grasped the beam with his hands
around its sides so that his fingertips could sense the upper side of
the beam. An assistant then released a ball to roll down the
inclined plane. As it rolled, Palmieri’s fingertips picked up the
vibrations induced in the beam, which were also transmitted
through his cranial bone, and he heard the sound through his ears
as well.
The resulting experience Palmieri calls holistic auscultation.
It is no mere juxtaposition of different effects, but an integrated
effect. It powerfully suggests that through our senses we can
delve deep into the fine structure of physical reality. The experience is markedly stereoscopic. The experimenter, hugging the
plane at a particular location, is first aware of the ball’s starting to
move far up behind his head, then hurtling close by, and finally
fading away in the distance. The descending ball produces a
sound that varies as the ball speeds up. Sound and speed grow
uniformly together, and this togetherness takes center stage. The
arresting character of this experience, Palmieri proposes, could
have derailed the young Galileo’s ambition to reduce changing
speed and sound to effects of the qualities dubbed primary by
Aristotle and the schoolmen.
In the scriptorium [where the Juvenilia were produced], the hot-cold-dry-wet chemistry of pitch and
speed can only be thought-through. But it is possible
to leave the scriptorium, visit workshops, and turn life
into a tastier affair. . . . We reach a new balance between knowledge and values when we learn how to
reconfigure life-worldly objects while letting our
senses be affected by them.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In The Two New Sciences Galileo stresses the simplicity of the
means nature adopts—in the case of descending bodies, the increase of speed in proportion simply to time elapsed. Reenactments of Galileo’s inclined plane experiment, however, yield at
best rough confirmations of this relation. In multiple repetitions
of the experiment, Palmieri and his students used a water clock of
the type Galileo describes, weighing the water released during the
duration of the descent to obtain a measure of elapsed time. In a
descent of the whole plane, compared with a descent of one
quarter of it, the expected ratio of the times is 2:1. In five trials of
a bronze ball one inch in diameter, running on the groove cut by
a router into the beam (so that the ball was running as though on
rails), the numbers obtained were 2.18, 2.19, 2.15, 2.09, 1.97,
averaging to 2.12, hence with 6 percent error and a root-meansquare dispersion from the mean of 0.08. In five trials of a bronze
ball seven-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, running in the
groove, the numbers obtained were 2.04, 1.90, 1.95, 1.90, 1.84,
averaging to 1.93, hence with 3.5 percent error, and a root-meansquare dispersion from the mean of 0.067.
Palmieri records twelve more sets of five trials each. The
errors are dramatically larger for decreased inclinations of the
plane, especially in the case of smaller and thus lighter bronze
balls. Five trials with a bronze ball seven-sixteenths of an inch in
diameter and an inclination of 1.36 degrees gave an average of
2.74, hence with 37 percent error; but five trials with a bronze ball
one inch in diameter and the same inclination yielded an average
of 2.17, hence with 8.5 percent error. An increase of the inclination to 3.8 degrees for these two balls reduced the errors to 18
percent and 6 percent respectively.
The deviations from expected theoretical ratios do not easily
admit of a detailed explanation, nor does Palmieri attempt one. Of
the factors likely to be operative we mention two. Human reflexes
cannot be relied upon to open the water-clock precisely when the
ball is released to start rolling, or to close it precisely when the
ball hits the stopping block. And, throughout the run, friction is no
doubt operative. Friction is an action at or between surfaces.
Seeking to find what schoolmen were saying in Galileo’s day
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concerning friction, Palmieri examined the Juvenilia and a book
on natural philosophy by Galileo’s contemporary, the Paduan
professor Giacomo Zabarella (d.1589). He found discussions of
“reaction” and “resistance,” but not of friction. The presumptive
role of friction in the inclined plane experiment, Palmieri believes, was a potent riddle leading Galileo to abandon scholastic
explanations in favor of an atomistic ontology. Galileo knew and
undoubtedly consulted Lucretius’s De rerum natura. It gives a
psychophysical explanation of pleasant and unpleasant tastes in
terms of smooth and rough or hooked atoms. The shapes of atoms
could similarly account for friction in the sliding or rolling of one
surface over another. Friction would thus be a “fight” between
particles of different shapes. The amounts of friction would no
doubt differ with the extent of contact between ball and trough,
with the shapes of atoms, and with the speed of the ball. Such
factors may be the causes of the deviations between observed and
expected time ratios above reported. But it is hard to imagine how
this hypothesis could be tested quantitatively. Besides, Galileo
may have shied away from openly entertaining a hypothesis
deriving from Lucretius’s philosophy—such a move on his part
could have led to a new charge of heresy.
One of Lucretius’s doctrines appears to have played a seminal
role in Galileo’s thinking about falling bodies. Lucretius states
that, since bodies falling in the void meet with no resistance, all
fall with the same speed. He attributes the observed differences
in the rates of fall to the checking action of the medium, which
hinders the motion of lighter bodies more than that of heavier
bodies. Galileo in the Two New Sciences will reach an analogous
conclusion, but with a crucial difference: all bodies falling in the
void fall, not with the same speed, but with the same acceleration.
We recall that earlier, at the time of the De motu, Galileo had
thought that the rates of fall would be as the specific gravities
(weights per unit volume) of the bodies. That assertion differed
from the Aristotelian position, which made the speed of descent
proportional to the body’s weight. Galileo rejected the latter
position on the basis of the following argument. He hypothesized
that any heavy body that falls has its speed, or (if accelerated) its
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
degrees of speed, fixed by nature, so that the speed or the acceleration cannot be increased or decreased without violence. (Thus
the argument applies whether the body falls with a constant or an
accelerated speed.) He then imagined two bodies equal in volume
and weight, e.g., two bricks. If let fall together, their speeds or
accelerations are equal, and they remain side by side. If tied
together so as to form the double weight, the result does not
change: they still fall with the same speed or acceleration, neither
“burdening” the other. Hence speed of fall cannot be proportional
to weight.
By the time he wrote the First Day of The Two New Sciences
(probably in 1634), Galileo had concluded that all bodies that fall
begin by accelerating, and he was hypothesizing that all bodies in
the void, independent of their specific gravities, accelerate with
the same acceleration. The reasoning leading to this conclusion,
as given in the Postils to Rocco (marginal notes on a work in
which Antonio Rocco attacked Galileo’s arguments in Two New
Sciences) proceeds as follows. He imagines two equal spheres,
one of gold and the other of cork, that are let fall from the same
height. Since both are surrounded by air, both are buoyed up by
the same force, equal to the weight of the volume of air they
displace (the buoyancy effect identified by Archimedes). Each
body in its motion will also be slowed by the viscosity of the air,
and this effect, since it derives solely from a property of the air,
would likewise be the same for both. Friction, which Galileo
explains as due to the sticking of particles of the medium to the
asperities of the body’s surface, can also be imagined to differ
negligibly in the two bodies (both could be covered by the same
surface material).
Finally, there is the resistance to the speed of each body,
which is greater for greater speeds. Galileo does not imagine that
this resistance can be eliminated practically (as it was a few years
later, after Galileo’s death, in experimentation with Torricelli’s
mercury barometer and with von Guericke’s air pump). But experience, Galileo tells us, suggests that this resistance is entirely
an effect of the medium. In a fall of the gold and cork spheres
through 100 braccia (150 feet?) in air, the gold, he asserts, will
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precede the cork by two or three braccia. In a fall of 1 or 2 braccia
the difference all but disappears. If in a thin medium like air, differences of speeds all but disappear, then, Galileo claims, we are
entitled to hypothesize that in a vacuum the speeds would be
identical. For this conclusion, we note, Galileo can claim only a
hypothetical status.
Galileo’s Third Day of his Two New Sciences is in one respect
strange—even peculiar! The First and Second Days, dealing with
the strength of materials, are clearly about real material bodies.
The Fourth Day, likewise, deals with real projectiles, actual
bodies moving through the air and resisted by it in their motion.
The mathematical part of the Third Day, by contrast, is presented
as about points descending along inclined lines. Real bodies are
absent, as are real planes along which they could descend. Friction is nowhere mentioned. The idealization of bodies is at least
as drastic as that in Euclid’s Elements. Galileo’s adoption of this
extreme idealization may owe something to the seeming impossibility of eliminating the effect of the medium, and the difficulty
of quantifying the effects of friction.
Among the numerous theorems proved in the Third Day is
the “expansion theorem”: points falling simultaneously along
variously inclined lines starting from a single point as origin are
all at each instant on the surface of an expanding sphere. Galileo
has the interlocutors of his dialogue engage in a considerable
discussion of this theorem. It may be, Palmieri suggests, a relic of
an earlier project to elaborate a Lucretian cosmogony starting
with point-atoms—another dangerous project which Galileo may
have relinquished to avoid further conflict with the papacy.
Early in his book Palmieri cites John Dewey’s Experience
and Nature for its “take” on Galileo’s quest for a science of
nature. To Dewey, Galileo’s turn to active, controlled experimentation represented a radical challenge to the Graeco-Christian
spectator-theory of knowledge. In Aristotle’s philosophy, as coopted by Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, high value
was placed on detached contemplation of the world. The human
being was seen as situated at the center of the cosmos, empowered to survey and understand its parts. But in Dewey’s pragma-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tist perspective, true knowledge can be gained only by intervening in the world and attempting to bring disturbing or confusing situations under control. Detached contemplation is “out of
touch,” powerless to penetrate the intricate mysteries of the
world. Only by intervening, risking mistakes and failure, can we
begin to learn the world’s ways.
Was Galileo self-conscious about the revolutionary break he
was making with the methodology of earlier natural philosophy?
Palmieri in his Chapter 7 adduces three pieces of evidence
suggesting that he was.
During his three-year professorship at the University of Pisa
(1589-1592), Galileo had as friend, tutor, and colleague the
professor of Platonic philosophy, Jacopo Mazzoni. Mazzoni was
a syncretist, seeking to show the compatibility of Plato and
Aristotle with each other and with Christianity. He was, indeed,
the very model of a late sixteenth-century Graeco-Christian philosopher. Yet there was one opinion, apparently shared by Plato
and Aristotle, that Mazzoni took issue with, the opinion that
theoretical mind was categorically distinguishable in kind from
practical mind. Every branch of philosophy, Mazzoni insisted, has
both a theoria and a praxis. Each of these incorporates operations
directed toward particulars. In theoria such operations are for the
sake of propping up the truth; in praxis they are for the sake of
attaining the truth, and of finding the essence of things in the
order of existence. Such praxis Mazzoni saw as dangerously rushing toward particulars, plunging the seeker after truth into the
perilous world of the unstable, of the disturbed situation where
action can make the difference between failure and success. In
this characterization Galileo, struggling to make sense of his
results in the inclined plane experiment, might have recognized
himself.
Another glimpse into Galileo’s discomfort with the suffering
of experiential learning may be gathered from his Considerazioni
al Tasso. This consists of notes criticizing Tasso’s epic poem,
Gerusalemme liberata. The publication of the poem in 1581 had
sparked a lively debate among Italians as to its merit relative to
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Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516). Pro-Ariosto by taste, Galileo
was vehemently anti-Tasso. He rejected Tasso’s treatment of the
human passions. Whereas in Ariosto’s poem there was a metamorphosis of res into verba, leading to a satisfying outcome,
Galileo judged Tasso’s poetry to lack poetic inspiration, and to
end up cobbling together fragmented concetti (imaginations)
lacking continuity and reciprocal dependence. The result was thus
like marquetry, in which colored pieces of wood are fitted together, and the border lines between pieces always remain sharp
and crudely distinguishable. Tasso had failed to realize that the
passage from res to verba must be dynamic, transformative.
Aficionados of Tasso found in his poetry a new conception of
human feeling: feeling as a force originating from deep sources in
the senses and the body, so strong at times as to overwhelm the
mind. Imitating the pathos in Tasso’s poetry became a project for
composers of madrigals like Monteverdi. The resulting works
were among those sharply criticized by Galileo’s father Vincenzo.
Vincenzo saw “modern music” as mixing together voices and
modes, diverse words (in polyphony), different rhythms and
tempos, and thus giving rise to disparate and confusing emotional
reactions in the intellect of the listener. The future of music,
Vincenzo urged, lay in resolving the polyphonic “confusion” of
voices of the madrigal into a monodic style of singing.
Vincenzo’s criticism of polyphonic music as fragmented and
unintelligible is closely parallel to the younger Galileo’s criticism
of Tasso’s poetry as marquetry. Palmieri sees Galileo’s disdain for
Tasso as a disdain for “the real, oblique, polyphonic nature of
experiential learning.” Galileo’s preference for Ariosto is “a preference for an ideal of experience in natural philosophy in which
he had been inducted by Mazzoni’s teachings.” But “Galileo’s
radically new practice of philosophy . . . had brought him face to
face with the reality of experiential learning.” A deep rift runs
through Galileo’s mind, as Palmieri reads him: on the one hand,
Galileo ardently strives after a science of nature—which requires
dealing with the reality of experiential learning; on the other
hand, he would like that science to conform to the ideal sketched
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104
by Mazzoni. Perhaps, Palmieri suggests, Galileo was salvaging
something of Mazzoni’s ideal in his sanitized accounts of his
experiments.
Finally, Palmieri adduces a sonnet written by the dying
Galileo, giving it both in the original Italian and in a translation
by Dennis Looney. The latter runs as follows:
Enigma
Monster am I, stranger and more misshapen
than the harpy, the siren, or the chimera.
There is not a beast on land, in air or water
whose limbs are of such varied forms.
No part of me is the same size as any other part;
What’s more: if one part is white, the other is black.
I often have a band of hunters behind me
who map out the traces of my tracks.
In the darkest gloom I take my rest,
For if I pass from the shadows to bright light,
Quickly the soul flees from me, just as
The dream flees at the break of day.
And I exhaust my discombobulated limbs
And lose my essence, along with life and name.
Palmieri interprets the sonnet as a meditation on experiential
learning, caught between the polarities of individuality and universality. The metaphor of the monster captures the jagged contour of experience. The darkness is Galileo’s blindness, physical
as well as metaphorical. The hunters are his persecutors, real and
imagined. Only after death, with the loss of individuality, will the
light of truth shine forth. Thus Galileo recognizes that knowledge
is not coextensive with human experience. His sonnet refracts as
through a prism his lifelong pursuit of truth; an active engagement with the life-world, turning up more difficulty and more
unsolved conundrums than he has been able to cope with. The
strife, the tension, as he still relives it toward the end, is tragic in
its intensity. The only resolution is limitless relinquishment.
�
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 53, number 1 (Fall 2011)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
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ISSN 0277-4720
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�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Contents
Essays
Reading the Constitution as a Great Book............................1
William Braithwaite
Platonic and Jewish Antecedents to ...................................33
Johannes de Silentio’s Knight of Faith
Jacob Howland
Kant’s Rational Being as Moral Being ...............................47
Joseph Smith
Reflections
What Did You Learn? .........................................................73
Lise van Boxel
Poem
To the New Recruits............................................................81
Elliott Zuckerman
Reviews
Delphic Examinations
A Review of David Leibowitz’s The Ironic Defense of
Socrates: Plato’s Apology ............................................83
David Bolotin
Toleration
A Review of Eva Brann’s Homage to Americans.............101
Janet Doughterty
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1
Reading the Constitution as a
Great Book
William Braithwaite
Our national political conversation is just now being much
exercised in a deliberation about the Law and the Divine:1 on
one side, those who hold sacred a certain place in New York
City, because of those who died there; on the other, those who
plead the cause of religious freedom. Jews, Christians, and
Muslims have spoken on both sides. These circumstances can
remind us that the horrific brutalities we human beings
continue to inflict upon one another often arise somehow from
what we believe about the Divine: either that it is, and the
disputes over what it is, or that it is not, and the disputes over
what, in this event, we should look up to, if anything. These
questions are so ancient, universal, and persistent that they
appear rooted in some primal dividedness of the soul. Politics
and law cannot, it seems, escape the Divine; nor we, our own
double nature.
In Book I, Chapter 1 of the Physics, Aristotle observes the
most natural path of inquiry starts from what is familiar.
Especially to those Americans who have grown up with it, the
Constitution is familiar. But if this makes us think we already
know what it says, we might fail to read it with the care that a
great book deserves. We can study the Constitution with this
kind of care even while suspending judgment on whether it
truly is a great book. We then avoid the error that is committed
when, for example, one reads Euclid while assuming he has
been made obsolete by Algebra—looking down, from a place
of assumed superiority. We cannot know a priori whether
William Braithwaite is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This article was
originally a lecture delivered at the College in Annapolis on Constitution Day,
September 17, 2010.
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Euclid’s Elements, Aristotle’s Physics, or the Constitution, is
outdated, and we disable our judgment if we begin by looking
down on what we may come to learn we should look up to.
Diminishing its magnitude in relation to ourselves, we distort
what it presents to us. We will not see it for what it is.
Other obstacles besides familiarity can get in the way of
reading the Constitution well. It is short; so we may suppose,
mistaking its brevity for lightness, that it doesn’t need much
time. It can be taken to belong to a special discipline, the law;
lacking expertise, we read it without confidence that we can
understand very much. It’s political; since it touches issues we
may care passionately about, we search it for what we want it
to say, and can fail to notice that what it does say might not
agree with our partisan inclinations, or even when it does
agree, that its grounds may be different from our presuppositions.
This essay has five parts. In the first, I will suggest why I
think the Constitution can usefully be read as the preeminent
chapter, one of four, in what we might call the Book of the
Constitution. The second and third parts deal, from two
different points of view, with the distinctively American
experience of trying to form a political union based on an idea,
rather than on blood ties or religious beliefs. In the fourth part,
I will propose a way of thinking about the Constitution’s
Article VI, which contains the well-known “Supremacy
Clause,” providing that the Constitution “shall be the supreme
law of the Land.” In Part V, to conclude, I will suggest brief
and tentative answers to two questions: Is the Constitution
really a great book? Who can understand it best?
I
The Constitution is arranged into a Preamble, seven Articles,
and at the very end, formulaic legal words attesting authenticity. Some Articles are divided into numbered Sections. Parts
of Sections, or of Articles with parts not separately numbered,
BRAITHWAITE
3
are called Clauses. These are either paragraphs, sentences, or
parts of sentences.
The Preamble: “We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of
Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The grammatical skeleton is: “We the People . . . ordain
and establish this Constitution”—a subject, two transitive
verbs, and one direct object. “We” is plural; “the People” can
signify one or many. If we wanted to translate this sentence
into Ancient Greek, should the verbs be singular or plural?
Should the aspect of the verbs be aorist, to signify something
completed? Was the American Founding over and done with,
once and for all, when the Constitution was ratified, in 1789?
A verb of progressive aspect would signify that the ordaining
and establishing are continuous; they may still be going on.
Would the verbs be active voice, middle voice, or passive
voice? It makes a difference—doesn’t it?—whether the lawmaker says (active voice): I ordain and establish a constitution,
a regime of laws, and you choose to accept it? Or (middle
voice): I choose to obey, for my own reasons, only the laws I
make for myself? Or (passive voice): I make the laws, and you
have to accept them, like it or not?
“The People” are “of the United States.” A State is more
than a geographical place—land and water. The New York
mosque controversy reminds us that there are sacred and nonsacred places, garbage dumps and burial grounds. What kind
of place is a State of the United States—Maryland, for
example? What does it mean to say that places are “united”?
We all know that churches, temples, and mosques are sacred
places. Do legislatures and courts partake of the sacred also?
Those who serve there do take an oath, to uphold the law
(Article VI, last Clause). Why do we require this?
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The Preamble says that “the People” “ordain and establish”
the Constitution. “Ordain” means put in order; “establish”
means make firm. But political things seem to be disorderly
and always in flux. How is it possible that what is always
changing can be arranged so that it is stabilized?
In the Physics, Aristotle leads us through a long inquiry
into this question. Among his elemental ideas are place, form,
and material. What material do “the People” work on when
they “ordain and establish” a Constitution? And what is the
form of a constitution? Is it found in the words? If the Constitution has a place, where is it? In the national and State
capitals, and halls of city government? In ourselves? When
people speak of a “living Constitution,” where do they think
the Constitution lives?
The Preamble states six aims: union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and securing the
blessings of liberty. What is the principle of order here? Did
the men who wrote the Constitution believe, for example, that
without union, justice would be harder to achieve? That without tranquility at home, Americans would be less well prepared
for common defense against threats from abroad? That
liberty’s blessings are secure in proportion to the general welfare of all Americans?
The Preamble speaks of a “more perfect” union. Some
kind of union already existed, and it was deficient, less perfect.
It is named, in Article VI, “the Confederation.” This was the
union ratified in 1781, though first proposed in the Continental
Congress in 1777, ten years before the Philadelphia Convention proposed the Constitution we now have. The predecessor
constitution we know as the Articles of Confederation. If the
Constitution was a maturation, then it matters to know what it
grew out of, just as it matters, if you want to know a tree or
fish, to know how and from what it came to be what it is when
it is full-grown. To read the Constitution well, we must read
also the Articles of Confederation. I will say more about the
Articles later.
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The Preamble may be the best-known part of the Constitution. We turn now to the least-known part, at the very end,
the Attestation Clause. It says: “done in Convention by the
Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day
of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven
hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the
United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We
have hereunto subscribed our Names.” Thirty-nine signatures
follow.
Constitution Day is September 17 because this is the day
the Delegates signed it, attesting what they had done; it is the
Constitution’s “birthday.” But why should its birthday be the
day it was written, rather than the day it became legally
effective? The 39 men who signed were the ones who proposed
it, but under Article VII, only “the People” could make it law,
by ratifying it in State Conventions. Is the Constitution’s
birthday the date of publication, rather than the date of ratification, because publishing the words was more its coming into
being than the actions of ratification which made it law?
The Attestation Clause dates the Constitution from two
beginnings: the beginning of the Christian religion and
calendar (“Year of Our Lord”), and the beginning of the
Americans as a separate people (“of the independence of the
United States of America the Twelfth”). As the beginning of
the Constitution implicates the Articles of Confederation, its
end implicates the Declaration. To read the Constitution well,
we must also read the Declaration, out of which it somehow
grew.
The words of the Declaration came into effect on October
19, 1781, when the commander of the main British army, General Cornwallis, acknowledged military defeat by his surrender
at Yorktown, Virginia. But Americans celebrate their independence on July 4, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration in 1776. Were the words more the beginning of the
United States than the deeds of war necessary to make them
effective?
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The Constitution is a plan of government. The Articles of
Confederation were a treaty, agreeing to a “league” among
thirteen independent, sovereign States. The Declaration of
Independence is neither of these. It is an argument. Its aim is
to justify the action of Great Britain’s American Colonists in
separating themselves from the Mother Country. It has an
argument’s five-part formal structure: Introduction, Statement,
Proof, Refutation, and Conclusion.
An introduction is what leads us into. Here is the Declaration’s: “When in the course of human events, it becomes
necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which
have connected them to another, and to assume among the
Powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent
respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should
declare the causes that impel them to the separation.”
The Colonists appeal to Law, from three sources. Two are
mentioned here; the third we will get to shortly. “Laws of
Nature” points us back toward Aristotle’s Physics, the first
sustained inquiry into the regularities and patterns we can see
in the world around us. He shows that the phenomena of the
natural world are not chaotic and jumbled, but on the contrary,
have characteristic regularities and patterns, ways of being and
working. Nowadays we would say they change, grow, and
move according to laws—for example, the laws of force,
which, as Newton demonstrates, govern the motions of the
planets. If “Nature’s God” refers to the God of the divinely
created order of the world described in the Book of Genesis,
then this phrase points us back toward the Bible. In the
Declaration, law comes ultimately from the Divine, by way of
Nature, or from Nature as a manifestation, a showing forth, of
the Divine.
The Declaration does not “dissolve” all ties with Great
Britain—only the political ones. Ties of blood, language, religion, and law, along with common culture, history, and habits
BRAITHWAITE
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remain. In the Refutation, the Americans call those in England
“our British brethren.” The American War of Independence
was in some sense a war within the family, a war of brothers.
It thus recalls stories of other, more ancient animosities among
kindred: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau; Polyneices and Eteocles, the sons of Oedipus; Romulus and Remus. How do we
reconcile the apparent inevitability of war with the shedding of
kindred blood, which seems to be one of the most unnatural of
human actions?
Thucydides claims that his History of the Peloponnesian
War is the only book we need to read about war. It recounts the
war of the Athenians and the Spartans, both of them Greek
peoples, who once were united in resisting invasion by the
Persians, an earlier war recounted by Herodotus. In the later
war, they turn against each other. The paradigm of war,
according to Thucydides, is the killing of kindred, the people
of one’s own kind.
In their War of Independence, 1776-81, the thirteen
American States united against their “British brethren.” Three
generations later, the Americans fought another war, also
against kindred—our Civil War of 1861-65. Both wars were
between people related by blood, or “consanguinity,” as the
Declaration puts it. Both were wars about the words of the law:
the earlier war was about who may speak words of law (only
those who speak with “the consent of the governed”); the later,
about what the words of the law meant (are all men created
equal, and if so, in what politically relevant ways are they
equal?).
Both wars were also about Equality and Liberty: the
American Colonists wanted to free themselves from a lawmaking power in which they had no equal voice; the American
South, calling itself “the Confederacy,” wanted to be free to
tell the negro slave and his descendants that they would never
have any voice in making the laws to which they were
subjected.
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The proposition to be proved in the Declaration’s Proof
section is that “the present King of Great Britain” (he is
nowhere named) is a tyrant. This Section begins: “To prove
this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.” Eighteen
complaints follow, and more than half deal specifically with
the power to make laws. Throughout this 18-count
“indictment” of the King, the Americans speak as if claiming
no more than their rights under established English law. This is
the third source of law they appeal to—not new rights, but
traditional ones, belonging to them as Englishmen. The King is
a tyrant because he has abused these traditional rights. Exercise
of the powers of government without the consent of the
governed is tyranny, the Americans argue. This is the startingpoint of their argument; it is found in the Declaration’s second
part, which begins with the famous “self-evident truths.” There
it is asserted that the only just powers a government has are
those “derived from the consent of the governed.”
That a government’s just powers derive from consent of
the governed depends on prior premises. The first of these is
asserted in the Declaration’s most famous words—“That all
men are created equal.” This is the philosophical source of the
American people’s claim that to be ruled rightly, they must be
ruled by their own consent, by laws they themselves have
made. “All men are created equal” are the words under contention during the Civil War, in which my own ancestors were on
opposite sides. Whom did the Declaration’s authors intend to
exclude, if anyone, from the words “all men”? Did they mean
to exclude negro slaves and their descendants? In 1857, the
Supreme Court of the United States, in Dred Scott v. Sanford,
said Yes. Did the Court read the Declaration rightly and well?
Do the Declaration and the Constitution exclude negroes from
citizenship? I will say more about this question later. Many
people seem to believe that the Constitution is about rights,
mainly. It isn’t. What they are probably thinking of is the first
ten Amendments, which we now call, collectively, the Bill of
BRAITHWAITE
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Rights. These were added later, in 1791, after the original
Constitution was ratified. The Articles of Confederation and
the Constitution are about powers; the Declaration and the first
ten Amendments are about rights. According to the Declaration, the powers are derived from the rights, and the rights are
derived from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
Rights are primary, because they are the source; powers are
derivative, because they pre-suppose rights. Thus the soul of
American law is the Declaration, for it is there that the organic
bond between powers and rights, or between government and
nature, is made explicit. As the beginning and end of the
Constitution implicate the Articles of Confederation and the
Declaration of Independence, the powers in the Constitution
implicate the rights asserted in the Declaration and the Bill of
Rights. To read the Constitution well, we must also read the
Bill of Rights.
With the Bill of Rights in mind, we have become accustomed to speaking of “individual” rights. The Constitution
never does. Throughout the Constitution proper and the Bill of
Rights, the standard language is “person,” “persons,” or “the
people.” The Third Amendment does refer to “the Owner”; the
Sixth, to “the accused”; but these terms are used nowhere else,
I believe. The Sixth also uses three masculine pronouns, but
for reasons that I will spell out later, with respect to the
Rendition Clause, I believe it doubtful that these refer only to
males. What is the difference, if any, between “individual”
rights and rights of “persons,” or “personal” rights? Does the
difference matter?
“Person” comes from Latin persona, meaning mask, especially one worn by an actor. Our persona is our public face, the
one we put on, for example, when we mask our private feelings
from strangers or acquaintances we don’t know very well.
Good manners require that we sometimes do this. Does politics
require it too? What do people mean when they say “All politics is personal,” or “The personal is the political”? “Personal”
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seems nowadays sometimes to mean “private.” What are the
real differences, the ones that matter, between our public or
political lives and our private lives? Does the Constitution
suggest which things belong to which? Should it?
The use of “person” in the Constitution was not motivated
by an effort to find what some call today “non-sexist”
language. “Person” is a technical term in law; it means human
beings in their public, or political, capacity. This usage came
into English law from Roman law, and is directly traceable to
the codification of twelve centuries of Roman law that was
ordered by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. The
language of “individual” rights began, I believe, to be more
common and customary in American law during the middle of
the twentieth century, when the now-extensive body of court
opinions on the Bill of Rights was developing. “Individual,”
like “persona,” is also Latin in origin, but its meaning and
connotations are quite different. It is cognate with “indivisible,” that is, with the unit, the monad, the atom. This carries
implications of the uniquely private—that which makes each
of us, as each snowflake is said to be, absolutely different from
every other of the same kind. Has the elemental language of
mathematical physics crept unawares into our understanding of
the law? Our vanity, pride, and ego certainly prefer “individual” rights. We cannot help wishing to be special; most of us
do seem to have a deep longing to be loved for no other reason
than that we are who we are. But what the Constitution secures, in law, is “personal” rights, not “individual” rights. In
exchanging the former for the latter, what have we gained, and
what have we lost?
We now have a book of four parts: the Declaration of
Independence of 1776, the Articles of Confederation of 1781,
the Constitution of 1787, and the Bill of Rights of 1791. This
is the Book of the Law for a self-governing people. To read
well its pre-eminent “chapter,” the Constitution, we must read
the whole of which it is a part. The theoretical first principles
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BRAITHWAITE
of this people are Equality and Liberty; these are mediated by
Justice. The practical first principles are Prudence and
Tolerance; these are mediated by Law.
Among this self-governing people, all persons are politically equal. Each has equal right to speak freely in public
places about all that relates to the common good. Each has,
also, equal right to worship freely in his own church, temple,
or mosque. It is the work of the law (among other things)
constantly to mediate, heedful of prudence and tolerance,
claims to these fundamental rights and to other rights derivative from them. Which, if either, is primary—the right of
freedom of religion, or the right of freedom of speech? Both
are mentioned in the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, and
both are in the foreground of our national political conversation today. How are these two rights related?
II
To be one and whole is a human yearning. When our heart says
yes, and our head says no, we say we are conflicted. We are at
war with ourselves. We are not one and whole. In friendships,
the things of each are common to both, says Phaedrus in
Plato’s dialogue of that name (279c). In marriage, the Hebrew
Bible’s teaching (Genesis 2:24), inherited by the Greek Bible
(Mark 10:7-8), is that a man and woman become “one flesh.”
Modern biology and genetics confirm this. So does Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium (189c-193e). What would a
community that is one and whole look like? Might much of its
law not need to be written? This would be the law of custom.
In English legal history, unwritten or customary law was called
the common law. The American Colonists inherited this law,
and, consonant with its animating spirit, they reshaped it to
their own circumstances. We learn the common law by living
in it. We abide by the law, and it abides in us. It becomes a
second nature, and eventually we may feel as if it were natural
simply. At home in our community, we feel one and whole,
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both in ourselves and in relations with others. We have a place.
We know who we are. To be one nation and whole, a true political union, has been what Americans have aimed at since the
beginning. It has therefore been our greatest political problem
as well. Is it also the greatest political good and the greatest
political problem simply?
After their War of Independence, from 1775 to 1781, the
Americans, recently united against a common foe, tried to
establish a political union among themselves. Their first
attempt, the Articles of Confederation, failed. Their second attempt, the Constitution, has stood the tests of 225 years. What
made the American Union under the Articles “less perfect”?
Both the Articles and the Constitution aimed at union. The plan
of government each designed toward this end was different,
however. This difference is apparent on the face of the two
documents. The Articles are wordy and legalistic. Their substance is marred by excessive precision through avoidable
repetition, the spelling-out in detail of cumbersome procedures
for resolving differences among the States, and the political
asymmetry of imposing obligations on the States without giving the national government powers to enforce them. Article
IX (of thirteen Articles) spells out the powers of the Confederation Congress. It is over 1,400 words, in nine lengthy, unnumbered paragraphs. It would take over ten minutes to read it
aloud, at a brisk pace.
About two-thirds of Article IX deals with two subjects,
boundary disputes and raising “land forces,” that is, an army.
The complicated procedure for settling boundary disputes between States is set out in a single sentence of about 400 words.
This sentence piles one dependent clause on top of another:
three clauses begin with “if,” or “but if”; two others, with
“provided that.” It is a labor to read and understand it. The
provision for raising land forces gives the Confederation Congress power to request a proportionate quota of soldiers from
each State. These requisitions “shall be binding,” but the Arti-
BRAITHWAITE
13
cles give Congress no legal power to enforce them. This is true
also of Congress’s power to collect contributions from the
States to “a common treasury” and to pay expenses for “the
common defence or general welfare.” Consequently, there was
no national army and no national treasury, except insofar as the
States chose voluntarily to comply with Congress’s quotas and
requisitions.
The different aims of the Articles and the Constitution are
revealing. The Constitution’s Preamble, we recall, states six:
union, justice, domestic tranquility, defense, general welfare,
and securing the blessings of liberty. The Articles, in Article
III, state three: defense, security, and general welfare. Notably
absent are justice and domestic tranquility. That the Articles’
primary object was defense against foreign enemies is
indicated by that part of Article III in which the States agree “to
assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made
upon them, or any of them.” The vulnerability felt by the
American States in 1781 is understandable. They were militarily weak, having just fought an exhausting five-year war.
They had won only with the help of the French and good luck.
England, Spain, and others still coveted further possessions in
the New World. The Americans had won their independence;
now they had to keep it.
The Confederation’s “union” was “less perfect” in being
more for defense against attack from outside than for political
union within, and in being more detailed on paper than feasible
in practice. The States agreed to a mutual defense treaty, but
did not empower Congress to raise a national army through
legally enforceable quotas of soldiers from each State. The fear
of foreign enemies was counterbalanced by an equally
powerful fear of yielding local powers to that genuinely
national government which some thought necessary for true
political union. Fear breeds, and is bred by, distrust. A sign of
the States’ fear and mutual distrust was their uncertainty about
what to call their relationship. In the Articles of Confederation,
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the introductory “Whereas” Clause and the Attestation Clause
at the end call it “a perpetual union.” Article I calls it a
“confederacy,” Article II a “confederation,” Article III, “a firm
league of friendship.” Perhaps they could not find the right
name because they were not yet sure what they wanted to
name. “League” may have been closest to the truth, in its sense
of coming together for a common purpose. History has
decided, however, to call our first, “less perfect” Union “the
Confederation.” This fits, because “to federate” means to come
together in a league. In another way, it does not fit. The Latin
root of “federate” and “federal” is related to fides, meaning
faith or trust. What is missing from the spirit of the Articles of
Confederation trust is mutual trust. A coming together for a
common purpose is not yet a union.
III
What drives us apart, makes us decide to separate? What are
the differences that get in the way of forming a real and lasting
union? Are there natural kinds, natural differences that inevitably have political consequences? Male and female seem to be
different kinds by nature. Aristotle argues in Book I of the Politics that some men are naturally slaves, or slavish. Linguistic
and cultural differences can feel almost natural. Whatever the
source of whatever differences there are, political arrangments,
if they are to be decent and sensible, will have to take account
of them. Which differences matter most, politically? How do
they matter, and to what extent? We now consider some differences of kind that are implicated in the Constitution.
In 1972, it was proposed to amend the Constitution to
provide that “Equality of rights under law shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of
sex.” The intent of the Equal Rights Amendment was to prohibit, with the force of written law, discrimination against women. The main argument for it was the claim that the Constitution “excluded” women, because the only sex-specific pro-
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15
nouns in it are masculine. It is true that the Constitution’s text
does not anywhere use feminine pronouns. Does this signify
intent to exclude women from the rights of citizenship and the
holding of public offices?
Article II vests the Executive Power of the National
Government in a President and specifies requirements of age,
citizenship, and residency. It says, “No Person” shall be eligible to the office without these requirements. “Person” is neuter in grammatical gender, and does not exclude women. This
Section further provides, with respect to the President, “Before
he enter on the Execution of his office, he shall take the
following oath or affirmation” (emphasis added). Do these
masculine pronouns exclude women? The conventions of
English grammar, both in 1787 and in 1972, allowed masculine
pronouns to refer to the female sex. Whether a particular
masculine pronoun was presumed to include females, or
intended to exclude them, was to be determined by context.
Supposing that the Constitution as a whole is the proper
context, let us look at other uses of masculine pronouns to see
if they exclude women.
An example is in Article IV. Its Section 2 includes what is
called the Rendition Clause. It says that a criminal fugitive
who flees from the State where he committed a crime “shall on
Demand of the Executive Authority of the State from which he
fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the Crime.” If we read the “he” in the phrase “the
State from which he fled,” to refer only to men, here is the
result: A man who robs a grocery store in Maryland and is later
discovered by Maryland authorities to be in police custody in
Virginia, is constitutionally required, by the Rendition Clause,
to be “delivered up” to Maryland police. But his female
accomplice is not, because she is not a “he.” It seems to me
unlikely that the authors of the Constitution intended this
result.
The Equal Rights Amendment came close to being ratified
before the time to do so ran out in 1982. How should we under-
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stand the American people’s declining to ratify it, after more
than ten years of public deliberation about it? No serious
argument seems to have been raised, during the Democratic
primary-election campaigns of 2008, that then-Senator Hilary
Clinton was constitutionally ineligible for the Presidency because the ERA had not been ratified. The question remains,
nevertheless, whether there are differences between men and
women of such a kind that the law can properly make distinctions between them for some purposes, such as combat duty in
military service.
We turn now to another common misreading of the
Constitution. Among some Americans, both black and white,
an opinion persists that it favors, or supports, slavery. Three
specific provisions deal with this subject directly, two others
indirectly. None uses the words “slave” or “slavery.” Used
instead is “Person” or “Persons.” It should seem odd that a law
said to approve of slavery fails to name its subject plainly and
correctly. What could account for such reticence? Article II
vests the National legislative power in a Congress consisting of
a Senate and House of Representatives. Section 2 provides that
each State shall have not more than one Representative in the
House for every 30,000 of its population. With exceptions not
relevant here, population includes “the whole Number of free
Persons, . . . [and] three fifths of all Other Persons.” No one
disputes that by “Other Persons,” the Constitution’s authors
meant slaves.
Does the phrase “three fifths of all Other Persons” mean,
then, as some people continue to believe, and to say publicly,
that according to the Constitution, the negro is three fifths of a
Person? Such an opinion would be consistent with the opinion
that the phrase “All men are created equal” in the Declaration
of Independence was intended to mean “All white men,” and
therefore to exclude negro slaves and their descendants (this is
the reading of the Declaration by the Supreme Court in the
Dred Scott case). Often not noticed by those who say these
things is that the Three-fifths Clause deals not only with repre-
BRAITHWAITE
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sentation in the House, but also with taxation. The relevant
language says, “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States” according to population,
counted according to the formula just noticed.
From each State’s point of view, representation in the
House and direct taxation have opposed incentives. To get
more seats in the House, the Slave States wished to count all
their slaves; to pay less taxes to the National Government, they
wished to count none of them. The Free States, on the
contrary—those in which slavery was forbidden—wished to
have the Constitution count no slaves for representation in the
House. This would give the Free States greater power there,
increasing the prospect that Congress could eventually abolish
slavery. But for taxation, the Free States would have been glad
to agree to count all slaves. This would increase the tax contributions required from Slave States to the National Treasury. In
this controversy over representation in the House, what the
Free States wanted was that the Constitution not prohibit or
impede the eventual abolition of slavery; what the Slave States
wanted was its constitutional preservation. These opposed
interests were compromised by joining the opposed incentives
of gaining political power and reducing taxation. More House
seats meant more taxes; paying less tax meant fewer House
seats, and less political power.
In Mathematics, three one-fifth parts of 100 is the same as
100 three-fifths of each unit. But the dispute in the Constitutional Convention addressed by the Three-fifths Clause was
not about counting parts of slaves. It was about whether to
count all slaves as whole Persons, or some of them, or none.
Has the Three-fifths Clause been read in the mode of mathematics, rather than with a proper understanding of the language
of the law? Reading the Constitution in the mode of mathematics is consistent with thinking of individuals, of ones or
monads; but as we noticed earlier, the Constitution speaks of
“persons,” not of “individuals.” Ones can be fractionally
divided; “persons” cannot. What the Constitution says is that
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three-fifths of the total slave population were to be counted as
“Persons” and two-fifths were not to be counted at all. Did the
authors of the Constitution mean to say, by these words, that
out of every 100 slaves, sixty were Persons, and forty were
property? Which ones were which?
If the text obliges us to acknowledge that the Constitution
acquiesces in counting two-fifths of the slave population as
property, then we must concede that it also counts three-fifths
of that population as Persons. More slaves are constitutionally
recognized as human beings than are not so recognized. Is this
pro-slavery or anti-slavery? It seems more just to the text to
say that the Constitution looks up to the ultimate good aimed
at—placing slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction,” as
Lincoln was to put it—more than it looks down at the political
constraints that made this good temporarily unachievable in
1787. Would negro slaves have been better off in 1787—would
we be better off today—if the opponents of slavery in the
Convention, acting on high-minded principle, had simply
refused to consider any compromise whatever with the slave
interests? (This was the stance, later on, of the Radical
Abolitionists.)
We have taken note of two differences that American
Constitutional Law has had to deal with: man and woman,
master and slave. The first difference is natural. Slavery,
according to Aristotle’s Politics, has two forms, one natural,
the other conventional. In American law, slavery is against
natural law, or natural right. “All men are created equal.”
Slavery existed here, legally, only by convention, by positive,
written law. It could therefore be abolished, without injustice,
if the lawmaker changed the law. The Slave States saw, and
feared, that Congress would do exactly that. They were
willing, in consequence, to fight a Civil War to keep what they
claimed as their freedom, or “natural” right, to hold the Negro
in bondage. In the decades leading to that war, the Southern
legal arguments turned more and more to the assertion that “the
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” made Negro slavery
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19
lawful because it was both natural and consistent with the
Bible. The slave interests felt these claims to be vindicated
when the Supreme Court decided the Dred Scott case in 1857.
So the war came.
It can be tempting to view the Union victory in the Civil
War as a victory for the jurisprudence of natural rights, on
which the Constitution is founded. With different political
leadership, and if President Lincoln had not been assassinated,
perhaps the victory might have had some chance to become
that. But it didn’t. What the South lost on the battlefield, it won
in politics and the law. One visible sign of the South’s triumph
was racial segregation—that vestigial remnant of slavery
which the most unregenerable elements in the South clung to,
in defeated rage, dragging down with them their decent and
moderate, but timid, compatriots. This was the South in which
I grew up, in Virginia, during the 1940s and 1950s.
The triumph of Southern jurisprudence involves, and is
involved with, the story of what we today call “judicial
review,” and this story belongs to a third difference for our
examination—the different aspects of sovereignty. The specific
question is this: what distinguishes the making of law,
legislative power, from the interpretation and application of it
in particular cases, judicial power?
The Constitution, in Article I, vests the law-making power
in Congress. The power to decide “Cases and Controversies” is
by Article III vested in “a Supreme Court and such inferior
courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and
establish.” What we seek is to discern how these two powers,
aspects of sovereignty, differ. We cannot, on this occasion,
make an adequate inquiry into this question. I offer, instead,
some observations we might draw upon, in order to begin
thinking about how a judge differs from a legislator.
“Judicial review” refers to the Supreme Court’s power to
act as a kind of super-legislature by declaring Acts of Congress
“unconstitutional,” which is taken to mean, “not lawful,” or
not law. Is judicial review consonant with the spirit of the
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Constitution? What is the source of the Supreme Court’s power
to overrule the deliberate will of “the People,” expressed in
laws passed by Congress? What is at stake here, in the words
of the Declaration, is the “consent of the governed.” The
Declaration accused the British King of the arbitrary exercise
of power. What are the differences, with respect to “consent of
the governed,” between an arbitrary king, an arbitrary Congress, and an arbitrary Supreme Court? If “arbitrary” means
unreasonable and willful, then all three are forms of unjust
rule, even if different in formal appearance and practical
consequences. Are an arbitrary Congress and an arbitrary
Supreme Court dangerous in equal degree? This may depend
upon the remedies available to the People, and on the kind of
harm either branch might do by its willfulness. Senators’ terms
are six years; House Members’ terms, two; the constitutional
power to remove them belong to the People, and can be
exercised at the ballot box. Supreme Court judges serve,
constitutionally, “during good behavior”; they seldom resign
voluntarily. With good health, most serve as long as physically
and mentally able. The most recent retiree was ninety years
old. The Chief Justice and the newest Associate Justice are
both about 50; they are likely to serve for several decades.
Bad or questionable laws enacted by Congress may be
more accessible to correction, both constitutionally and in
practice, than abuses of power by the Supreme Court. The
Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, holding
that racial segregation of negroes and whites in public schools
was unconstitutional. To reach this result, the Court had to
overrule its own prior decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy
was decided in l895. Both Brown and Plessy involved state
legislation, not an Act of Congress, so these two decisions
were not, technically, exercises of the power of judicial review.
But the jurisprudential progenitor of Plessy, insofar as it addressed racial segregation, the remnant of slavery, from the
perspective of positive law rather than of natural law, or natural
right, as affirmed in the Declaration, was the Court’s decision
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in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which did involve an Act of Congress.
Dred Scott was decided in 1857. There Mr. Chief Justice
Taney held that Congress had no power to exclude slavery
from United States Territories not yet admitted to the Union as
States. On the way to this conclusion, Taney opined that the
words, “All men are created equal” were intended by the
Declaration’s signers to mean only white men. “The Negro has
no rights a white man is bound to respect,” he said. I believe
this to be a misreading of the Declaration; if it is, Taney’s opinion “de-natures” the Constitution by poisoning its seminal
source in the Declaration’s doctrine of natural right, tranforming its vital principle from the sovereignty of reason into the
will of the sovereign. Beginning with the Dred Scott decision,
and its repudiation of the political principle that “All men are
created equal,” the Supreme Court’s prestige and authority
stood behind the legally sanctioned and publicly tolerated policy of racial segregation for a hundred years, until the Brown
decision in 1954.
By contrast, efforts to change legislation enacted by
Congress can begin, if the People choose, after the next
election. The Civil Rights Movement of the l960s can be seen
as a “bottom-up” citizens’ effort (assisted by a better-instructed
Supreme Court) to make this ballot-box power effective
against those Members of Congress who held influential
committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to
impede, stall, or stop civil rights legislation in the National
legislature. A bad law is sooner corrected than a corrupted
understanding of the law itself. In the most important moral
controversy ever to divide this country, the Supreme Court was
on the wrong side for a century. Dred Scott was the first time
the Court effectually exercised the power of judicial review. In
doing so, the Court abandoned, in order to assert the political
power of a “super-legislature,” what might have been its
proper role as law teacher to the nation.2 It also prepared the
groundwork for suffocating the natural-right source of
American law in the Declaration of Independence. Without
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22
natural law, or natural right, the highest thing in American law
is the power of the sovereign. By asserting the power of
judicial review, the power of exercising a veto over Congress,
the Supreme Court declared itself first sovereign. We are under
a Constitution, a Chief Justice of the Court said in 1907 (and
repeated in 1908), but the Constitution means what the Court
says it means.3 This understanding of law seems to take as its
essence the political (and sometimes military) force that is
certainly necessary to make law effective in practice, rather
than that ultimate good which law looks up to, aims at, and
constantly strives toward. This good, according to the
Preamble, is to “establish Justice.”
IV
What is law for us? This is Socrates’ opening question in
Plato’s short dialogue Minos. The Constitution, I suggest,
answers Socrates’ question for Americans in the way I shall
now crudely sketch out; for a fuller answer, we would need of
course to read Plato’s Laws, to which the Minos is propaedeutic, and some other books as well.
Article VI in the Constitution has three unnumbered
Clauses. The first requires that the National Government honor
“Debts and Engagements” made under the Articles of Confederation. The obligation to perform contracts continues, notwithstanding a change in the external form of government.
This first Clause gives constitutional recognition and stature to
the principle of keeping your promises. This is a moral
principle, because a promise invites reliance, and to ask
reliance is to accept moral responsibility. Promise-keeping
nurtures trust. When our words invite others to rely firmly on
what we say, we vitalize our personal, social, and commercial
relations. Our expectation that most people, most of the time,
will generally do what they promise, governs such commitments as “I’ll meet you at the Dining Hall at 11:45” and my
marriage vows, as well as our commitments to friends and all
the buying and selling we do everyday, including the commer-
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23
cial contracts we enter into by e-mail and telephone with
people we have not met, don’t know, and will never see. The
law of promise-keeping is very ancient, its origins obscure.
Abraham relies on it when he buys a burial place for Sarah;
Jacob relies on it when Esau sells him his birthright. This law
was for a long time unwritten, residing in the habits and
customs of people’s ways of dealing with one another. In
England, it was one element in the nurturant soil of what came
to be called the common law.
The second Clause of Article VI is the famous Supremacy
Clause. It provides that the Constitution, laws enacted pursuant
to it, and treaties made by the United States, “shall be the
supreme Law of the Land.” This Clause makes the Constitution the highest written, or positive, law for the American
people. Unlike the law of promise-keeping, the Constitution
and its Supremacy Clause are recent in time, and its authors are
known by name. All peoples have laws of promise-keeping.
But only the Americans have “this Constitution,” ordained and
established by themselves.
The third Clause of Article VI requires all members of
Congress and the State legislatures, and “all executive and
judicial officers” of the United States and of the several States,
to bind themselves “by Oath or Affirmation” to support the
Constitution. This requirement resonates with the tones of the
closing lines of the Declaration of Independence: “And for the
support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the
Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each
other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” These
closing lines recall, in turn, the Declaration’s beginning, with
its reference to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
The three Clauses of Article VI ascend hierarchically. They
move from the law of promise-keeping that has grown up
spontaneously and been preserved among all peoples by
custom, to the highest law of a particular people, to the laws
that are highest simply, the Laws of Nature and the Laws of the
Divine, however understood. The written Constitution referred
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to in the Supremacy Clause is in the middle of Article VI,
placed between the unwritten laws of custom and the unwritten
laws of the Natural and Divine orders.
Is the being of the Law to be found more in its stability,
which may be most manifest in its written and unchanging
words, or more in what the Law is grounded upon and in what
it looks up to? The structure of Article VI suggests that what
we hold, or ought to hold, most solidly to be Law is the ways
and usages, of unremembered origin, that give identifying
character to us as a particular people. This, according to the
Declaration of Independence, is the English common law (with
its reliance on natural right), as we have adapted it to American
circumstances. The structure of Article VI suggests, as well,
that what American Law looks up to is the relation between
Nature and the Divine. The Divine is referred to in the
Declaration four times: as “Nature’s God” and the “Creator,”
the source of “unalienable rights,” and hence of the just powers
of government, and of law; as “divine Providence”; and as
“Supreme Judge of the World.” As presented in the Declaration, the Divine could appear to be the transcendent original
form of which the National Government’s three branches—
legislative, executive, and judicial—are the earthly image and
shadow.4 Such a view seems consistent with the Biblical
testimony that Man is created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).
What does this way of reading Article VI suggest about
reading the Constitution as a great book?
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails trying to
see what is in it, not only expressly, but also implicitly. I have
suggested that both women and blacks are “in” the Constitution, as potential citizens—human beings who were not
citizens in 1787, but whom the Constitution did not legally bar
from becoming citizens. Women are “in” because they are
“Persons,” and the men who chose the Constitution’s masculine pronouns knew these pronouns could be understood as
including women. Women are in the Constitution because they
are not out—they are nowhere excluded, expressly or by impli-
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25
cation. Blacks are “in” because even if the Constitution grudgingly acquiesces in treating 40% of negro slaves as not
countable in the population, it affirmatively treats 60% of them
as countable “Persons,” that is, as potential citizens, as “men”
politically within the meaning of “All men are created equal.”
It is best to interpret the words and intentions of the
Constitution and the law in the same way we want our own
actions interpreted, that is, in the way we should try to interpret
the actions of others—by the good that is aimed at, rather than
by the necessities, circumstances, and human weaknesses that
impede or hobble the practical realization of our better hopes
and dreams.
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails trying to
see, also, what lies under it—a Western tradition of over two
thousand years, accessible to us in a few hundred surviving
books. But much of what underlies the Constitution and the
law is not in books. It was, and is, unwritten. No express words
in the Constitution command us to be just, prudent, and
tolerant. We learn such things, to the extent we do learn them,
by living with, and among, others.
Reading the Constitution as a great book also entails trying
to see what is above it, what it appeals and aspires to—Nature
infused with the Divine, the Divine as the First and the Final
Cause of Nature. To read the Constitution most deeply, we
have to read the Bible and Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Physics
and Metaphysics, Aquinas’s Summa, and much more.
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails, finally,
trying to see what is behind it, the background out of which its
thought emerges. This background begins to reveal itself when
we ask the questions, Does it make a difference that the
Constitution was written in English? Could its meaning be
expressed in German, or French, or Chinese? Perhaps what is
particular in it could not be. But what about the things in it that
are universal? Which things are these? If it makes a difference
that the Constitution was written in English, then, for the same
reason that reading Homer illuminates the background neces-
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26
sary for reading Plato, reading Shakespeare illuminates the
background for reading the Constitution.
To begin to know what the Constitution and the law are—
this is the work of a lifetime.
V
A great book, for me, is one that speaks with the authority
of depth and weight about serious questions that really matter
to me. Friendship is such a question. Who are my best friends?
Surely those who want for me the highest good I am capable
of. How do I know who these are? Aristotle’s Ethics might help
me to know. Whom can I love? Whom can I trust with the
innermost thoughts and secrets of my heart? Who, or what,
should I love and trust the most? Plato and the Bible, Jane
Austen and George Eliot, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have a lot to
say about these questions.
A great book, for others as well as for me, is one that
speaks with coherence and insight about questions that will
matter a lot to most of us throughout our lifetimes. Work is
such a question: What should I do with my life? What work am
I most fit for?
Aristotle’s Politics and Tocqueville’s Democracy in
America can help us think about how to find a place in the
American polis where we, all and each of us, may thrive with
the talents we have by nature and the good habits we can
acquire by care and self-discipline.
A great book simply, for all human beings, speaks with
clarity, harmony, and proportion about questions that stay with
mankind always. What is Law? Does God exist? If God is not,
where are we? What is the soul? Is it immortal?
The Constitution was not a great book for me when I was
in law school, or during the 25 years of law practice and law
teaching that followed. Nor was it a great book for me when I
came to St. John’s College in 1995. But, for me, it is now.
Whether or not it is in itself a great book, I have found that it
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27
has always been a doorway and a path for me to the questions
in the greatest books. What I had not known before was how to
read it. Can the Constitution be a great book for you? Yes, if
you choose to let it. But no book can matter very much for any
reader who is not ready, or able, to accept as a genuine possibility that he may always have to be stretching upward in order
to approach its meaning.
Who can read the Constitution? Anybody willing to make
the effort. But as with all other difficult and worthy activities,
some people are likely to be able to do this better than others.
A book published fifty years ago has something to say on this
point. Its title is The People Shall Judge. The Preface begins
this way:
This book expresses the faith of one American
college in the usefulness of liberal education to
American democracy. If the United States is to be a
democracy, its citizens must be free. If citizens are
to be free, they must be their own judges. If they are
to judge well, they must be wise. Citizens may be
born free; they are not born wise. Therefore, the
business of liberal education in a democracy is to
make free men wise. Democracy declares that “the
people shall judge.” Liberal education must help
the people judge well.5
If a liberal education helps us read the Constitution better, then
those with such an education have an advantage over those
who lack it. It is unhappily the fact that most lawyers and
judges today lack a liberal education, since one is to be had in
only a very few colleges.
Perhaps the most discerning readers of all will be those
with much leisure who are able to use it well in reading the
greatest books. Probably it would help to have had some direct
experience of politics or war. The opportunities for such a life
are infrequent, however, and the men and women few who can
make the most of such opportunities when they are available.
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BRAITHWAITE
29
The rest of us must do the best we can with whatever gifts we
have, trusting in the indemonstrable premise that one evanescent glimpse of something high, even from a great distance,
may be worth more than the solid worldly goods always
tempting our grasp from nearby.6
EPILOGUE
The artist of the work depicted in these four images is Albin
Polasek. He was born in 1879, in Moravia, now the Czech
Republic, and apprenticed as a wood-carver in Vienna before
emigrating to the United States at age 22, later becoming an
American citizen. He was head of the Sculpture Department of
the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly 30 years.
At age 28, while still a student in sculpture at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he made
the work shown here. It is one of his most famous. Its title is
Man Carving Out His Destiny. (Later he made the following
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female companion piece called Unfettered, an exquisite nude
in bronze, with blue-green finish:
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NOTES
1. At the time of this lecture, public debate was raging over whether
a community center proposed by a Muslim organization should be
built near the site of the attack on the World Trade Center in New
York City.
2. See George Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787: A Commentary
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 135.
Unlike Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost, Polasek’s Woman directs her gaze exuberantly upward.)
The first two views of Man Carving Out His Destiny show
the work in progress, initially as a small-scale plaster model,
then in full size, in stone, in a version that very likely was
preliminary—compare the positions of the right arm in the
studio and outdoor versions. The last two views show two perspectives of the finished work.
As you see, the work of the Man whom the sculpture depicts is not finished. If we take this statute to represent a selfgoverning people shaping themselves by means of the law,
then the verbs in our Greek translation of the Preamble should
be progressive in aspect, not aorist: self-government is never
over and done with, because our own lives are always a work
in progress. So far as “the living Constitution” dwells within,
to “ordain and establish” it is up to us.
3. “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the
judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and
of our property under the Constitution.” Charles Evans Hughes,
“Speech before the Elmira Chamber of Commerce, May 3, 1907,” in
Addresses of Charles Evans Hughes, 1906-1916, 2nd ed. (New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 185. “Congress may pass laws, but the
Supreme Court interprets and construes them, and determines their
validity. The Constitution, with its guarantees of liberty and its grants
of Federal power, is finally what the Supreme Court determines it to
mean.” Charles Evans Hughes, “Address Delivered at Youngstown,
Ohio, September 5, 1908,” ibid., 307.
4. Cf. Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787, 26.
5. The People Shall Judge: Readings in the Formation of American
Policy, Vol. I, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), vii.
6. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus 279c.
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Platonic and Jewish Antecedents
to Johannes de Silentio’s
1
Knight of Faith
Jacob Howland
As very young children, we tend to engage the world with the
joyful expectancy and unimpeded capacity for delight that
spring from a trust as yet unbroken. But repeated experiences
of loss and disappointment almost inevitably cool our enthusiasm for life, and teach us the usefulness of detaching
ourselves from what Kierkegaard in Either/Or calls “the fair
wind of hope.”2 According to Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, Abraham was an
exception to this rule: through “the wonder of faith,” Abraham
remains “young enough to wish” and “preserve an eternal
youth.”3 Fear and Trembling begins with the story of a man
whose ever-increasing admiration for Abraham was proportionate to the degree to which “life had separated what had
been united in the child’s pious simplicity.”4 Silentio thus
announces the central question of his book: how can a mature
understanding of the ways of the world coexist with a childlike
love of life?
Silentio is neither the first nor the last to pose this question.
The associate between wisdom and resignation is something of
a commonplace. In the Greek tradition, it appears as early as
Aristophanes’ Clouds, in which Socrates, who is portrayed as
the ascetic head of a school into which men have withdrawn
from the city in order to devote themselves to philosophical
studies, is called “miserably unhappy” by Pheidippides.5 In the
Hebrew Bible, the same sentiment occurs in the Book of
Ecclesiastes: “I set my mind to study and probe with wisdom
Jacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy and past Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa.
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all that happens under the sun.—An unhappy business, that,
which God gave to men to be concerned with! I observed all
the happenings beneath the sun, and I found that all is futile
and pursuit of wind.”6 In modern literature, this theme is
expressed by Goethe’s Faust:
True, I am more clever than all the vain creatures,
The Doctors and Masters, Writers and Preachers;
No doubts plague me, nor scruples as well.
I’m not afraid of devil or hell.
To offset that, all joy is rent from me.
*****
Hemmed in by all this heap of books,
Their gnawing worms, amid their dust,
While to the arches, in all the nooks
Are smoke-stained papers midst them thrust,
Boxes and glasses round me crammed,
And instruments in cases hurled,
Ancestral stuff around me jammed—
That is your world! That’s called a world!
And still you question why your heart
Is cramped and anxious in your breast?
Why each impulse to live has been repressed
In you by some vague, unexplainèd smart?7
Three decades after the publication of Fear and Trembling,
Friedrich Nietzsche would argue that loving life is inconsistent
with understanding it; wisdom produces nausea, while the
appetite for life can take root and grow only within an atmosphere of illusion.8 For his part, Silentio insists that there is a
solution to the problem of the unity of youthful enthusiasm and
adult knowledge, the name of which is “faith.” But while
Silentio does not doubt the actuality of faith—particularly as
exemplified in Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac—he
cannot satisfactorily explain its possibility, much less
reproduce its movements in his own life.
The subtitle “A Dialectical Lyric” announces that Fear and
Trembling is simultaneously a philosophical and a poetic
HOWLAND
35
work—one that employs intellect and imagination to
illuminate its subject. Yet Silentio is unwilling to accept without qualification the title of “poet” or “philosopher.” More
precisely, in denying that he is a philosopher, he affirms that he
is a poet, and in denying that he is a poet, he affirms that he is
a philosopher.9 If, as this contradiction seems to imply, he both
is and is not a poet and a philosopher, we might be entitled to
assume that he both does and does not know what he is talking
about. We are thus invited us to identify and ponder the potentially fruitful inconsistencies in Silentio’s discussion of faith.10
Here is one such inconsistency. Silentio states: “I can very
well describe the movements of faith, but I cannot make
them.”11 But if the movements of faith are wholly internal, and
so invisible to others, how could Silentio know them without
having experienced them? Caveat lector: Silentio’s explanation of the internal structure of faith—in particular, his
assertion that faith involves a movement of finitude that
follows a movement of infinite resignation12—deserves critical
scrutiny.
I. Silentio’s Flat-Footed Knight
The clearest description of the phenomenon that Silentio is
trying to understand in Fear and Trembling is contained in his
imaginative description of what he calls the “knight of faith.”
Silentio’s first encounter with this knight is inauspicious.
“Dear me!” he exclaims, “Is this the person, is it actually him?
He looks just like a tax collector.”13 In Silentio’s imagination,
the knight of faith is literally and figuratively “pedestrian.”14
We watch him as he strolls around the city and makes his way
through the week. At work, he labors with the precision of an
“Italian bookkeeper”; at church, he is “impossible to distinguish from the rest of the crowd”; at leisure, he resembles a
“mercenary soul.” He walks like a “postman,” talks of food
like a “restaurateur,” plans construction projects like a
“capitalist,” and relaxes with his pipe like “the local tradesman . . . vegetating in the twilight.” In brief, Silentio detects in
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the knight of faith not the slightest “crack” through which one
might catch sight of the infinite: “He is solid through and
through. . . . He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois
philistine could belong to it more.”15
But Silentio’s imagination goes beyond appearances, for
he also tells us what the knight of faith thinks and feels. From
this perspective, it is clear that he is free of the bourgeois
philistine’s social ambition, restless anxiety, and slavish
adherence to convention. Although he is poor, he “thinks about
an appetizing little dish of warm food his wife surely has for
him when he comes home.” Indeed, he “firmly believes that
his wife has that delectable dish for him,” and to see him eat
this meal would be an “enviable” and “inspiring” sight. But if
she doesn’t have it, “oddly enough—it is all the same to him”;
whatever he may find on his plate, so to speak, leaves him
deeply satisfied. He runs into a stranger at a building site; “in
no time he erects a building, having at his disposal all the
resources required for that purpose.” For “if it came to that,” he
thinks, “I could easily get it.” The knight of faith evidently has
an active imagination—for how can a man who “does not have
four beans” afford delicious delicacies, much less finance a
building project? What is more, “he enjoys and takes part in
everything”; “everything that happens—a rat scurrying under a
gutter plank, children playing—everything engages him with a
composure in existence as if he were a girl of sixteen.” In a
word, “he lets things take their course with a freedom from
care as if he were a reckless good-for-nothing.”16
Silentio remarks in passing that the knight’s appetite is
“heartier than Esau’s.”17 This statement cuts two ways. Jacob
purchases Esau’s birthright for a bowl of stew, and later steals
his brother’s paternal blessing. Like Esau, the knight of faith,
in his simple contentment and guileless freedom from care,
must be an easy mark for more cunning men. But unlike Esau,
the knight of faith is always blessed in life, because he receives
everything as a blessing. And this is the main point. To the man
for whom “life had separated what had been united in the
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child’s pious simplicity,”18 Abraham presents a paradox. Just
so, the knight of faith presents a paradox to Silentio, for whom
“God’s love, both in a direct and inverse sense, is incommensurable with the whole of actuality.”19 Silentio supposes that
the movement of faith comes after that of infinite resignation;
faith makes whole what life has fractured. But his imaginative
description of the knight of faith tells a different story. While
this knight knows the difference between actuality and possibility, reason and imagination, he combines them in his day-today existence in such a way that each augments the other: he
enjoys the products of his imagination as if they were actual,
and the actual conditions of his existence as if they were what
one could wish for in imagination. Silentio claims that the
knight of faith is “not a poet,”20 yet we see that his love of life
is essentially poetic and authorial.21 Inasmuch as he “enjoys
and takes part in everything,”22 God’s love has furthermore
never appeared to him to be “incommensurable with the whole
of actuality.”23 The knight of faith is thus no more familiar with
Silentio’s conception of resignation than he is with his Godforsaken conception of actuality, because the former is
dependent on the latter. The knight of faith, to repeat, is “solid
through and through”;24 there are no cracks, because he has
never been broken.
Let me put this point another way. Although Silentio does
not explain why he thinks that God’s love is incommensurable
with the whole of actuality, this is evidently a general
conclusion that he has drawn from experience. On the whole,
and setting aside particular exceptions, men act as if they did
not love God, and events proceed as if God did not love man.
Now this conclusion rests on the inherently uncertain presupposition that inductive reasoning gives one access to the nature
of actuality as a whole. Silentio accordingly envisions faith as
the solution to a problem that his intellect has posed.25 This
problem, however, is entirely foreign to the knight of faith.
Like Alyosha Karamazov, and unlike Alyosha’s brother Ivan,
he has always loved life “before everything else,” and in
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particular, before its “meaning” and “logic.”26 And because
love has always come first for him, he has never felt the weight
of the incommensurability that comes to light when one is
guided primarily by the mind rather than the heart. Unlike
Silentio, the knight of faith never renounced the world, so he
does not need faith to get it back.
II. Philosophers and Fools
The differences between Silentio and the knight of faith can be
delineated more clearly by looking at two antecedents to the
latter—one from Athens, the other from Jerusalem. The first
suggests that there may be more than one way to combine a
youthful passion for life with a mature understanding of it,
while the second suggests that the problem as Silentio understands it—namely, how to make the movement of faith after
the movement of infinite resignation—may be insoluble.
Plato’s Socrates resembles the knight of faith both externally and internally. Like Silentio’s knight, Socrates is poor; if
anything, he is even more carefree in his poverty inasmuch as
he does not work at all.27 Like Silentio’s knight, he is just as
satisfied in times of scarcity as in times of plenty. Alcibiades
explains in the Symposium that, during military campaigns,
Socrates put up with hunger better than anyone, yet he alone
was able to enjoy his meals when food was abundant.28 This
last detail suggests Socrates’ equanimity in the face of death,
something he amply demonstrates during his trial and execution.29 Like Silentio’s knight, Socrates is superficially pedestrian, and not just because he lacks the financial resources to
attain any higher rank than ordinary foot-soldier. “He speaks of
pack-asses and blacksmiths and cobblers and tanners, and
seems always to say the same things in the same ways,” Alcibiades observes.30 But as with the knight of faith, the inner is
not the outer: anyone who opens up his speeches or is vouchsafed a glimpse of his soul finds a sublime beauty beneath his
quotidian exterior.31 Like the knight of faith, Socrates’ appar-
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ent simplicity exposes him to the schemes of more cunning
men. Callicles accordingly warns him that he runs the risk of
being put to death by his enemies.32 But again, Socrates simply
is not afraid of death—a fact that has caused some commentators to infer that Socrates hates life, or, in Silentio’s terms,
that he embraces death with a kind of infinite resignation.33
This inference, however, flies in the face of his earnest and
energetic engagement with the essential tasks and opportunities of a human life. As Socrates makes clear in the Apology,
his watchword is wakefulness, not sleep.34 And yet, he takes
leave of life without apprehension and without regret.35
Socrates’ relationship to the world could be described as
one of engaged detachment. He approaches life in a manner
analogous to an athlete who “leaves everything on the field,”
but who nevertheless immediately forgets the result and is
utterly gracious in defeat as well as victory. In my view, it is
philosophical eros—which Socrates regards as even more
essential to the philosopher than intellectual capability36—that
sustains his attitude of engaged detachment. Socrates’ philosophical eros relates to a conception of actuality that differs
both from Silentio’s inductive disappointment and from the
poetically augmented conception of the knight of faith. Silentio describes a youth whose love for an unattainable princess is
“transfigured into a love of the eternal being.”37 Here we have
something like Socrates’ philosophical love of the Ideas or
Forms, except that Silentio associates this love with a movement of resignation that springs from an intellec-tual acknowledgment of the disappointing character of actu-ality. But
Socrates’ longing for wisdom is not a consequence of his
understanding of the world, and is not born of frustration.
Rather, it is nothing less than the most dedicated and persistent
love of the whole of actuality—and here actuality must be
understood not as the dispiriting way of the world or the
tedious limitations of human life (whether real or imagined),
but as that which most fully is, in the distinctive integrity of its
being.38
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The second antecedent of Silentio’s knight of faith that I
would like to consider is the Hasidic fool in Rabbi Nachman of
Bretslav’s influential story “The Clever Man and the Simple
Man.”39 Nachman’s tale is a religious allegory about two childhood friends who follow separate paths in life. “Determined to
conquer the world,”40 the clever man travels extensively,
becomes an expert in “every artistic achievement,”41 and
ultimately “penetrates the heart of everything in nature and in
the soul of man.”42 He becomes “enormously rich and wise,”43
yet his wisdom serves only to make him miserable: “a violent
disgust at the imperfection of life drove him from place to
place, and he nowhere found rest.”44 This is consistent with
Silentio’s assertion that God’s love is incommensurable with
actuality. But the clever man goes further than Silentio, for
when he is summoned by the king, he reasons—and tries to
convince others as well—that the king does not exist.
The simple man remains at home and learns the humble
trade of shoemaking. He is a clumsy craftsman and lives in
great poverty, yet he does not suffer from the spiritual anorexia
that afflicts his clever friend. Indeed, he is “joyous and in good
spirits from morning till evening.”45 Like the knight of faith, he
uses his imagination to enhance his experience, and so savors
everything that life sets before him. His wife gives him bread
and water, but he delights in these as if they were the finest
meat and wine: “Thus he seasoned the scanty bites with gay
fancies . . . and while he ate he really tasted all the choice
dainties of which he spoke.”46 He rejoices in his “shabby
sheepskin” as if there were no “nobler garment.”47 People
often make fun of him and attempt to dupe him, but their
insults and tricks have no effect on his good humor. “Ay,
friend,” he is accustomed to answer, “just see how foolish I
am! You can be a good deal cleverer than I and still be a proper
fool.”48 And when the king calls for him, he answers immediately, responding to this unexpected bit of good fortune estatically: “the joy of the simple man was overpowering.”49
It is significant that the simple man’s happiness is not
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41
purchased at the price of ignorance. Because the simple man
“had passed his life without intrigues, he knew how to see into
the heart of right and wrong.”50 In the person of the simple
man, this essential moral knowledge is inseparable from the
knowledge of how to live joyfully, come what may. In
Nachman’s story, it also pays off by conventional standards.
Valued by the king for his “virtue and simple understanding,”51
the simple man becomes the governor of his province and
finally the king’s prime minister. Meanwhile, the clever man
becomes impoverished due to his unwavering devotion to
exposing the “madness and delusion” of those who continue to
believe in the king’s existence.52 One day he meets the simple
man, and tries to prove to him that he, too, has been fooled
about this fundamental matter. The simple man cannot counter
his arguments, and does not even attempt to do so. Rather, the
story ends with the simple man declaring to his friend, “You
will never receive the grace of simplicity!”53
Rabbi Nachman’s tale recapitulates the main themes of
Silentio’s imaginative encounter with the knight of faith. Both
narratives trace the practical and theoretical problem of resignation to the sovereignty of the intellect in the soul.
Conversely, both teach that equanimity, together with the
ability to live joyously, springs from the poetically productive
love of a trusting and grateful heart. But Nachman’s story does
not merely confirm that Silentio’s problem of how to repair
what life has fractured is foreign to the knight of faith, for it
also warns that there may be a point beyond which what the
intellect has broken cannot be made whole. Measured by the
exacting standards of the intellect, the world manifests an
ineluctable imperfection. The “violent disgust” elicited from
the clever man by this imperfection convinces him,
furthermore, that there is no king—and such a repugnant world
is utterly inconsistent with the hypothesis of intelligent rule.
The simple man rightly refuses to challenge this inference,
because logical argumentation cannot address the deeper issue
of the clever man’s profound spiritual and emotional
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incapacity. How could one who regards every blessing as a
curse learn to feel joy? By the “grace of simplicity,” on the
other hand, the simple man is able to experience life as a
blessing, and it is this experience that leads him thankfully to
acknowledge God—the melech ha’olam, or “King of the
Whole,” who is the ultimate source of all blessings.
III. A Very Brief Conclusion
Rabbi Nachman’s simple man is wiser in his foolishness than
the clever man is in his wisdom, for only the simple man has
attained knowledge of himself and others. In this respect, the
simple man resembles Plato’s Socrates, who is also wrongly
considered by more cunning and worldly men to be deluded.
Like the knight of faith, Socrates and the simple man understand intuitively that love precedes cognition in the wellordered soul. This is a secret that Silentio makes available to
his readers, even if he himself fails to grasp it. But unless we
readers either love the whole or can learn to do so, our
knowledge will be of no more value than Silentio’s ignorance.
NOTES
1. This article was originally presented at the Sixth International
Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College in June of 2010. I would
like to thank David Possen for his critical comments, and Ed Mooney
for his encouragement.
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, ed. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 292.
3. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and
Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15.
4. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 7.
5. Aristophanes, Clouds, l. 104 in Four Texts on Socrates, trans.
Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 120.
6. Ecclesiastes 1:13-14. JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, 2nd ed.
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999), 1766.
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7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. George Madison
Priest in Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard
Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, vol. 47 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1952), Part I, ll. 366-370 and 402-413.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of
History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 814.
9. “The present writer is not at all a philosopher; he is, poetically and
tastefully expressed, a free-lancer” and “I am not a poet and go about
things only dialectically.” Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 5 and
79.
10. This is not the only indication that Fear and Trembling presents
us with a partial and incomplete understanding of its subject, yet one
that nevertheless enables a discerning reader to glimpse more than its
author has seen, and thus to begin to correct his mistakes. As Stephen
Evans observes in his Introduction to Fear and Trembling, the book’s
epigram—“What Tarquin the Proud communicated in his garden
with the beheaded poppies was understood by the son but not by the
messenger”— invites us to see Silentio as a messenger who is
unaware of the deeper significance of his own message
(Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, x). But because we do not know
whether this is the point of the epigram as Silentio understood it, we
also cannot know whether Silentio himself understands that he says
more in Fear and Trembling than he knows.
11. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 31.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 32.
14. Ibid., 34. The Danish word is Pedestre.
15. Ibid., 32-33.
16. Ibid., 33-34.
17. Ibid., 33.
18. Ibid., 7.
19. Ibid., 28.
20. Ibid., 33.
21. The word poet comes from the Greek poiētēs, which derives from
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the verb poiein, meaning to make or to produce—clearly apposite in
reference to the knight of faith. The word author comes from the
Latin auctor, which, among other things, signifies an authority, a
creator, a principal cause, a founder of a people. Note, too, that
Silentio consistently emphasizes the fruitfulness of faith as
exemplified in “father” Abraham, the auctor generis or progenitor of
the people.
22. Ibid., 32.
23. Ibid., 28.
24. Ibid., 32.
25. His relationship with God is mediated by his intellect: it is not
God’s love that makes him “unspeakably happy,” but the “thought”
that God is love. Ibid., 28.
26. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1990), 231.
27. Plato, Apology, 23b-c.
28. Plato, Symposium, 220a.
29. See Alcibiades’ description of his exemplary composure in battle
in Symosium. 220d-221c. Alcibiades also makes it clear that Socrates
has no desire for conventional honors, which others pursue as a
means of overcoming the oblivion associated with death—cf. 220de and 208c-d.
30. Plato, Symposium, 221e-222a.
31. Plato, Symposium, 216e-217a.
32. Plato, Gorgias, 486a-b.
33. See “The Problem of Socrates” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed.
Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 162.
34. Plato, Apology, 30e-31a; cf. Republic, 476d.
35. Plato, Phaedo, 117-118.
36. In explaining who the philosopher is, Socrates accordingly begins
not with the philosopher’s intellect but with his desire: he is a lover
of the whole of wisdom. See Republic, 475b).
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37. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 36.
38. See especially Republic, 476a-d.
39. Martin Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, trans. Maurice
Friedman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 71-94. On the
significance of this story within the context of Yiddish literature, see
Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
40. Buber, Tales, 72.
41. Ibid., 74.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 78.
44. Ibid., 74-75.
45. Ibid., 75.
46. Ibid., 76.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 78.
49. Ibid., 85.
50. Ibid., 86.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 90.
53. Ibid., 94.
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47
Kant’s Rational Being
as Moral Being
Jay Smith
In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure
Reason Kant writes:
This discussion as to the positive advantage of critical
principles of pure reason can be similarly developed in
regard to the concept of God and of the simple nature of
our soul. . . . Even the assumption—as made on behalf of
the necessary practical employment of my reason—of
God, freedom, and immortality is not permissible unless at
the same time speculative reason be deprived of its pretensions to transcendent insight. . . . I have therefore found it
necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for
faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics
without a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source
of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars
against morality.1
As evidenced by the Critique of Practical Reason and other
works such as Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, the
simple act of limiting the excessive and dogmatic claims of
speculative metaphysics in order to secure morality proved
more contentious, difficult, and complex than the passage
above suggests. The situation of practical reason changes in
radical and complicated ways as it emerges out of the shadows
of speculative reason to become the primary faculty that determines our rational being. I will first discuss the context established for practical reason and morality in the Critique of Pure
Jay Smith is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. This article was first delivered
as a lecture at St. John’s College in Santa Fe on April 10, 2009.
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Reason. Then I will try to show how pure practical reason is
connected to rational faith in the Critique of Practical Reason.
This examination will uncover the uncanniness of pure practical reason, an uncanniness hidden in part by Kant’s commitment to, and transformation of, a traditional view of pure
reason. The uncanniness is caused by the operation of a power
that is beyond, or out of, the normal course of nature—a power
that differs from natural powers. This essay tries to show that
Rational Being, for Kant, is Moral Being, and that this equivalence preserves a higher dignity for human beings than is
compatible with the mere pursuit of secure and comfortable
living.
I. Practical Reason and Rational Faith in the Critique of
Pure Reason
Kant connects a concept of knowledge with a synthesis made
possible by the reception of givens under the forms of sensibility, namely, space and time. By synthesis, Kant means an
activity that produces a unity. These sensible givens are made
ready for further synthesis by the productive imagination. Finally, by the exercise of synthetic judgments, the worked-up
impressions are brought under the unity of the categories of
the understanding, so that an object of experience is constituted. This constitution is possible only because these spatiotemporal givens worked up as presentations or representations
are accompanied by the formal ‘I think’—they are prehended
and apprehended by the same mind. It is this assertion of the
necessity of an overarching unity, a transcendental unity of
apperception, that is Kant’s response to Hume’s claim that the
mind is only a bundle of impressions. Without this ‘I think’
belonging to a persistently identical self-consciousness, the
subject would not recognize all these presentations as its own,
and, immersed in the stream of lived happenings, would
simply forget itself.
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49
Let me give an example as a way to explain this process
without getting too bogged down in Kant’s technical details. I
am standing in the kitchen, I hear a loud noise, I turn, look out
the window, and see a motorcycle going by. These impressions—hearing the loud noise and seeing the motorcycle—
arise in a temporal sequence and are spatially arranged: I was
standing by the refrigerator when I heard the noise, and then I
turned my head to look out the window and see a motorcycle
going by. These happenings, even given in a spatial and
temporal arrangement, are not yet an experience in the Kantian
sense. There is as of yet no constituted object of experience. To
have an experience it is necessary that these two happenings be
brought into unity—in this case, under the category of cause
and effect: the loud noise is the backfire of the motorcycle.
To be able to constitute an experience out of these happenings, I must be able to temporally and spatially rearrange these
happenings, cutting their ties to the way I happened to notice
them while standing in the kitchen. This rearrangement, which
prepares them to be taken up into the categories of the understanding, is the work of the productive imagination. The sound
I heard before I saw the motorcycle is not the cause of the
motorcycle but vice versa. Our mind in this way rearranges
these happenings to give us an objective experience, an experience in which the subject who has the experience—namely the
transcendental subject who spontaneously produces the ‘I
think’ that marks these happenings as happenings of the same,
constant mind—also posits a correlative transcendental object
of experience, a bare x, a placeholder as it were. The happenings become an experience, are constituted into an object of
experience, when the reference point shifts from the subject of
the happenings to the posited placeholder, so that the
happenings are experienced as centered on an object over and
against the subject. “Oh, that loud noise was the backfire from
the motorcycle.”
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This concept of knowledge and this description of how our
experience is constituted—that is, how we shape experience
and give it unity—are easily grasped by us and, for the most
part, accepted. For instance, here is a common puzzle: we
present someone with a series of, say, six pictures—six different stages of a person chopping down a tree. These pictures
are presented in a random order with the expectation that
everyone will reorder them in the same way. In Kantian terms,
we would say that each person can synthesize these
happenings into an objective experience valid for everyone.
Why is this concept of knowledge important for a
discussion of Kantian morality? First, because all objective
experience is constituted in this way, even what we take to be
our internal experience is given under a form of sensibility,
namely time, worked up by the productive imagination and
subsumed under the categories of the understanding. What we
take to be our inner experience, our inner selves, our deepest
and truest desires, are constituted and conditioned in this
manner. Kant calls this inner self the empirical or phenomenal
self. We have no speculative access, no intellectual intuition
either into the thing-in-itself that is the self or into a putative
“real” or “authentic” self—which Kant labels the noumenal
self. This lack of speculative access into the self has significant
repercussions on our discussion of morality and on what is
demanded from practical reason.
Kant’s concept of knowledge also produces a second, more
complicated consequence for our discussion of morality. Kant
seeks to reject the sort of speculative thought that emerged
from mythical thinking when we began to claim access to a
universal unity, a One. This One could be seen as the cause and
the ground of the Many; in the light of this One, the Many
could be conceived as a whole, a totality.
In striving for such a conception, the human mind marks
out for itself an extramundane point of reference in which the
flow and jostle of concrete events and phenomena are joined
together in a stable whole. In this distancing view, one is able
SMITH
51
to differentiate between the totality of what is and individual
entities, between the world and what occurs within it. Things
are understood not in their particularity but in what underlies
them. They are understood as ideas, as essences, as forms or
substances; that is to say, they are understood in regard to what
connects them back to the One. As part of this cognitive stance,
of this bios theōrētikos, the soul, in striving for an intellectual
intuition of the cosmos, forms itself as it becomes conscious of
itself in the recollective and reflexive intuition of the One. The
uniting of the knower with the One is both an ecstatic selftranscendence and a reflexive self-assurance that enables one
to see and live his or her life from this extramundane point of
reference. Within this self-assurance, fears of death, of
isolation, of frailty, of contradiction, of surprise, and of novelty
can be faced.
Kant provides a universal unity as well, but of an entirely
different stripe. He begins with the transcendental unity of the
knowing subject which, in relating itself to itself, requires, as a
posited correlate, a symmetrical concept of everything that
stands over and against the subject—that is, a transcendental
concept of the world as the totality of all appearances. Kant
calls this correlate a Cosmological Idea, which aims at the
whole of possible experience and the unconditioned. The
unconditioned is the ground of appearance and occupies what
would have been the place of the One. Perhaps an example
from Aristotle might be helpful here. At the end of the
Metaphysics Aristotle talks of an unmoved mover whose
activity is thought thinking on thought. The experience that he
wishes to ground is a theoretically worked-up experience that
has its roots in our sense-experiences of an ordered whole, an
eternal cosmos of ordered motions. Given that we can have
such an experience, how is it possible? To understand Aristotle’s unmoved mover, I am often tempted to make a transcendental move of positing the unmoved mover as a necessary
logical construct that lays out the conditions for the possibility
of this eternal and ordered motion while unifying everything in
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light of an overarching end. Aristotle, however, does not make
this move. Instead, he makes the puzzling assertions that such
an unmoved mover is alive, and that, in its activity of thought
thinking on thought, it exhibits the best kind of life there is, the
bios theōrētikos—which is a real possibility only for some of
us and only for short periods of time. In whatever way we are
to understand this exhibited life, we can point to it as
something transcendent, as a One that is the ground of the
order of the cosmos, a One of which we can say that it is not
merely a logical construct. Dante, in the context of a religious
journey, also calls upon this One at the beginning of his
Paradiso: “The glory of Him who moves all things pervades
the universe and shines in one part more and in another less.”2
Kant recognizes that this orientation toward the One, in the
philosophical context, is motivated by the needs of reason.
Reason is marked by universality and necessity as it strives for
systematic completeness and perfection. Speculative reason
seeks this One, this universal unity, as it attempts to bring
together in one synthetic act the conditioned—that is, the
whole of possible experience—and the unconditioned—that is,
the ground or end of such a whole. The results unfortunately
are the antinomies, the contradictions that reason inevitably
falls into when it seeks to know, to speculatively point at, the
overarching unity, the One. As Kant explains: “Either,
therefore, reason through its demand for the unconditioned
must remain in conflict with itself, or this unconditioned must
be posited outside the series, in the intelligible.”3 The positing
of something outside the series of appearances is needed in
order to point to a ground for appearances that makes the
possibility of appearances conceivable. This positing is also
needed in order to give a fuller account of us than are provided
by references to an empirical ego and to a transcendental unity
of apperception. But why take the trouble to label this positing
the intelligible world, especially since Kant has denied us any
intellectual intuition, and since his concept of knowledge en-
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sures that an intelligible world could never be a possible object
either of experience or of knowledge?
As a way to begin, let us look at what Kant accomplishes
in resolving the antinomies of pure reason by the positing of an
intelligible world. First, Kant preserves an idealizing synthesis,
a world-constituting synthesis that allows the distinction to be
made between the world as a whole and what is in the world.
This distinction helps to guide understanding in its work of
knowing objects in the world. In preserving the synthesis,
however, Kant downgrades the cosmos into the object-domain
of the natural sciences, into a kingdom of nature, a kingdom
whose only unity is a unity under a certain set of laws. This
unity is not a unity that could become an object of knowledge,
much less exhibit the highest form of life. It is not the One that
holds together the Many. This regulative unity merely assures
us that for any set of conditions a previous set of conditions
can be found from which the latter can be understood and so
on, ad infinitum. This world of nature, of appearances, is no
longer a whole organized according to ends; because its unity
is merely regulative, it has the heuristic goal of advancing
theory-construction. The regulative unity of the Cosmological
Idea does not provide an extramundane point of reference, nor
can it satisfy reason’s demand—or our need—for a whole that
contains contingencies, neutralizes negations, and calms the
fears of death and isolation.
Second, Kant preserves a space outside of nature that does
not conflict with the regulative unity needed for the
functioning of the understanding, as he states in the section that
discusses the Antinomy of Pure Reason:
The sensible world contains nothing but appearances, and
these are mere representations which are always sensibly
conditioned; in this field things in themselves are never
objects to us. It is not surprising that in dealing with a
member of the empirical series, no matter what member it
may be, we are never justified in making a leap out
beyond the context of sensibility. . . . On the other hand,
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to think an intelligible ground of appearances, that is, of
the sensible world, and to think it free from the contingency of appearances, does not conflict with the unlimited
empirical regress.4
As we said above, this intelligible world cannot be known
by us. The resolution of the antinomies of pure reason
therefore evokes resignation, which Kant expresses in this
way:
The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of
pure reason is therefore only negative; since it serves not
as an organon for the extension of knowledge but as a
discipline for the limitation of pure reason, and, instead of
discovering truth, has only the modest merit of guarding
against error.5
If there is to be a positive use of pure reason, it will not be in
its speculative use but in its practical use. Furthermore, Kant’s
assertion that he found it necessary to deny knowledge6
suggests that it is not in the search for truth that we find our
dignity; it is rather in guarding against error that some other
possibility is preserved for us.
To conclude this first section, let us consider why this
space is labeled “the intelligible world.” Our metaphysical
desire, the desire for a One that can satisfy reason, cannot be
satisfied speculatively; moreover, as Kant has shown, attempts
to do so propel us into a land of illusion and deception. Unlike
David Hume, who claims that this desire will disappear once
we see that it cannot be satisfied, Kant rightly asserts that this
metaphysical desire will not wither. The needs of reason are
always pressing, and it is these needs that provide the context
for Kant’s exploration of practical reason. The burden that
speculative reason attempted to carry in response to the
demands of reason and the needs of our metaphysical desire
can only be carried by practical reason—and in particular, by
practical reason intimately bound up with morality. This is why
Kant says,
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The idea of a moral world has, therefore, objective reality,
not as referring to an object of an intelligible intuition (we
are quite unable to think any such object), but as referring
to the sensible world, viewed, however, as being an object
of pure reason in its practical employment, that is, as a
corpus mysticum of the rational beings in it, as far as the
free will of each being is, under moral laws, in complete
systematic unity with itself and with the freedom of every
other.7
Kant strives to preserve for us a rational core, a moral world
whose objective reality is affirmed by the fact of the ought. An
ought requires an I beyond the empirical ego, an I not reducible
to the kingdom of nature, an I somehow connected to considerations of freedom. Kant tries to preserve rationality by relying on pure practical reason, and on its affiliated concept of a
world of rational beings, each of which acts at all times as if,
through his maxims, he were a legislator in the universal kingdom of ends. Reason, which requires universality, necessity,
and ends, must be at play in this moral world that is also intelligible. Comprehending such a world would be an exalted and
stirring project; but Kant’s articulation of the project at the end
of the Critique of Pure Reason—as was pointed out by Kant’s
critics—lacked both clarity and content. Let us turn now to the
work that tried to respond to such concerns, Kant’s second
Critique, The Critique of Practical Reason.
II. Kantian Moral Being
Here is how Kant introduces his Critique of Practical Reason:
The theoretical use of reason was concerned with the
objects of the cognitive faculty only, and a critique of it
with regard to this use really dealt only with the pure
cognitive faculty, since this raised the suspicion, which
was afterwards confirmed, that it might easily lose itself
beyond its boundaries, among unattainable objects or
even among contradictory concepts. It is quite different
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with the practical use of reason. In this, reason is
concerned with the determining grounds of the will,
which is a faculty either of producing objects corresponding to representations or of determining itself to
effect such objects (whether the physical power is
sufficient or not), that is, of determining its causality. For,
in that, reason can at least suffice to determine the will and
always has objective reality insofar as volition is at issue.
The first question here, then, is whether pure reason of
itself alone suffices to determine the will or whether it can
be a determining ground of the will only as empirically
conditioned. Now there enters here a concept of causality
justified by the Critique of Pure Reason although not
capable of being presented empirically, namely that of
freedom; and if we can discover grounds for proving that
this property does in fact belong to the human will (and so
to the will of all rational beings as well), then it will not
only be shown that pure reason can be practical but that it
alone, and not reason empirically limited, is unconditionally practical. Consequently, we shall not have to do a
critique of pure practical reason but only of practical
reason as such. For, pure reason, once it is shown to exist,
needs no critique. It is pure reason that itself contains the
standard of critical examination of every use of it. It is
therefore incumbent upon the Critique of Practical
Reason as such to prevent empirically conditioned reason
from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnished
the determining ground of the will. If it is proved that
there is pure reason, its use is alone immanent; and the
empirically conditioned use, which lays claim to absolute
rule, is on the contrary transcendent and expresses itself in
demands and commands that go quite beyond its sphere—
precisely the opposite from what could be said of pure
reason in its speculative use.8
A mouthful to be sure! Let us try and bring some clarity to this
passage. First, Kant refers to pure reason as a unified faculty
that can be talked about either in its speculative or practical
use. Next, pure reason is concerned with the questions of
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freedom, God, and immortality, as is made clear by Kant’s
insistence upon universality and necessity. Finally, pure reason
bears within itself the “standard of critical examination of
every use of it.” Pure reason does not look to a higher authority
for its standards, nor does it see its finiteness as marked and
determined by reference to an infinite, divine reason. The unity
of pure reason is preserved over the difference between its
speculative and practical use by promoting pure practical
reason to a place of primacy, while at the same time demoting
speculative reason to secondary status. This reversal of priority
is quite striking when compared to theological explorations of
the relation between human and divine reason. A look to
theology’s distinguishing of divine and human reason puts this
reversal of priority in an interesting light. For some theologians, human reason is intimately connected to divine reason,
because the former takes its standards and orientation from the
latter. Thus, as regards human reason, the primary faculty is
speculative and the supporting faculty is practical. In speculative reason man looks up to an order of higher ontological
status than himself—God and his created order—while
practical reason guides man’s actions within this order of ends.
God, however, cannot have speculative reason as primary,
since there is no order of higher ontological status for him to
look up to. If there were such a higher order, he would not be
the creator, but the divine craftsman. So for God it is his reason
in its practical aspect that is primary. He creates by his word—
Let there be light!—and then he beholds that it is good.
By reversing the primacy of the two faculties of reason,
Kant makes human reason resemble divine reason: pure
practical reason, or reason in its moral activity, comes first;
then speculative reason follows—creating, then beholding.
There is no ontologically higher order that is open to man’s
speculative view, and thus the traditional metaphysical claim
that actuality anchored in this higher ontological order is prior
to potentiality becomes suspect as well. This rejection of the
priority of actuality is part of what is at stake in Kant’s
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rejection of the ontological and cosmological arguments for
the existence of God. For Kant, possibility—a possibility not
tied to an already existing actuality, but a possibility tied to
freedom—will be central. Since there is no existing order of
the Good that is open to our view, and thus no way to measure
our actions by reference to such an order, this reorientation is
a significant break from traditional ethics with its concerns
about such things as the distribution of goods, and with its
grounding of obligation in the demand that we bring to
fulfillment our potentialities as human beings.
Let us now turn more directly to the passage quoted above.
Kant seems to assert that practical reason determines the
faculty of the will, but that the will can be determined in two
different ways: it can produce objects corresponding to representations, or it can bring about such objects. To understand the
first alternative, we must see how something can be a cause of
our actions. In the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason,
Kant says, “Life is the faculty of a being to act in accordance
with the laws of the faculty of desire. The faculty of desire is a
being’s faculty to be by means of its representations the cause
of the reality of the objects of these representations.”9 In other
words, this faculty of desire requires representations of certain
objects, from the very concrete (such as desiring an ice cream
cone) to the more abstract (such as honor or shame). The
subject is affected by a certain representation of a desired state
of affairs, and then practical reason goes to work to determine
how to attain or bring about such a state of affairs. The content
of this representation and the attendant evoking of pleasure or
pain is determined by our experience. Kant claims that we do
not innately know what we desire and what will bring us
pleasure or pain; and furthermore, he claims that these will
vary from person to person. We find what it is that makes us
happy through experience. When practical reason determines
the will through representation, it is operating as empirical
practical reason. Under various descriptions it should be
familiar to all of us.
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When we strive toward a desired end—usually happiness—empirical practical reason is at work as the overall endin-itself that needs no reference to another end. Maxims and
rules of conduct formed in consideration of this end Kant calls
hypothetical imperatives: if you want this, then you must act in
this way. A way of life organized around such imperatives is a
prudential life. Kant indicates this dependency upon experience by the word empirical. This dependency on experience
motivates most of our actions, and that is why Kant sees those
actions as pathological—because they are determined heteronomously rather than autonomously.
Kant thinks that heteronomous determination is natural to
us, since he believes that we are inwardly determined in the
same way as the course of nature is determined. Our inmost,
authentic desires, which we believe both determine and
express who we really are, have been shaped by our education,
by our experience, and by our society—that is, from without.
Hence to be determined by these inclinations is not to be free,
but to be determined heteronomously. Kant regards everything
we think of as deeply, inwardly human—our desires, our social
roles, our insights, our feelings of love, care, and devotion—as
heteronomously determined, which is to say, conditioned from
a moral perspective, and radically pathological. Kant considers
all desire-driven action to be pathological because it arises in
us as a pathos, as a suffering of a determination that arises
outside of us. In this sense, therefore, pathological activity is
not contrasted with normal activity—since it is precisely
normal activity that is pathological—but with autonomous
activity, that is, with freedom and the formal determination by
one’s own will.
This other possibility of determining the will, in which we
are not determined heteronomously, is to have the will effect
the object by the exercise of the faculty of pure practical reason
that is not grounded in our experiences. This way of determining the will may be rather puzzling, but we can at least
understand that it would eliminate the mediation caused by
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representing to ourselves objects of experience that then activate the faculty of desire, thereby bypassing our dependence
on experience. To be subject to representation and desire is in
fact to be determined pathologically; moreover, to be motivated by concerns for happiness is to be determined heteronomously. Kant frames this option in the form of a question:
“The first question here, then, is whether pure reason of itself
alone suffices to determine the will or whether it can be a determining ground of the will only as empirically conditioned.”10
Kant claims that what is at stake here is freedom and the possibility of autonomy in the sense of self-determination. Our
freedom might well be at stake, but it is hard to accept the
claim that pure reason alone, pure practical reason, can be
sufficient in itself to determine the will. The common view,
which is easier to accept, was expressed by Hume in his
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: “Reason being
cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only
the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing
us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery.”11
There are, of course, actions that we perform under the guidance of reason for which we have no immediate inclination—
for example, submitting to a painful and risky surgery, or dragging oneself out of bed early to work at a job one dislikes. But
the motivations for these actions are also tied to inclinations—
to the desire for health or the desire for food and shelter. In
other words, reason in its practical work can only direct inclination—that is, in Kantian terms, it can function only as conditioned or empirical practical reason.
Kant is aware of this limitation, of course, and so he asserts
that it is “incumbent upon the Critique of Practical Reason as
such to prevent empirically conditioned reason from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnishes the determining
ground of the will.”12 If we stand aside from our mode of
representation, if we leave aside our faculty of desire—which
is, after all, the defining faculty of life—we are certainly in an
uncanny place. Is it possible that there could be an ethics or a
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morality that is not the fulfillment of desire in some form, a
fulfillment guided by the representation of the way the world
is? Kant proposes that such an ethics or morality is possible,
and that it is made possible by the operation of pure practical
reason, a practical reason that is not dependent upon the representation of a desired object or state of affairs, not dependent
on ends that are given to it. This claim about a will that can
determine itself apart from representation sets the stage for the
prominence of will as a basic metaphysical category for many
thinkers following Kant.
Kant pushes us very hard here. In effect, he says that we
are less free than we believe. There is no internal sanctuary in
which we can discover our true selves, and if we respond to
divine commands or act on promises of an afterlife we are
being determined heteronomously. Morality for Kant will not
consist of a set of norms for bridling desire in order to keep our
conduct free of excess. In relation to the smooth, normal
course of events—now seen as pathological—morality is always an interruption, a going beyond the way the world is, a
going beyond even the pleasure principle. Kant, in fact, rejects
the distinction between higher and lower desires, between
higher and lower pleasures, a distinction based on whether the
desire originates in the intellect or in the senses. Such a
distinction lies at the center of much moral reasoning and
education, and is implicit in all appeals to moderation. The aim
of such a morality is to refine our desires by reflection and to
redirect them toward objects of higher ontological status, that
is, objects that are visible to the mind only. By lifting our eyes
to the intelligible heavens, as it were, we lift our desires as
well. A simple example: Pleasures of the senses have a limit—
sound, for example, can become so loud that it can destroy the
sense organ; pleasures of the mind, on the contrary, can be
unlimited—learning simply prepares the mind for more
learning. Kant flatly states that all desires are on the same
level; this is indicated, for instance, by the fact that we can and
do leave a poetry reading because we want to go running and
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vice versa. His contention is supported further by the fact that
there is no intelligible heaven open to our view, and by the fact
that we are determined in what we desire, we are fully conditioned beings. Because we are fully conditioned beings, we are
less free than we believe, and everything we take as proper to
our humanity stands on one side of the ledger, while only an
invisible marker stands on the other side, pointing toward an
empty dimension into which we can think ourselves, and in
which we can imagine that it is possible to determine our moral
being rationally, that is, universally and necessarily.
If, however, on the one hand we are less free than we believe, Kant nevertheless also indicates that we are freer than we
know. In his critique of practical reason, Kant often refers to
the experience of moral necessitation, the experience of the
ought—I ought to perform this action, I ought not to have done
this, this ought not to have happened—and he gives us an interpretation of this experience that indicates that we are freer than
we know:
Lest anyone suppose that he finds an inconsistency when
I now call freedom the condition of the moral law and
afterwards . . . maintain that the moral law is the condition
under which we can first become aware of freedom, I want
only to remark that whereas freedom is indeed the ratio
essendi of the moral law, the moral law is the ratio
cognoscendi of free-dom. For, had not the moral law
already been distinctly thought in our reason, we should
never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a
thing as freedom (even though it is not self-contradictory).
But were there no freedom, the moral law would not be
encountered at all in ourselves.13
The positing of freedom is bound up with the moral law as a
condition of its possibility, and this interpretation shores up the
experience of the ought, making it a necessary, rather than a
contingent, element in human cognition. In order, then, for the
moral law to be encountered as the moral law—and for Kant
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that means it must be encountered in its universal and necessary character—it is necessary to posit freedom. In this way,
we are freer than we can know, since the moral law necessarily
calls forth the postulate of freedom: even though freedom is
not a possible object of knowledge for us, we must postulate it.
This rational necessity of positing freedom is, for Kant, the
first tenet of a rational faith.
Of course it is critical for Kant that this positing of freedom
should not contradict the doctrine of freedom found in the
Critique of Pure Reason—namely, that freedom, though
incapable of being an object of experience, is thinkable and
conceivable as a transcendental connected with our noumenal
selves, as part of the intelligible world needed to resolve the
antinomies. This theoretical conceivability does not ground the
concept of freedom, does not give it objective reality, but it
does leave open the possibility of freedom. In the Groundwork
of The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says:
The intelligible world signifies only a “something” that is
left over when I have excluded from the determining
grounds of my will everything belonging to the world of
sense, merely in order to limit the principle of motives
from the field of sensibility by circumscribing this field
and showing that it does not include everything within
itself but that there is still more beyond it; but of this
something more I have no further cognizance.14
The only cognizance of the freedom proper to our intelligible,
noumenal self, is an indirect one, a posited one. Only through
the experience of the moral law, as interpreted in a certain way,
can I become aware that I must be free.
Of course this experience of the ought, of the moral law as
universally and necessarily binding, can be interpreted otherwise. For example, following Freud, we could see the categorical imperative as an internalization of the strictures of our
parents and society, resulting in the formation of the superego;
or, following Freud’s contemporaries, we could see it as no-
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thing more than the consequence either of long-settled custom
or of the necessities dictated by prudence. Kant, however, is
strongly drawn to this interpretation of the moral law because
it solidifies many aspects of his thought. In the Preface to the
Critique of Practical Reason he says,
The union of causality as freedom with causality as
natural mechanism, the first of which is established by the
moral law, the second by the law of nature, and indeed in
one and the same subject, the human being, is impossible
without representing him with regard to the first as a being
in itself but with regard to the second as an appearance,
the former in pure, the latter in empirical consciousness.15
This positing of freedom fills out a possibility foreshadowed in
the Critique of Pure Reason, allows for some kind of unity of
the human being, and supports a view of reason that is not
unavoidably in contradiction with itself. Our noumenal self in
its freedom prescribes universal and necessary laws to our
empirical and conditioned self, which experiences itself as
necessitated by these prescriptions, not heteronomously, but
autonomously, as self-determining. The preservation of the
universal and necessary character of these prescriptions allows
Kant to see this experience as rational. Only in this way do we
gain some purchase on the intelligible world. We will take up
this rationality again at the end of this essay.
But why talk of this purchase on the intelligible world in
terms of a rational faith? We see a similar move on the part of
Maimonides in his recognition and resolution of a question that
I am going to frame as an antinomy: Is the world eternal or
does it have a beginning in time? Maimonides is concerned
about the claim that Aristotle has demonstrated the eternality
of the world. To hold onto the belief that God created and
governs the world in the face of such a demonstrated claim is,
for Maimonides, to be placed in an impossible situation.
Neither he nor Kant could tolerate the proposition that we must
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sacrifice reason for faith—that we should believe precisely
because it is absurd. Maimonides spends a great deal of time
showing that Aristotle did not claim to demonstrate that the
world is eternal; and, in fact, he tries to show that it is not
possible to demonstrate either that the world is eternal or that
it has a beginning in time.16 We do not have a coherent,
scientific account of our world to base such a demonstration on
because our best physics (an Aristotelian one) and our best
astronomy (a Ptolemaic one) are in contradiction. Thus, we are
at liberty to decide this issue on other terms. Aristotle can hold
a considered opinion that the world is eternal because it
concurs with and supports his other metaphysical concerns. Of
course, Maimonides is also at liberty to base his considered
opinion on considerations of compatibility with his traditional
faith. Kant goes a bit further than this compatibility, because he
sees the moral law as universal and necessary: he holds that in
determining the moral law we act as legislative members of a
kingdom of ends. The underpinning of such universal,
necessary, and teleological action must likewise have this rational character. Thus, for Kant, freedom is a tenet of a rational,
not a traditional, faith.
Let me now address the other two tenets of this rational
faith. As mentioned above, somehow the will, quite apart from
representation and desire, brings about an object. This object,
for Kant, is the highest good, in which happiness ought to be
distributed according to how much one deserves to be happy.
Kant tells the painful truth: that in this world, those who
deserve happiness often do not attain happiness—the wicked
do indeed often prosper, and the good often suffer. Virtue is not
its own reward; moreover, happiness does not constitute a
coherent system: the things that make us happy often work
against each other. In addition, it is not in our power to bring
about this highest good. We can act individually as if we are
legislating members of a Kingdom of ends, but to bring the
highest good into being requires that others act with us—thus,
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to do so is not in our power. God is posited as a necessary
condition for the possibility of such a highest Good, inasmuch
as He can somehow harmonize our actions with those of
others. Furthermore, the human will is not good, as we can see
through the experience of being morally determined: we must
struggle against our sensual nature as we strive to be virtuous.
Now although we can strive to perfect our will, it is an impossible task, which Kant must reframe as an infinite task in order
to make the completion of our striving at least conceivable.
The condition for the possibility of such an infinite task is the
immortality of the soul. Thus in order for the will to bring
about the highest good, and thereby to have a rational hope that
our actions are not completely futile, the rational postulates of
God and immorality are required. The postulate of freedom
grounds the moral law while the other two postulates, God and
immortality, transform our moral actions (namely, making the
world into what it ought to be and perfecting our will) into an
infinite task. It is important to see that these rational postulates
give us neither any knowledge of what God is in himself nor
any knowledge of what life after death may be like. All I know
is that it is necessary to assert these tenets in order to make it
conceivable that we can bring about the highest good as an
object of our will. In this way, our metaphysical desire is
addressed and met by a rational faith; and this is the only way
that these desires can be met, since Kant has demonstrated that
they cannot be met by striving for a speculative vision.
Let us now marshal further support for Kant’s assertion
that we are freer than we know. We have already seen that in
claiming to be the sole power that can determine the will,
empirical practical reason oversteps its boundaries and closes
off the uncanny space of freedom. This space is preserved by
pure practical reason. But is there other evidence of our
freedom?
Kant presents several examples that show situations in
which our freedom is made manifest. In the Critique of
Practical Reason, he rebuts the claim that we are impotent in
the face of our desires—that, for instance, those of us who lust
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are controlled by our lust. Kant responds that a lustful person
about to enter a brothel would soon learn to control his lust if
he encountered a gallows in front of the door together with an
official proclamation that anyone frequenting the establishment would be hanged. We can certainly conceive of controlling our lust under such a threat, but if we do exert control,
it is for the sake of self-love and self-preservation. Kant then
extends this rebuttal with a slightly different example: A prince
pressures someone to bear false witness against an innocent
man whom the prince wants eliminated. Kant claims not only
that everyone knows what ought to be done in such a situation,
but also that it is quite conceivable that someone in that
situation would refuse to bear false witness even despite the
threat of the gallows. The first example shows that we can
exert control over our desires if something serious, like our
life, is as stake; the second example shows that we can refuse
to perform an action even if our life is as stake. These
examples show that our relation to moral activity takes place
on two planes; in one we appear to be determined by the
situation, while in the other we appear to be free.17
A few pages later in the same book, Kant provides another
bit of evidence for our being freer than we know—what might
be called a phenomenological description of the difference in
self-critical response between losing at a game and cheating at
a game. He who loses a game (or, by extension, loses the game
of life by not becoming as successful or respected as he might
have desired), might be angry with himself or at his unskillful
play; but if he knows himself to have cheated at the game, he
must despise himself as soon as he compares his action with
the moral law. These two failures are different; the second
clearly lies in the moral realm and is connected to freedom.18
In this second response, we see again that there is a plane of
moral action that points to an independence from external
determination.
Finally, let us look at one last piece of evidence for our
freedom: the categorical imperative. Both our own inclinations
and sometimes the blandishments of others, including our
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friends and family, try to persuade us that we are a special case,
that a normally prescribed action is necessary just this once,
and that to take the action is really, in this situation, better for
all concerned. We may be told that this action is what God, or
our church, or our family, or our country demands of us if we
are to fulfill our responsibilities. These persuasions of sentiment, reason, and authority are effective because they touch on
our foremost moral weakness—the temptation to make a specific exemption for ourselves in a special case. The tendency
toward self-favoritism or particularism is a commonplace both
in philosophical systems of morality, where judgment of
actions typically must be made by an impartial spectator, and
in everyday legal practice, where we may not sit in judgment
in our own case. The Categorical Imperative is a rational procedure that makes this common and pervasive temptation
explicit, because it demands that actions be judged by universal and necessary laws: we must act so that the maxim of
our action can serve as a law for all rational beings—including,
quite pointedly, the law-determiner himself or herself.
Now it may seem that following commands, doing as one
is told, has the same form as Kantian duty. But this is problematic for several reasons. First and foremost is the sacrifice of
freedom in following a command that is not the product of
one’s own self-determination. In a bold move, Kant places
following commands together with following inclinations (two
functions that are kept strictly separate in most moral systems)
under the same heading, namely, being determined heteronomously. It is at this point that Kant introduces his famous
distinction distinguishing actions that are merely in conformity
with duty from actions that are in conformity with duty and
done for duty’s sake. Kant places actions that merely conform
with duty in the category of legality, which is, strictly speaking, an empty formalism, since it is independent of intentions
and motivations. Actions that are both in conformity with duty
and done for the sake of duty bring into play the pure practical
reason as well as a will that can determine itself, apart from
SMITH
69
desire and representation, by means of the universal form of
the categorical imperative. The pressing question here is: How
can a form, namely the form of universality, serve as a material
incentive?
Kant’s answer to this question takes us to a strange place.
In his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant asserts
that we are free to decide, after a certain age, which of our
inclinations we will we allow to influence us. He does not
mean that we cease to feel these inclinations; he is asserting,
rather, that in feeling them we are not necessitated to act. Or,
to put it more broadly: we can choose our character by deciding which of our inclinations to emphasize. It is in this freedom
of choice that we can decide to have the universal form be the
principle of the maxims by which we act. This decision
happens in the twinkling of an eye. Kant describes it in this
way:
[I]f a man is to become not merely legally, but morally, a
good man . . . this cannot be brought about through a
gradual reformation, so long as the basis of the maxims
remain impure, but must be effected through a revolution
in man’s disposition. . . . He can become a new man only
by a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation.19
Strictly speaking, this does not constitute evidence of Kant’s
uncanny space of freedom. But he is not the only thinker to
claim that our freedom to decide what will influence us determines what character we will have. In the myth of Er near the
end of the Republic, Plato depicts our souls in a place outside
of time, having to choose a life, a character that they will fall
into.20 Kant suggests something similar: a place of freedom, a
place outside of time, in which we can actually exercise the
faculty of choice.
III. Conclusion
Kant’s step of setting our humanity aside, of asking us to be indifferent to our desires, has evoked passionate criticism. Some
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are upset by his refusal to allow our inclinations—especially
our positive inclinations such as care and sympathy—to serve
as a ground for obligation; others complain that he ignores the
consequences of our actions; yet others are genuinely puzzled
by what in the world (or out of it, for that matter) Kant could
possibly mean by designating humans as “finite rational
beings.” For the most part, these criticisms come from critics
of single-principle moralities such as Kant’s that place a
premium on conformance to duty and obligation; such moralities tend to denigrate concerns for life-fulfillment or happiness,
that is, questions about what is good to love or good to be, both
for ourselves and for others. The great benefit of Kant’s moral
system is that it can resolve complicated situations in which
there are competing goods, and cut short the angst of moral
remorse. But the critics of single-principle moralities ask, At
what cost do we purchase this benefit? And for them, the
answer seems unacceptably high: At the cost of our humanity.
All of these are understandable concerns, but behind most
of these criticisms is the fear that if we become indifferent to
our desires, to our humanity, we will lose what makes us most
truly who we are. This self is our personal self—not personal
in the Kantian sense of having standing in a court of law as a
bearer of rights, but personal in the sense of a personal touch
or personality. In creating the moral world by acting as if we
are members of a possible kingdom of ends (a creation ex
nihilo, since we are not guided by a pre-existing good nor tied
to our existing potentialities), we are acting impersonally. Kant
is asserting that at the very core of our being exists an impersonal space. It is this space that Kant seeks to preserve,
because he sees it as the guarantee for whatever dignity we
have. As he says in the Groundwork of The Metaphysics of
Morals:
There is a sublimity and dignity in the person who fulfills
all his duties. For there is indeed no sublimity in him
insofar as he is subject to the moral law, but there is
insofar as he is at the same time lawgiving with respect to
SMITH
71
it and only for that reason subordinated to it.21
Our dignity demands that happiness is not a blessing to be
bestowed on us by a higher power as a reward for obedience or
service; rather, it is a right belonging to reason, and it ought to
be distributed in proportion to the worthiness of being happy.
If we insist that a personal self lies at our core as the
foundation for our dignity, we abandon the possibility of being
a lawgiver in a possible kingdom of ends; in effect, we
abandon reason. If we replace Kant’s pure reason with a reason
that is socially and historically mediated, we relinquish the
possibility that reason can access the space of freedom. For
Kant, it is this lawgiving self, a universal, necessary, and enddetermining rational power, which is admittedly impersonal
and uncanny, that is at the center of our being. This rational
power, this pure practical reason, determines its own ends, and
therefore it should be respected as an end-in-itself—that is, as
a moral being. In Kant’s view, as expressed in the passage from
the Introduction of the Critique of Practical Reason quoted
earlier,22 pure practical reason allows us to attain a threefold
end that other moral systems cannot match: the requirements
of reason are satisfied by rational faith; the supremacy of our
faculty of pure reason (which defines who we are) is preserved
as practical; and our dignity remains intact—not as knowers of
eternal truth, but as autonomous moral beings.
NOTES
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), 29 (Bxxix-xxx).
2. Dante, Paradiso, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander
(New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 3.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 482 (B592).
4. Ibid., 482 (B591).
5. Ibid., 629 (B823).
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6. Ibid., 29 (Bxxix-xxx).
7. Ibid., 637-38 (B836).
8. Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason” in Practical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 148-49.
9. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 144n.
10. Ibid., 148.
11. David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,”
in Moral Philosophy, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 2006), 274.
12. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 148.
13. Ibid., 140.
14. Kant, “Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical
Philosophy, 107.
15. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 141.
16. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Part II, Chapters XV-XIX.
17. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 163.
18. Ibid., 170.
19. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans.
Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, ed. John Silber (New York:
Harper and Row, 1960), 42-3.
20. Plato, Republic 614b-621d.
21. Kant, “Groundwork,” in Practical Philosophy, 88.
22. See above, pp. 00-00 and note 8.
REFLECTIONS
73
What Did You Learn?
Lise van Boxel
Congratulations on successfully completing the Master’s
Program in Liberal Arts.
Now that you have your M.A., it is a good time to reflect
upon what you have learned and the reasons why you began
the journey that led you to your degree. What knowledge have
you acquired at St. John’s College? Have you gained any
practical skills here? Your employers or potential clients, your
friends and your family will certainly ask such questions. What
will you say to them? What do you say to yourself?
Before turning to a consideration of possible answers to
such questions, consider briefly some of the presuppositions
that often underlie them. Frequently, the real meaning of
“What did you learn?” is, “In what way has this education contributed to your value as a worker or to your ability to earn a
living?”
These questions are not ridiculous. Unless you are lucky
enough to be independently wealthy or to have a patron, you
have to think about how to support yourself. On the other hand,
it is wrong-headed to think of education simply or primarily in
these terms, as if employability and income were the highest,
most important considerations for a human being.
Friedrich Nietzsche offers a vivid description of this
impoverished and narrow understanding of education—an
understanding that characterizes the modern era. In sum, he
argues that an education that looks solely or primarily to the
marketplace deforms the souls of its students because it is
Commencement Address to the Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, August 12,
2011. Lise van Boxel is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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ignorant of, or denies, the proper fullness and activity of the
human soul:
[T]he present age is . . . supposed to be an age, not of whole,
mature and harmonious personalities, but of labour of the
greatest possible common utility. That means, however, that
men have to be adjusted to the purposes of the age so as to
be ready for employment as soon as possible: they must
labour in the factories of the general good before they are
mature, indeed so that they shall not become mature—for
this would be a luxury which would deprive the ‘labour
market’ of a great deal of its workforce. Some birds are
blinded so that they may sing more beautifully; I do not think
the men of today sing more beautifully than their grandfathers, but I know they have been blinded.1
Nietzsche grants that the emphasis on science, and more
specifically on science directed by the marketplace, will indeed
produce economic success, at least in the short term. However,
he adds that this kind of science is a desiccated version of the
comprehensive understanding that is the proper goal of science
or higher learning more generally—a goal that the modern
world has largely abandoned:
I regret the need to make use of the of the slave-owner and
the employer of labour to describe things that in themselves
ought to be thought of as free of utility and raised above the
necessities of life; but the words ‘factory’, ‘labour market’,
‘supply’, ‘making profitable’, and whatever auxiliary verbs
egoism now employs, come unbidden to the lips when one
wishes to describe the most recent generation of men of
learning. Sterling mediocrity grows even more mediocre,
science ever more profitable in the economic sense. . . .
Those who unwearyingly repeat the modern call to battle and
sacrifice—‘Division of labour! Fall in!’—must for once be
told in round and plain terms: if you want to push science
forward as quickly as possible you will succeed in destroying
it as quickly as possible; just as a hen perishes if it is
compelled to lay eggs too quickly.2
REFLECTIONS | VAN BOXEL
75
If Nietzsche’s account of the trend in modern education
aptly describes the kind of education you did not receive and
to which, I think, St. John’s is opposed, how might you describe what you did learn here?
While denouncing an overly narrow view of education,
Nietzsche alludes to the effect of a complete education: it
would create “whole, mature and harmonious personalities.”
Neither you nor I can honestly claim that you acquired a complete and harmonious soul as a result of several years of education at St. John’s. This is not to say that I reject the idea that the
truly authoritative education aims at, and can produce, a harmonious soul. Rather, I think this education is the ongoing
activity of a lifetime. Nonetheless, I do believe that the liberal
education you received here can contribute greatly to the
attainment of this goal. However, I will put aside these ideas
for the moment, and I will turn instead to a more modest articulation of what a liberal education is and what skills may be
acquired as a result of it.
To do so, I will replace Nietzsche’s high-flying, though
accurate, description of a complete education with Aristotle’s
sensible, though still ambitious, account of a liberal education.
In distinguishing a specialist from someone who, like you, has
been generally educated, he says:
With regard to every [kind of] contemplation and inquiry,
both lowlier and more esteemed alike, there appear to be two
ways of being skilled, one of which it is well to call the
science of the thing, and the other as it were a kind of educatedness. For it is characteristic of an educated man to be able
to hit the mark and judge appropriately what the speaker sets
forth finely and what he doesn’t. For something like this is in
fact what we suppose the generally educated man to be, and
that to be educated is to be capable of doing this very thing—
except that we believe that this one, the generally educated
man, is able to judge about virtually all things, though being
one man, but that the other one is able to judge [only] about
some limited nature.3
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I do not recommend launching yourself into this quotation
when asked what practical skills you acquired at St. John’s
College, though if you decide to do so, take a deep breath, and
deliver it with panache. You can, however, capture the essence
of what Aristotle says in your own words.
In my own words, I say that, as a result of your liberal
education, you are better able to judge when an argument or
account is adequate and when it is not. When it is inadequate,
you are more capable of seeing how it is deficient and what
would need to be addressed to alleviate this shortcoming. Such
judgment can be brought to bear on any argument, regardless
of the field. If the argument includes technical language, all
you need is the time to look up the definitions of these words
before you are able to proceed as you would with any other
account. At bottom, such an argument is no different from any
other.
To Aristotle’s description, I would add that, as a result of
your education, you are now better able to admit when you do
not know something, and to do so without embarrassment. Do
not underestimate the value of this intellectual honesty. It will
help you to continue to learn. In addition, it will be greatly
appreciated by other people, most of whom are anxious about
their own ignorance, but are afraid to admit that they do not
know. It can be a tremendous relief to encounter someone who
can say without shame that he does not know, but that he wants
to learn.
This training in judgment—in clear thinking—is an
essential part of a liberal education. And it can indeed help you
to advance your career. I advise you, therefore, to consider how
you can describe this skill to others so that you can represent it
with the full strength that it deserves and in a manner that is
readily apparent to others. If you do this, you will be well
equipped to respond to those who want to know how you can
apply what you learned to the workplace.
This account of your education, however, is neither
complete nor does it capture the most important element of
VAN BOXEL
77
education. Aristotle would say that, in order truly to judge well,
one must have a satisfactory understanding of the ultimate end
at which one aims. It is not enough to have an idea of the
proximate goal that one seeks to fulfill. One must have
adequate knowledge of whether and how this proximate goal
accords with the highest and most comprehensive goal at
which human beings can and should aim. Without a sufficient
account of this authoritative, supreme good—the Good—no
judgment is adequate, strictly speaking, and consequently one
cannot truly be said to know. Thus, any education can and must
be considered in terms of whether and how it can contribute to
the Good. Regarding questions about whether your education
here was practical, therefore, the real issue is not whether this
education will contribute to your employment opportunities,
but whether it contributes to your knowledge of the Good. And
the real question about your job is not whether your education
has made you suitable for it, but whether it can contribute to
your ability to lead a good life.
No, I will not let go of the highest account of education to
which Nietzsche alludes and which, I dare say, all great
thinkers share. Moreover, I expect that you empathize with me
in my refusal to forgo these highest goals.
While some of you came to St. John’s partly in order to
advance your career, I doubt that any of you came here
primarily for this reason. You came because you had
questions—questions that perhaps you could not quite articulate, even to yourself, but that you could not put aside. As you
made your way through the works of our Program, I suspect
many of you began to recognize your questions reflected back
to you in the Great Books: “What is justice?” “What is love or
friendship?” “What kind of beings are we, and what is our
place in this world?”
Many and perhaps all of these questions arise from a
common origin: the yearning to have a good life, combined
with the realization that you do not know clearly enough what
this is. I suspect, in other words, that the fundamental reason
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why you came here was because you thought this education
might help you to understand the Good.
Since our human life is limited, and since the clock is
already ticking on the time that we have, this question of the
Good is urgent. No one wants to realize at the end of his life
that he misused or wasted his time. And since none of us know
how much time we have, it is foolish for any of us to postpone
the question of the Good indefinitely.
Such talk of mortality and the Good sounds very serious.
Well, what did you expect? Has anything valuable that you
have read or discussed here been unserious? Thankfully,
seriousness does not have to be grave. You need only recall the
company you have kept as you have pursued your questions,
and you will feel, not weighted down, but elevated by the
astounding souls who have walked alongside you.
Here is Plato, on the same journey as you, speaking with a
voice as nuanced and relevant as it was some 2,400 years ago.
With a touch of mischief, he doubles himself, adopting the
voice of Socrates, who recollects taking this same path, just a
day earlier: “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston.”4
Another man introduces himself with the words: “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.”5
He hands you his book, which contains his thoughts about your
shared questions, saying as he does so: “I have written my
work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the
moment, but as a possession for all time.”6
Homer turns his blind eyes upon you and points to Achilles
and Odysseus, each of whom tackles the questions of the good
life and what it means to be a good human being. Shakespeare
speaks to you with a profundity that is surely expressed in
some of the most beautiful language ever heard. Nietzsche
reaffirms life with a cry from his electric soul: “We still feel it,
the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow.”7
REFLECTIONS | VAN BOXEL
79
These souls are among the best students and teachers ever
to have lived. Their greatness consists largely in the fact that
they investigated the most serious eternal questions with
unmatched comprehensiveness and depth. What have you
learned from them about the Good?
If you have learned anything, it is that, when speaking to
one who does not already know the answer, you cannot
respond meaningfully to this question in a single sentence or
two. You might say, for example, that they taught you that the
good life is the philosophic life or the life devoted to the
Divine, but then you would have to explain what philosophy or
the Divine is and what it would mean to dedicate your life to
such things.
While there are answers to these questions, each answer
leads to a new question—and this is not the occasion for a long
conversation. It is the occasion, however, to remind you that all
of these great students and teachers spent their lives engaged
with such questions. Inquiry is thereby shown to be central to,
if not the essence of, a good human life. Furthermore—and this
is worth emphasizing, since you are have now exited the
Master’s Program—these students were able to learn from virtually everything and everyone, if not directly, then indirectly.
Life after your M.A. may not be as leisurely as it was when you
were a student, but you can and will find opportunities to learn,
if only you come to embrace life itself as a learning opportunity.
I hope and expect that something of this way of life has
become a part of you and that, if you look around now at the
faces of your fellow students, you will see in their eyes something of the souls of those great human beings who are your
models.
Continue to be thoughtful. Be open-minded. Retain the
flexibility of soul that is necessary for continued learning. In
sum, keep the goal of a good life always before you. Use the
Good as your North Star to guide every significant action and
decision you make. Doing this will not guarantee that you
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always make the right decision, but it will mean that you will
have done the best that you could do, and that, whatever contingencies you may face, you will have led the best life that is
possible for you.
Let me conclude with one of Plato’s favorite valedictions:
“Have success in action, and do what is good.”8
NOTES
1. Friedrich Neitzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 97-98.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, 639a2-15, trans. David Bolotin.
4. Plato, Republic, trans. Allen Bloom, 2nd ed., (New York: Basic
Books, 1991), 3.
5. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, in The Landmark
Thucydides, ed. Robert B.Strassler (New York: Free Press, 2008), 3.
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kauffmann
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 3.
8. Plato, Republic, 303 and 472.
POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
To the New Recruits
Elliott Zuckerman
From now on I’ll refer to you as waiters,
even those whose ears do not resemble
the picture in the magazine.
You will be issued the standard bill of fare
including a list of all the famous sauces
and all the substitutions we allow.
You’ll wear the studded cuff
the collar and the pied cravat
and those who can will wear the earrings
that fascinate the men who dine here,
whether they arrive by pre-arrangement
or enter dazed directly from the street.
I ask you not to fall in love.
When two of you collide, just smile,
stand up again and go about your business.
The moppers will come running.
Ignore the murmuring of the clients who
deplore the loss of sequence in the dance.
After a month or two you’ll get the steps
and grow to like the music.
Then we can film the service.
We’ll play it back at half the pace of life
And next we’ll show it speeded up.
The comic rondo will delight us all.
81
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REVIEWS
83
DELPHIC EXAMINATIONS
David Leibowitz, The Ironic Defense of
Socrates: Plato’s Apology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
204 pages, $80.
Book Review by David Bolotin
David Leibowitz’s book on Plato’s Apology of Socrates is in the
first place a thorough and penetrating interpretation of the dialogue. It also claims, however, and attempts to show, that the
Apology is the key to the entire Platonic corpus, and to this end it
includes thoughtful interpretations of various aspects of other
dialogues. Yet the book’s ultimate ambition goes much further
even than this. For its chief aim is to show, in Leibowitz’s words,
“that Plato’s Socrates is not just a colorful and quirky figure from
the distant past, but an unrivaled guide to the good life—the
thoughtful life—who is as relevant today as he was in ancient
Athens” (1).* Thus, Leibowitz combines his interpretations with
arguments for the truth of the Socratic positions that he has
brought to light. The book even includes arguments in Leibowitz’s own name that reply to objections a reader might make to
Socratic views. Now it is likely to be younger readers who are
most open to the question of whether Plato’s Socrates is an
unrivaled guide to the good life, and thus the book’s primary
audience is not other scholars but these younger readers. But
Leibowitz asks of his readers that they follow him in his
scholarly, and even more than scholarly, attention to the details of
Plato’s text (24-25). And his reason for doing so is indicated in his
book’s title. Socrates was ready and even wanted, on Leibowitz’s
* Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in The Ironic Defense of Socrates:
Plato’s Apology.
David Bolotin is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
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view, to be convicted at his trial and executed, out of a wish to
promote the cause of philosophy by becoming a martyr for it. But
this wish required him to explain to potential philosophers what
philosophy is while concealing from the other citizens—even as
he was courting death—those aspects of it that, as he thought,
could never become publicly acceptable (59-60, 154-160). And in
order to achieve all this in a single address, Socrates had to speak
ironically, a term that Leibowitz well explains to mean speaking
“in a ‘double’ fashion so as to be understood differently by
different listeners” (18). But this implies that Socrates’ deepest
thoughts could be revealed only in hints, whose intended meaning
could come to light only though careful attention to his words. We
who have the good fortune to be able to study these words as
Plato presented them must therefore pay great attention to subtle
details of Plato’s text. Leibowitz himself has surely done this, and
though his account of the philosophic life and his argument for its
being the good life are ultimately stated with great directness, he
develops them in stages, following Socrates’ own guidance,
through an almost line-by-line reading of the Apology.
It would be too large a task for me to comment on Leibowitz’s work in its entirety. So I shall limit myself instead to what
he himself presents as the core of his account, his interpretation
of Socrates’ story of the Delphic oracle. According to Leibowitz,
this story is a fiction, whose purpose is to call attention, as
inoffensively as possible, to the central theoretical crisis in
Socrates’ life. As we know from the Phaedo and from Aristophanes’ Clouds, Socrates in his youth was a student of natural
philosophy. But the Phaedo also teaches us that Socrates’ study of
nature led him to an impasse, since he realized that he could not
be certain of the causes, i.e., the necessary causes, why things
come into being, are as they are, and perish. Recognizing the
limits of his knowledge of nature, Socrates also came to recognize
that he could not even be certain that there is nature, which he
understood as a necessity that limits what a being or class of
beings can do or suffer. The implications of this awareness of
ignorance were made more acute by his recognition that many
REVIEWS | BOLOTIN
85
people at least implicitly deny that there is nature, since they
believe in gods with unlimited power to intervene in the world.
Moreover, at least some of these believers claim to have had
evidence of there being such gods from their own experience of
them. Thus, Socrates had to admit that, for all he knew, the study
of “nature” was a pseudo-science based on a false premise, and
also a turning away from the deepest human evidence of truth.
According to Leibowitz, it was this crisis resulting from Socrates’
youthful pursuit of natural philosophy that led him to the crossexaminations that he pretended to undertake at the instigation of
the Delphic oracle. In keeping with this suggestion, Leibowitz
presents these examinations primarily as attempts by Socrates to
learn that his interlocutors lacked the evidence of omnipotent
gods that they thought they possessed—or in other words, that
what they had thought of as evidence was illusory. For if he could
know this about his interlocutors, then even though he lacked
certainty that natural necessities are at the root of things, he could
at least know that he knew no one else with a firmer hypothesis
(63-69). Leibowitz also argues that there was a second reason for
Socrates’ “Delphic” examinations, even on the assumption that he
could successfully refute his interlocutors’ claims to superhuman
wisdom. For he says that Socrates came to doubt, even on the
assumption that there is no such wisdom, whether the life of
philosophy is the best or happiest life, and he interprets the crossexaminations as having the subordinate aim of confirming that it
is (72-73).
In discussing Leibowitz’s interpretation of Socrates’
“Delphic” activity, I will stress what I see as difficulties with his
account rather than its merits. This is not because I am blind to
these merits—which seem to me to be quite considerable—or that
I disagree with Leibowitz about what is primarily at stake in
Socrates’ examinations—which I do not. But since I believe that
he does not give an adequate account of this central aspect of
Socrates’ life, I feel compelled to say why.
Let me begin with the second of the two reasons that Leibowitz gives for Socrates’ Delphic examinations, since it is the one
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he focuses on first in his own elaboration. To repeat, Leibowitz
claims that Socrates had to examine the various classes of nonphilosophers in order “to confirm that the life of philosophy or
science, or to speak more cautiously, the life based on human
wisdom, is the best or happiest life if indeed there is no ‘superhuman wisdom’ to guide us” (72). And the first thing I would say
about this suggestion is that I can see little if any evidence for it
in Plato’s text. The only time that Socrates even mentions the
question of whether his life is preferable to those of his interlocutors, as distinct from the question of whether he is wiser than
they—though even here it is not simply distinct from it—is in the
context of his examination of the craftsmen. And the reason he
asks it seems to be that he had to grant to the craftsmen a superiority of sorts in wisdom, since they were wise in their crafts, even
though, like his other interlocutors, they turned out to suppose
falsely that they were wise with regard to the greatest things. For
that reason he asked himself whether he would prefer to be as he
was, neither wise in their wisdom nor ignorant in their ignorance,
or to be as they were; and he replied that it was better for him to
be as he was. But apart from this, Socrates’ account of his examinations deals only with the question of whether he was wiser than
his interlocutors. It is true, of course, that he will later claim that
his own way of life is “the greatest good” (or, perhaps more
precisely, “a very great good”) for a human being, and that “the
unexamined life is not livable for a human being” (Apology of
Socrates 38a1-7). But he never suggests that these conclusions
relied on any fruits of his examinations other than the knowledge
he gained of his interlocutors’ inferiority in wisdom.
Further difficulties with this suggestion of Leibowitz’s
emerge when we consider his discussion of it in more detail.
Leibowitz stresses, and rightly, that after coming to the conclusion that the first political man he examined was not wise,
Socrates “did not leave it at that. Instead, he tried to show him
both that he thought he was wise and that he was not. . . . In short,
Socrates exposed him as a fraud” (75). Not surprisingly, this
caused Socrates to be hated, both by the politician and by many
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of the bystanders, and Leibowitz asks what Socrates’ reason could
have been for “the seeming malice of his procedure. Why did he
rub the man’s nose in his foolishness” (75)? Dismissing what I
agree is the implausible suggestion that Socrates hoped to steer
the politician toward philosophy, Leibowitz proposes an answer
to his question in terms of Socrates’ eagerness to establish—even
assuming “that he is already confident that no superhuman
wisdom (divine guidance) exists”—that “philosophy is the best
way of life for any human being capable of living it” (77-78). And
he suggests that Socrates hoped to confirm this belief by prompting his interlocutors, once they saw that they lacked wisdom
about the noble and good, about which he questioned them, to
acknowledge that their lives appeared “fundamentally defective
or unsatisfying” (78). In other words, Socrates confirms that
philosophy is the best way of life by showing that everyone can
in principle be brought to agree with him that their alternative
ways of life are unsatisfying. Ultimately, then, there is no dispute,
since the philosopher is the only one whose belief in the goodness
of his life can be maintained in the face of scrutiny. According to
Leibowitz, Socrates’ interlocutor will come to feel dissatisfied
with his life because the beliefs that Socrates shows to be false or
inconsistent are central to his way of life. But how will Socrates’
interlocutor reveal his dissatisfaction with his life? Leibowitz
says that he will do so by “getting angry at Socrates. . . , blaming
him for his distress, perhaps even coming to hate him” (79). This
anger and hatred will reveal the pain he feels once he sees not
only that Socrates’ refutation is sound, but also that it destroys a
prop on which his satisfaction with life has depended. And
accordingly, “anger and possibly even hatred are part of the
confirmation that Socrates seeks, not unintended, or altogether
unintended, byproducts of his examinations. In many cases, they
may be the only confirmation available” (79).
But as I said, there are difficulties with this account. In the
first place, it assumes that Socrates is successful in showing his
interlocutors that they are unwise, or that their fundamental
beliefs are false. But Socrates says explicitly, in the only case
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where he describes at length this aspect of his examinations, that
his (first) interlocutor did not see this, but that in Socrates’ view
he continued to suppose that he was wise (Apology of Socrates
21d4-5). According to Leibowitz, however, this continuance of
his false belief, and therefore also his continuing sense of satisfaction with his life, was the result of “powerful defenses,” which
allow people to “bury this awareness [viz., that their lives are
unsatisfactory] by the next day or even the next minute” (79-80).
“But this changes nothing,” he continues. “For in their one
moment of clarity, they themselves have judged their lives to be
defective” (80). Socrates’ first interlocutor has revealed this judgment by his anger, or more precisely, “the disturbing insight that
leads to his anger is clouded by or in the anger itself,” so that
Socrates’ attempt to show him that he was not wise “both did and
did not succeed” and “its success was partial and unenduring”
(80-81). This is how Leibowitz can square his account with Socrates’ unambiguous statement that he thought he had not succeeded in his attempt to show this interlocutor that he was not
wise.
But in fact Leibowitz’s suggestion is unsupported by the text
of the Apology. On the basis of the dialogue, it makes more sense
to say that Socrates’ interlocutors, or at least those among them
who became angry at him, never stopped believing that they knew
what the noble and good (or virtue) was, even when their assertions about it were refuted. They may have recognized that they
were unable to give an adequate account of it in the face of
Socrates’ questions, but this meant only in their view that they
were unable to give adequate expression to what they knew (cf.
Meno 79e7-80b4; Laches 194a7-b4, 200b2-4). And so their anger
at Socrates must not have stemmed from the pain of becoming
aware of their ignorance, and thus dissatisfied with their lives, but
rather from the more common pain of being insulted (cf. Meno
94e3-95a3). Indeed, an additional difficulty with Leibowitz’s
suggestion is that an interlocutor’s anger could never reveal
clearly that its source was anything other than this more obvious
one. Leibowitz acknowledges the difficulty of interpreting an
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interlocutor’s anger, but he dismisses it on inadequate grounds,
with a mere assertion that in practice it “may not be very difficult”
to distinguish the anger that he says Socrates is looking for from
other kinds (79).1
But if Socrates’ attempt to make his (older) interlocutors
aware of their ignorance was not aimed at eliciting the kind of
anger and hatred that Leibowitz suggests it was, what was its
purpose? I am not certain of the ultimate answer to this question,
but the most plausible beginning point is that Socrates must have
wanted to confirm what he in fact discovered, that he would be
unable to show them their ignorance of virtue, or in other words
that their confusion about it was ineradicably deep-seated or that
they had a stake in holding on to this confusion. This discovery
must have been important enough to Socrates that he was willing
to incur the anger and hatred that he knew he would arouse in the
course of coming to it. But he was not looking for the anger itself.
Leibowitz has given a surprising amount of weight to what he
regards as Socrates’ attempt to discover through conversation that
his interlocutors, in addition to being his inferiors in wisdom,
lived less satisfying lives than his own. His Socrates does not
assume that his discovery of their lack of wisdom, or their
confusion about virtue, is sufficient to confirm the superiority of
his life to theirs. They themselves must be made to see, if only
partially and only for a moment, that their lives are unsatisfying.
Leibowitz argues for the significance of such a moment by
reminding his readers that we human beings want more than
illusory happiness, such as the “happiness” of a deceived cuckold,
but a contentment rooted in truth (82-84). But what if it turned out
that some human beings were satisfied with illusory happiness, or
that their contentment with their lives was not affected, even for
a moment, by the discovery that they were based on falsehood?
How could this imagined state of affairs have been of any concern
to a man like Socrates? Would it have made him doubt the superiority of his life to theirs? Hardly. And more generally, in order to
be convinced of the choiceworthiness of the philosophic life,
Socrates did not need to burst other people’s bubbles.
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Leibowitz’s belief that Socrates deliberately sought to
provoke anger and even hatred in his interlocutors has an unfortunate bearing, it seems to me, on the tone of his own writing. For
too often he expresses his unavoidably challenging views with
unnecessary and un-Socratic harshness, a harshness that could
well provoke anger and hatred, especially in older readers. I have
already cited his claim that Socrates exposed the first of his
examinees “as a fraud,” and that he rubbed his nose “in his
foolishness.” Along the same lines, he claims later in the book
that those refuted by Socrates’ youthful imitators—their fathers,
or at least men of their fathers’ generation—act “as if Socrates
were to blame for their own stupidity.” And he adds that when
they are asked how Socrates corrupts the youth, as they accuse
him of doing, they are “of course not about to reply, ‘by teaching
the young to expose men like me for the fools and frauds we
really are!’” (105). Such language on Leibowitz’s part seems to
me to show a failure to appreciate the respect—even intellectual
respect—that Socrates, like any sane man, would naturally feel
for at least some of those who turn out to be confused about the
questions he raises. Another example of Leibowitz’s harshness is
his suggestion that “ordinary decency” (which he here distinguishes from the “deeper and more solid decency” of the
philosopher) is “perhaps the chief enemy” of philosophy (109).
Or consider his claim that Socrates is confident, even before
conversing with his typical interlocutor, that “his moral beliefs are
always false. . . , in the first place because they are sure to
presume the existence of ‘high’ things. . . , yet Socrates knows
through his own reflection that highness in the relevant sense is
literally inconceivable” (96). A footnote makes clear that by
“highness in the relevant sense” Leibowitz means “intrinsic worth
or goodness” (97). And later in this footnote he adds, “Given the
unintelligibility of the notion [viz., of intrinsic worth or
goodness], it is a cause for wonder, then, that belief in high things
has such extraordinary vitality in people’s lives” (97). Now in
company with Kant, as well as most ordinary people, I disagree
with Leibowitz’s assertion that intrinsic worth or goodness is an
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unintelligible notion (whether or not it is as fundamental a
concern for us as Kant thinks it is). But even apart from this, why
does Leibowitz choose to assign the word “high”—even if
slightly qualified at first—to a notion that he rejects as unintelligible? Later in this footnote he admits, “[T]o deny that there are
high things is not, of course, to deny that there are admirable or
beautiful ones” (97). But this admission rings hollow in the wake
of his initial rejection of the very notion of highness. And readers
of what he calls ordinary decency, who are likely to be deeply
attached to the notion of highness, whether or not they understand
it adequately, are therefore also likely to feel anger and hatred
toward a way of life that is said to reject it out of hand. Under less
liberal conditions than those which prevail now in the West, such
feelings could lead to a renewal of the persecution of philosophy.
Even now, they are likely to stand in the way of Leibowitz’s
attempt to guide the most promising young people toward the
philosophic life (cf. 174). And I fear that Leibowitz’s apparent
indifference to these concerns—in practice, if not in principle (cf.
59-60)—is at least partly rooted in his view of Socrates as a man
who deliberately sought to provoke anger and hatred.
But let me turn now to the primary reason that Leibowitz
gives for Socrates’ Delphic examinations, namely, his concern to
meet the theoretical challenge to philosophy posed by those who
claim to have evidence of an omnipotent god or gods. For, to
repeat, this claim directly calls into question the presupposition of
philosophy that there are natural or necessary limits to all possible
change. Now it is not immediately apparent, to say the least, to
the reader of Plato that Socrates’ Delphic examinations had this
anti-theological motive. But Leibowitz’s excellent interpretation
of many large and small details of the Apology (and of other
dialogues) might well convince even a reader who, unlike me,
was not already persuaded of it that this view was sound.
However, Leibowitz’s account of the precise manner in which
Socrates’ refutations aim to meet this challenge to philosophy
seems to me to be problematic, both in itself and in terms of the
textual evidence that he claims for it. According to Leibowitz,
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Socrates thought that his Delphic conversations, which were
primarily about virtue, “are somehow the key to answering the
question of whether or not there are gods, and hence whether or
not philosophy in the full sense is possible” (71). More precisely,
I would say, and in keeping with the bulk of Leibowitz’s argument
(e.g., 67-68, 72), Socrates thought that they were somehow the
key to answering the question of whether or not human beings
have genuine evidence of there being gods. In Leibowitz’s view,
Socrates suspected that the belief that one has experienced the
presence of a god, a belief whose soundness—or, as I would say,
the alleged evidence for which—he could not dispute directly,
“rests on other false beliefs” (88), about virtue or morality, whose
falsity he thought he could show. Accordingly, his refutations are
intended to lead his pious interlocutors, once they have seen the
falsity of their own beliefs about virtue, to come to understand, if
only for a moment, that what they previously may have interpreted as experience of the supernatural was no such thing.
Leibowitz suggests that these interlocutors would perhaps reveal
their loss of faith in what they had taken to be their experience of
a god “by getting angry,” and he adds that “their reaction to what
he showed them must have been a crucial part of his confirmation
of the possibility of philosophy” (88, cf. 96).
I have the same doubts about this last suggestion as I do about
Leibowitz’s earlier suggestion that Socrates intended to provoke
in his interlocutors a momentary awareness of ignorance about
virtue and an angry response to it. But leaving this aside, let us see
how he supports his more fundamental claim—that according to
Socrates, belief that one has experienced the presence of a god
rests on one’s beliefs about virtue or morality. He leads up to this
suggestion through his account of Socrates’ examinations of the
poets, which he begins by quoting from Socrates’ own report of
these examinations. What Socrates says, in Leibowitz’s translation, is that he “soon came to know . . . that the poets do not
make what they make by wisdom, but by some sort of nature and
by divine inspiration, like the prophets and those who deliver
oracles. For they too say many noble things, but they know
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nothing of what they speak. And it was evident to me that the
poets also are affected in the same sort of way (22b8-c4)” (86).
According to Leibowitz, this passage means more than what it
says clearly, which is that the poets, like the prophets and those
who deliver oracles, do not speak as they do by wisdom or with
knowledge of what they are speaking about. Leibowitz thinks it
also means that these three classes are all “consciously or unconsciously . . . makers [not merely of poems and other verses, but]
of gods and of reports of seeming evidence of gods,” and that they
make these gods and these reports about gods by nature and not
by divine inspiration (87-88). Now I do not accept this interpretation of the text or the argument leading up to it, but rather than
going into tedious and I think unnecessary detail, let me say only
what seems to me most important: by presenting Socrates as
denying that his interlocutors were divinely inspired—though
Socrates explicitly asserts that they were, whether or not he meant
it literally (cf. Philebus 15e1)—Leibowitz weakens the focus of
Socrates’ concern, which was not to learn what cannot be learned,
namely, that there are no gods and no divine inspiration, but rather
to learn that the poets and the others do not possess knowledge of
what they speak about (which would of course include the gods).
But to continue with Leibowitz’s account, he goes on to ask,
“How has Socrates confirmed . . . that all three classes make what
they make by nature and not by wisdom or divine inspiration?
How has he to this extent settled the question of the gods? He
explains briefly with the words, ‘for (γάρ) they too’—the prophets
and those who deliver oracles as well as the poets—‘say many
noble things’—he does not say true things—of which they know
nothing. In other words, he implies that the belief that one has
been inspired by a god rests on other false beliefs about the
noble” (88). But these words of Socrates, which are presented by
Leibowitz as an answer to his question of how Socrates has
settled the question of the gods (to the extent at least of ruling out
that poets or prophets are divinely inspired), are clearly intended
rather by Socrates to explain why he has just likened the prophets
and those who deliver oracles to the poets. And from all that I can
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see, Socrates is not concerned here to settle the question of the
gods, except to the extent that his interlocutors’ claim to knowledge of them can be successfully challenged through the discovery that they say the many beautiful things they do—primarily, as
I agree, about virtue and about the noble, rather than the gods (cf.
Republic 598d7-e4, 599c6-e1, 600e5-6; Ion 531c2-d2)—without
knowledge of what they are speaking about.
But precisely how could the discovery of such ignorance on
the part of his interlocutors help Socrates make any progress at all
with respect to his question about the gods? Leibowitz addresses
this question directly in a section of his book entitled “Socrates’
Approach to the Theological Problem” (92). He contends that
Socrates tries to show his interlocutors, or at least those among
them who claim to have had “vivid and detailed experience of a
god,” that “the moral content of their experience—the divine
command, let us say—is incompatible with the moral perfection . . . that they demand, perhaps without knowing it, of god”
(93). “Consciously or unconsciously,” as Leibowitz elaborates a
bit later, “the believer raises the claim that god’s commandments
and actions are just, and this claim can be examined” (94). And,
returning to the original passage, “In the most successful cases the
interlocutors then come to doubt, at least for a time, that their
experience was genuinely divine” (93). This would of course
corroborate Socrates’ own suspicion. Leibowitz illustrates the
possibility of such conversations by referring to Socrates’
refutation of the definition of justice that he attributes to Cephalus
at the beginning of the Republic. In Leibowitz’s view, Cephalus’
belief that it is a requirement of justice always to return what one
has taken—to the extent, at least, that this really was his belief—
seems to have its origin, or to find support, in dreams in which a
Zeus-like figure commanded him to pay all his debts or be
tormented forever. On this view, and assuming that Cephalus
really held this belief about justice, Socrates would have hoped to
confirm that Cephalus would not respond to a reasonable critique
of this belief by objecting that a god’s commands must be obeyed
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whether or not they are just or seem just to our human reason, but
would instead come to doubt that his dreams were really divine.
This account, however, of Socrates’ approach to the
theological problem suffers in the first place from a lack of textual
evidence. Leibowitz’s premise that Socrates’ interlocutors
thought of morality or virtue as consisting in obedience to
divinely revealed commands seems to me to find no support,
except in the Euthyphro, where the virtue in question is piety (cf.
Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 134-35). The only
other instance I can think of where interlocutors in a Platonic
dialogue speak of virtue as obedience to divine commands, and
where their beliefs about what the gods have commanded are
transformed in the wake of a rational critique of their opinions
about virtue, is in the Laws. But in the Laws, the philosophic
character is not Socrates, but an Athenian stranger. And though
this stranger does indeed seem to be a kind of fictional “Socrates”
(who chose to flee Athens rather than accept death at the hands of
the city), his intention is not to provide a theoretical defense of the
possibility of philosophy, but rather to help frame a code of laws
for a newly founded city in Crete in which philosophy would, to
the extent possible, have legal sanction. Now it is true, as these
two instances suggest, that Leibowitz’s account does indeed
capture a genuine aspect of Socratic thought. But I see no
evidence that it gives an adequate picture of what Socrates hoped
to learn about the gods, or about our knowledge of them, from his
Delphic examinations.
Moreover, there is at least one substantive difficulty with
Leibowitz’s account, a difficulty that he raises himself, namely,
that it deals only with those interlocutors who believe that the
gods are just, and not with anyone who believes that they are
“unjust or unconcerned with justice” (95). Now for Leibowitz to
state the objection in this way is perhaps unfair to his own
argument, since he has just said that in Socrates’ view the believer
“consciously or unconsciously” (94) claims that god’s commandments and actions are just, and he has argued that Socrates
confirmed this view by seeing his interlocutors’ response to his
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refutations. But at all events, Leibowitz goes on to downplay the
significance of this objection by claiming, as he suspects that
Socrates discovered, that the belief in gods who are unjust or
unconcerned with justice is both rare and “almost never
supported—at least among believers who are even modestly
educated and sane—by the experience of revelation, that is, by
seeming evidence that natural philosophy cannot assess” (95).
Still, he acknowledges that “Socrates’ approach to the theological
problem cannot tie up every loose end,” and that “the possibility
of revelation from an amoral, willful, or radically mysterious god
cannot be ruled out” (95). But this last is a very serious admission.
For whatever may be the case about belief in gods who are unjust
or unconcerned with justice, the belief in a god who is radically
mysterious—in his actions, and even in his commands—has been
held by thoughtful people throughout the centuries (cf.
Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, III 25-26). For Socrates to
leave unchallenged, then, the alleged evidence of those who claim
to have had experience of such a god would be to fail to respond
to a most serious objection to the possibility of philosophy.2
But let me turn to Leibowitz’s most important reason for
focusing only on believers who believe in (intelligibly) just gods,
a reason that comes to light in what is also his most important
discussion of the confusion about morality that he thinks these
refutations disclose. Leibowitz claims that Socrates thought of
morality or virtue as something that people regard as the source
of happiness, not by constituting happiness itself, but by
promising it as a deserved reward. But since virtue itself, as the
argument continues, does not deliver this reward, it can have the
power that people think it has only if there are gods who do
deliver it. “Virtue, one can perhaps say, is a claim on the attention
and concern of just gods” (177). Leibowitz goes on to argue that
Socrates rejected the belief in just gods on several grounds, but
chiefly because the concern for virtue that it presupposes (and to
which it also gives support) rests, as he claims that Socrates
thought, on a confused and even contradictory view of our own
motivation. Leibowitz presents what he sees as this contradiction
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in the following way. He begins by observing that “virtue, seen in
the first place as noble, inspires devotion” (178). But then he says
that “devotion would seem to be harmful, if only because it
distracts us from the pursuit of our own good” (178). And since,
as he reminds us that Socrates claimed, no one voluntarily (or
knowingly) harms himself, he asks how voluntary devotion is
possible. His proposed answer to this question is that devotion to
virtue gives us hope that we will obtain—because we deserve to
obtain—a greater good than anything we might give up as a result
of such devotion. It is, then, as he says that Socrates suggests, “the
expectation, perhaps only half-conscious, of benefit to oneself
that makes devotion possible” (179). But this line of reasoning,
Leibowitz continues, which would seem to establish the possibility of voluntary devotion, “suggests instead the impossibility of
all devotion. For if benefit to oneself—as Socrates implies—is
our ultimate consideration, no true devotion is possible, for
devotion embraced as a benefit is not true devotion” (179). And
“if men are never truly devoted, they never meet the condition of
deserving rewards as they understand that condition” (179).
However, most of us never face up to this truth about our
motivation, and it is through this failure that we can preserve the
hopes that our attachment to virtue inspires. Accordingly,
Leibowitz concludes, our attachment to virtue, or at least the kind
of virtue that arouses hope in rewards from the gods, is rooted in
the contradictory thought that what we most care for is both the
noble and our own happiness.
This is a powerfully stated argument, as it seems to me, and I
am sympathetic to it, having even tentatively proposed something
similar to it in print myself. But Leibowitz proposes his argument
without tentativeness, and I must therefore say that in my view he
has failed to make his case. I will leave aside the difficulty that his
description of the believer as someone who thinks he deserves
divine rewards shows a surprising insensitivity to the fact that at
least the most thoughtful believers regard themselves as unworthy
to receive the blessings they hope for. For even apart from this,
the argument fails to show that the believer has contradictory
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thoughts about what he most cares for. A believer will readily
grant to Leibowitz that he cares very much about his own good or
his own happiness, which he hopes for both in this world and the
next. But he would deny that this is what he loves or cares for
most (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, qu.26, a.3).
He might fear that, because of his weakness, a loss of hope for his
own happiness could undermine his attachment to virtue, but he
would not believe that it would necessarily do so, and he might
even be thankful never to have experienced or yielded to such loss
of hope. And Leibowitz’s argument, it seems to me, has done
nothing to show that the believer’s view of himself is wrong. The
most he has done is to attribute to Socrates the claim that we care
mostly for our own good. But I don’t see his evidence even for
this assertion. What he apparently relies on is Socrates’ exhortation to virtue, “Not from money comes virtue, but from virtue
comes money and all of the other good things for human beings
(30a-b).” Leibowitz interprets this exhortation to mean that “men
should care above all for virtue, and for virtue for the sake of the
good things it brings. Men should and should not care above all
for virtue” (178). It is the latter of these conflicting claims that he
thinks Socrates means seriously. But Socrates’ statement that all
good things come from virtue does not say, as Leibowitz says it
does, that men should care for virtue for the sake of the good
things it brings, and surely not for the sake of these good things
above all. Socrates knew, of course, that the many among his
listeners might take him to be saying this. But that he made it easy
for them to do so means only that he understood them well
enough to know that he could not reach them with a higher
appeal. Leibowitz has therefore not shown that our own good is
our ultimate concern even according to Socrates. And so he has
also not shown, and not even shown that it was Socrates’ view,
that a believer’s hope for divine rewards rests on self-contradictory thoughts about what he cares for most.3 And this means,
finally, that he has neither undermined nor shown that Socrates
thought he had undermined the basis for this hope on the part of
the believer.
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It seems to me, then, that Leibowitz has not explained with
sufficient clarity what Socrates wished to accomplish through his
Delphic examinations or how he sought to accomplish it. In
particular, he has not explained adequately how Socrates hoped to
meet the challenge posed to philosophy or the study of nature by
those who claim to have evidence of miraculous gods. On the
other hand, he has outlined this challenge in an unusually
compelling way, and he has made a persuasive case that the
Apology presents the core of Socrates’ response to it. For this
merit, among many others, we should be grateful to Leibowitz for
his book. Even if he has not shown, as he intended to show, that
Socrates is an unrivaled guide to the good life, he has, I think,
shown that this is at least a serious possibility, and he will help his
best readers to keep considering the evidence for and against it on
their own.
NOTES
1. In a footnote, Leibowitz refers to Callicles’ anger in the Gorgias as a clear
case of what he calls the deeper kind of anger, but he offers no evidence that
Callicles ever becomes aware of his ignorance of virtue, as I believe he does
not. (Moreover, at the moment when he seems to come closest to that
awareness, at Gorgias 513c4-6, he is not angry at Socrates.)
2. I suspect that Leibowitz thinks that the possibility of revelation from a
radically mysterious god can indeed be ruled out, at least to some extent, on
the basis of what he speaks of as a necessary “second branch” of Socrates’
Delphic examinations, or the conversations he had with those “promising”
young people who could go “to the end of the road” with him in their
critique of our ordinary moral beliefs. Accordingly, when he says that
Socrates sought to determine “whether for them, as for himself, all traces of
seemingly divine experience eventually disappear,” I think he meant to
include in this even the apparent experience of a radically mysterious god
(98-100; cf. 134: “the so-called experience of the gods of the city, and
indeed of any gods”). But even if one admitted for the sake of argument that
this was Socrates’ intention and that he learned what he hoped to learn from
his most promising interlocutors, this would not be adequate to the question
at hand unless one could show the bearing of these conversations with
regard to his examinations of his more typical interlocutors. After all, a
radically mysterious god, and even a not so mysterious god, might be disin-
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clined to reveal himself to people like Socrates. And I do not think that
Leibowitz has given an adequate account of the bearing of this “second
branch” of Socrates’ Delphic examinations.
3. There is perhaps the outline of a stronger argument for Leibowitz’s view
of our ultimate concern in his discussion of Glaucon on pages 96 and 97.
But even there I think he has failed to present an adequate case. In this
connection, I wonder about Leibowitz’s claim, in note 72 on page 99, that
Socrates would like to know “whether those who reconcile themselves to
unfathomable gods and inexpressible divine experiences could also, if
brought to see the truth about highness, reconcile themselves to the unintelligible nobility and goodness of the commands that these allegedly divine
experiences communicate.” For if Socrates knows, as Leibowitz claims he
knows, that “the noble and good,” or virtue, “does not exist” (180), because
it rests on contradictory thoughts about our motives, why would he care
whether others who appeared to understand his argument would accept its
conclusion? If they did not accept the conclusion, wouldn’t he assume that
they had not understood the argument?
Eva Brann, Homage to Americans
Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010. 273
pages, $19.95.
Book Review by Janet Dougherty
Eva Brann’s Homage to Americans is an expression of heartfelt,
genuine, and ungrudging respect for the American people. As Ms.
Brann explains in the first essay of the book, “Mile-High Meditations,” true respect may involve—nay, it requires—thoughtful and
sometimes pointed criticism. In particular, she notes that toleration,
which has eclipsed and perhaps supplanted all other standards in
contemporary American society, is “helpless before reality” (7)* and
“culpably helpless in the face of evil” (3). Like Lincoln, Ms. Brann
displays a kind of “radical conservatism” in her writing: she reminds
us of our roots and thereby invites us to renew our awareness of our
convictions and our goals. She never preaches; she reflects. Beginning, as she says all reasoning must, in media res, Ms. Brann speaks
for herself and writes so as to invite her readers to engage in the
examination of our shared habits of thought. Homage to Americans
is the work of a master teacher who respects her students and therefore wishes them to think for themselves.
Homage to Amerians is divided into three parts: “Mile-High
Meditations,” “Close Readings,” and “Time-Spanning Speculations.”
“Mile-High Meditations” is a single essay in eight sections, named
according to the time and place of her reflections. In it we see Ms.
Brann’s mind at work, beginning with immediate responses to what
she sees around her and deepening into philosophical and practical
thinking of wide-ranging significance. The second part of the book
comprises close readings of Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance
*
Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Homage to Americans.
Janet Dougherty is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The third part includes a lecture
given to the students of the Air Force Academy on “The Paradox of
Obedience,” together with a lecture given at St. John’s College on
the destruction of two great South American civilizations, the Aztec
and the Inca, by conquerors from Spain. The book is unified by Ms.
Brann’s persistent concern with the integrity of American culture,
and therefore with the prob-lem of reconciling the adherence to true
and defensible principles of human society with toleration of
otherness.
“Mile-High Meditations” is a fitting opening of the book, for in
it Ms. Brann puts into perspective the principle of toleration—which
means, in part, putting it into the context of the Western tradition.
Ms. Brann and the Americans to whom she speaks share this
tradition, albeit some of us half-heartedly and with little awareness.
Her writing moves seamlessly from contemporary American society
to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza and Heidegger, Swift, Shakespeare, and Wallace Stevens. This is no display of erudition, but
rather of openness to the tradition wherever it can offer support for
genuine inquiry. Ms. Brann’s style of writing is egalitarian in its
openness to insight wherever it manifests itself, and therefore to the
tradition that shapes our society. In “Mile-High Meditations” she
invites her readers to reflect upon the appropriate limits to toleration,
and the invitation is unequivocally democratic. All may engage in the
inquiry she shares with her readers; all, that is, who are willing to risk
“respectful contempt,” the rightful punishment for those who fall
short of the standard to which we deserve to be held. This is democracy in the high sense. This is the democracy that we ought to count
as our heritage.
For a thoughtful citizen there are no insuperable barriers
between intellectual inquiry and everyday reflection. Americans can
seek depth of understanding wherever it is to be found and we ought
to begin wherever we find ourselves. Ms. Brann shows the way by
reflecting on an overweight couple playing chess in the Denver
airport. (Their tastes, happily, are not limited to fast-food pizza.) She
provides a model of judging cautiously without surrendering the
power to make judgments. Toleration, she shows us, cannot be held
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103
as a principle overriding all others without being intellectually flabby
as well as weak in the defense of right; but respect for others requires
openness to their sometimes surprising combinations of traits. With
no absolutes to rely on, Ms. Brann plunges into the morass of distinctions that alone help to untangle mere prejudice from thoughtful
conjecture. In this piece Ms. Brann exhibits an intellectual courage
and straightforward honesty worthy of emulation. She acknowledges
that she shares the “bias for the thinkable, the bias of our West” (63).
(Who, after all, lacks biases?) Her ability to examine the grounds of
her convictions and the convictions that characterize the West does
not fade but rather gains momentum as she identifies what may be
the bias of all biases: “The faith that some thoughts are true and their
opposites false is attended by this unease: It is not itself a truth,
meaning a mode of the intellect in which it is through and through
lucid and—or rather because it is—about something through and
through genuine. It is rather an opinion, even a prejudice” (27). The
prejudice that there are truths drives one to seek them. Ms. Brann
does not pretend to settle the difficulties she articulates and clarifies.
But she does work towards greater clarity and, ultimately, toward
answers.
The compelling question of this piece, as I see it, is whether our
biases serve us as human beings worthy of respect, and, in doing so,
serve humanity? Do they allow for the “personal practice of virtue”
(both intellectual and moral) that Ms. Brann, by her own admission,
prefers over general principles of morality (79)? While falsity is a
condition for thinking through to the truth (31), and a multiplicity of
perspectives can give us insight into another’s position, to acknowledge those perspectives is not to obliterate the sense that some things
are beyond the pale. Near the close of this essay Ms. Brann reflects
on the difference between intellectual and moral virtue (“a virtue in
thinking is, however, often a vice in doing” [82]), and announces the
importance of “doing right.” This conviction is easy to account for in
those who “care less about the livability of life than its consecration”
(8)—that is, those who acknowledge a firm religious faith. With
regard to faith in God, Ms. Brann is Socratic: she chooses “knowing
that I don’t know” (49). She begins and ends the essay, however,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
with a reference to the possibility of evil. Without assuming that evil
is always easy to recognize, one must acknowledge the problem of
evil while putting toleration into perspective. One brief reference to
Nazism is enough to prove the point: “What, for example, was the
attraction offered by the Nazis to the young but Romanticism writ
large and made official” (82)?
The key to toleration might be seen as “letting others alone,” but
in the face of evil it is clear that such thoughtless toleration is
shameful and irresponsible. In section IV of the essay, Ms. Brann
lays out several reasons for thoughtfully respecting, not merely tolerating, others. Throughout the essay she demonstrates what it means
to avoid forcing the truth into preconceived notions, by letting something be, but not letting it alone (12), and this distinction, it seems to
me, points to a standard for action as well as for thought. Like people
who espouse values in conflict with one’s own, the current trends
demand respectful examination; Ms. Brann demonstrates that they
are unworthy of slavish adherence. Toleration without respect is a
standard that is below the dignity of human beings. The contemporary emphasis on the dissimilarity of races, for example, on “dissimilation” rather than assimilation (59), is flawed in that it overemphasizes otherness. Particular humans combine their share in universal humanity with particular accidents and unique choices—here
Ms. Brann finds an opening into the perennial philosophical problem
of the relation of same and other. That problem is just beneath the
surface of the complex and delicate issue of how various ethnic,
racial, religious and otherwise differentiated groups relate to one
another in a society that derives its fundamental principles from
universal humanity and whose status depends upon the respectability
of these principles. American society cannot maintain its integrity
unless its members maintain a habit of thoughtful reflection. Ms.
Brann’s “Mile-High Meditations” provides us with a model.
In the next section of Homage to Americans, Ms. Brann goes on
to make available to the reader the kind of thinking and writing that
gave this nation its character. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are both models of
thoughtful eloquence; the first united Virginians, the second, Amer-
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105
icans committed to the preservation of the union, to uphold convictions that provided the basis for liberty and mutual, respectful, toleration. Ms. Brann’s examinations of these two texts are models of
close and informed reading. Her analyses reveal to the reader the
greatness of these documents in a way that a casual reading—that is,
a reading uninformed by knowledge of the tradition in which
Madison and Lincoln were steeped—cannot. After a paragraph by
paragraph account, Ms. Brann, quoting from Hume’s “On
Eloquence,” sums up Madison’s work as “at once ‘argumentative
and rational,’ grandly passionate and carefully constructed” (123).
As for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Ms. Brann shows in a line-byline reading its beauty as poetry and its resonance with the Biblical
language by means of which Lincoln tried to persuade his audience
of the “bonds of affection” (181) that could alone preserve the union.
Both sections of this central part of the work deserve slow and
careful readings. The section on Madison’s Memorial showed me
that I had read this document only superficially. While I have read
and heard Lincoln’s Address many times and with great appreciation,
Ms. Brann’s account showed me that it too is a richer piece of writing
than I had ever imagined.
In his Memorial and Remonstrance, Madison argued against a
bill to support Christian education and in support of the toleration of
all religions because he was confident that without governmental
interference they would thrive. He was far from disparaging the role
of religion in supporting a healthy society. Ms. Brann asks, “What
would Madison have said in the face of an observable decline of
religious commitment and the increasing legal expulsion of religion
from communal life” (110)? She wonders whether the kind of
rhetoric he uses in the Memorial is an irrecoverable art. These are
pressing questions for us to consider, questions, it seems to me, that
were easier to address in a time when the hope that the United States
could provide a “practical political pattern to the world” (161) was
not considered narrowly self-serving, and when few if any would
claim that “truth is a private predilection and everything is ‘true for’
them that believe it” (116).
Not only did Lincoln and Madison not share this prejudice, but
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
they did not feel obligated to respond to it. The depth of both
statesmen’s grounding in religion, far from being a hindrance to their
promotion of democracy, was at its heart. Lincoln looked forward to
a “new birth of freedom” in the aftermath of the Civil War, a new
birth that was possible only through the common respect for the
principles of the Declaration of Independence, and especially the
principle that “all men are created equal.” The principles of the
Declaration must be held, he thought, as sacred. Respectful
tolerance thrives on the support of such principles.
In the penultimate piece of Homage to Americans, a lecture
addressed to students of the U. S. Air Force Academy entitled “The
Paradox of Obedience,” Ms. Brann maintains her characteristic sense
of balance between opposing respectable views in the difficult
context of the use of armed force. She avers that an “unthinking
warrior is a fearful thing” (195), and argues that “submission can be
an act of freedom” (208). She broaches a question that is urgent for
those who defend this nation with force: how does one fulfill one’s
duty to obey one’s superiors while cultivating a thoughtful awareness
of the possibility that “personal, conscientious disobedience” (206)
may sometimes be morally necessary? Citing the Spartan obedience
to law rather than to an individual, Ms. Brann suggests the possibility
that freedom requires some sort of obedience. But blind obedience
cannot support freedom. It seems to me clear that the respectability
of a warrior must depend on the respectability of the nation he or she
serves, but it is equally clear after reading this lecture that the
nation’s general character is insufficient by itself.
The discussion of toleration that opens the book is complemented by the last piece in the book: “The Empires of the Sun and
the West”—and in particular by Ms. Brann’s account of the intolerance of human sacrifice that characterized Cortés and his men,
which contributed to their determination to conquer the Aztec
people. This is no whitewashing: the Spanish conquistadors were
guilty of unnecessary brutality, which Ms. Brann appropriately deplores (253). The motives of the Spanish conquerors were self-interested, but their prejudices, like ours, were integral to the Western
tradition that promotes respect for human dignity. Where then ought
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107
we to set the limits to toleration? This is no small problem. Ms.
Brann peremptorily dismisses the suspension of judgment as any
kind of solution: “A non-judgmental historian is an incarnate contradiction and produces only an armature of facts without the musculature that gives it human shape (222). In this respect she sides with
Cortés himself, who “dignifies his subjects with his condemnation”
of their practice of ritual human sacrifice (223).
The role of human sacrifice in the Aztec (or Nahuan) culture,
Ms. Brann argues, is the key to their defeat by the Spanish conquistadors. For the Aztec people thought they were compelled to sacrifice
human beings in order to render more reliable the annual and epochal
returns of the sun, their primary god. The nobles themselves may
have experienced a sense of doom, for they were “living over a moral
abyss” (241) created by the compulsion to kill their own kind. They
were betrayed by their trust in their gods (248-9). The Spanish, by
contrast, worshipped “a god mysterious but not capricious, [who]
made nature according to laws and left it largely alone” (257).
Although Ms. Brann describes the conquistadors as ruffians, she
attributes their victory over the Aztecs and the Incas to the Western
culture that shaped them, and she supports their disgust and horror at
a practice they could not see as justified or tolerable.
This account of the conquest of the Aztecs is well informed and
extensively researched. Ms. Brann describes a wide variety of
sources, including Cortés’ own letters to his king, and acknowledges
their biases. No set of citations can demonstratively establish the
truth of Ms. Brann’s account, but its plausibility is, to me at least,
manifest. The contest was by no means a conflict between good and
evil: it is worth repeating that there was plenty of wrongdoing on the
side of the Spanish conquerors. But their victory does seem to have
been a victory of the West (our “West”—an ambiguous but convenient term, as Ms. Brann acknowledges [217]), of a culture that
produces a kind of human being who knows “how to fight back,” and
“how to correct our aberrations by returns to sounder beginnings”
(229). The Aztecs were trapped by their culture; we, with all our
defects, may find renewal at the heart of ours. This is not a promise
but a task.
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Ms. Brann has accomplished a great deal if she has helped her
readers to understand that task. I think she has done that and more.
To read Homage to Americans is to prepare to undertake the task of
renewing our culture.
�
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Pastille, William
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Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Braithewaite, William
Howland, Jacob
Smith, Joseph
Boxel, Lise van
Bolotin, David
Dougherty, Janet
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 52, number 1 (Fall 2010)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Barbara McClay
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Krause, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to the The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
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©2010 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available on-line at
www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essay
Jacob Klein’s Two Prescient Discoveries..............................5
Eva Brann
“YOU ARE THAT!”: The Upanishads Read Through
Western Eyes.......................................................................21
Robert Druecker
Principles of Motion and the Motion of Principles:
Hegel’s Inverted World........................................................71
Peter Kalkavage
The Work of Education........................................................99
Jon Lenkowski
Falstaff and Cleopatra........................................................109
Elliot Zuckerman
Review
Portraits of the Impassioned Concept: A Review of Peter
Kalkavage’s The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit......................................123
Eva Brann
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5
JACOB KLEIN’S TWO
PRESCIENT DISCOVERIES
Eva Brann
Jacob Klein was in the last year of his nine-year tenure as dean of
St. John’s College in 1957 when I came as a young tutor. He died
in 1978, still teaching. In those twenty-one years during which I
knew him, he was above all a teacher—mine and everybody’s.
His spirit informed the college. While dean, he was a fierce
defender of his conception of this remarkable community of
learning. This passion had generous parameters, from a smiling
leniency toward spirited highjinks to a meticulous enforcement of
rules meant to inculcate intellectual virtue. As a tutor, he shaped
the place through lectures that the whole college attended and
discussed, through classroom teaching that elicited from students
more than they thought was in them, but above all through
conversation that was direct and playful, serious and teasing,
earthily Russian and cunningly cosmopolitan. We all thought that
he had some secret wisdom that he dispensed sparingly out of
pedagogical benevolence; yet he would sometimes tell us things
in a plain and simple way that struck home as if we had always
known them. I, at least, always had the sense of hearing delightful
novelties that somehow I’d known all along. He also had an
aversion to discipleship and a predilection for wicked American
kids. And he could be infuriating whenever someone tried to
extract definitive doctrines from him. His reluctance to pontificate
was in part indolence (we sometimes called him “Jasha the
Pasha”)—an indolence dignified by his aversion to philosophy
carried on as an organized business—and in part pedagogical
reservation—a conviction that to retail one’s thought-products to
students was to prevent inquiry. This aversion to professing
authority is, to my mind, his most persuasive and felicitous legacy
Keynote Address at the Conference on Jacob Klein, held at Seattle University on
May 27-29, 2010. Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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to the college, and the reason we still call ourselves tutors—
guardians of learning—rather than professors—professionals of
knowledge.
Nonetheless, there were doctrines and they were published.
He had set himself against academic publication, so much so that
I had to translate Jasha’s youthful book on the origin of algebra in
secret—though when confronted with the fait accompli he capitulated quite eagerly. This book is now the subject of Burt
Hopkins’s acute and careful analysis, The Origin of the Logic of
Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (to be
published in 2011).
Today I would like to present two of his chief discoveries
from a perspective of peculiar fascination to me—from the standpoint of the contemporary significance and the astounding
prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. Now I grew up
intellectually within a perspective enforced by our program of
studies and reinforced by Jasha’s views (forgive the informality;
it was universal in his circle), which were rooted in certain continental philosophers, of whom Husserl was the most honorable.
The guiding notion of this perspective was that modernity is best
apprehended as being in a ruptured continuum with Greek
antiquity—a continuum insofar as the terms persist, ruptured
insofar as they take on new meanings and missions. That
perspective makes those who hold it avid participants in the
present—critically and appreciatively avid.
I will state immediately and straightforwardly the issues of
our present-day lives to which Jasha’s insights speak. First, they
speak to the ever-expanding role of image-viewing and virtual
experience in our lives. Here the questions are: What degree of
“reality” is ascribable to images? What does life among these
semi-beings do to us? Do we lose substance as they lose their
ground? Do originals retain their primary or even a residual
function in the virtual world? Second, Jasha’s insights speak to
the burgeoning brain science that tends to ascribe an ultimately
physical being to human nature. Here the questions are
approachable in terms of “emergence.” Granted that brain and
mind are intimately linked, what is the manner in which the latter
EVA BRANN
7
emerges from, or projects into, the former? How might an entity
emerge, be it from above or below, that is radically different from
its constituents? These are questions about consciousness (what
we are aware of) and about self-consciousness (who we are) that
should be of great concern to us, because they dominate public
life quite unreflectively. To put this in a form that is not currently
fashionable: Do we have souls?
Klein’s two insights, then, are both interpretations of Platonic
writings and are set out in A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (1965)
and Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra
(1934). The latter is a learned book written by a private European
scholar for academic readers, the former is a very accessible work
written by an American teacher for lovers of Socrates. Of both
these insights Burt Hopkins has produced detailed analyses,
which have added a new edge to doctrines I’ve lived with familiarly for half a century. I will, however, feel free here to
supplement, embroider and question Jacob Klein’s interpretation
of Plato and Burt Hopkins’s reading of Klein as I go. I’ll do it
implicitly, so you shouldn’t trust this account for faithfulness to
the letter, though I hope you may trust it for faithfulness to the
spirit. You’ll see, I think, what I mean when I speak of the
immediacy and naturalness of Klein’s interpretation: His readings
sit well.
The first insight, then, begins with an understanding of the
lowest segment of the so-called Divided Line in Plato’s Republic,
that mathematical image (picture it as vertical) of the ascent to
Being and the learning associated with that ascent. In this lowest
segment are located the deficient beings called reflections,
shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associated with
them called eikasia in Greek and usually rendered as
“conjecture.” Klein’s interpretation starts with a new translation
of this noun: “image-recognition.” The nature of these lowest
beings—they are revealed as basic rather than base—is set out in
Plato’s Sophist. Consequently, the Republic and the Sophist
between them lay the foundations of the Platonic world.
The second discovery involves a complex of notions from
which I’ll extract one main element: the analysis of what it means
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to be a number, and what makes possible this kind of being—
which, as it turns out, makes possible all Being. Again, the
principal texts are the Sophist and the Republic, supplemented by
Aristotle’s critical account of Plato’s doctrine. To anticipate the
perplexity that is also the doctrine: Take any number—say two. It
is constituted of two units. Each is one, but both together are two.
How can it be that two emerges from elements that are each
precisely not two? I might remark in passing that Socrates thinks
that one mark of readiness for philosophical engagement is a
fascination with this perplexity. And from my experience with
students, I know that Socrates was correct.
So now, after these broad previews, some nitty-gritty.
Socrates begins by dividing the whole line mentioned above in
some arbitrary ratio, and then he divides the two subsections in
that same ratio. So if the whole line is, say, sixteen units, and the
ratio is, say, triple; then one segment is twelve units, the other
four. Then subdivide the twelve-unit segment similarly into nine
and three units, and the four-unit segment into three and one.
There are now four segments, two by two in the same ratio with
each other and with the first division of the whole. Whether you
want to make the top or the bottom segment the longest depends
on whether you assign more length to the greater fullness of
Being or to the larger profusion of items. It can also be shown that
in all divisions of this sort—called “extreme-and-mean ratio”—
the middle segments will be equal. Socrates will make the iconic
most of this mathematical fact.
Now the subsections make a four-term proportion called an
analogia in Greek—a:b::b:c—and they mirror, as I said, the
division of the whole line. You can read the line up or down.
Down is the cascade of Being, which loses plenitude as it falls
from true originals to mere images. Up is the ascent of learning,
ending in the direct intellectual vision of the prime originals, the
eide, the “invisible looks” in Klein’s language, usually called the
“forms.” Beyond all Being there is the notorious Good, the
unifying power above all the graduated beings, the principle of
wholeness, which I’ll leave out here. At the bottom is the aforementioned “image-recognition.” Now just as each of the object-
EVA BRANN
9
realms assigned to the upper sections is causally responsible for
the ones below, so, inversely, in learning, each stage, each
capacity, is needed for the learner to rise. None are left behind; all
remain necessary. And so the bottom, the first capacity, is also the
most pervasive. Children recognize images early on. Look at a
picture book with a two-year-old: “Kitty,” he’ll say, pointing.
“Careful, it’ll scratch.” “No, it won’t,” he’ll say, looking at you as
if you were really naïve. That’s image-recognition, the human
capability for recognizing likeness as belonging to a deficient
order: a cat incapable of scratching.
It is as fundamental for Socrates as it is low on the scale of
cognitive modes, because imaging is the most readily imaginable,
the least technically ticklish way of representing the activity by
which the realm of intelligible Being produces and rules the world
of sensory appearances. Each step downward in the scale of being
is a move from original to image; each step upward in the scale of
learning involves recognizing that something lower is an image of
something higher.
Just to complete the sketch of the Divided Line, here are the
stages of knowledge and their objects in brief. Above images,
there are the apparently solid objects of nature and artifice. The
acquaintance with these is called “trust,” pistis. It is the implicit,
unreflective belief we have in the dependable support of the
ground we tread on and the chair we sit in—the faith that our
world is not “the baseless fabric of a vision” that melts into thin
air.
This whole complex of dimensionally defective images and
taken-on-faith solidity of our phenomenal world is itself an image
of the upper two parts of the line. The third part, equal in length
to the second from the bottom, contains all the rational objects
that look, on the way up, like abstractions from the sensory
world—mathematical models and logical patterns. To these we
apply our understanding, a capacity called in Greek “thinkingthrough,” dianoia. They are then revealed to be the originals of
the sensory world, the intelligible patterns that impart to the
sensory world such shapeliness and intelligibility as it has. Thus
they make natural science possible; for they are the rational
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
counterparts of the sensory world. Finally, there is the realm of
direct knowledge. As happens so often in the dialogues, the
contents of these upper reaches are named in inverse relation to
the contents of the lower ones: “invisible looks” (since eidos is
from the vid-verb, the verb for seeing), and they are reached by a
capacity for direct insight (which Aristotle will in fact analogize
to sensing)—noesis. Above and beyond them all is the very Idea
itself, the idea of all ideas—the Good, which produces, nourishes,
and unifies all beings, and grounds all human learning.
Implicit in this ladder of Being is the answer to the question
that matters most: What is an image, such that we can know it as
an image? The answer is given in the Sophist, whose main
character is, in his general person, an image incarnate—the mere
image of a truly truth-seeking human being. Socrates poses the
opening question of the Sophist, but he sits silently by as a
Stranger from Italian Elea, a follower of Parmenides, finds a
solution. I’ll venture a guess why he falls silent. In the Sophist
appears a serious ontological teaching, and ontological doctrine is
not Socrates’ way: He is the man of the tentative try, of
hypotheses. I’ll even venture a—perhaps perverse—appreciation
of this mode: His stubborn hypotheticalness, his unwillingness to
assert knowledge, is the complement of his unshakable faith in a
search for firm truth, carried on in full awareness of human
finitude.
What then is the Parmenidean solution? I call it Parmenidean
although the Stranger, the intellectual child of Parmenides, calls
himself a parricide, since he is about to deny a crucial
Parmenidean teaching: that Nonbeing is not, is neither sayable
nor thinkable. For he will in fact affirm a yet deeper teaching of
his philosophical father: that what counts is being thinkable and
sayable. The Elean Stranger will show how Nonbeing can be
thinkable and how speech is in fact impossible without it—as was
indeed implicit in Parmenides’ very denial.
It is thinkable as Otherness. To say that something is not is
usually to say that it is not this but that, that it is other than
something perspectivally prior. (I say “usually,” because there
“is” also something called “utter non-being,” which is indeed,
EVA BRANN
11
though superficially utterable, insuperably unthinkable.)
Relational, comparative Nonbeing, however, is one of the great
ruling principles of ontology. It is totally pervasive, since
whatever is a being is other than other beings. It is the source of
diversity in the world and of negation in speech. Has the Stranger
really done in his philosophical progenitor? No, as I intimated. He
has actually saved Parmenides from himself; for he has shown
that Nonbeing is, is Being in another mode. Being is still all there
is. There is no parricide. Moreover, this Other, a piece of apparently high and dry ontology, turns out to give life to the realm of
ideas and to the world of human beings: it informs the one with a
diversity of beings and articulates the other with the oppositions
of speech.
Why was this modification necessary in the search for the
Sophist? Because a Sophist is indeed a faker, himself an image of
a truth-seeker and a producer of images of what is genuine.
Otherness, the great genus of “The Other,” is the condition of
possibility for images, since it has three tremendous powers. First,
it makes possible that a thing not be what it is. And that is just
what characterizes an image: “It’s a kitty,” the child says,
pointing. But not really; it doesn’t scratch. Or people bring out
photographs in order to be in the presence of an absent one, but
they are not real enough to assuage longing. Hence an image is
understood first, and most ontologically speaking, as not being
what it is, but also, second, as being less than the original it represents; for it represents that original in a deficient likeness. Here a
second capacity of the Other shows up: it creates a defective,
derivative Otherness. And third, it makes negative knowledge and
denying speech possible: we can think and say, “The image is—
in some specifiable way—like its original; but likeness is not
identity.” The sentence “An image is not the original” displays
Otherness as negation, articulated as Nonbeing. The ability to
utter—and mean—that sentence is specifically human. Its loss
would be, I think, a serious declension of our humanity. Therefore
this complex of consideration, illuminated by Klein in his book
on the Meno, seems to me crucial for navigating our imageflooded world with full awareness.
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More particularly, the ability to distinguish image from
original is crucial today because the shaping of our American
lives, which is more and more a matter of declining options and
refusing temptations, is much in need of suggestive approaches
for coping with images. What are the truths and falsehoods of
images in general? What consequently are the effects of discretionary image-viewing on our consciousness? Do all images in
fact have originals, or is it images “all the way down”? And if
there are always originals, how can we find our way back to
them? What is real within our world, what is genuine beyond it?
I’ll assert simply that without occasional reflection on such an
eminently current issue our lives tend toward passing by rather
than being lived. “The unexamined life is unlivable (abiotos),”
Socrates says in the Apology (38a)—and so a life without
reflection on its central issues is thus, in effect, unlived.
I’ll now go on to Klein’s second interpretive discovery, a
much more technical, but equally future-fraught, construal.
A preoccupation of Socrates—it might be puzzling to readers
who haven’t yet seen the implications—is often expressed by him
in this way: “Each is one, but both are two.” To be gripped by this
odd perplexity is, as I said, a beginning of philosophizing. The
oddity comes out most starkly when we think of countingnumbers, the natural cardinal numbers. Take the first number,
two. (For the ancients, one is not a number; it is the constituent
unit of which a number is made.) Each of its units is one and
nothing more. Yet this unit and another together make up the
number two. Neither is what both together are. This ought to be
strange to us, because we are used to the elements of a natural
collection having each the quality that characterizes the whole:
The doggy species subsumes dogs. Whether we think of
dogginess either as an abstracted generalization or as a qualitybestowing form, each member has the characteristic that names
the kind. Clearly, numbers are assemblages that work differently
from other classes. Numbers have a uniquely characteristic, a socalled “arithmological” structure. The recognition of the significance of this situation and its peculiar appearance among the great
forms, particularly in respect to Being, is Klein’s achievement.
EVA BRANN
13
Let me begin by briefly reviewing the kinds of numbers Klein
takes into account. He observes—a previously ignored fact—that
the first meaning of the Greek word that we translate as number,
arithmos, is that of a counted assemblage of concrete things. Any
counted collection—a flock of sheep, a string of horses, a herd of
cattle—does not have, but is an arithmos. If we think as Greeks
(and we may, with a little effort), we count ordinally, because we
must keep items in order: first, second, third (and then go on
cardinally four, five, six, for verbal convenience). But when we
have counted up the whole, we allow it to become a heapnumber—a distinct, discriminated group. It is a counted
collection that has lost its memory. An arithmos is such a sensory
number. It is, for example, a sheep-number, and its units are
sheep-monads. To me it seems undecidable whether such a
concrete number has an arithmological structure, since in it the
sheep are both sheepish and mere units; as a flock we discriminate
them, as units we count them.
Next come the mathematical numbers made up of pure
monads, units that have no quality besides being unities. A mathematical number is defined by Euclid thus: “An arithmos is a
multitude composed of monads,” where a monad is a pure unit.
This type of number has an arithmological structure with a
vengeance, and you can see why: a pure unit has no characteristics besides unitariness. It’s neither apples nor oranges, which is
precisely why you can count fruit or anything at all with it. Being
thus devoid of qualities, it has mere collectibility, but it has no
other contribution to make to the assemblage. Being two is not in
the nature of a monad as a monad, though adding up to two is.
“Two” appears to emerge from these associable units. If you think
this is unintelligible, so does Socrates. It will get worse.
The difficulty is implicitly acknowledged in the modern
definition of number. It begins with arithmos-like concrete assemblages. If their elements, treated now as mere units, can be put
into one-to-one correspondence, the collections are said to be
equivalent. The collection or set of all equivalent sets is their
number. This definition evades the questions, What number is it?
and Does the set of sets arise from the units of the concrete
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
collection, or does it bestow on them the numerosity? Therein lies
an implicit recognition of Socrates’ problem.
It gets worse, for now a third type of number appears. Klein
knows of it from Aristotle’s critical report in the Metaphysics,
where there is mention of “form-numbers,” arithmoi eidetikoi.
The highest genera in the Platonic structure of forms are
organized in such numberlike assemblages. These are, unlike the
indefinitely many mathematical numbers, limited in multitude.
(There may have been ten, the so-called root-numbers of the
Pythagoreans.) Now the super-genera in the Sophist are Same and
Other. The highest after these is Being, which consists of Motion
(kinesis) and Standstill (stasis). (This last is often translated as
“Rest,” but that inaccurately implies a cessation from, or deprivation of, motion, though the two genera are coequal.) Notice,
incidentally, that the three kinds of numbers run in tandem with
the three rising upper segments of the Divided Line—concrete
numbers with the sensory world, pure units with the mathematical
domain, form-numbers with the eidetic realm.
Each of these forms acts like a monad in an arithmetic
collection. However—and this is Aristotle’s most pertinent
criticism—these high forms are not neutral units. They are each
very much what they are in themselves, indefeasibly self-same
and other than all others. They are, as he says: asymbletoi,
“incomparable,” literally “not throwable together.” Thus, unlike
pure, neutral mathematical numbers, they cannot be reckoned
with across their own genus, and so, a fortiori, it would be seen
that their association within their genus is unintelligible. For how
can Motion and Standstill be together as the genus of Being if
they have nothing in common and so cannot be rationally added
up?
Klein claims that Aristotle’s cavil is in fact Plato’s point. The
forms are associated in what is the very paradigm of an arithmological structure: what each is not, that they are together. It is
because they have a number structure in which unique eide
associate in a finite number of finite assemblages that
innumerable sensory items can collect into concrete countable
heaps organizable into finite classification. Furthermore, it is in
EVA BRANN
15
imitation of these eidetic numbers that we have the indefinitely
many mathematical numbers uniting as many pure units as you
please—though we are left to work out the manner of this
descent. For my part, I cannot claim to have done it.
I have mentioned before what is certainly the foremost
stumbling block for most people in accepting the forms as causes
of worldly being and becoming. The perplexity is usually put as
“the participation problem”: how do appearances “participate” in
the forms? These are infelicitous terms, because they imply the
least satisfactory answer—that dogs somehow take a part in, or
appropriate a part of the form, a non-solution scotched in
Socrates’ very early attempt in the dialogue Parmenides at articulating his great discovery of the forms. “Imaging” might be a
more felicitous term, since it is at least less awkward to the intellectual imagination than is “partaking.”
But let me stick here with the familiar term, and follow Klein
in pointing out that the participation problem has two levels. On
the lower level, the question is how the phenomenal world participates in the forms. On the higher level, it is how the forms
associate with, participate in, each other. For unless they do form
assemblages, genera and their constituent eide, the sensory world,
even granted that it does somehow receive its being and structure
from these, can have no learnable organization. Crudely put: we
can classify the world’s beings, natural and artificial, in terms of
hierarchies of kinds, such as the genera, subgenera, species, and
subspecies of biology, only because their causative principles
have a prior, paradigmatic structure of associations and subordinations. On this hypothesis, even only artificially distinguished
heaps can be counted up by reason of the arithmological character
of eidetic groupings.
The eidetic numbers are thus intended to be a Platonic
solution to the upper-level participation problem. It is, so to
speak, a highly formal solution. For while the type of association
is named—the arithmoi eidetikoi with their arithmological
structure—the cause of any particular association is not given.
There is no substantive answer to the question, Just what in a
form makes it associate numerologically with a specific other?
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
There should be no such answer, because the eidetic monads are,
after all, incomposable. Motion and Standstill have in themselves
nothing in common. Moreover, why are they the sole constituents
of Being? And yet, there must be an answer since they are in fact
composed. As Klein keeps pointing out, in the upper reaches the
logos, rational speech, fails. One way it fails is that to reach the
number two, for instance, we count off one, one, two; that is, three
items—yet there are not three, but only two. For Two, be it mathematical or eidetic, is not over and beyond the two units; it is just
those two together. How two items can become one our reason
cannot quite articulate. Nor can it say what makes either an
eidetic monad, which is a qualitative plenum, or the mathematical
unit, which is a qualitative void, associate with others in
“families,” (that thought-provoking classificatory term from
biology) or in “numbers” (those colorless collections that yet
have highly specific characteristics).
Now we come to Klein’s novel construal of just this eidetic
number Two, which occurs in the Sophist, although it is not
explicitly named there. Being is a great eidetic genus. It is
composed of Standstill and Motion. Neither of these can have any
part in the other; it is just as unthinkable for Standstill to be
involved in Motion as for Motion to be involved in Standstill. Yet
there is nothing in the world that is not both together. Our world
is one of dynamic stability or stable dynamism, in place and in
time. The duo responsible for this condition in the realm of forms
is called Being. Being is not a third beside or above Motion or
Standstill but just the togetherness of these subgenera. Being is
only as both of these together, and neither of them can be except
as part of a pair. As an unpaired monad, neither is; both are as a
couple: Being is the eidetic Two. And once more, it is this arithmological structure that descends to, makes possible, and is
mirrored in, the mathematical number structure of any mathematical two—on the one hand. On the other hand, it makes the
phenomenal world appear as I have just described it: at once
stable and moving, variable and organizable. On the way up, it
might look as if the eidetic numbers are an erroneous levering-up
of a mathematical notion; on the way down, they appear as the not
EVA BRANN
17
quite humanly comprehensible, but necessary, hypothesis for an
articulable world, a countable and classifiable world. And again,
seen from above, Being must—somehow—bring about its own
division; but seen from below, Being emerges from its
constituents. And just as the modern definition of number in terms
of equivalent sets leaves unarticulated the question of whether the
number set is the ground of or the consequence of the equivalent
sets, so too in Klein’s exposition of the first eidetic number, Two,
it is left unsaid whether the genus determines its eidetic monads,
or the reverse, or neither. It is left, as textbooks say, as an exercise
for the reader—a hard one.
I might, before I end, even venture a still formal but
somewhat more specific answer to the associability question. In
the upper ontological reaches, at least, what might be called
extreme Otherness—by which I mean either contrary (that is,
qualitative) or contradictory (that is, logical) opposition—seems
to be the principle grounding togetherness. Motion and Standstill
are as opposite as can be, and for that reason yoked in Being; so
are Same and Other. I will not pretend to have worked through the
hierarchy of these five greatest genera. Nonetheless I have a
suspicion that Same and Other, the most comprehensive genera,
are not only intimately related to each other as mutually defining,
but may ultimately have to be apprehended together as prior to
and thus beyond Being, as a first self-alienation of the One, the
principle of comprehension itself. As such, they might even be
termed the negative Two, but that’s too far-out. In any case, these
Plotinian evolutions are beyond my brief for today. I refer to
Plotinus at all only because his One is in fact articulable only
negatively and, is self-diremptive.
Now the strange structure of number, in which indiscernibly
different but non-identical elements like pure monads, mere units,
can be together what they are not individually, is only a case,
though the most stripped-down, clarified case, of what is
nowadays called “emergence.” Recall that emergence is the
eventuation of a novel whole from elements that seem to have
nothing in common with it. Examples range from trivial to lifechanging. Socrates himself points out that the letters sigma and
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
18
omega are individually different from the initial syllable of his
own name, “So,” and that this is one new idea composed of two
elements (Theaetetus 203c). Two molecules of hydrogen and one
of oxygen combine to form water, whose liquidity emerges as an
unforeseeable quality. Individuals form communities that evince
a might beyond the additive powers of their citizens. The
emergent entity is other than rather than additional to, novel to
rather than inferrable from, its elements. In the reverse case,
sometimes called projection, the elements falling out from a
totality are qualitatively quite different from it. This case might be
called inverse emergence; an example might be the relation of
Platonic forms to their participant particulars.
The most significant problem of emergence is also the most
contemporary one. Since it seems indisputable that specific brain
lesions lead to specific psychic disabilities, it is claimed by scientists who don’t want simply to identify mind with brain that the
soul is brain-emergent. Does that make it a mere epiphenomenon?
A miracle? “Emergence” names the event as a bottom-up process.
But could it be a top-down happening, could the soul shape, or
participate in shaping, its physical substructure? These are the
recognizable old questions of “one-and-many”: one over, or in, or
out of, many?
I want to make a claim that in this company especially should
garner some sympathy: when deep human matters are at issue, it
helps a lot to have delved into some ontology; the inquiry into
Being may not affect our lives materially, yet it illuminates our
daily lives more directly than does research providing factual
information or theory producing instrumental constructs. This is
the hypothesis under which Jacob Klein’s opening up of two
Platonic preoccupations, images and numbers, is of current
consequence. Herein lies the prescience, the foresightedness of
his Platonic discoveries.
Addendum
I have omitted here, as too complex for brief exposition, a third,
more directly global interpretation of the modern condition,
EVA BRANN
19
which is central to Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin
of Algebra. It is an understanding of the basic rupture between
antiquity and modernity, of the great revolution of the West, as
brought about by, or at least paradigmatically displayed in, the
introduction of algebra. Algebra works with quantities abstracted
from concrete collections (such as were betokened by the Greek
arithmoi), with “general,” essentially symbolical “numbers,”
such as the variables x, y, z or the constants a, b, c. These letters
are symbols of a peculiar sort: they represent neither a concrete
thing nor a determinate concept, but rather present themselves as
the object of a calculation—a mere object, an indeterminate
entity. Klein saw algebraic problem-solving procedures, so
effective precisely because so contentlessly formal, as
emblematic of a modern rage for that second-order, deliberately
denatured thinking which dominates as much of our lives as is
method-ridden. The human consequences of this symbolic
conceptuality are great.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“YOU ARE THAT!”
The Upanishads Read Through
Western Eyes1
Robert Druecker
Introduction
The original title of this essay—“You Are That!”—was a
quotation, from the Chāndogya Upanishad, of an exclamation
made several times by a man named Uddālaka to his son
Śvetaketu. The “That” refers to a realm or state of being, known
as “Brahman.” One who experiences it is called a “knower of
Brahman” (brahmavid). Uddālaka was a knower of Brahman,
speaking to his son out of his direct experience.
The classical Upanishads are expressions of, and invitations
to, this direct experiencing. Understanding them, therefore, is a
matter of understanding what that experiencing is like, not a
matter of believing or knowing some truths about the world.
Thus, elucidating the meaning of this title will convey a sense of
the experience of Brahman, which is what the Upanishads as a
whole are about.
But, of course, their ultimate aim is not simply to produce
understanding in this sense, but rather to bring about the direct
experiencing of the Brahman-realm. Even Śaṅkara, the most
highly esteemed expositor of the Upanishads, a man noted for his
theoretical acumen, considered direct experience as surpassing all
understanding. He is said to have regarded theoretical reflection
as one hundred times more efficacious than oral instruction,
meditation as one hundred thousand times more efficacious than
theoretical reflection, and direct experience of the Brahman-realm
as defying all comparison.
The revised title of the essay is: “‘You Are That!’: The
Upanishads Read Through Western Eyes.” In making this change,
Robert Drueker is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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I have followed Aristotle’s recommendation to begin with the
things best known to us, where “us,” in this case, refers to the St.
John’s community. Thus, Part One will give a sense of what the
Brahman-realm is like by elaborating on an analogous experience
in Homer and Aristotle. Part Two will elucidate the experiencing
of Brahman in a more direct way.
Finally, many of the writings in the Upanishads are dialogues
involving a knower of Brahman. Yājñavalkya is the central figure
in the conversations in the oldest Upanishad. In working on the
lecture, I imagined him, a knower of Brahman, as my interlocutor.
Throughout the essay, I will allow the voice of Yājñavalkya to
provide his understanding of analogues between the Brahmanrealm and the worlds of Homer and Aristotle.
Part One: Νοεĩν and Ittisāl (Conjunction)
A. Homer
Homer frequently refers to human beings or gods waking up to,
or realizing (νοεĩν), the full significance of a situation.
Sometimes, on the other hand, what they realize is their ability to
wake up to the full meaning of a situation (νόος in some uses).2
The verb in the aorist expresses an individual’s sudden flash of
insight. For instance, Hektor, resisting his parents’ entreaties,
holds his position, as he watches Achilleus coming toward him.
He is pondering what might happen should he retreat or should he
offer to return Helen; but then Achilleus closes upon him: “And
trembling took hold of Hektor when the realization suddenly
struck him (ἐνόησεν) [what single combat against Achilleus really
meant], and he could no longer stand his ground there, but…fled,
frightened.” (II, 22.136-37).3 The use of the progressive aspect,
however, conveys the process of fitting pieces together gradually
to form a wholly new picture, as when Theoklymenos tells the
suitors that the realization is dawning upon him (νοέω) that there
is an evil on the way that they will not be able to avoid (O,
20.367-70).
Because of the intensity of the character’s involvement in the
situation, the experienced shift in significance is often accompanied by strong emotion, as is the case with Hektor. When the
DRUECKER
23
insight concerns an individual object instead of a situation, the
realization is always accompanied by such emotion; it is as if the
shift in the meaning of the situation were compressed into a single
thing or person. So, For example, Menelaos, having caught sight
of Paris, leaps down from his chariot. Then, Homer tells us,
“when [Paris] realized the full significance of Menelaus standing
there among the champions, the heart was shaken within him” (I,
3.29-31). The full significance here is that Menelaus is drawing
near Paris, seething with an overwhelming desire to kill him.
“Realization of significance” has a variety of meanings that
spread over a directional arc.4 A character begins in a situation in
which he has already seemingly recognized (γιγνώσκειν) the
surrounding things or people as definite individuals that are
familiar. Then, once awakened to their real significance, he or she
experiences a corresponding emotional impact; a way of dealing
with the newly perceived situation comes to light and the will to
do so arises. Thus, the present naturally extends itself into the
future. When the primary meaning is at either end of this arc, the
other parts of the arc are co-present. Thus, when the emphasis is
on present clarity of mind, the future is nonetheless kept in view.
(For instance, when Kirke tells Odysseus that no magic can work
on his ability always to realize what is the real meaning of the
situation in which he finds himself, she also has in mind the
insightful character of his future aims, plans, and actions [O,
10.329].) And, on the other hand, when the emphasis in on future
action, clear vision in the present is also involved. (For instance,
when, according to Achilleus, Peleus vowed to the river
Spercheus that Achilleus would sacrifice to him upon the latter’s
return home, this wish [νόον] was not a representation of a vague
future, but rather a distinct depiction of the wished-for future
action and of the detailed steps leading to it [I, 23.144-49].)
The realization of significance may or may not be prepared by
a thought process. But when it is, the realization is distinct from
the preceding reasoning, in the same way as “seeing” one of
Euclid’s proofs is different from figuring out how it is justified in
terms of previous propositions. For Yājñavalkya, realizing
Brahman can also be characterized as including an emotional
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response—joy (ānanda)—and a way of acting—calm responsiveness to the whole situation.
The realization may penetrate to great depth and extend far in
space and time, like that of Theoklymenonos mentioned earlier or
like that of Athena when she speaks to Achilleus as he is drawing
his sword to kill Agamemnon. The more intense the situation and
the deeper and broader the realization, the more likely it is that the
characters are raised above their ordinary abilities, so that they are
able to see almost all the implications and consequences of the
situation with unusual clarity and to act with extraordinary
foresight. This experience of being raised above the ordinary is a
divine manifestation.5
Homer most often mentions Athena and Apollo in such
moments. For instance, Odysseus’s sudden realization of the true
meaning of return—the moment when he recognized the right
time to reveal himself to Telemachos—occurs in the presence of
Athena (O, 16.155ff.). And Hektor’s sudden waking up to danger
when he was about to oppose Achilleus is Apollo’s manifesting
himself (I, 20.375ff.). These two examples point to the difference
between the two gods. Athena remains untroubled and serene in
the midst of action, while she discerns at every juncture what the
situation requires, plans the deed with precision, and readies
herself to bring it about energetically. Apollo, on the other hand,
is associated with a cognitive attitude of stately objectivity, wideranging gaze, distance and freedom, clarity and good form. He is
the god of the saving or preserving awareness (σωφροσύνη)
expressed in the Delphic dictum, “Know thyself,” meaning
“Realize what human beings really are, that is, how great a
distance separates them from the omnitemporal gods” (HG, 21617, 215, 52, 57, 59, 78-79, 66). Yājñavalkya would remark that
such traits as serenity in the midst of action, the freedom of a
ranging gaze, and saving, or preserving, awareness pertain to the
Brahman-realm as well.
In a manifestation of Athena or Apollo, the god is revealed as
the very essence of the realization. That is, the realization’s
ultimate meaning is that it is a ray of the divine, illumining human
life. Homer realizes that the complete lucidity in which we
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sometimes act is a connection with something superior to us, even
though we think of it as a quality of our own minds. In decisive
moments, what a warrior realizes is both himself and the deity
together (HG, 7, 247, 174, 184-85). Yājñavalkya would comment
here that in the Upanishads, this non-separateness of the human
and divine is known as “non-duality” (advaita; BU, IV.3,32):
“Whoever meditates on a divinity that is other (anyām) [than
himself], thinking, ‘This [god] is one (anyah), I am another
(anyah),’ does not know [‘I am Brahman’]” (BU, I.4.10).
Homer’s recognition of moments in which the divine and the
human are non-dual is sharply opposed to a view that would see
Athena and Apollo as external causes of the events he is narrating
(HG, 213). Somewhat similarly, according to Yājñavalkya, we are
invited to awaken to Brahman not as an external cause, but rather
as what is most profound in our experience.6
When the god is present in moments of non-duality, the
warrior’s ego and personality recede into the background (HG,
241f.). That sort of impersonality, which also characterizes the
moment when we experience the truth of a Euclidean proposition,
is inherent in the Brahman-realm, according to Yājñavalkya.
The divine coming-to-presence has been said to occur at “the
critical moment when human powers suddenly converge, as if
charged by electric contact, on some insight, some resolution,
some deed.”7 Lightning comes forth from the clouds to strike
buildings or trees that have risen from the earth; so, too, the divine
suddenly emerges from the background to shock an individual
only when that individual has gone forth from himself toward the
background. Yājñavalkya could note that the instant of recognition of the Brahman realm is also compared to “a sudden flash
of lightning” (BU, II.3.6; cf. KeU, IV.4). Moreover, he would
think that moving toward the background might be, in some way,
analogous to a “moving-towards” Brahman—something like the
movement involved either in practicing meditation or in coming
to wonder, “Who am I?”
While in the examples given so far the divine manifestation
has come in an awakening to significance or in an elaborating of
a plan, this should not lead us to think the divine is encountered
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merely by turning inward. The appearance of the goddess is not,
for instance, Achilleus’s pondering whether to kill Agamemnon or
to check his anger (I, 1.193), but rather the resolution of his introspection in a flash of certitude (HG, 174, 48). Yājñavalkya would
agree that introspection neither characterizes the Brahman-realm
nor is a means thereto. However, there is, he would add, a
different sort of inward turn that can facilitate its realization.
There are many instances in which a god is present at a
moment when none of the characters is aware of it. But
sometimes a warrior, when awakening to the full significance of
his situation, may realize that his very awakening is itself the
manifestation of a god. An interesting example occurs when
Poseidon appears to the Aiantes in the likeness of Kalkas. At first
neither brother is aware of the presence of a god; but, after
Poseidon departs like a hawk, Aias son of Oïleus realizes that
some god, whom he does not recognize, has addressed them,
while Telemonian Aias notices only his own increased strength
and energy (I, 13.43-80). On other occasions the human being
recognizes the god by name—sometimes only after the encounter,
but sometimes already at its inception (HG, 207-08).
A god may be especially close to a particular individual in
that the human being regularly displays the qualities of the
particular god, as Athena acknowledges Odysseus does (O,
13.330-32; HG, 192-95). There is even one person who seems to
be fully awake to divine presence—Homer himself, who
sees events through and through even when the participants see only the surface. And often when the
participants sense only that a divine hand is touching
them the poet is able to name the god concerned and
knows the secret of his purpose (HG, 195-96).
According to Yājñavalkya, there is just as much idiosyncratic
variety in realizing Brahman as there is in recognizing the
presence of a god in moments of waking up to meaning: different
individuals respond differently, both in frequency and in degree,
to such events.
Up to this point in our consideration of Homer we have
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emphasized cognition. This is appropriate because cognition in a
broad sense is the way in which we come to realize Brahman.
However, this focus on cognition gives a distorted picture of the
world as Homer depicts it. For there are many gods—Ares,
Aphrodite, Poseidon, Hera, and others—who manifest
themselves in the world in addition to Athena and Apollo, who are
especially associated with realizing significance. Moreover, the
appearance of a deity often involves an inner phenomenon other
than awakening, as when Hektor’s body is “packed full of force
and fighting strength” (I, ,17.211-12) or when Athena puts
“courage into the heart” of Nausikaa (O, 6.140). Yājñavalkya
could point out that these phenomena of enlivening, energizing,
and strengthening were included, along with realization, in what
the Upanishads call the “Inner Controller” (antaryāmin; BU,
III.7.1).8 He might also remark that Homer did not think of nonduality as limited to cognition, because he recognized that these
phenomena, too, were divine manifestations.
In addition to a character’s “waking up” to the presence of a
god, a deity often manifests itself by affecting a character from
outside. Most notably, Patroklos’s aristeia was put to an end by
Apollo, who “stood behind him, and struck his back and his broad
shoulders with a flat stroke of the hand so that his eyes spun” (I,
16.791-92). Yājñavalkya would point out that events like this
might be echoes of Brahman as “pouring forth,” or “emitting,” all
things. (MuU, I.1.7.) He would add that, just as Homer recognizes
the one Apollo both in his striking of Patroklos and in Hektor’s
realization mentioned earlier, so too the Upanishads express the
realization that the inner controlling and the outer emitting are
one when it states: “This Self is…Brahman” (BU, II.5.19).
B. Aristotle and Averroes
For help in thinking through the experiences highlighted by
Homer, we turn to Aristotle. In moments of realization, we are in
a state of what he called “being-at-work,”—what I will call
“activity.” Activity is “complete over any time whatever”; it is not
a temporal phenomenon. By contrast, a motion “is in time and
directed at some end…and is complete when it brings about that
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at which it aims” (NE, 1174a15-21). For example, whereas the
activity of dancing is “all there” at each moment, the motion of
learning to dance is complete only when you’ve actually become
a dancer.
Homer’s gods Athena and Apollo are manifested in activities
of ours that would be “choiceworthy in themselves” (NE, 1144a1)
even if they didn’t effect anything in addition. The active state of
our ability to awaken to significance is what is best and most
powerful in us and is “either divine itself or the most divine of the
things in us.” When it is directed toward the most divine, timeless
things, it is a pure beholding (NE, 1177a13-21).
One living in this state of activity would be living a life that
“is divine as compared with a human life.” Hence, Aristotle said,
“one ought to immortalize” (NE, 1177b25-34); that is, one ought
to be as much as possible in this best state of activity—the activity
of Homer’s Athena and Apollo, or of Aristotle’s impersonal
divinity. When we are in that state, we are in the same state over
a limited extent of time as is the divine over the whole of time.9
Moreover, “each person would even seem to be this [best state of
activity]” (NE, 1178a1). “[A]nd so the person who loves and
gratifies this is most a lover of self” (NE, 1168b33).
Yājñavalkya could comment that the Brahman-realm, too,
has the characteristics of being an atemporal phenomenon, of
being a sort of pure beholding, and of being our true self.
Moreover, it, too, is impersonal, not divided up into essentially
different Athena-moments and Apollo-moments. Finally, knowers
of Brahman, living the life of their true self, are leading a life that
transcends the human. Consequently, since most of us live in
ignorance of Brahman, most of us are not living the life of our
true self.
Aristotle seems to agree formally with this conclusion: it is,
after all, an implication of Apollo’s injunction “Know thyself.” It
might be objected, however, that Aristotle’s characterization of
the true self as divine contradicts Apollo’s insistence on
separating the human from the divine. Yājñavalkya would reply
that when a similar objection is voiced in his tradition, the
response is that the contradiction is only apparent. Someone who
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took the “You” in “You are That!” to refer to his ordinary sense of
self, would be engaging in self-inflation. Students are encouraged
to ponder “Who am I?” as a practice, in order to shift them from
the ordinary to the true sense of self. So, Yājñavalkya and
Aristotle could both take “Know thyself” in a double sense: “With
respect to your ordinary sense of self, think mortal thoughts, but
recognize that the true you is divine activity.”
In On the Soul Aristotle began to sketch what might be
entailed in realizing his analogue to “You are That!”—namely, the
immortalizing involvement in the best activity. One of Aristotle’s
foremost interpreters, Averroes, has developed Aristotle’s blackand-white sketch into a detailed, full-color portrait that bears a
striking resemblance to the Upanishadic picture. To that portrait
we now turn.10
The customary name in philosophical texts for Aristotle’s best
state of activity is “intellection.” Following Aristotle’s lead,
Averroes begins his account of intellection with what is clearer to
us, and he ends it with what is clearer by nature. There are three
main figures in his initial portrait—the “material intellect,” the
“disposed intellect,” and the “agent intellect.” Averroes compares
intellection, as Aristotle does, to a craft in which some material,
like clay, receives a form—say, that of a bowl (OS, 430a10-14).
When I acquire a simple intelligible, such as, ‘straight line,’ it is
received as form by the material intellect—which, not being
corporeal, is material only in the sense that it serves as materialfor. My disposed intellect,11 now having the acquired intelligible
as an active disposition (ἕξις), is in what Aristotle calls a first state
of maintaining itself (έχειν) in (ἔν) its completed condition
(τέλος), with respect to this intelligible. Henceforth we shall say,
somewhat inaccurately, that the mind in this state is “in first
actuality.” By analogy, we could say that Suzanne Farrell, the
accomplished dancer, is “in first actuality” when not dancing
(since she maintains all the dispositions of a dancer), but is “in
second actuality” when dancing (since she then makes use of
those dispositions.) Similarly, when I am not contemplating the
intelligible ‘straight line,’ my intellect is “in first actuality” (since
I have the disposition necessary to contemplate it if I so choose),
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but when I am contemplating it, perhaps in the course of a demonstration, my intellect is “in second actuality” (since I am then
making use of the disposition).
According to Aristotle, “the soul never engages in intellection
without an appearance” (431a24), which Averroes takes to mean
imaginative appearance.12 Thus, when I am led up to (ἐπάγεσθαι)
a particularly suggestive instance, say a good image of a straight
line, that image specifies that the material intellect will receive the
intelligible ‘straight line.’ Averroes said that the material intellect,
as so determined by my imagination,13 is “conjoined” with it and
that my disposed intellect is precisely this conjunction of the
material intellect with my imagination.
One of the unusual features of Averroes’ interpretation is that
according to him, there is only one material intellect. My disposed
intellect and your disposed intellect are the results of its conjunctions with the different images in our respective imaginations; we
actualize it differently. In this way the one material intellect is
said to be incidentally many. (Zedler 1951, 175.) Moreover, since
my imagination is corporeal, the intelligibles of mundane things
in me, and, consequently, my disposed intellect itself, are
generable and corruptible.14 Yājñavalkya might also say that the
one Brahman is incidentally many individual selves (jīvātman).
Now, before the intelligible ‘“straight line’” can be received
by the material intellect, the irrelevant portions of the image in
which it is “embodied” must be taken away (ἀφαιρεῖσθαι). This
abstraction brings it into the state of actual intelligibility. To
elucidate this act of abstraction, Averroes referred to another of
Aristotle’s comparisons: The passage from potential to actual
intelligibility is like a color’s transition from potential visibility to
actual visibility when the lights in a room are turned on. The
“light” that illumines the darkness of the image, producing the
abstraction of the latent intelligible, is the agent intellect.
This picture of the agent intellect as shining from the outside
onto a potential intelligible embedded in an image is, however,
only the way it first appears to us. Averroes said that if we
consider its role in the intellectual insights we have when we draw
conclusions from the intelligibles that we have acquired—for
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31
example, the insight that one and only one straight line may be
drawn between two points—we come to a deeper view. In reality,
the agent intellect is related to the intelligibles of my disposed
intellect as form to material. It is as though the agent intellect
were a light full of Color itself. What really happens when it
shines on an image is that the image’s conjunction with Color
itself draws out of the latter a particular color, one that had been
potentially within Color itself. Then that particular color is
received by the material intellect. Even in my acts of intellecting
simple intelligibles in the world, the agent intellect is incidentally
in partial conjunction with my imagination.15 Since I am, then,
intellecting it to some degree, it must be at work as the form of
my disposed intellect.
For Averroes, this understanding means that the agent
intellect itself is the source of the intelligibility of the corporeal
world. For since the image arises on the basis of sense perception
of things in the world, the potential intelligibles in my imagination are due to the potential intelligibles in the things in the
world. Consequently, Averroes takes the agent intellect to be
Aristotle’s unmoved mover from the Metaphysics (1072b18-30;
1075a5-11). Hence, there is only one agent intellect; and it is its
very activity of unchanging, eternal self-intellection.
Correlatively, the potential intelligibles of things in the world are
their actualities, their being-at-work maintaining themselves in
their respective states of completeness. Their intelligibility
depends entirely upon the agent intellect in the following way: for
each of them its state of completeness is the closest state to the
agent intellect’s self-intellection that its materials are capable of
attaining.16 The agent intellect’s responsibility for all intelligible
being makes it analogous to the one source of all existence in
Yājñavalkya’s tradition.
But how can the self-directed intellection of the agent
intellect be responsible for our intellection of the intelligibles in
things outside of itself in the world, when it and the object of its
intellection are absolutely one? Reflexively turned toward itself,
it is not aware of the multiplicity of the potential intelligibles of
mundane things as such. Yet it nevertheless does comprehend
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them, somewhat in the way that the craft of pottery-making
comprehends the forms of all the bowls for which it could be
responsible. But to be actively responsible for the intellection of
this intelligible on this occasion, the agent intellect must also be
“turned outwards,” as it were, away from itself, in order to shine
on the appearances of mundane things in the imaginations of
individual human beings.
When it is turned outward but still not illuminating any
appearance, the agent intellect seems to be lacking any intelligible. And yet as an image arises, the agent intellect will bring one
of the intelligibles into focus. Thus, surprisingly, the agentintellect-as-turned-outward is pure potentiality, pure material-for;
it is the material intellect. In order to appear as such, that is, as
empty of intelligibles of mundane things, it must become
“temporarily ignorant of itself” (Blaustein 1984, 214-15).
This self-forgetfulness is concretely realized by its
conjunction with our imaginations. By virtue of that conjunction,
the agent intellect becomes “ignorant” of being the self-intellecting source of all intelligibility; it appears, instead, in each of
us in a double form—first, as our partially actualized receptivity
for intelligibles (our disposed intellect) and, second, as light
eliciting those intelligibles by abstraction from our images. The
agent intellect’s ignorance of itself seems to be in remarkable
agreement with the role of ignorance in the Upanishads:
according to Yājñavalkya a knower of Brahman “knows
knowledge and ignorance, both of them, together” (IU, 11). For
Brahman, too, turns outward, so that ignorance, that is, awareness
of multiplicity, is one of its aspects (Aurobindo 1996, 61-62 and
94). But Brahman is both knowledge and ignorance; the two are
inseparable (Aurobindo 1996, 58 and 72).
From the perspective of an individual human being, as I learn
more, the agent intellect becomes the form of my disposed
intellect to an ever greater degree. In this way my three principal
differences from it will decrease. First, in acquiring more intelligibles, my disposed intellect becomes less and less a partial view
of the agent intellect. Second, in advancing to intelligibles that are
less and less referred to the corporeal world, my disposed intellect
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33
becomes purer.17 Third, in embracing ever more encompassing
intelligibles, it approaches the agent intellect’s unitary vision.
Ultimately, while still “in this life” (Ivry 1966, 83), I may
arrive at the point where I have acquired all the intelligibles.18
Then I will have achieved a state of complete conjunction19 with
the agent intellect. My disposed intellect will have lost all traces
of individuality,20 which are what make it my disposed intellect; it
will have perished as such. All of me that is not intellect is “cut
off” from my intellect, which is identical with the agent intellect
(Blaustein 1984, 272). In this sense the state of complete
conjunction has been said to involve an “existential break” from
the world.21 Once again Yājñavalkya would recognize in this
existential break an analogue, at a deep experiential level, to a
prominent feature of the realization of Brahman.
In complete conjunction, I experience myself permanently
(Ivry 1996, 83) as shining forth intelligibility, but this “myself” is
not the self I used to think I was, for the conjunction removes that
which had prevented me from recognizing that the agent intellect
is my form.22 Averroes says that at this point the agent intellect,
united with us as our form, functions as our sole operative
principle.23 We might wonder what life in this state of conjunction
would be like. One suggestion is that I might experience it as “a
wakeful loss of rationality,” a loss of consciousness of my
humanity (Blaustein 1984, 272). I would not be engaged in
thinking things out; I would not be conscious of myself as an
individual, as a member of the human species.
Alternatively, guided by his own experience, Yājñavalkya
would propose that perhaps I might be aware of myself (what
Aristotle in the Ethics pointed to as my true self) engaged in selfintellection, while simultaneously being aware of experiencing
my ordinary self involved in its everyday activities against this
backdrop. Yājñavalkya would offer two possibilities, the second
of which would not be analogous to his own experience. First, in
each instance of intellection, I could perhaps experience the agent
intellect as transitioning from unitary self-intellection to the
offering of an aspect of itself to my imagination. Second,
analogous to the end of the path outlined in the Yoga-Sutras (that
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is, kaivalya),24 it could be that when I am engaged in self-intellection I ignore the particulars of the world and desist from
everyday activities, and so, ultimately, wither away and die.25
Part Two: Cit (Pure Awareness)
To begin our consideration of pure awareness, let us return to
Aristotle. In the Nichomachean Ethics he writes:
[O]ne who is seeing is aware (αỉσθάνεται) that he is
seeing, and one who is hearing [is aware] that he is
hearing,…[and, in general,] whenever we are
perceiving [we are aware] that we are perceiving and
whenever we are engaged in intellection (νοῶμεν) [we
are aware] that we are engaged in intellection
(1170a29-31).26
To what aspect of experience is Aristotle pointing here? Many
believe this passage means that perceptual consciousness is
accompanied by a reflection on, or a thought about, that
consciousness.27 For example, I know that I’m looking at you
seated there before me. However, such reflection seems to occur
only intermittently. Hence, an alternative interpretation has been
proposed,28 according to which perceptual consciousness is
always “selfaware”—that is, aware (of) itself,29 but not conscious
of itself—although, at any given time, we may notice
selfawareness to a greater or lesser degree. Yājñavalkya would
emphasize that only diligent practice could enable me to
recognize the difference between reflective consciousness and
selfawareness in my own experience.
To clarify the difference between selfawareness and reflective
consciousness, we shall draw upon some descriptions of
experience by the philosopher J.-P. Sartre.30 Consciousness is
necessarily always aware (of) itself, but precisely as being
conscious of an object beyond itself. “[T]his awareness (of)
consciousness…is not positional; that is, consciousness is not for
itself its own object. Its object is outside of it by nature…. We
shall call such a consciousness ‘consciousness of the first
degree’” (S, 23-24). In this essay, “consciousness” will always
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mean positional consciousness, consciousness of an object.
As an example of first degree consciousness, let us take my
perceptual consciousness-of-a-coffee-cup-on-a-table—say, in the
mode of staring-at.31 In this experience, the perceptual
consciousness is not an object for itself, whereas the coffee-cupon-a-table is an object for it. But in each such act of
consciousness, there lives an attentive presence by virtue of
which the consciousness is aware (of) itself. When, as is usually
the case, the attentive presence goes unnoticed, we experience
only a dim awareness (of) consciousness.
Yājñavalkya could point out that in his tradition this
awareness is called the “witness” (sākshī; ŚU, VI.12-14) and the
self-aware quality of consciousness is called “self-luminousness”
(svajyotir). He might add that this is what he was referring to
when he said, “You cannot see the seer of seeing; you cannot hear
the hearer of hearing; you cannot think of the thinker of thinking;
you cannot perceive the perceiver of perceiving” (BU, III.4.2);
and when he said, “It is the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the
unthought thinker, the unperceived perceiver. Other than this
there is no seer…hearer…perceiver” (BU, 7.23). Sartre would
seem to agree with him that this awareness cannot be the object
of consciousness: this sphere “is a sphere of absolute existence,
that is, of pure spontaneities, which are never objects” (S, 77).
As opposed to this selfaware, first-degree consciousness-ofobjects, which makes up most of our waking lives, there arises
from time to time “a consciousness directed onto [the firstdegree] consciousness, [that is,] a consciousness which takes [the
first-degree] consciousness as its object.” Sartre calls it a “seconddegree” or “reflecting consciousness.” Whereas in the previous
case there was no duality at all to synthesize, here “we are in the
presence of a synthesis of two consciousnesses, of which one is
consciousness of the other.” When I think, “Staring at this coffee
cup on the table is wasting time,” this act of reflective
consciousness involves a synthesis of the thinking consciousness
and the reflected-upon consciousness-of-the-coffee-cup.
Moreover, just like first-degree consciousness, second-degree
consciousness—my thinking, in this instance—is self-aware (S,
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28-29).
When the thinking consciousness posits the previously
unreflected-upon staring consciousness as its object, it is not its
own staring that it is positing. What the reflecting consciousness
states about the staring consciousness does not concern itself; it
concerns the staring consciousness, which the reflecting
consciousness reflects upon. Hence, what reflecting
consciousness is turns out to be selfaware consciousness of
another, prior, selfaware consciousness, which, in turn, is
consciousness of an object that is not a consciousness. Reflecting
consciousness really does re-flect; that is, it bends backward to
look at an earlier moment of consciousness.
The fact that it is not its own staring that the thinking
consciousness posits in reflecting on the staring consciousness
raises the question whether the I that seems to be thinking “is that
of the consciousness reflected upon” and not, in fact, an I
supposed to be “common to the two superimposed consciousnesses.” Indeed, one suspects that the reason why every reflection
possesses a sense of self is that the reflective act itself gives birth
to the sense of self in the consciousness that is reflected upon (S,
28-29).32 Sartre offers an example in order to test this hypothesis:
I was absorbed just now in my reading. I am going to
seek to recall the circumstances of my reading….
Thus I am going to revive…also a certain thickness of
un-reflected-upon consciousness, since the objects
were able to be perceived only by that consciousness
and remain relative to it. That consciousness must not
be posited as the object of my reflection; on the
contrary, I must direct my attention onto the revived
objects, but without losing sight of the un-reflectedupon consciousness, while maintaining a sort of
complicity with it and making an inventory of its
content in a non-positional way. The result is not in
doubt. While I was reading, there was consciousness
of the book, of the heroes of the novel, but the I was
not inhabiting that consciousness (S, 30; italics in the
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last sentence added).
Here Sartre reawakens the original self-aware consciousness and
dwells in the awareness.
That awareness is also a precondition for reflection. Should
he reflect, upon being absorbed in his readings, “I was absorbed
in my reading,” then, instead of dwelling in the awarenesscomponent of the original consciousness, he would, as it were,
transform it into an act of consciousness, the object of which is
the original consciousness, (of) which the awareness was aware.
There certainly is an I present to that second-order
consciousness.33 So, we may call it “self-consciousness.”
Based on this I of reflection, Sartre shows how I construct a
unified sense of self in three stages: first, as a unity of states, like
my hatred of Peter; then as a unity of actions, like my playing a
piano sonata; and finally as a unity of qualities, like my spitefulness. For instance, let us suppose a first-order consciousness of
disgust and anger, present together with the perception of Peter. If
the self-consciousness reflected only on what was appearing in
the first-order consciousness, it would be thinking, “I feel
disgusted with Peter.” But instead, the angry disgust at Peter
appears as a profile, or perspectival view, of the disposition
“hatred of Peter,” just as a house will show itself to me in different
profiles depending upon where I am standing. The hatred appears
to be showing a “side” of itself through the momentary
experience of angry disgust. To the self-consciousness, the angry
disgust appears to be emanating from the hatred. On a later
occasion, perhaps, the hatred will appear upon reflection as an
actualization of a quality of spitefulness, which is in me (S, 4546, 51, 53). But in neither case does the self-consciousness realize
that the hatred or the spitefulness is arising in the moment of
reflection; rather it supposes that the state or the quality was
already there in the first-order consciousness.34
This process resulting in a sense of self leads me to say things
like “my consciousness,” when in fact “[t]he I is not the owner of
consciousness; it is the object of consciousness” (S, 77).
Yājñavalkya could report that a process of construction of the
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sense of self (aham-kāra) also figures prominently in the
Upanishadic tradition. It leads to the arising of many fears and
desires, which, in turn, function as barriers to the realization of
Brahman by keeping us “glued” to objects. I note that there is a
remarkable agreement here with Sartre, who wrote: “But perhaps
the essential role [of the sense of self] is to mask to consciousness
its own spontaneity…. Hence, everything happens as if
consciousness…were hypnotizing itself over that sense of self,
which it constituted” (S, 81-82).
Usually we do not notice the awareness-aspect of
consciousness because we are so taken up with what is appearing
to consciousness. Yet, on occasion, awareness may stand out in
our experience. For instance: Some people are engaged in a
heated discussion at an outdoor café, when a nearby car suddenly
backfires. Several of the participants may be so caught up in the
conversation that they don’t even notice the loud sound; others
may be startled and shift their attention to the street; someone
who was anchored in awareness, however, would notice, but not
be jarred by, the sound.
Another example: On a good day the football quarterback Joe
Montana, at the top of his game, would experience a pass play as
follows.35 He was conscious of the linemen rushing at him, of his
receivers running downfield, and so on. But instead of looking
with hurried, anxious glances, he experienced an awareness
spread over the whole unfolding scene. All the players seemed to
be moving in slow motion, and everything appeared with great
clarity and distinctness. He was keenly aware of his own body, the
motions of his limbs and an overall sense of relaxation, as his arm
drew back and the ball headed toward the receiver.36 Taken by
itself this example may mislead us into thinking that awareness is
dependent on the attainment of a certain level of skill, in this case,
that of an MVP quarterback. But the previous example and the
following one make it clear that this is not the case.
A third illustration: Some automobile drivers experience
freeway traffic as follows: “First, one driver cuts me off; then a
slowpoke is holding me up. My consciousness narrows to focus
on the offending driver; and, irritated, I react by honking or
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39
suddenly changing lanes.” Another driver may perceive the same
cars on the beltway as if they were moving in a force field. She
experiences that field as calling forth the alterations in her driving
required in order to maintain a smooth flow of traffic.
A fourth instance: “Surgeons say that during a difficult
operation they have the sensation that the entire operating team is
a single organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it as
a “ballet” in which the individual is subordinated to the group
performance” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 65).
A fifth example: The following story shows a transition out of
awareness into self-consciousness:
Suppose a woman is engaged in sewing something. A
friend enters the room and begins speaking to her. As
long as she listens to her friend and sews in
[awareness], she has no trouble doing both. But if she
gives her attention to her friend’s words and a thought
arises in her mind as she thinks about what to reply,
her hands stop sewing; if she turns her attention to her
sewing and thinks about that, she fails to catch everything her friend is saying, and the conversation does
not proceed smoothly. In either case….she has transformed [awareness] into thought. As her thoughts fix
on one thing, they’re blank to all others, depriving the
mind of its freedom.37
This example enables us to avoid the misconception that
awareness is incompatible with words. For it was a shift in the
way in which she attended to speech, or to her sewing, that led to
the woman’s loss of the ability to attend to both simultaneously.
A sixth and final case, as described by Merleau-Ponty (1945):
Being most of the time in the consciousness-mode, we live in a
world that “only stirs up second-hand thoughts in us.” Our mind
is taken up with “thoughts, already formulated and already
expressed, which we can recall silently to ourselves and by which
we give ourselves the illusion of an interior life. But this supposed
silence is in reality full of words rattling around.” However,
occasionally we may “rediscover primordial silence, underneath
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the words’ rattling around.” Then we pass from the mode of
consciousness-of-objects to dwell in awareness. We experience “a
certain emptiness,” “a certain lack which seeks to fill itself,” to be
transformed into speech (213-14). Then there can emerge “an
authentic word, one which formulates something for the first
time”—such as “that of the child who is pronouncing her first
word, of the lover who is discovering his feeling” (207-08), or of
“the writer who is saying and thinking something for the first
time” (214). In the mode of awareness, we can live through a sort
of original emergence.
Words usually serve to keep our thoughts moving within
already formulated articulations. They could be said to function
like “preciptitates” (Niederschläge)38 of previous “chemical
reactions,” brought about by our own words or those of others.
However, when awareness becomes prominent, it acts as a
catalyst, which facilitates a fresh chemical reaction.
All the above examples manifest an awake, keen involvement
in experience together with an absence of the sense of self and of
self-focused emotions and motivations from the foreground. And
each of them brings to the foreground a different property of
awareness: the first, “unstuckness” to objects; the second,
spaciousness, not merely in the spatial and the temporal senses;
the third, responsiveness to dynamic qualities of the surrounding
field; the fourth, organic connectedness with whom or what39 is in
the field; the fifth, motion away from the directing I; and the sixth,
a sense of emptiness out of which newness arises spontaneously.
We might say that a good seminar could give evidence of
some of these signs of increased awareness. If, over time, the
participants have developed seminar skills analogous to the skills
developed by the members of a surgical team, the seminar might
be experienced as a sort of ballet. Along with the development of
those skills, some of the members may have cultivated their
awareness to some degree, paralleling the range of levels of
awareness in the operating team. That cultivation may enable
them to experience “a certain emptiness,” from which an
“authentic word” may emerge with greater frequency.
Such characteristics of awareness as those listed above have
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led people in certain pursuits, such as martial arts, to cultivate it,
so that it will remain reliably in the foreground. In developing a
painterly vision,40 for instance, one must learn to forget what
things are, in order to see how they are actually appearing to the
eye—which means, how they are coming into being before our
eyes. As Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne: “It is the mountain that
he interrogates with his gaze. What exactly does he ask of it? To
unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it is making
itself a mountain before our eyes.”41
We might expand on this account in the following way. As a
potential painter’s awareness becomes more prominent, she no
longer sees things as already “finished off,” but, instead, as
having a potential for greater “aliveness.” It is as if they were
calling to her to join in their emergence. Then she may heed the
appeal and begin to paint. Now it is this particular piece of fruit
before her that she captures “coming into being before her eyes”
in such a way that it can do so later before our eyes.42
Another example of the cultivation of awareness is found in
psychoanalysis. In his recommendations on the proper attitude to
be adopted by the analyst, Freud counsels a state of mind
possessing, first, an absence of reasoning or
deliberate attempts to select, concentrate or understand; and [second,] even, equal and impartial
attention to all that occurs within the field of
awareness…. This technique, says Freud…“consists
simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in
particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly
suspended attention’…in the face of all that one
hears” (Epstein 1904, 194).43
That is, the analyst deliberately withdraws from consciousnessof-objects and dwells in the awareness component of
consciousness. This open attentional attitude is to be distinguished, on the one hand, from a merely passive attention, in
which the mind wanders freely from object to object, and, on the
other, from a focal attentional attitude, searching for a particular
meaning (Epstein 1904, 195). Partly because evenly suspended
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attention was criticized as unattainable,44 Freud’s prescriptions to
practice it did not become integrated into psychoanalytic training
programs.
However, Wilfred Bion, perhaps the most thoughtful psychoanalyst of the latter part of the twentieth century, forcefully
advocated this practice in the following terms:
[T]he capacity to forget, the ability to eschew desire
and understanding, must be regarded as essential
discipline for the psycho-analyst. Failure to practise
this discipline will lead to a steady deterioration in the
powers of observation whose maintenance is essential.
The vigilant submission to such discipline will by
degrees strengthen the analyst’s mental powers just in
proportion as lapses in this discipline will debilitate
them….
To attain to the state of mind essential for the
practice of psycho-analysis I avoid any exercise of
memory…. When I am tempted to remember the
events of any particular session I resist the
temptation…. If I find that some half-memory is
beginning to obtrude I resist its recall….
A similar procedure is followed with regard to
desires: I avoid entertaining desires and attempt to
dismiss them from my mind. For example…it interferes with analytic work to permit desires for the
patient’s cure, or well-being, or future to enter the
mind. Such desires…lead to progressive deterioration
of [the analyst’s] intuition….
[There is an aspect of ultimate reality] that is
currently presenting the unknown and unknowable [in
the consulting room]. This is the ‘dark spot’ that must
be illuminated by ‘blindness’ [that is, ignorance].
Memory and desire are ‘illuminations’ that destroy the
value of the analyst’s capacity for observation as a
leakage of light into a camera might destroy the value
of the film being exposed (Bion [1970] 1983, 51-52,
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55-56, 69).
The effect of failing to observe this discipline is to interpret
what the patient says in terms of what the analyst wishes or
already “knows,” thus closing her off from what may be emerging
for the first time in the current hour. Bion’s psychoanalytic state
of mind may be comparable to Socratic ignorance. Both represent
an opening up of the self in conversation, for the sake of noticing
emergent possibilities that would otherwise remain unthought.
Another area in which a practice has been advocated for the
enhancement of awareness is philosophy. In the early twentieth
century, Edmund Husserl proposed pursuing wisdom by
following a path that he called “phenomenology.” By this he
meant an account of the things appearing to you precisely in the
way in which they actually appear.
Philosophy students sometimes think that studying phenomenology entails mainly reading books. However, learning to see the
things appearing to you precisely in the way in which they
actually appear takes practice. Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s best
known student, had great difficulty at the beginning of his study
of phenomenology.
It concerned the simple question how thinking’s
manner of procedure which called itself “phenomenology” was to be carried out…. My perplexity
decreased slowly…only after I met Husserl personally
in his workshop…. Husserl’s teaching took place in a
step-by-step training in phenomenological “seeing”
which at the same time demanded that one relinquish
the untested use of philosophical knowledge…. I
myself practiced phenomenological seeing, teaching
and learning in Husserl’s proximity after 1919.45
The phenomenological seeing that one would practice is
founded on an act called “the phenomenological reduction.”
While the reduction was instituted in the service of phenomenological philosophy, Husserl was aware of a powerful transformative effect it could have upon the person practicing it:
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Perhaps it will even turn out that the total phenomenological attitude, and the [reduction] belonging to it,
essentially has, first of all, the vocation of effecting a
complete personal transformation, which would, in the
first place, be comparable to a religious conversion,
but which beyond that contains within itself the
significance of being the greatest existential transformation to which humanity as humanity is called.46
Yājñavalkya would note at this point that the designation
“greatest existential transformation”—like the earlier “existential
break” associated with conjunction in Averroes—also fits with the
experience of “waking up to” (pratibodham) Brahman (KeU,
II.4).
In characterizing the phenomenological reduction, I shall
borrow the descriptions of the Husserl’s closest collaborator in his
later years, Eugen Fink, because they are vivid and strongly
suggestive of awakening to Brahman.47 The phenomenological
reduction is a two-part act (F, 41). Husserl called the first
component of that act a “disconnection” (Ausschaltung) or an
epoché (ἐποχή)—a suspension of the “natural attitude,” the
attitude in which we take things for granted, or as a matter of
course (als selbstverständlich).
Disconnection means that you deliberately abstain from all
beliefs; you inhibit your customary acceptance of what “counts”
(das Geltende) for you (F, 39-40). In Sartre’s terms, you cease
living in acts of positional consciousness. While remaining
disconnected, as we observed Sartre doing, you turn your
attention from the objects of consciousness to the awareness
ingredient in consciousness-of-objects. You are not caught up
with objects, but are attentively “spread” over the whole of
consciousness-of-objects, without positing that whole as an
object. And you alter your mode of attention from an active
searching-for to a receptive letting-things-come. You are learning
to do something involuntary, like preparing to receive “the
visitation of sleep,” which comes as the god Dionysus visits his
followers, when they no longer are distinct from the role they are
playing.48 You are not gradually acquiring things in the way the
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disposed intellect acquires intelligibles.
The disconnection includes the “nullification” of the sense of
yourself as an empirical human being—it “un-humanizes”
(entmenschlicht) you inasmuch as it “lays bare the…onlooker in
himself” that is “already at work” in you, into which you now
“fade away” (F, 40). In the terminology of this essay, you
disidentify with your sense of self, and you pass into awareness
instead of remaining in consciousness. Yājñavalkya might remark
that the realization of Brahman involves a similar correlation
between the deconstruction of the sense of self (nir-aham-kāra)
and a fading away into the “witness,” which, as we have seen, was
already at work.
You are now in a position to notice precisely what appears to
you in just the way in which it appears. As with Freud’s evenly
suspended attention, all the phenomena are treated equally; none
is assumed in advance to have priority over the others. As in the
case of painterly vision, you are not imposing your knowledge on
your experiencing; you are operating “prior” to your identification of things or events. Your going backwards involves a sort
of reversal of the outward-turning action of the agent intellect.
For the agent intellect elicited intelligibles from their latent state
in the appearances, whereas the disconnection goes back behind
those intelligibles, which, due to language, are already at work in
our ordinary experience of the appearances. In its open attentiveness, the disconnection has an “empty” relationship to
experience, perhaps somewhat like the agent intellect in its
“empty” state as material intellect.
The second component of the phenomenological reduction,
the reducing proper, is a leading-back.49 In the reducing, “while
explicitly inquiring backwards behind the acceptednesses…with
respect to your belonging to the world,” you “blast open
(sprengen),” through transcendental insight, the “captivation and
captivity (Befangenheit)” caused by those world-acceptednesses.
You experience this as a “breakthrough” (Durchbruch; FK, 348).
As a result, you discover for the first time that a primordial
conviction (Husserl calls this an Urdoxa) has been underlying all
of your experiences—an unformulated, implicit acceptance of the
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world and of yourself as belonging to it (F, 40-41). Here ‘world’
refers, not to the collection of all things, but to what is originally
given as a universal background, in the way a horizon is given for
vision. While you may have occasionally experienced a
breakdown of particular beliefs in the past, that did not shake your
implicit acceptance of the horizon.
You are now sharing in the onlooker’s awareness of the
world, which is the “universally flowing and continuing [world-]
apperception,” the “underground” (Untergrund) out of which
every act of consciousness springs up. In this sense, phenomenology is said to make the ultimate ground of the world available
to an experience (FK, 349, 352, 340),50 one in which we
experience “how…the world is coming about for us” (Husserl
1962, 147.29-32).
Yājñavalkya might accept the notion that painterly vision,
evenly suspended attention, and the phenomenological reduction
are at least partial Brahman-experiences, ones that go beyond the
spontaneously arising Brahman-moments on the football field or
on the highway. However, he would point out two differences.
First, they are cultivated in the service of other ends—painting,
healing patients, or pursuing wisdom—whereas realization of
Brahman is the supreme end (BU, IV.3.22), pursued for its own
sake. Second, in the other contexts awareness is to be actualized
only on particular occasions—before the canvas, in the consulting
room, or in the phenomenological “workshop”—whereas one
remains continually in the Brahman-realm.
According to Husserl, in going about the course of ordinary
life, the phenomenologist has the epoché as “an active-dispositional51 attitude to which we resolve ourselves once and for all”
and which “can be actualized again and again” (Husserl 1962,
153.36-37 and 140.19-20), like the dancer’s repeated re-actualizing of the dancing that she has as a first actuality. This raises the
question whether the knower of Brahman could be said to be
Brahman in this dispositional sense.
In the Upanishadic tradition you may engage in a meditative
practice, in which you could pass through several stages. At the
beginning you deliberately concentrate and turn your
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consciousness inward, while endeavoring to dwell more and more
in awareness (Sekida 1985, 62 and 93).52 You need to keep
reminding yourself to notice the awareness, which is always
there. Initially you cannot accomplish this while you are doing
something else, because a thing or event always captures your
attention.
After a while you will be able to maintain this centering of
yourself in awareness. While your mind gradually has become
dominated by awareness, you still occasionally experience
moments of conscious reflection on the immediately preceding
moment of awareness (Sekida 1985, 93).53 You are now “allowing
the mind to fluctuate.” The following analogy may convey some
sense of this experience.54 Suppose a neighbor were to ask you to
look after her children. When the children come, you could take
one of three different courses of action: first, you could abandon
responsibility by telling them that they can do whatever they want
as long as they don’t bother you; or, second, you could try to
control them by telling them what to do and what not to do; or,
third, you could
allow the children to play. This “allowing” is not
active, since you do not interfere. It is not passive,
since you are present with the children…in a total
way. It is like a cat sitting at a mouse hole. It appears
to be asleep, but let the mouse show but a whisker and
the cat will pounce. It is only by allowing that one
truly understands what allowing means.
“Allowing” brings awareness to the fore in a way that pushing
away and controlling do not.55 You are aware of movements from
focused to unfocused consciousness, of shifts from perceptual to
thinking consciousness, of fluctuations from consciousness-of to
empty awareness, and so forth, as well as of the reversals of all
these. “Allowing is…so to say, what fluctuating awareness is
‘made of.’”
Eventually no reflection is experienced any more; this total
wakefulness completely purifies one of the “sleepiness” which is
what the “habit” of consciousness really is (Sekida 1985, 62 and
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94).56 To be aware you don’t have to be conscious of something;
nor do you need to be someone, much less someone special (Low
1993, 40).
Positional consciousness-of-objects, which was first for us,
here shows itself to be in fact a derivative of non-positional
awareness, which is what is first in itself. Initially, consciousness
seemed to have the component of awareness; but now we may say
that awareness sometimes manifests itself partially in the form of
consciousness-of-objects, while in itself it is pure awareness (cit).
Again, this is quite analogous to what Averroes said of the agent
intellect. In itself it is pure, having no reference to the world; but,
through its outward turn, it conjoins itself with our imaginations,
resulting in the emergence from it of particular intelligibles.
Upon emerging from this absolute silence, you may be so
forcefully struck by something in the world that you consciously
recognize that you are just pure awareness (Sekida 1985, 95). You
momentarily become conscious of this “objectless being present
with the children in a total way” as yourself. You are now
conscious of having arrived in the Brahman-realm.57 Yājñavalkya
might note that this recognition is what is expressed in the words:
“I am Brahman!” (BU, I.4.10), adding that this experiencing of
pure awareness is what he was referring to when he said:
Though then he does not see [any thing], yet he does
not see while seeing. There is no cutting off of the
seeing of the seer…. But there is no second
(dvitīyam), no other (anyad), separate from him, that
he could see…. When there is some other (anyad),
then one can see…the other (BU, IV.3.23 and 31).
According to this account, pure awareness seems to be empty.
Yājñavalkya could respond that, while it is empty of objects, it is
full in the sense that it is an experiencing of the moment-tomoment “going forth of things in different directions”
(vyuccaranti), like “sparks from a fire” (BU, II.1.20).
Alternatively, it is an experiencing of the whole’s springing forth
(sambhavati), which is like a spider emitting (srjate) a thread of
its web, or like plants springing up from the earth (MuU, I.1.7). It
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is as if in pure awareness we had “gone backward” to a point just
“before” things, self, and world emerge. This brings to mind a
passage in Sartre: “Thus, each instant of our conscious life reveals
to us a creation ex nihilo...[—]this inexhaustible creation of
existence of which we are not the creators” (S, 79).
Yājñavalkya’s characterization of the fullness of pure
awareness is conveyed by the traditional name for the Brahmanrealm, saccidānanda. The three parts of the one word express the
oneness of pure existence (sat), pure awareness (cit), and pure joy
(ānanda). Since there is no “of,” as in “consciousness-of,”
awareness is pure sat rather than a consciousness of it. Fink seems
to be giving voice to the same experience when he refers to the
unique identity of the onlooker and the universally flowing worldapperception: as “there is…no other (anyad), separate from him,
that he could see,” so there are no objects to separate the onlooker
from the flowing world-apperception (FK, 355).
This oneness of existence and awareness appears in the
Thomistic branch of the Aristotelian tradition as follows: Each of
us exists by virtue of a separate act of “is-ing” (esse), which is
something other than our essence, our humanity. A human being
is, not by virtue of being human, but by participation in, or
reception of, is-ing from, absolute Is-ing, just as a piece of wood
that is afire is so by participation in Fire (ST, Q.3, A.4r). Absolute
Is-ing is like the Sun, and a human being is like some part of the
air. Each individual instantiation of the intelligible human essence
remains illuminated, that is, continues is-ing, only as long as
absolute Is-ing is shining on it (ST, Q.8, A.1r). That is why
Thomas says that what we call “creation” is, in fact, an ongoing
“flowing out, arising, springing out (emanatio)” (ST, Q.44, A.1r)
from absolute Is-ing. This much of Thomas’s view can help us to
understand how the Upanishadic experience of cit is an
experience of sat.
Jacques Maritain (1956) applied Thomas’s understanding of
the distinction between esse and essence to interpret the
experience of the knower of Brahman in the following way.58 In
reflecting consciousness we experience our soul in its acts. What
we experience in reflection is not our intelligible essence but
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rather our self as “prisoner of the mobility, of the multiplicity, of
the fugitive luxuriance of the phenomena and the operations
which emerge in us from the night of the unconscious—prisoner
of the apparent self” (145-46). But, as we have seen, the cultivation of awareness, as distinct from consciousness or reflecting
consciousness, enables those on the path toward realizing
Brahman to pass out of ordinary self-conscious experience and
into “an exceptional and privileged experience, emptying into the
abyss of subjectivity…to escape from the apparent self, in order
to reach the absolute Self” (146). These practitioners “strip
themselves of every image, of every particular representation, and
of every distinct operation to such a degree that…they reach not
the essence of their soul but its existence, substantial esse itself”
(148) “by an…annihilating connaturality” (146), in the absolute
silence of total wakefulness.
[F]rom the fact that existence is…limited only by the
essence that receives it…one can understand that this
negative experience, in reaching the substantial esse
of the soul, reaches, at once, both this existence
proper to the soul and existing in its metaphysical
profusion and the sources of existing, according as the
existence of the soul…is something that is emanating
and is pervaded by an inflow from which it holds
everything…. It is the sources of being in his soul that
the human being reaches in this way (153-54).
Thus, through practice in experiencing pure awareness (cit), the
knower of Brahman has come to experience himself as the inflow
of is-ing flowing out from absolute Is-ing (sat). One might say
that the transition from experiencing myself as the witness to
recognizing pure awareness is like going from having my finger
on the pulsing of the world to recognizing my finger as the
pulsing of the world. Maritain’s interpretation clearly distinguishes the Sun of Averroes’ outward-turned self-intellection of
intelligible essences from the Sun of outflowing self-aware
existence.
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Now we are in a position to say that when Śvetaketu realizes
“You are That,” he is experiencing himself as the outflow of sat
and he is recognizing, as his true self, pure awareness (of) the
continual emanation of sparks that are “on the way” to becoming
things—and that this recognizing is that very outflow. Moreover,
in this recognition Śvetaketu is what is recognized: “One who
knows the supreme Brahman becomes that very Brahman” (MuU,
III.2.9; cf. BU, IV.4.13) and “becomes this All” (BU, I.4.10).
Just as we wondered earlier what the daily experience of the
state of complete conjunction would be like, so now the
analogous question arises with respect to the Brahman-realm. In
the discussion of the phenomenological reduction, I raised the
possibility that we could acquire pure awareness as a first
actuality, in the sense of an active disposition. The knower of
Brahman would then alternate between pure awareness and
consciousness-of, in the way that I can “turn on” or “turn off” my
contemplation of the Pythagorean Theorem as I wish. This
suggestion would parallel Aristotle’s experience that we are, for
intermittent periods of time, in the same state as the divine itself
is over the whole of time. The difference would be that instead of
turning from one mode of consciousness (say, perceiving or
thinking) to another (intellecting), the knower of Brahman alternates at will between two different ways of total experiencing—
between consciousness and pure awareness. It would be
somewhat analogous to looking at the well-known ambiguous
figure of the duck-rabbit, and seeing it now as a duck, now as a
rabbit.
We learn from Yājñavalkya that living in the Brahman-realm
is, instead, like a hypothetical double seeing of both the duck and
the rabbit at once, rather than like a seeing of them in alternation
(Carter 1997, 54).59 The knower of Brahman is engaged with
“consciousness-of” while simultaneously remaining in the realm
of pure awareness. The following analogy, in which the author
(Sharma) quotes Ramana Maharshi, conveys something of this:
The ordinary person only sees the reflection in the
mirror but the realized person sees the reflection as
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well as the mirror. “For instance you see a reflection
in the mirror and the mirror. You know the mirror to
be the reality and the picture in it a mere reflection. Is
it necessary that to see the mirror we should cease to
see the reflection in it?” Similarly, the realized one
continues to experience the world in his realized state.
Thus the realized person appreciates “the distinctions”
of sound, taste, form, smell etc. “But he always
perceives and experiences the one reality in all of
them.”60
Brahman-knowers experience the everyday world in the mirror of
purified awareness, and this makes possible their keen yet calm
involvement in that world. In the analogy we could take “seeing
the reflection” to stand for consciousness of the world, and
“seeing the mirror,” for pure awareness. When I see the mirror
along with the reflections, the latter are not being viewed “from
outside,” as they are in the mode of consciousness, but rather as
emerging out of awareness. One might also apply the analogy to
the self by saying that knowers of Brahman experience their
ordinary selves, too, as being virtual images cast by the mirror.
The mirror analogy may be applied to the modes of experiencing other than those encountered specifically in meditative
practice. Consciousness-of-objects in any manner—perceiving,
sensing, emoting, evaluating, thinking, and so on—and selfconsciousness, too, are like a vision of things in the virtual space
of the mirror. There are two fundamentally different modes of
consciousness-of-objects, depending upon whether the object in
question is an object in the true sense. When it maintains itself
throughout a succession of acts of consciousness, it is an object in
the etymological sense, namely something set or put (jectum)
before or over against (ob) the act of consciousness. This settingover-against is what is meant by “subject-object duality.” Such an
object shall be referred to henceforth as an ‘Object.’ It has an
identity, to which we may return again and again.
The following example illustrates the different layers that
may arise in perceptual consciousness-of-Objects. It begins with
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the emergence of an implicit Object from the background,
continues with a prepredicative explicating of it, and then
undergoes various layers of predicative development. The
following illustration may help to explain this: While I am
engaged in seminar, someone’s coffee cup may emerge from the
margins of my consciousness and may attract my attention and
become an explicit object of consciousness. My attention may
travel from its color to a figure on the side, and then to its overall
shape, and so on.61 Then my interest may awaken sufficiently so
that I think, “The cup has a circular figure on the side.” This shift
represents a transition from the cup’s just previously having
become implicitly determined as having a circle on its side to its
being grasped in an active identification as determined by the
circle on its side.62 Then I may think, “The fact that the cup has
that circular figure on its side is puzzling. I wonder what it stands
for.” My thought may subsequently be led to such Objects as “the
circular,” “shape in general,” and “property.”63
“Prior” to such perceptual consciousness of Objects and its
developments, there is a sensory consciousness of objects that has
been vividly described by Erwin Straus (1956). We sense objects
in the same way in which we respond to the dynamic quality of a
tone, which is “a state of unrest, a tension, an urge, almost a will
to move on, as if a force were acting on the tone and pulling it in
a certain direction” (Zuckerkandl 1959, 19). We are in a
symbiotic relation (Straus 1956, 200) with the “tones,” to which
we respond with incipient movements as we do to dance music
(239). This pre-linguistic, flowing realm is the ground from which
Objects emerge (204). We live simultaneously in the Objective
and the sensory and may experience the tension between them, as
the latter resists being fit into the former. Some people may be
especially attracted to the loss of their stance over-against
Objects, to the dispersion of their self-consciousness, and to the
blurring of the distinctness within the Objective realm (284 and
275). Precisely because of its lack of subject-Object duality and
self-consciousness, sensory consciousness is occasionally
mistaken for awareness by beginners. It is, however, just another
way of viewing the reflections in the virtual space produced by
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the mirror.
All of the above are distinctions that can be seen clearly in the
vision of that virtual space. In addition to seeing these distinctions, the knower of Brahman sees the virtual space and its reflections as emanating from the mirror. This second sort of seeing is
pure awareness. While awareness is never totally absent from our
experience, we notice it to varying degrees.
Usually, the degree to which we notice it is very minimal—as
when we seem to be, in Sartre’s words, “hypnotized” by what we
are conscious of. This is our “default” mode of experiencing.
When we are reading, thinking, conversing in seminar, dancing,
gazing at a sunset, or “even stretching out a hand to open the
door,” we are absorbed in that moment’s action (Sekida 1985, 91).
When we are self-conscious, we are also absorbed in the selfconsciousness. In absorption, awareness seems to have gotten
lost; but it has only receded into the deep background.
In some special moments, which have been called moments
of “flow” (Csikszentmilalyi 1990), awareness becomes prominent
in an incidental way:
A rock climber explains how it feels when he is
scaling a mountain: “You are so involved in what you
are doing [that] you aren’t thinking of yourself as
separate from the immediate activity” (53).
The absence of the self from consciousness does
not mean that a person in flow has given up the
control of his psychic energy, or that she is unaware of
what happens in her body or in her mind…. A good
runner is usually aware of every relevant muscle in his
body, of the rhythm of his breathing, as well as of the
performance of his competitors within the overall
strategies of the race (64).
We do not deliberately pursue such moments; they just
happen. The flow experience may be spontaneous, as in the earlier
examples of the driver and of the woman sewing; or it may be
skill-related, as in the examples of Joe Montana, the surgeon, and
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the rock climber. In the case of skill-related flow experiences, one
might say that the body’s usual resistance to intended action is
overcome by practice. As a result, consciousness as “overagainst” the body disappears, allowing awareness to become
prominent. We move out of flow when the “over-againstness”
arises again as the “I” becomes active either in reaction (“Wow!
This is so exciting!”) or in action (“If I bear down, I can keep this
going”).
As we saw in relation to painting, psychoanalysis, and
phenomenology, prominence of awareness may be deliberately
cultivated in order to be able to engage in some pursuit. Here
awareness is practiced, so that the practitioner comes to
experience the witness as a disposition. Once the practitioner
comes to possess the witness as a first actuality, he or she can then
activate it when engaging in the activity for the sake of which it
was developed.
Finally, in the double seeing of the knower of Brahman, pure
mirror-awareness is permanently prominent as a second actuality;
and there is a “loose,” “unstuck,” clear consciousness-of-objects
as well. This is said to be the state of one “freed while alive”
(jīvanmukta; cf. BU, IV.4.7).
In virtue of the oneness of sat and cit, this double seeing is
one with the out-flowing of existence. Thus, freedom manifests
itself on the one hand inasmuch as one’s awareness is active or
creative in respect to the world, and on the other hand inasmuch
as one’s action is responsive or receptive with respect to the
world—a reversal of the usual receptivity of consciousness and
activity of action (Yuasa 1987, 68). In the realm of action, this
freedom is freedom to respond without a “hitch” to the [field of
dynamic qualities] in the field of experience, which are analogous
to the directional arc involved in realizing the full significance of
a situation mentioned in Part One. These field [tensions] include
what Yājñavalkya takes Aristotle to be referring to when he
speaks of feeling feelings or performing actions as required
(δεῖ)—in the required cases, with respect to the required people,
in the required way, and for the required reasons (NE, 1106b1727).
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Another way of putting this is to say that the freedom of the
knower of Brahman manifests itself in the ability to be able to
move freely through the world with grace and effortlessness,
which [preserves thoughful awareness] (σοφροσύνη):65
For σοφροσύνη is precisely the virtue of general and
unself-conscious self-possession, of universal grace
and effortless command neither specified by particular
action, which would transform it from σοφροσύνη to
some particular virtue, nor checked by any opacity,
which would translate it into a mode of self-control.
What could work better for its model than a pure
objectless knowledge?
Knowers of Brahman have no inner barriers that can impede the
spontaneous emergence of whatever is called for by the current
moment.
In conclusion, we note certain formal parallels between the
role of Brahman in the Upanishads and that of the agent intellect
according to Averroes. First, each is the source—Brahman, the
source of all existence; the agent intellect, the source of all being,
that is, of all intelligibility. Second, both are “self-luminous” and
are responsible for “seeing” in some sense. Third, the non-dual
relation between the individual self and Brahman is like that
between the disposed intellect and the agent intellect. Fourth, a
“self-forgetting” “outward turn” occurs in the case of each of
them. Fifth, both the experience of Brahman and the experience
of intellection could be said to involve a breaking-free from my
ordinary captivation by the images on the walls of a cave-like
dwelling; both involve engaging in practice; and both ultimately
arrive at an existential breakthrough to “immortalizing.” In that
breakthrough, in both cases, I deconstruct my ordinary sense of
self and discover my true self as being both non-private (that is,
not mine alone) and non-dual with respect to the true self of
others.
There are fundamental differences, however, in other
respects. In the case of intellection, one escapes the captivity of
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opinions and of the perceptual world by becoming free for intelligibles through the gradual purification of theoretical study; in
the case of realizing Brahman, one escapes the captivity of the
mundane way of experiencing objects, regardless of whether they
appear in sensory, perceptual, or intellectual consciousness, by a
sudden shift from involvement in consciousness (whether firstdegree or reflective) to pure awareness—a shift that may be
experienced by the practice of cultivating awareness. Moreover,
the one, impersonal, non-dual, true self of us all, in which we
share in our immortalizing, is understood by Averroes to be the
self-intellection of the agent intellect; Yājñavalkya, on the other
hand, understands it to be pure awareness. And finally, in intellection, the material intellect realizes conjunction with the agent
intellect, which is the source of all intelligibility in the world; in
experiencing Brahman, however, pure [selfawareness] realizes
that it is non-dual with respect to the emergence of existence in its
entirety, encompassing both the sensory and the intelligible
realms.
Jacob Klein makes the following comment on Aristotle: the
receptive aspect of “νοεῖν…is the state of wakefulness, a state of
preparedness and alertness…. Νοῦς…when it is…one with the
νοητά….[—o]nly then can be said to be wakefulness ‘at work’”
(Klein 1964, 65). Looking back at the beginning of this essay,
Yājñavalkya might wonder how Homer’s realization of the full
significance of a situation,66 Aristotle’s reception of an intelligible, and Averroes’ complete conjunction with the agent
intellect’s self-intellection would compare, in regard to their
degrees of wakefulness, with dwelling in pure awareness.
He might think that the major difference between the
Upanishads and our three Western thinkers is that in the former
the state of empty receptivity is supreme—that is, even more
wakeful than “wakefulness at work.” But, alternately, it might be
that Averroes’ account of complete conjunction is a satisfactory
partial depiction of Brahman. If we focus on the emerging
revelation that occurs in the empty, receptive intellect’s becoming
one with a “profile” of the full, unitary agent intellect, we may be
considering one face of Brahman, as it were, namely, the intel-
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lectual one. Perhaps Klein was directing our attention to the
wakefulness of the experiential living-through of such a moment,
a wakefulness that, however, is not limited to the intellectual
sphere.
Let us allow Yājñavalkya the last word: “What you may be
overlooking is that the empty, receptive material intellect is an
appearance of the outward turning of the full source of determinacy, the agent intellect, whereas, in the case of Brahman, the
full and determinate is an appearance of the outward turning of
the empty.”
1
This essay is a revision of two NEH-supported lectures given at St. John’s
College, Annaopolis, on February 15 and 19, 2008 and dedicated to the
memory of Ralph Swentzell, who did so much to further the study of Eastern
Classics at St. John’s College.
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meditate on them as [being] simply the Self (BU, I.4.7).
9
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1075a7-11: “So, the condition the human intellect...
is in at some period of time...is the condition the intellection that intellects
itself is in over the whole of time.” Cf.: “For the gods, the whole of life is
blessed, and for human beings it is so to the extent that there is in it some
likeness to such a state of activity” (NE, 1178b25-26).
10
I am indebted to my colleague, Michael Blaustein, for a very fruitful recent
conversation about Averroes. This section is based upon the works of Altmann,
Black, Blaustein, Hyman, Ivry, Leaman, and Zedler listed in the bibliography.
Leaman and Zedler have been particularly helpful for the early part, but I have
taken most of it from Black. In the later part I have relied heavily on
Blaustein’s working out of the details of the relation between agent and
material intellects and have made significant use of Altmann and Ivry,
especially the latter’s thoughts about conjunction while we are still alive.
However, responsibility for any errors that there may be in the interpretation of
Averroes is mine alone.
2
This and the following few paragraphs are based on K. von Fritz, “ΝΟΟΣ
and ΝΟΕΙΝ in the Homeric Poems,” Classical Philology 38 (1943), 79-93.
‘aql bi al-malaka, which means intellect in natural disposition, aptitude,
faculty; intellectus in habitu.
3
12
Also: “the intellective [part of the soul] intellects the [intelligible] looks in
appearances” (De anima 431b2). I accept Nussbaum’s (1978) suggestion about
the meaning of φαντσία. It is based on such passages as the following 428a1,
7, 14ff., & and 29ff., as well as; 428b30ff.), wherein in which the link between
φαντσία and φαίνεσθαι seems compelling.
The translations from Homer are based upon those listed in the bibliography.
4
This “directional arc” is analogous, at a higher level, to Merleau-Ponty’s arc
intentionnel on the level of sensing (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 158).
5
The following few paragraphs are based on W. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The
Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954).
6
Since this essay is intended to be an introduction to a way of experiencing, it
will not go very far into the many conceptual distinctions that have come to be
seen as part of the Upanishadic teaching. For instance, there is no discussion
of the distinction between nirguṇa and saguṇa Brahman. While it is true that
such distinctions do reflect distinctions in experience, the reader who is being
introduced to the way of experiencing in question is not likely to have encountered them.
7
This quotation and the situation described in the following sentence derive
from HG, 6, 210, 195.
8
The Inner Controller is depicted mythologically as follows:
He entered in here right to the tips of the nails, as a razor slips into
a razor-case…. When he breathes he is called ‘breath’; when he
speaks, ‘speech’; when he sees, ‘eye’; when he hears, ‘ear’; when
he thinks, ‘mind.’ They are just the names of his actions. Whoever
meditates on any one of these does not know [the Self], for [the
Self] is not completely active in any one of them. One should
11
13
In fact, for Averroes, the imagination or, more properly, the cogitative
power—which, together with the imagination and memory, prepares what is
given in sensation, so that, when illumined by the agent intellect, the intelligible look can appear through and in-form the material intellect—is a fourth
intellect, the passible intellect (LC, 449.174, and cfp. 409.640). “The cogitative
power has the following functions: it can make an absent object appear as
though present; it can compare and distinguish the re-presented objects with
each other; it can judge whether a given re-presented object bears a relation to
a directly presented sense intention” (Zedler 1954, 441).
14
Yet because the human species is eternal, the succession of human souls in
which intellection of intelligibles of mundane things occurs ensures the continuity of intellection in the material intellect and the omnitemporality of the
intelligible looks of mundane things as such. Through the repeated presentation of potential intelligibles in imaginative appearances, this succession
“provides a replica in time and in matter of the eternal” intellection of the
agent intellect (Zedler 1951, 173). It is possible that the belief that souls
migrate into different bodies in succession is a reflection in the form of popular
myth of the truth of the omnitemporal unity of the material intellect in the
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multiplicity of disposed intellects (Altmann 1965, 82).
15
The agent intellect in this incidental connection would be what Aristotle
referred to as the intellect that enters “from outside the door”: “It remains then
that intellect alone enters additionally into [the seed of a human being] from
outside the door (θύραθεν) and that it alone is divine, for corporeal being-atwork has nothing in common with its being-at-work” (De generatione et
corruptione 736b27). Cf.:
But the intellect seems to come to be in [us] while being an
independent thing, and not to be destroyed…. [I]ntellecting or
contemplating wastes away because something else in us is
destroyed, but it is itself unaffected (without attributes). But
thinking things through and loving or hating are affections
(attributes) not of the intellect but of that which has intellect,
insofar as it has it. For this reason, when the latter is destroyed,
the intellect neither remembers nor loves, for these acts did not
belong to it but to the composite being which has perished; the
intellect is perhaps something more divine and is unaffected (OS,
408b18ff.).
What Averroes actually says is that the incidental connection constitutes a
“disposition” (isti‘dād, which means readiness, willingness, preparedness,
inclination, tendency, disposition, propensity; dispositio) of the agent intellect,
but one located within human souls. It is a disposition to receive the intelligible looks of mundane things. Thus, the material intellect is in reality the
agent-intellect-as-having-such-a-disposition-in-human-beings.
16 Based
on Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072b12: “[I]t is beautiful and in that way
a source.”
17
When my disposed intellect is actively engaged in intellecting an intelligible
look, it is also intellecting itself, since, as Aristotle points out, the intellect is
one with what it intellects, in that the second actuality of both is identical, as
lumber’s being built is one with the activity of building. In contemplating itself
as informed by the intelligible look, my intellect is also directed toward the
image, which specifies the particular look that is to be received, in the same
way in which, when we look at a painting, we are directed toward the scene
that we see in it. However, since the mundane thing toward which the intellect
is directed via the image is not pure intelligibility, the disposed intellect’s selfintellection is not pure self-intellection; its act of intellection is not absolutely
one with its object of intellection. In this way it differs from the self-intellection of the agent intellect; for the object of the agent intellect’s intellection
does not point beyond itself.
18 What had been my intellect would now be either fully (Blaustein 1984, 272
and 283) or partly assimilated to the agent intellect. That is, either “I” would
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be engaged in intellection of everything intelligible or, having abandoned all
the contingent aspects of my intellection, I would be focusing solely on its
formal aspects, which are supplied by the agent intellect, so that I would be
participating in an aspect of the formal governing source of the whole
(Leaman 1998, 101-03).
19
Ittisāl =connectedness, unitedness, union; juncture, conjunction, link;
connection; contact (from wasala = to connect, join, unite, combine, link,
attach). Continuatio = a following of one thing after another, an unbroken
series, a connection, continuation, succession (from continuare = to join
together in uninterrupted succession, to make continuous). Wasala may be a
reformulation of Aristotle’s θίξις.
Altmann (1965, 83) says that this notion reflects Plotinus’s συνάπτειν (= [1]
[transitive] to join together; [2] [intransitive] to border on, lie next to;
combine, be connected with). Consider: “[W]e lift ourselves up by the part [of
the soul] which is not submerged in the body and by this conjoin at our own
centres to something like the Centre of all things…. [W]e must suppose that
[our souls conjoin] by other powers, in the way in which that which is engaged
in intellection naturally conjoins with that which is being thoroughly intellected and that that which is engaged in intellection…conjoins with what is
akin to it with nothing to keep them apart” (Plotinus, VI.9.8.19-30).
Altmann (1965, 83n.) also mentions that Plotinus refers to his experience of
union as a contact (ἁφή). However, in Averroes, “conjunction” (ittisāl) is to be
distinguished from “union” (ittihād); the latter signifies oneness, singleness,
unity; concord, unison, unanimity; combination; amalgamation, merger, fusion;
union, (from wahada = [1] to be alone, unique; [2] to make into one, unite,
unify; to connect, unite, bring together, amalgamate, merge). In Greek the
corresponding word is ἕνωσις = combination into one, union.
20
In its perfected state, as engaged in intellection of the agent intellect, the
disposed intellect is called the intellectus adeptus (Hyman n.d., 188), “intellect
that has reached to or attained or obtained.”
21
Altmann 1965, 74, characterizing the position of Averroes’ teacher.
22
Blaustein 1984, 284. Cf. also: “[T]he material intellect’s awareness of itself
even when it is not thinking of any intelligible form…is itself a kind of
actuality, however empty. Averroes claims that this kind of self-awareness is in
fact the obverse of the [agent] intellect’s fully conscious awareness of itself;
the material intellect’s awareness of its own potentiality is a dim awareness of
its actuality as the [agent] intellect.” (Ibid.)
23
It is interesting to note that with respect to conjunction, the agent intellect
exercises all four kinds of responsibility that Aristotle describes in the Physics.
It is responsible for my attainment of conjunction in functioning as my end
(τέλος). Moreover, it is responsible for the motion of learning, by which I
approach conjunction; for my learning is really its producing intelligibles in
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me by revealing itself to me as the form of my disposed intellect (Blaustein
1984, 276-77). Since the agent intellect is what I am increasingly intellecting
and, thus, coming to be, it is also responsible for conjunction in the manner of
a form. Finally, it is also responsible as material, since the material intellect is
ultimately identical with it. The same could be said of Brahman, with the key
difference that its responsibility is not limited to the realm of intelligibility.
24
Patañjali 1989, IV.34; see also Feuerstein’s comment in Patañjali 1989, 145.
Kaivalya is “the aloneness” of seeing.
25
As far as Averroes’ own position with respect to individual immortality goes,
there are two interesting possibilities. He may have thought that the only
immortality was the impersonal immortality of the state of conjunction and
that philosophers were orienting their lives accordingly; the belief in personal
immortality on the part of ordinary people would then be the closest approximation to truth of which they were capable. On the other hand, he may have
held that, while only a few intellects may attain conjunction, all souls are
immortal (Zedler 1954, 451-52). There is a somewhat similar divergence in the
Upanishadic tradition between Śankara’s position that the individual self is in a
sense unreal and Rāmānuja’s view that individual selves, while not
independent, are real.
26
Cf. the following passages: “Since [in all cases of seeing and hearing] we
are aware (αỉσθανόμεθα) that we are seeing and hearing, it must either be by
sight that we are aware [for example] that we are seeing or by some other
[sense]” (OS, 425b11-12). “To each sense there belongs something special and
something common. For example, what is special to sight is to see, [what is
special] to hearing is to hear, and similarly with the rest. But there is also a
certain common power that goes along with all of them, by which one is also
aware that one is seeing and hearing (for it is not, after all, by sight that one is
seeing that one is seeing).” (De somno et vigilia, 455a12-5.)
27
We may speak of self-consciousness in the sense as consciousness of myself
only “after” the construction of the sense of self, which is discussed in the text
below.
28
By Kosman (1975), who also made reference to Sartre’s La Transcendence
de l’Ego. In planning the lectures, I had intended to use Sartre to introduce the
notion of selfawareness (see footnote 29) as an alternative to anything in
Aristotle. However, Kosman’s article, which I discovered while writing the
lectures, made it possible to cite Aristotle himself in order to introduce this
notion.
29
I write “selfawareness” and “awareness (of) itself” to suggest that the
relationship between awareness and what it is aware (of) is not the same as
that between consciousness and the object of consciousness. I am following
Sartre’s practice in L’être et le néant (pp. 18-20), where he writes conscience
(de) soi to refer to what I am calling “selfawareness” or “awareness (of)
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itself.”
30
In La Transcendance de l’Ego, from which the quotations are taken, Sartre
uses only one word, conscience, which I have rendered as “consciousness”
when it is positional and as “awareness” when it is non-positional. Moreover,
he does not here write conscience (de), as he did later (see footnote 28).
31 What is said will apply as well to consciousness that is imagining, remembering, judging, thinking, intellecting, feeling, or evaluating.
32
See footnote 34.
33
The last two sentences represent my understanding of Gurwitsch 1985, 5,
second paragraph.
34
Gurwitsch (1941) pointed out that this account of the arising of the sense of
self is incompatible with the fact that reflection can accomplish no more than
to render explicit the content of the reflected-upon consciousness (332-33). He
later (1985) offered a corrected account of the construction of the psychical
empirical sense of self (15ff.). It is based on the recognition that both states
and qualities “designate psychic constants, i.e., regularities of
experience…rather than mental facts which themselves fall under direct
experience” (15), as they do in Sartre.
35
I remember many years ago reading an article by him in The Washington
Post, in which he described his experience in something like these terms.
36
These characteristics are similar to those in the example of the violinist in
Csikszentmihalyi 1990: “A violinist must be extremely aware of every
movement of her fingers, as well as of the sound entering her ears, and of the
total form of the piece she is playing, both analytically, note by note, and
holistically, in terms of its overall design” (64).
37
Bankei 2000, 58. I have substituted “awareness” first for “the Unborn” and
then for “it,” referring to her Buddha-mind.
38
This word is used passim in Husserl 1964.
39
It need not be living beings with respect to which we experience the
connection: “The [mountain] climber, focusing all her attention on the small
irregularities of the rock wall that will have to support her weight safely,
speaks of the sense of kinship that develops between fingers and rock.” “This
feeling is not just a fancy of the imagination, but is based on a concrete
experience of close interaction with some Other.” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 64)
40
A popular book on learning to draw tells us of a subjective state that artists
speak of, which is characterized by “a sense of close ‘connection’ with the
work, a sense of timelessness, difficulty in using words…a lack of anxiety, a
sense of close attention to shapes and spaces and forms that remain nameless.”
It is important for the artist to experience the shift from the ordinary state to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
this one. The student is encouraged to set up the proper “conditions for this
mental shift” and to become “able to recognize and foster this state (Edwards
1979, 46). These characteristics correspond quite well with the qualities of a
consciousness in which awareness is in the foreground.
41
Merleau-Ponty 1961, 166, translation modified.
42 The articulation in this paragraph emerged in a conversation with Nina
Haigney, just a few minutes before I delivered this lecture. It was an example
of the sort of thing it attempts to articulate—a conversation, with awareness to
some degree in the foreground, allowing for the experience of “a certain
emptiness,” followed by the emergence, in two people, of an “authentic
word”—or a least a relatively authentic one.
43
The quotation from Freud is from “Recommendations to Physicians
Practicing Psychoanalysis” (1912).
44
By Theodore Reik in 1948; see Epstein 1904, 199-201.
45
M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, quoted in Ihde 1977, 15; italics added
and translation corrected at one point.
46
Husserl 1962, 140.27-33; to maintain consistency of terminology, I substituted “reduction” for “epoché.”
47
Husserl himself conveys the same view in different language (Husserl 1962,
Sections 37-42).
48
Merleau-Ponty 1945, 191, where, however, the expression is not being used
to characterize the phenomenological reduction.
49
The distinction between disconnection and reducing proper parallels that in
the Buddhist tradition between mindfulness (sati) and seeing distinctly in
detail (vi-paśyana).
50
Cf. “And so also must the gaze made free by the epoché be…an experiencing gaze” (Husserl 1962, 156.13-15).
51
I take habituell to correspond to an adjectival form of ἓξις.
52
This stage in the yogic tradition involves eight members, the last three of
which are concentration, meditation, and in-stance (samādhi), which is
opposed both to ex-stasy and to our ordinary counter-stance vis-à-vis objects
(Patañjali 1989, II.29).
53 Cf. Patañjali 1989, I.42 and 44: coincidence with reflection (savicārā
samāpattih).
54 The quotations in the remainder of this paragraph are taken from Low 1993,
149-50; italics added.
55
When allowing the children to play, you are not caught up in their playing;
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65
so, you have a kind of distance from it. Yet you are “with” them, accompanying them. Thus, your distance is of a different kind than the distance that
occurs in objectification, where the ob-ject stands over against you (discussed
in the text below). Moreover, while it might seem as though the objective,
perceptual world were free of captivation, when compared to the dynamic,
sensory realm (discussed in the text below), one can see that the former is, in
fact, grounded in the primordial doxa of the latter.
56 The
role that this experience of pure awareness plays in the Upanishadic
tradition parallels that of the “aloneness of seeing” (drśeh kaivalyam; Patañjali
1989, II.25) in the yogic tradition (Patañjali 1989, III.50; IV.26 and 34).
57
This account of realization of Brahman is based on zen sources. However, as
Shear (1983 and 1990) points out, this experience of awake, pure
selfawareness lacks any empirical qualities or content. As a result, differing
references to it as the Brahman-realm or Buddha-nature are not pointing to
qualitative differences in the experience (Shear 1983, 57-59; 1990, 392). [Note
added in revising the lecture: I now think it would be better to say that the zen
account is an interpretation of the realization of Brahman.]
58
The page numbers given in this paragraph refer to Maritain 1956.
59
Sekida 1985, 91-97, also depicts the corresponding state in the zen tradition
in this way. Carter proposes the comparison with binocular vision. It is interesting that Bion also uses this analogy (Grinberg, Sor, and Tabak di Bianchedi
1993, 35-36).
60
Sharma 1993, 43; first two sets of italics added. The quotation is from
Ramana Maharshi as reported in D. Goodman, ed., The Teachings of Sri
Ramana Maharshi (NY: Arkana, 1985), 42 and 41.
61
Cf. the description in Husserl 1964, 124-25.
62
Cf. the description in Husserl 1964, 206-08.
63
Cf. the descriptions in Husserl 1964, §§58-61, 80-82, 86-87 and in Husserl
1950, §10.
64
The page references in the remainder of this paragraph are from Straus
1956.
65
I believe that Kleist (1964) had the same phenomenon in view when he
reported Herr C.’s words after two anecdotes, one about a graceful dancer who
lost his grace when self-consciousness arose and the other about a bear, who
effortlessly parried every thrust of Herr C.’s rapier with a graceful swipe of his
paw:
[I]n the same degree as, in the organic world, reflection becomes
more obscure and weaker, grace emerges there ever more radiant
and supreme.—Yet just as…the image in a concave mirror, after
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
66
withdrawing to infinity, suddenly comes right in front of us again,
so when consciousness has, as it were, passed through an infinite,
grace will again put in an appearance. Hence, it appears most
purely in the human bodily structure that has either no selfconsciousness or an infinite self-consciousness (Kleist 1964, 67).
That is, in our terms, grace emerges in the realm of animal, sensory
consciousness, a realm that we can experience, but not enter completely
(Straus 1956, 284). And it emerges again in the realm of pure [selfawareness],
in which we are no longer caught up in first- or second-degree consciousness.
66
Another question to pursue might be whether Homer’s realization of full
significance became narrower and more limited in passing over into intellection.
DRUECKER
67
containing Ia, QQ.2-11.
TU
Taittitrīya Upanishad
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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_____, On Sophistical Refutations, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away, tr. E.
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_____, On the Soul, tr. J. Sachs (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2001).
_____, Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study, tr. and ed. J. Sachs (New
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BU
Brihadāranyaka Upanishad
CU
Chāndogya Upanishad
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F
Fink, E., Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental
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FK
“Die Phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der
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HG
Otto, W., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek
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I
Homer, Iliad
IU
Īśā Upanishad
KeU
Kena Upanishad
Black, D., “Conjunction and the Identity of Knower and Known in Averroes,”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1999), 159-84.
LC
Averroes, Long Commentary = Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis
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Blaustein, M., Averroes on the Imagination and the Intellect (University
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MuU
Mundaka Upanishad
NE
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; translation altered in some places.
Carter, R., The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Nishida Kitarō, second edition (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1997).
O
Homer, Odyssey
OS
Aristotle, On the Soul; translation altered in some places.
S
Sartre, J.-P., La Transcendance de l’Ego: Esquisse d’une description
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ST
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Latin text, Volume II,
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(Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953).
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Waddell (New York: South Point Press, 2000).
Bion, W., Attention and Interpretation (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc.,
1970/1983).
Csikszentmihalyi, M., Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New
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Edwards, B., Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing
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Epstein, M., “On the Neglect of Evenly Suspended Attention,” The Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology 16 (1904), 193-205.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
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Fink, E., Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of
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Philipp Reclam Jun., 1964), 58-67.
_____, “Die Phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der
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Kosman, L., “Perceiving that We Perceive: On the Soul III, 2,” The
Philosophical Review 84, No. 4. (Oct., 1975), pp. 499-519.
Grinberg, L., Sor D., and Tabak di Bianchedi, E., New Introduction to the
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Leaman, O., Averroes and His Philosophy (Surrey: Curzon, 1998).
Gurwitsch, A., Marginal Consciousness (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,
1985).
_____, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press,
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_____, “A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 1 (1941), 325-38.
Gurwitsch, A. and Schütz, A., Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of
Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959, ed. R. Grathoff and tr. J Evans
(Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1989).
Homer, The Iliad, 2 vols., tr. A. Murray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1925).
_____, The Iliad of Homer, tr. R. Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1951).
_____, The Odyssey, tr. A. Cook (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974).
_____, The Odyssey of Homer, tr. R. Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row
Publisher, 1967).
Husserl, E., Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die
Transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff,
1962).
_____, Erfahrung und Urteil (Hamburg: Claussen Verlag, 1964).
_____, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen
Philosophie I (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950).
Hyman, A., “Aristotle’s Theory of the Intellect and Its Interpretation by
Averroes” in Studies in Aristotle, ed. D. O’Meara (Washington, DC: The
Catholic University of America Press, n.d.), 161-91.
Ihde, D., Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction (NY: G.P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1977).
Ivry, A., “Averroes on Intellection and Conjunction,” Journal of the American
Oriental Society 86 (1966), 76-85.
Klein, J., “Aristotle, An Introduction,” in Ancients and Moderns, ed., J.
Cropsey (NY: Basic Books, 1964).
Low, A., The Butterfly’s Dream: In Search of the Roots of Zen (Rutland, VT:
Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1993).
Maritain, J., Quatre essais sur l’esprit dans sa condition charnelle (Paris:
Alsatia, 1956).
Merleau-Ponty, M., “Eye and Mind” (1961), tr. C. Dallery, in The Primacy of
Perception, ed. J. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
_____, Phénoménolgie de la perception (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945).
Moore, G. E., “The Refutation of Idealism,” in Philosophical Studies (Totowa,
NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1965).
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in her Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1978).
Otto, W., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1954).
Patañjali, The Yoga-Sutra of Patañjali, tr. G. Feuerstein (Rochester, VT: Inner
Traditions International, 1989)
Plotinus, Enneads, Volumes III, V, VI, and VII, tr. A. H. Armstrong
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967-88).
Sartre, J.-P., L’être et le néant (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1943).
_____, La Transcendance de l’Ego: Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique (Paris: Vrin, 1966). [Originally published 1936.]
Schütz, A., “Scheler’s Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General Thesis of
the Alter Ego,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (1942), 323-47.
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Weatherhill, 1985).
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Banarsidass Publishers, (1993).
Shear, J., “Mystical Experience, Hermeneutics, and Rationality,” International
Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1990), 391-401.
_____, “The Experience of Pure Consciousness: A New Perspective for
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Snell, B., “Die Ausdrücke für den Begriff des Wissens in der Vorplatonischen
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Books, Inc., 1966).
_____, Vom Sinn der Sinne (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1956).
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QQ.2-11, T. McDermott, O.P., ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
1964).
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Philology 38 (1943), 79-93.
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and T. Kasulis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).
Zedler, B., Introduction to Aquinas’s On the Unity of the Intellect against the
Averroists (Milwaukee: Marquette University, 1968).
_____, “Averroes and Immortality,” New Scholasticism 28 (1954), 436-53.
_____, “Averroes on the Possible Intellect,” Proceedings of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association 25 (1951), 164-78.
Zuckerkandl, V., The Sense of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1959).
71
Principles of Motion and the
Motion of Principles:
1
Hegel’s Inverted World
Peter Kalkavage
Oh, judge for yourselves: I have been concealing
it all the time, but now I will tell you the whole
truth. The fact is, I…corrupted them all!
—Dostoevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”2
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, late in Hegel’s chapter on force
and understanding, a baffling figure comes before us. It is the
famous “inverted world.” This figure completes the dialectic of
understanding. As a result of the inverted world, consciousness—
the sole but protean hero of Hegel’s philosophic epic—undergoes
a conversion: it ceases to put truth in objects or things and instead
places it in the thinking subject.
My plan is to take us through Hegel’s chapter on understanding with the following questions in mind: Why, for Hegel, is
understanding logically unstable? Why is force its proper object?
What is the inverted world, and how does it come about? What
does it show us about the nature of thinking, and the nature of
nature? Finally, how does the inverted world bring about the great
turn in the Phenomenology from knowledge as the consciousness
of things to knowledge as grounded in self-consciousness?
Understanding, Verstand, has a range of meanings in Hegel.
It refers most generally to our capacity for making distinctions,
our power of analysis. In his Encyclopedia, Hegel indicates the
function and limit of understanding as follows: “Thinking as
understanding stops short at the fixed determinacy and its
distinctness vis-à-vis other determinacies.”3 In other words,
understanding establishes fixed boundaries and stable identities.
Fond of schematizing, it regards mathematics as the model of
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
�72
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
what it means to know. In the Phenomenology, the archetype of
Verstand is the “new science” inaugurated by Galileo and
Descartes and brought to its peak in the force-theories of Newton
and Leibniz. The chapter “Force and Understanding” presents a
critical reflection on this science. Hegel studied the physics of his
day extensively and acknowledged its impressive achievements.
But it does not for him embody absolute truth; it is not science at
its highest, most complete stage. Hegel’s exposé in the
Phenomenology reveals why this is the case, why the supposedly
stable principles of modern physics are ultimately unstable.
Hegel’s chapter is difficult even by Phenomenology
standards. To guide us through its twists and turns, I have divided
my presentation into six parts. The first three deal respectively
with Force, Law, and Explanation. These are related as follows.
There are forces at work in nature that operate according to
immutable laws (for example, the law of universal gravitation).
The scientist explains nature by showing how a given
phenomenon (say, a body in free fall) is an instance of a force
grounded in one of these laws. Hegel’s account preserves this
familiar interweaving of force, law, and explanation but at the
same time places it in the context of a dialectical unfolding.
Hegel’s logic, unlike ordinary logic, proceeds genetically, like
life. Concepts, stages, moments, categories, whatever we wish to
call them, do not merely succeed each other, or relate to each
other in the manner of different aspects, but emerge out of the
evolutionary process that is thought. In the chapter before us,
force gives birth to law, and together these give birth to explanation, which eventually gives birth to self-consciousness. This
amazing process as a whole, this labor, defines understanding.
I. Force
The Phenomenology is the journey of consciousness to absolute
knowing, or what Hegel calls Science. We come upon understanding at a pivotal moment in this journey: at the transition from
the sensuous to the intelligible. The previous shapes of
consciousness are sense-certainty and perception. Like all the
KALKAVAGE
73
shapes in Hegel’s book, they embody certainty—a claim to know
absolutely or unconditionally. Sense-certainty places its absolute
trust in the sensuous particular, the whatever-it-is that is here and
now; perception trusts the thing and its properties. Both shapes of
knowing, together with their corresponding objects, prove to be
self-contradictory: they negate themselves.
Force is the Phoenix that rises from the ashes of thinghood. It
is an example of what Hegel calls determinate negation. This is
negation that preserves and lifts up what is negated [79, 113].*
Force is the proper object of understanding because it resolves the
dissonance that defines the thing of perception. The thing is a One
and a Many: this one thing and its many properties. To save this
opposition from being contradictory, perception posits another:
the thing is independent or for itself and dependent or for another,
that is, related to other things. In the dialectic of perception, these
opposed aspects become identical: the thing is shown to be
independent insofar as it is dependent, and dependent insofar as it
is independent [128]. It makes no sense, then, to regard the thing
as absolutely real: a thing is what it is, not through itself alone but
only in relation to what it is not, namely, other things. How this
ideality of thinghood comes about does not concern us here. The
relevant point is that force solves the problem at hand, the
problem of substance and relation. Things as things dissolve in
their essential relation to other things: they lose their substance.
Force, by contrast, is substance that is relation. It is the higher
category of substantial relation, the unity of being-for-self and
being-for-another, of independence and dependence.4
Let us look more carefully at what this means.
Force, our new object, is not something seen or heard or felt
but only thought. It is the purely intelligible inner core of perceptible things. Force is not property but act, the act of selfexpression.5 In the force-world, a thing does not, strictly
speaking, have a property but rather emanates what we call a
property from an intense invisible center.6 By analogy with
*
Numbers in square brackets refer to paragraph numbers in Phenomenology
of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
language, force, in Hegel’s terminology, is the utterance or
Aüßerung of an inner point. Hardness, for example, is not a
quiescent attribute lodged in the thing but an act by which the
thing asserts itself or “makes its point.”7 Moreover, to act is to act
upon another thing. Action implies interaction. This is how force
makes it possible for individual things to be what they are through
their relation to other things: their being-for-self is a being-foranother, and their being-for-another a being-for-self.
Force, Hegel tells us, is a movement [136]. This is not
movement in space but dialectical movement—conceptual instability or transition. Consider a metal sphere. Its hardness is one of
the properties by which the sphere, at the level of perception,
defined itself as an independent thing. Hardness is now to be
regarded as emergent from an intensive center, a center of force.
Force is the transition of a given content—in this case,
hardness—from inner to outer. As Hegel stresses in an earlier
version of his system, force is not cause as opposed to effect but
rather the identity of cause and effect.8 The intensive center of
force does not produce something other than itself but exactly
itself.9 It is a self-realizing potential. It is like an inward thought
that finds faithful expression in outward speech.
Dialectical movement comes into play when we attempt to
spell out precisely what is happening in the transition from inner
to outer. What we find is that the act of self-expression involves
negation. The hardness of the sphere, as an emergent property or
effect, must come out of hiding, be released from mere implicitness or potency; but if it were simply released, set free, it would
not be the hardness of the sphere, the expressive manifestation
sprung from the intensive center of force. And so, we must
conclude that as a property is affirmed or posited, it must at the
same time be negated as something independent or on its own. As
the property is emitted, it must remain the property of the thing,
the expression of the center of force. Hegel uses the terms force
proper and force expressed to distinguish the two moments
involved in the action of force. Force proper refers to the
intensive center (force as cause), force expressed to force as
KALKAVAGE
75
“there” in the perceptible world (force as effect). These moments,
Hegel says, are self-canceling [135]. Force proper must negate its
inwardness in order to be external or manifest, and, as we saw
earlier, force expressed must negate its outwardness in order to be
the expression of force proper. This self-cancellation on the part
of both moments of force is what it means to say that force is a
movement. We phenomenological observers see this dialectical
truth in the movement of force, but understanding does not. It
clings to the safety of stable distinctions and assumes that the
movement from inner to outer occurs simply, that is, without any
negation or self-otherness.
Force can do what thinghood cannot: it is a deeper, more
potent category. Why, then, does it self-destruct? To answer this
question, we turn to the phenomenon of interaction, the realworld event in which force meets force. As we proceed, we must
bear in mind that understanding claims not merely that there are
forces at work in the world, but that force is the absolute truth of
things—their abiding substance. Hegel will show, to our
amazement, that “the realization of force is at the same time the
loss of reality” [141]. Like the thing, force will fail to be
substantial.
The self-annihilation of force results from what Hegel calls
the “play” of two forces: active and reactive. This play is implicit
in Newton’s Third Law: “To every action there is always opposed
an equal reaction.” Force is spontaneous and impulsive but not
self-inciting. It must be inspired by the presence of another force
in order to express itself [137]. Hegel here borrows terms that
Leibniz uses in his analysis of collision. One force solicits, the
other is solicited: one is active, the other passive or re-active.10
This is like the human situation in which I voice my opinion,
translate my inner thought into outer speech, thereby inciting you
to respond with a verbal expression of your thought and opinion.
Perhaps the forcefulness of my expression prompts you to an
equally forceful counter-expression—an equal and opposite
reaction.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The play that is essential to force can be maintained as
logically stable only if the difference between active and passive
force, soliciting and solicited, remains clear and distinct. We must
be able to say: “This force is active, that one passive.” Hegel
proceeds to show that this is not the case. The two opposed determinations of force—soliciting and solicited, active and passive—
become identical, or pass into each other. Once this happens,
force as the solid substance of things vanishes. It loses its status
as a self-subsisting entity and becomes merely ideal, what Hegel
calls a moment.11
To see how this evaporation of force as substance comes
about, imagine banging your fist against a wall. When you hit the
wall, the wall hits back: it re-acts. At first, it seems that your fist
is active and soliciting, the wall passive and solicited. But you
could not hit the wall unless, at the moment of impact, the wall
acted on you and solicited the hardness of your fist. This hardness
is just as much solicited by that of the wall as the hardness of the
wall is by that of your fist. Fist and wall have exchanged determinations, like actors who reverse their roles in mid-scene, and it
is impossible to call one of them only active and the other only
reactive. Each is both. Soliciting is a being solicited, and being
solicited is a soliciting.
Let us recapitulate the story of force. Force starts out as a
mere concept in the mind of a subject who claims to know
absolute truth: it is in itself or implicit, a theoretical good
intention. Then it is put to work as the substance of things: it
becomes for itself or actual. But in the act of making itself real, it
becomes evanescent and unreal: the distinction on which its reliability as substance rests becomes a play or interchange of nowfluid determinations. As force leaves the stage of the solidly real,
it assumes a new role. It reverts to being inward or conceptual,
retreats from the world and goes back inside the thinking subject.
We may imagine this as the act in which understanding experiences the dissolution of force, internalizes what it has experienced, and then comes up with a revised perspective. As Hegel
observes, force does not return to its original ideality but
KALKAVAGE
77
advances to a new state [141]. Force falls but does not simply fall.
Paradoxically, it falls up. In negating itself, it becomes a new and
improved universal, a new object that stands over and against the
thinking subject. This higher object, which force has generated, is
the deeper inner of things.
II. Law
The dialectic of law will lead us to the inverted world. Law, our
newly postulated absolute, will prove unstable. It will fall. This
fall is more dramatic than anything we have witnessed so far in
the Phenomenology. It is the collapse of the very citadel of
objective truth, truth that is grounded in objects.
In the fall of force and the rise of law, consciousness experiences a new relation to its object. Hegel calls it a mediated
relation. Understanding now “looks through [the] mediating play
of forces into the true background of things” [143].12 In other
words, understanding sees rest within motion, sameness within
difference, form within flux. Law is the eternally abiding, purely
intelligible “look” or ἰδέα of the always-changing world. Verstand
at this point is even more recognizable as the modern scientific
understanding, which seeks laws of nature so that it may gaze
upon change under the aspect of eternity.
Our new object, law, is the imperturbable base and depth of
the world. World, here, refers to the unstable play of forces, the
role-reversal of our soliciting and solicited “actors.” This play is
appearance, as opposed to law, which constitutes the world’s
essence. In its perpetual self-otherness, appearance recalls the
elusive “matrix” of Plato’s Timaeus, where the powers of body—
earth, air, water, and fire—constantly turn into each other, play the
game of self-cancellation (49B-C). Law is different from the
objects we have seen so far: the sensuous This, the thing of
perception, and force as individual substance. It is a world unto
itself, separate from but also governing and shining through the
world of appearance. Law opens up a supersensible world set
over and against the sensible world. Hegel calls it an “abiding
Beyond above the vanishing present”—a Jenseits or Over There,
as opposed to the Diesseits or Over Here [144]. Unlike the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
turbulent realm of sense, this Other World is “restful” [157]. It is
the heaven of scientific theory.
This two-world thesis will be the death of understanding. As
Hegel will show, the waywardness of appearance, the to and fro
of change, invades theoretical heaven: the Beyond will collapse
into the very realm from which it was to be strictly distinguished.
It will become an aspect of appearance. The certainty of understanding is that there are two worlds: the truth will be that there
is only one. Intelligibility is not separate from change, like a law
or a platonic Form, but is change—change as dialectical logic or
what Hegel calls the Concept. The clue, then, to the discovery of
concrete truth is not in some other world but in this one, not in
motionless being but in unstable becoming, where opposed determinations flow into each other. This inverts our normal
perspective on things, governed as that perspective is by the sober
teachings of Verstand. As we think our way through the inverted
world, we are inverted.
The conclusions I have sketched are already present in what
Hegel says just before his analysis of law. He reflects on the
nature of appearance, in effect telling us where the dialectic of
understanding will end up. Understanding mis-understands
appearance and the intelligible essence that supposedly governs it
in another world. From the perspective of understanding, law is
an eternal thing-like object that grounds and “saves” the appearances. But this object, the supersensible Beyond, has in fact been
generated by appearance [147]. Appearance is the dialectical
father, law the offspring. What understanding calls law or essence
is in fact, Hegel says, appearance as appearance.
To grasp the meaning of this utterance, we must observe that
appearance is not sensuous presence: it is neither the This of
sense-certainty nor the thing of perception. Appearance is process
and play, flash and shining forth. It is not presence but fleeting
presence—presence that constantly cancels itself to become
absence.13 It is becoming as the unity of coming-to-be and
passing away. In his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel defines time as
“that being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it is
KALKAVAGE
79
not, is; it is intuited becoming.”14 Time is appearance in its most
rudimentary form. It is the same process of self-negation that we
saw in the Now of sense-certainty. When the Now negated itself
to become the next Now, it gave birth to universality as the Now
of Nows, say, an hour of minutes [107]. Appearance, through its
self-negation, also begets a universal, as we have seen. This is
law.
Appearance, like time, is a process of self-transcendence,
self-beyonding. The understanding erroneously treats this selfbeyonding, which it has glimpsed in the self-contradictory play of
force, as a Beyond that is objectively there. It reifies process. But
essence, here identical with the supersensible, is the intelligible
truth of appearance, the truth that the play of force has itself
generated and brought to light. As Hegel puts it, “the supersensible is…appearance as appearance” [147]. The meaning of this
pivotal sentence, to which I alluded earlier, is that essence and
appearance, inner and outer, are identical. As one commentator
puts it: “The essence of essence is to manifest itself; manifestation
is the manifestation of essence.”15 Appearance, in other words, is
not a low but a high category. It is the self-otherness of essence,
the instability of sensuous things that has come out into the open
as their higher and deeper truth. In this revelation appearance
proves to be not something in need of being “saved.”
Hegel’s critique of the supersensible Beyond recalls Plato’s
Forms and the problem of separateness. This problem is
highlighted in the dialogue Parmenides, where the old Eleatic
stings young Socrates with the absurdities of his two-world
theory. How is it that a Form, a separate entity off in its own
world, is nevertheless manifested in its sensuous instances? Why
are we able to see the original in the image? Law is like a platonic
Form in that it is eternally self-same and purely intelligible. But it
is unlike a Form in being a universal that governs movements,
events. Law is the eternal self-sameness of perpetual selfdifference. Consider Galileo’s law of free fall. Expressed as an
equation, this is the familiar s = 1/2 gt2, where s is the distance a
body traverses as it falls, g the gravitational constant, and t the
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time during which the falling takes place. For our purposes,
however, the more revealing form is s ∝ t2: distance varies as the
square of the time. This expresses a constant difference or
otherness, as opposed to a mere identity. It helps us see what
Hegel means when he says that law is “universal difference” and
“the simple in the play of force” [148]. Things as such don’t come
into the picture. As far as Galileo’s law is concerned, it makes no
difference whether the falling object is a cow or a cannonball.16
What matters is the motion, the event. Galileo’s law is the simple
universal in this event. It is the perfectly general, purely intelligible form of falling.
Let us now turn to the dialectic of law. Understanding has, we
recall, a mediated relation to its supersensible realm of law. It
looks through the medium of becoming, as through a veil, to
glimpse being and truth in the unchanging forms of change. It
imagines that it will in this way take hold of absolute knowing.
Problems will emerge when understanding tries to explain how its
universal laws fit the actual determinate content of appearances.
Up to this point, law is only a good idea. This idea must now
prove itself in the act of governing. Law must become actually
true or what Hegel calls for itself.
To uncover the actuality of law, we turn once more to Galileo,
this time to his experiments with the motion of a ball rolling down
an inclined plane. Assume that we have found the law that
governs this movement and have expressed it mathematically. We
say: “This is true; it is the law.” But it isn’t absolutely true. Air
resistance, surface friction, and the phenomenon of rolling as
opposed to sliding all come into play to qualify the law. In order
for a law to be true, it must, as Hegel puts it, “fill out the world of
appearance” [150]. This can happen only if there are many laws
that apply to a given case. Here we have a sign of trouble to come.
Law, by definition, is sheer universality; its glory is to be above
cases and particulars. But the events to which law must apply if it
is to be actual truth involve cases and particulars: phenomena
have a determinate content that must somehow be subsumed
under law. The world is not movement in general but this
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movement in these circumstances. The problem can be stated as
follows: law, though stable, is general or empty, while appearances, though shifty, are full and differentiated. To overcome this
asymmetry, to unite the universal and the particular, law must be
on more intimate terms with the phenomenal world if it is to be
the truth of that world.
A single law, as we have seen, is not enough to “fill out” the
appearances. We need many laws to prevent law from being an
empty inner. These must be organized into one law that unifies
them—a mega-law. Hegel here refers to Newton’s inverse square
law of attraction, which unifies the laws of planetary motion and
those of ordinary mechanics. But this mega-law is, alas, the
victim of its triumph over specificity. By transcending the
difference among the many different laws, it becomes utterly
abstract. Hegel calls it “the Concept of law itself,”17 that is,
lawfulness as opposed to a law [150]. But then, what to do about
all the different ways in which lawfulness manifests itself in
nature? To address this problem, understanding interprets
lawfulness, the pure form of law, as the “inner necessity” of all the
different laws [151]. This inner necessity results in a new, more
abstract version of force—force as such [152]. Earlier, force was
differentiated as active and passive; law was the simple universal.
Now force is the simple or undifferentiated, and law is the source
of difference [152]. Gravity, for instance, is just plain gravity, a
simple force of nature, whereas the law by which a body falls
involves difference as distance traversed and time squared. So
too, electricity is just plain electricity, whereas the law of
electricity expresses the difference between positive and negative.
The assumption at work here is that law will express the
necessary action of simple forces. Hegel shows that this
assumption is false. Force and law are in fact “indifferent” to each
other, that is, fundamentally unrelated [152]. Electricity indeed
manifests itself as positive and negative, but not because of any
inherent necessity. The law does not express causal connection
but rather what Hume called “constant conjunction.”18 It does not
reveal the origin of difference, but simply states difference as a
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fact. It sidesteps the primordial act by which electrical force as
such divides into its two opposite forms. The result, Hegel says,
is that “necessity here is only an empty word” [152].19
Indifference shows up in yet another way for the scientific
understanding. The very elements that the law combines in its
formulas lack necessary connection with each other. Galileo’s law
of free fall, for instance, expresses a constant conjunction of
distance and time. But it sheds no light on why these should be
connected at all, let alone connected in this particular way. There
is nothing in the concept of distance traversed that necessarily
implies the concept of time squared, and nothing in time squared
that implies distance traversed. As mathematical variables, s and
t are logically indifferent to each other. They are quantitatively
conjoined in a ratio but not conceptually united in a λόγος.20
The necessity that understanding craves, we must note, would
be achieved if in its world-view there were a place for inner
difference, that is, the immanent self-differentiation of the
absolutely simple. That would account for why electrical force
necessarily, out of its own nature, divides itself into positive and
negative. Law, in that case, would be the Concept or dialectical
truth. But understanding is no dialectician. It likes its identities
neat and its distinctions restful. And so, to prevent simple force
from becoming (in its view) compromised, understanding takes
difference into itself [154]. Necessity now acquires a new
meaning. It ceases to be causality in the phenomena and becomes
instead the necessity at work in the human subject’s act of
theorizing.
III. Explanation
We are on the threshold of the inverted world, which is a second
supersensible world [157]. Understanding will reach this extreme
point of its effort once it is revealed that explanation is nothing
more than the propounding of tautologies—differences that make
no difference. Explanation, here, is not scientific account-giving
in general but rather a species of bad argument that regularly
occurs in physical science. It is the act in which understanding
propounds a law that supposedly governs an appearance but ends
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up being identical to the appearance. In explanation, ground and
grounded become the same.
We saw earlier that force is the absolutely simple (electricity),
whereas the law of force expresses a difference (positive and
negative). Understanding uses explanation to bridge the gap
between force and law, simplicity and difference. But its effort is
sophistical: it distinguishes force and law, and then “condenses
the law into force as the essence of the law” [154]. Hegel uses
lightning to illustrate his point. Lightning occurs: it is a
phenomenon. Indeed, as a flashing forth, lightning functions as
the symbol for appearance as such. Understanding explains
lightning by enunciating a law that supposedly expresses how the
force of electricity works. Force is assumed to be simple, but the
process of explaining involves positive and negative. The explanation purports to the necessary ground of the phenomenon. But
in fact, it just repeats what happened at the surface of the
phenomenon. It says: “There was a strong electrical discharge
because of positive and negative electricity.” This simply says all
over again what lightning as a phenomenon is. It is not something
new and different, but same: a tautology. Understanding posits
differences and then, once these differences disappear in the
phenomenon (in this case, once the electrical discharge subsides),
allows the differences to sink back into an undifferentiated simple
force—mere electricity. A distinction is made only to be
withdrawn.21 In other words, the distinction is merely an artifact
and formality of the process of explanation.22
Explanation, for Hegel, borders on the absurd, or at least the
comic. Why does electricity divide into positive and negative?
Because that is its law. And why is that its law? Because
electricity divides into positive and negative. When we ask understanding why something is the case, it pretends to show us some
underlying ground but in fact only repeats the appearance that
prompted our question in the first place. This sleight of hand is not
confined to physics. Why are human beings the way they are?
Because of their genes. What are genes? That which makes us
who we are. Or, to shift to the world of Molière: Why does opium
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induce sleep? Because it has a “dormitive virtue.” These are all
tautologies masquerading as etiologies, accounts of cause. In the
earlier version of his system, Hegel summed it up nicely. All
explanation, he says, ultimately reduces to the deflating
admission: “That is just how it is.”23
We might be tempted to accuse Hegel of oversimplifying
explanation in order to make his case. But Hegel is right. We are
surrounded by explanations that purport to reveal a law, a
necessary ground, for how the world works—or how the mind
works, or how language and culture develop—which, when
examined more closely, prove to be nothing more than
tautologies. I point this out to remind us that, in reading those
parts of the Phenomenology that are critical of theory-building,
we must allow our scientific, as well as our pre-scientific or
natural, perspective to be inverted.
Hegel, we must note, inverts what we ordinarily mean by
tautology. Tautology, for him, is not a static A=A, but rather the
dialectical movement in which a difference is posited and immediately canceled [155]. This recalls the play of force, in which
active and passive were posited as different and then became
identical. The movement of tautology is a turning point in the
dialectic of understanding. It is the point at which the shiftiness of
appearance “has penetrated into the supersensible world itself”
[155]. In the platonic analogy, motion becomes part of the once
restful realm of the Forms.
IV. The Inverted World
Who among us has not wondered: What if the world as it is, is the
exact opposite of the world as it appears? What if what we call
real is really nothing but a dream, and dream reality? What if
good people are in themselves bad, and bad people good? What
if, in obedience to some perverse cosmic law, being reverses
seeming, inner reverses outer? To pose such questions is to set
foot on the terrain of Hegel’s inverted world.
The dialectic of understanding is a series of postulated
objective inners. The first was force. When force as the substance
of things vanished, a new inner appeared: the restful realm of law.
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But law led to the sleight-of-hand called explanation, where
differences make no difference. This movement of tautology
generates another inner: the inverted world, which is the inner
truth of the first supersensible world [157].24 Hegel has taken us
on one long journey into the interior of appearance. But the
inverted world brings us full circle, confirming the truth of La
Rochefoucauld’s maxim: “Extremes touch.” The inverted world
will obliterate the Beyond. It will collapse the distinction between
essence and appearance, and make appearance the standard to
which law must conform.25
Inversion is our new principle, according to which, “what is
self-same repels itself from itself” and “the not self-same is selfattractive” [156]. Hegel’s language of repulsion-from-self and
attraction-to-other recalls the magnet, which soon emerges as the
paradigm of inversion.
The first thing Hegel tells us about the inverted world is that
it completes the inner world opened up by understanding [157].
We saw earlier that law failed to “fill out” the world of
appearance: it lacked a principle of change or alteration. As an
inverted world, the supersensible realm acquires this principle. It
becomes an exact replica of the world we actually live in. This is
the irony of the inverted world. Strange seeming at first, this
world in fact restores what is familiar to us and what had been lost
in the abstractions of understanding. It lets our world be as fluid,
playful, and self-contradictory as it seems.
This is our perspective, not that of understanding, which
clings to its abstractions and continues to think in terms of a
supersensible Beyond, where every restless appearance finds its
restful double. The inverted world is what the world is implicitly
or inwardly, what it is in itself. Hegel offers a broad range of
examples. The first ones he cites are suited to the theoretical bent
of understanding. Like, under the law of the first supersensible
world, becomes unlike under that of the second, inverted world;
black in the first is transposed to white in the second; the north
pole of a magnet in the first world is south in the second; the
oxygen pole of the voltaic pile becomes the hydrogen pole, and
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the hydrogen the oxygen [158]. But then Hegel goes beyond
theory. Revenge on an enemy in this world turns into selfdestruction in the other; crime in the first turns into punishment;
guilt into pardon; disgrace into honor.26
It would be highly instructive to think through all of Hegel’s
examples of inversion. Let us focus on one: the magnet. This
remarkable object will help us make the transition from inversion
as understanding represents it to the philosophic Concept of
inversion.
From the perspective of understanding, the poles of a magnet
are inverted in the sense that each pole has reference to a
separately existing and opposite in-itself. This in-itself—the home
or, in Gilbert’s phrase, the “true location”27 of the magnet’s
poles—is the Earth, the Ur-magnet that orients our mini-magnets.
It seems strange to regard the Earth as a Beyond, but this view
makes sense if Earth is the Earth of scientific theory. That the
Earth is a body in no way detracts from its theoretical function as
the locus of magnetic essence divorced from the things whose
essence it is. In our current usage, which was also prevalent in
Hegel’s day, the north pole of a magnet is called north because it
points to the magnetic north pole of the Earth. But as Hegel
argues in his Philosophy of Nature, it is more accurate to call it
“south,” since, by the law of magnetism, it must point to its
opposite.28 With this in mind, we can say that each pole of our
mini-magnet points to, and is defined by, the opposite pole of the
Earth-magnet. North “here” has its inner truth in South “there,”
and South “here” has its truth in North “there.”
Hegel calls this approach “superficial” [159]—superficial
because non-dialectical. Through its ingenious idea of inversion,
understanding, to its credit, hits upon a great principle of nature:
polar complementarity.29 But it fails to grasp the true meaning of
this principle; its two-world thinking gets in the way. In truth, a
magnet’s inversion is not to be found anywhere but in itself. The
magnet is self-inverting, which is to say that it contains negativity
within itself, or is self-other. How do we know? Because any
attempt to isolate a pole fails. If we chop off one of the poles, it
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simply reappears in the now-smaller magnet. “Pole” is not a
material chunk of a body but one term of an opposition. In the
Phaedo, Socrates tells an Aesop-like fable about how god, seeing
that Pleasure and Pain were always quarreling, tied their heads
together, so that where the one was the other was bound to follow
(60B). The same moral can be inferred from the magnet, where
each “head” always entails its opposite.
The magnet illustrates what is true in all cases of inversion. In
its true meaning, the inverted world is not a Beyond but rather the
intelligible form of the actual world. Inversion in this sense
undoes the superstition of understanding, according to which
things exist in one world but have their intelligible essence in
another: “antitheses of inner and outer, of appearance and the
supersensible, as of two different kinds of actuality, we no longer
find here” [159].30 Magnetic north, as I indicated earlier, is not
south somewhere else but right here: “the north pole which is the
in-itself of the south pole is the north pole actually present in the
same magnet.” Similarly, in the moral sphere, crime calls down
on itself the law’s judgment and correction, invokes its nemesis as
its fulfillment, not in some other world, but right here. Crime and
punishment are the inseparable poles of the moral magnet—a fact
well known to Dostoevsky. Moral self-inversion is at work even
when we don’t get caught. Having done something wrong, we
suffer the torments of conscience and punish ourselves: we strain
to negate our negation.
Let us sum up what we have seen so far. Understanding
embraces the principle of inversion as the true inner meaning of
its supersensible law. According to this principle, a given determination finds its truth in its opposite: it is the law of all determinations to be transposed into their opposites, to move. But understanding regards this shift in a static way, as mere reference to
another object-like world, another substance or medium. We see
what it does not: that inversion defines appearance as such. It is
the essence of all determinations in the realm of appearance to be
self-inverting, to summon their opposites in a new version of the
play of force.
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The precise meaning of the inverted world, and the corresponding critique of the supersensible Beyond, lead us to the
metaphysical primacy of motion. Understanding treats motion or
change as though it needed to be saved by transcendent principles
and mathematical formulas, as though rest alone were intelligible.
But motion, as the inverted world has revealed, is the intelligible
as such, the Concept as the unity in which opposites flow into
each other. In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel makes this point
with respect to our friend, the magnet: “For the magnet exhibits
in simple, naïve fashion the nature of the Concept, and the
Concept moreover in its developed form as syllogism.”31 He adds
in a note: “If anyone thinks that thought is not present in nature,
he can be shown it here in magnetism.”32 Magnetism, as opposed
to the thing we call a magnet, is a movement of poles toward and
into each other. It is the logically structured fluency of opposite
determinations present in a simple object.
To think the inverted world, then, is “to think pure change or
think the antithesis within the antithesis itself, or contradiction”
[160]. The inverted world, our second supersensible world, is not
alongside the first, but has in fact “overarched the other world and
has it within it…; it is itself and its opposite in one unity” [160].
The inverted world, rightly understood, generates what Hegel
calls “inner difference.” This act of immanent self-differentiation
is the genuine necessity that was lacking in understanding’s effort
to connect force and law.33 The simple force of electricity divides
itself into positive and negative because, as a simple force, it is
inwardly tense, polarized with respect to itself [161]. Difference
isn’t something tacked on as an explanatory construct but is
inherent in unity. To be one is to be self-divided, to contain rather
than exclude opposition. In revisiting electrical force, Hegel
applies the wisdom of the magnet: positive and negative
electricity “animate each other into activity, and their being is
rather to posit themselves as not-being and to cancel themselves
in the unity” [161]. This is our familiar play of force, which,
having been constrained by static principles and mathematical
formalism, now rises up against understanding to proclaim: “I, in
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my instability, was the truth all along! I, pure change, am the
essence of law!”
V. Infinity—And Beyond
Hegel gives inner difference an evocative name: infinity [161].
Infinity, here, is not indefinite ongoing-ness, which Hegel calls
“bad infinity” [238]. It is neither the potential infinite of Aristotle
nor those limitless mute spaces that terrified Pascal. It is rather the
logical process by which opposites flow into each other. Infinity
is transition as such. It is the self-negation of a finite determinateness. The magnet, with its inseparable poles, is the sensuous
symbol of infinity in this sense of the term.
Infinity sums up the dialectical movement we have already
seen in tautology. It is the “absolute unrest of pure selfmovement, in which whatever is determined in one way or
another…is rather the opposite of this determinateness” [163].
This flow of opposites into each other inverts the perspective of
understanding, which is infatuated with rest and wants to keep its
terms clear and distinct. Hegel makes the striking claim that
infinity “has been from the start the soul of all that has gone
before.” It is the energy of self-negation that was implicit in all
the finite shapes of consciousness that have appeared so far—and
will continue to appear. When one of these finite shapes selfdestructs, refutes itself, it is experiencing the infinity, the selfopposition, that it holds within. In suffering contradiction, it is
getting in touch, so to speak, with its inner magnet.
Hegel identifies infinity with what he calls “the absolute
Concept” [162]. Infinity and Concept both embody the self-differentiation of the self-identical, which for Hegel is truth. This selfdifferentiation appears in its purest form in Hegel’s Logic. Here in
the Phenomenology, Hegel calls infinity as Concept “the simple
essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood” [162].
Infinity, he says, “pulsates within itself but does not move,
inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest.” It is Hegel’s version of the Logos
of Heraclitus—the Fire that enlivens, pervades, consumes, and
unifies all things.
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Life, soul, blood. These words suggest that the force-world
we are now transcending, the world that seemed so eventful and
alive, was not really alive at all. To be sure, there was motion, but
not life—vis viva, but not organic being.34 Understanding is
prejudiced on behalf of physics. This is no doubt largely because
the phenomena of physics, unlike those of biology, are readily
reducible to the homogeneity of mathematical formalism, that is,
equations. Life is the scandal of Verstand because the determinations of life are fluidly interconnected and defy rigid boundaries.
To appreciate this fact, we have only to think of how animal
organisms, in their embryonic development, exhibit spontaneous
self-differentiation, develop their different organs and systems,
wondrously, from within.
Infinity, which has been generated by the inverted world,
brings us to self-consciousness. This step had already been taken
in the phenomenon of explanation, our internal movement of
differentiating what is simple or self-same [163]. Explaining
things, Hegel observes in passing, is fun—a holiday of the mind.
The reason, he says, is that in the act of explaining why the world
does what it does consciousness enjoys conversation with itself,
Selbstgespräch [163]. To explain is ultimately to enjoy the play of
our own inner movement, our self-consciousness.
Inversion, inner difference, infinity, explanation all converge
in self-consciousness, which now officially comes on the scene in
the Phenomenology. The truth of the magnet was the repulsion of
the self-same and the attraction of the self-different. This truth is
now fully revealed as the self. To be self-conscious, to be aware
of myself as myself, is to be tautologous in Hegel’s sense of the
word. It is my act of generating inner difference that is immediately canceled or negated. Hegel describes self-consciousness as
follows:
I distinguish myself from myself, and in doing so I am
directly aware that what is distinguished from myself is
not different [from me]. I, the self-same being, repel
myself from myself; but what is posited as distinct from
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me, or as unlike me, is immediately, in being so distinguished, not a distinction for me [164].
Hegel compares this movement of self-identity with the axial
rotation of a sphere [169]. As the sphere turns, it continually
generates different positions in space and continually cancels
them. It is constantly returning out of the self-otherness that it
constantly begets. Every move “away” is a move “toward” and
back home.
Hegel stresses that self-consciousness was behind the drama
of consciousness all along. It was the energy of self-divisiveness
that was the living soul of sense-certainty, perception, and understanding. Now it is revealed that, just as infinity is the true inner
of all objects, self-consciousness is the truth of consciousness. In
other words, external things are and are true only insofar as they
are and are true for a thinking subject or self. “True” means “true
for me.”
VI. From the Play of Force to the Drama of Man
How does Hegel get from the paradoxes of physics to the fight for
recognition with which the drama of self-consciousness begins?
This will be my closing question.
I begin by observing that force is already on the verge of selfconsciousness. Once physics takes force as its central concern,
once it identifies force with nature itself—as happens most
dramatically in the physics of Boscovich—it invites a connection
between the spontaneity of inanimate bodies and the inner state of
human beings.35 Nature and human nature find their common
source, their essence, in impulsiveness, or what Hobbes was the
first to call conatus, striving. Force, seen in this light, is protowill.36 If we keep in mind this connection between force and will,
it becomes less surprising that Hegel’s chapter on understanding
begins with force and ends with self-consciousness, which, for
Hegel, is our impulse or drive to self-affirmation.
As I suggested earlier, the dialectic of understanding
generates life as well as self-consciousness. Life and selfconsciousness come on the scene together. Both exhibit infinity as
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the process of self-differentiation. But for the self at this nascent
stage of its development, the mingling of life and selfconsciousness poses a problem. On the one hand, the self is aware
of itself as being beyond body and finitude. To be an inwardly
turned being is, in a sense, to experience myself as the absolute, a
god. But I am also immersed in organic life, the necessary
condition for self-awareness: I am aware of myself only because
I am alive, rooted in this living body, which is the immediate
object of my desire, care, and anxiety. And so the self is burdened
with a double being. It is both a transcendent or pure self, the self
in its glory, and an empirical self caught up in the mortifying
contingencies of the flesh. This incarnation of inwardness, this
unhappy unity of the divine and the mortal, is the contradiction
that self-consciousness must somehow resolve, the riddle of its
existence.
In the fight for recognition the self seeks to transcend its
animality or life. “Self-consciousness,” Hegel says, “is in and for
itself when, and by the fact that, it is so for another; that is, it is
only as a being that is recognized” [178]. Recognition, here, is not
blank awareness but honor. In winning the recognition of another,
I confirm the absoluteness that I experience within. This recognition is my self-recognition, my certainty of myself as absolute,
made concrete, out there, really existent. I use this other
individual to accomplish my goal, which is to achieve selfcertainty through the negation of my self-otherness. But this
other, who is also at my stage of raw self-consciousness, wants to
use me for the same reason. And so there is a fight for recognition.
In this fight I seek to negate the presumed absoluteness of this
other individual who confronts me. I also risk my life. I do so in
order to show myself and my alter ego that I am more than an
animal. I show that I am a pure self, a self that is worthy of being
recognized as absolute.
The two individual selves are thus bound together in what
Hegel calls a “double movement” [182]. It is double because two
selves are involved and because the negation each performs on
itself it also performs on the other, which is itself. This reciprocal
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action recapitulates the dialectic of force, in which the opposed
determinations of active and passive, soliciting and solicited,
came to be lodged in each of the separate forces: “In this
movement [of selves] we see repeated the process which
presented itself as the play of forces, but repeated now in
consciousness. What in that process was for us, is true here of the
extremes themselves” [184]. In other words, self-consciousness,
as a collision of interacting selves, is force made self-conscious.
In the Phenomenology Hegel mounts a critique of force. But
the poverty of force is also its potency, its impulse to develop into
self-consciousness, and, after many inversions, into the mutual
recognition that is spirit. Spirit, for Hegel, is the spirit of the
Greek polis, the spirit of the Roman Empire, the spirit of the
French monarchy, and the spirit of the German Reformation. This
last, which posits the absolute testimony of the heart, sets the
stage for Kant’s moral world-view, conscience, and the beautiful
soul. Each of these worlds is an attempt on the part of selfhood to
incarnate itself so that it may know itself as the shared truth of a
concrete community of selves. This communal selfhood Hegel
calls the “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’”[177].
What, then, is the dialectic of force in Hegel’s
Phenomenology? It is the Prelude to the Great Fugue of conceptualized history, which begins with the fight for recognition and
ends in absolute knowing.
Endnotes
1
A lecture delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis on 15 October 2010.
The first version of the lecture was given at the Spinoza Society in
Washington, DC on 8 March 2010.
2
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Other Stories
(West Valley City, Utah: Waking Lion Press, 2006), 16.
3
The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S.
Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 125. Hegel extols understanding in the
Preface of the Phenomenology, where he calls the analytic “force” of Verstand
“the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power”
[32].
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KALKAVAGE
What pure labor of fine flashes consumes
Many a diamond with imperceptible foam,
And what peace seems there to be conceived!
When over the abyss a sun reposes,
Pure works of an eternal cause,
Time scintillates and the Dream is to know.
4
Hegel identifies force with relation, Verhältnis, in the so-called Jena Logic
(The Jena System, 1804-1805: Logic and Metaphysics, trans. John W.
Burbidge and George di Giovanni [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1986], 47).
5 Leibniz is the father of this idea: “Substance is a being capable of action”
(Principles of Nature and Grace, G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans.
Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989], 207).
6
A thing’s property, for Hegel, is a universal, but one that is bedingt: conditioned or be-thinged. Force, by contrast, is unbedingt—an unconditioned or
unbe-thinged universal [132]. In other words, force is purely thinkable. It is
not, like color, qualified and limited by a material medium.
7
See Newton’s Principia, Definition 3, where body or mass is identified with
the force of resistance or vis inertiae.
8
See Jena Logic, 54.
9
“Force thus expresses relationship itself and the necessity to be within itself
even in its being-outside itself, or to be self-equal” (Jena Logic, 56).
10
“A Specimen of Dynamics” in Leibnitz, Principles of Nature and Grace,
121.
11 In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel at one point offers what is perhaps his
most deeply revealing critique of force. This is in the context of his argument
that Kepler’s account of planetary motion is philosophically superior to that of
Newton (Philosophy of Nature, Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970],
65-83). He remarks: “Seldom has fame been more unjustly transferred from a
first discoverer to another person.” (Ibid., 66.) Hegel’s detailed critique elaborates the three aspects of scientific theorizing that we see in the
Phenomenology: force, law, and explanation.
12
Italics Hegel’s. Throughout his analysis of force and law, Hegel refers to the
syllogism. The middle term of the syllogism mediates between the two
extremes, not as a distinct and static tertium quid, but as the dialectical identity
of the extremes. For a fuller account of the syllogism, see Hegel’s Science of
Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1976), 664 ff.).
13
In his poem “The Cemetery by the Sea,” Paul Valèry precisely captures
appearance as the dazzling unity of shining forth and evanescence:
Quel pur travail de fins éclairs consume
Maint diamant d’imperceptible écume,
Et quelle paix semble se concevoir!
Quand sur l’abîme un soleil se repose,
Ouvrages purs d’une éternelle cause,
Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.
95
14
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 34.
15
Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1974), 125.
16
Throughout this part of his discussion, Hegel’s word for “thing” is Sache,
not Ding—that is, a generalized “matter at hand” or πρᾶγμα, as opposed to the
thing of perception.
17
Miller’s English translation reads “the Notion of law itself.” In all citations
from Miller the word Notion is changed to Concept wherever it appears.
18
Hegel cites his agreement with Hume on this point in the Jena Logic, 52-53.
19
The pseudo-necessity of scientific theory re-appears at the level of observational reason. For example, so-called “psychological necessity” (the supposed
necessity of psychological laws) proves to be “an empty phrase” [307].
20
Λόγος means both ratio and account. In the Philosophy of Nature, 59, Hegel
gives a genuinely conceptual λόγος of Galileo’s law of free fall.
21
More examples occur in the Jena Logic, 51. Why is the soil wet? Because it
rained. What is rain? Falling moisture. Which is to say that the soil is wet
because of wetness. In his Science of Logic, 458-466, Hegel identifies explanation with the sophistical “arguing from grounds.”
22
Berkeley had made a similar claim: “Force, gravity, attraction and terms of
this sort are useful for reasonings and reckonings about motion and bodies in
motion, but not for understanding the simple nature of motion itself or for
indicating so many distinct qualities” (De motu, 17, trans. A. A. Luce in
Berkeley’s Philosophical Writings [New York: Collier Books, 1965], 255).
23
24
Jena Logic, 61.
Donald Verene suggests that Hegel’s phrase was inspired by a play of that
name by Ludwig Tieck (Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the
Phenomenology of Spirit [Albany: SUNY Press, 1985], 39). The inverted
world is, in German, die verkehrte Welt. Verkehrt means either upside down, or
twisted and perverse. Hegel uses the term with the latter meaning in a section
entitled “The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit” [377]. Scholars
disagree as to whether, in the context of the inverted world, verkehrt means
perverse as well as upside down. Gadamer makes an interesting case for the
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double meaning (Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P.
Christopher Smith [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976], 35-53).
25
This fits the analysis of the inverted world in the Science of Logic, 509: “In
point of fact, it is just in this opposition of the two worlds that their difference
has vanished, and what was supposed to be the world in and for itself is itself
the world of Appearance.” Hegel adds (510): “the world of Appearance is thus
in its own self the law which is identical with itself.”
26 An otherworldly inversion occurs in Sophocles’ Antigone. When Creon
accuses Antigone of having bestowed equal honor on both her brothers, even
though one was the enemy of his city and the other its defender, Antigone
responds (l. 521): “Who knows if down there this is holy?”
27
William Gilbert, De Magnete, trans. P. Fleury Mottelay (New York: Dover,
1958), 26.
28
Philosophy of Nature, Addition, 166. Hegel here follows Gilbert, De
Magnete, 27.
29
“There has been a lot of talk in physics about polarity. This concept is a
great advance in the metaphysics of the science; for the concept of polarity is
simply nothing else but the specific relation of necessity between two different
terms which are one, in that when one is given, the other is also given. But this
polarity is restricted to the opposition” (Philosophy of Nature, 19).
30
The first supersensible world was a theory of transposed essence, the second
that of transposed reversed essence. The transposition of essence is the theoretical analogue of what Hegel calls self-estrangement (Selbstentfremdung). In
the realm of pure theory, things have their essence in another world. In the
more advanced, praxis-oriented stages of spirit, man’s essence, the meaning of
his life, will be outside of and beyond his actually present world: “In the
Phenomenology, Hegel repeatedly discusses the duality he wishes to surmount,
a dualism which expresses the torment of spirit obliged to live in one world
and to think in the other” (Hypollite, Genesis and Structure, 382).
31
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 163.
32
Ibid., 165.
33
Inner difference first appeared when force split into two interacting forces
[138].
34 The closest we got to life was with magnetism, which Gilbert regarded as a
kind of soul: “Wherefore, not without reason, Thales, as Aristotle reports in his
book De Anima, declares the loadstone to be animate, a part of the animate
mother earth and her beloved offspring” (Gilbert, De Magnete, 312). Hegel, in
a similar vein, praises magnetism in the Preface: “Even when the specific
determinateness—say one like Magnetism, for example—is in itself concrete
or real, the Understanding degrades it into something lifeless, merely predi-
KALKAVAGE
97
cating it of another existent thing [the Earth], rather than cognizing it as the
immanent life of the thing, or cognizing its naïve and unique way of generating and expressing itself in that thing” [53].
35
In order to save continuity in nature, specifically in the phenomenon of
collision, Roger Boscovich argued that the repulsive force mutually exerted by
two colliding bodies is exerted before the actual collision. All action is action
at a distance, and there is never any actual contact between two bodies. Max
Jammer puts it succinctly: for Boscovich, “‘force’ is consequently more fundamental than ‘matter’” (Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of
Dynamics [New York: Dover, 1957], 178).
36 Schopenhauer goes even further by simply identifying force and will:
“Hitherto, the concept of will has been subsumed under the concept of force; I,
on the other hand, do exactly the reverse, and intend every force in nature to
be conceived as will” (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, trans. E.
F. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969], 111).
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The Work of Education
Jon Lenkowski
Good morning to you, ladies and gentlemen, students, colleagues,
distinguished guests, family and friends; and, most particularly, to
the current graduates who will receive master’s degrees today.
While it is customary at commencements to be congratulatory
and encouraging, I’m not going to do that, at least not primarily.
Rather, I’m going to try to address the following two connected
questions: What exactly have you been doing here? and What
have you learned? The first of these two questions goes to the
peculiar nature of the work we have tried to get you to do here;
the second looks easier, but may also require further consideration. Having spent a certain time with us, these seem to be the
very same questions you have to be asking yourselves; and they
are not very easy questions to answer. I’m going to go over some
old ground and I want to assure you that, while I’m enjoying
myself, I promise not to keep you very long.
To say that you have spent a certain number of semesters here
and read a certain list of deep and important books, and have had
conversations about them, is not really to say enough, because it
does not capture the essence of the specific work you have been
doing. It is true that we read a lot of books. But we view this not
really as an end, but as a beginning, since we hope and expect that
you will return to these same books, and others like them, again
and again throughout your lives. And therefore what you have
been doing here must be properly called a commencement—that
is, only the beginning of an activity that will just continue in you
as an essential and constant part of your lives. But this can happen
only insofar as the books that we have read here together have
already gotten a sort of permanent hold on you. Thus our hopes
Commencement address to the Graduate Institute of St. John’s College in
Annapolis, Maryland, 14 August 2009. Jon Lenkowski is a tutor at St. John’s
College.
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for your future are inextricably linked to what we assume has
already taken root in you here. Let’s try to think through the
implications of this.
First of all, it would have to mean that you have not kept the
books at arm’s length, but have allowed them to enter into you in
deep and essential ways. In other words: that you have made the
books your own. This looks different from something like
memorization—say of songs or even certain verses of poetry—
which is also a sort of internalization. Memorization might look
like making something my own, but really I’ve only made it
always readily available to myself. I can now repeat the song
anytime the mood strikes me—but it is still kept at a distance and
is in no way active in me. On the contrary, it is our great hope that
what you have read, studied and discussed here will stay with you
in an active way; will continue to reverberate and resonate in you;
will remain active in the sense that these matters will forever
make demands on you, will continue to inform and remain central
to your lives and to whatever you think and feel as human beings.
This also distinguishes what we have you do here from
merely technical and professional studies. It is true that these also
make demands on us, but only in our capacity as professionals of
one sort or another, not as human beings as such. So while they
may be active in us in our professional work, they are compartmentalized and only kept off to the side, without touching us as
human beings, without being allowed to become, or without
being thought of as, central to our lives. Our hope here, on the
contrary, is that what we have you study will make deeper and
more thoroughgoing demands on you, simply as human beings
and as citizens.
Thus to say that you make the books your own is to say that
you carry your education inside yourselves, where you continue
to let it work on you. This is then what we expect you to have
been doing here: making the books your own, or—what is the
same thing—bringing your education within yourselves. To see
how completely appropriate this way of speaking is to what we do
here in particular, you have only to consider what you have
studied: the philosophy, politics, language and literature, history,
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mathematics, and science you have studied here are not simply
making claims in the abstract, are not merely certain subjectmatters over there, alien to me. Rather, we make the book our
own. We enter the book and make ourselves part of the book’s
world. Or, maybe better: we allow the book to enter us; we internalize the book and let it inform and illuminate the ways we look
at ourselves. Whether a political teaching centers on Athens in the
fifth century BC or on Florence in the sixteenth century, it is
always—immediately and directly—drawing my attention to my
own political situation. Whether it is Plato’s version, or Freud’s
version, of the tripartite soul, my attention is drawn—immediately and directly—to the phenomena of my own inner life. If this
were not the case these books could at most be only of antiquarian
interest. These books are always making such demands upon us,
saying things about us, demanding that we turn toward
ourselves—so that to read the books thoughtfully and intelligently is always to be turning toward ourselves.
This turning toward oneself has two aspects. First there is the
question of the unity or unification of the various things we study.
And here I would remind you that both our undergraduate
program and our graduate program, despite the variety of subject
matter in both, claim to be unified programs. So where is the unity
to be found? This question is addressed vividly in Book VII of
Plato’s Republic at 537b-c, where Socrates says:
And the various studies acquired without any
particular order by the children in their education must
be integrated into a synopsis, [or seeing-together,]
which reveals the kinship of these studies with one
another and with the nature of what is.1
This seeing-together (σύνοψις in Greek) is directed first of all to
the integration of what are there called gymnastic and musical
education, but then subsequently also to what is called the higher
musical education, or what we might call the liberal arts. It is the
“seeing-together that reveals the unity of these studies.” Only in
turning inward, toward ourselves as the locus of these various
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studies can we achieve this synopsis or seeing-together, for it is in
me, in my “seeing them together,” that these various studies find
their unity, gather and integrate themselves and do their work.
And this leads me to the second aspect of this turning inward
toward oneself: as the books become your own and enter into
your souls, they continue to work upon you and upon your view
of all things, including your view of yourselves.
This does not mean that what we read is simply believed or
swallowed whole or uncritically. It’s more that claims and
counter-claims—or even nuance and counter-nuance—vie with
one another; that what were fixed, and maybe dearly-held, views
get unsettled and become questionable. This is the work done by
the books and by our conversations about them. And all of this is
going on in us. Thus our attention is quite naturally, even effortlessly, drawn inward.
But we are not mere observers here; rather we become active
participants in this, our own inner drama. A certain activity or
work on our part seems to kick in almost automatically. Or it
could be said that the work that the books do elicits, and is
completed by, a certain corresponding work on our part. But
though this might initially arise automatically, a certain effort
seems required to sustain it and make it work for us. This
sustained effort at turning inward, turning toward yourselves, is
the peculiar and proper work we have been intent on getting you
to do. The tasks of reading the assignments and participating in
class, while necessary and important, are really only a first step,
preparatory to this more essential activity. We might name this
activity rumination, or simply thinking, and it consists in carrying
on a conversation within one’s own self, as the ideas take hold
and confront one another.
In Book I, Chapter 2 of the Politics (1253a8 ff.) Aristotle talks
about the importance of language for man, the political animal:
Now it is evident that man is more of a political
animal than bees or any other gregarious animal.
Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and
man is the only animal that has speech. And whereas
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mere voice is only an indication of pleasure and pain,
and is therefore found in other animals (for their
nature reaches as far as the sensing of pleasure and
pain, and the communication of these to one another,
and no further), the power of speech is intended to
articulate what is advantageous and what is disadvantageous, and therefore similarly what is just and what
is unjust. And it belongs to man that he alone among
the animals has any sense of good and evil, of just and
unjust and the like, and the association of living
beings who have this sense constitutes a household
and a city.2
Language is different from mere vocal sound and thus sharply
distinguishes human beings even from other social animals. What
is so important about the power of speech, according to Aristotle,
is that it is language that allows us to consider matters of justice
and injustice, good and evil, and—we would add—other matters
of the same order. We must note here that, while it is speech that
clearly distinguishes man from other animals, Aristotle himself is
more interested in the specifically human activity that speech
alone makes possible for us. It is this activity of thinking and
considering that really makes us human; it is this that is the
specifically proper activity of human being as such.
And this has been our principal aim in your time here with us
that, along with internalizing the books, and carrying your
education within yourselves, you have accustomed yourselves to
this turn inward, this rumination, this conversation with
yourselves, as the proper and essential work, or being-at-work
(ενέργεια in Greek) of human being as such—and to such an
extent that this activity becomes simply a part of your lives. This
is the principal aim of the education we offer you, and may well
be the essential and intrinsic goal of education as such.
To help me make the case for this last claim, let me return
briefly to Book VII of Plato’s Republic. I will read from 518b6d7, abbreviating the passage slightly. Socrates says:
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[T]herefore education is not what the professions of
certain men assert it to be. They assert that they put
into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they
were putting sight into blind eyes.... But the present
argument indicates that this power is already in the
soul of each and that, just as an eye is not able to turn
from darkness to the light without the whole body
turning, so also the instrument with which each learns
must, together with the whole soul, be turned around
from becoming, until it is able to look at what is....
And therefore there would be an art of this turning
around, concerned with the way in which this power
can most easily and efficiently be turned around: not
an art of producing sight in it, but rather, this art takes
as given that sight is there, but not rightly turned, nor
looking at what it ought to look at.3
So: education is not a matter of taking knowledge that is already
in the teacher’s soul, and then transposing it to the soul of the
learner. Rather it is a sort of turning of the power of seeing that is
already in the learner’s soul, in the right direction—a turning
brought about by a certain art (τέχνη) called the art of turning
around (περιαγωγή, μεταστροφή).
Book VII begins with an image of our education—that is, our
rise from ignorance to knowledge—depicted as the gradual ascent
of released prisoners from within a dark cave up to the light of
day. At each stage the released prisoner is torn away from what he
had been looking at, and what he had implicitly trusted as real, to
now confront something entirely new which conflicts with what
he had previously seen. This confrontation compels him to turn
inward—that is, to weigh the one against the other, and also
against all of the other views he had once held at stages already
passed through, each one of which had also made truth-claims
and had at one time been simply and implicitly trusted and
believed in. He is now forced to “see all of these together”
(συνορᾶν, the infinitive of συνοράω—that is, σύνοψις, synopsis)
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105
and carry on a conversation with himself, in which each of these
has its say.
The description of the release from shackles and of the
violent turning around of these prisoners at the beginning of the
Cave passage might suggest the necessity of some external agent
(a Socrates, for instance), but even the simplest reflection on the
passage quickly gets one to see that this process can occur entirely
within a single soul—in other words, through a conversation with
oneself. Such an inner dialogue, in which one “talks right through
something” is in Greek called διαλεκτική, dialectic, from the verb
διαλέγειν, where λέγειν means “to speak” or “to talk,” and the
prepositional prefix διά means “right through.” So someone who
finds himself in the same situation as this released prisoner would
have to effortfully “talk right through” this panoply of claims and
counterclaims upon him that he now finds in his soul. This is
captured nicely in the middle voice of the verb, where διαλέγεσθαι
often has the sense of talking with oneself. A bit further on in
Book VII, at 532b4-5, the release from bonds and the turningaround connected with it are identified with dialectic.
This, then, is the picture of education given in the Republic.
It is supposed to culminate in light, or in genuine knowledge. But
whether this culmination is ultimately a real resolution, and
whether all of the antagonisms in the soul between claims and
counterclaims are ever really left behind, seems difficult to assess,
especially since what the Republic claims to be the ultimate
moment of this journey upward—namely, the Good or the Idea of
the Good—is explicitly said to be beyond being (Book VI, 509b).
But however this turns out, we in the meantime accomplish
something of enormous significance:
First: This turn inward, turn toward the self, where the
synopsis or seeing-together occurs, could be called, or likened to,
a kind of conversion, since we have been turned around and
turned inward toward ourselves.
Second: Furthermore, and as a consequence of this, whatever
progress we make here toward knowledge seems at the same time
to also be a progress toward self-knowledge. So here knowledge
and self-knowledge seem to come together or coincide.
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Τhird: If we persist in this turn inward and allow it to develop
into a full-blown conversation with oneself, we are making actual
within ourselves the proper and essential work (ἔργον)or being-atwork (ἐνέργεια) of human being as such.
Fourth and finally: This dialectical movement of the soul
within itself, which is the essential work and the very heart of the
education we have tried to provide for you here, is at once the
inner essence of education as such.
Postscript
The inward turn talked about here might invite comparison with
the concept of Er-innern, Er-innerung in Hegel (cf.
Phänomenologie des Geistes, VIII: Das Absolute Wissen, the very
last paragraph), and importantly revived by Gadamer (cf.
Wahrheit und Methode, Erster Teil, Sec. II, 2, d, penultimate
paragraph), as well as the concept of Er-eignen, Er-eignis in
Heidegger (cf. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), passim).
In ordinary German, the verb erinnern normally means “to
remind,” and with sich in the reflexive form “to remember,”
though Hegel and Gadamer take the word more literally to mean
something like “to interiorize”—an easy enough connection via
the adverb inne (English “within”) in the verb root. The verb
ereignen normally means “to happen” and the noun Ereignis
means “an event.” The standard etymology (cf. Der Grosse
Duden, Bd. 7: Etymologie) traces ereignen, through a shift in the
root, to the archaic eräugnen, carrying the sense of showing
(itself) before the eyes (Augen in German). The connection
between this and “to happen” seems clear enough. But Heidegger,
true to his fierce independence, takes the verb in an entirely
different direction, linking ereignen through the root directly with
the adjective eigen (English “own” or “one’s own”)—a
connection that Duden explicitly warns against. Heidegger’s
insistence on linking ereignen to eigen, together with the
particular stress he puts on the motive power of the prefix er-,
leads him to take er-eignen to mean something like “on the way
to appropriating,” or “on the way to ownness.” (The current
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standard way of rendering this in English is “en-owning,” which,
while neither German nor English, tries to capture both the sense
and flavor of Heidegger’s usage.) Of course, there is an agenda
behind this reading. And yet it seems too simpleminded to dismiss
Heidegger’s interpretation as just bad philology. Should not the
presumption at least be that he has seen into something hidden
and essential which has allowed him to look beyond the everyday
and obvious?
Notes
1 The
Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968),
216. Translation slightly altered and emphases added by the author.
2 Translation
3
by the author.
The Republic of Plato, 197. Emphases added.
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Falstaff and Cleopatra
Elliott Zuckerman
I
Falstaff and Cleopatra do not look alike. We all have a mental
picture of Falstaff, and most of us think we can visualize
Cleopatra. Yet it is surprising how few words in their plays are
devoted to their physical descriptions. Falstaff comes upon us
unannounced in the second scene of Henry the Fourth Part One.
At the same moment we move suddenly from formal verse into
prose. If we envision as a whole the four plays of Shakespeare’s
mature history cycle—Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth
Part One and Part Two, and Henry the Fifth—then it is in that
scene that Falstaff begins his domination and transformation of
the two middle plays. After the regular verse that we have heard
so far, both Falstaff and the prose come as something new. They
announce that the messy world of London lowlife will be exposed
to us, inserted below the arena of dynastic rivalry and war. To put
it impressionistically into color and sound, it is as though the
greenish white and the glitter of Richard the Second have been
replaced by the rich browns of smelly taverns and Spanish sherry,
later to be succeeded by the golden brass of Henry the Fifth.
At the end of two full acts all we are actually told about
Falstaff’s looks is that he is old and that he is fat. We also learn
that he has wit, but wit, so far as I know, is not limited to a
physical type. As it happens, all three of these definitive words—
fat, old, and wit—are used by Prince Hal in the opening phrase of
their first exchange. But it is Falstaff’s habitual drink that Hal
calls old, and it is his wit itself that he calls fat:
Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack…1
A lecture delivered on 2 April 2010 at St. John’s College in Annapolis. Elliot
Zuckerman is a tutor emeritus.
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Later on, Falstaff will famously tell us that he is not only witty in
himself but the source of wit in other men. But here the Prince is
not referring to the expanse of Falstaff’s humor or the infectiousness of his intellect. In his banter Hal is calling his
companion thick-witted, the opposite of what we might call a
“rapier” wit. Yet isn’t it remarkable that in his opening words Hal
uses the three words—four, if we add sack—that signify what
may be most important in Falstaff’s being? Fat, Wit, Old, Sack—
it is one of those marvelous details in Shakespeare about which
we wonder whether he placed them there strategically in premeditated design, or whether they simply turned up, self-generated by
genius.
As for Cleopatra, all hints about her looks are eclipsed by
something said about her that beggars all description. It may be
the greatest compliment ever paid anyone:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.2
Perhaps such hyperbole is necessary not only because she tempts
one of the greatest Roman heroes to betrayal, emasculinity, and
death, but also because—in the company of Juliet and Cressida,
Rosalind and Viola, Imogen and Isabella—she is played by a boy.
I think she is the only heroine who explicitly refers to that
convention, when, near the end, she evades the captivity in which,
as she says, some squeaking actor will “boy” her greatness.
(Among her countless talents, Cleopatra is good at transforming
nouns into verbs.)
Cleopatra is not only associated with crocodiles and snakes,
but she is expanded into a personification of Egypt and the Nile.
We see her playing the capricious monarch and the jealous rival.
My favorite among her various guises is in her scene as music
lover. She calls for music by echoing the opening line that this
audience ought to know well:
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111
Give me some music, moody food
Of those that trade in love.
[Music is called for. After a performance of whatever
length, she interrupts:]
Let it alone, let’s to billiards. 4
By replacing music with billiards, Cleopatra demonstrates her
infinite variety.
In an instructive anthology of French prose, designed for use
in the language tutorial of the college, there are samples of the
short character sketches of La Bruyère. Each paragraph is a list of
personal and sartorial characteristics, and ends with a declaration
of what the person is: il est riche, il est pauvre. Such generic tags
cannot be attached to the great people in Shakespeare. There is
only one Hamlet, one Rosalind, one Lady Macbeth—only one
Falstaff and only one Cleopatra. Why, then, did I put those two
together in the title of this lecture, and why have at least some of
you already guessed why they deserve to be paired? Whether for
good or for ill, the Fat Wit and the Serpent of the Nile, each in his
or her respective world, represent a counterpoise and a threat to
what is going on politically.
The History Tetralogy has the bones of a Morality Play. In the
line of legitimacy, Prince Hal lies between Richard the Second,
who was legitimate but weak, and the Henry the Fifth that Hal is
to become, who will legitimize the crown his father wears
uneasily. Meanwhile there is a gamut of Honor, ranging from
Falstaff, for whom it is a mere word, to Hotspur, for whom it is
everything. Hotspur, by the way, is the only rival to Falstaff in
liveliness and language. In Part Two the underlying schematism
is further personalized by the introduction of the Lord Chief
Justice, representing the moral order for which the future king
must eventually reject Falstaff. Falstaff is also the Prince’s
surrogate father—a role that is memorialized in a long and
separate scene.
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Richard II
{
Falstaff
Henry IV
HAL
Hotspur
Lord Chief
Justice
Henry V
Prince Hal is at the center of four triads, which at their most
neutral should give him—and us—the wherewithal for a proper
political and moral choice. The trouble is that Shakespeare in his
fecundity has endowed Falstaff with so much being that the scales
are, so to speak, outweighed.
Falstaff cannot be a measurable factor within the world when
he is already a world in himself. As he tells the Prince in the
peroration of a play within the play:
…banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins—but
for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack
Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more
valiant, being as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish not
him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s
company, banish plump Jack, and banish all the
world.5
The Prince answers truthfully but mysteriously in a tone the actor
must think up for himself: “I do, I will.”
Cleopatra, too, despite her pairing with Antony, also has her
separable world. This is paradoxically most evident in the manner
of her death, which is sharply divided from the death of Antony.
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All the other Shakespearean tragic heroes die at the end of their
plays, but after the succession of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and
Macbeth, it is in Act Four that Mark Antony has his prolonged
suicide in the presence of Eros. The playwright needs an entire act
for something new: the exotic and polysemous apotheosis of
Cleopatra. That redemption looks forward, I think, to the final
plays, often called Romances, that follow, in which old dissensions are harmonized, lost children are found, and statues come to
life. When Cleopatra embraces the asps she is showing the tragic
hero how such things ought to be done. All the boyishness is gone
in this triumph of the woman. And it is accomplished amidst
verbal music that rivals the sensuality of that other triumphal
woman, Isolde, who, twenty minutes after the suicide of her
lover, achieves her first and final sexual climax.
Most of the Romans can’t understand Cleopatra, and are
persistently fascinated with her and with Egypt. Even Antony has
what she calls “Roman thoughts,” but unfortunately not often
enough. The most extremely Roman of them all—I refer to
Octavius Caesar, who is an undisguised boy marching in from the
arena of Coriolanus—seems to be unable to recognize her attractiveness. That is, anyway, how I interpret his entry, near the end
of the play, into her room in Alexandria. “Which is the Queen of
Egypt?” he asks.7 He was only the adoptive son of Julius.
I mention Julius because I want to tell a brief anecdote about
what happened some years ago in a Graduate Institute preceptorial. At the end of the first act we came to Cleopatra’s famous
reference to her youth:
My salad days,
When I was green in judgment, cold in blood...8
I asked what she could have meant, and an elderly man in the
class observed that she was referring to a Caesar salad. I thought
the interpretation was entirely Shakespearean. This addition to all
the other meanings of the salad metaphor would have seemed to
him apt and irresistible.
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II
Cleopatra’s arrival on the barge at Cydnus is a celebrated passage
of English verse. It is also a powerful example of how
Shakespeare can transform his sources. In this case the source is
the good prose of North’s translation of Plutarch. The speaker is
Enobarbus, who earlier spoke the lines describing Cleopatra in
general. He has one of the most privileged roles in Shakespeare.
The transformation from good prose to great verse, and then from
great verse to great poetry, is worth a lecture of its own. It is
certainly worth a Tutorial of its own. Here I can only point to a
detail or two that have been added to the description. They have
been italicized in the example:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were
silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.
*****
Antony,
Enthron’d i’ the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.8
I have italicized the places where the winds, the water, and
the air itself are in love. Cleopatra has seduced Nature itself. And
as I transcribed these passages I felt obliged to insert a plea for the
restoration of this play—I am tempted to say this poem—to a
more secure place in the program. Not only should it be a seminar
reading, but it contains a detail that entitles it to be the very last
reading of the senior year. For—as my colleague Mr. Kutler likes
to point out—somewhere in its text it contains the word UNSEM-
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INARED.
The word unseminared—which refers to the deprivation of
something even more important than the Seminar—is used only
once in Shakespeare’s works. There are many thousands of such
words. When they occur in Ancient Greek we may assume that
other instances haven’t survived. In Shakespeare they tell us that
his genius had at its disposal a language that was rich in transitional flux. It could be said that Elizabethan and Jacobean English
displayed a variety that rivaled Cleopatra’s; or that, like Falstaff,
the language was fat and witty in itself.
When talking about iambic pentameter, or blank verse, I like
to show its remarkable range by quoting pairs of lines that as
neighbors highlight the immense contrasts possible in both the
language and what had become its characteristic dramatic
medium. Some of you already know the following lines as my
favorite example, from Hamlet’s dying injunction to Horatio:
Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.9
The first line is Latinate and quick-syllabled, leaving unrealized
two or three of the metrical stresses. The second is Anglo-Saxon
and monosyllabic, realizes extrametrical stresses, and even
provides clusters of consonants—“this harsh world”—that slow
the line down further, and that are unimaginable in, say, Italian
verse. Here is another such line, from Macbeth:
The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Making the green one red.10
Each of the two lines could belong to a different language. (If, by
the way, you don’t see that all but the last of these lines are legitimate and unarguable lines of iambic pentameter, please ask me
to show you—at the risk that I’ll actually do so!)
Such extravagance is in sharp contrast with the economy of
the other great modern dramatist we study here. According to one
set of tallies, Shakespeare’s lexicon is almost ten times that of the
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sparse and highly selective lexicon of Racine. (As the students
know, most of Racine’s vocabulary compensates for its brevity by
being untranslatable!) The difference is of course reflected in the
difference of the action. In answer to the on-stage horrors of
Shakespeare—even Sophocles would not have allowed the
audience to witness the gouging-out of eyes—the typical action
of the Racinian queen is to go off into the wings and then return,
having slightly changed her mind. The so-called unities of time
and place are usually ignored in Shakespeare, no more blatantly
than in Antony and Cleopatra, where Act Four has as many as
fifteen scenes. Those scene-numberings are, by the way, entirely
editorial. It is a delightful fact that in the First Folio, our only
original text, the heading of the play is Act One, Scene One—and
then there are no further act and scene divisions. Perhaps a
careless omission, but it is nicer to think that the first editors
realized that this play ought to flow on unimpeded, like the river
Nile—or like the overflowing dotage of Antony, which is
mentioned in the opening lines.
There is something about the richness of Shakespeare’s
language that is not always approved: his propensity for punning.
One of the great classical critics of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson,
played right into my hands when he wrote about it. “The quibble,”
he said—in his day a pun was called a quibble—“is the fatal
Cleopatra for which Shakespeare lost the world.”11 Just as for
Antony the world was well lost, so Shakespeare’s attraction to
wordplay is happily inseparable from his love of the word.
Tonight there is no time to discuss the wonders of
Shakespeare’s quibbling, for, as you’ll hear, there is a rarer and
more hidden aspect of his wordplay to which I shall devote a few
minutes. But recently I have been reading learned discussion of
the pun—there are such things—and have been confirmed in
something I have always suspected: that an investigation of the
pun must lead to a discussions of language itself. But even when
you hear an everyday pun, let it be enough to remember
Shakespeare’s predilection when you automatically groan. If the
groan is simply to let the punster know that you “got it,” a smile
of appreciation is a better indication. But if it is a groan of
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reproach, the practice of our greatest poet requires that you at
least take the time to decide whether the pun is a good one.
But more broadly you might remember that there are petrified
puns at the roots of our words—a Platonic dialogue is devoted to
quibbling etymologies, strongly countering the now popular
notion that the form of words is merely conventional. Punning is
related to rhyming and to metaphor. Bear in mind the dangerous
double-meanings of the Delphic oracles, where the wrong choice
of interpretation might mean one’s death. Remember that it was
with a quibble that Odysseus escaped from the Cyclops. Much of
the sense of music depends upon the ambiguities of what can
fairly be called tonal punning, for every modulation pivots on a
pun. And above all consider what you are doing when you dream.
The other aspect of wordplay I just referred to is the
Anagram, and it is the occasion for my second anecdote. The
anagram got me into trouble in my early years of teaching at St.
John’s. In a language tutorial we were reading one of the sonnets,
which I present here. I’ll read the whole sonnet, but I’m afraid
that I shall talk about only line eleven, which I have italicized:
SONNET 64
When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometime lofty towers I see down razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store,
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate:
That time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
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There can be little doubt that the poet is asking us to hear the
connection between RUIN and RUMINATE, and I think he is
also asking us to see the connection in the printed text. We did so
in that class, long ago, noticing that when we removed RUIN
from RUMINATE we were left with a bereft MATE. We didn’t
stop there, but went on to look for more anagrams. We found
TIME, which is the theme of the sonnet, and words related to that
theme, such as MINUTE, MATURE, and REMAIN. Someone
happily discovered NATURE. There are more, but I’ll let you find
them for yourselves.
At a dinner-party that evening, I boasted of what we had
discovered in class. I was overheard by one of the elderly
members of the faculty, who later took me aside and told me that
at St. John’s College we don’t do such things. Perhaps he thought
I also counted up the letters in all my texts, in order to discover
what was at the dead middle.
It is now fashionable to include anagrams among the
treasures one seeks in the sonnets. I know of recent major studies
that do so. When the poem is printed out and non-dramatic, there
is an invitation for anagram hunting. But what about the plays,
which were presented without a text to follow, to an audience not
all of whom could read? Are we to find literal wordplay in the
spoken text?
For a test case, I seek the help of Iago. In most of the action
of Othello, we watch with fascination and dread the virtuoso
performance wherein Iago, malignantly and I think motivelessly,
brings to destruction a great hero and his innocent wife. He does
so by means of a handkerchief. His performance begins with what
is almost a whisper: “Ha,” he says, “I like not that.”12 What am I
to make of the fact that HA—that H and A—are the first two
letters of HANDKERCHIEF? What are you to make of it? Did
Shakespeare make anything of it? Did Shakespeare even notice
it? Does his intent matter, despite the warnings that there is
something called the Intentional Fallacy? Isn’t the richness and
variety of the play enough, without the need to pile up
superfluities?
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I think similar questions must be asked about any such
discovery, particularly when its attraction feels irresistible. Their
discovery is only a preliminary to the criticism of the poem.
Criticism begins with the attempt to decide whether what is
discovered is properly there.13
III
One reason why Shakespeare the Poet and Shakespeare the
Dramatist vie for supreme beauty is that the poetry spreads
itself—leaks out, so to speak—into the action. I am referring to
what, for want of a better name, I call Enacted Metaphors. The
poetic trope is staged for us. Cleopatra, on the upper level of the
storied stage, has the wounded Antony reeled up to her, and she
observes that fishing is a great sport. The blind Duke of
Gloucester thinks he is jumping off a cliff, but only falls from one
step of the stage to another. In a speech filled with other sublimely
monosyllabic lines, Othello extinguishes a lamp while on his way
to smother Desdemona:
Put out the light, and then put out the light.14
Whole scenes can be large figures of speech. The unweeded
garden of England, with a gardener named Adam. The Forest of
Arden, which always has Another Part. Lady Macbeth twisting
her spotted hands while wandering in disturbed sleep.
Falstaff stages his own resurrection. True to his denigration of
Honor, he plays dead in battle. When he gets up, he has the chance
to celebrate his ebullience in more than speech. Then, to make the
act entirely outrageous, he carries off the body of Hotspur, dead
from Honor, in order to claim the victory as his own. When
Falstaff was lying in pretended death, we heard an impromptu
eulogy from Prince Henry, which is in great contrast to the repudiation of Falstaff at the end of the play. Falstaff’s pretended death
is comic; his true death is pathetic, and it comes when he is still
alive. Cleopatra also keeps dying, and her deaths and recoveries
bring on the death of Antony and his brief resurrection. Her final
death, carefully staged, is, in the largest sense of the word, comic.
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About Falstaff’s actual death, there is an aspect I have never
seen mentioned in the books I have read. In two significant ways
the very end of his life parallels the death of Socrates. As you
know, when Socrates is about to die he refers to a debt he owes to
the demigod Asclepius—who, as I interpret it, cured him of
Becoming. Falstaff, right after his rejection, refers to the money
he owes Justice Shallow. More important, both Socrates and
Falstaff die from the bottom up. The effect of the hemlock starts
at the feet. And in her description of Falstaff’s death, Mistress
Quickly notices that the final coldness began at his feet. I asserted
earlier that one of the duties of criticism was to try to judge
whether an anagram, say, was admissible. A similar attempt at
discernment should be brought to bear on the significance of such
classical parallels.
The most magnificent of all the staged metaphors must be the
death of Cleopatra. She herself stages it. She nurses the asps, like
the mother of death. She readies herself to meet Antony again,
and her ladies follow her, to assist in the seduction:
The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
Which hurts, and is desir’d.15
But this operatic love-death is not that of the singing divas. They
depend upon the easier effects of passionate music. Cleopatra’s is
the triumph of clarity and wit.
Epilogue
In the Folio version of King Lear, shortly after the five Nevers
that hammer out the culminating despair of the negative action,
the King, with the dead Cordelia in his arms, imagines that his
daughter is about to speak. As a staged metaphor, it might remind
us of Cordelia’s initial refusal, five acts earlier, to speak more than
a single repeated negative. At the end of the play she is saying
nothing. At the beginning she had uttered the word Nothing, and
with that word she seems to have released the army of uncanny
evil manned by her sisters and their allies.
Cordelia, who seems to be Grace itself, and who takes upon
herself a redeeming forgiveness, must be eliminated from the
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world. Nothing could be more perverse than the eighteenthcentury happy ending, in which she survives and is married off to
Edgar. This is not only absurd; it is, in another sense, not absurd
enough. From the point of view of stagecraft, it is easy enough to
save Cordelia. Shakespeare makes that obvious, so that we see
that the killing of Cordelia is of the utmost importance. While we
are all reasonably hopeful that there is still time to save her, he has
Edmund delay until it is too late the casual word that would have
meant rescue. It is being asserted, I think, that in order to
eliminate the extreme evil, the extreme good must also go. At the
end of this tragedy, and I think most of the others, the world must
be deprived of both Grace and Evil, leaving us with the merely
good and the merely bad.
I’ll go one rash step further and draw an analogy with my
chief subject. Both Falstaff and Cleopatra reveal a seductive
amorality that also, like Grace and Evil, must be purged. England
and Rome are left with the ordinary, the political, the moral, and
the livable.
1
Henry IV, Part I, I.1.4.
2
Antony and Cleopatra, II.2.278-81.
3
Ibid., V.2.262
4
Ibid., II.51-4
5
Henry IV, Part I, II.4.457-63.
6
Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.135.
7
Ibid., I.5.86-7
8
Ibid., II.2.230-58
9
Hamlet, V.2, 361-63
10
Macbeth, II.2, 77-8
11
Samuel Johnson, A Preface to Shakespeare, §44
12
Othello, III.3.37
13
I once gave a lecture on the opening note of “Dove sono,” the great C-major
aria of the Countess in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. It was only while
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speaking the lecture that I realized that the first syllable of the Italian text, DO,
was also the DO of the C-major scale.
PORTRAITS OF THE
IMPASSIONED CONCEPT
Peter Kalkavage, The Logic of
Desire: An Introduction to Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit.
122
14
Othello, V.2.7.
15
Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.343-44.
Paul Dry books, xvi + 537 pages, $35.
Book Review by Eva Brann
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is an enthralling “picture
gallery” (447)* of the successive incarnations in which human
consciousness appears in the world; it is also a repellant trudge
through the abstract dialectic by which its concept develops. I
would claim that until you’ve undergone the complementary
experiences of delighting in the imaginative recognition of the
various “pictures” and of suffering the pains of thinking through
the logic, you haven’t quite lived—if living means having
plumbed the possibilities of passionately driven thought in search
of self-awareness.
Like all great classics of philosophy, the Phenomenology is
written for all of us, the amateurs of thinking no less than the
professional philosophers (451), provided we have this single
qualification—that we are Hegel’s contemporaries in the sense of
living with him at the end of time, when consciousness has come
to full self-realization as spirit. More mundanely put, the
Phenomenology presupposes only “some familiarity with the
history of philosophy” (xii), and that can be supplied by any of
the good commentaries available.
Nonetheless, the book is a nest of labyrinths at whose every
turn we readers meet, in Peter Kalkavage’s words, a monstrous
Minotaur, a “Demon of Difficulty” (xi). To overcome each new
Minotaur we need help of a more global sort than even the best of
*
Page numbers in parentheses refer to The Logic of Desire.
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paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries can provide. This is
exactly what Kalkavage gives us in The Logic of Desire. It is a
full-scale narrative, a readable yet faithful retelling of Hegel’s
story. It has several serious predecessors (which are given full
credit in a brief analytic biography), but is in a class of its own for
its engaging, distinctly American-flavored accessibility, its downamong-the-readers and do-it-yourself egalitarianism. Indeed, an
early reader of the book wrote to me to praise it as “a popularization of the right kind, explicating the thinking of Hegel in its
own terms, while constantly watching the mind of the potential
reader to see whether that mind is taking it in.” The Logic of
Desire intends to lead us “into the thick of Hegel’s arguments”
(xii), not from a commentator’s outside view but from the
position of a reader venturing into the labyrinth. That is, of
course, what an “introduction” should do – bring us into a text.
The Logic of Desire is, so to speak, a friendly doppelgänger of the
Phenomenology that steadily accompanies it (being as long as the
text) without ever eclipsing it.
Kalkavage presents Hegel’s book as one of a quartet of great
books on education, together with Plato’s Republic, Dante’s
Divine Comedy, and Rousseau’s Émile. All four of these works
present the drama of the soul’s development and liberation, as
Hegel puts it, from consciousness’s “immediacy” (its unreflectively natural familiarity with its world) to its “mediated” (that is,
conceptualized) appropriation of that world as fully selfconscious spirit. The Phenomenology is the story of the epochs in
the education of spirit, the life changes self-generated by its
“passionate self-assertion,” its spirited longing, its desire, to come
into its own. This eventful journey of consciousness’s becoming
spirit is a tragic drama, because the spirit-to-be “cannot become
wise without making a fool of itself. An extremist at heart, spirit,
our human essence, is fated…to learn through suffering” (2). The
journey that consciousness drives itself through is a logical one –
hence the title The Logic of Desire.
This logic is new upon the scene of rationality. Hegelian
dialectic is a living, developmental logic. It is not the work of
individual human understanding passing judgment on this or that
EVA BRANN
125
by reference to a fixed set of categories, but rather the work of
Thought itself—“the Concept” in Hegel’s language. This
energetic Concept drives itself in a violent, dialectical (that is,
self-antithetical) motion from continuously new “self-positings”
through inevitable “self-otherings” to ever current and ever
collapsing self-reconciliations, until an ultimate consummation of
mutual absorption by self and other is reached. In the hackneyed
and unhelpful language of some Hegel-explications, this rising
and plunging onward motion of the spirit is referred to as thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis, but Kalkavage does not use this terminology in his inside chronicle of spirit’s way. He finds fresh
language for every “moment,” every station of consciouness’s via
dolorosa.
In the self-motion of dialectical logic, two elements are
compounded: desirous striving and spirited assertion. Here one of
the accepted translations of the German Geist as “Spirit” (the
other is “Mind”) proves serendipitous, for it alludes to “spiritedness,” that proud self-assertion and other-negation which the
Greeks called thymos. The desire that drives the dialectic is thus
shown to be a powerfully negative and destructive force, and it
reincarnates itself in a succession of figures—that portrait gallery
of impassioned concepts by which spirit drives itself to cancel,
keep and raise (the three main meanings of the well known
Hegelian verb aufheben) all significant oppositions. The
paradigm of all these oppositions is that of subject and object, self
and other.
The Logic of Desire presents an exemplary attitude for a
reader to adopt toward a book. To use a fancy term, it embodies a
“hermeneutic,” a principle of interpretation. The most respectful
such hermeneutic rule I know is the so-called “principle of
charity”: give the text a chance to make maximum sense.
Kalkavage outdoes this principle by embracing a “principle of
appreciation”: savor and learn from the text to the utmost of your
ability. The principle of appreciation is to the principle of charity
as awed generosity is to squint-eyed tolerance—a way of treating
a book with magnanimity rather than with mere civility.
Thus it is not until the last pages, in the epilogue, that we
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learn that Kalkavage could not possibly be a whole-hearted
Hegelian, that the book that has captivated him has not captured
him. The main sticking-point is that very condition mentioned
above, that coloring of spirit’s eros, of its desire to know itself, by
thymos—spirit’s aggression toward its other. “Desire here is not
other-affirming but self-affirming and other-negating” (454).
Thus, if Hegel succeeds, he will—and this is in fact his aim—
have killed philosophy, the love of wisdom, not only by the
combative self-positing of consciousness (which is discordant
with the open inquisitiveness of philosophy), but also by the
claim that the curriculum of self-development can be completed;
for, once Absolute Science, the knowledge that has absorbed all
its conditions, has been attained, philosophy is superseded.
Kalkavage’s approach is therefore a welcome counterweight to a
mode that is all too prevalent in contemporary philosophy: to allot
living space only to those problems and solutions currently within
the consensual range of the philosophical profession. The Logic of
Desire teaches the lesson of non-credulous admiration.
Does it follow from this way of reading that Kalkavage’s
Hegel must be either left-leaning or right-leaning? Hegel students
on the left—notably Marx—interpreted his work as atheistic
because God becomes man and is his congregation, while on the
right this entry of God into his people was thought to preserve
some transcendence. Kalkavage says that “what Hegel no doubt
intended is that each is absorbed into the other. God must be
humanized in order to be self-conscious, and man divinized in
order to enjoy absolute self-knowledge” (509, n. 2). This view,
certainly supported by the text itself, compounds right and left
Hegelianism. The Phenomenology is neither a theology nor an
anthropology but a theoanthropology.
There remains, however, the question of Hegel’s politics. In
some final advice to the now-engaged reader about which book to
tackle next, Kalkavage recommends Hegel’s Elements of the
Philosophy of Right as “the most deeply philosophic political
work of modernity, which contains his most powerful critique of
modern liberalism” (452). But since the liberalism Hegel was
critiquing has much in common with contemporary conservatism,
EVA BRANN
127
here too, the right-left question has no bold solution. Hegel’s
conservatism is too sui generis to fall neatly under any predetermined rubric. And yet, perhaps we can find a pidgeon-hole for
him. There is among Hegel’s epochal portraits a figure called “the
beautiful soul.” It is described by Kalkavage as being afflicted
with “spiritual narcissism,” as being “miserable in principle”
(345, 348); it is too pure to be practical, and is, on top of that, a
harshly unforgiving judge of those who are doers. Kalkavage
points out that Hegel himself is, in turn, a particularly harsh judge
of this beautiful soul (507, n. 28; 509, n. 48). In this portrait,
Hegel paints a wickedly true-to-type likeness of a liberal intellectual—thereby revealing himself to be the “right” Hegel after
all.
I might add here that Kalkavage recommends, as another next
reading after the Phenomenology, The Science of Logic. It
postdates the Phenomenology by five years, and yet it is an everfascinating question whether the former comes “before” or
“after” the latter. For the Logic (or its shorter, more accessible
version, often called the “Lesser Logic”) is in fact God’s pretemporal life-plan for the spirit in the world—that is, its purely
logical unfolding told through the abstractly dialectical moments
of the Concept. When this ideal plan, this Concept, enters time, it
takes on appearances. Hence “phenomenology” is the account of
the phenomena, the appearances of the Concept in a dialectal
sequence of forms. In Kalkavage’s more accurate and eloquent
rendering: “[P]henomenology, as the prelude to science, is spirit’s
rational communion with itself in its manifold appearances in
history” (108). Then the question for us readers might well be:
Does Hegel know the Concept through its appearances or the
converse? Does experience of the appearances precede the logic
that makes it rational, or is the dialectic plan prior to any comprehension of the shapes that invest it (516, n.10)? Kalkavage opts, I
think, for the first case, and that decision puts the Phenomenology
first in Hegel’s system and first for us readers.
Kalkavage has, as I said, done an end-run around the leftright controversy. And yet, as he leads us to listen to Hegel’s
language, to savor his symbolism, to follow his figures, we come
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to see Hegel as an uncircumventably religion-bound writer. If the
structure of the Phenomenology is dialectical, its pathos is
religious. The above-mentioned “beautiful soul” is one of a
myriad of examples. When, as its dialectic demands, this
judgmental, holier-than-thou bystander is finally reconciled with
the doer (the Phenomenology is a roman à clef that names no
names, to which Kalkavage often supplies the key; in this case,
the man of action is Napoleon) they come together in mutual
forgiveness “Spirituality no longer consists in life-denying
judgmental inwardness, and the world is no longer God-forsaken
and vain” (357). Kalkavage’s rendering captures the spiritual
aspect of the event.
But more—he catches and conveys at once the pervasive
Christianity and the self-willed heresies of Hegel’s book. For
example, the religious drama of the Phenomenology culminates
not in the Resurrection of Easter Sunday, but in the Passion of
Good Friday. It is this “speculative Good Friday” that images the
conceptual ultimate reconciliation of man with God, the
revelation that God needs man in order to be fully God. The
Passion of Jesus (who is never named) already contains, has
conceptually collected and recollected within itself, the resurrection of the spirit, which is not a separate ascent but just “man
in history” (449-50). For it is in history that man and God are
united, and this union culminates in the infinite sadness of God’s
death which is also the first moment when spirit knows itself as
spirit. Philosophy must “go down” in order genuinely to “go up”
into the eternal Now of Absolute Science. (This moment of
consummation is far more complex, of course, than my account
of it.) Kalkavage accompanies his presentation of this bold
tampering with the climactic events in the calendar of the church
year by a remarkable list entitled “Hegel’s Heresies” (398). This
list on the one hand leaves me convinced that Hegel was indeed
the ultimate heretic; on the other, however, I remain mindful of
the fact that “heresy” (Greek for “choice” [hairesis]) is, after all,
a version of faith—though perhaps a willfully original one.
Indeed, the Phenomenology exhales such awe before the events of
EVA BRANN
129
God’s appearance on earth that it is palpable even to a nonChristian.
The Phenomenology is complex beyond summary but
without loose ends, and labyrinthine but without cul-de-sacs. The
complexities and abrupt corners, the startling turns and sudden
familiarities, the space-inversions and time-loops that mark the
Concept’s path are lovingly—and clearly—traced out in The
Logic of Desire. Near the center of the book an “Interlude” is
devoted to schematizing these movements and their achieved
moments, without letting us forget that conceptual thinking is
essentially unpicturable and that the Phenomenology speaks with
a forked tongue. The phenomenal picture gallery is an aid to be
continually subverted; its visualizable images are countermanded
by its sightless logic. For images are “out there,” since they are
objects, and thinking is within us, since we are subjects. To keep
the reader on the conceptual track, Kalkavage continually recapitulates—as Hegel does, but often very abstrusely—the purely
logical progress. But Kalkavage also asks the question of
questions about this text: “What, possibly, is lost in the move
from picture to Concept?” (518, n. 30.) He has, in fact, given an
answer, intimated above. What is lost is the element of positive
love animating philosophy when it welcomes some sort of vision.
This autobiography of the spirit is, then, the recollection of its
continually morphing recognition of itself both in and as the
world, of the moments of reconciliation between self and other, of
the mutual “mediation,” the bridging of the gap, between subject
and object. As in any autobiography, time is essential, and indeed
the latter is spirit’s ultimate definition: time is spirit’s intuition of
itself, meaning that its self-othering and self-finding, its
projection of itself into an object and its consequent seeing itself
in that object, is the motion, the dialectical flux of appearances,
that we call time. But this time is not necessarily chronological.
The time-loops mentioned above testify that spirit’s phenomenal
progress is not a mathematical continuum, a succession of linear
befores and afters. For example, Newton’s force of attraction,
which holds together the world filled by bodies, appears chronologically much later than God’s power which unifies the creation
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
inhabited by souls. Yet Hegel regards the latter as more conceptually complex, more replete with dialectical reconciliations, and
so, as Kalkavage points out, it appears later in Hegel’s account
(77). The grades of spirit’s self-education are not always consecutively numbered.
Consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, are the
beings whose experiences, whose successive times, are recollected in the Phenomenology. By whom? Who is the true teller of
the tale? All the Peoples of the Book, Jews, Christians, and
Muslims, are familiar with this enigma of authorship, which no
amount of textual analysis can solve. For suppose that numerous
hands are discerned—the question remains, Who guided the
hands? Just two centuries ago, in 1807—Kalkavage’s book
celebrates this bicentennial—Hegel, a professor of philosophy at
Jena, published his book. And yet, scandalous as it may seem, it
is not he but the spirit that guided his hand, the hand of one who
knows “conceptually grasped history,” who recalls the Golgotha
where spirit completed its suffering and became absolute—that is
to say, fully itself and self-sufficient. “[T]he Phenomenology,
strictly speaking, is the work of spirit rather than the work of
Hegel” (267; 494, n. 12). The willingness to utter such words is
testimony to a readiness to take this terrific book and its demands
seriously; it is what gives The Logic of Desire its own intensity.
Who or what, then, constitutes this gallery of impersonal
persons, from consciousness to spirit, that exhibits the unnamed
but identifiable human shapes of history? Logically, as concepts
in thought, they are the immature moments of the pure Concept;
temporally, as individuals on earth, they represent Everyman
(521, n. 71), the various human embodiments of the appearing
Concept that we readers, participating in Hegel’s “inwardizing”
(the literal translation of the German word for recollection,
Erinnerung) can still find within ourselves. For the spirit’s autobiography is also ours, and we now recognize the struggles which,
though opaque to our predecessors, have brought us to our
common modern humanity, to the community that has grasped its
history conceptually (449).
EVA BRANN
131
This consummation of Hegel is, I think, as dubious as it is
high-toned, but on the way there are many moments of wonderful
down-to-earth plausibility, and The Logic of Desire reports them
with down-home humor. I don’t know where else Hegel would
find himself so appreciatively joshed, in accordance with the
Socratic wisdom that playfulness can levitate dead earnestness
into live seriousness. (I should point out, though, that there is also
weighty evidence that Hegel himself has a sense of humor.) An
example of Kalkavage’s wise levity is a section called “Artful
Dodgers” that recounts a moment in the life of consciousness—a
moment in my history, recapitulable within me—when I no longer
find myself in external works and objects but shift suddenly to
being immersed in “the heart of the matter” (die Sache selbst).
That shift, however, lands me, by a convoluted evolution, in a
drama of deceit that leads to an inevitable downfall by selfnegation. For this project, to dwell with the true matter, is my
cause, and to my fellow workers it connotes a loss of the objectivity they were led to expect of me. Say—this is Kalkavage’s
example—I was a molecular biologist trying to discover the gene
for self-consciousness. Having become engaged with the matter
itself as it matters to me, I become irritated by other researchers
taking up my interest; my scientific “objectivity” shows its limits.
Since I can’t reappropriate my matter, I take my cunningly noble
revenge by interesting myself in theirs: I write a best-seller called
Genes Are Us (222). Thus I take part in a “pathology of appropriation”; for in praising the work of other laboratories I praise my
own. I am the Great-Souled Biologist.
Whoever has some small familiarity with modern institutional research will laugh out loud at these insights into the
mutual invasion of different scientists’ “techno-space” (221). Yet
who would have thought of this psychological episode as being a
way-station to the reconciliation of subject and object? But so it
is, for what consciousness learns at this moment is that
“subjective me-ness and objective this-ness are both essential to
the matter itself” (223).
Finally, for all the human intensity of The Logic of Desire, it
is a narrative kept as free as possible of personal opinion. Such
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
obiter dicta are relegated to the endnotes, which consequently
abound in concise illuminations and suggestive queries. Here is
Kalkavage on the beautiful soul: “Sensitive types are often
merciless judges” (508, n. 39). And a few notes later, he asks a
question incited by Hegel’s harsh condemnation of this same
beautiful soul and other condemned types hanging in his picture
gallery: How do such judgments fit into his scheme of mutual
forgiveness and the ultimate reconciliation of oppositions? “[W]e
wonder about the connection of reason and judgment in
philosophy. Is the philosopher allowed to condemn, or does
genuine rationality preclude all condemnation?” (509, n.48.)
This is a version of the unabashedly strange question—asked
of us not as an academic exercise but as a living perplexity—
whether Hegel the philosophy professor and Hegel the spirit’s
secretary quite coincide. It is also an example of the engaging
directness with which Peter Kalkavage leads us into one of the
wonders of the West.
�
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
McClay, Barbara
Sachs, Joe
Druecker, Robert
Kalkavage, Peter
Lenkowski, Jon
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 51, number 2 (2009)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Barbara McClay
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to
blind review. Address correspondence to the Review,
St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 214042800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the
St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2009 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essay
The Secret Art of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, Part Two...................................5
Judith Seeger
“The Things of Friends Are Common”........................37
Christopher B. Nelson
Review
“My Subject Is Passion”...............................................45
Eva Brann’s Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers
Think and People Know
Ronald Mawby
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
The Secret Art of Isaac
Newton’s Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Part Two
Judith Seeger
4. The Second Hidden Text: The Great Work of Nature
Tis true without lying, certain & most true.
That wch is below is like that wch is above & that
wch is above is like yt wch is below to do ye miracles
of one only thing
And as all things have been & arose from one by
ye mediation of one: so all things have their birth
from this one thing by adaptation.
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the
wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its
nourse. The father of all perfection in ye whole
world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be
converted into earth.
Separate thou ye earth from ye fire, ye subtile from
the gross sweetly wth great indoustry. It ascends
from ye earth to ye heaven & again it descends to
ye earth & receives ye force of things superior &
inferior.
By this means you shall have ye glory of ye whole
world & thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.
Judith Seeger is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. This essay is
published in two parts. Part one appeared in The St. John’s Review, volume
51, number 1. All bibliographical references appeared at the end of part 1.
Endnotes are numbered continuously through both parts
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Its force is above all force. ffor it vanquishes every
subtile thing & penetrates every solid thing.
So was ye world created . . . . (“Tabula
Smaragdina,” translated by Isaac Newton)37
The General Scholium with which the second and third
editions of the Principia end is so powerful that it may
obscure the discussion of comets that precedes it. That
discussion, however, is of crucial importance. The main text
of all three editions of the Principia culminates with
Newton’s demonstration that the formerly fear-inspiring
comets, rather than being supernatural signs of God’s wrath,
are natural bodies that obey the same laws as the planets. This
accomplishment is one of the triumphs of the book. But
Newton did not stop there. The wide-ranging disquisition on
comets at the end of Book 3—consisting primarily of celestial
observations, mathematical calculations, and inferences
drawn from Newton’s optical studies—includes, as well,
assertions about the active role comets play in the universe, in
passages that stand out in the context of mathematical calculations and demonstrations.
Consider, for example, the remarks that follow
Proposition 41 of Book 3 in all three editions. At this point,
Newton has already established that the bodies of comets are
“solid, compact, fixed, and durable, like the bodies of
planets” (918), and that their tails are composed of extremely
thin vapor which the head or nucleus of the comet emits
under the influence of the fierce heat of the sun. Then,
surprisingly (for what does this have to do with the mathematical determination of celestial motion ruled by universal
gravitation?), he states that this extremely thin vapor is
essential to the replenishment both of water on earth and of
a more subtle spirit required for life. The passage continues:
For vapor in those very free spaces becomes
continually rarefied and dilated. For this reason it
happens that every tail at its upper extremity is
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7
broader than near the head of the comet.
Moreover, it seems reasonable that by this
rarefaction the vapor—continually dilated—is
finally diffused and scattered throughout the whole
heavens, and then is by degrees attracted toward
the planets by its gravity and mixed with their
atmospheres. For just as the seas are absolutely
necessary for the constitution of this earth, so that
vapors may be abundantly enough aroused from
them by the heat of the sun, which vapors either—
being gathered into clouds—fall in rains and
irrigate and nourish the whole earth for the propagation of vegetables, or—being condensed in the
cold peaks of mountains (as some philosophize
with good reason)—run down into springs and
rivers; so for the conservation of the seas and
fluids on the planets, comets seem to be required,
so that from the condensation of their exhalations
and vapors, there can be a continual supply and
renewal of whatever liquid is consumed by
vegetation and putrefaction and converted into dry
earth. For all vegetables grow entirely from fluids
and afterward, in great part, change into dry earth
by putrefaction, and slime is continually deposited
from putrefied liquids. Hence the bulk of dry earth
is increased from day to day, and fluids—if they
did not have an outside source of increase—would
have to decrease continually and finally to fail.
Further, I suspect that that spirit which is the
smallest but most subtle and most excellent part of
our air, and which is required for the life of all
things, comes chiefly from comets. (926)
This is an allegory of circulation as the alchemists understood
it, in which the spirit provided by the tails of comets is
analogous to the philosophers’ mercury—whose many names
included dew of heaven, oriental water, celestial water, our
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
balm, our honey, May dew, silver rain—the spiritual agent,
whose properties were activated, according to Basil
Valentine, by expulsion from its habitat in the form of airy
vapors, and whose descent was perceived as heavenly
condensation falling to nourish the earth, which would perish
without it (Nicholl, 92-3).38 Newton is not here speaking of
circulatory motion within a single immovable plane, which he
has shown in Proposition 1 of Book 1 to be the motion of
bodies driven in orbits under the influence of centripetal
force. He is describing, rather, a continual churning within
the universe, the manifestation of nature as a circulatory
worker, to borrow his characterization of it in 1675.39 This is
an image of earth as retort, inasmuch as comets supply both
the fluids and the subtle spirit required for the development
of life itself.
The final book of the first edition of the Principia ends
abruptly with Proposition 42. But the second edition
continues. In addition to incorporating more observations
and calculations of the paths of comets, Newton in the 1713
edition extends the image of renewal nourished by comets to
the fixed stars themselves, writing, “So also fixed stars, which
are exhausted bit by bit in the exhalation of light and vapors,
can be renewed by comets falling into them and then, kindled
by their new nourishment, can be taken for new stars. Of this
sort are those fixed stars that appear all of a sudden, and that
at first shine with maximum brilliance and subsequently
disappear little by little” (937). This phenomenon, he
comments, had been noted by such reliable observers as
Cornelius Gemma, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler’s pupils.
In his last recorded conversation with John Conduitt,
Newton, at the age of 83, expanded upon the circulatory
image implicit in this understanding of those celestial events;
for, as the preceding citations from the Principia show, he
regarded the appearance of what we call supernovae as
evidence that the universe itself undergoes vast cycles of
destruction and regeneration. Conduitt wrote of this conversation that:
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9
it was his conjecture (he would affirm nothing)
that there was a <sort of> revolution in the
heavenly bodies that the vapours & light gathered
<emitted> by the sun <which had their sediment
as water & other matter had> gathered
themselves by degrees into a body <& attracted
more matter from the planets> & at last made a
secondary planett (viz. one of those that go round
another planet) & then by gathering <to them>
& attracting more matter became a primary
planet, & then by increasing still became a comet
wch after certain revolutions & by coming nearer
& nearer the sun, had all its volatile parts
condensed & became a matter fit to recruit <&
replenish> the sun (wch must waste by the constant
heat & light it emitted), as a fagot put into
<would> this fire if put into it (wee were sitting
by the <a wood> fire) & and that that would
probably be the effect of the comet in 1680 sooner
or later . . . (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Newton added that when this collision occurred, after
perhaps five or six more revolutions, it would “so much
increase the heat of the sun that <this earth would be burnt
&> no animals in this earth could live” (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Indeed, he seemed to Conduitt “to be very clearly of opinion”
that such a collision, and subsequent “repeopling” by the
Creator had happened at least once already, observing, first,
“that the inhabitants of this earth were of a short date,” partly
because “all arts as letters long ships printing – needle &c
were discovered within the memory of History, wch could not
have happened if the world had been eternal,” and, further,
that as far as the earth itself was concerned, “there were
visible marks of men [Westfall (1984: 862) has “ruin” here;
the word must be difficult to make out.] upon it whch could
not be effected by a flood only” (Iliffe, 1: 166). Such collisions were, Newton speculated, the cause of the suddenly
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
brilliant stars he had noted in the Principia—but without
mentioning there, as he did in his conversation with
Conduitt, that he took those stars to be “suns enlightnening
other planets as our sun does ours” (Iliffe, 1: 165). When
Conduitt asked him “why he would not own as freely what
he thought of the sun as well as what he thought of the fixed
stars—he said that concerned us more, & laughing added he
had said enough for people to know his meaning” (Iliffe, 1:
166).40
Newton could laugh, even in the face of past and future
death and devastation, for he trusted that a benevolent and
all-powerful God—both perfect mechanic and perfect
alchemist—determines everything that happens in the
universe, including the generation and apocalyptic
destruction of all living things (as, of course, Newton had also
read in the Bible, though he seems not to have mentioned
that particular bit of testimony in the conversation Conduitt
recorded). The second text concealed in the Principia, by
giving us an alchemical account of the generation of life,
expresses Newton’s confidence in God as perfect master of
the Great Work. This text is fully contained in the following
sentence, added to the second edition of the Principia, in a
translation based on that of Cohen and Whitman (938), but
retaining the ampersands of the Latin text. The issue is not
the use of the ampersand itself, which appears stranger here
in English than it does in the Principia, as it is used
throughout that work. What is striking is that both a comma
and an ampersand separate every term from the one that
follows it. This is not Newton’s common practice when
listing members of a series:
And the vapors that arise from the sun & the fixed
stars & the tails of comets can fall by their gravity
into the atmospheres of the planets & there be
condensed & converted into water & humid
spirits, & then—by a slow heat—be transformed
gradually into salts, & sulphurs, & tinctures, &
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11
slime, & mud, & clay, & sand, & stones, &
corals, & other earthy substances.
In the second edition this sentence is followed by two more
sentences. In the third edition those two sentences have been
omitted, so that the sentence cited above is the last one in the
body of the work immediately preceding the General
Scholium.
By the time he wrote these words, Newton had
abandoned his attempts to achieve experimental evidence for
the existence of the forces he had sought through his
alchemical work, but his references to comets show that he
had not abandoned his faith in the truth behind that quest,
for the language and imagery of this sentence come from
mystical alchemy. The sentence can be read as an allegory of
the three fundamental processes by which, according to the
alchemists, nature perfects her work: sublimation (the vapors
arise from the sun, the fixed stars, and the tails of comets);
distillation (by gravity they are condensed and turned into
water and humid spirits); and concoction (they change form
under the application of a slow heat). This process as a whole
Newton knew as vegetation, which in one of his earliest texts
on this subject (called “Of Nature’s obvious laws & processes
in vegetation,” written between 1670 and 1675) he explicitly
distinguished from what he called the “gross mechanicall
transposition of parts” (3r). In the 1670s Newton had no
inkling either of universal gravitation—writing, for example,
that clouds could rise high enough to “loos their gravity”
(5r)—or of a possible connection between comets and life on
earth. Although he writes in the manuscript that, “this Earth
resembles a great animall or rather inanimate vegetable,
draws in aethereall breath for its dayly refreshment & vitall
ferment & transpires again with gross exhalations” (3v), he
does not claim to know the renewable source of the ethereal
breath. After writing the Principia, however, he was able, in
allegorical language, if not in the language of experimental
science or mathematics, to complete the system of life-giving
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circulation.41 The products of vegetation, listed in order as
rising from the depths of the planet toward its surface in the
presence of the fertilizing philosophical mercury falling from
the heavens are emphasized in the Latin text by the repetition
of the ampersand. The first three—fundamental salts,
oleaginous and fiery sulphurs, and transforming tinctures—
are alchemical ingredients of increasing power, associated
with spirit and necessary for the origin and development of
life. The next four describe the evolution of matter under the
gradual drying effect of slow heating: slime (the residue of
putrefaction), mire, clay, and sand. With the eighth member
of the series, stones (a category that includes precious stones),
we begin to see the organization associated with the mineral
kingdom, considered a union of spirit and matter. The ninth
member of the series is coral, which also appears in the generative series in “Of Nature’s obvious laws.” Unmodified this
would be red coral, a precious natural analogue (according,
for example, to Michael Maier, nine of whose works were
part of Newton’s library) of the crimson philosophers’ stone
(169). With coral we pass from the mineral to the vegetable
kingdom, for coral was thought in Newton’s day to be a
marine plant, which grew under water and hardened to stone
when brought into the air. The last member of the
sequence—seventh in the group comprising the evolution of
matter, third in the group comprising the evolution of life in
terms of the three “kingdoms,” and tenth in the entire
process comprising the gradual union of spirit and matter—
brings us to the animal kingdom, telling us that “all terrestrial
substances,” a category that includes our own bodies, have
come into being through the natural transmutation of
celestial vapors by gravity and the planet’s slow heat. Newton
begins this sentence speaking generically about planets. He
ends it speaking specifically about that which “concerns us
more”: our earth and ourselves.
The final sentence of the body of the Principia, then,
reaches back to the very beginnings of Newton’s concern
with cosmology. He has returned at the end to the old
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questions on a new level of understanding made possible by
his discoveries in the Principia, though not yet sufficiently
developed to be expressed openly in the mathematical
language of experimental philosophy. In the second and, even
more pointedly, in the third edition of the Principia (both
prepared with more leisure than the first edition), it seems,
Newton wanted to end his book with a powerful vision
encompassing all of nature; a vision which, like that of the
veiled text at the beginning of Book 1, would be at once as
clear as crystal to those who knew how to read it and as clear
as mud to those who did not. The dissertation on comets is
the last dual teaching. Through careful observations and
sophisticated mathematical calculations Newton has transformed our understanding of the nature of comets and the
laws behind their motion. But he has also composed hauntingly beautiful images of generation in our universe and on
our earth, for in the final allegory comets link the earth and
everything in it to the heavens. Newton chose not to express
this grand life-giving circulation openly in the Principia. But
he did include it. The processes revealed in these allegories
declare the Great Work of nature under the guidance of God.
In this vision perpetual circulation leads to life itself, and
universal gravitation is its motor.
5. “The fountain I draw it from”
Nature may truly be described as being one, true,
simple, and perfect in her own essence, and as
being animated by an invisible spirit. If therefore
you would know her, you, too, should be true,
single-hearted, patient, constant, pious, forbearing
and, in short, a new and regenerate man. (The
Sophic Hydrolith)42
I am not so bold as to assert that I have interpreted the
concealed texts correctly in every detail and I certainly do not
claim that I have discussed every appearance of symbolism in
the book. Nevertheless, I hope I have shown that a coherent
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vision may be seen by reading the beginning of Book 1 of the
Principia in terms of numerological, esoteric geometrical,
theological, and alchemical symbolism, and by reading the
end of Book 3 in terms of alchemical allegory. I am not
arguing that the Principia properly understood is a sort of
Paradise Regained couched in mathematical metaphors, and I
have not forgotten for a moment that I am dealing with the
foundational text of modern terrestrial and celestial
mechanics; that what I have been calling the exoteric text has
existed ostensibly on its own for over 300 years; and that the
esoteric texts, in the absence of the exoteric text, would be no
more than mystical fancies, and perhaps not particularly
interesting ones at that. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake
to dismiss or avoid the esoteric texts, because they open the
way to a new and richer level of understanding of the work
as a whole, as well as of its author.
In fact, the existence of concealed texts in the Principia is
a solution, rather than a problem. Newtonian scholarship has
been a prolonged and uneasy exercise in rethinking his work.
Isaac Newton devoted the passion of his soul and the activity
of his intellect to discovering the intelligibility and the unity
of the world in all its manifestations. Yet even before we knew
of his vast manuscript collection of theological and
alchemical writings, whose subjects and style are so very
different from those usually attributed to the author of the
Principia, Newton was considered a complex and contradictory character. Now, the impacts of successive revelations—among them the ardency of his alchemical pursuits,
the intensity of his theological studies, and his conviction that
much of his work was restoring ancient learning—seem to
some to have shattered the possibility of ever seeing him as a
single, cohesive individual.
The Principia has been the crux of the problem.
Mathematicians and physicists have, quite reasonably,
focused on its mathematical and physical aspects. Meanwhile,
Newton’s biographers and the students of his theological and
alchemical pursuits have, for the most part, surrendered the
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Principia to those capable of following its formidable mathematics. I hope that, by looking closely at the Principia in a
way that (to my knowledge) has not been attempted before, I
have demonstrated that the mathematical, philosophical,
theological, and alchemical aspects of Newton’s work are
intertwined. But, even granting the existence of the concealed
texts, important questions remain: Why would Newton have
incorporated these teachings into the Principia? Why would
he have hidden them rather than revealing them openly? And
to whom are they addressed?
The first hidden text is particularly perplexing. Even as
mounting evidence persuaded me that it must be there, I had
no ready answer to the question why someone absorbed in
the relatively hasty composition of such a difficult and timeconsuming work would (or even could) have taken the time
and trouble to construct it. And yet perhaps it is not so
surprising. The language of symbol and allegory would have
been second nature to a man so thoroughly steeped in the
interpretation of alchemical and theological texts.
Incorporation of allegory and symbolism into his own text
would not have required inordinate effort. More importantly,
while for readers of the Principia, the hidden texts might
seem to be subsidiary to the open text—if they are seen at
all—for its author the relationship would have been the
reverse. The esoteric texts are not appendages to the exoteric
text; they are, instead, its foundation. There were certain
things Newton was not disposed to doubt and he held certain
convictions he would not deign to explain. In 1676, for
example, in a letter to John Collins, after asserting what he
realized was astonishing power and generality for his method
of fluxions, Newton wrote, “This may seem a bold assertion
because it’s hard to say a figure may or may not be squared or
compared with another, but it’s plain to me by ye fountain I
draw it from, though I will not undertake to prove it to
others” (Correspondence, 2: 180). The symbolic texts allow
Newton to incorporate into his masterwork the certainty
which was the source of his amazingly fruitful vision of the
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world, without having also to prove its existence to others.
They proclaim the glory of God suffusing both the universe
and the souls of men: the ground of Newton’s assurance that
the pursuit of knowledge through experimental and mathematical means is the proper vocation of humankind.
So did Newton include the hidden texts as a prayer of
thanksgiving to God, or perhaps as a personal meditation,
without intending them to be visible to others? I do think that
expression of his deepest beliefs at the heart of his greatest
work must have been a balm to the lonely soul of its author.
Newton had an attentive niece, devoted disciples, sympathetic colleagues, and even friends; but he had no peers. His
manuscripts with their repeatedly suppressed declarations
and speculations tell the story of an individual tormented by
the conflict between the aching desire to share his convictions
and the conviction that he could not do so. The “classical”
scholia, parts of which I have quoted above, serve as a particularly poignant example of this struggle, which he finally
settled by not including them in the Principia. The hidden
texts, thus, help resolve what must have been nearly
unbearable tension. Newton would have known that,
whatever their fate as far as the rest of the world was
concerned, they were there as his testimony of faith.
Nonetheless, it seems impossible that he concealed texts
in the Principia simply for his solitary satisfaction. There are
abundant indications within the work that signal the existence
of the first hidden text, while the remarks cited concerning
comets are in plain sight of anyone who reaches the end of
Book 3. Moreover, Newton himself, in the General Scholium,
calls our attention to the relation between God and natural
philosophy in a way that, when read only in the light of the
surface text of the Principia, is more puzzling than enlightening. The extended discourse on God, located at the center
of the General Scholium, is, frankly, shocking. It bursts
through the surface of the text with the force of a pent-up
spring, a surging torrent of words, far too powerful and far
too passionate to be neatly contained within the book the
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Principia seems at first to be. And then this ardent outpouring
vanishes without a trace, subsiding as suddenly as it began,
beneath the sentence: “This concludes the discussion of God,
and to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of
natural philosophy” (943).44 No one who reads this passage
can doubt that its author was a man of exceptional piety, but
if he was so very pious (and if he really believed that to treat
of God from phenomena is part of natural philosophy), how
could he have slighted God in his greatest work? It is true that
the Principia is a book of experimental philosophy (though
there are necessarily few actual experiments in it), and that
there is no experiment that will simply prove the existence of
God. But, except for a few scattered remarks, God appears to
be so utterly absent from the work that—despite the
testimony of Richard Bentley’s lectures, titled A Confutation
of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, delivered
in 1692 and published in 1693—Newton has been
condemned for writing an atheistic book (or, alternatively,
commended for writing a secular one).45 Of course, I have
been arguing that God is not at all missing from the Principia.
On the contrary, anyone willing to admit that this work (like
white light, the stone of the philosophers, man, and the
universe) may be simultaneously one and many, and able to
follow the clues Newton has provided, can see that it is, in
fact, filled with God’s presence and that we are meant to see
that presence.
But if we are meant to see that presence, then why hide
the teachings? There are several partial answers to this
question. One reason may have been Newton’s personality,
which has been described by such various terms as prudent,
paranoid, modest, arrogant, cautious, suspicious,
domineering, fearful, and vindictive. A more important factor
in his decision to hide the teachings could have been his
particular situation in the context of the political and
religious turmoil that was occurring in England during his
lifetime. Most importantly, the nature of the teachings
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themselves would have determined the form of their presentation.
As for his personality, extreme reticence, whatever its
source, was apparently part of Newton’s character. Public
revelation of any of his work seems often to have required a
struggle with himself as well as with others; most of what he
wrote, by far, he did not publish. But a simple appeal to
character does not really resolve the issue, for in the works he
did publish Newton was not always quite so reluctant to
reveal his beliefs as he was in the Principia. In the Opticks, for
example, published during his lifetime in six editions (three
in English, in 1704, 1717/18, and 1721; two in Latin, in
1706 and 1719; and a French translation in 1720), he wrote
increasingly openly of his hopes and speculations regarding
natural philosophy, though he still disguised them (however
transparently) as queries. He first published the Opticks,
however, after the death of his nemesis Robert Hooke in
1703 and his own ascent to a position of fame and power as
author of the Principia and president of the Royal Society,
and at a time when he was becoming more conscious of the
need to leave his work for posterity. Openness had also
characterized his early “New Theory about Light and
Colours.” But the tone of ingenuous excitement in which on
January 18, 1672 Newton (who was not yet 30 years old)
described his discovery of the nature of light to Henry
Oldenburg as “in my Judgment the oddest if not the most
considerable wch hath beene made in the operations of
Nature” (Correspondence, 1: 82-3) is one he never again
employed publicly. Instead, burned by the hostility that work
aroused, he designed his Principia to ensure that the
expression of his deepest passions and convictions would be
visible only to like-minded readers.
Newton’s penchant for secrecy, however, was not simply
(and perhaps not even primarily) a matter of character. He
had compelling external reasons to conceal his theological,
philosophical, and alchemical beliefs. With respect to
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theology, in the General Scholium to the Principia Newton
finally affirms the strict monotheism and the vision of God as
Παντοκρατϖρ that underlie his work, though with characteristic discretion he eschews the scorching anti-Trinitarian
diatribes he allowed himself in his unpublished manuscripts.
But by the time the second edition of the Principia was being
prepared—and the General Scholium was Newton’s final
addition to that edition—its author was Sir Isaac, secure in his
renown; and the Principia was so highly regarded that it had
practically become a sacred text itself. Had the unknown
Cambridge professor expressed his dangerously unorthodox
beliefs in 1687, he would have risked his career if not his life
(for religious heterodoxy was a capital offense in England at
the time). Moreover, the peril of confessing such beliefs did
not abate during Newton’s lifetime. He was a member of the
Convention Parliament of 1689, which declared equally
illegal the Roman Catholicism he loathed and the Arianism he
held.46 Newton could reasonably conclude that open
acknowledgment of his religious convictions would have put
his entire philosophical program at risk. At the very least it
would have provided for a lifetime of distraction, as he would
have been forced to engage in endless discussion and defense
of his beliefs. He had better things to do.
Newton had good reasons, as well, not to proclaim his
unorthodox philosophical convictions in the Principia,
closely tied as they were to his heterodox theology. He
believed that the existence of gravity had been made manifest
through its effects as revealed in the Principia, and that such
revelation, as he wrote in the General Scholium, was—
indeed, had to be—enough for now. Throughout his long life
he repeatedly tried to claim the right to say that he did not
know the cause of gravity, insisting (as had Galileo) that
knowledge of causes was not necessary for the pursuit of
natural philosophy. In fact, Newton was convinced that
requiring that causes be known, or hypothesized, before
effects could be studied stifled philosophical progress.47 In the
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General Scholium, after his often quoted assertion that he
does not feign hypotheses, Newton continues: “For whatever
is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a
hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or
physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no
place in experimental philosophy” (943). This statement—in
addition to neatly equating, in terms of their uselessness, the
metaphysical with the physical and the mechanical qualities
that the Cartesians held with the occult qualities which to
them were anathema—stakes out Newton’s philosophical
position on this issue. He publicly refuses to attempt to
explain gravity, and, with the authority of the Principia
behind him, he goes on to declare that a search for its cause
is, at best, beside the point.
But his protestations were not accepted by the mechanical
philosophers. Surely the heat with which they attacked him
was due in part to their understandable suspicion that he
thought he knew the cause of gravity, and that it was not
mechanical; for it was quite clear that impulse was unable to
account for universal gravitation. Explanation of gravitation,
therefore, seemed inevitably to require acceptance of a
doctrine of attraction, of action at a distance, of a force that
was, to use their heavily-laden word, “occult.”48 Newton
would readily have admitted that the workings of gravity
were occult—in the simple sense that we do not know exactly
how God does it. But he could never have satisfied the strict
mechanical philosophers on this point, no matter what he
said, for conservation of the universe as Newton understood
it required active force;49 and any admission of a nonmechanical cause into the universe was unacceptable to those
who held that the physical world could only be intelligible in
terms of matter and motion alone. If Newton harbored
personal beliefs about God’s active role in the universe, he
also realized that it would have been foolish for him to
express openly in the Principia convictions for which he
could not supply experimental evidence. Wisely, he designed
the surface text of the book to preclude speculation about
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causes. The deeper teachings—composed in a language not
susceptible to argument—were reserved for those who could
appreciate them.
As concerns Newton’s alchemical quest, as well, there
were abundant reasons not to reveal it openly in the
Principia. Again, one was the character of the open text as its
author constructed it, for if he had no demonstrable evidence
of the cause of gravity he had no demonstrable evidence even
of the existence of the forces he sought so avidly through
alchemy. Newton seems to have read alchemical texts with
the same intent with which he read all texts: seeing their
deliberately deceptive exposition and dense symbolic enigmas
as expressions of a single truth uniting nature and revelation,
obscured by a veil that could be penetrated by interpretation,
which in this case was aided by the experimentation at which
he was so adept. Whatever the philosophers’ stone may have
meant for other alchemists, for Newton I believe achievement
of the stone would have been the culmination of his life’s
work: it would have meant the acquisition through experimental means of that truth which he sought so very intensely.
As early as the first edition of the Principia, Newton struggled
with the desire to reveal his alchemical pursuits, writing in
the Preface, after describing the procedure he would follow
in the book:
If only we could derive the other phenomena of
nature from mechanical principles by the same
kind of reasoning! For many things lead me to
have a suspicion that all phenomena may depend
on certain forces by which the particles of bodies,
by causes not yet known, either are impelled
toward one another and cohere in regular figures,
or are repelled from one another and recede. Since
these forces are unknown, philosophers have
hitherto made trial of nature in vain. But I hope
that the principles set down here will shed some
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light on either this mode of philosophizing or
some truer one. (382-3)
As usual, however, he resolved that the open text of the
Principia was not the proper place for conjectures, no matter
how fervently he may have held them. This brief statement of
his strong suspicion and hopes and a few speculations in the
last paragraph of the General Scholium, which he cut short
for lack of experimental evidence, are as close as he comes to
openly stating his chemical aspirations in that work.50
Failure to obtain experimental evidence for chemical
forces might have been sufficient motive for Newton to
withhold open acknowledgment of those aspirations, but
there were other cogent reasons for discretion, as well.
Newton surely considered himself among the philosophical
alchemists, for, unlike the puffers or smoke-sellers, whose
base activity the philosophical alchemists universally decried,
he was surely not interested in acquiring personal power or
amassing wealth through chicanery. Nevertheless, he knew
that alchemists were widely considered to be rogues and
conjurors and as such were both ridiculed and feared.
Therefore, in personal terms, there was much to be lost and
nothing to be gained by publicly espousing alchemy. In
practical terms, serious alchemists considered the power they
hoped to achieve too dangerous to be proclaimed openly to
an imperfect world, a constraint that we know Newton
respected.51 And finally, the philosophical alchemists were
engaged in a spiritual quest for purification and perfection,
which they also called healing, not only of metals but also of
their own souls. True philosophical alchemy required a
relationship between the practitioner and his God wherein
the success of the work depended at least as much upon the
state of the alchemist’s soul as upon his facility in deciphering
texts or his dexterity in following procedures. The one thing
serious alchemical writings make perfectly clear is that only
the pious and pure of heart will be able to discern the proper
proportions of materials, the correct degrees of heat for each
part of the procedure, and the precise timing necessary to
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perfect the work.52 Achievement of the philosophers’ stone
would have been a gift of God awarded to one who merited
it. Open acknowledgment of engagement in this intense and
intimate quest would have been not only foolhardy but also
impious.
There are, then, abundant negative reasons for Newton
to have hidden his theological, philosophical, and alchemical
beliefs; but there is also a powerful positive argument for
including those beliefs in the form of concealed texts.
Newton seems to have considered, repeatedly, the possibility
that the world was ready for him to reveal, in his own name,
the convictions he held. And every time he considered that
possibility, he rejected it. He, therefore, took his place as a
member of a distinguished secret fraternity long engaged in
the task of seeking the truth and revealing it in a dual
manner: each work simultaneously expounding one text for
the many, and another, through symbols and figures, for the
few.53 He believed that the alchemists, the ancient sages, and
the inspired writers of the Holy Scriptures—recognizing the
peril to themselves and quite possibly to others of openly
displaying their true convictions in unsettled times like those
in which he was living—had conveyed their mystical
teachings in metaphors, fables, allegories, images, parables,
and prophecies, as well as numerological and esoteric
geometrical symbolism. All of their texts, like the book of
nature itself, required interpretation. Newton understood the
worth of his Book of Principles. Why should it differ in this
respect from the world-changing works that preceded it? In
his remarkable passage about God in the General Scholium,
Newton comes close to expressing in words the vision of the
concealed texts. But the full force of mystical belief cannot be
conveyed in everyday language, corrupted by the Fall and
confined by what Newton called its “unavoidable
narrowness” (McGuire, 199). Newton had numerous reasons
not to express his mystical teachings openly, but he also had
a powerful reason to express them in the way he did:
Symbolism is their proper language.
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An unavoidable, and perhaps uncomfortable, consequence of this reading is the recognition that not all of the
teachings in the Principia were meant for everyone (though
the shock of this realization should be attenuated by recalling
that the book is a restricted text at every level). But if the
teachings were not meant for everyone, to whom were they
addressed? Clearly, Newton wanted others to continue the
work he had begun. He published and repeatedly revised
both the Principia and the Opticks in the interest of
promoting the development of natural philosophy, which, he
told Conduitt toward the end of his life, he felt the comfort
of having left less mischievous than he found it. But, aside
from those two books, he seems to have cared so little (or
perhaps, in some cases, feared so much) what his contemporaries would think of his work that he preferred not to
publish it during his lifetime, particularly if publication meant
that he would be hounded and pestered by critics.54 On the
other hand, he cared very deeply that his work be preserved
and, furthermore, that others know that it was his. Both his
reluctance to publish and his wounded outrage—when his
originality, at least with respect to his fellow moderns, was
assailed (as by Hooke); or his work, to his mind, was
hindered (as by Flamsteed); or his priority and even his
probity were challenged (as by Leibniz)—may be partially
understood if we realize that Newton considered the intellectual community to which he belonged to be temporal.55 In
the concealed texts Newton was addressing primarily those
he would consider his true intellectual heirs. Those philosophers, carrying on the task of improving natural philosophy
and presumably familiar with its venerable dual tradition,
would be able to see and recognize the true foundation of the
work in which they were engaged.
For Newton knew that the work was not complete.
Although he recognized that his remarkable achievements
had reached new heights of natural philosophy, he was also
well aware that his deepest questions had gone unanswered.
There is evidence that when he finished the first edition of the
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Principia, he still hoped he would find those answers. In the
early 1690s he immersed himself in a monumental study of
the entire alchemical tradition. He may, as well, have
attempted to initiate his young disciple, Nicholas Fatio de
Duillier, into his alchemical pursuits. But it came to nothing.56
In 1693 Newton suffered a breakdown, a mysterious episode
which led to rumors on the Continent that he had become
permanently deranged or had even died. The onset of this
crisis has been attributed—not fully persuasively—to various
causes; but equally remarkable (and also unexplained) is its
abrupt end. This end was characterized by the full resumption
of his sanity—if not of the intense intellectual power that had
previously marked his life—only a few months after he wrote
the rambling letters to Samuel Pepys and John Locke that
were the source of their fears for his state of mind.57 His
failure to unlock the chemical secrets of the universe, despite
his fevered attempts to do so, must have been devastating.
But Newton finally accepted that he would not be the one to
answer those questions. In 1696, at the age of 53, he
abandoned his experimental search into the unity of nature
and took a position as master of the mint.
Nevertheless, he did not repudiate his earlier failed
attempts. On the contrary, he left ample evidence of his
ongoing conviction that such unity did exist. This evidence
includes his elaboration of the second concealed text in the
second and third editions of the Principia, as well as his
decision to leave both that work and the Opticks open,
inviting further study and suggesting possible directions for
it. Newton also scattered clues to his beliefs outside of the
works published in his name. He impressed some of his
unpublished views upon the young men whose careers he
fostered, and they in turn disseminated them. His disciple
David Gregory, for example, in “The Author’s Preface” to his
Astronomiæ physicæ & geometricæ elementa (1702) included
a history of astronomy, according to which the laws his great
mentor Isaac Newton supposedly was the first to discover had
been in fact only rediscovered, as they had been known to the
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ancients. In the twentieth century the manuscript of this
passage was found among Newton’s papers, written in
Newton’s hand. Newton himself had composed it.
In addition, though he is said to have burned numerous
papers in the days before his death, Newton left millions of
words concerning the interpretation of history and scripture,
as well as his interpretation of alchemical texts and detailed
notes on his experiments.58 As he seems to have left no
written account of his reasons for wanting his unpublished
manuscripts to survive him, it is impossible to be certain of
his motives. One might surmise, for example, that Newton
left us his alchemical notes as proof of failure, as evidence
that not even he could unlock the chemical secrets of the
universe by following that path, and therefore as an
indication of precisely how not to proceed. But what, then,
do we make of the historical and scriptural interpretations
that accompany that record? Are we to regard them as
repudiated, too? In the absence of a note stating his intent—
whose discovery among the manuscripts would be a real
coup—it seems likely that he retained hope that another,
knowing of his efforts now that he was “out of the way,”
could pick up his task of unifying scripture, history, and
natural philosophy where he had abandoned it. Newton
could not have known that the executors of his estate would
label his alchemical writings not fit to print. Nor could he
have known that his more radical theological manuscripts
would also be deemed unprintable, despite the desire his
niece expressed in her will that they be published. Newton, in
short, could not have known the extent to which his
published work—particularly his Principia—like the
philosopher’s stone he had sought for so long, had begun to
transform both the world and himself within it. One of the
effects of this transformation may have been to shield the
secrecy of its author’s convictions after his death more
thoroughly than he intended. But he seems not to have cared.
Dying intestate, he left the matter in the hands of God, who,
he trusted, would allow it to be revealed at the proper time.
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For Newton believed the time would come when an
improved world would be ready to accept his teachings. In
the spirit of the ancient philosophers he most admired, his
philosophical aspirations extended beyond the realm of
natural philosophy; he trusted that its perfection would lead
to that of moral philosophy, so sadly imperfect in the
turbulent world he saw around him. The last edition of the
Opticks ends with the following passage, looking toward
progress in natural philosophy, which Newton believed
would lead not to a new morality but to a return to pure
ancient morality:
In this third Book [for the Opticks, too, is divided
into three books] I have only begun the Analysis of
what remains to be discover’d about Light and its
Effects upon the Frame of Nature, hinting several
things about it, and leaving the Hints to be
examin’d and improv’d by the farther Experiments
and Observations of such as are inquisitive. And if
natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this
Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds
of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged. For so
far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is
the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and
what Benefits we receive from him, so far our
Duty towards him, as well as that towards one
another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature.
And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had
not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy
would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal
Virtues; and instead of teaching the
Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun
and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have
taught us to worship our true Author and
Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the
Government of Noah and his Sons before they
corrupted themselves. (405-6)
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But the outcome of Newton’s “method” has been quite
other than the unification of natural and moral philosophy he
intended. We can never know how things would have been
different had his concealed convictions been brought to light
before the twentieth century. In the event, his Principia was
driven like a wedge between reason and faith. Designed to
declare the power of the deity in the world and, thereby, to
revive and foster both natural and moral philosophy,
Newton’s masterwork has instead been seen as a monument
to the separation between science and religion, as antithetical
to the unity of the very traditions of which it was in fact the
culmination.
6. Conclusion: The Old Made New
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.59
So what then is this Principia? To construct his grand vision,
encompassing the whole of creation, Newton, of course,
drew on his exceptional mathematical ability. But the
Principia is more than the mathematical and physical
treatise—however great—that it appears to be. It is a little
world, an artful elaboration of secular and sacred traditions
of human knowledge, born both of Renaissance
Hermeticism, which was so influential in the development of
experimental science in the seventeenth century, and of
Newton’s faith in a beneficent creator who ruled the universe
and who (in the fullness of time) would allow his human
creatures to discover and reveal its lawfulness. Behind everything that Newton did was a firm faith in God’s providence.
All of his work conveys his conviction that we live in a world
whose history is the working out of God’s great story from
the creation to the apocalypse. We humans do not have the
power, he thought, nor should we have the desire, to alter
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29
that already-written story; but God has hidden clues to it in
both nature and scripture, which some of us may be granted
the power to see and understand. The texts concealed in the
Principia—in their vision of God’s glory filling, fertilizing,
and illuminating the entire universe and the soul of his
disciple—are Newton’s grateful acknowledgement of the
source of his understanding and also his message to the
future; they are the manifestation of his peculiar genius and
his true secret art.
I do not intend here to discuss the validity of Newton’s
vision of the world. My goal in this study has been merely to
urge a thoroughgoing reconsideration of his Principia, a book
that resolutely resists easy classification. Seen as a whole, the
work both supersedes, and incorporates, the secular and
sacred traditions of learning that preceded it. It is a
magnificent product of transformation and circulation, a
manifestation at every level of the old made new (and, for
that matter, of the new made old). Together with the unparalleled mathematical achievements of the open text, the
mystical journey near the beginning of Book 1 teaches us that
our minds are capable of ascending to the heavens and
beyond, while the cosmic allegory at the end of Book 3 shows
us that our bodies are composed of the material and spiritual
stuff of the universe. The open text is grounded upon the
visions expressed in the hidden texts, and the hidden texts
depend for their power upon the open text while extending
its domain.
The Principia, in sum, speaks to both our intellect and our
imagination, addressing our deep human desire to be intellectually, spiritually, and materially at one with our universe.
Newton’s greatest book is far stranger and far richer than we
have ever suspected. A mathematical and physical work of
prodigious power, the Principia is also an expression of the
highest art and a declaration of the deepest love of which this
remarkable man was capable.
*
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I would like to thank Curtis Wilson, Tom Simpson, and Dana
Densmore for reading and commenting on an early draft of
this paper. I would also like to thank Rob Iliffe and Peter Pesic
for doing the same for a nearly final draft, and the editors and
editorial assistants of the Review for seeing it through to
publication. I am especially grateful to Eva Brann for her
unstinting support from beginning to end. I have attempted
to address the questions and suggestions of these generous
readers. None of them bears any responsibility for anything
written here.
Notes
37
Isaac Newton’s translation of the Tabula Smaragdina, the “Emerald
Tablet” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (quoted in Dobbs 1991, 274).
The passage continues with some alchemical instructions.
38
Simpson, too, in the final section of his article, addresses what he calls
the astronomical alchemy that comets undergo in their close approach to
the sun, which he calls the “furnace of the heavens,” a crucible that
reaches a temperature unattainable on earth, thus leading to “the
emission of that ‘spirit’ which was always the ultimate objective of the
alchemic search and is fundamentally needed in order to complete
Newton’s account of the true System of the World” (164).
39
Newton wrote in his Hypothesis explaining the properties of light: “For
nature is a perpetuall circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids,
and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile, & volatile out of
fixed, subtile out of gross, & gross out of subtile, Some things to ascend
& make the upper terrestriall juices, Rivers and the Atmosphere; & by
consequence others to descend for a Requitall to the former”
(Correspondence, 1: 366). These sentences were written while Newton
still accepted the vortex hypothesis of planetary motion, well before he
had any idea of universal gravitation. As he developed the Principia, he
abandoned the hypothesis of vortices and, indeed, in the Principia he
takes every opportunity to combat that hypothesis. I believe, however,
that the sentiment of the passage survives as a metaphor of the circular
chemical processes, moved by gravity, that make life possible.
40Actually
he had acknowledged it, writing: “The comet that appeared in
1680 was distant from the sun in its perihelion by less than a sixth of the
sun’s diameter; and because its velocity was greatest in that region and
also because the atmosphere of the sun has some density, the comet must
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31
have encountered some resistance and must have been somewhat slowed
down and must have approached closer to the sun; and by approaching
closer to the sun in every revolution, it will at length fall into the body of
the sun. But also, in its aphelion, when it moves most slowly, the comet
can sometimes be slowed down by the attraction of other comets and as a
result fall into the sun” (937). He does not, however, dwell on the implications of the predicted collision for life on earth, but moves directly on
to his remarks about supernovae to which Conduitt called his attention in
their conversation.
41
This image appears in the Opticks, as well. In Query 30, one of those
added to the Latin and later English editions of that work, Newton muses
about the convertibility of light and gross bodies into one another,
writing, “The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is
very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with
Transmutations” (374), and, later, “All Birds, Beasts and Fishes, Insects,
Trees and other Vegetables, with their several Parts, grow out of Water
and watry Tinctures and Salts, and by Putrefaction return again into
watry Substances. And Water standing a few Days in the open Air, yields
a Tincture, which (like that of Malt), by standing longer yields a Sediment
and a Spirit, but before Putrefaction is fit Nourishment for Animals and
Vegetables. And among such various and strange Transmutations, why
may not Nature change Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies?” (375).
Like the alchemical allegory at the end of the discussion of comets in the
Principia, these passages were written after their author had abandoned
alchemical experimentation.
42
Quoted in Waite, 1: 75.
43
There are exceptions: notably Alexandre Koyré, I. Bernard Cohen, and
Richard Westfall. But Westfall, who has produced the most comprehensive account of Newton’s life and work, admits with frustration that
during two decades of study Newton became ever more of a mystery to
him. In a modern version of the opinion of the Marquis de l’Hôpital—
who wondered if Newton ate, drank, and slept like other men or was
truly the god he seemed—Westfall concludes that there is no measure for
Newton, that he is wholly other. I do not agree; but I do believe that
until we acknowledge the texts hidden in the Principia we will never
understand its author.
44
Et hæc de deo, de quo utique ex phænomenis disserere, ad philosophiam
naturalem pertinet (764). This quote is from the third edition of the
Principia. In the second edition Newton states that to discourse of God is
the business of experimental philosophy, a statement which makes even
more perplexing the apparent absence of God from this particular book.
Newton seems to have thought better of that claim, for he changed it in
the final edition. Larry Stewart contends that the General Scholium “was
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written, and certainly perceived to have been written, with an eye to the
difficulties and the defence of the anti-Trinitarianism of his disciple
Samuel Clarke” (145-6). It is not clear to me why Isaac Newton would
have used his masterwork as a tool to defend Samuel Clarke, though it is
possible, as Stewart claims, that the General Scholium was (at least to
some degree) a salvo fired against societal assault on experimentalism. If
Stewart is right we find ourselves presented with yet another case in
which Newton manages to say what he means in a veiled manner.
45
The scholium following the Definitions does mention “Scriptures,”
(414) which is Cohen and Whitman’s translation of the Latin “sacris
literis” (52). And the first edition of the Principia contains (in Corollary 5
to Proposition 8 of Book 3) the following sentence: “Collocavit igitur
Deus Planetas in diversis distantiis a Sole, ut quilibet pro gradu densitatis
calore Solis majore vel minore fruatur” (583). Corollary 5 was excised
from the later editions, and some of its content was included in Corollary
4. But Newton replaced “God placed . . .” with “the planets were to be
placed. . .” (Cohen 1969, 529-30). This, by the way, is further evidence
that Newton’s use of the passive voice in the Principia is deliberate and
significant. Cohen argues, I think rightly, that these passing references are
indications that Newton was thinking of God all along, as he constructed
every edition of the Principia.
46
During Newton’s lifetime, refusal to accept the doctrine of the Trinity
could lead to prison; in 1696 a man was hanged for denying that article
of faith. Moreover, open expression of unorthodox beliefs was costly to
some of Newton’s disciples. Edmond Halley’s supposed atheism, for
example, cost him the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford
University, which was awarded to David Gregory, another protégé of
Newton, who apparently was scarcely more religious than Halley, though
he was more discreet about his heterodoxy; and William Whiston lost his
position as successor to Newton in the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge University for espousing religious views similar to
those Newton held. Newton, of course, considered the Trinitarians to be
the real heretics, and at crucial times in his life he refused to compromise
his beliefs. He was willing to sacrifice his appointment to Cambridge
University rather than take the requisite holy orders; he fought hard and
successfully against appointment by King James II of a Benedictine monk
to the university (though in this case the grounds were Roman
Catholicism rather than Trinitarianism as such); and on his deathbed he
refused the sacrament of the church. Nonetheless, he attended church
services occasionally; and he supported the Anglican Church. I doubt that
his intent in doing so was merely to disguise his true convictions in order
to protect his reputation. Newton would have regarded the Church of
England as a valuable bulwark against the political and religious
encroachments of the Roman Catholic Church, which he called the
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Whore of Babylon, and which he identified in his Observations on the
Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, published posthumously in 1733, as the little horn of the fourth beast prophesied in the
Book of Daniel.
The widespread social upheavals of the time may also have influenced
Newton’s decision to be circumspect about his theological beliefs. David
Kubrin, in his article “Newton’s Inside Out!” speculates that the reason
he censored himself and repressed his insights, ideas, visions, and grand
plan of the cosmos, “was largely social, and stemmed from the fact that
Newton realized the dangerous social, political, economic, and religious
implications that would be associated with him should he dare reveal his
true thoughts” (97). Though Kubrin focuses on the social aspects of
Newton’s ideas, his claim is reminiscent of Law’s assertion that Newton
did not reveal his supposed indebtedness to Boehme because he did not
want to be associated with enthusiasm.
47
Descartes, for example, criticizing Galileo’s method in his Discorsi, had
written to Mersenne, “Nothing that he says here can be determined
without knowing what gravity is” (October 11, 1638, quoted in de
Gandt, 118). If Newton had waited to know what gravity was before
writing the Principia, the book never would have been written.
48
Newton considered action at a distance, in a universe containing only
matter, ridiculous, for he did not believe that brute matter could act in
any way at all. In Rule 3 of Book 3 of the Principia, added in the second
edition (Koyré, 268), he explicitly repudiates the notion that gravity is
inherent in matter. In his third letter to Richard Bentley, he expressed this
conviction even more strongly, writing: “That gravity should be innate
inherent & essential to matter so yt one body may act upon another at a
distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by &
through wch their action or force may be conveyed from one to another
is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
49
As he wrote to Bentley, “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting
constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material
or immaterial is a question I have left to ye consideration of my readers”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
50
Further evidence for Newton’s struggle with himself over this issue, as
well as his awareness of the effects revelation of his beliefs would have
had on others’ perceptions of both himself and his work may be seen in a
draft of a Proposition 18 (crossed out and relabeled Hypothesis 2), which
he wrote after finishing the first edition of the Principia. This hypothesis,
which was to have been part of a general conclusion to the Opticks,
reads: “As all the great motions in the world depend upon a certain kind
of force (which in this earth we call gravity) whereby great bodies attract
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one another at great distances: so all the little motions in the world
depend upon certain kinds of forces whereby minute bodies attract or
dispell one another at little distances.” He refers to his demonstration of
universal gravitation in the Principia, and continues: “And if Nature be
most simple & fully consonant to her self she observes the same method
in regulating the motions of smaller bodies which she doth in regulating
those of the greater. This principle of nature being very remote from the
conceptions of Philosophers I forbore to describe it in that Book least I
should be accounted an extravagant freak & so prejudice my Readers
against all those things which were the main designe of the Book: but &
yet I hinted at it both in the Preface & in the Book it self where I speak
of the inflection of light & of the elastick power of the Air but the design
of the book being secured by the approbation of Mathematicians, I had
not scrupled to propose this Principle in plane words. The truth of this
Hypothesis I assert not, because I cannot prove it, but I think it very
probable because a great part of the phenomena of nature do very easily
flow from it which seem otherways inexplicable: . . .” (quoted in Cohen
1982, 63) He goes on to list some of the phenomena he has in mind.
Newton repressed but did not destroy this remarkable statement.
51
We know that Newton admitted the possibility that this fear was well
founded because of a letter he sent on April 26, 1676 to Henry
Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, regarding a question raised by
a “B. R.” (Robert Boyle) in the Philosophical Transactions whether he
should publish the recipe for a mercury that heated gold when mixed
with it. Newton stated that he doubted that this particular mercury could
be useful “either to medicine or vegetation.” Then he continued:
But yet because the way by which mercury [Newton here
places an alchemical symbol instead of the word] may be so
impregnated, has been thought fit to be concealed by others
that have known it, & therefore may possibly be an inlet to
something more noble, not to be communicated wthout
immense dammage to ye world if there should be any verity
in ye Hermetick writers, therefore I question not but that ye
great wisdom of ye noble Authour will sway him to high
silence till he shall be resolved of what consequence ye thing
may be either by his own experience, or ye judgmt of some
other that throughly understands what he speakes about, that
is of a true Hermetic Philosopher, whose judgmt (if there be
any such) would be more to be regarded in this point then
that of all ye world beside to ye contrary, there being other
things beside ye transmutation of metals (if these great
pretenders bragg not) wch none but they understand. Sr
because ye Author seems desirous of ye sense of others in this
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35
point, I have been so free as to shoot my bolt; but pray keep
this letter private to your self. (Correspondence, 2: 2)
Newton and Boyle engaged for years in a correspondence about
alchemical research, which itself was typically guarded in the manner of
alchemical writers who rarely revealed everything even to sympathetic
correspondents. Few of these letters survive, but in a letter of August 2,
1692 to his friend John Locke, who shared Newton’s interest in
theological and alchemical pursuits, Newton observes, and respects,
Boyle’s “reservedness” about revealing a certain recipe, a restraint he
speculated might have proceeded from his own (though he does seem
somewhat miffed that Boyle is being quite so reserved with respect to
him). (Correspondence, 3: 218)
52 Newton himself, in his old age, implied as much in a conversation with
John Conduitt, stating that, “They who search after the philosophers’
stone by their own rules [are] obliged to a strict and religious life”
(quoted in Dobbs 1975, 15; also see Iliffe, 1: 178).
53
In one of the “classical” scholia, which Newton decided not to include
in the Principia, after writing of the analogy the ancients made between
the harmony of musical strings and the weights of the planets, he
continues: “But the Philosophers loved so to mitigate their mystical
discourses that in the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded
vulgar matters for the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth beneath
discourses of this kind” (McGuire and Rattansi, 117). I am not claiming
that Newton considered the surface text of the Principia to be a vulgar
matter foolishly propounded for the sake of ridicule. My claim is merely
that in emulation of the ancient philosophers he composed the work as a
layered text.
54
As early as 1676, reacting in part to the criticism that followed his
1672 publication on light, Newton wrote to John Collins, who had urged
him to publish his method of fluxions:
You seem to desire yt I would publish my method & I look
upon your advice as an act of singular friendship, being I
beleive censured by divers for my scattered letters in ye
Transactions about such things as nobody els would have let
come out wthout a substantial discours. I could wish I could
retract what has been done, but by that, I have learnt what’s
to my convenience, wch is to let what I write ly by till I am
out of ye way. (Correspondence, 2: 179)
55
Special circumstances, among them Newton’s own character and that
of his adversaries, influenced the particular course of each conflict, but it
seems plausible that, as far as Newton was concerned, they all had the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
same ground. The perception that the importance of his work was
historical could also go some way toward explaining the numerous
portraits of himself he commissioned. Further, it sheds light on his
willingness in his later life to let others carry on the controversies his
work aroused, rather than entering them himself until they touched his
reputation too closely, at which point he would join the fray, but usually
anonymously. This tactic was not unique to Newton, but it may have
been unusually powerful in his case, as in later life he was able to speak
with the voice of the Royal Society. He allowed Roger Cotes to write an
explanatory introduction to the second edition of the Principia, but he
refused to read it, so as not to be asked to clarify or defend it. He did not
want his peace to be disturbed by the obligation of justifying his work to
anyone.
56
During the same years that he was making, and failing at, his final
alchemical attempts he may have contemplated excision of the first
hidden text from the Principia. Whether we think he did depends upon
how we read David Gregory’s notes and Newton’s own manuscripts of
proposed alterations to the book. In any event, if he considered dismantling that text, he did not do it.
57
The letter to Pepys was dated September 13, 1693 (Correspondence, 3:
279), and the letter to Locke three days later (Correspondence, 3: 280).
On September 28 Pepys’ nephew John Millington visited Newton in
Cambridge and was able to report to his uncle that, though “under some
small degree of melancholy,” he seemed quite sane as well as “very much
ashamed” at the rudeness of the letter, which Newton himself characterized as “very odd” (Correspondence, 3: 281-2). In a letter of October
3, Newton apologized to Locke, explaining that “by sleeping too often by
my fire I got an ill habit of sleeping & a distemper wch this summer has
been epidemical put me further out of order, so that when I wrote to you
I had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight & for 5 nights together not
a wink” (Correspondence, 3: 284).
58
Rattansi estimates that Newton wrote 1,300,000 words on theological
and biblical subjects (167), and Westfall estimates that notes and compositions on alchemy in Newton’s hand exceed 1,000,000 words (1980, 163).
59
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2.
37
“The Things of Friends are
Common”
Christopher B. Nelson
I came to a startling realization over the summer as I was
preparing to greet our newest class: that I had returned to this
college to take the position I now hold in the year in which
most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have
passed quickly, it seems to me now, and my appreciation for
the community of learning I joined back then has grown as
my friendships within the community have deepened. I think
I became a wee bit sentimental as I ruminated upon my first
year as a student at St. John’s more than forty years ago. My
Greek has gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the
things learned first are remembered best, and I have kept with
me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my
first days at the college: χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά and κοινὰ τὰ τῶν
φίλων.
The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are
difficult” or “Noble things are difficult.” The second can be
translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What
friends have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my
youth the College used a different Greek grammar book, so
this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson
Introduction to Ancient Greek, with which our students now
begin to learn Greek. And there they were, the same two
sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and
predicate position of the definite article, and I rediscovered
something I once must have known about the two sentences,
something I had carried with me all these years: they are both
nominal sentences with the article τά in the predicate
position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole
Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s
College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
sentences without the use of a verb. I was pretty sure I had
not committed these sentences to memory because of the
substantive-making power of the article τά. It’s more likely
that I remembered them because they were both quite short,
and perhaps because they appeared to carry a mystery and a
whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if only
I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new text that “nominal
sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless
character of maxims or folk-sayings” (31).
I wanted to understand better the little maxim κοινὰ τὰ
τῶν ϕίλων, “The things of friends are common.” The
sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the
notion that if I made the effort to understand this maxim
better, I also might come to see why “beautiful things are
difficult.” Two birds, one arrow—so to speak.
So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little
maxim means that friends share what they have, or that they
ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the
lunch I packed for us both, and tomorrow you will share
yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly common
to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out
separately to each of us, albeit equally. We may each have an
equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each
consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it
is with all sorts of goods, earthly goods, goods that are
external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with
a friend is something I will no longer have after giving it. I
will have less of it after sharing it than I did before I shared
it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been,
and however much I imagine I may have gained in the
improvement of my character by sharing.
But what, then, are the things that could be common to
friends? What kinds of things can truly be held in common
without having to be meted out among friends? I suppose
things of the soul are of this nature, things that belong to the
heart, the spirit, the mind, things that belong to our inner
NELSON
39
lives. We both may love a single object or person without our
having to share that love as we might share the expense of a
gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less because
you love too. And, of course, if we should actually love one
another, that love is surely greater and stronger for it being
reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with things
of the intellect. When I learn something you have shared with
me, it does not pass from you to me like milk from a pitcher;
you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that
is now common to us both. The sum of what is common to
us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And should
we together go about learning something new, we will each
be richer for what we come to have in common.
In pursuing such learning together we enter a whole new
community. For example, when we learn Euclid 1.47—the
Pythagorean theorem—each of us has it wholly but neither of
us possesses it. We now have something that belongs to us,
but not merely privately; we have gained something that is
common to us both, and in learning it we enter the
community of all who have learned it. This perhaps is why we
say “things in common” belong to “friends”: the soul is not a
wholly private place, but is able to enter this sort of
community with others.
But there is an added dimension that I think has
something to do with the reason we seek these common
things. We are moved to love something because it is
beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is
beautiful to us. We seek to know something because we
believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this
knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be
turned to good in the world about us. These things we have
in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish
beautiful and good things for our friends. If the common
goods are those that increase our community by pursuing
them together, then the greatest acts of friendship must be the
searching together for such a common good.
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St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a
place and countless opportunities for our students to pursue
together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves
a community of learning, aware that the word “community”
in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word
“common.” We make many an effort to put into practice the
conviction that we learn best when we learn with others, who
like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a
community offers some pretty fine opportunities for
friendship.
We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading
books that are worthy of our attention, even of our love—
books written by men and women who were themselves
model fellow learners. The books and authors may even
become our friends, as can the characters in some of these
books. If incoming students have not already met the Socrates
of Plato’s dialogues, they soon do, and they spend a lot of
time with him in the freshman year. For some of them it is the
beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character with
whom—if open to the possibility—one can converse over and
over again. The words on the page may remain the same, but
the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every
time he or she returns to the dialogue. At least, so it is with
me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he
seeks only my own good. He has taught me humility,
inasmuch as I possess it all.
I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them
are books. Homer’s Iliad has been my companion since the
seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid
has become a more recent friend who has helped me to
understand and better bear the responsibilities of fatherhood
and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job
have helped me understand what it means to be human and
how great is the distance between the human and the divine;
I read them to remind me how little I really understand about
the relation between the two, which in turn serves as a spur
to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the
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finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of
the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for its logical, progressive
movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s
Republic is the finest book about education ever written; it
inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation at the
College, reminding me that a community of learning is
reshaping and refounding itself any time a few of its members
come together to engage in learning for its own sake—and
that this is what we ought always to be encouraging at this
college, even by device when necessary.
Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can
evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity in each of his
dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of
power is evident in his finest writings and in the mark he left
on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I
consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words
reshaped what it meant to be an American; Jane Austen,
whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a
beautiful author to me); and Martin Luther King, who taught
me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical
measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving
response to the hateful misconduct of fellow human souls.
Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as
friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector, Breaker of Horses,
“O My Warrior”; and Penelope, who weaves the path that
allows Odysseus to return home, and is far worthier of his
love than he of hers. There is Don Quixote, the indomitable
spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, whose simple
acts of goodness change the whole world about her. I rather
like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty
brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager
when I met Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, and I grew to
adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely
his path to responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd,
unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and his Captain
Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty.
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The Program also offers some reflections on friendship:
every winter, Aristotle provides freshmen with a framework
for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods
they afford. Perhaps they will find his list incomplete, or
perhaps their own experiences will be embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of
friends in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in
friendship, for better or worse: Patroclus and Achilles, David
and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and
Knightley, to name a few.
We journey through the Program with the assistance of
many friends, some of whom live among us here and now,
while some others live on in the books we read during this
four-year odyssey. They help us as we struggle with the big
questions that in turn can help to free each of us to live a life
that truly belongs to us. It is these friends, standing close by,
who help us to find our answers to the questions: Who am I?
What is my place in the world? How ought I to live my life?
One of my more beautiful living friends, a colleague here at
the College, has put it this way: “Our friends are doubly our
benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to
return, to face together with them our common human
condition” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Projects, 55).
Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical
doctor, gave last year’s graduating class in Santa Fe this
reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the
books how we might be better friends to one another: “So
often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions about
people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which
robs you of the deeper experience that defines us as humans
in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a
great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I
am sometimes ashamed when my presumptions are exposed
and I then see the remarkable person within, between the
covers of the book of their own story.” This doctor has
devoted himself to saving the lives of patients suffering from
cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the
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spirit of community and friendship within the soul of every
human being: “In my own work, it is sometimes said, we are
guided…by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is
considered as if one has saved the world. To me that has
always meant the life saved is much more than a single life
restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s
brother or sister, someone’s parent, or child, a member of the
community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend,
and as all are affected by loss, all are restored by their return.”
(Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement Address, Santa
Fe). This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of
friendship at work in the world.
In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner
world of reflection and learning to the outer world of putting
what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping
others. The second must always follow the first. By this, I
mean that we owe it to ourselves and to others to take
advantage of the opportunities this community offers to learn
with our fellow classmates and tutors how we might acquire
a little self-understanding through the common endeavor we
practice here, before going out and putting it to work in the
world. And in the process, perhaps we will make a few friends
who will stay with us for the rest of our lives, enriching them
because “what friends have they have in common.”
This little nominal sentence, κοινὰ τὰ τῶν ϕίλων,
happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s
dialogues, Phaedrus, which is the only book read twice for
seminar, at the end of both freshman and senior years.
Phaedrus and Socrates have engaged in the highest form of
friendship as they have conversed together to try to understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and
balance in the soul by directing that soul to a love for the
beautiful. Socrates concludes the inquiry with a prayer to the
gods:
Friend Pan and however many other gods are here,
grant me to become beautiful in respect to the
things within. And as to whatever things I have
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44
outside, grant that they be friendly to the things
inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich.
May I have as big a mass of gold as no one other
than the moderate man of sound mind could bear
or bring along.
Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I
think I’ve prayed in a measured fashion?
To which Phaedrus responds:
And pray also for these things for me. For friends’
things are in common. (279B – C, trans. Nichols).
45
“My Subject is Passion”: A
Review of Eva Brann’s Feeling
our Feelings
Ronald Mawby
Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know is Eva Brann’s latest large and wonderful reflective
inquiry into what it means to be human. Previously she has
written on imagination (The World of the Imagination, 1991),
time (What, Then, Is Time? 1999), and negation (The Ways of
Naysaying, 2001) as “three closely entwined capabilities of
our inwardness” (2001, xi). Now she takes up our affective
life: “that subtly reactive receptivity we call feeling, the
psychic stir seeking expression we call emotion, and the not
always unwelcome suffering we call passion” (2001, xi) as
well as those pervasive unfocused feelings-without-objects
called moods, each “as seen through the writings of those
who seem to me to have thought most deeply and largely
about it” (2008, 441).
Her inquiry aims at thinking about our feelings. The
second part of her subtitle—what people know—insists that
we have in our own experience the data that thinking about
feelings must address. Anyone who has been angry, for
instance, in one sense knows what the feeling of anger is. Yet
merely having felt the feeling does not enable one to grasp its
nature, sources, psychic situation, and human significance. To
grasp the full meaning of the feelings we need thinking, and
Ms. Brann believes that those who have thought best about
them are the philosophers. Hence she proposes “by way of
picked philosophers” to hit the “high points that will best
help me to make sense of myself—and of the world, natural
Eva T. H. Brann. Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know. Paul Dry Books, 2008. Ronald Mawby teaches in the Honors Program
at Kentucky State University.
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and human-made, then and now, passing and perennial, the
world that impinges on me by instilling or eliciting feelings in
me” (xxi).
This book is singular. I would say it is sui generis were it
not of a kind with her previous trilogy of the human center
(1991, 1999, 2001). The reader naturally wants to classify
the book under the identifiable rubric of some collective
scholarly enterprise, but it resists. Ms. Brann explicitly warns
us of ten scholarly categories into which her book fails to fit.
In fact, although the book is full of learning, it is intended not
“as a work of scholarship for scholars but rather as an effort
at inquiry for amateurs” (xxv). Her inquiry into our affective
being aims at “getting a clear view of the contrasting possibilities and developing a warm—though correctable—
adherence to one of them for carrying on my life” (122), and
she hopes that reading philosophy “might be useful at the
least for gaining some sense of the way particular human
experiences are entailed by larger frameworks and, perhaps,
for finding a coherent set of livable opinions for ourselves”
(401). Her standards are dual: “verisimilitude by the criteria
of knowing and verifiability by the test of life” (442).
Ms. Brann, I would say, seeks significant truth, that is, a
view that can stand the scrutiny and serve the purposes of
both thought and life. She believes that large philosophical
accounts offer her the best chance of advance toward
significant truth. She knows her approach is not obviously
sound:
My approach is, I think, not very hard to defend
as a working method for marshaling views but not
so easy to justify as a way to establish truth. For
these grand wholes of philosophy are obviously
even less easy to reconcile than the narrow partialities of scholarship, while to cannibalize such
frameworks for handy parts to cobble together
would break up the very integrity that gives their
passion theories stature. Therefore the justification
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for my—somewhat unfashionable—interest in
grounds can hardly be, it seems to me, in culling a
theory from this tradition, but rather in showing
how and why the inquiry into human affect might
be thought to involve all the world there is. (398)
An option that Ms. Brann has declined would look toward
“psychological theories—those points of view that base their
observations concerning the passions on natural theories of
the soul (or the converse) and often only implicitly on
metaphysics (or its denial)” (xx). She justifies her neglect of
psychological science by saying that discredited psychological
theories disappear at once or fade away after becoming either
literary tropes or folk-psychological terms, whereas philosophical systems show a sort of eternal recurrence. Her
unpersuaded scientific opposition would interpret Ms.
Brann’s observation as showing that in science false coin is
eventually withdrawn from circulation, whereas in
philosophy bad pennies continually turn up. The scientist
would add that even for discerning the phenomena scientific
experiment has an advantage over philosophical reflection
because experimental manipulation can separate factors that
are ordinarily confounded, so the experiment may reveal
things that ordinary observation may not. On the other hand
the scientific literature tends to be dry: vital issues can be
desiccated through operational definition, and the reader
must travel many a dusty mile through descriptions of experimental setups and statistical analysis of results to find the
small god of factual truth who lives in those details. The issue
finally is whether such factual truths lead to a livable oasis of
significant truth, or whether philosophical reflection can lead
there, or whether “significant truth” names a mirage. I am a
lapsed psychologist whose life witnesses my sympathy with
Ms. Brann’s approach, but I add that psychological studies
too can be thought-provoking.
Having sketched Ms. Brann’s aim I turn to the book itself,
a handsome, well-produced volume of over 500 pages. I urge
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potential readers not to be put off by the perhaps daunting
prospect of so much philosophical exposition. As she says,
“my subject is passion” throughout, but one topic does not
imply one continuous argument. Ms. Brann presents the
philosophers independently, on their own terms, and saves
her own conclusions for the end, so one need not read from
beginning to end to profit from the book. The ten chapters
between preface and conclusion could be read separately as
free-standing expository essays, serving as orientation for
those who go on to the original texts, as recapitulation for
those who have previously read them, or as cribs for those
wishing to be spared the trouble. And the work is a delight to
read. Her expositions are clear, her comments insightful and
judicious. Basing my judgment on the texts I know, her
accounts, even when brief, are nuanced and correct. She
knows the conceptual geography so well that she is never lost.
As a guide Ms. Brann is attentive to the needs of the reader
and her lively lucid graciousness makes her a fun companion.
The prose moves quickly without hurry, combines delicacy
with penetration, shows a keen wit and generous spirit, and
exemplifies Eliot’s dictum on diction: ”the common word
exact without vulgarity, the formal word precise but not
pedantic.” The honesty of her thinking and the accuracy of
her writing produce a dominant impression of sun-lit clarity.
*
In the remainder of this review I wish to imitate Ms.
Brann’s model by separating my exposition of the book’s
contents from my personal response. I do not think Ms.
Brann expects everyone who reads her book to adopt her
conclusions; neither do I expect everyone to adopt mine.
When, after considering various factors and divergent
viewpoints, we tentatively conclude on a way to put it all
together, our conclusion is neither independent of nor strictly
entailed by the dialectical considerations that inform it.
Truthful reporting should be disinterested, all the more so
where the topic has personal significance. Therefore I first
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present the contents with minimal commentary, and then
discuss my response.
Ms. Brann begins considering “passion itself ” through
the depiction of erotic love in Greek lyric poetry. The
passionate lover receives the uneasy privilege of being subjugated by an external power: “Eros whacked me.” Here the
source of the passion is outside, and the soul contributes only
the power to be so affected. One persistent issue in thinking
about feelings is the ratio between exogenous and
endogenous factors: how much is the feeling shaped by its
object, and how much is the object merely a trigger that
evokes a soul-formed feeling?
Plato begins the philosophy of feeling with his inquiries
into eros (brought inside the soul), spirit, desire, and
pleasure. We get the Platonic images of the soul from the
Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic, and the account of
pleasure in the Philebus. Ms. Brann follows the latter thread
to Aristotle on pleasure as a bloom on activity, to Freud on
pleasure as the reduction of psychic excitation, and to
modern research on desire.
Aristotle gets a chapter of his own as the founder of
methodological emotion studies. Aristotle writes about the
passions in his ethical and rhetorical works because of the
centrality in the soul of appetite. Passions, like virtues, are
seen as means between extremes. A focus of Ms. Brann here
is the analysis of shame, which in the “cycles of popularity”
among passions has recently been on the rise.
The Stoics come next, with special attention to Cicero. As
“moderns among the ancients” they have a representational
theory of mind and insist on the primacy of the theory of
knowledge. Yet unlike many moderns who view a drench of
the passions as a welcome relief from arid rationality, the
Stoics view passions as mistakes, irrational excessive impulses
that upset the soul, and philosophy as the cure.
We then make a long jump to Thomas Aquinas, who
places us as rational animals in the midst of creation and
situates passions between the intellectual and vegetative
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powers in the center of the soul. Thomas presents a “comprehensive and differentiated synthesis” (186) of the tradition.
Ms. Brann in a high tribute says that Thomas offers “the most
extensive and acute phenomenology of the passions known to
me” (446).
Descartes, the cunning innovator, next gives us “an initiating and deck-clearing simplification” (186). Descartes
considers a human being not as a rational animal but as a
minded machine, and says the passions arise in the body and
are felt in the mind. Ms. Brann traces Descartes’s taxonomy
of the feelings and ends her discussion of his Passions of the
Soul with this summary judgment: “a seminal treatise that
combines confident assertion with ready retraction, brisk
definitiveness with unabashed equivocation, proud
innovation with tacit recourse to the tradition, hopeful
emphasis on experimental science with a speculative physiology, and a determined reliance on the metaphysics of
distinct substances with an insistence on a human union that
the theory itself forestalls. But if the theoretical exposition is
surely obscure just by reason of its attempted lucidity, the
practical advice might be sage just because it is wisely
ambivalent” (227).
Spinoza refashions Cartesian notions into a system that
aims to overcome traditional oppositions such as body/mind,
impulse/freedom, desire/virtue, passion/action, emotion/
reason, and feeling/thinking. Spinoza’s onto-theology implies
that the impetus at the base of our being is emotional and that
affect is our body’s vitality. Intellectual understanding transmutes experience from passive to active and entails an
increase of joy. This chapter I found fascinating, as I have not
studied Spinoza, and his metaphysics is often taken as a
grounding precursor to contemporary mind-brain identity
theories. I don’t know whether his “God-intoxicated”
metaphysics finally works—Ms. Brann thinks not—but
thinking about it is invigorating.
The Spinoza chapter contains an interlude on Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its “wonderfully
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wise worldliness” that “operates with three moral-psychological terms, “sympathy,” “propriety,” and “the impartial
spectator” (236).
Whereas Smith assumes common sense, David Hume, the
topic of Ms. Brann’s next chapter, is reductively skeptical in
the Treatise of Human Nature. As she observes, “in matters
philosophical, when you deliberately deny depth you seem to
have to embrace compensatory complexity” (292). Thus
Hume’s view of the passions as reflective impressions
becomes “baroquely elaborate” (292), yet “the analysis of
pride in particular seems, complications aside, true to life”
(309).
In the chapter entitled “Mood as News from Nothing:
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the Age of Anxiety,” Ms. Brann
begins with Romanticism. She comments on Rousseau, Kant,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Pascal before proceeding to
two thinkers who take up an “uncircumventable sense of
nothingness borne by a persistent mood about nothing in
particular” (342). Kierkegaard views anxiety as “the
intimation of the possibility of being free—to sin” (342) and
thus invests this mood with a deep theological-existential
import. Heidegger says anxiety reveals “The Nothing” that is
beyond beings and thus attunes us to the aboriginal. Ms.
Brann, who dislikes Heidegger’s character for its lack of
probity, nonetheless avers “Heidegger has told us an unforgettable truth in “What is Metaphysics?”: Moods are human
affects that tell not only how we are but what our world is”
(356).
Unlike these existential-ontological theories, Freud’s
account of anxiety uses “developmental, mechanistic, quantitative, that is, basically naturalistic terms” (368). Ms. Brann
contrasts ancient passion with modern moodiness, and notes
that moderns tend to see good moods as superficial and bad
moods as revealing, so anxiety, depression, ressentiment,
disgust, boredom, and their kin prevail in 20th century
thinkers and writers.
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We come at last to the dispersal of theorizing in our times.
Ms. Brann presents the very different philosophical accounts
of Sartre and Ryle, the empirically-based conceptualization of
Silvan Tomkins, and the currently dominate English-language
school of cognitivism. Cognitivism includes a cluster of
theories that generally view emotions as judgment-like evaluations that can motivate behavior. Modern theoreticians
emphasize the utility of emotions for the organism, a role I
think is made the more urgent since, unlike older theories in
which responsive and responsible reason can discern and
judge ends, many current theories admit only a shrunken,
neutered, calculative rationality.
In the final chapter Ms. Brann begins with a disquisition
on philosophical accounts as responses to the open receptivity of questions and as frameworks that set definite
problems by pre-determining constraints on solutions. She
then articulates the leading questions of the philosophical
accounts she has examined in the preceding chapters. She
concludes with her tentative answers to the questions that
motivated her project: Is feeling a legitimate object of
thinking? What is human affect? How are thought and feeling
related? Are emotions judgments? Are we fundamentally
affective or rational beings? Are the passions revelatory?
What distinguishes aesthetic feeling? Are the emotions good?
This fragmentary statement of content fails to convey the
book’s richness. It is full of insights, with many sagacious and
thought-provoking incidental remarks. It is striking how
often Ms. Brann can summarily depict philosophical accounts
of the soul with diagrams—images of the topography of our
inwardness.
*
Now then, what response did the book elicit from me?
Ms. Brann says that to make sense of ourselves we should
read the philosophers, and that made me wonder, for in my
experience the benefit of reading philosophy for finding
livable opinions depends on which philosophers I read, our
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shared basis in what I call common sense, and the dependence
of their insights on their systems. Let me explain with
examples.
Plato and Aristotle—the former through images and
arguments, the latter through analytic articulations—
organize, refine, and supplement common sense, so when I
read them I feel that we share a common world. They see
what I see, and a lot more, so I benefit. As a ‘seventh-letter’
Platonist I don’t look to the dialogues for a systematic
philosophy that can settle every question it raises, and I don’t
find one. Aristotle used to annoy me when I felt he truncated
a discussion saying “enough about that”; I would rebel,
wanting—I now see—a systematic completion that is askew
to his enterprise; he is usually not imposing a theory but
trying to articulate what is there, and when he has said all he
has seen, he stops. I profit enormously from reading these
authors, though, of course, for both, if we push every
question to the end we come upon mysteries.
In contrast, philosophers such as Descartes and Hume
seem to be constructing systems intended as alternatives to
common sense. They say, in effect, that what is really there is
less or other than common sense imagines, so when reading
them I feel I am in their systems rather than in the world, and
if their systems are incoherent, as I believe they are, then I am
nowhere, and the insights I do gain from them are in spite of,
rather than because of, their systemic notions. Take
Descartes. Ms. Brann agrees that we can see clearly and
distinctly that Cartesian matter and Cartesian mind cannot
interact, yet according to Descartes, they do. And Hume’s
systemic notions don’t illuminate my experience but render it
inconceivable; his conclusions seem to me an unacknowledged reductio on his premises. These authors, rather than
ending in mystery, begin there.
So I wonder, What is the value of an incoherent system
for illuminating the passions? How can we make sense of
ourselves using notions that don’t make sense? Ms. Brann
writes, referring to Spinoza’s Ethics,
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What is the good of attending to a text so beset
with perplexities? Well, to begin with, I cannot
think of a work that is not so beset when pressed.
At any rate, don’t we study philosophical writings
largely to learn what price is to be paid for certain
valuable acquisitions, and don’t we think out
things on our own largely to find out what
problems follow from what solutions and what
questionable antecedents we can tolerate for the
sake of their livable consequences? (278)
Our choice, then, is not between some perplexity and no
perplexity, but between various configurations of perplexity.
To avoid perplexity is to abandon thinking, or at least to give
up that serious amateur personal thoughtfulness that since
Socrates has been called philosophy.
Philosophy as amateur (i.e., loving, hence feeling)
thoughtfulness is related to Ms. Brann’s distinction between
problem-solving and question-answering, which I would
describe as follows. Problem-solving aims at reduction of
uncertainty; when a problem is solved, our sense of the world
becomes more determinate. A solved problem moves out of
our center of attention; as the solution becomes a determinate thread woven into the fabric of belief or projected as
a settled line of action, attention is freed for new tasks. The
question-answering thought of reflective inquiry aims at
heightened awareness. A question is the soul’s attentive
receptivity focused and formulated. When an answer is
glimpsed, our experience brightens. The question does not go
away when an answer is disclosed; rather the answering
world is formed and focused in our soul more intensely.
Philosophies in Ms. Brann’s scheme sit between questions
and problems, and face both ways. Philosophies can set the
terms for formulating problems. In this employment
philosophy is often antecedent to science, a communal enterprise devoted to the piecemeal discovery of truth.
Philosophies can also assemble and organize questions. In this
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employment philosophy contributes to living well, and is not
a collective scholarly enterprise. It is an individual way of
being more consciously alive. Friends can help each other
here—in the end Ms. Brann’s book is just such a friend—but
we are finally alone in our sense of what is true about what is
significant.
I have a final response that concerns one of Ms. Brann’s
conclusions. Among the “unformed urgencies” that she
brought, or brought her, to this study is this question, the
question of her project: “Are we fundamentally affective or
rational beings?” (461). Spinoza affirms the former, Aristotle
the latter, and Ms. Brann sides with Spinoza but quite
properly plays on an ambiguity in “fundamental” to have it
both ways: “while we are at bottom affective, we are at our
height thought-ful” (362). She concludes that our inwardness
is affectivity variously aroused (453). Thus my being, not the
impersonal intellectual “I” that Kant says accompanies every
representation, but me, my very own inner ultimate self, my
subject, is passion.
But the question, Are we thinking or feeling beings? is
inadequately posed, since it excludes other alternatives.
Maybe what is primary for us is neither feeling nor thinking,
but doing and making. Maybe as human animals we act and
produce to remain in being and thinking and feeling arise out
of our living agency. Deeds worth doing and artifacts worth
making surely have been praised in our tradition. That Ms.
Brann writes books is at least consistent with the primacy of
works and deeds. For she agrees with Thomas that baths are
restorative, and she has tenure. Why not soak in a luxurious
bath, feelings one’s feelings, thinking thoughts, and when one
has a “eureka” insight rest content with a self-satisfied smile?
Why leap out and write a book? Might it not be because the
“production of a perfect artifact” (443) is another fundamental way of being human? Now she could reply, rightly,
that clarity of thought requires verbal expression, so writing
is a means to thinking. And certain feelings, such as pride,
require genuine achievements about which to be proud. Thus
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good works and deeds may be instrumental to the best
thought and feeling. Granted. But the best works and deeds
also require, as instruments, good thought and feeling. Which
is primary, which derivative, is not clear to me, so I cannot
approve of excluding a possible answer through the posing of
the question.
While this is a weighty issue when considering what it
means to be human, in terms of this book it is a minor
quibble. Ms. Brann undertook this project to better understand herself as a feeling being, and offers the book as an aid
for any reader also “hoping to come near to an answer to the
question: What does it mean to feel?” (234) The final test for
each reader, then, is whether after having read it one better
understands one’s affective being. For myself the answer is,
Yes, I do. My vision is larger and my discernment is keener. I
am still not sure in what sense the inquiry into human affect
reaches all the world there is, but it surely reaches the depths
of the soul and, as Aristotle observed, the soul is in a way all
things. This book energized my thinking mind and enlivened
my feeling soul, and engaging with it has been a pleasure. Ms.
Brann is again to be congratulated for a marvelous
achievement.
*
Brann, Eva T. H. (1991). The World of the Imagination: Sum and
Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (1999). What, Then, Is Time? Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2001). The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and
Nonbeing. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2008). Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and
People Know. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books.
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
56 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
The St. John's Review, 2009/2
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2009
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
McClay, Barbara
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Seeger, Judith
Nelson, Christopher B.
Mawby, Ronald
Description
An account of the resource
Volume 51, number 2 of The St. John's Review. Published in 2009.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_51_No_2
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
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