1 20 57 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8dbd4c4937cf731077be6088c7a01dec.mp3 41ce622b496843832bea04787665ffc2 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp3 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:08:35 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 Memorial Service for J. Winfree Smith Description An account of the resource Memorial service for Annapolis tutor J. Winfree Smith, April 20, 1991. The service includes eulogies by John White, Eva Brann, William Darkey, Joseph Cohen, Francis Mason, Brother Robert, Curtis Wilson, and Douglas Allanbrook. Please note that the recording quality is poor and some speakers are difficult to hear. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource White, John F., 1942-2020 Brann, Eva T. H. Darkey, William A. Cohen, Joseph Mason, Francis Smith, Robert, Brother Wilson, Curtis Allanbrook, Douglas Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991--04-20 Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Smith, J. Winfree Eulogies Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Tape_358 Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7adf00f044b4062c642d91fb7662da57.mp3 29a43c2a17a9e6f80d25fd53ff7cd492 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 042:46 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 Age of Illusions: America after the Cold War Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on Apr. 26, 2019 by Andrew Bacevich as part of the LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture Series. The lecture is part of a joint lectures series between St. John's College and the U.S. Naval Academy to honor the memory of Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen. An alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and the St. John's College Graduate Institute, Kristensen, a Navy SEAL, was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan in 2005. This lecture series aims to create even greater ties between the two schools, as well as to educate the public about civil-military relations and the place of the liberal arts in education of naval and military professions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bacevich, Andrew J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-04-26 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bacevich_Andrew_2019-04-26 Kristensen lecture series U.S. Naval Academy https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7545db4228dd9721eecc4fbb46481783.mp3 0652d23669b76cd7db3569168cb444c4 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audiotape (Tape 225) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:29:45 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 Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan answer questions about the history and development of the St. John’s College Program (Part 1 of 2) Description An account of the resource Audio recording of Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan discussing and answering questions about the history and development of the St. John's program. Recorded in two parts on August 25, 1966 as a supplement to Warren C. Bomhardt’s Master’s Thesis, “The St. John’s College Program: its history and development” for Loyola College, Baltimore, MD, 1968. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Barbara, CA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966-08-25 Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/4051" title="Part 2">Part 2</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Barr Buchanan 1966-08-25 (part 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Barr, Stringfellow, 1897-1982 Buchanan, Scott, 1895-1968 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Bomhardt, Warren C. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bd4dcfbfd62ac3a4edcc825f161d9145.mp3 3d65949a2c1e97994ec33c4279219327 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audiotape (Tape 225) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:17:10 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 Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan answer questions about the history and development of the St. John’s College Program (Part 2 of 2) Description An account of the resource Audio recording of Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan discussing and answering questions about the history and development of the St. John's program. Recorded in two parts on August 25, 1966 as a supplement to Warren C. Bomhardt’s Master’s Thesis, “The St. John’s College Program: its history and development” for Loyola College, Baltimore, MD, 1968. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Barbara, CA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966-08-25 Type The nature or genre of the resource audio Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/4050" title="Part 1">Part 1</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Barr Buchanan 1966-08-25 (part 2) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Barr, Stringfellow, 1897-1982 Buchanan, Scott, 1895-1968 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Bomhardt, Warren C. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2c9681c631a750f266a929096f63fc0c.mp4 536fb345b5b2972647931398a82eee82 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Zoom video conference Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:36:02 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 Learning While Alone Together On-Screen Description An account of the resource Video recording of an online lecture by Annapolis tutor William Braithwaite given on April 15, 2020. <br /><br />Braithwaite describes his lecture: "In <em>Memory and Recollection</em>, Aristotle distinguishes that calling-back to conscious attention which we name 'remembering,' from the kindred activity of re-assembling that ensemble of original perceptions and primary intuitions ('connecting the dots'?) which together constitute knowing some one thing whole. <br /><br />Are our e-meetings working as well as they are because we are able to remember and recollect the on-campus being-together that preceded them? <br /><br />This communal experience, now a memory, had at its heart a paradox: we regularly met face-to-face, in the same place, to read together books written long ago (some in languages not our own), in far-away places, by men and women whose faces we can never see, whose voices no technology can let us hear. How is such a way of learning fruitful? Can it be done through a screen? <br /><br />Drawing on our books, I shall offer some preliminary reflections on the differences, which we are now experiencing, between the screen and the page."<br /><br /><span>Enkh-Od Batzorig of the Student Committee on Instruction introduces Braithwaite's lecture.</span> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Braithwaite, William T. (William Thomas) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-04-15 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission to record the lecture and provide online access to the recording has been received. Type The nature or genre of the resource image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Distance education Technology--Philosophy Quarantine Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Batzorig, Enkh-Od Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Braithwaite_William_2020-04-15 Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6c4aa0e35b97ae9214cb8b978b7d629e.pdf 8a878711332b5a6f432a3d2c9287fdcd PDF Text Text THE OFFENSE OF SOCRATES A Re-reading of Plat6's Apoloiy Eva Brann St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland prepared for delivery at the 1975 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco Hilton Hotel, San Francisco, California, September 2--5, 1975 �THE OFFENSE OF SOCRATES A Re-reading of Plato's Apology Eva Brann St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland 1. A first reading of Socrates' defense before the court of the Athenian people as handed down by Plato induces an exalted feeling in favor of Socrates. 1 That is my experience and, I think, the experience of most studentsa we hear a philosopher nobly coping with a persecuting populace. It is a perennial perception. To cite only two of the numerous testimonials; 1 one from the last and the other from this century1 John Stuart Mill, referring to the Apology in his essay On Liberty, says that the tribunal "condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved best of mankind to be put to death as a criminal," and Alfred North Whitehead asserts that Socrates died "for freedom of contemplation, and for freedom of the communication of contemplative experiences." By and large the defenders of Socrate$ are to be fot.md among those who might reasonably be called liberals, both of the thoughtful and the lightheaded kind. Now a re-reading of the speech can check this first feeling and raise suspicions which subsequent readings confirm. I am taken aback by the intransigencew1.th which Socrates is shown to go on the offensive and to convert his defense before the court of the Heliaea into an accusation against the ''men of Athens." A small formality sets the tonea he never once accords the court the customary �2 address of "Judges;" he reserves it for those who vote for his acquittal (40 a). What is more, the speech intensifies in provocation toward its end. In that section, delivered after convic- tion, where Socrates avails himself of the opportunity granted by Athenian law for proposing a penalty to counter that demanded by the prosecution, he first suggests maintenance at the public table for himself, so that he might have more leisure for exhorting the Athenians, next a derisory fine about equivalent to a prisoner's ransom, and only finally, urged by Plato, Crito and other friends, a reluctantly reasonable sum thirty times as great. As a foreseeable consequence eighty juror-judges, evidently convinced that this Socrates, once convicted, must be executed, now vote for the death penalty (Diogenes Laertius II, 42). And yet later, after judgment, when Socrates is allowed to speak once more, he issues dark threats against the city through its children (39 d). · This perspective on the event, resistant to Socrates as it is, also has a lineage of testimony. Its sources range for the most part from respectably conservative through illiberal, even to reactionary writers, from Jacob Burckhardt who calls Socrates "the gravedigger of the Attic city," through Nietzsche and Sorel to the Nazi writer Alfred Rosenberg, who regards his defense as the degeneration of Greece. an intimation of This rough division of views will have a certain bearing on what I have to say. But the variety and bulk of Apology is itself significant. commen~ concerning the It shows :'\ow unlikely it is that I could hope to say anything new or anything binding, �3 the more so since the one discovery which might really startle us--what Socrates in fact satd--is totally beyond our reach, as it already was beyond that of a contemporary like Xenophon. In his own Apology, which both counters and complements the Platonic version, he calls all current accounts of Socrates' speech deficient (paYa..1) and says that the only aspect on which all agree ts its "grandeur of utterance." So we are thrown back on the consideration and re-consideration of the major version, Plato's--which is undoubtedly what he intended. 2. I can see two inferior and one pressing reason for undertaking this effort. The first lies in the speciaJ position which the Apology occupies in Plato's Socratic works. It is the only speech among them; the auditors participate only by shouting, and its single interlocutor, the reluctant witness M!letos, is impressed into a dialogue. It is the only work in which the author, who is explicitly absent even at Socrates' death (PhaedO 59 b), reports himself present, a fact Xenophon omits. I understand these circumstances to indicate that what Socrates said and did here is to be seen as casting its shadow over the other works, including those preceding the trial in dramatic date. I mean not only the dialogues explicitly associated with the Apology, namely its prologue, Socrates' conversation u.. about piety with Ethyphro; its complement, about patriotism, /\ with Crito; and its consummation, on death, with Phaedo and others. Nor am I particularly referring to the works which contain clea~ allusions to the trial, like Anytos' threats in the lifillQ (94 e) or the prediction of the �4 philosopher's death in the Republic (517 a). But rather, all Platonic conversations, even those at which Socrates is absent, are colored by his defense--in just what way is the question .ta bP discus~ed. 3. A second reason for attending to the Apoloey is that it belongs to a group of works which I would hesitate to call a literary genre because of the solemnity of their occasion, but education. w1io8~ subject does form a topic in moral . They are the accounts of the trials of rni::n who have offended the authorities by thinking or speaking, but .!lQ.t J2Y doing anything l~ the.gross sense. For example, two days before his conviction for hir:,h tn=!ason and less than two weeks before his execution Helmut von Moltke~ wrote a letter to his wife reporting on his trial before the National Socialist P~ople's Court. was smuggled out of prison, he saida In the letter, which ";ve are cleared of every practical ;i.ction; we are to be hang~d 'because we thought together." 3 IIe goes on to praise the othen.:ise despicable judge for his clarity of perception in this respect. Anyone who dies for his deeds also finally dies for his thought. But what distinguishes these deaths for thinking and speaking alone,,attended by no provable intention to incite particular action, is the acute form they give to_ ::-the question co~cerning the work of thought in the world. 4. First among these comparable accounrs stand those of the trial of Jesus. There is, in fact, a very long �5 tradition setting Socrates' and Jesus' ordeals side by sides it is done, to name a small selection, in the writings of Origen, Calvin, Rousseau, and G&nctbt\1 4 The apparent similarities begin with the very fact that there are varying accounts of what was said and done. As for the defendants both are the objects of th~mselves, popular passion channelled by a Group of implacable opponents, lA<i respectively by Anytos for the re-established democracy and Caiaphas for the Sanhedrin. Both are attended by a band of adherents, friends or . disciples, to whom they are suspected of imparting secret teachings, and both deny the charge. Both are intransigent in their refusal to defend themselves effectively. Both show a shocking unwillineness to evade death, and for both, their deaths only confirm their influence. A most striking parallel, furthermore, is the chief explicit charge, irreverence in Socrates' and blasphemy in Jesus.' case. also, however, It is at this pointl\that the utter incommensurability of the two cases begins to appear. Jesus "holds his peace" before the Sanhedrin and answers Pilate with "never a word" (Matthew 26,63; 27,14; a divergent account lets him answer with counter-questions and evasions). from his situation. His silence arises He is suspected of claiming the power and being of the Messiah. That claim is undeniably blasphemy if it is false. But the Jewish court has already prejudged its falsity, and since he has certainly asserted the claim in secret (16,15-20), his only course is to obscure its assertion publicly. Again, when the Jewish authorities represent him to the Roman goverrtor as seditious because he has assumed for himself a new .. �6 sovereignty, Jesus follows a similar coursea he admits and at the same time denies this assumption by putting it in the mouth of the governor--"Thou sayest it" (27,11), and by denying that his rule is pplitical--"My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18,36). So far there might still be a parallel between him and Socrates, for both withhold themselves from the court; both present themselves as less than they are. is this all-important differences But there the writers of the Gospeis believed, after all, that Jesus' claim was true; that the defendant at this trial was, acknowledged or not, God. So while both cases are the consequence of an irruption into the corrununity of powerful claims incompatible with its authority, they are quite incomparable in a way very revealing to the Apology. For Jesus, as the 1.ong- awaited Christ, is represented as fulfilling in his life and death a prophecy and a mission, while Socrates, who specifically denies having even super-human wisdom (20 e), is a man, and a man unheralded and unordained. Therefore, while the Passion is an inevitable consummation, Socrates' end is no part of a prefigured unique drama but a deliberate, human deed. It is consonant with this difference that Socrates speaks where Jesus is silent, and speaks boldly, if selectively, to his city, in this world. The Apology is part of a thoroughly political event. s. There is, however, another trial \.:hich is more permissibly comparable. Sir Thomas More. "our noble, new Christian Socrates," as his biographer Harpsfield calls him, �7 was brought before the King's Bench, indicted on a statute which made it treason to deny, or, in the court's interpretation, to refuse to affirm, the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England. Socrates' and More's conduct are similar in these pointsa Both have an opportunity for evading their trials as well as their sentences, Socrates by voluntary silence or exile, More by offering to "revoke and reform" his "wilful obstinate opinion." Both defend themselves before the court and b~th speak again, more bluntly and intransigently, after having been pronounced guilty, both revealing that they consider the real cause to be other than the stated indictment, but also that they are in spirit, at least, guilty as charged. Finally, both explain their conduct by reference to other-wordly considerations, More to "the hazarding of my soul to perpetual damnation," Socrates to his welcome among the heroes in Hades. Buts More makes a wily, subtle defense, standing on the letter of the law in claiming his right to silence, and revealing only after the verdict his implacable opposition to the king's heterodoxy. He saysa ••• ye must understand that, in things touching conscience, every true and good subject is more-bound to have respect to his said conscience and to his soul than to any other thing in all the world besides, namely, when his conscience is in such a so~t as mine is, that is to say, when the person giveth no occasion of slander, of tumult and sedition against his prince, as it is with mea for I assure you that I have not hitherto to this hour disclosed and opened my conscience and mind to any person living in all 5 the world .... More, then, as a statesman and a lawyer defends himself with all legal care, while as a subject and a Christian he, as did Christ, preserves inviolate his inmost thought•• �8 But Socrates, a private man who has never held office and has no experience of courts (17 d), handles his defense very cavalierly, while as a citizen and a philosopher he, unlike his Christian counterpart, has no notion of . privacies of conscience, The comparison therefore throws into relief his freedom in the Apology, His resolve derives from no hidden recesses of conviction, but from a ground which by its very nature is common and in need of communication. 6. The most vivid reason, finally, for re-studying the Apology is the desire to come to some answer to the questions was Socrates rightly convicted and rightly condemned to death~ It is a question of several aspects. First, why did the Heliastic court convict Socrates and accept the prosecutior&view that this had to be a capital case'? It is essential here to recall that Socrates himself not only considers irreverence and corruption of the young definable offenses and agrees with the authorities that such charges could lie, but that, as the Crito shows, he is in deepest accord with the Solonic fundamental law from which they arise. 6 Now in the absence of the case for the prosecution, this first questionJcan only be resolved by examining Socrates' defense, which I want to do later. That task is, however, complicated by the fact that Socrates turns his defense into an offense, into an accusation against his accusers and his fellow citizens. For :t would be ludicrous to attempt to examine the substance of hi: attack, which would mean trying to determine whether it is more true of �9 the Athenians that they are sluggish in self-examination than of, say, Thebans, Spartans, or Americans. Indeed, it might be argued that charges which are universally true of all humankind are, when pointedly levelled at one particular community, pernicious, so that his very attack might become evidence to the jury of his bad faith. A second aspect of the question concerning Socrates' conviction is this. Shortly after Socrates' execution a backlash seems to have occurred. Meletos may have been condemned to death and .Anytos to exile. 7 Socrates the persecuted philosopher was vindicated in the repentant city. How then ought a Heliastic juror have voted, had he been able to foresee subsequent events, particularly the most immediate result, that a convicted Socrates would cooperate with hjs accu~P.rs bv Amov~~to force the court into the death penalty? But the most important aspect is that framed in contemporary terms. How should I be disposed in analogous present-day situations7 For in spite of the fact that such cases can no longer arise with the judicial directness of the ancient city, the Socratic issue is always present when persons of more mobile intellect, more extensive education and more leisure than most people come into collision with the religious beliefs and moral traditions of those whom they are intent on serving. 7. To begin with, then, I must examine the sufficiency of Socrates' defense. Xenophon takes . Jocrates' "grandness of utterance," " a feature present a~ his poi~t of ~n all previous accounts of the speech, d~oarture. This tone must, he says, �10 appear as "rather mindless .. unless it can be shown that Socrates was in fact deliberately inviting death as an escape from the decay of old age (6). Here is the classic statement in. the tradition propounding self-euthanasia as an explanation of Socrates' strange conduct in court. For it is evident that Socrates' defense is a deliberate failure. Now Plato attempts to forestall Xenophon's explanation of this striking fact in the dialogue of Socrates' last day, the Phaedo. There Socrates himself argues that suicide is simply impermissible, no matter how desirable death might seem (62 a). To regard Socrates as manipu- lating the Athenians into killing him and to confuse his welcoming acceptance of death with suicide is to trivialize the events of that day in court. Only the fact that Socyates invited conviction stands. 8. Let me then present a critical rehearsal of Socrates' speech, stated in the least well-disposed terms. Socrates begins by accusing his accusers of lying when they warn the court that he is a skilled and formidable speaker. Unaccustomed as he is to public speaking he is · not formidable, "unless they call him formidable who speaks the truth" (17 b). This truth he will present, and indeed in the subsequent speech he is, "alien to the diction" of a crowd though he may be, complete master of the situation. He even contrives for a stretch to introduce his own dialectic mode into the proceeding, as he interrc~ates Meletos, a co-accuser, who is by law obliged to subrrit to examination. Anytos, his senior opponent, he wisely omits to call. �11 He attacks this inadequate young man, who, as Socrates puts it, goes running to accuse him "to the city as to his mother" (Ey.thyphro 2 c), with an ad hominem arguments Meletus himself does not care about the substance of the accusation. But what weight in law can that have, supposing it were so7 In any case, Socrates does not allow Meletos to answer his question--Vho, then, does make the young better7--in the only way Meletos and those behind him.£.!!! answer it, namely by asserting that the laws, but most of all the citizens, improve the young (24-2~). For in the Meno (92 e) he had already disallowed Anytos' answer that it is the respectable citizens of the city, its gentlemen, who transmit excellence from generation to generation. Now he wants Meletos to tell the court what particular person, like a horse trainer, exercises the youth of Athens into excellence, But, of course, this is precisely what Meletos' backers resist--the notion that their children's formation should be in the hands of such experts. As a part of Socrates' wider attack, on the good faith of his accusers he substitutes a charge of his own devising for the true formal indictment. In bringing his charge, he claims, Meletos trusted to an "old slander" (19 a, 28 b), a long-standing hatred in the city aginst him, which Socrates associates with Aristophanes' comedy, The Clouds, there are difficulties. But Not only does he himself later refer to the high esteem in which he is held in the city, where "the opinion prevails that Socrates is somet.hing more than most men" (35 a), but the relation of Aristophanes to Socrates in the Svrnposium and Plato's veneration for the playwright make it hard to believe that Socrates' friends �12 really saw that old comedy as working over near a quarter of a century toward his undoing. 9. Socrates, then, makes up a suppositious new indictment based on the Clouds (112, 117), which runsa "Socrates does wrong and meddles, searching into the things below the earth and into celestial things and making the worse reasoning the stronger and teaching others these very things" (19 b). By means of this reformulation he pretends that the real charge of irreverence--which he himself recognizes as such in the E§lthyphro (S c)--is directed at his supposed researches into the nature of heavenly bodiPs and similar matters. These he had, indeed, given up long aeo when still in his youth, for reasons set out in the Phaedo (96 b). Of .;uch matters, he plausibly argues, he no longer knows anything nor do they any longer concern him. And yet--in that very dialogue he gives a vivid _ topoloey of the things above and below the earth (198 e ff.) , as he does i.n the Republic and in other conversations. Can he really in good faith argue that he has no interest in eschatology, when he makes up novel stories and private myths about the upper and lower realms--the very enterprise that disturbs the Athenians 'l His chief defense, however, against the "old sl;:i.nder"-which is at bottom nothing but the imputati.on of 5ophistry-rests on a tale he tells (20 e). Chaerophon, his crony in the Clouds, had perpetrated a coup in 11elphi. 1-Ie had gotten Apollo's oracle to declare that no man "·'ls wiser than Socrates. Whereupon Socrates modestly undertakes to prove �13 the god mistaken, but, to his own regret, fails. He calls this undertaking "giving the god's business the highest priority" (21 e), and regards its mention as a sufficient defense against the old charge (24 b), 10. The correct indictment, as Socrates cites it, isa "that Socrates does wrong, corrupting the young and not respecting the gods whom the city respects, but other, new half-divinities" (24 b). Here is how Socrates meets the actual charge of irreverence, when he finally reaches it. The wording of its first point, if the meaning of the verb (nomizein) is translated very carefully, is that Socrates "does not regard the gods in the customary way." Against this point Socrates has no defense--he himself admits its truth to Euthyphro, for he tells him that he, Socrates, cannot accept the traditional stories of the gods, that is, the common myths of the Greeks; this, he adds, is the reason for his rrosecution (6 a). In cross- examining Meletus, however, he traps him into thoughtlesly agreeing with an altered formulation, namely that Socrates "does not regard the gods as existing" (nomizein einai, 26 c, d). Now he can defend himself, and he produces an argument as logical as it is ludicrous. Using the indictment itself, he argues that he who is accused of introducing new half-divinities cannot be charged with not believing in the full gods who must be their parents, any more than someone who acknowledges the existence of mules can be supposed not to believe in their parents, namely horses and asses (27 c). So much for irreverence. Ther~ remains the charge concerning the introduction of �14 new divinities. Socrates makes it clear in the EMthynhro (3 b) and again in the Aoology (31 d) that he understands the accusers to be thinking of his notorious daimonion, the "half-divine thing" within him, and that they regard him as a "me.ker of gods" on account of it. Nonetheless Socrates not only makes no effort to allay their apprehensions, but he even dwells more extensively on his "divine sign" here in court than anywhere else. 11. How next does Socrats defend himself against the corruption charge7 His version of it in terms of the "old slander" is that Socrates is a "clever one," the unique indigenous sophist, an excogitator who dispenses dangerous wisdom to a clique from within a cogitatorium. Of course, as everyone knows, Socrates actually has no establishment of his own, so the comic claim needs no refutation. Its serious counterpart in the real accusation, on the other hand, is that he has esoteric teachings. Socrates calls this charge a lie and asserts that no one has ever heard anything from him in private that all were not welcome to hear (33 b). Ha<l I been in that court-room I would simply have refused to believe him. Bot1'fing ·· is clearer than that Socrates does not say everything to everybody. Furthermore, Socrates knows very well that his accusers are not very precise in their knowledge of this intrusive travelling tribe of professionals. In the~ Anytos wanders into the conversation expressing a horror of these people, but readily confesses that he has neve:.· even met one. Socrates is in no position to ridicule h;m for that lack of experience. For in the Republic he himself argues that it �15 might be useful for a physician to have experienced disease in his own body, but that it is in no way good for someone who is to govern the soul by the soul to be experienced in corruption (409 a). A magistrate like Anytos might well claim that it is a staunch caution that keeps him from seeking acquaintance with those whom his good sense makes him despise. Since, therefore, the description of the sophists' co~petence is left to Socrates, he chooses to present them as people wh9 "might be wise with a greater than human wisdom" (20 e). That is, they are the ones who are expert in the things above and below, while Socrates has the reputation only of "a certain wisdom," which is "perhaps human wisdom." At this point the Athenians make a disturbance, for they know that this Socratic wisdom, thisnunwilling wisdom" (Ey:thyphro 11 e), has but one contents the knowledge of his own ignorance and the determined exposition of- the ignorance of everyone else in the city . (21 .d). Part of the charge of sophistry is the charge of "teaching." Teaching is not in the terms of the actual indictment, but Socrates imports it and tricks Meletos into amending the wording to include it (26 b). Why7 Because he · intends, in making the point that his activity is not teaching, to bring out these circumstancesa that he takes no money, that he conveys no subject-matter and that he accepts no responsibility . (33 b). But if he takes no money, that only means that he is uncontrollable--he cannot be engaged or dismissed, as a parent might hire or fire a professionalo And if he takes no responsibility for the careers of his young associates, �16 why, that is usually called irresponsibility. But if he conveys no positive matter to these young men, that is the very worst of all, in the light of what he shows them instead. For with disingenuous innocence he himself gives a vivid description of what it is that is conveyed to them 1n his companya he goes about engaging public men, poets and craftsmen in conversations which are really examinations and in the course of which it emerges that they do not, in truth, know what they are doing, although they think they know it well enough--while the young men stand by and watch and smile; for, he says charminglya "it he repo~ts, is~ unpleasant" (33 c). Afterwards, they range through the city imitatine him, presumably like those skeptical puppies who have inopportunely gotten hold of dialectic, which he himself describes in the Republic (529 b). This is what Socrates calls "not being anyune's teacher," and this is how he makes himself palatable , to his fellow-citizens. He . ompletes his defense aeainst the corruption charge c by pointing to the fact that no·.one --who either considers himself to have been corrupted or is a parent of a corrupted child is then and there coming forward to complain (34 b). But then, of course, aside from the unlikelihood that a parent would proclaim his child's corruption in public, the whOle town knew that the chief accuser Anytos considered himself to such a parent. b~ just Xenophon records this circumstance (Apoloey 29). 12. This then is Socrates' defense a~ Plato permits us to construe it in the mind of a Heliastic juror. There is i.ncr iia.i na t 1 ng undoubtedly something deliberately self-,..,. - -_- - about it. Socrates does not even scruple to use phrases to the �17 court which intimate in his own terms the equivocal nature of his own acti.vity. I am referring to the phrases which · in the Republic give the working definition of right or justice, namely "to do one's own business," and of wrongdoing, namely "to be busy at many things" (433 a), to meddle, ~ to do everything,h the latter being Socrates' favorite description of the sophists' activity (596 c). Yet for Socrates in Athens the two apparently coincide--he claims that in his private interrogations he is both "doing his own business" (33 a) which happens to be going about meddling in theirs (31 c), and that in doing theirs he is also doing the god's (33 c). So he intimates something possibly pernicious, while he never takes cognizance of the real fears of his judges. Those fears concern the substance of the citY, which is compounded of traditions, particularly the deep old myths about its gods and the established respect for the wisdom of its citizens, of whose collapse Socrates' scrutiny makes a spectacle for the young. So also, because he never ac- knowledges that he in fact teaches, he evades rendering a candid and comforting account of the essential loyalty of his intention~ such as even a very uncomfortAing citizen- teacher would feel obligated to give to apprehensive parents1 he never says that he and they in the end care for the ~ city. It is necessary here to recall that Socrates' indictment was judicially correct. Under these circumstances it seems to me that even a decent juror, realizing in the course of the speech that both charges had the same root, which the defense had in no way reached, might feel compelled to �18 convict, and, if he was a man of ftir~s; i'gb;t_, he might pray the while that it would not come to execution. 13. Indeed there is a case to be made for the convicting Athenians. Hegel, for instance, who of course takes a very comprehensive view of the affair, is their brisk defender, and some of the points that follow are, in fact, made in the History£! Philosophy (Vol. II, "The Fate of Socrates"). First, the common view that this was a political trial, the attack of the rabid returned democracy against a man with aristocratic views and associates, will not hold up. Socrates himself recounts at his trial how he had been in difficulties under various regimes, certainly under the oligarchical Thirty who included his own interlocutors Critias and Charmides (32 e). Furthermore, the chief accuser Anyt.Js was a moderate democrat, a "seemly and well-conducted man" of respectable reputation by Socrates' own account in the Meno (90 b). In fact the very description of Socrates as an antidemocrat is not very convincing. Read without prejudice the vignette of the democratic regime in the Republic, a dialogue itself set in the democratic stronghold of Athens' harbor, shows, for all its outrageousness, one vital redeeming features this regime is, Socrates says, a perfect supermarket of constitutions, and anyone who wishes to erect a city, ~~~doing," should go there (557 d). "~ Socrates' activity is at home in a democracy, not to speak of the fact that the Athenians regard Socrates as instigating that very forwardness in the young which he describ0s as endemic to democracies (563 a). �19 Now the Athenians have, 1.n fact, as Socrates himself observes in the Crito (52 e), borne with him for seventy years, in spite of the supposed "great hatred" against him (28 a). Even his two incursions into politics, for which, as he tells the court, he might "perhaps" have died (32 d), passed off safely. So that. the man who tells the Athenians that they will kill anyone who publicly opposes them (31 e), has himself been allowed to live a long life of semi-public resistance. Even this late conclusion need never have come. If they had managed better, Crito sadly observes, the ·case need never have come to court (45 e). Nor need Socrates have died, for voluntary exile was possible, as the Laws remind him when he makes them speak (52 e). Even in that court and in spite of Socrates' intransigence there were 220--nearly half--of the five hundred (or 501) jurors who either thought the accusation insufficiently proved, or were moved by a strong sense of Socrates' excellence, or agreed with him that the city could profit by his existence, or considered that the city would be better served by forbearance. him guilty. These 220 refused to find Their number surprises Socrates who has evidently not done justice to the quality of some Athenians (36 a). Again, once the verdict is in, Socrates is allowed to speak freely, as is the civilized Athenian cu$tom, and to reaffirm his partnership in the city by participating in the fonnulation of his sentence. Socrtites abuses this occasion in order to re-iterate his view of the incompetence of the Heliastic court. Yet more, once sentenced and in prison the Athenians allow him daily conversation with his friends and Accord him a bloodless death among friends. �20 Indeed his freedom to speak before the large public of the court-room or to the intimate circle of friends in prison ts complete. The formal issue of a mere right to free speech is of no concern to Socrates or to the Athenians1 ~ care only about the substantial question whether Socrates' speech does damage. In this light even Anytos' harsh recommendation that the case must either not come before the court at all or come as a capital case (29 c) can at least be taken to evince a state of mind the opposite of trivial, a state of mind Plato must respect. For in the Statesman, the stranger to whom Socrates has turned over the conversation says that in the absence of true statesmanship, the laws and the customs must rule. anc~stral Since, then, no one is to be wiser than they, if anyone is seen to be searching into the crafts which have been legally established, and waxing wise about them, he can be indicted on a charge of corrupting the young and made to suffer "the most extreme penalti?s" (299 b). In .sum the very seriousness with which they take Socrates' non-political activity gives the Athenians a claim . to our respect, wh ose mo d us viven di t. to regar d p h' 1 osop h ers i is i I\ light-heartedly. To be sure, it is not good to interrupt a speaker, but their clamor is brief and controllable--and it comes correctly, at crucial points. Here in effect the attention of a whole city has been gained by one man, a philosopher. Of what other people can that be said? 14. Clearly this Socrates, who confron~s and affronts such a city in this way, is Socrates in a very oblique aspect. This aspect is just that described by Kierkegaard in a �21 R passage from The Concept .Q.f Irony: ·· Thus we see clearly how the position of Socrates with respect to the state is thoroughly negative, how he ivholly fails to fit into it, but we see it even more clearly at the moment when, indicted for his way of life, he surely must have become conscious of his disproportion to the state, Yet undismayed he carries throueh his position, with his sword above his head, His speech is not the powerful pathos of enthusiasm ••• but instead we have an irony carried through to its last limit. By irony Kterkegaard means not what Socrates means when he uses the tenn laticrl, his ~ith respect to himself, namely his dissimu- preti::>1~ce of knowing less than he does, but a kind of self-levitation by which one is raised above all rositive knowledge. Such a zestful abstention from content does, in a way, characterize the Socrates of the Apology. At any rate, Socrates with his sword above his head is a man of neeation, and these are his featuresa 15. First and foremost there is that uncanny nay-sayer within him which he calls his daimonion, and which plays -a larger role in this than in any other genuine dialogue. He describes it (31 d) as a sort of inner voice which has been with him from childhood; that is to say, it is innate but not in need of "recollection," of being .searched out by thought. This "half-divine" and even "divine something," -· action. ... . never aids thought and never urges . '.' ;.·. It speaks only to warn him .!!.Q.!; to do a deed. To what realm of being this notorious daimonion belongs is unfathomable. But the role it has in Socrates' life is not beyond conception. Enthusiasm means literally the state of having a d~vinity within (cf. entheos)1 The daimonion is Socr .... tes' negative enthusiasm., a permanently ~--i~n~oA r~~~r~inin~ oower. Socrates is no enthusiast, �22 because the exaltations of thought are not due to a special agency, but he does need a special negative faculty. For it is his chief teaching that excellence is knowledge _ (e.g. Protagoras 360 e ff.), and that deeds of excellence are the direct consequence of knowledee. But then, by the inverse proposition, wrong deeds stem from ignorance anc1 are always in some deep sense inadvertent; no one does bad things in full consciousness. Consequently, since they are by their very nature beyond the context of reason, they require an uncanny power for their prevention. The daimonion is Socrates' ability to avoid wrong, his negative excellence. In particular the daimapjap makes Socrates refrain from engaging in politics (31 d) because that would have been tantamount, he says, to a futile sort of self-destruction. None- theless he describes himself in the Gorgias (521 d) as being the only man in Athens who does truly engage in politics. That ts to say, he has devised for himself a mode of being privately public (or the reverse); by his description it is a way of "conferring in private the greatest benefit on each citizen" (36 c). This mission he has devised for -himself he will not give up even if he "is to die many times over" (33 c). This is Socrates' neeative politicsa to deny that the public realm is the truly political realm and to assert his inner logos intransigently in the service of the city. mpqt differs from Tho~s More. FoT. Mpre ~ocratesJ\unwillingly It is 1n this respect that accepts : ~::_ but dutifully . . high public office, and yet asserts to the right to open his mind to no one. his'~ death It is, in capsule, the distinction in matters political between a Christian and a philosopher. �23 16. Last and most important, when Socrates formulates what is to be within this speech "the greatest good for man" it is in altogether negative termss "The unexamined life is 'for mC}n" not livable/\ l38 a); what people at present care for is nothing much (30 a); the truly worthwhile work is that of examining, testing, refuting, exposing impartially both hi~self and others. In this one respect at least he finds himself wise: that he knows he knows nothing (21 d); his fellow citizE?ns, on the other hand, fail totally under examination--and it is precisely' his offense that he publ ish~s these failures, He claims, however, without irony, that to fall silPnt would be disobedience to the god. To put it another -ways the first culmination of Socrates' non-didactic teaching is usually his notorious anori'1, literally "waylessness," a profitable perplexity or embarassment, i.nducP<l in the learner for his own sake (e.g. t-1 Ano 84). a public Insofar as sf'>rvic~, Socrat~s rr--prPsents his activity as however, his interlocutor is embarrassed not for his own sake but as an.object-lPsson, nor does the conversation continue to positive learning; in this setting Socrates is indeed a negative teacher. Here, then, the philosophic activity is presented as an entirely negative effort, without an end or a substance-sienificantly the substantive philosophia is never used, but only the verb philosophein, "to carry on the effort for wisdom." But most particularly, at thP. literal center of the speech (29 b), and again at its end, Socrates asserts his ultimate negative wisdoms concerning Hades, th~ his knowledee of his ignorance realm of death. �24 17. To offset clearly the negative Socrates in the dock, whose defense he appears to record, Plato writes a second defense for Socrates in prison. The conversations of the Crito and the Phaedo arE' the deliberately posittve cornp1Pments to the oratory of th~ A~olo~v. In the l:>eeinning of the Crito So~r<:1tes o.wakP.s from a deep blank sleep, 1 ik!J <:!1:-1 t so lo!1gir.3ly c!escribed at end of the Apoloey, to a conversation in which hP condemnation as he never would before th!? court, duly proceeding from the laws he has under all his life (53 a). V!~l.'Y th~ acc~~t~ I! l .J .::.s r1a:"t~ely willirie,1y \.-. liv~d In a tone thP very o_;:•I="osite of that in the Apology he has the laws upbraid him: the right thing is the same for you an~ whatever we undertake to do to you, you "•• for us, thin~ .r.o yo•..: •.:hir:k t!:=t t :.;0 it is ri~ht to do the same back to us1" (SO e). This other, positive Socrates is even more stronely del in ea ted in the Phae<lo, the dial oeue o:i his second and; he ho~es, more successful dP<t th ~,,h ich def~nse con ta ins (69 e). On this his last day he is not a harsh and offensive rhetorician, but a charming and attentive listener, as the narrator makes a point of noting (89 a). Here he speaks not as a relentless interrogator but as one who is prepared, if his interlocutor wishes it, to "talk it through in tales" (diainytb"ologei!!·•! . , 70 b). Here he does not present himself as proudly ignorant, but is presented as the one and only knower (76 b); nor does he pretend to be without a teaching, but he rather appears as one who--the recipient of Phaedo's account interrupts to remark--makes philosophical matters astonishingly clear (102 a). Here all the great Socratic notions are recapitulateda his �25 supposition of the eide, the invisible "looks" or forms1 the myth of r~collection; the true good beyond the merely human good of refutation in the Apology. In this conversation Socrates frequently refers to philosophia, and presents it as the inquiry into the rec:ilm of death, the "invisible Hades" (Ai~~s Aeides) which is also the place of the invisible eide (80 d), the place of being (76 d). of death but ~.;1?11-studied Here he is not ignorant in it, and the death the city confers on him is not an ahscon<'ling into sleep-like nothingness but an "immigration" to the realm of being (40 c, 117 c); a felicitous alternative to exile. So, then, there can be no question that before the court Socrates <:leliberately curtails and withholds himself. 18. Then the question becomes1 why? deliberately offend the court, why ~oes Why does Socrates he go on the offens- ive acainst the Athenians, why does he use his defense to document his offense against the city? Since Socrates actually lived and actually came before the Heliaea, there must be some aspects of Plato's Defense which derive from the actual circumstances. Once a defendant, Socrates became a resister, the defender of philosophy from the city's attack. He must have thought that this public occasion was a moment to display spirit, to confirm the lifelong business of words in deed, to be what Achilles, to whom he compares himself, was in war, 4hero for philosophy - (28 c). YT1 Again, in part his conduct must have been an accomodation " to the conditions of the occasion, ·namely the short time he has for speaking end the great crowd to whom he must address himself. Twice he mentions the lack of time for quie~ . �26 persuasion (19 a, 37 b). This lack of leisure and of intimacy is not a peripheral matter--~othing Socrates thinks can be expeditiously conveyed by public deliverance; it always be slowly engendered in lei.sur~ly with its accompanying inner dialogue. n ust 1 direct conversation Socrates' positive wisdom stated concisely in public would appear simply bizarre. The negative and the positive Socrates are obverses of each other. Refutation, the breaking up of an accerterl opinion, goes over into the search for a truth. But in IJUblic, whether Socrates has been summoned to court or has accostP.d a man who is not a friend, the transformation will not take place--the conversation is curtailed. The Apolo0v leaves aside the widest and deepest Qllf':'Stions conr.en1ing the rie,ht relation between the political community and the care of souls, but it implies this mucha when philoso;'hY comes upon the 8ity it comes as a threat. 19. Accordingly it is possible to surmise whv Plato ~ut on record for times to come so detailed and emphatic a statem0nt of the resistant Socrates. A startling moment in the Apology throws light on this matter. For the first and last time Plato himself irrupts into his own work (38 a). Socrates hears him raisP his voice to suggest a sober and sensible money penalty, to subvert as it were, Socrates' own proud and derisory proposals. The suggestion is very much like a rebuke, and Socrates accepts it. It is as if in this work, in which he does not so much speak through Socrates but represents himself as spoken to by him, Plato is recording something he h..\d heard in court which must cast its shadow over the other dialogues, and so �27 over the whole philosophical tradition. He had heard that Socrates' actiyity .ll publicly indefensibl<-?. 20. Let me conjr~cture. The nialogues proper, the Socratic conversations, would by and laree p.:iss into oblivion, the ~'ositive co11tent of Socrates' wisdom, its <leep suppositions and encompassing myths shrivelled into conformity with his succ8s~:ors' ci p:;'ea r in rnor~ ,~thens s tr1~!1uoos sys ter.is. OnP. succe1=rn or such"would soon • . the other hand, Socrates' speech, delivered before C:-i the 1ar!3E'St public of his life, would continue to be at work. Its heroic intransigence, which had driven the court to extrem0s c..:,2.inst him, would play a part in a revulsion endine in his re-est:abl i.shment. It would be the Socrates of refutations uho would prevail. In a softened popular col0.r_·ine. this . is thc-> Socrates of Cicero's "1-l'el 1-known 1escription1 Socrates was the first who cal lf'?d rhilosophy <1o"m from the b..eavens, SP.ttle<l her in the citiP-s and even introduced her into private houses and compelled her to ask questions about life and moral matters and things good ~nd ba~. (T1_1sculan !)isDutations, V, iv, 10) :2u t the so-cal led "Socr:.:l tic method" •vould also make 1.'3.rsher reappearances, as "rn.rlical doubt," as "enlightenment," 1 · as "critique," as the'\.e-examination of all values" or as a ~eneral affirmation of the questioning disposition. In each of these modes philosophy would penetrate the preit:ences to credit of yet another community. 'l 'lithout supposing that Plato could have foreseen all these developments, it is yet possible to imagine that he had intimations, that he was as apprehensive ahout the facile vindication of Socrates' way as he was about the learned ossification of his thought. To �28 prevent the lattcr--or rather to provide a per.manent possibility of revival--he wrote nu.~erous Socratic conversations. To forestall the former--or rather to put perennial obstacles in its wa.y--he wrote one Socr.atic speech. noble oration ~.,roul<l, This proud and at least on re-examination, reveal that Socrates had committed an undeniable offense against thi::city and that Socrates was it woulrl serve - is a : da~eP.rnus; warning to his future frienr:ls--and as an enticement. To append a mocern applications In our polity Socrates' offense is not a ~apital crime nor a.re his modern successors of his stature. Furthermore in a court of law an American citizen juror would be guided and restrained by the Constitution and its interpretations and law.s. The judicial issue is therefore much less excruciating--what is more urgent is to form some general opinions about such situations. And here the Apology makes a clear comment, which, stated most cautiously, is that the side resisting enlightenment also has something vital to defend. There is yet one more thought. Seer.ates . himself would, I am persuaded, live out his life among us doing no harm and receiving none. isa The great question then to be thought through ought such mutual immunity to be a source of high satisfaction or of deep misgiving 7 �29 Notes 1. Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates S!!.Q Crito, edited with notes by John Burnet (Oxford, 1924). References to the .d ialogues are by Stephanu1 page. 2. The Socratic Enigma, A Collection QI Testimonies Through Twentv-Four Centuries, ed. Herbert Spiegelberg (The Library of Liberal Arts, 1964)1 PP• 99, 112, 3. Helmut James von Mbltle 1 Verlag, 1971)1 ~43, 262, 203, 278. Briefe (Berlins Henssel p.63. 4. Socratic Enigma, .Ql2• .£..!.!;. pp. 43, 66, 187, 228, 285. 5. William Roper and Nicholas Harpsfield, Lives of Saint Thomas~ (Everyman Library, 1963)1 p. 157. 6. Burnet, .Ql2• cit. p. 103. 7. ~Meno 1.961) 1 8. of Plato, ed. E. Seymer Thompson (Cambridge, p. xxiv. St/>rP-n Kierkegaard, Constant Reference J;,Q ~ Concept of Irony, Vi.th Socrates (London, 1966)1 Socratic Enigma, .Ql2• cit., p. 291. p. 221. Cf. � 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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. 30 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/. Title A name given to the resource The offense of Socrates: a re-reading of Plato's Apology Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975-09-02 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 02, 1972 by Eva Brann at the 1975 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Foundation. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1975-09-02 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant San Francisco, CA 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 has been given permission to make this item available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Deans Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d94bc934a9090ca74d759c2a5b0eae2b.pdf 0045ff34baf8851f7755749e7d778407 PDF Text Text ON TRANSLATING PLATO For "Retracing the Platonic Text": Conference held on March 20-22, 1997 at Penn State Eva T. H. Brann Dean St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland I imagine that Professor Sallis asked me to speak on translating in the first instance because of some work I had done in turning German into English. First was the translation of Jacob Klein's book Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, which was originally published by the M.I.T. Press in 1968, and, having become a sort of classic not only in the history of mathematics but also in the study of modernity, was picked up for republication by the Dover Press in 1991. I had also done an annotated version of Heidegger's essay ''What is that -- Philosophy?'' for the use of our seniors at st. John's College. It remains unpublished because Professor Sallis was unable to obtain reasonable terms from the Heidegger estate. Furthermore I did an essay written by Nietzsche when he was twenty "On the Relation of the Speech of Alcibades to the Other Speeches of the Platonic Symposium," which our student journal Energeia published to serve not only a model but also as an encouragement for our students who choose similar topics for their annual essay. I aiso did a short vignette by Hermann Hesse, called "An Evening at Home with Doctor Faustus" for the same journal; in this story Mephistopheles invents a future-phonograph and plays for Doctor Faustus the music of our century -- pretty nearly the same that sometimes wafts across our campus. The Doctor concludes that the world has gone to the devil, as he himself soon will. In 1995 I was asked by the series adviser, Keith Whitaker to do a first translation for the nascent Focus Philosophical Library; Plato was suggested as a possibility. The Focus Press publishes fresh translations, intended to be very reasonably priced and to be used by American students. The project was appealing to me both as a teacher in a school dependent on good and accessible translations and as a dean in need of intellectual recreation. I had what turned out to be an inspired idea, that of seeking collaborators among my colleagues, figuring that the pleasure of becoming so really intimate with a dialogue as only a translator is would be enhanced by the close partnership of common work, and that three heads could better solve the problems and detect the mistakes that would surely dog a lone translator. Peter Kalkavage and Eric Salem agreed to becoming a trio. We chose the Sophist because we had all three begun to recognize the dialogue as the most ontologically future-fraught of them all, �2 and we welcomed the challenge of preserving its originary freshness. What follows is a report, under various headings, of the things we think we learned, and the advice we might venture to give our fellow translators. Collaboration One feature of the Sophist is that wherever you are, there he is not; he is forever trying to escape into trackless impassible thickets, ("Impasse," incidentally, is one of our translations, very nearly literal, of aporia -- waylessness.) But those who deal in knowing also display an opposite fault in the dialogues. That is the fault of position-taking. They occupy positions in defense of which they throw up outworks (problema is the Greek word for such a defensive outwork) and employ various apotropaic stratagems. Evidently Socrates and Plato consider that either to have a universal escape route in all arguments or to occupy entrenched positions is unworthy of the philosopher's mission. And so it is of the translator's task. Those who work together on transferring Greek meanings into English words have to be focussed on what the Greeks call the praqma and what Hegel calls die Sache. They have to eschew both escape and entrenchment, and they must be objective -- intent on the object at hand. Yet while ego is out, there is a strong human element in a collaboration put in the service of a dialogue. It demands and develops friendship. The three of us all bring slightly different strengths: One is perhaps more alert to Greek grammar, another to the philosophical resonances of terms. All three of us, having undergone the most effective part of our education at St. John's College, are relatively fearless in the face of ignorance and fresh in our deliberate amateurism. The way we work is that each of us presents a translation of one Stephanus page in turn every third week, which all of us together then rake over as with a fine-tooth comb, the original translator explaining but not particularly defending a choice. Often we let somewhat daring or awkwardly accurate readings stand, waiting for that reading, close to the final one, in which we attend particularly to idiom and flow while erasing false inspirations. I think we have become persuaded that in putting a rich Greek text into English there are so many facets to be attended to, that three heads are indeed better than one. We do in fact �3 have grand predecessors to look to: You will recall the legend about the seventy-two scribes, six from each of Israel's twelve tribes, who produced the Septuagint, the earliest extant Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, in the third century B.C. They worked in separate cells and came up with identical translations, presumably inspired by the text itself. We might say that the Platonic text acted on us in a more modest ex post facto mode in a similar way -- one version would suddenly, after some trial and error, click for all three of us. Our advice to collaborators: Cotranslating is a form of intimacy, best done by those who have the same object firmly in their sights while viewing each other with affectionate respect. Readership We thought it essential to keep in mind for whom we meant this translation. We meant it for the people that we imagine standing around in this as in so many other dialogues as spectators and auditors. They are presumably tacitly engaged, like the silently present young Socrates, Theaetetus's friend, who shares our Socrates' name, as Theaetetus shares his looks. Another way to put it is that we thought of our students as they prepare for a seminar by silent reading. Some are quite innocent of the issues, some have, or think they have, insider knowledge, some read casually and disengagedly, and some are intensely serious. That brought up the delicate question of colloquialism. One device that would keep the conversation casually speech-like was contraction, and we used it a lot, but not in places that we thought were meant to be stuffy, highflown, or solemn. We looked for idiomatic equivalents but avoided slang (though we had a great time devising some raucous interim translations, such as "wise guy" or "weisenheimer" for the sophist himself) . While we were well aware that every idiomatic translation will in time betray its date, nothing dates more quickly than slang, and even in its day it fails, like all truckling-under to fashion, to have real appeal for students. In the course of thinking about drawing readers into the dialogue we often had occasion to consider what is probably a real difference between the ear of a young contemporary Greek and one of our students. The well-brought up Greek (and not only an Athenian) , being nourished on Homer and the tragedians whose language was no one's spoken Greek, could savor artificialities and archaisms that our students would find simply off-putting. A couple of generations ago some English-speaking students would have absorbed enough of Shakespeare and Milton to be appreciative of such echoes, but we couldn't count on that. So we put �4 everything into plain current English, sometimes allowing ourselves the merest whiff of high poetry or archaism. Above all, we tried, in our students' behalf, to put ourselves into the interlocutors' sandals: What is being said, what is being heard, what is being felt, what is being thought? We called on our experience as teachers to guess at the dialogic backdrop of anxious agreement, triumphant dissent, and shamed realization - that young Theaetetus contributes. But above all we clung to our main hypothesis as trusting readers of the dialogues: that each speech uttered has a discernible meaning contributing to the drift of the conversation, and that the translation should preserve that motion. our advice here is: In translating fill out imaginatively not only the conversation within the text but draw in the external participant, the reading student. Predecessors Of course, we took all the help we could get from earlier translations. We used Robin for his intelligently chosen readings, Campbell for his linguistic annotations, Cornford for informational help. The two translations we had always at our side were the Loeb Fowler and Benardete. Fowler, though old-fashioned in diction and uninspired in terminology, was almost unfailing in making sense of puzzling passages and turns of phrase. We consulted Benardete whenever we ran into trouble, because of his meticulous attention to every word and because of his linguistic ingenuity. His version is a crib for the better sort of folk; it becomes intelligible if you read it as essentially in Greek and accidentally in English. Since, however, we were determined to translate not only from Greek but also into English, we only rarely borrowed phrases from him though we took many hints as to meaning. Heidegger translates numerous passages of the Sophist in the lecture notes published in 1992 under the title Platen: Sophistes. These versions are a reminder that in certain respects the translator into German is to be envied. Some of the forms that have to do with Being go more directly into German than into English. For example, to einai becomes "das Sein," while in English the infinitive cannot normally be nominalized; also to on readily goes into "Seiendes," and ta onta is rendered as "das Seiende," which functions, like the Greek neuter plural, as a collective noun. Probably most provocative and least helpful to translators who intend to be as naively true to the �5 text and as agendaless as possible, are Heidegger's terms for ousia, which he renders in an uninterpreted and an interpreted version, as it were. In the former, ousia is plain "Sein." In the interpreted version ousia is rendered as if it were parousia: "das Anwesende" or "das Vorhandene," i.e., "the present" or "the at-hand," in accord with his idea that Greek thought suffers from the aboriginal flaw of thinking of Being as if it were a thing. We puzzled a good deal over the proper translation of ousia, being loath on principle, namely the principle that translation should be as far as feasible into an existent language, to invent non-current abstract substantives. But we finally decided on "beinghood. 11 We chose it over "beingness" not only because it sounded better to us but because it had more concreteness, as in neighborhood or manhood; we were mindful that ousia means something like ''real estate" in ordinary Greek. And we decided to make up a word to begin with because we had an unresolved sense that ousia, which in the Sophist is usually contrasted with genesis, had a peculiar weight, and we wanted the reader to be in a position to attend to that interpretational problem. I was relieved to see that even German could not deal with the crucial little adverb ontos, which for our private amusement only we translated as "beingly" but more soberly, for public consumption, as "in its very being;" thus the phrase that concludes the ultimate collection of differentiating terms reveals ton ontos sophisten: "the Sophist in his very being." To return to the advantages of translating into German with two examples. 1. We had long discussions about the translation of stasis, the specific other of motion. We settled on rest, knowing full well that rest is wrong insofar as it means lack of, or cessation from, motion. "Stand-still" or "stationariness," a condition coequal with motion, seemed too strained, and we consigned them to the glossary. German is lucky in being able to form "Standigkeit" quite naturally, as Heidegger does (p. 579). 2. In 244 c 4, when the stranger begins his critique of Parmenides' hypothesis of the One, we were pretty much forced to use the English word "hypothesis" with all it scientific baggage. Schleiermacher uses the Germanized version of "presupposition," that is "Voraussetzung," but Heidegger eschews both and brilliantly writes "Ansatz," with the observation that Parmenides's One is not a supposition to be consequently confirmed but a beginning, an arche, an "onset" -- which is exactly what "Ansatz" may mean. Nonetheless, with all the felicities to be gotten especially from the German propensity for easy prepositional compounding, I kept being grateful that it was our lot to be putting Plato into �6 English, particularly American English. In our idiom we could achieve a plainness and a playfulness that must be, when all is said and done, more pleasing to Socrates as he listens in than a lot of linguistic incense. I think our general advice to fellow translators would be unabashedly to cannibalize and unabashedly to set aside previous translations. Apparatus Since we were left very free by our press to decide on supplementary materials, we thought long and hard about our obligation to the text and to the reader. We come from a school meaning both a way of thinking and an institution -- that has the greatest misgivings about standing between a reader and the book. The extra-textual stuff in a volume is of course meant to facilitate the approach to the translated text, but really, how can it? Take an introduction. If it says the same thing as the work, it will, assuming that the work is of the highest quality, say it worse. If it says something else, it will keep the reader from the work by that much time. We have a strong faith, based on our common teaching experience, that good books don't need approaching; they need facing, immediately and directly, at least at the first reading. We compromised that faith, partly because by the end of our labor we were simply so full of thoughts that we couldn't contain ourselves, partly because we know perfectly well that wellinstructed students skip introductions and come back to them much later, if at all. So we decided to keep it short, simple, and straightforward. We avoided historical backgrounding on the principle that Plato would have felt about our doing it much as a landscape painter might if we took his painting and provided it with a broad frame extending the scenery so as to give the viewer an enlarged setting. We didn't want to deface the dialogue or distract or prejudice our student readers in this way; I should say that at st. John's evidence of familiarity with introductions is a suspect virtue. But we did set the dialogue briefly in its sequence -- Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman and the mysteriously missing Philosopher. We gave a succinct plot outline of the hunt for the sophist, geared to a new and, we think, quite spiffy diagram of the infamous divisions that play so large a role in the Sophist. We pointed out some aspects of the dialogue that had become particularly pregnant for us, such as the generic nature of the Sophist here pursued (as opposed to the named individual sophists Socrates politely persecutes in dialogues �7 like the Gorgias and the Protagoras). We had a little section on Father Parrnenides and the strange and wonderful fact that he, the Stranger's own teacher, attracts the main attack of the dialogue. Then we told briefly what we understood about the such deep matters as the relation of Image to Non-being and of Non-being to Otherness. And we left it at that. Since we made use of the printer's full typographical menu, we had a little note on that. We were very sparing with footnotes, using them mostly to supply what we thought an ancient contemporary reader might have known, or where we thought we detected a joke or an allusion obscure to a current reader. Our energy went into the glossary, which we put in back, to be used or not. We arranged the Greek terms and our reasoned translations in meaning-clusters. (You will find something similar in the Hope translation of Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics, except that we transliterated all our Greek in the hope that students might learn to accent and pronounce words like phr6nesis and poiesis and mimesis correctly.) We avoided the alphabetic order so as to prevent the impression that we -- or the partners of a dialogue -- are ever looking for dictionarylike definitions. We also hoped to provide students with what we thought of as the proto-terrninology of a corning ontology -- or perhaps better a me-ontology, an account of Non-being; the Sophist is a spawning ground of metaphysical terms-to-be. Our advice to translators is to go easy on the paraphernalia of translation. Editing The translator's final reading of course tries for absolute correctness. But we have to warn the trustful that having a perfect disk is no protection. Something will get screwed up, there will be unexpected glitches and, as we learned to our sorrow, it will be in the most carefully construed first sentence. No matter how good and accommodating the editor -- and we have good reason to thank Ron Pullins, the editor-publisher of Focus Press -- there will be howlers. Our advice: final proofs. Trust no one but yourselves and demand to see �8 Replies Theaetetus plays to the Stranger by regularly uttering a budget of stock replies signifying slight hesitation, passive assent, positive agreement or requests for clarification. After a while we began to suspect that the rotating litany of responses might not be entirely mechanical. This apprehension made it incumbent upon us to keep a list of our considered renditions of nai, pos, pos d'ou, pos gar ou, ti de, houtos, anangke, pan, panu ge, pantapasi men oun and a dozen others, so that in one of our later readings we could make all the replies consistent. In that way we would give readers of the translation a chance to discover patterns we only suspected. For example, pantapasi men oun, for which we borrowed Benardete's "That's altogether so," occurs in the dialogue as a strong assent to a summary claim and concludes the dialogue as Theaetetus's last response to the final collection of divisions that catch the true and ultimate sophist as the expert of the non-genuine. Theaetetus is clearly assenting not only to the definitive but also to the global character of this final determination of a human type and profession. Particles We were similarly anxious to render particles fairly consistently. The dialogic life is in them -- they indicate inflections of the voice, gestures of the body, and even motions of the soul. The dictionary, or even Denniston's Greek Particles, though they must be consulted to give the limits of usage, cannot do it all. The translators must savor the speech in its context and judge whether it is marked as an inference or a new departure, whether eagerness is being displayed, smiles are suppressed, eyebrows raised or hands thrown up. We were mindful of typographic and punctuational devices not available to a Greek composer of living speech and used italics, dashes, colons, semicolons and exclamation points liberally to render the force of particles or emphases indicated by sentential order. I might mention here that capitalization helped us a great deal in translating a dialogue full of terms for f orrns and kinds designated in Greek by the definite article and a verbal or adjectival substantive such as to on (Being), to me on (Nonbeing), tauton (the Sarne), thateron (the Other). Our advice to translators is to be -- within the limits of natural English -- consistent, careful and ingenious in rendering apparently little and apparently automatic elements of the �9 dialogues; they may be more revealing than one realizes at the time. Techno-humor At the end of Bacon's New Oraanon there is to be found a prescient catalogue of one hundred and thirty "histories" of special investigations that are one day to constitute the sphere of human expertise. It is a strange and wonderful fact that the first such comprehensive ordering of extant technical know-how · (that I know of) is found in the Sophist -- and that it is a send-up. The stranger, who is not an overtly funny person, engages in what might be called techno-humor at the expense of experts. Of course, as readers of the dialogue, we thought a good deal about the reason why a comprehensive classification of human know-how or technique -- we translated techne as "expertise" and sometimes "art," as in "arts and crafts" -- should be the approach of choice to the delineation of the Sophist. We were, of course, alert to the startling conjunction of apparently disjunct themes that governs a number of the great dialogues, as the Phaedrus, for instance, seems to yoke the unlikely pair of love and rhetoric. Moreover, it does not take much reflection to see that the Sophist, whose nature is presented here as that of a faker and a know-it-all, should be tracked into the branches of human activity, and that in that great decision-tree he should reappear in seven places, and sometimes among the lowly but genuine crafts and sometimes among the high-sounding but dubious ones. It also made sense that the hunt for this elusive creature should be the occasion for presenting to the world the new dialectic art of division and collection and all its problems -- chief among them what might be called the problem of heuristic direction: at what moment in this dialectic enterprise, at the beginning, end or inbetween, does new insight arise? But as translators it was not so much our business to have theories about the inevitable implication of expertise and shamming or about the problems of classification as to render the divisions faithfully into English. And there we were in a pretty good position. As I have said, all three of us come from a college that has distanced itself from specialization, and we were alive to the tragicomedy of defining human beings as the professors of a profession. (Our English version of sophistes was, incidentally, "professor of wisdom.") Not that all of us aren't ourselves certified members of the world of expertise. I myself, for instance, began my working life in a profession that the Stranger might have ranged, looking to the three great �10 branches of human expertise called "getting," "separating," and "making," under getting, specifying it as a hunt beneath the soil for fragmented old artifacts carried on by means of pick-axes. We call it archaeology. Recall that the Sophist is first found in the right hand branch of animal hunting on land, specified as the sham-teaching hunt of wealthy youths. We tried to preserve the neologic high-jinks of some of the divisions. Thus the sophist is found a second, third, and fourth time in the getting part of expertise as a psycho-trading virtueseller, and in the manipulating part both as a seller of selfmade learnables and a peddler of other-made learnables: "psychotrading" renders pychemporike and "learnable-selling" mathematopolikon. We had not long worked on our new current project for the Focus Philosophical Library, a translation of the Phaedo, before we became aware of the varieties of Platonic humor. In fact one of us, Peter Kalkavage, who, as it happens, got his doctorate at Penn State, began retrospectively to refer to the Sophist as a one-joke dialogue, dominated by the techno-humor of the otherwise ponderous Stranger that I've just described. The Phaedo, because in it Socrates not only speaks but even makes speeches, is, we discovered, infused with a very different, far more subtle humor, which we are doing our best to preserve. It is the sort of hilarity or jocundity in the original Latin sense, the subdued joyousness and even merriment of the ultimate moment, that belongs to a man going blithely to his death without having lost his firm, even hard grip on the earthly condition. We have come to think of it as the tone of the . lightness of Being. It keeps his companions in an ambivalent state of sorrowful exhilaration, suspended between tears and laughter. Of course the secondary partners too, are very different in the two dialogues. Theaetetus is, at least vis-a-vis the Stranger, a somewhat stuffy boy, while that comradely pair, Simmias and Cebes, are each in their way pretty lively. Does bringing out the humor of the dialogues in translations need a justification? I should not imagine so, but I might mention once more that all three of us are receiving our real education in a place to which a way of reading Plato was introduced by Jacob Klein, who in his interpretations was especially alert to the mimetic character of the dialogues. As imitations of Socrates and the conversations he conducted or attended, they were bound to be playful, as Socrates was playful, with a playfulness that is the kindly counterpart of his notorious dissembling, his irony. But not all humor is comedic in Aristotle's understanding of comedy as the imitation of what is laughable, that is, low or ugly but relatively harmless (Else, Aristotle's Poetics, pp. 39 ff, 183 ff). The techno-humor of the Sophist comes far closer to comedy than does that of the other �11 dialogues, with the proviso that the laughableness of the sophistic craft is not so harmless. In any case, our advice to colleagues who plan to translate Platonic dialogues is to be prepared not only to laugh themselves but also to be the cause of laughter in others. Faithfulness It was clear to us from the beginning that looseness, paraphrase, and interpretative adumbration were intolerable in the translation of any Platonic writing, but especially in a dialogue like the Sophist, which is so close to the brink of technical metaphysics and yet so carefully refrains from letting philosophy become a techne, an expertise. It does so by going at what Aristotle will later codify as "problems" of Being in an oblique and human way. It is oblique in concentrating, as was said, less on ontology than on me-ontology, the account of Nonbeing as the ground of imitation or pretense, and it is human in pursuing the Sophist as a human type as much as it does sophistry as a profession. In this morning-twilight of philosophy meticulous accuracy is especially necessary. So we spent, as I have said, much time on words, determining for ourselves whether they were terms of a trade or not -- yet. Aporia and methodos are examples. Both come to be fixed as terms of philosophy: "perplexity" and "method." But we aimed to preserve at least in some places the unfixed original meaning: "impasse," i.e. lack of passage, and "way," both at which preserve the playful spatial analogy that is so prominent in the Stranger's reflections on the motion of thought. We aimed at faithfulness, however, not only in words and terms but also in sentences. The obvious problem is always subliteralness -- producing a contortedly accurate pony. We thought that it was a part of faithfulness to render the various levels of elegance, clarity and emphasis of the speeches -- and the Stranger surely has his obscure and klunky moments, at least as we heard them. The faith of translators who mean to be faithful must be that, meaning-element for meaning-element, it is possible to turn Greek into English, and that this must imply that usually -- it never pays to be too rigid -- one Greek word goes into one English word or typographical symbol, one phrase into one phrase, one clause into one clause, and one sentence into one sentence -in other words that it is possible to get equivalence without sublinearity. It also implies that one can find an English word order that renders the emphasis of the Greek sentence, and English connectives that maintain the Greek flow. One of our last readings was addressed, as I have mentioned, to the attempted eradication of all signs of translaterese. Our trust �12 was that if we stuck faithfully to the Greek, barring simple mistakes and omissions, we would get English that said exactly what the Greek said and with something like the original naturalness and deviations from naturalness. In other words, we had the faith that we might overcome the charge expressed in the Italian pairing traduttore: traditore; we hoped that a translator need not be a traitor to the text. our best advice to others is not to give in to current hermeneutic theories concerning the essential untranslatability of one language into another, but to suppose, as a starting hypothesis, that even if not all human speech can say the same thing, then at least we can think and say practically the same thing as our ancient intellectual progenitors -- from which it is evident that the translator's hypothesis is no negligible commentary on contemporary philosophy. Requirements The last item on my list of observations concerns the crucial question what translators need to know and be good at. The three of us did not think that we were required to have a full-fledged interpretation to have a go at a translation. What we needed instead was a lively sense of intimations, a sense born of a belief in the unfailing significance of the text. In other words, we came to Plato's philosophic plays with the trust that every word (or nearly every word) was deliberately placed, but that some terms and turns were special sign-posts to implied meanings. We tried to be alert to oddities of language and emphasis as well as to hapax legomena (linguistic singularities which we treated as occasions for literalness even if it proved awkward). On another level, we listened for high points and crucial junctures, which Plato's most responsible speakers, and of course Socrates himself, often signal by a throwaway reference to that one more "little" addition. None of us are, this is the moment to say, great believers in esoteric readings. We are much too possessed by a sense of the pedagogic generosity of the dialogues, a sense that here a discreetly fierce energy is devoted to carrying interlocutors, bystanders, and readers beyond themselves, into realms reachable only by circuitous and indirect means. To put it another way: In the dialogues we are told as much, but no more, than we need to make us want to think onward. That is why the dialogues are fairly easy to read the first time and get harder to understand as, with each reading, more signals are picked up. There certainly exist occasionally esoteric writers like Newton who, "to avoid being baited by little smatterers in �13 mathematics ... designedly made his Princioia abstruse" (Portsmouth Collection), and authors who touch guardedly on theological or political issues in intolerant times (though they never do seem to escape persecution). Socrates' dissembling and Plato's subtlety, however, are not of this self-protective sort but are pedagogical devices for drawing the learner in -- at least that is our experience. The dialogues work on the principle that "a cat may look at a king," or rather, "a boy may look at Being." And in any case, they display hardly any attempt to mask the fact that not everything that goes on in these conversations will be of comfort to respectable parents. So the first translator's requirement is a belief in the many-layered accessibility of the text and an alertness to those signs and signals which the English version should preserve for readers to puzzle over. A second requirement we put on ourselves was to attempt consistency but to shun method. An intelligent consistency is, we thought, the guardian spirit of open minds. So as far as possible we· tried, as I said, to choose the right word and to stick with it even in fairly routine phrases. Thus phainetai is almost always "it appears" and dokei "it seems." At the same time we tried to remain open to significant nuances and strange turns within each dialogue, though our avoidance of methodical translating bound to a particular interpretation of Platonic philosophy applied mainly across the dialogues: In taking up the · Phaedo we saw once again the truth of the teaching that each dialogue is a fresh world of discourse and is to be faced without preconceptions regarding "Platonic thought." That observation is particularly true as between dialogues in which Socrates guides the conversation and those in which he only listens in or is, finally, even absent. As far as preparation is concerned, since none of us can really read Greek as a living language, we were glad to see that we could do pretty well on a lot of Greek reading experience to give us a feel for the intention and on enough grammatical expertise to tell us when we needed to do careful parsing. We found that besides Liddell-Scott we needed to have at hand Roget's Thesaurus to help us to the word we were looking for. But we think that all in all, the main requirement for translators of Plato, and our advice to them, is to believe in the semantic plenitude of the Platonic texts, and to produce an English version that, like the Greek, says more than the translators know. � 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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. 13 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/. Title A name given to the resource On translating Plato Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997-03 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered in March 1997 by Eva Brann at the "Retracing the Platonic Text" conference held at Penn State. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 1997-03 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Pennsylvania 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 has been given permission to make this item available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Deans Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/071884928c03ae207de14a3f374811b2.mp3 f511bfe1dc8362fc31732a869b96fc2a 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp3 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:20:38 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 Memorial for Elliott Zuckerman Description An account of the resource Memorial service for Annapolis Tutor Elliott Zuckerman, October 27, 2019. The program includes musical tributes and eulogies by Jamie Young, Kirk Duncan, Dylan Knight Rogers, Eric Stoltzfus, Eva Brann, Christopher Nelson, Chester Burke, James Siranovich, Jonathan Tuck, Zena Hitz, Howard Zeiderman, and the St. John's College Ensemble. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-10-27 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Young, Jamie Zuckerman Duncan, Kirk Rogers, Dylan Knight Brann, Eva T. H. Stoltzfus, Eric Nelson, Christopher B., 1948- Burke, Chester Siranovich, James Tuck, Jonathan Hitz, Zena, 1973- Zeiderman, Howard Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Signed permission forms have been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Zuckerman, Elliott Eulogies Music Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Abbott, Robert Charles, Jr. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Zuckerman_Elliott_MemorialService_2019-10-27 Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/477307439d8a9edfdcb85d35e9ab3b29.mp3 ab690596e3adf105c229546effea91bb 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp3 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:44:51 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 A Conversation with Tom Brokaw and Admiral Mike Mullen Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a conversation between Tom Brokaw and Admiral Mike Mullen held on February 19, 2017. This is part of the Great Conversations series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brokaw, Tom Mullen, Mike 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-02-19 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to post this online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Wolf, Mary Relation A related resource <a title="Brokaw-Mullen" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/brokaw-and-mullen" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Event information on SJC Website</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Brokaw-Mullen Great Conversations https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ae09b2be30907e29f0eabd439f6cf2fa.pdf 1ae06bc4227ea8f393c2e75a4407f90c PDF Text Text ����� 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 5 pages 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 Santa Fe Baccalaureate Address, Spring 1991 Description An account of the resource Transcript of a the address given on May 19, 1991 by James Carey as part of the Baccalaureate service in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Carey, James Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-05-19 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000381 Baccalaureate service https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/475a5de4178fb2c9309d44665ca6027b.pdf 97d9d38e9b2898d2883d61346623d325 PDF Text Text �������� 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages 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 Freedom, letters, and leisure : west and east Description An account of the resource Transcript of the Graduate Institute commencement address given on August 15, 2008 by James Carey in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Carey, James Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008-08-15 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Language Leisure Psycholinguistics Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24003569 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c75d5dff127cb656069684a254ee1c1b.mp3 1c93c0b7c71eda63a1f5744b93e80bc8 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:52:03 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Natural Law of War and Peace Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 19, 2017 by Dr. Angelo Codevilla as part of the LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture Series. The lecture is the part of a joint lectures series between St. John's College and the U.S. Naval Academy to honor the memory of Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen. An alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and the St. John's College Graduate Institute, Kristensen, a Navy SEAL, was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan in 2005. This lecture series aims to create even greater ties between the two schools, as well as to educate the public about civil-military relations and the place of the liberal arts in education of naval and military professions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Codevilla, Dr. Angelo Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-04-19 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nelson, Christopher (Introduction) Relation A related resource <a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2091">Typescript</a> Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Codevilla_Angelo_2017-04-19 Kristensen lecture series U.S. Naval Academy https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ede9398cd0cc178fa83cf43ffc5d7394.pdf 8e05543d484b97062124e7b4183653c3 PDF Text Text On the Natural Law Of War And Peace By Angelo M. Codevilla 1.We are here to celebrate the memory of Erik S. Kristensen, a warrior who had graduated from the Naval Academy and who then came to St. Johns College - the closest thing in today's world to Plato's Academy. In his memory, someone comes here each year to explain why the peace on which the practice of philosophy depends requires successful statecraft, including success in war. LCDR Kristensen's life testified to the interdependence of war, peace, and philosophy. 2500 years earlier, Socrates had testified to the same truth by speaking with young men about good and evil after having carried his spear in the Athenian Phalanx. Like Socrates and Erik Kristensen, we are lovers of our country, and of truth - truth with the capital T what is true by nature, and lovers of what America's Founders called "the laws of nature and nature's God." What guidance do these laws give us about war and peace in our time? That question is urgent because Americans have enjoyed peace for only about thirty of the past hundred years. America's armed forces have won essentially all their battles. Winning battles naturally leads to winning wars, and hence to earning peace and security. But already by 1950 George Kennan had noted that the American people's peace and security had diminished. Today, we look at the peace and security of the 1950s much as Kennan looked nostalgically back to 1905. How come? Results so contrary to nature and intentions do not happen because of etTors �in policy. They happen only from mistakes regarding first principles. What are these first principles? There has been no shortage of controversy among American statesmen through the past hundred years about the principles, the laws of nature, concerning peace and war: Woodrow Wilson against Theodore Roosevelt, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman against Robert A. Taft and Douglas MacArthur, Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, and Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater, candidate George W. Bush against President George W. Bush. Though they disagreed fundamentally, all believed they were advocating the truly the right way for nations - especially this nation - to behave. In this they have been consistent with America's founders, who meant to establish a great nation on the basis of what is right, simply. 2. Our very civilization is based on understanding that man and nature exist and behave, according to laws that our minds can grasp by observation and study. Only recently has it become customary to distinguish between science and philosophy, between facts and values. Formerly, the study of physics and chemistry as well as of ethics and politics was known as "natural philosophy." The fundamental distinction was between truth and opinion. The people who built America believed that attention to the laws of nature and nature's God was the key to thriving. They believed it because they knew that ignoring or flouting reality does not turn out well, that sanity begins with not banging one's head against reality. 2 �Let us now consider what this thing called natural law is, and what it demands of statesmanship and war. 3.Naturallaw is the complex of the laws by which the world works. Physics and chemistry remind us that natural law is inflexible and self-enforcing, that what we humans imagine about ourselves and the world is irrelevant. You may "identify" as a bird, eat bird food and wear feathers. But if you jump off a cliff chirping and flopping those feathers, Mother Nature's laws regarding mass and motion will punish you. If you want to fly, you had better learn her laws concerning the pressure and speed of fluids. By the same token, no amount of commitment will enable you join two sodium atoms into salt. Plants are just as subject to inflexible laws. Regardless of anybody's opinion, apples and oranges and avocados require different conditions to thrive. That is why judgments about farming have to be right by nature. Not so long ago, following scientific consensus that acquired characteristics are inherited the Soviet government wasted millions of tons of seeds trying to modifying wheat to grow in Siberia. In America today, scientific consensus has it that the globe is warming. And yet, citrus growers are moving their operations southward because the trees happen not to share that consensus. Mother Nature does not care what anybody thinks. Wild animals are, as the saying goes, "hard wired" to survive and thrive. They move and reproduce to take optimal advantage of weather and food sources. They operate by day or night as 3 �best fits the species. They can't help doing the right things for themselves. 4. Human beings, unlike animals, are free to do the wrong things for themselves. But nature is just as clear about what it takes for human beings to thrive and survive as it is about what it takes for any other species to do so. Like horses and wolves, we need food and community to survive. But, to fulfill ourselves, we humans have to do the things that make for the survival and happiness of peculiar creatures that are neither mere animals nor gods. What might these be? The Ten Commandments are the most common and concise compendium of natural law regarding man. But isn't that a set of peculiarly Jewish ideas that draw their authority from the claim that Moses got them from God? Think again. Try reversing each of the Commandments, and ask how humans would fare living by that reversed list: Have many gods and disrespect them all, never stop to rest or to consider whence you came or whither you go, dishonor your father and your mother, kill as you please, take what you can from whomever you can, fornicate with whomever you can. Lie and betray, enry and scheme against those around you. Not even criminal gangs can survive on that basis. Nor could any individual be happy who lived by such counsels. At best, he might become a tyrant. But, having no friends, his choice would be whether to die like Stalin - or like Ceaucescu. Hence we are forced to conclude that the Ten Commandments just happen to be a pretty good summation of what nature requires for human beings to live human lives. 4 �That is true regardless of whether they were jotted at random by a stone-carving monkey, or discerned by Moses, or given by nature's Creator. Moses gives a bunch of other precepts applicable to man in general. They are subject to the same test: how do they relate to human nature? Here is one: "Thou shalt not suffer a sorcerer to live." Is that a Jewish prejudice? Consider. Magic claims that nature is capricious, but that it can be mastered by occult practices. Mother Nature decrees that people who live by magic are stuck in misery. In fact, banning magic is right by nature because all human improvement depends on reading and heeding nature's open book of rules. How about Moses' condemnation of anal intercourse? Is it that another Jewish prejudice? In fact, since whatever else that practice does, it sure does not propagate the species, we may well consider Genesis' story ofSodom's fate as another of Mother Nature's warnings. The point here is not that the Torah is the apex of natural law about man. Aristotle, Cicero, and many others have delved into the subject far more deeply and systematically. Rather, the point is that our civilization is full of pretty accurate descriptions of what happens when humans disregard Mother Nature. 5. How does natural law apply to actions? In fact, all actions can only be understood by their natural consequences. Naturally, all movement aims at some state of rest. We move, walk, speak or shut up, for certain purposes each of which is for the sake of ends that we value even more. A concise illustration of the term "teleology" is the old saying: "not even a dog wags his tail for 5 �nothing." I fix my tractor so I can till the ground, so that I can grow my grapes, so that I can sell them and maintain my household, so that I may fulfill my duties. 6. Human trades or professions are naturally about producing certain things. What is the natural law about them? Yes, all of them also bring advantages to the tradesman. Yet by nature, each is about producing a good peculiar to itself- buildings that stand, ships that float, plumbing that does not leak, shoes that fit and last, medicine that heals. What does Mother Nature do when human activities aim at results other than the ones proper to them? Mother Nature makes humans suffer the violations' consequences. Buildings built badly fall down on you. Bad ships leak or capsize. Bad shoes chafe and fall apart. That is why human activity cannot be understood in terms of power-seeking or pleasure-seeking as ends in themselves. Along with Socrates and Thrasymachus, let us consider the successful tyrant. He can have anything he wants - including all sorts of things that are bad for him. The same goes for very rich people. If they do well, it is not be because they have the power to please themselves, but because they learn what is really good. Dictators and rock stars routinely make themselves powerfully miserable. Powerful men differ from powerless ones only in the number of people they make miserable. 7. Nature obliges soldiers and statesmen to produce certain goods, just as it obliges shoemakers and shipwrights. What are the goods, the natural ends, of the activity known as statesmanship? The Chinese empire's millennia! claim to rule 6 �has been providing tien an men, heavenly peace. Caesar Augustus' claim to the imperial power that replaced Rome's raucous Republic was that he was the Princeps Pacis - the prince of peace. As the Roman Empire was falling, St. Augustine defmed statesmanship for the next thousand years. Its product was to be "the tranquility of order." The temporal ruler was to be the "defensor pacis." Fourteen hundred years later, Lincoln summarized his objective as "peace among ourselves and with all nations." Niccolo' Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes are, if anything, more insistent on judging any exercise of statesmanship on the degree of peace that it produces especially internal peace. Indeed, the incapacity to rest from war really does seem to be the punishment that Mother Nature imposes for incompetent statesmanship. (A caveat is in order here: The above does not apply to Persian civilization or Indian civilization, whose manuals of statesmanship- the Shah Nameh and the Arthrasastra, respectively - do not look beyond struggles for power. It applies to Islamic civilization only insofar as it might after all resistance to Islam had ceased. Nor does it apply to certain primitive tribes.) 8. If peace is so essential to well being, why, so often does it take war to establish it? Simply because, by nature, each of us wants his or her way. We human beings share in Eve's lively appetites and in Adam's irresponsibility. Individually and collectively, we want to be a law unto ourselves. Statecraft is the art of reconciling all sides' claims to their own desires, and perhaps to their own peace. We fight wars so that we may have 7 �peace - our version of peace. That is why Any peace is what one side earns for itself by defeating the other side's attempt to get the peace that it wanted. Still, although war is the most intense of activities, it aims naturally at a state of rest neither more nor less than any other activity. This is why approaching war as anything other than the pursuit of peace is naturally self defeating. Consider how two of history's greatest warriors failed. Napoleon never thought of an end to his string of battlefield victories. Hence, as Charles De Gaulle wrote, Napoleon "broke France's sword by striking it unceasingly." His failure to aim at peace more than nullified his valor as a warrior. During the Second Punic War, Hannibal subordinated strategic logic to operational logic by staying on the offensive even after having failed to force Rome to negotiate. 9. Nature leads the warrior to ask: "When will this end?" The warrior's contact with the enemy presses him to end the fighting, and to do it as fast as possible. Thus did Aristotle note that the warrior's natural objective is victory. By the same token, Aristotle also noted that peace is the natural end of the statesman's art: your victory is what makes possible your peace. Victory, of course, comes in different forms - everything from the enemy's annihilation or enslavement, as was the rule in ancient warfare, to sovereignty over border provinces, as was common in European 18th century warfare. But all forms share a denominator: the vanquished no longer disturbs the winner's enjoyment of his peace. 8 �10. Victory, forcing the enemy to acquiesce to one's enjoyment of one's own peace, naturally presupposes a coherent understanding of that peace. During the past hundred years however, American statecraft has not produced peace because, Progressive statesmen, beginning with such as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Evans Hughes, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt, have pursued concepts of peace that are literally out of the realm of possibility. Indeed, the enemies which these statesmen have designated are purely creatures of the statesman's own minds, respectively: "autocracy," "war itself," "world disorder," "ancient evils, ancient ills." Whom would we have to kill to defeat these enemies? To make war is to destroy or bend the persons and causes that stand in the way of your peace. Victory, comes when none troubles your enjoyment of your peace any longer. If you have made war, killed and destroyed, and yet you cannot enjoy peace, it means that you have killed the wrong people. 11. For century, American blood and treasure has been committed to kill and destroy certain people as if they embodied the abstractions in our statesmen' own minds. But who are the people who whose death would end war itself, bring about world order, establish liberal democracy, end ancient evils, reconcile historic enemies? The conjuring of unreal enemies makes it impossible to ask who might be the persons whose killing or constraint would deliver peace vis a vis the actual, living ones who actually shoot at us. This is a principal the reason why America's military campaigns have been waged without 9 �reasonable plans for achieving a better peace. Moreover, since Korea 1950, the U.S government has explicitly disavowed seeking military victories. Understanding this hundred-year divorce of force from purpose requires attention to the arguments between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. 12. In a nutshell: TR, the apostle of "the big stick," rejoiced in America's emergence as a great power because he believed that the U.S government could and should use this power to secure Americans' enjoyment of domestic peace and tranquility better than it could in George Washington's time. Like Washington, whom he called "the best of great men and the greatest of good men," TR wanted to mind America's business as "our interest guided by justice shall counsel." TR regarded power as a means of keeping trouble away from America. The enemy was whoever troubled America's peace. War was a temporary measure to secure that peace. By contrast, Woodrow Wilson had started his career denouncing the hurdles that America's founders had placed in the way of forceful human improvement. For him, the enemy at home and abroad was everything and anything that stood in the way of human improvement. For him, America itself existed to defeat such enemies. To improve America, he pushed Prohibition. This started a war at home. To improve the world, he invented the league of Nations. For him, Washington's (and the Gospel's) admonition to mind one's own imperfections looking not for specks in others' eyes was priggishness. Such was his vision of 10 �the peace that his League of Nations would secure that, when senators asked him how this commitment to everlasting peace differed from a commitment to perpetual war, he was unable to answer. in short, Wilson erased the distinction between war and peace. In short, the peace at which TR aimed was America's peace, to be secured by minding America's business, that is, by speaking softly to foreigners, and by carrying a big stick to bash whomever would interfere in America. George Washington, John Quincy Adams, TR, had taken for granted that America's business came first always, and that this business requires jealous attention to squaring ends with means. Words had to be smaller than the stick. Wilson, however, collapsed the distinction between America's business and everybody else's business. Voicing limitless objectives, he gave little if any thought about how America's armed forces could actually achieve them. Yet Wilson won the hearts and minds of the subsequent century's statesmen. Reading Charles Evans Hughes, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Dean Acheson, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Bush 41 and 43, and Obama we might imagine that, respectively, the world had united in disarming, in outlawing war, in eliminating "ancient evils, ancient ills" that it was policing the world through the U.N.; that nothing could stand in the way of freedom, that satisfying the USSR had tamed it, that a New World Order was a-borning, that democracy is conquering the Middle East, and that Islam is terrorism's solution. None of this was true. Although most of these statesmen were not shy about sending Americans to fight 11 �abroad, none explained how doing so could materialize the marvelous vistas they sketched. 13. From Washington to TR, American statesmen had worked on the realization that the world is made up of different folks who want incompatible things. That is why the essence of statecraft's craft is jealous attention to what our own power can do to secure our own interests. But because statesmen from Wilson's time to our own have voiced certainty that all civilized peoples share the same objectives for peace and progress, they have felt justified in dispensing with their craft's essence. That is why, far from producing peace, the past hundred years' statecraft resembles less the engineering of sound buildings or seaworthy ships than it does ritual human sacrifices performed to the sound of assumptions recited as if magical incantations. Each of their ventures got us fewer victories, less peace, more war. Each set of statesmen have emphasized one or more aspects of that departure from statesmanship's nature, and earned the penalties that Mother Nature imposes on unnatural behavior. Let us see what truths Mother nature has been trying to teach us. 14. In 1921 Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes brokered the "Washington Treaties," which scrapped more naval tonnage than all of history's wars had ever sunk, and fixed the major powers' ratios of naval power. Japan also agreed to respect China's integrity and sovereignty in exchange for America's promise not to fortify our Pacific bases. Hence America disempowered itself from securing that objective. America's best 12 �and brightest believed that this secured peace because they were sure that all peoples shared their consensus that armaments caused war. Hence, their logic said, limit the means of war and you will limit the will to war. In fact, the natural chain of logic leads in the opposite direction: from ends to means. That is why these Treaties secured not peace but Japan's supremacy in the western Pacific, China's dismemberment, Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, etc. ..... 15. Herbert Hoover believed that, the world had outlawed war by the 1929 Kellogg Briand pact. That was not true. Franklin Roosevelt spent the first seven years of his presidency lecturing America and the world about the need to act as if it were true. His lasting legacy was to fight WWII while trying to persuade the American people that Stalin understood good and evil in the same way as Americans do. Naturally, because untruths necessarily cause confusion, they produced divisions among Americans. They plague us to this day. 16. FDR, and especially Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, fostered a consensus that, finally, the United Nations had brought law and order to international affairs. So precious was that consensus-in-illusion that they sent some fifty-thousand Americans to die in Korea in what they called a "police action" to preserve it. Naturally, that sacrifice resulted in preserving an enemy that now targets nuclear weapons on America. Douglas MacArthur had protested: "in war, there is no substitute for victory." Mother Nature nodded yes. The ruling Consensus thought McArthur was a dinosaur. 13 �17. Under presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon the practice of defeating global evils by committing U.S military forces against foreign enemies without intending to defeat them became explicit. JFK redeemed his promise to "bear any burden" in freedom's defense- presumably against the Soviet Union - by sending Americans to fight in Vietnam. Johnson explained that military victory was impossible there, for anybody, because "the enemy is poverty, ignorance and disease." He and Nixon rotated some twelve million Americans in and out of there in the service of these illusions. Ho Chi Minh and the Soviets had other ideas more in tune with Mother Nature. So did the North Vietnamese soldier who drove his tank through the US embassy gate. 18.The great Consensus spoke through Harvard's Kissinger and Richard Nixon to the effect that nuclear weapons had sobered the Soviet politburo. All America had to do for the Soviets to join in Wilson's dream of world order was to make U.S nuclear forces incapable of targeting the Soviet military or of interfering with Soviet missiles targeted on America. The U.S. government would not use U.S strategic forces because using them would do us no good. The government crafted the forces and Kissinger crafted the treaties that embodied this vision. In 1972 Kissinger, presenting the treaties to the Senate, spoke of having banished nuclear war. Eight years later Jimmy Carter's Defense Secretary, had to tell America that the Soviets were far advanced in preparations to fight, survive, and win a nuclear war. Those who pay attention to natural law, you see, build things to do themselves some good. Not even a dog wags his tail for nothing. 14 �19. As the Soviet monster was croaking of disaffection, Bush 41 tried to save it by massive transfusions of U.S cash in untied loans (never repaid). He also told a crowd in Ukraine's capital that they should be good Soviet citizens. This was the voice of the U.S establishment Consensus, which valued the dream of U.S. Soviet cooperation over the real prospect of undoing a real enemy. Ukrainians shook their heads in disbelief. The same president and Consensus decided that since Saddam Hussein's Iraq had violated World Order by absorbing Kuwait, the U.S government would conduct a police action to reestablish the borders. At the time, Saddam was no enemy of America. A half millennium earlier, Niccolo' Machiavelli had cautioned: "people ought to be caressed or extinguished." Bush 41 just assumed that "a new world order " would follow his bellum interruptus. Instead, by harming Saddam without eliminating him, he helped make him the Middle East's paladin of anti Americanism. The troops which Bush 41 then stationed on Saudi soil to deal with this newly menacing Middle East ended up energizing Muslim Jihad against America. 20. Bush 43 and Barack Obama differed only verbally and quantitatively in their approach to this Jihad. Essentially, both ordered the U.S armed forces to do the same things they had done in Vietnam: hunt down hostile groups and individuals while the rest of the government infuses their societies with economic aid and social reform. They did so eschewing explicitly any plans for ending the conflict, never mind winning it. With various degrees of emphasis, both bent backward to counter suggestions that the Muslims who attack America do so 15 �for reasons related to Islam. In fact, both refused to identify any causes of anti American terrorism. Bush 43's proposal for the Department of homeland Security states that terrorism will be with us indefinitely because "modernity itself' is the cause. Obama's use of the term"violent extremism" moved the problem further into abstraction. But the blood of hundreds of innocents and the fears of millions are not abstract. 21. OrdinaryAmericans' desire to live peacefully is natural. So is resentment of a Consensus that shows no sign of plans for delivering peace. Though the Consensus has become shy of voicing support for more "nation building" or "engagement with moderate local allies," it cannot imagine anything other than what it has been doing. Therefore the question imposes itself: what has it been missing? What has Mother Nature been trying to teach us about how to deal with war so as to obtain peace? 22. The lessons are neither new nor complex. They will startle only those whose intellectual horizon is the Consensus. First, foreign relations involve dealing with foreigners - that is, people whose cultures, priorities, and interests are their own, not ours - above all whose business is their own. The sine qua non of peace is to recognize different people's natural, ineffable, focus on themselves, distinguishing what is our business and what is others' business is. Others may not like what we do in pursuit of our own business. They are less likely to forgive intrusions into theirs. 16 �By nature as well, statesmen are their people's fiduciaries. Minding the business of one's own nation is a task that stretches the capacity of the very finest of statesmen. Just as it is impossible to serve two masters, it is impossible to serve more than one nation at a time. Nor is the attempt to do so legitimate. John Quincy Adams rightly reproved suggestions that the U.S help one side or another in conflicts within or among foreign peoples by asking "who appointed us judges in their causes?" By nature, "they" alone get to decide what they want for themselves. Second, by that very nature, we alone get to decide how important anything is to us and what to do about it. Because we alone are responsible for ourselves, decisions about how to mind such business as we decide is our own come first, while the needs, desires, views, of foreigners are naturally incidental. Like everybody else, we are the only ones on whom we can count to defend "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." Hence, alliances are subject to the same rule of nature as bank loans: the more you need them the less they avail you. In short, nature seems to dictate that we must make only such commitments as we can, and intend, to keep with our own resources no matter what. Even questioning whether our own interests should come first is unnatural. Third, earning the respect necessary for living peacefully as we please requires fulfilling commitments, and especially dealing harshly with whomever disrespects us. Respect is the practical meaning of "honor" in international affairs - Hard-earned and easily lost. How precious honor is may be seen in a 1791 memo 17 �from Alexander Hamilton to George Washington on how to respond to Britain's possible movement of troops across U.S territory to attack Spain in New Orleans. Hamilton outlined the ways in which Washington could ignore or color Britain's affront. But he ended by counseling that, were Britain's transit to have violated America's honor, the disasters of war with Britain would have to be suffered for the sake of America's honor. In fact, nations exist only insofar as they are honored. Fourth, while America's armed forces have earned honor arguably more than any in history, American statesmen's failure to draw peace from their victories has drawn down the reservoir of respect for America among foreigners and, most impot1antly, among us Americans as well. The Consensus, from such as Henry Kissinger on down blames the American people for insufficient support of long range policy and for "isolationism." But the discrepancy between the declared objectives, the sacrifices, and the results has been impossible to hide. Woodrow Wilson's promises could not possibly have been fulfilled. Nor could those made on behalf of the United Nations. What is the natural reaction to using forces capable of overwhelming those facing them and yet forbearing to do so? Actions such as in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East in our time make sense only to those thoroughly trained to suppress the revulsion felt by ordinary human beings. Fifth and finally, our experiences with Mother Nature tell us that those old simpletons, George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abe Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt were right, along with 18 �Machiavelli and Don Corleone: Don't go looking for trouble and make nice with everybody. But if you have to fight, then fight with all you've got to defeat them as quickly as possible. Partial commitments, "sending signals," shows of force" convey stupidity and invite contempt. Yes, all wars are foggy and require adjustments. But Mother Nature supplies a compass by which to navigate the fog. Its needle keeps pointing straight to the reason you fought in the first place: your understanding of the peace you are seeking. The path to that peace is victory. 19 � 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 19 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Natural Law of War and Peace Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 19, 2017 by Dr. Angelo Codevilla as part of the LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture Series. The lecture is the part of a joint lectures series between St. John's College and the U.S. Naval Academy to honor the memory of Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen. An alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and the St. John's College Graduate Institute, Kristensen, a Navy SEAL, was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan in 2005. This lecture series aims to create even greater ties between the two schools, as well as to educate the public about civil-military relations and the place of the liberal arts in education of naval and military professions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Codevilla, Dr. Angelo Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-04-19 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nelson, Christopher (Introduction) Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2080">Audio recording</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Codevilla_Angelo_2017-04-19_Typescript Kristensen lecture series U.S. Naval Academy https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7bf4882279bf15027abdad1feab7764f.MP3 db4d659cccbe720caffce0fd35d723ad 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:58:20 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 Patriotism in the 21st Century Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2016 by Seth Cropsey as part of the LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture Series. The lecture is the first in a newly established joint lectures series between St. John's College and the U.S. Naval Academy to honor the memory of Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen. An alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and the St. John's College Graduate Institute, Kristensen, a Navy SEAL, was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan in 2005. This lecture series aims to create even greater ties between the two schools, as well as to educate the public about civil-military relations and the place of the liberal arts in education of naval and military professions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cropsey, Seth Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-04-13 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Beall, James (Introduction) Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Cropsey_Seth_2016-04-13 Kristensen lecture series U.S. Naval Academy https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d6f39725ddb1828610067938a0bf60e7.mp4 0777bfd32b8c3ac1c3295150f7430cbb 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:47:50 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 America and Russia in the Information Environment: How to Survive in Today’s Social Media Battlefield Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered on April 21, 2021 by Dr. David V. Gioe as part of the LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture Series. David Gioe is an Assistant Professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a History Fellow for the Army Cyber Institute, and, currently, a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London. In his Global Professorship at King’s College, he is examining why and how state intelligence services have harnessed emerging technologies – social media platforms in particular – to shape the information environment for strategic ends. This interdisciplinary project applies intelligence history, strategic studies and technological perspectives to evaluate and to counter influence operations that seek to advance state security interests in an asymmetric manner short of war. Gioe was an intelligence officer, serving as a counterterrorism analyst and serving multiple overseas tours as an operations officer. His articles have appeared The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The National Interest, and Foreign Policy. The lecture is part of a joint lectures series between St. John's College and the U.S. Naval Academy to honor the memory of Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen. An alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and the St. John's College Graduate Institute, Kristensen, a Navy SEAL, was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan in 2005. This lecture series aims to create even greater ties between the two schools, as well as to educate the public about civil-military relations and the place of the liberal arts in the education of naval and military professions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gioe, David, 1977- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-04-21 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John’s College permission to make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library. To make a recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Disinformation National security Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gioe_David_2021-04-21 Kristensen lecture series U.S. Naval Academy https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/61fa706e7dc1257f1905211828b35f6a.mp3 d4882424c10f261139aa4ccc0b3d17b4 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:34:09 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 Jonathan Hand Memorial Description An account of the resource Audio recording of the memorial for tutor Jonathan Hand that took place on February 1, 2020 in the Great Hall of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Golluber, Michael Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this recording. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Axelberg, Emily Kgalema, Thato Levine, David Lawrence Levy, Allison Pagano, Frank N. Sterling, J. Walter Storey, Benjamin Storey, Jenna Silber Stover, Sonya Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_Jonathan_Hand_Memorial_2020-02-01 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6760">Jonathan Hand Memorial Program</a> Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/25b777525cae22f837f9073697e1aeb2.pdf 6fa41f0ac81f6495db88f562260abe58 PDF Text Text In Remembrance of Jonathan Hand July 6, 1958 - November 6, 2019 ST JOHN'S College SANTA FE • ANNAPOLIS ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE FEBRUARY 1, 2020 3:00 P.M., GREAT HALL �Lara Fabian ''Mistral Gagnant" lyrics They say that souls wait around before returning to earth That's what they say Sometimes I think of this child of mine which is not yet here And whom I am waitingfor And I am so afraid for it WELCOME Michael Golluber Ah to sit down on a bench for jive minutes with you And watch all the people, Such as there are. Talk to you ofthe good time Which is dead or which'll come back Squeezing within my hand your little fingers Then give something to eat to idiotic pigeons Aim a few kicks at them in pretend . To hear your laughter which splits cracks in the walls Which can cure above all wounds that I've had. To tell you for a while how I once was: "Mino The Fabulous Bombecs", Which we used to pinch from the shop. "Car en Sac" and "Minto caramels"for one franc And the "Mistrals" that win a prize. To walk in the rain for five minutes with you And watch life go past Such as there is. To tell you tales ofthe earth feasting my eyes on you Speak to you ofyour mum a little while Ofjumping in puddles to make her grumbleRuining our shoes and having jun. And to hear your laughter as one hears the sea Stopping then starting offon the way back. To tell ofabove all the "Carambars" of times past And the "Coco- hoers" and the real "Roudoudous" Which used to cut our lips and chipped our teeth enamel And the "Mistrals" that win a prize. Ah to sit on a bench for five minutes with you Watching the sun going down Talk to you ofa good time which is dead and I don't care To tell you those in the wrong that wasn't us. That ifI am crazy it's onlyfor your eyes For they have the advantage of coming in twos And hearing your laughter flying up as high As fly up the cries of the birds To tell you in the end that you need to love life And love it even if time is a great killer And takes off with him the laughter of children And the "Mistrals" that win a prize. And the "Mistrals" that win a prize. Emily Axelberg David Levine Ave verum corpus Performed by the SJC Schola Cantorum (William Byrd) Frank Pagano Allison Levy Benjamin Storey Jenna Silber Storey Mistral Gagnant (Renaud Pierre Manuel Sechan) Performed by Christopher Young (piano) and Natalie Gammill (vocals) Thato Kgalema Walter Sterling Remarks from Jonathan '.s Family Reception in the Junior Common Room Cover image: Athena, Greek Goddess of Wisdom and War �Tutor Michael Golluber Jonathan - or "Mr. Hand" as my wife Tracey always playfully addressed him, easily embarrassing him - he was so easy to tease, and he enjoyed being teased more than most , because he knew we were all flirting with him. So, for example, one could say to him (as I in fact did) "I'm not entirely sure what kind of look you're going for, Jonathan, but you've neglected to shave a noticeable portion of the left side of your face." Jonathan was a great friend and magnificent colleague. Life here at the college for me has not been the same since he left us, and I suffer from losing him each and every day. Jonathan, as everyone knows, was a most enjoyable and joyful interlocuter. I learned so much from him during my many serious, and my many silly conversations with him (there was of course hardly any - if any at all - of a distinction between silliness and seriousness when f spoke with Jonathan - he nailed "that tragedy and comedy of life" thing down). Jonathan had a twinkle or sparkle in his eye {I imagine he would prefer "sparkle" - "twinkle" doesn't quite lend itself to the manliness he pretended to care about, dressing up as he did every day as a lumberjack) . It was that sparkle that I saw, when, at a question period after a lecture, I had just finished asking a question, and he turned around, and with a wink, let me know that he knew that my question was not in fact a real question, but rather was a polite and indirect way of pointing out that the lecturer didn't know what the heck they were talking about. He was much more bold, straightforward and ruthless in communicating such things than I, and to my astonishment he always got away with it somehow. It was that same sparkle that I saw, when , sitting across from me in my Camille Paglia study group (Paglia, by the way, is someone Jonathan was madly in love with, and he wanted to ask to her to marry him, despite (and maybe because) she identifies as an "Amazonian lesbian") it was that sparkle I saw when I asked a question of our dear students that he could not quite believe I could get away with asking, a question he knew he could never get away with as king. And it was the same sparkle when at one of our many lunch conversations, I would say something that he decided was exactly false. Behind the smile and that sparkle, he was thinking: "Michael - there is no way you could have gotten it any more wrong than that! " Or at another lunch, after things got a little heated, he would back down, acknowledging that maybe, just maybe there was something I got a bit right and that he might give it some further consideration. The final setting for such conversation was in the context of my present study group on Simone de Beauvoir' s "The Second Sex" (Beauvoir, by the way, was someone Jonathan had no desire whatsoever to marry). Jonathan came to the first couple of these meetings. But with great selflessness, sincere selflessness, he decided to leave the group because he was sure his crankiness about the book would lead to some misbehavior on his part. After all, Jonathan cared most of all for our students and their education. The strange thing, though, was that �when I walked out of the Private Dining Room and into the dining hall after these meetings, I was always greeted by Jonathan, sitting alone at a table, waiting for me to come out. There was no wave of a hand, there was only that intense sparkle, commanding me to come sit down and join him. You see, he had been keeping up with the Beauvoir readings as our group was reading them. And he demanded from me, after each and every meeting, a minute by minute account of who said what about this astonishing claim or that inexplicable argument, and then demanded an account of why I thought that this student had said that, and then, applying psychology to ontology, demanded that we decipher together what this "why", of the "that" which was said by this particular student, about this book - what that could possibly mean for the present and future of the human as such. And he grew irritated and delighted at the very same time. As deeply irritated as Jonathan may have been with us at one time or another, Jonathan deeply loved us even more. He and his speeches remind one of how Alcibiades described Socrates and his speeches as a sileinos, in all appearances a hubristic satyr, the inside of which is really something altogether divine, having the largest number of images of virtue within, applying to the whole area that is proper to examine for one who is going to be beautiful and good. �Student Emily Axelberg The most difficult part of Mr. Hand's passing, for me, has been accepting the fact that I will never get the chance to adequately thank him for being my teacher, if such a thing is ever really possible. With this brief speech, I would like to try to begin to express my gratitude. I would like, first, to thank Mr. Hand for his seriousness. This one might surprise some of you who knew him well, because Mr. Hand made a lot of jokes. He seemed never to miss an oppo1tunity for biting sarcasm, and often didn't appear to pay much mind to whether or not those around him would deem his humor appropriate to the context. However, I'd like to reference briefly a commencement address that another excellent teacher of mine, Lise van Boxel, gave that touched on this point. Sh~ astutely observed in that speech that, "seriousness does not have to be grave." I think this is one of the most important lessons that I learned from Mr. Hand. He openly rejoiced in the work that we do here, in the books, and in the company of his colleagues and students. This rejoicing often took the form of a particularly effusive and lively approach to teaching and conversation. Mr. Hand's ability to do the work here with impressive diligence and rigor while unapologetically having the most fun possible is the standard by which I continue to evaluate my own work. He taught me that the most serious response to the great books is an ecstatic kind of joy, a lightness. In a document entitled "Mr. Hand's paper advice to freshmen ," which he sent to our freshman language class, he wrote, "these authors are suns: we, at best, mere moons, straining to reflect some of that original brilliance." Mr. Hand's particular sort of seriousness reflected the original brilliance of our authors to me and revealed the undeniable vitality of their dusty old books when I was just starting out at the college. He was my first shining example of what it means to search for humanity in the books we read, and to celebrate when we find it. His last point of advice in that same document simply reads, " have fun. Really." I believe this advice, though it might not seem like much, is one of the deepest and most imp01tant lessons I have learned at St. John's. I would also like to thank Mr. Hand for his continued commitment to my education. Mr. Hand demonstrated a persistent dedication to my growth as a student and as a human being, even at times when I was not so dedicated. A good example of this, which I will relate here mostly because it's funny, is his contribution to my don rag about my performance in language class during the second semester of my freshman year. When it was his turn to speak, he very curtly declared something like: "I think Ms. Axelberg has gotten cocky and lazy." He, of course, followed this remark by saying that my writing was basically satisfactory and there were no major problems with my class participation, etc, but his first statement really stuck with me because it was the truest thing that any one of my tutors said in that don rag. Even though my work in class had been just fine, he knew that I was capable of doing better and called me to account for it so directly that I couldn't disregard him . I remember that Ms. van Boxel even asked him if she should write the first part down in the don rag notes, to which he responded, "I don't see why not." This story is just one of many examples throughout my time at the college of �Mr. Hand noticing me slipping, academically or personally, and encouraging me to do better with the kind of totally unveiled criticism that it seems only he could get away with. The reason he got away with it, though, is because even when he was at his harshest, I never doubted that he was in my corner and wanted me to succeed. I know that the only reason he was so tough on me is because my education mattered to him just as much, if not, at times, more than it mattered to me. Without his constant support, I don't know how I would have persisted through some of my roughest patches over the past four years. I don't think I really have to tell any of you how much it means to have a great teacher believe in you and your work. Obviously, it means a great deal. I will briefly mention my gratitude to Mr. Hand for his lesson on friendship. He once told me that he reads to make friends, and the time I spent reading with him over the past four years proved that to be abundantly true. I enjoyed reading with Mr. Hand not only because I had a lot to learn from him about how to read the great books, but also because it provided an opportunity for me to build the kind of trust and mutual respect with him that I had long been searching for in a mentor. Because of this willingness of his to become a friend to me, I will cherish our time together not only for how it contributed to my academic growth, but how it came to shape me more broadly as a human being in my ability to be a better friend . My last conversation with Mr. Hand was supposed to be on Book II of Rousseau's Emile, but we ended up returning to a discussion that began for us in my freshman language class when we were translating the Meno. We often revisited this conversation, which usually began with one of us asking, "why do we even read these books anyway? What is it we're doing here? What do we really hope to learn or gain?" Both of us struggled to provide an answer sometimes . It seemed to me that Mr. Hand, like me, wasn't always completely sold on the promise of ultimate happiness some people claim you will attain once you manage to figure out all the secrets hidden in the pages of our most revered texts. Still, though, this work was the work of his life, and I know now that it is mine, too. Faced with this version of Meno's paradox the last time we spoke to one another, Mr. Hand and I once again sided with Socrates, agreeing that, " in supposing one ought to seek what one does not know we would be better men, more able to be brave and less idle than if we supposed that which we do not know we are neither capable of discovering nor ought to seek -- on behalf of that I would surely battle, so far as I am able, both in word and deed ." With Mr. Hand as my example, I feel confident I will continue to side with Socrates and attempt always, through my seeking, to be better, braver, and less idle. Thank you. �Tutor Frank Pagano A few words on Jonathan I am Frank Pagano, a tutor at the college and like so many others a friend of Jonathan's. I do not think I am capable of speaking adequately about the personal characteristics that made Jonathan uniq ue like his sunrise smile that glowed with good will, joy and mischief. Instead I shall try to speak of the nobility of his mind. My theme, therefore, is Jonathan's daring intellect and courageous soul, but I must start from afar, for Jonathan was at heart a St. John's tutor. The college promotes and is defined by the conversation between the students and the great books. The tutors are peripheral since it is not their education to which the college is devoted. According to the St. John's Statement of the Program, tutors do not teach directly, they do not profess. The vocation of a tutor is to ask good questions. Recently this humble calling has become harder to follow because good questions presume that there are true questions. In our time the value of the truth itself is problematic. Frequently we ask questions to avoid the truth. Jonathan was one of the few who dared constantly to ask true questions. Let us try for our sakes to understand the truth of his questions. Jonathan wrote primarily about Hegel, the man of many answers. Jonathan told me that he regarded Rousseau as greater than Hegel. Each of the statements in Rousseau's Second Discourse is a hundred questions. Jonathan did not share publicly his questioning of Rousseau. Instead he devoted himself to demonstrating for us the inestimable worth of the truth. Thus his turn to Hegel. In some ways Hegel is the culmination of modernity, but for Jonathan Hegel is not strictly speaking a complete modern, at least from the vantage of the contemporary moment. Jonathan begins his lecture, "Reconciling Subjectivity and Substance: Hegel's Critique of Pure Personhood," with the claim: "Dissatisfaction with or at least ambivalence about modernity is part of modernity1.'' The reconciliation that Hegel attempted is in one way a departure from the spirit of modernity. Hegel thinks that he has achieved, according to Jonathan, an integration of the state, society and family that prevents our person from being empty and our being from descending into nihilism and producing a human nothingness. If Hegel's philosophical enterprise was successful, then there seems to be nothing peculiar to our time for us to ask him. What then is the question? Jonathan's lecture is an act of startling intellectual daring for it reveals how the true question lives. The true question, the question that does not already know the answer, seeks out the right interlocutor. In our education, we must learn to be the right interlocutor for the true question. But we do not know what for us the true question is. Because a true question is a hybrid mixing ignorance and knowledge, our questioner must know and hope and fear. The question must hold out hope for the truth and fear of the error of self-congratulation. Accordingly in Jonathan's lecture Hegel is not the interlocutor, he is the questioner. Hegel puts the question to modernity, including our contemporary pieties. Hegel integrates the human world, family, society, and state. In contrast the way we like to talk is that modernity is revolutionary. Following 1 Hand, Jonathan. Reconciling Subjectivity and Substance: Hegel's Critique of Pure Personhood, Draft of March 10, 2019. �Jonathan's Hegel we see this revolution is really disintegration. The contemporary revolutionary movements in the family, society and state tear apart the Hegelian integration. This has always been the spirit of modernity. In terms more convivial to my cruder mind, since its founding modernity has been in decline. What then does Hegel ask our contemporaries? He asks, What is the worth of your person without the truth? This in its fullness is a terrifying question. Jonathan suggests that Hegel asks this questi on because he has seen us once before. Hobbes claims that each of us awards ourselves infinite value and our neighbors no value in themselves. We are the persistent deceivers of ourselves. Jonathan's Hegel implicitly reveals that value, that social valuation, is an incomplete understanding of ou r fellow human beings. It is merely the coin of the social marketplace. "I have my values and you yours" is the social echo of an empty soul. Jonathan was not a pure Hegelian. He recognized Hegel as the proper interrogator of our times, not the least because he developed many of our approaches to our condition. Jonathan revealed how to suspend the tyrannical spirit of modernity. Without fear he showed how to bring modernity to question its own spirit. True questioning of ourselves, of the dominant spirit of our time, shining a light in our cave, requires the strength of soul and the courage of a giant. �Tutor Allison Levy Jonathan Jonathan was a true friend . To the College, to his students, to me and others. He and I got to be friends back before I was a tutor, when I used to join David for lunch in the cafeteria and observe the fights he and Jonathan had there over the mean ing of pretty much every seminar reading. It wasn't that Jonathan didn't enjoy those fights -- I think he liked them, and I know David loved them - but at some point Jonathan conceived the hope that the wife might prove a less misguided and argumentative Hegel-hater than the husband, so one day he asked me to lunch alone. From this grew our tradition of four- or five-hour margarita lunches at Harry's Roadhouse . From me he got less fighting about philosophy, more drunken gossip, obscene jokes, and petty complaints, which he always treated with great compassion. From him I got what everyone who's been fortunate enough to call Jonathan a friend did: a profound, even visceral concern for my suffering and my good fortune, a fierce loyalty that often defeated the dispassionate judgments of his prodigious intellect, a sensitive and deeply thoughtful conversation partner, and a lively, irreverently funny drinking buddy who delighted in the ridiculous, with which life and the College kept him generously supplied. He had a sharp wit and a particular gift for impressions; if I had his talent and didn't mind getting fired, I'd share some. But one of the many wonderful memories Jonathan has given me sticks with me and seems fitting to mention. Last year, I happened to have all five of my senior essay orals scheduled over only two weeks, which is a bit of a crunch and which occasioned much grumbling from me. Without mentioning it to me, Jonathan noted the date and time of my last oral; when I came out of it, there he was, with a bottle of champagne to congratulate me. We drank it in the coffee shop, where he complained to everyone who walked by about the wrong I had suffered in being subjected to so grueling a schedule; he made sure everyone knew of my heroic virtue in enduring such a trial, and called angrily for the punishment of all responsible . little did he know, my feat was much less impressive than he imagined. It was Jonathan's practice to devote to each senior oral an entire weekend of preparation, which issued in multiple typed, single-spaced pages of careful commentary for every single essay; it didn' t seem to occur to him that most of us give of ourselves less generously than he did, which was certainly the truth in my case. Anyway, after we polished off the bottle I left; Jonathan struck up a two-hour conversation with a student, about books and the meaning of friendship, a conversation which so impressed the student that he told me about it many months later. This was all standard Jonathan, I think. His generosity and intense care for his friends, for his obligations to the College, for students in general, were central to who he was. As has been said, he was gravely concerned about the possibility of deep human attachment in the modern world - in his own words, taken from a speech he gave in honor of his beloved mother on her 801h birthday, "modernity is a world of self-interest, of commerce, of fluid, contractual relationships, of social ties that are made and unmade daily." His favorite image of modern human beings, as slices of "kraft singles" cheese -- that is, of human beings as mass produced, identical " person units," individually sealed off and protected from one another by plastic wrap -- was invoked often. Happily, Jonathan himself provided a very different example of what human connection could be. His intensity of feeling and devotion to what he thought right could make him quick to anger -- but unlike so many bloodless academics, he cared about things worth caring about, and had the nerve to stick up for what was important even when it didn't win him any friends. This combination of intense liveliness and awareness of the most pressing human concerns, �together with an intellect as powerful as his, is extremely rare. Jonathan was a great boon to the College and great delight and comfort to his friends. I miss him very much, and count myself extremely grateful to have known him. �Benjamin Storey Jonathan Bradford Hand, 1958-2019 I met Jonathan some twentyyears ago. Both of us were graduate students at the C.Omrnittee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. It was the spring of 1999; I was finishing my first year, and was still more than a little green-curious and eager, but inexperienced and poorly read. I was a kid who showed up from my state school education in the south to find myself surrounded by people from Yale and other such places, who were infinitely better initiated into the ways of the academic world than I. Jonathan was older and wiser; he had read widely and traveled much. But he was also utterly devoid of academic pretension. He never dropped names; he never jingled his Phi Beta Kappa key. He had an infinite amount to share with me, which he did with great generosity. But he was also unfailingly curious, always asking about what I was reading and thinking about, with his eyes always peeled for new things that might engage his indefatigable attention. We were both there to study philosophy, and philosophy, for Jonathan, was three things: political, personal, and comedic. Political: Jonathan had no taste for metaphysical abstractions-he was interested in the question of how to live, and how the spirit of the laws we live under shape our souls. Personal: Jonathan thought that the thinkers and ideas that interested us were reflections of our character, that you could tell a lot about a person from that person's taste in books and ideas. And finally, comedic. & everyone who knew Jonathan knows, he was a great teacher, and he was honored with a teaching award while we were in Chicago. Interviewed about that award, he remarked that a good teacher was pan priest, pan lawyer, and pan comedian. He could do all three, �but his comic talents were extraordinary. He excelled in imitations of the sages, living and dead, who surrounded us in Hyde Park His Allan Bloom was forever spraying cigarette ashes about and saying, "the-ahh, the-ahh, problem of, ahh, lxdng," his Martha Nussbaum was forever droning on in an absurd falsetto about autonomy and wearing leather pants in solidarity with somebody or other. He gave marvelous nicknames. For example, the chairman of the Committee on Social Thought, Robert Pippin, was and is a brilliant scholar who commanded the respect of all of us, Jonathan very much included. But Jonathan didn't respect him too much to give him a nickname. Pippin was then writing about Hegel, whose progressive theory of history culminates in the liberal, bourgeois modem life that we all find ourselves living, with all its material trappings, from the white picket fence to the microwave oven. Jonathan cut through all the technical, Hegelian vocabulary in which Pippin was so fluent so as to give him a splendid moniker: "The High Priest of the Minivan." Jonathan's wit always brought life and thought together. In his way of thinking and talking, I found the kind of playful, honest, learned but unpretentious philosophy I had come to Chicago to study. Jonathan was my unofficial but deeply influential teacher, and he shaped my own way of thinking and talking as much as anyone on the actual faculty of the university. The classroom in which I got my lessons from Jonathan was a Hyde Park greasy spoon called Salonica. There, we would meet almost every Sunday for long, leisurely brunches. Jonathan would peruse the menu, for form's sake, and then proceed to order the same thing every time: skirt steak and eggs, the steak medium rare, the eggs over easy-plus whole wheat toast, for health's sake. He would do so in flirtatious engagements with his favorite waitress, a crusty Chicago dame who gave as good as she got and who plainly enjoyed their repartee. We would spend about three hours there, drinking large quantities of thin, American coffee and talking about everything: Plato, Shakespeare, Tocqueville, our teachers, our friends, the young �women in our circle. It was at that table, in Jonathan's company, that I really learned to think my life through. For it was at that table that I learned how life and thought come together. Afterwards, in the summer, we would repair to Promontory Point Park, where would swim off our brunch in Lake Michigan. It was Jonathan who taught me that swimming in Lake Michigan was in fact possible, in spite of the frigid temperatures and the occasional e-coli warnings. For he was an adventurous spirit as much as a learned one. And we never caught either e-coli or frostbite. Before long, I started dating one of the young women in our circle, Jenna Silber. Jenna and Jonathan were friends, as well, and the three of us spent many hours in one another's company. Both of us formed our adult selves in conversation with him, andJenna and I became a couple in the context of those conversations. When we married in 2003, Jonathan gave a mischievous, beautiful toast at our rehearsal dinner that people would remark to me about for many years thereafter. Eventually, we both left Hyde Park for our teaching careers, mine at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina; Jonathan here. You all know Jonathan's work here better than I do, but I always thought that St. John's was made for Jonathan, and Jonathan for St. John's. For the mind of a St. John's tutor must be both powerful and ready for anything-two qualities Jonathan had in spades. My own teaching at Furman was deeply marked by his influence. I agree with Jonathan that a teacher is part priest, part lawyer, part comedian. I'm more priestly than Jonathan was, but I make efforts at wit, as well. And when I listen to myself talk, I sometimes realize that I'm repeating phrases I learned from him. More than that, my own who way of thinking about philosophy, as something intimate and personal, something that we can see in all of our everyday interactions, from the breakfast table to the convenience store, comes from him. One could see this influence in our �shared love of the gauche Swiss-French philosopher Rousseau, who brought life and thought together in a sprawling, unholy, but brilliant mess equal parts intellect, honesty, and absurdity. Jonathan visited my family many times in Greenville, sometimes at Christmas or Thanksgiving, sometimes just to hang out. Once, we all went for a hike in the mountains near there. On the way home, we stopped for lunch at a squirrely-looking South Carolina roadside joint called the F-Man. The proprietor, a guywith a handlebar mustache, a ten-gallon hat, and a brass belt buckle the size and shape of Texas, took one look at us and decided he'd have some fun. When he found out we were college professors, he began quizzing us on all manner of trivia he had picked up in his correspondence school education, which wasn't~ bad. After he'd stumped me, the political science professor, by asking about the running mates of failed presidential candidates of the 1890s, he turned toward science, and Jonathan took over. Mr. F-Man had met his match. Before long, he was sitting slack-jawed at our table, as Jonathan patiently explained the theory of relativity to him, using the salt and pepper shakers to illustrate. When we told my kids of Jonathan's death, and were talking about his brilliance and honesty with them, my middle daughter, Rosalind, reminded us of his bravery. For she remembered the stories he told when visited us after spending a sabbatical sailing across the Atlantic, through a near hurricane in a boat that was no match for such weather. Most professors, after all, spend their sabbaticals in libraries. Not Jonathan. In thinking about what it means to have and to lose a friend such as Jonathan, a remark of one of his favorite authors, Alexis de Tocqueville sprang to my mind. In his memoirs, Tocqueville writes that " Whenever there is nothing in a man's thoughts to or feelings that strikes me," " I, so to speak, do not see him. I have always supposed that mediocrities as well as men of parts had a nose, mouth and eyes, but I have never been able to fix in my memory the forms that those features take in each �particular case. I must constantly ask for the names of such men; yet it is not that I despise them, but I have little truck with them, feeling that they are like so many cliches. I respect them, for they make the world, but they bore me profoundly." Who has ever been less of a cliche than Jonathan Hand? And who has ever been bored by him? Jonathan suffered and he could be difficult; everyone who knew him well knew that. But I knew him in the roles in which he was at his best: as my teacher and my friend. A few years ago, the two of us met up in Roscoe, New York for a weekend. The place was an old haunt of Jonathan's, and boasted of the two things that, in Jonathan's eyes, guaranteed a good weekend: a very good diner and an excellent swimming lake. It was delightful, and Jonathan plainly delighted in introducing me to it. He had discovered many beautiful things in life, and he was always eager to share them. The man I am, the person mywife and children and students know, was formed by and through him. He was a singular and decisive presence in my life, whose like I have no hope of meeting again. I do not know if Jonathan believed in blessings, but he was a blessing, to me and to many others. To his sisters, and his parents in Ithaca, thank you for sharing this extraordinary man with me and with my family for so many years. �Reflection for Memorial Service for Jonathan Hand February l5t, 2020 J. Walter Sterling, Dean St. John' s College, Santa Fe Welcome and Opening Welcome, thank you for joining us. Thanks especially to Michael Golluber, but also to other faculty, staff, students, for planning and working on this event, and thanks to all of our speakers today. I want to recognize Jonathan' s sisters, Sonya, Pattie, and Brooke, and his dear friends Ben and Jenna Storey, and their children, Eleanor, Rosalind, and Charles, all of whom traveled so far to be here. You 've heard some music playing now, by the Beatles, music which Jonathan enjoyed and associated with lifelong memories . We'll hear more music in his honor ... We do well simply to recognize the sadness and loss that many of us are carrying, but we are here today to honor the memory of our friend, colleague, and teacher, and to celebrate together the gift of his life, and in doing so we are strengthened as a community and brought closer together; and we renew our sense of purpose. In that spirit, I invite our first speaker, Michael Golluber, to begin when he is ready. Reflection Words, phrases, memories, images, quotes .. . jokes, so many jokes ... have flooded my imagination, daily, since Jonathan 's passing. But it remains so difficult for me to wrap words around it all. We wish, I wish, to honor and celebrate his life, to express the profound gratitude I feel for the indelible, decisive mark he left on me, for the outrageously delightful and sometimes maddening, often delightful because maddening, times we spent together. But my feelings of sadness, confusion, and, yes, anger at his passing, and the powerful sense that a Jonathan-shaped hole in my world will travel with me for a long time, forever, are all still with me. I have to acknowledge that. It wasn't easy living with him as a friend, and it is much harder still to let him go. His sister Pattie said recently he was larger than life. So true, so beautifully, absurdly, magnificently true. Jonathan contained fascinating multitudes within him and even people who knew him well could be forgiven for not really seeing or believing all of it: his academic accomplishments, most vi sible for us, perhaps, but also: - his incredible, unscripted, and sometimes remarkably dangerous travels all over the world; his teaching sailing over many summers; his crewing a sailboat on a physically exhausting North Atlantic passage on his sabbatical; summers spent traveling in the Greek isles, or Turkey, or Italy; long daily swims in the Mediterranean; taking his bike on the train to Albuquerque and cycling all around; his Jove of smart pop culture, going to see stand-up comedy or Weird Al Yankovic (as he once reported, to my surprise); his serious study, if I might put it that way, of Mad Men, or Downton Abbey, or South Park. His love of jokes and impersonations. (One former student once sent him a mix tape, titled "I see London, I see France .. ." with the rest of that off-color playground taunt left unstated, the tape had British Invasion rock, the Stones, the Beatles, on one side, and some of his favorite French pop music on the other - he loved that; he loved how that student got him , his playfulness, his sense of humor and inuendo, his delight in that pop music, his love of Europe.) - and: his deep connection to C_ �his family, especially his devotion to his parents, his rootedness in his eternal home in Ithaca. All of that lurking behind his jaunty grin, with a cocked hat on his head. ( As dean and as a colleague, I will say now what I would say to some people while he was with us, risking hyperbole: He was the best reader, the best teacher, we had here. He had enormous intellectual gifts (surprisingly voracious for, obsessive with, mathematics and physics, and with politics, and with the philosophy and literature that were his foundation) and he combined his gifts with an intensity, a relentlessness, an incandescence, that was powerful and even more rare - at times, too powerful to be contained in the word "teacher." One philosopher famously wrote, "I am dynamite!" and sometimes, often even, Jonathan could feel like such dynamite. He learned from some of his teachers - Harvey Mansfield, Allan Bloom ... -that it was possible for these books, for philosophy, and for teachers, to make all the difference, if and only if teachers, and students, could go right to the nerves of the books and the arguments, where everything was at stake - to cut through jargon, to risk impoliteness and offense, to (as I long said of Jonathan, to Jonathan) "strip and wrestle naked," to use a Platonic image for the most serious business of conversation and dialectic. He got into the game for all of that- not to play it safe, not to have a career, not to be esteemed or win accolades, but to be ready, like a great poker player, to push out all his chips when it mattered most, to drop everything and follow the argument wherever it led. Book after book, conversation after conversation, he was able to take me, take students, take friends, to the center of things, to the difficult places where our hearts' and souls' demands were all at stake and in play. But what a risk, and sometimes what a cost! I know, I know, that sometimes, when he sensed it could matter, he put more hours, many more hours, sleepless nights, of reading and thinking into, say, preparing for one senior oral where he thought the stakes were high, more than I believe (from my experience) any of my other colleagues do, certainly more than I ever had or would - more than once, I saw a senior on the business end of that preparation, in copious notes Jonathan wrote but especially in an oral bordering on interrogation, and that wasn't always ... easy to watch. Would they learn from that? Would they be grateful for it? Would they realize that it came from respect - from seeing them as worth that effort, that tension? I hope so, but it was a risk, it was teaching without a net, and whatever the outcome, he poured his lifeblood into that kind of effort. In reading hundreds of old emails from him in recent weeks, I came across one where a student who had left the college had written a cringeworthy casual, familiar, and self-deluded, request to Jonathan for a letter of recommendation, after failing Jonathan's class. Serious miscalculation. Jonathan was the only tutor I know who would have responded as he did, and he copied me in (as dean): he wrote a long letter, a brutally honest letter let's say ... and added, is that the letter you want sent? St John's is forgiving, the world less, so, he said, closing with, " buckle up." He put hours into crafting that, trying to do good for that student, to jolt that student into waking up; in fact, hi s sincere plea was that the student really should return to the college. I, like many of us I think, would probably have written a two-sentence note politely declining. One of the things that he and I agreed strongly about is that beyond the job as a job, beyond colleges as institutions, beyond all our rules and practices, beyond syllabuses and curricula, beyond the books, beyond teaching as a vocation even, at the heart of it all was and is an uncontrollable, unmanageable, quest to get to the bottom of everything, to get to what matters, to fight for what matters ... you can' t domesticate that, and for someone like Jonathan who was �always ready to push his chips out, there would always be risks and costs. Prices he'd pay, bruises others would take. If all of us were like Jonathan, we wouldn't have a college, but if none of us are like him, the peak of what we are about ceases to be visible. Without someone like Jonathan, some of us would never hear the one thing needful, we'd never realize both how deep and how immediate the books can be in speaking to us. To borrow from a revered author he respected, Jonathan reminds us of "the sacrifices we must make in order that our minds may be free." Like Falstaff, like Socrates, life is simpler, maybe easier, without him ... but real education will always involve such dynamite. Certainly, some of us carry bruises, he carried bruises, from his not playing it safer - but I know so many students and friends who were given treasures and riches through his teaching, through that incandescence, and for us it was worth all the costs. He was my late friend, my last friend, with whom the conversation could, would, go on forever. Not everyone understands these friendships that are forged through hours and hours of arguing about philosophy, about the good, the true, and the beautiful, with all that entails, but here at St. John's I don't think it sounds too strange. I venture to say that for those of us for whom that is the highest, or one of the highest, forms of friendship, we recognize that you only get a few, a very few, friends with whom you can share almost everything, understand each other, drive each other to the edge of what you understand, bring to articulation the questions that are just beyond that understanding. And if you can do that with shared loves of music, poetry, film, travel, food and drink, well, all the better .. . what a miracle ... - and, it seems to me, those friendships tend to come during, and perhaps fade after, a certain season of life. ( l I met Jonathan our first week as tutors at the college, in August 2003, sitting at the Coyote Cafe. I can say now, I never expected at that point in my life to have another friend, to join maybe the one or two from the previous decades, with whom I could share all of that. I thought that season of life was over. That friend you see on your way somewhere else ... and end up still at the coffee shop, the bar, the park bench, driving in the country, hours and hours later, having forgotten whatever else you meant to do that day. That day, Jonathan and I sat down together over a margarita and talked - and talked. Our first conversation went on for hours (I still remember exact phrases and formulations we used), we disclosed our views on religion, our deepest commitments, our loves and lost loves, the books and authors we had in common, and ... for many years, all the intervening years, that conversation - though interrupted by days, weeks, months, and, much later, even years - never ended. I thought the season for such friendship, for such ecstatic and wonderfully desperate conversation, had ended - but Jonathan at his core was a kind of eternal springtime of the possibility of such friendship. It was what he lived for agonizingly irreconcilable as it might be with what counts as daily life for many of us. Part of Jonathan's vocation was to be (as Plato wrote of the Greeks) "forever young" in this way. I think any of Jonathan's close friends, and his many interlocutors and colleagues with shared interests, know him as the one who would keep that dialogue going - forever, all night, as in Plato' s Symposium, as long as we could go to what matters. - It was hard to keep up, and it was hard to sustain. My memories of Jonathan include so many nights where he would nurse a last drink, or jealously defend a last bite on a plate from waiters and busboys, or he might end up reclined on your couch ... and he would seem content if the conversation never ended. You felt, I felt, like a mortal, who needed sleep and rest, hanging on by a thread, with an Olympian who was prepared to stay at the feast forever. At the end of every semester, we used to plan one escapist day in Albuquerque. For years he loved to make that drive in my Miata convertible, top down, music �playing, driving and talking, walking and talking, eating and drinking and talking ... peripatetics, dreamers, adventurers of the mind. In search of. .. serendipity. Serendipity: he was with me at the dinner in 2005, where I chanced to meet Meghan, in the great good fortune of my life, and he was the first person I talked to the next morning, "see, that is the kind of woman I should be with ... " Jonathan was a great acolyte of serendipity: Among his favorite films, one we discussed many times, for many hours, was Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, together with the rest of that amazingly conceived trilogy, tracking the fate of a romance sparked on a train, with one night of wandering the streets of Vienna, during which two kindred souls passing in the night test their destiny together. Jonathan consciously and well understood that he lived his life as if the magic of that movie might strike ... anywhere, any day, as romance, as friendship, as intellectual insight or epiphany. We all have those hopes in us, but he lived it relentlessly, ever renewed; it animated his European wanderings, it animated his desire never to end the conversation, it animated his interest in what surprising next thing might come from a student's first reading of Plato, from the exigencies of a seminar, from nature, from art. I said of him, to him, that "he loved not wisely, but too well," like Othello, and I said that from a place of deep sympathy and shared, unreasonable hopes; I have thought of that phrase often since his passing. That edge of glistening, romantic hope married to such a rigorous intellect was ... dynamite. As his friend, it was hard to keep the faith, hard not to disappoint, like Prince Hal with Fal staff, hard not to be the first one to blink, to give up on the quest and return to ... life, to the demands of the day. But Jonathan was always ... there ... waiting, ready ... there on the far side of all of everyday life, ready to renew the quest, to forgive all, if we could just go again straight to the heart of things. He was larger than life, he was Falstaff (which I intend and he took as the highest praise) - his ideas and words, his wit, his perpetual youth, his incandescence, will stay with many of us who were blessed to get close to him, to travel with him, in all senses. With a gratefu l heart, I today mourn the passing, but celebrate with abundant gratitude the life, of a great teacher, the rarest of friends, and a bright, restless soul who illuminated the world for me and many others, one with whom I shared so many adventures, adventures that are the stuff of life. - J. Walter Sterling �Williatn Byrd (c.1539-1623) Ave verum corpus ( Published by :-«. Aoede Consort :-«. Troy, New York Copyright© 2012 Dan Foster, Aoede Inc. Edition may be freely distributed, duplicated, performed or recorded. Please give credit. ________________________________________. ( \_, .._ www.AoedeConsort.org Aoede@AoedeConsort.org �Ave verum Corpus 2 Processional Hymn, Corpus Christi Gradualia I, 1605, vol.2 no.5 Pope Innocent VI (d.1342) Superius Medi us ; ~ William Byrd (c.1539- 1623) fl I • t) fl 1IR1z~ c ~~lzlz ... 1-( 2:~& ve ...... -eve A ve rum A ve A ve -- I " Cor ,pus, -6- -0'" rum ...... y "<. Cor pus, ~! I l1 Bassus ve - " I ,, ~ " A u Tenor I ve Coe rum pus, - b c ' ve rum Coe pus, 5 ; fl I s. I t.J na fl - tum I de I Ma - ri I a Vir - ne: - ...., gi ne: - Ve re pas -d..___;f Ve -d re pas re pas - I A. ...,. ' t.J na - tum 'I de Ma - ri a I Vir - I ~) - I na - tum de ,.,........---..,., Ma - ri a -0- - I T. B. I gi I " ne: Vir - gi Ve ,., ; I I ' na - tum de_ _ Ma - ri - a Vir gi I I Ve ne: re pas - 10 , fl I s. I ...., t.J .....___..... -sum, fl im mo - la I A. t.J -0- -sum, I\ in ---- ............_____.;- 'I- im mo - la I tum -etum I T. l1 I -sum, im mo - la tum in I I -sum, im ------ cru 4 -0- m cru ce - ce pro pro I - pro ho - mi- ...... fr ho mi - mi - ho I B. ' ce cru ..... I mo - la tum in CCU Copyright© 2005 Dan Foster, Aoede Consort Source: David Fraser ce pro ' ho - ' mi- rev. 9/25/08 minor edit ( �3 15 ~fl I s. 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T. - - t..I I me ' ,........, i. . ., �5 44 ,,, fl I I 2. r.\ s. \ eJ A - i. fl men. I eJ ~"?" - I. I I T. l) -~ - i. ..__ J -&- - A 77 ---- - - :: ~ men. (';'\ I ~ "~ I I I A I men. r.\ I B. -- -- A. (';'\ :;- ' I - i. A I I men. Ave verum corpus natum de Maria Virgine. vere passum immolatum in cruce pro homine: cuius Iatum perforatum fluxit aqua et sanguine: esto nobis praegustatum mortis in examine. 0 [Iesu] dulcis! 0 [Iesu] pie! 0 Iesu fili Marire. Miserere mei. Amen. Hail true body: that was born of the Virgin Mary, That truly suffered and was sacrificed on the Cross for us men, From whose pierced side flowed water and blood; Be for us a foretaste of death and judgement. 0 sweet Jesus! 0 gentle Jesus! 0 Jesus son of Mary. Have mercy upon us. Amen. \_.. . �. 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()_ -{p { lu, v vt {,,,,' ( ( .... , ................................................................................................................................ fV t-z- L c;>f-~ 1J&u~&: fvlc\J2>~lc9 ��D ~--· rz~-- - ._ __ __ � 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 28 pages 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 Jonathan Hand Memorial Program Description An account of the resource Program for the Jonathan Hand Memorial that took place on February 1, 2020 in the Great Hall of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Golluber, Michael Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Axelberg, Emily Levy, Allison Pagano, Frank N. Sterling, J. Walter Storey, Benjamin Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_Jonathan_Hand_Memorial_Program_2020-02-01 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6759">Recording of Jonathan Hand Memorial</a> Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1b231d39b8883a7c5da34ddca0d8ec23.mp3 310589d7bc2d7850fc682baa45abc8bb 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:51:28 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 Utopia, ideology and grand strategy in the 21st century Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2018 by Dr. Arthur Herman as part of the LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture Series. The lecture is the part of a joint lectures series between St. John's College and the U.S. Naval Academy to honor the memory of Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen. An alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and the St. John's College Graduate Institute, Kristensen, a Navy SEAL, was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan in 2005. This lecture series aims to create even greater ties between the two schools, as well as to educate the public about civil-military relations and the place of the liberal arts in education of naval and military professions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herman, Arthur Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-13 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Herman, Arthur 4-13-18 (Kristensen lecture) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Kristensen lecture series U.S. Naval Academy https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6356a46b8bc98643a5a69457472ad514.pdf 1192c57fbef50a4794d752b6f7fb204d 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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. 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context John Owens Address for Weigle Inauguaration Title A name given to the resource Address of John W. Owens at the Inauguration of Richard D. Weigle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1950-10-28 Description An account of the resource Address of John W. Owens at the Inauguration of St. John's College President Richard D. Weigle on October 28, 1950. 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource John W. Owens Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource inauguration Inauguration https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e889a6d304d4561f47fb9c46ed10382e.pdf d43e6407c7b6b0e216e6803dbe68644a PDF Text Text Cemetery Thoughts Peter Kalk:avage 28 November 2011 "Gesang ist Dasein." Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (3) I remember my first encounter with Valery's Le cimetiere marin. Like all first-time readers, I was baffled by the poem's dense imagery and its curious blend of mysticism and intellect. The language was obscure, as were the transitions from line to line, and from stanza to stanza. But the intensely metaphysical-mystical aspect of the poem strongly attracted me, along with its stunning formal perfection, play of sounds and seductive rhythms. Over the years I have grown closer to the poem and have learned a great deal from it about what a great poem is. The epigram from Pindar's Pythian Ode II, addressed to Hieron of Syracuse, may be regarded as Valery's note to self: "Do not, dear soul, eagerly pursue deathless life, but exhaust the resource that is within your means [emprakton]." The French poet here joins the Greek poet in urging his "dear soul" -the soul he loves and which he seeks to keep clear of danger-to resist the temptation of longing for immortality. He will inure his soul against eros, as it appears in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus. The poem's overt anti-Christian teaching must be combined with this critique of Plato and the philosopher's "supersensible world." The poem, in its own way, is in league with Hegel's ideabrilliantly displayed in "Force and the Understanding" -that there is only one world. The world of appearance, Erscheinung, is the only world that is. For Valery, this identity is not dialectical in Hegel's sense: there is no identity between time and conceptual �unfolding. In the end, the thought of the poem is much closer to that of Heidegger and his Sein-zum-Tod. The Roman numeral headings are part of the poem and serve to mark time monumentally. They also emphatically demarcate the stages of the poet's consciousness, as the poet meditates, enraptured, on the play of images that are before him: the glittering, beguiling surface of the sea and the human artefact, the cemetery, which reminds the poet of his mortality and of the attempt to transcend mortality through various sorts of dreams and illusions, both pagan and Christian. The Roman numerals are imposingly classical. They recall the grandeur of an empire that is now only an abiding memory. A 614 rhythm pervades the whole. It is present in the IO-syllable line (4+6), and in the 24 stanzas (the poem is six-by-four), which seem to be in 6 groups of 4. The 6/4 rhythm recalls the French dance known as courante- "running" or "coursing." The number 24 represents the elements of the Greek language, the books of Homer, the hours of a day, and no doubt much more. The Roman numerals go with another prominent aspect of the poem: the abundance of Latinate words like edifice, altitude, terrestre, to name a few. We must be careful not to breeze past these deliberate Latinisms, which are embedded in modern French (and English). They are part of the word-image world and echo of antiquity the poet means to conjure. Their sound, their look on the page, and their historical resonance affirm the poet's austere anti-romantic stance. They also suggest, to our modern ears, a scientific detachment from the human-all-too-human-the objective stance of a soul that braces itself for the irrefutable facticity of Dasein or what is inescapably there. 2 �I "This tranquil roof, where doves (or pigeons) walk." The first line immerses us in perplexing symbols. It is not "the" or "a" tranquil roof but this one, ce-the roof that is there, now. The poet beholds, and in reading the poem we are one with his beholding. Reality is dream here: the sea-surface is not a roof, but it looks like one; the little boats on the water are not birds, but they look like birds. The world is the world of representation, the world of potent revelatory symbols. To read the poem, we must give ourselvesyield-to this receptive dreamy mood that will reveal, at times, harsh unyielding truths. The dream-state is also a state of acute awareness, the state in which things usually hidden from us, or which we hide from ourselves, come to light. The sea-surface moves but not in a linear fashion. It vibrates, pulsates. We view this quivering surface, this wave-motion, as framed by the solid objects in our foregroundby the pines (which are ever green, a symbol of eternal life) and by the tombs (the image of inevitable death). The quivering is not merely visual, in other words, but also eidetic. The sea quivers between the poles of life and death. As we shall see, it contains these poles in its dialectical nature, its unity of opposites. It is high noon or, as the poet calls it, Midi le juste. It is the time of day when the sun achieves the peak of its arc and divides this arc into two equal parts-equitably,justly. At high noon there is no escape from the burning light-the truth-that descends on sea and cemetery alike. One thinks of Joseph Conrad's statement that his goal as a writer of fiction was "to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe." Conrad obviously did not mean that he was interested in theodicy, in justifying the world. He meant rather that his vocation was not to flinch; it was to capture in writing the world as 3 �it is and as it appears, in defiance of all wishful thinking. The composer-god is not a being but a state or condition, the condition of Midi le juste. The Sun, if we may call it that, com-poses or puts together a cosmic scene by means of fire: fire is the element here of divine demiurgy, the fire of creation. But the scene is composed in another way too: it is the serene godlike composure and peace of a settled way of things-a way that abides. The scene inspires this very state in the thinker-poet who beholds, whose toit already hints at the intimate bond between outer world and inner world (tai)-between the composed-ness of the scene and the godlike composure of the theoros, the one who looks on thoughtfully. The sea undergoes composition out of fire. To call it "the sea, the sea" is true to the appearances. The repetition, the rhythm and music of the line, is the appearance in the poem itself of the undulating sea-surface-and also the poet's moving in sync with it. A wave indeed has a linear component: it travels. But its periodicity is a kind of rest: the laws of nature that govern oscillation are the "look of eternity" that shines through the turbulent world and stabilizes it. One perceives this lawfulness in the eternal return of waves: the visible music of Same in Other. All this the poet sees and in seeing thinks. "O," he says-and the exclamation, the affect of wonder and passionate openness to the whole, resounds through the poem. It recalls Valery's statement that all lyric poetry "is the development of an exclamation." Indeed, the poem is full of exclamation points, the first of which occurs right after the line "La, mer, la mer, toujours recommencee!'' There is thought,pensee, and there is re- com-pense afterwards. The I thinks and is gratified, at peace with having thought, with intellectually having seen. The recompense is sweet payback for the act of thinking. Penso, in Latin, is to weigh, also to counterbalance in an act of justice. (Think of 4 �"compensate.") It is also to weigh in one's mind, to ponder or consider. Here pensee is godlike, as the poet, in response to the gift-image of the divine poetry of world-making, identifies with the gods, who contemplate and are calm. The poet, in beholding the expanse of glittering undulating action (the flash of the whole's beguiling surface), is compensated for his thought by a godlike peace: he beholds, in a privileged dream of the mind, the composure and calm of Olympian theoria. The last line of the stanza-Q'un long regard sur le calme des dieux!-beautifully captures, in its lulling lingering sound, the state of prolonged godlike peace. But later (and inevitably), thought will become the thought of the mortal human that suffers the fate of mortal self-consciousness. The poet will become pensive and melancholy. His pensee will become grave, ponderous, and oppressive, as he descends from the glittering surface of eternal shining-forth (Spinoza's natura naturans) to the humiliation of imperfection, limit, and death. II The poem as a whole reads like the revelation of (anti-Christian) mysteries: the secrets of change. The poem starts high: with images of godlike peace. And yet the fascinating tremble of the glittering whole must contain death: for a spark to appear, a spark must die. Scintillation is a perpetual life-out-of-death. This is the "pure work" of stanza II. The flashes look like thousands upon thousands of diamonds. But they cannot be diamondhard. To use Spinoza's terms, they are passing modes in the great sea of substanceNatura as the god who constantly appears in boundless effulgence. Already in II, the poet is aware that surface means surface of what is not the surface, the surface of a concealed 5 �depth. This is the abyss: the sea as both infinite expanse and infinite depth. It is not "the" sun but "a" sun that reposes. Following Heraclitus-"the sun is new each day"-the poet is true to how the world appears. It is as though the sun died every day and was every day created anew: its etemality is eternal rebirth. The sun seems to rise up out of the abyss and sink back down into it. Also, to call the sun un soleil saves the appearance of motion that has been suspended. The poet is experiencing the Sun not as the body that appears to move, or the object of scientific theory (sun as revolving body or body around which we revolve), but as this burning light-source that is there right now in the scene, as if in a painting, and that seems in the privileged moment of high noon to hover and cease to move. In the poet's experience, which the poem invites us to share, the Sun is a revelatory wonder-inspiring symbol. Why are the ouvrages pure? Perhaps because they are the sheer flashing forth from. their first principle: they are not altered in any way, not mixed and corrupted by consoling myths of origination. Nature is, in a sense, the true and only God-Nature not as effect (natura naturata) but as "eternal cause," as infinite productivity and being-atwork (natura naturans). Time scintillates rather than marches on. This is because the poet is seeing an image of the whole of all things sum.med up. In his godlike (and ironic) lookout point on the hilly cemetery, he is above it all, at least for now. Le Temps scintille et le Songe est Savoir: "Time scintillates and the Dream. is to know." Two senses are at work here in the second half of this provocative concluding line. In the first, the dream. is to know because the hum.an soul, in its eros, longs to know the absolute, to see what the gods see. The philosophic intellect gazes at the phenomenal world and is tempted to go beyond it, to the 6 �noumenal res ultimae or "things-in-themselves." This is the ultimate Dream of Man, the butterfly that Man chases without ever catching. But in another, more positive sense, the poet's dream-state, which appears wondrously as a divine gift (a sort of pagan grace), the truth that is appearance is revealed-not to discursive reasoning or philosophy but to poetic intuition and receptivity to the play of images. Time may be said to scintillate only from this divine perspective that regards things sub specie aeternitatis (Spinoza again). Otherwise, from the ordinary finite perspective of thinghood, time marches on. This fmal line, Le Temps scintille et le Songe est savoir, has special weight, as if it were the culmination of the previous lines in the stanza. The capitals highlight Temps and Songe, give the words universal stature, and also cause them to be intimately paired. Time is time that is summed up, seen from the eternal (or apparently eternal) vantage point; and songe is not any dream but rather this privileged Dream that is a state of poetic cognition. III This is a truly beautiful stanza, breathtaking in fact in its sound, rhythm, and imagery. Yvor Winters singles it out for special praise, as though to say: "Now that's poetry." Note the hypnotic effect of the repetition of parallel grammatical structures-the wave-like flow of appositions. And not a complete sentence to be found! No main verb. The treasure is "stable." That is, it is solidly, dependably there-a structure. It is lasting-the source and fund that is never exhausted and never to be budged. It is a certain kind of structure-a temple or structure for the gods. Simple-yes, unadorned with artifacts of human sentiment and consolation and therefore truthful. The fire- 7 �composed sea-surface, the dream-image of the whole, is a fitting temple for the goddess of wisdom-a temple of Minerva. It is not a mass of water but a mass of calm: a massive condition or state. We can see the glittering sea-roof; it is visible. But what is visible is, again, not water, not a thing, but reserve. Reserve is a source and place of storage but also a condition. To be reserved is to be discrete, to have one's inner state composed and held in check. There are depths within, but they are discretely covered, kept secret, by the glittering surface. The simple Greek temple stands in sharp contrast with the cemetery's symbols of Christian consolation-with non-pure, non-simple adornment. The water, Eau, is also an eye, Oeil-the lens-shaped body of water that the poet beholds. It is supercilious because it evinces the gesture or affect of a raised eyebrow or supercilium. This imagined expression of ironic disdain goes with the images of purity, simplicity, reserve and Olympian aloofness. The poet addresses this Eye or shiny haughty surface as something that guards within it sleep under a veil of flame. The shiny surface connotes the daylight world of consciousness. But beneath (ah, beneath!) there is "so much sleep" (the sheer amount is wondrous), so much potency that is down there below the conscious world-the world of unconscious, unsounded depth. The poet continues this sequence of mystical-seeming appositions, as he goes from treasure to temple to mass to reserve to water to eye to--silence! "O my silence," that is, "O that which is within me that is deeper than my most brilliantly conceived words! That which 'sleeps,' buried beneath my words and my intentions! This is my pure potencywhat has not yet risen, and may never rise, to the level of consciousness and language." Edifice in the soul: the word edifice is one of those deliberate Latinisms with which the poem abounds. It is a fussy learned word, which means originally the making (facio) of a 8 �temple (aedes). The sea is a kind of undulating never-failing structure made of flashes and foam. Note that the poet has refrained from thinking of the sea as watery or wet: for now, sight alone matters. The poet sees himself, the edifice that is himself, in the edifice that is the sea, with its shining rooftop and its dark Underneath. The poet has built himself up over the course of years. He has absorbed, and even enhanced, what we call culture. He embodies the House of Culture (Bildung) that has been built up over the course of centuries. Much of the poem is, indeed, about the poet's record of an experience in which inner and outer mirror each other--each other's structures, each other's truths, each other's play of divine Up Here and mortal Down There. The mais, "but," is important. The poet has been reminded of his inarticulate, perhaps inarticulable, depths-the "silence" that is the unfathomable mysterious source and foundation of his brilliant light-filled words, his glittering, rhythmically undulating poiemata or "makings." The poet must be imagined as peering down into himself, as if from a height: he is experiencing his depth from a height. The mais brings him back up to his surface: "Yes, I am an abyss, like this seascape in front of me. And yet this Dark, this Silence, is crowned with a glittering surface-like my poems, which somehow emerge from the Down There that is also my Not Yet." Both together-abyss and surface, the Dark Down There and the Bright Up Here-form the edifice that is a source of the poet's abiding wonder. Tait here is experienced as Toi. IV The word "temple" derives from tempus, time. "Temple of Time" is an etymological spelling out, a lesson for mortals about the unity of the divine and the deathbound. The 9 �temple to Minerva was the glittering sea-surface. But now a metamorphosis occurs, as the image shifts-the poet's meditation shifts-from sea to cemetery. The cemetery is truly a temple of time, that is, the sanctified solidly present home of mortality. The monuments endure and are made of stone, but each proclaims to those of unclouded mind: "It is a stone-like lasting truth that we all die because change rules the whole." The cemetery is summed up in the feeling-filled exhalation we call a sigh (soupir). It is the affect of mortal self-consciousness as it contemplates the last release of breath and the final destination. To think of death is to go down into our abyss. We each carry a personal grave within ourselves in our dark, pre-representational self-consciousness. To reflect on ourselves, on our interior, is to go down into ourselves, to retreat from the daylight world of representation and the consoling aspect of solid thinghood. The poet mounts to this "pure point." Physically, he had to climb a hill to be where he is now, sitting in a raised cemetery that overlooks the sea. But his soul also mounts to the truth that surrounds and pervades him. The poet settles into this truth of death and grows accustomed to the cemetery-mode, as though it were a rarefied ether that required more than human lungs. He is surrounded, he says, by "my sea-outlook." The poet is one with the objective truth that reveals itself. He is keenly aware of himself as this individual here at this time in this place and is justly proud of his ascent to the divine above-it-all perspective that he now enjoys. He refers to his "supreme offering to the gods." No doubt this refers to his godlike creativity-his writing of poems, like this one. The scintillation has generative force: it suffuses the whole place, the whole altitude or lofty state to which the poet has accustomed himself, with a "sovereign disdain." Although in a cemetery, where once living beings descend into the earth, the poet experiences the place as one of 10 �godlike recognition, where, as we have seen, dream is knowledge. v The poet shifts from the cemetery-temple to the profound and intimate bond between pleasure and death. Pleasure, delight, is produced in the act of consumption. The eating of fruit is, of course, a chemical transformation in which something Other than me becomes the Same as me in the act of eating-assimilation. But the poet is interested in another feature of this common act. We eat because we desire. But what do we desire? Not only sustenance but also pleasure and gratification. Fruit is juicy, sweet and satisfying-a fitting symbol of life itself. It delights, like the sound of the delicious line: Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance (the favorite line of students in a Valery preceptorial I once led). But the delight is born only when the fruit is destroyed, consumed. We think here of Hegel's notion of desire (Begierde)-negativity, the drive to negate what is Other. The cemetery is the place of preserved absence: the once-living beings have been consumed by their fire of life. Their form has been turned into their absence, as the poet will soon remind us-a fruitful absence that feeds the surrounding grass, plants and trees. This is the implied connection between stanzas IV and V. We are the always-consumed fruit of the Whole. We are being urged to think that somehow we are to the cosmos what fruit is to our faculty of taste, that the cosmos gathers delight from our vanishing form. In the curious chain of ever-changing images, the poet moves from fruit to smoke- another form of absence (and of exhalation). He drinks in, breathes in, his "future smoke," future fumee. The sound captures the fizzle of out-going fire. This future smoke is life after it has gone up in flames as a natural result of the life-process. Again, this 11 �seems to recall Heidegger's Sein-zum-Tod. The smoke image is combined with the sound of the waves as they hit the shore: it is the cosmos singing its endless song of change, beautifully caught in the musically shushing sound of the French changement. The sky or heaven, the great Ouranos, sings to the poet's consumed soul. The transformation of form into absence, life into death and cosmic renewal, is the music of the whole. It is not the soul music of the Timaeus, with its eternal form-like ratios. VI We dwell with the sky, which the poet addresses as though it were a god. The sky combines beauty and truth in its song of change. "Look at me, who changes!" This is both confession and boast, as the poet puts himself into the light of truth. The pride to which he refers recalls the earlier suggestion of the poet as a being committed to and in the grip of intellectual activity. As maker and thinker, the poet is godlike, but there is also a "strange or unaccustomed laziness," that is, non-activity, non-actuality. Non-actuality, yes, but "full of power or possibility." In the wake of (apres) all the poet's proud productivity and sleep-like potency, the poet "abandons himself' to the sunlit place of the dead. He gives himself up resolutely to everything that the light is and illuminates. The reference to the poet's "shadow," which is also of course his Shade, is stunning. He sees his shadow because the sun strikes his body, which, being opaque, turns light to dark, prevents the light from going straight through him. Shadow becomes symbol once it is cast on the gravestones: it is the poet's future "smoke" and "shade"-his future union with the dead. The quivering, frail movement of this shadow tames the poet by schooling his fierce pride of life, his productive potency and his will to stay integral and individual. 12 �Frail movement masters human will and human pride, however strong. VII The poet's soul is exposed to the torches of the solstice, that is, to the high point of the sun's annual arc. This conspires with high noon, the high point of the sun's diurnal arc, to intensify the force and violence of the sun as focus or burning point. The poet both endures and supports (se soutient) the "admirable justice of the light with pitiless weapons." The light is not a god who loves man. It is Apollo, the god without pity whose arrows pierce as they illuminate. As my mother used to say when she told me something she knew I didn't want to hear, "The truth hurts." Yes, sometimes it does. And some endure the hurt of the pitiless Light, while others cover it up with consoling myths about the best of possible worlds and a timeless Beyond. The poet stands on the side of deadly Apollo: he seconds the piercing rays that destroy illusion and preserve "justice" by showing things to be exactly as they are. The poet is acknowledging his place within the Whole. Indeed, he has a new pride: a mirror's pride! "I give you back pure [notice the justice-word "render"] to your original place [that is, your origin]." Why pure? Because the poet does not flinch and does not mythologize or corrupt. He takes it, as it were, like a man. But he also acknowledges that in thus taking it, he fulfills what would otherwise be left unfulfilled: the Whole' s awareness of itself (the self-consciousness of Apollo). "Regard yourself!" he exclaims. That is, "Behold yourself face to face." The poet is a shadow being. We already know that. But his shadow-nature is necessary to the Whole, integral to the structure or edifice of the Whole. This idea is new to the poem's unfolding. If the Apollo-source is to be one with itself, if it 13 �is to reflect itself and be fully circular and all-embracing, it needs an opaque surface. The poet is that surface. His opacity, his shadow nature, which includes everything that makes him non-divine and mortal, fulfills a cosmic function. The world, as we later hear, is the Great Diamond, which, like all diamonds, has its fault line. Imperfection is not the result of man's Fall. On the contrary, imperfection-ontological evil-is woven into the very fabric of the Whole. Creation is the fall. This idea is made explicit in Valery's Serpent poem, where the biblical Serpent (imagined as a sophisticated French seducer, dandy and metaphysician) champions gnosticism and sings the praises of Non-being. I cannot leave the stanza without remarking on the perfect sound of its final line, in which the poet has captured in words the garbled, opaque character of his inner being: d'ombre une morne moitie. vm Light, so prominent in the preceding stanzas, now vanishes, as the poet descends into his dark interior, a descent induced by the meditation on the sea. He sounds his depths, which resound in the lightless world of pre-representational self-consciousness. Sound leads the way, as the poet accumulates Hegel-sounding terms of self-reference: "O for me alone, to myself, in myself." He travels backward, as it were, from the bright sea-surface of his poetic words and the world of representation to the pre-posited dark Inner that is the wellspring and living heart of the poem. He puts himself in the very moment of poetic unfolding: pre-creation. He is between the void of non-being and the "pure event" of poetic discovery (that next word, that next line, that next image). The poem will be his grandeur, but it is not there yet: it is still a house-a-building. The poet has placed himself 14 �into the very temporality and Dasein of the poem itself, which has a source and a living heart. He waits. He cannot will the next word, the next line, the next image into being. As Nietzsche tells us, a thought comes when it wants to. The poet's Inner is a vast container or cistern-bitter like the sea, somber like the cemetery. Bitter because it is the nothing that is the self, somber because it is a depth one goes down into (like a grave). The future of the poem is also the future of the "poem" that is the rest of the poet's mortal life. What will come out of the hollow that is my self? Who knows! The inner cistern is in any case a sort of echo chamber in the soul. With what does it resonate? With the poet's pure unpredictable potentiality-an "always future hollow," that is, a depth that is truly pro-fond or has its bottom (fond) always ahead of itself (pro). Heraclitus again comes to mind: "You would in your going never traverse the boundaries of the soul, so deep is its logos." IX The sea is a "false captive of the foliage." From the poet's visual perspective, the sea is framed, contained, by various tree branches. But it is not really contained: it transcends all frames and contains all things. The golfe or abyss "eats away" the thin fence-work: it is a golfe mangeur. No doubt this is because of the diffraction of the reflected light. But it also refers to the whole as that which ultimately devours all boundaries, which are, in the end, thin and weak. Again, not really a being but an all-embracing condition (of change), the sea as image of the whole contains even what is long past. On intimate terms with the sea, the poet interrogates it dreamily: Do you know? That is: Do you have within you? The poet closes his eyes, perhaps not all the way. As we 15 �know, this act increases the effect of dreaminess, blurring, diffraction. The secrets are things hidden from the poet's eyes: he cannot see beneath the dazzling sea-surface. Also, he is thinking of the mystery that is his total self: his body, his brow, the thought behind the brow. This thought, the poet's fascination with the Whole, draws him to this "bony place." It is, as it were, the inevitable encounter of spirit and skull. The glimmer of the sea mirrors the glimmer of his thought: the sparkle "thinks there" of his absent ones. The mes here does not refer to the poef s personal dead but rather to all the absent things that are in the poet's mind and have become intimately "his." He is personally identifying with their absence, which he experiences as an eternal vanishing. x The poet reflects further on the connection between sea and cemetery. The cemetery is enclosed, sanctified (ultimately not by a Church but by the truth-revealing Sun), and full oflight-energy. The Latinate "terrestrial" gives an objective, scientific dignity to the place that is "offered up" as a sort of earthy death-gift to the light. The poet likes being where he now is, in the place lorded over, dominated, by cypresses (trees that are shaped like flames). The place is "composed of gold," that is, put together and settled by the rays of Apollo. The hard gravestones "tremble" because of the light that falls on them, graces them. They too are a symbol of change. And the sea? It is "faithful." As the next stanza makes clear, the sea is the faithful watchdog that guards the mysteries of change. La mer sleeps "over" and "above" the gravestones like a good mere. Here we must put ourselves into the poet's visual perspective, from which the sea, as observed from the raised bit of earth, appears to be above the tombs. That is how it would look in a painting. 16 �XI The "splendid bitch," that is, the dormant sea (symbol of abiding change), keeps off the idolaters. Here, again, we must be careful to note the Latinate splendide, or else the word becomes superficial: splendid means "shining, glorious." The idolaters are Christians, and possibly other believers in personal immortality, who would corrupt and darken the scene and its revelations with wishful thinking and the denial of world and change. The poet is the "good shepherd," who, in this inverted world, makes sure people do not follow Christ and his promise of a timeless Kingdom. With an amazing near-comic irony, the sunlit gravestones become "mysterious sheep"-mysterious because they guard the mystery of change, the having-been of those once present who are now absent (as individuals). Tue tombs are ''tranquil," that is, sealike: composed and dignified. The seeming of the tombs, their being as symbols, keeps away the thought of providence ("prudent" doves), heaven ("empty dreams"), and angels ("curious" because always poking their noses into our lives to see what's going on, perhaps in order to record it). XII "Having come here." A simple beginning to a fascinating stanza, the theme of which seems to echo Heraclitus: "a dry soul is wisest and best." Tue future is lazy because the dead aren't going anywhere and have nothing to do: they have no agenda. They are now perpetually lying down on the job. The insect, the cicada, is precisely formed (net), even skeletal in its design. It scratches the dryness and makes the sound it makes: it joins the 17 �symphony of the shore's song of change. All is dryness. This is the new idea, the Dry, which comes after the stanza about the corrupting influence of "wet" sentimental notions and symbols. The sun is bountiful, a source of life and warmth. But it also dries out and cooks what it illuminates and warms (recall Baudelaire's carcass poem). Thanks to the sun, once-juicy beings become desiccated, stripped down, skeletal, reduced and analyzed into their elements. Here again, the physical mirrors the intellectual and the unflinching. "Analysis kills." Yes, and in so doing it reveals elemental truth. Moisture is "received into the air" and becomes "I know not what severe essence." It is sublimated. "Severe" because strictly reduced, as well as harsh with respect to our sensibilities, which like to hold on to the individuality and wholeness of self and thing. Life is "vast" in the Latin sense of the term: not so much expansive as wasted. In another inverted world of symbols, life, because it is the place of constant desiccation and moistbecoming-dry, is drunk on everything that passes away in this process. It is an orgy of evaporation, a constant influx of moisture that once was. We recall the fruit and its disappearing form in the earlier stanza. Life is drunk on absence or non-being, on a disappearing act that never quits. "Bitterness is sweet, and the mind clear." To the poet's mind, which supports and seconds the fact and mystery of change-of life as the process oflife-becoming-death---desiccation is an essential condition oflife's sweetness; and the mind that can grasp and accept this is "clear," that is, unclouded by sentiment. XIII We are at the midpoint of the poem's arc and life, as the poem itself reminds us (Midi lahaut). The dead are hidden well-that is, well taken care of qua dead people-in the 18 �earth. This continues the composite image of watchdog, shepherd and sheep. Now, in addition to the Dry, we get the Warm. The earth keeps the dead nice and toasty. It keeps the mystery of change dry (uncorrupted and unsentimental). Again there is the reminder of the cosmic condition-high noon, when the sun hovers in a moment of seeming eternity, the Now of terrible revelation and poetic "absolute knowing." Again the Whole is personified as intellect. We think of the myth in the Timaeus, where the cosmic sphere resembles a gigantic always revolving, always thinking head. The cosmic sphere (for that is what the sky looks like) thinks itself as it sparkles and creates (like the ultimate Poet that it is) and fits itself, is at home with itself. The Whole is a tete complete, a filled-out or complete head, and a "perfect diadem." The line scans the same both forwards and backwards, in imitation of the Whole's perfection. "I am the secret change in you," says the poet. The large theme here is the one that pervades the poem: the poet sees in the scene an image and symbol of himself as poet and thinker. Why secret? Because of the poet's mortal opacity, his participation in murk and muddle. The poet completes the perfect head and diadem by virtue of his imperfection, his otherness with respect to divine effulgence. XIV Change is a feature of the whole: there is nothing hidden about it. But the sort of change that the poet qua human uniquely embodies is his inner changeableness and emotionality: his fear, repentance, doubt and hesitancy. These are all negative and retreating emotions, feelings that cause us to feel our limits. "You [the poet addresses the Whole with the familiar] have only me to contain" all these things. The idea here is that these 19 �imperfections had to exist if there was to be any creation at all (creation is a fall from the "purity of non-being" [the Serpent poem]). The imperfections had to go somewhere, and human selfhood was that place. Humanity is the dumping ground for necessary cosmic imperfection made self-aware. And yet, it is for that same reason the elevation of our imperfection to the status of a cosmic requirement. This idea seems to derive ultimately from Plato's Timaeus, where human corruption completes and perfects the cosmic Animal. The poet experiences himself as the "fault" of the cosmic diamond, the Whole that shines forth. Then there occurs one of several ellipses in the poem ( ... ), as the poet shifts, through the word "but," to the change that is going on underground. There is a whole race of people down there-not a people determined by age, sex, race, nationality, personality, etc., but rather a ''vague" people. That is, their outlines are blurred. But also they are a vagrant people: they wander in the sense that their being is in constant biochemical transformation. They wander in a "night" "all laden with marble." If they could look up, their perceived "sky" would be the dark underside of the gravestones, and there would be no stars or moon! The vague people are constantly ''traveling," migrating, into the roots of the trees. They have taken their part, taken sides, with the fact of change. They live change, or are utterly committed to the change-advocates (as opposed to those who sentimentally resist change). They have taken this side "slowly," that is, in a gradual process of chemical breakdown and transference of nutrients. Perhaps lentement also refers to our all-too-human unwillingness to take the side of change, which involves the dissolution of the individuality to which we desperately cling. But slowly-that is, by and by-we come to be participants and advocates of change, if not in word then in deed. 20 �xv Being dead is a congealing. This is another inverted world of symbols. The dead are reduced and dissolved, yes. But they have also been compacted and concretized into "a thick absence." This is one of the poem's most amazing images. The thickness is the material substance of nutriment formed by decomposition. The earthy or red clay has "drunk" the white kind (bone and whatever marrow it contains). Death is life's way of recycling life. The decomposing dead and the nutrients they contain are a gift passed on to the flowers. But then the poet turns to questions that will lead quickly back to the harsh truth of change and the evanescence of feeling. "Where are the familiar phrases of the dead, the personal way of being, singular [or colorful] souls?" Well, they have gone back to their origin in the Whole and its song of change. This fact is stated with brutal irony: "The worm wends its way (or files) where tears used to form." The worm of mortality replaces and triumphs over all mortal care. XVI The poet's reflection on the passage of all human things into death continues. He lists the scenes of youth and its flirtations: "the shrill cries of tickled girls [in flirtation]/ the eyes, the teeth, the moistened eyelashes/the attractive breast that plays with the fire [of sexual arousal], the blood [passion] that shines on lips that offer themselves/ the final gifts [that men want to touch] and the fingers that defend them." All this--not just the beings, bodies, and parts of bodies, but the whole vibrant scene of lusty youth-goes under the 21 �earth and enters the cosmic j eu or game, the play of coming to be and passing away. XVII The poet now turns to himself with the formal or respectfully distant (and ironic) vous. "And you, great soul-who do you think you are? Do you think yourself, a dignified and non-silly being, immune to the game of the preceding stanza? Do you have lingering dreams of immortality, a dream that will no longer have the colors of a mere seeming or lie, colors that wave and light make here on eyes of flesh? Do you think you will one day, after death, 'see' the Thing-in-Itself and the deathless Ideas of things in their hyperuranian heaven? Do you think, great soul that you are, that you are less mortal than the tickled girls? Will you sing, write poems, when you are vaporous?" In this last question, the poet slyly deletes the vous from the quand clause: his future will indeed be a deletion. Then the poet sides with change: "Go! All flees!" He embraces his mortal fate, answers his question. His presence, he says, is porous. That is, his presence and beingthere is not solid but full of holes: it is riddled with non-being. He then adds, cryptically, "holy impatience dies too!" Impatience is the refusal to wait it out, also the refusal to suffer the change that all things must suffer. "Holy" impatience probably refers to the Christian holdout who says no to change and refuses to enter into the game, and who is impatient for immortality. That refusal, in the end, becomes part of the game. It too dies. XVIII The rejection of the belief in personal immortality now reaches its peak. Immortality is "skinny," "black" and "gilded." She is a consoler "frightfully laurelled." The description 22 �is perhaps prompted by a figure the poet has seen among the monuments. This consoling mother figure makes of death "a maternal breast." She represents "the beautiful lie" and the "pious ruse." We all recognize death and yet we all (or most of us) reject it: the empty skull and the eternal grin (death's last laugh)! The stanza is explicit and needs little commentary. Making Lady Death into a mother figure recalls these lines from Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning: "Death is the mother of beauty, mystical/Within whose burning bosoms we devise/Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly." XIX This stanza goes much deeper than the preceding one, which is bluntly dismissive in its tone and language. The peres profonds are our ancestors, who were also our teachers and guides. They are deep down now but once may have been profound in the other sense of the term. In any case, they are now "uninhabited heads," heads with nobody home. Their profundity is now only their being buried deep in the earth. Indeed, the poet says addressing them directly: "You are the earth, and you confound our steps." Once, our profound fathers guided our steps. But now their gravestones just make walking harder, just as their death is a stumbling block for us, as we make our way through life. Note again that the poet suggests a personal deletion by suppressing the implied subject vous. The profound fathers are eaten by physical worms as they lie "under the table" of the graveyard. But the true worm, which eats away at every still living self-consciousness, is busily at work above the table. We who live on the surface of the earth are on the table of life as food for this gnawing worm. We are devoured more deeply, more truly than the profound fathers. This true worm-the ver that is verum-is "irrefutable." That is, he is 23 �an undeniable part of human experience: the abiding essence of man as selfconsciousness and desire. This worm in the self-.which is the self qua self-referringlives on life (that is, on the living). He never takes a day off: il ne me quitte pas. xx The poet continues to meditate on the Inner Worm. What is its right name? Love of self (amour-propre)-or maybe hate of self? The hate reminds us of the verb remordre: to experience remorse is to bite oneself back, to punish oneself. The poet observes that the "secret tooth" of this worm is so close to everything he is and does that it talces on all names. The statement reminds us of La Rochefoucauld's long maxim on amour-propre, which pervades our being, takes on many names and lives even in his (apparent) death and denial. The worm of selfhood is everywhere: its name really doesn't matter. "It sees, it wants, it dreams, it touches. It likes my flesh." This Worm is so intimately bound up with me that it even follows me to bed and invades my dream life. There is no getting away from it, no rest. "I live to belong to this living thing" that constantly feeds on me, and is me. XXI I always like getting to the Zeno stanza, which Valery (with his accustomed cheek) claims to have thrown into the poem to please the philosopher types. The repetition of Zeno's name captures the zing of Zeno's argumentative arrows, the brilliance of his paradoxes. Zeno is from Elea and a student of Parmenides, the philosopher who denied the reality of motion. Zeno is cruel because he arouses thought only to stop it in its tracks 24 �and kill it. His paradoxes are, simultaneously, birth and death. He stirs us into thought and then blocks our way. (As Aristotle says somewhere in his Physics, Zeno's paradoxes are bad for our intellectual digestion: they "block" us.) This too is related to the warning against every form of immortal longing, not just the Christian form. Philosophy leads to antinomies and nothing more. It is, in the end, a tragic love affair and instance of Hegel's Unhappy Consciousness, perhaps best summed up in the critical philosophy of Kant. In any case, the arrow in this stanza is both the arrow in the famous paradox and the arrow that is the paradox, the logistical zinger. The arrow quivers, flies-and yet does not fly! Zeno is the enemy of change. He sings a beguiling song that tries to counter the song of change in stanza V. The intellectual ring of the famous paradox gives birth to me, wakes me up intellectually, and the arrow that is the argument kills me, aborts my effort to think about the world of change and to make progress. From the Eleatic enemy of change the poet now returns to the sun. He exclaims: "Ah!" This "Ah!" is not a continuation of the wonder the poet felt earlier. The role of the sun within the poet's ever-shifting meditation has changed. The poet has caught it in the act of changing, seen its potential for distraction-and Zeno has brought this to light. The "Ah!" expresses a truth just discovered about a familiar but until now hidden object. The sun does everything we have seen in the poem: it is fiery demiurge and cosmic composer. But it is also a great tempter-the tempter (see the Serpent poem). The sun suspended at high noon seems to stand still in a moment of absolute knowing and intellectual stasis. But its shining there, its holding out the prospect of changeless Being (Eleaticism), is in fact a great shadow in the mind. It moves like the shadow of a tortoise for the soul. It is glory-seeking Achilles frozen, crippled, in a moment of non-action and thereby falsified. 25 �Philosophic thought has robbed Achilles of his fire-like glory, which he can achieve only if he is allowed to stride forward-to his death. In sum, Homer is more truthful than Zeno, or Plato. He does not reduce motion, especially tragic motion, to a changeless Idea. XXII The poet rebels. Zeno has made him rebel. Momentarily charmed by the prospect of changeless Being as it gleams in the sun-god as eternal symbol, the poet utters a decisive (that is, a cutting) "Non, non!" He commands himself to get up, to get on with life, to move into "the next era." This is striking language for an individual. It is as though the poet feels in himself the need for a whole age of humanity to move into its future, to break free of ideas that constrain its bond with temporal unfolding and possibilities that have yet to emerge. "Break," he tells his body, "this pensive [or ponderous] form." Rodin's gnarled Thinker comes to mind. "Breathe in," he tells his breast, "the birth of the wind." The poet, held in a seemingly timeless meditation on life, death, and self, experiences a rebirth, a resurgence of the primordial will to live. The stanza suggests, or perhaps asserts, that thought and life are irreconcilable opposites, that thought (pens er) is inevitably melancholic and static (ponderous or weighty). Thought is a spell in need of eventually being broken. It is the ultimate Siren song that charms and distracts intellectual non-Christians like our poet. A freshness of the wind restores the poet's soul, which has been stolen away by the Muse of eventually morbid contemplation. "O salty potency!" the poet exclaims, as he exhorts himself (and us) to run into the wave, that is, to stop gazing meditatively at the water and actually get wet and lively! 26 �XXIIT Just as the previous stanza began with "no," this one begins with "yes"-as if to say, "Yes, you beguiling one, I too am under your spell, which is undeniable." "Yes! Great sea gifted with deliriums." We have gone from the sun to an exhortation to run into the water, and then back to the beguiling sea-surface, which now, in light of the previous stanza, has become a mythic monster, the Hydra. The "great sea" causes delirium, a profound confusion of mind-a bad sort of drunkenness and obsession (hence the Pindar quote). The surface is like the smooth undulating skin of a panther and a Greek horseman's cloak, or chlamys, riddled with thousands upon thousands of"idols of the sun," that is, idols of immortality. The image recalls Bacon's four Idols but here no doubt refers to the various theories of philosophers. It recalls Schopenhauer's observation that "we find philosophy to be a monster with many heads, each of which speaks a different language" (The World as Will and Representation I, 17). (Once Valery admitted that thinking, for him, was a kind of idol or false god, but the best idol he knew.) The by now familiar use of inversion reappears: the numberless glittering lights on the sea-surface are really black holes, pits in the fabric of becoming, into which aspiring minds fall (compare Melville's obiter dictum about how many minds have fallen into "Plato's sweet head" in MobyDick). The poet perceives the sea at this point of his meditation as "absolute hydra," that is, the Water-Monster of Absolute Knowing, or rather the desire for this knowing (which, as Kant asserted, reason can never possess but can never stop seeking). The Hydra is drunk on its blue flesh: it constantly eats itself, is turned on itself in an act of eternal self- 27 �reflection and self-consumption (again Rodin's gnarly thinker). The poet addresses the Water-Monster with the familiar: ''you who bite back [Quite remords] your glimmering tail in a tumult like silence." It is the image of infinite desire that feeds on desire and never transcends itself. It is the "place" where the silence of eternity is indistinguishable from mere noise. In gazing at the tranquil roof, one might think that the sea is summed up in the calm of the gods and in the knowing silence of repose. But that is not the whole truth. This silence, from the perspective that has now emerged, is a violent tumult that is like silence. XXIV Stanza XXIII is the only stanza that does not end with a strong mark of punctuation. It ends with a comma, whose "dynamic quality" pushes on into the final stanza of the poem, as the poet turns away from the Water-Monster of infinite desire to the wind of rebirth and renewed life. The wind rises, says the poet: "one must try to live!" He does not say that one must live but that one must try to. Life is an effort, an act of will or resolve. One must try to live in the face of all that has been revealed and experienced in the poem. High noon is a privileged moment, as is the human act of solitary contemplation. But it is still only a moment of life, not the whole. And so, at the end of this deep and complex experience, the poet reenters the realm of life and human feeling. He experiences the return of time as a process of moving forward. The wind, which is prominent here, is the very life-breath of the Whole that saves the poet from melancholic meditation. The wind (penuma and spirit) opens and closes the notebook in which the poet has been writing: it infuses the pages with a kind of life, 28 �corporeal life. The wave now is experienced not as moving on eternally but as finding its welcome climax on the rocks: it issues forth in a spray, as we may imagine, of delight (an echo of the earlier fruit). The poet addresses his pages full of brilliant words-words, which, like the sea-surface, have a rhythm of their own. "Fly away, pages all dazzling!" he says, as if the book had become a great bird now ready to take on new life and face the public. He exhorts the waves to break on the shore, and the waters to break the tranquil roof that for so long held and fascinated him He wants the surface to be tranquil no more. And he imagines the little boats as now pecking at and penetrating the sea-surface, no longer merely walking on it. The dream of knowing that the sea has evoked must in the end be dispelled through a combination of effort and yielding. A poem, once written, must at some point be given up ... Summary The poem is an artfully composed record of a human experience. It both expresses that experience and makes a statement about it. The poem invites us to be part of the poet's inspired dream-state. It encloses a sort of intellectual hypnosis in which truths otherwise not sufficiently felt and known come to light in a privileged moment of revelationpoetic cognition. The poet is at first, and for a while, under the spell of high noon. He meditates on the mirroring of Self and World, Poetic Composition and Cosmopoiesis, and the likeness between Poet and God as Demiurge. Pondering the brilliant surface of things leads to pondering what is beneath: the surface reveals that there is a depth, and the poet, resolved to endure the Truth-Ray of pitiless Apollo, goes down into that depth-and down into himself. He encounters the pure potency that is the mysterious source of his 29 �godlike brilliance. Tiris is the resonant Non-Being he carries within himselfand which presages his inevitable Non-Being in death. This meditation and self-encounter brings out and emphasizes the ponderous nature of penser or thought. The poet is not pure intellect, and he is not yet dead. He must therefore break the spell of thought and resolve to come back to life. He must regain the human perspective and recover the exuberance and nonthought that is life. He must also stop writing the poem. He must let go of this dazzling bird so that it may fly out of his hands, out of his control, and into the world. At some point, pure potencyfor a poet or maker-must die as potency. It must give way to the poem that has a life of its own: it must yield to actuality. A poem, as a finished product, is oddly at odds with change or process, even though it can, as in the present case, brilliantly capture in its musical way movement as a series of psychical states. What, then, is a poem in the cosmic song of change? What does its perfection and finish tell us about our striving to be more than process, more than change? Is a poem, in the end, inescapably the manifestation of our longing to be-immortal? 30 � 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 30 pages 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 Cemetery thoughts Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 28, 2011 by Peter Kalkavage. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kalkavage, Peter 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-11-28 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context FaFi-KalkavageP043 Cemetery Thoughts Tutors