1 20 52 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d9190e5c959097a4188f5ff469d07616.pdf b3442839fcfe23fee8cd338d2076802d PDF Text Text Summer Lectures (1979) 8 June Michael Dink 15 June Elliot Zuckerman 22 June Jon Lenkowski 29 June Samuel Kutler 6 July David Lachterman 13 July John White 20 July ESSAYS DUE 27 July Mary Hannah Jones 3 August James Carey Friendship in Plato’s Phaedo An Opinion about Major and Minor On Definitions Play and Seriousness On Aristotle’s Metaphysics Aristotle’s Poetics Muθos in the Odyssey Aristotle and the Problems of Intelligibility �\T k ! lt'-J l! 1it'\l t • ,, . ,n ~ C' J 1 1~ '·'A'~Y·. ,. i.. 7•lck. ' . 7 l ··~~~n. ' <)..tSr • r.:• J)f f in.i ... i;:H t. t I er ~·c ·~r ·8.!) .iotctJ.e'~ f..t?t t· , h Jon-.::s 8 I' 6/-17 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 2 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Summer Lectures (1979) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1979 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1979, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 1979 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dink, Michael Zuckerman, Elliott Lenkowski, Jon Kulter, Samuel Lachterman, David Rapport, 1944- White, John Jones, Mary Hannah Carey, James Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b66747e43e665d6bd1a8435c764d8230.pdf 3b48e5885059330e9d230ccee5239e36 PDF Text Text LECTURE SCHEDULE Summer 1981 - February Freshman Samuel Kutler On Perfection June 12 John White Poetics (of Aristotle) June 19 Douglas Allanbrook Concert Great Hall June 26 Donald Conroy Pindar July Mr. Lindemuth Ethics of Aristotle July 10 Elliott Zuckerman On Major and Minor July 17 N o July 24 Joe Sachs Metaphysics of Aristotle July 31 Winfree Smith The Wandering Moon June 5 3 L e c t u r e (essay week-end) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Lecture Schedule, Summer 1981 - February Freshman Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1981 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1981, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 1981 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kutler, Samuel White, John Allanbrook, Douglas Conroy, Donald Lindemuth, Donald Zuckerman, Elliott Sachs, Joe Smith, J. Winfree Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e0edbda775602f262bf4664c232ce9ff.mp3 a4f41520dc0d8ad92557ccd64ecc0fa0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library 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 audio cassette tape (Tape 636) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:44:41 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 Power of the Likely Story in Plato's Timaeus Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 29, 1983 by Peter Kalkavage. Mr. Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is an overview of Plato's dialogue Timeaus. He invites his listeners to dwell in particular on the aspects of homecoming and return in the dialogue and discusses the Timaeus in conjunction with Plato's Republic. 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 1983-07-29 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 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 Kalkavage 1983-07-29 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3849" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Subject The topic of the resource Plato. Timaeus Plato. Republic Homecoming Mythology Socrates Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/804b2f1dda3ec0db67fb6d2a7a5e9305.pdf e8223c6737b309da8f1ca3fdea3d4e06 PDF Text Text ·r he Power of the Likely Story Peter I<alkavage This material may be protected by Copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Cooe) .I would like to spea)c with you this evening about Plato's Timaeus as a whole. I will not go into any great depth about anything. I will simply talk to you about what .things the dialogue invites us to consider. I hope this lecture will serve as an introduction to your reading of this altogether strange book. The Timaeus is the Platonic story of return. It is about a homecoming of a very special and complex nature. In the Republic, you recall, Socrates attempts to found a just city in speech. As the conversation goes on, Socrates' task of praising justice becomes transformed into his praise of philosophy. Socrates exhorts Glaucon--and us indirectly--to lift our gaze away from sensed beauties to intellected beauties, away from becoming and towards the precise realm of being (Rep. VI, 518c 4-22). In the Timaeus, Plato takes us back to the world of becoming, to everything this world implies--our bodies and all their actions and sufferings, the visible heaven and its motions, the structure of the four elements and their transmutations, also the realm of political action and political history. The theme of the Timaeus is the so-called "real world." The theme is also our inevitable membership in and fascination for this world. Strangely enough, this "real world" with which we think we are so familiar is presented in an extraordinary way. It is presented through the power of ""!lyths or stories. As readers of the Timaeus, we are faced with several great questions. These are (1) What is the structure and purpose of the world of becoming? (2) What in particular is our place within this world? and (3) What can we learn from the myths of the Timaeus about these pressing questions? The high-point of the dialogue is the famous lik~ly story of Timaeus, the eikos mythes. This myth portrays and imitates the work it took to bring a cosmos into being. It is a story that mixes the nature of artful production.· with the nature of begetting. Like Socrates' effort in the Republic, the likely story tells of how a regime is founded. But the Timaeus does not begin with the question of the cosmos. It begins with the question of the best political order. The likely story does not stand alone. A dramatic prologue, concerned for the most part with politic al questions, precedes the likely story and gives it its place. Before taking up the likely story, then, we must look briefly at this prologue. A casual glance at the men who meet Socrates at the start of the dialogue shows us that the Timaeus is about worldliness. It is a cosmopolitan dialogue. Critias is the Athenian aristocrat who studied with the sophists, wrote his own poetry, and became one of the thirty tyrants. Hermocrates is the famous Sicilian statesman and orator we meet in Thucydides' history. As for Timaeus, here is what Socrates says about him: "Timaeus here, being from Locri, the best- regulated city in Italy, who is inferior to nobody in these parts in substance and class, has managed the greatest offices and honors in his city; moreover, he has in my opinion come to the peak of all philosophy." In deed and in thought, Timaeus is a man of the world(Tim. 20al-5). He combines the study of natural order--especially the order of the heavens--with the ·Mr. Kalkavage is a tutor in Annapolis. He delivered this lecture, intended to be an introduction to the Timaeus, to the January Freshmen in the summer of '83 . 18 �political life. The central image that governs the Timaeus is the ;easting of Socrates. Yesterda·y Socra~es played the host to Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates, and some unnamed fourth. These men had asked Socrates what his views were about the best political order, and Socrates gratified them. Today the tables are turned. The former guests become hosts who must now, in the interests of justice, pay Socrates back with a feast of logos. They must give Socrates his rightful guest-gift. This provocative image of feasting Socrat.es goes along with an extremely important fact about' the dialogue--Socrates does not cross-question anybody or inquire into anything. Instead he remains silent while his hosts entertain him with long speeches. The Timaeus presents us with a most uncharacteristic Socrates, a dressed-up Socrates who minds his own business and silently listens. If the task in most of the other dialogues is to penetrate Socrates' ironic questioning, the task here is to understand his silent receptivity. What is it, one wonders, that fills Socrates' silence? But Socrates is not completely silent. He provides a disturbingly incomplete summary of the Republic and then announces the task he has imposed on his hosts. Socrates states this task in a two-fold way--in the form of a desire and of an image. Like someone who beholds beautiful animals somewhere and desires to see them move and strive with one another, Socrates beholds the city he has founded and desires to see it engaged in what he calls a fitting war, a polemos prepon(l9b3-20c3). Socrates' desire is the reason why the action of the Timaeus takes place. This desire is not easy to understand and raises a number of difficult questions. Why is it right to compare the just city of the Republic to a beautiful animal? Even if it is true that the visio~ of a beautiful living thing begets in us the desire to see that thing move, why must the motion take the form of warfare? What in us, exactly, is gratified by such a vision, such a war-movie? Although it is difficult to understand the true basis of Socrates' desire, this desire introduces a central theme for the dialogue as a whole. It points to the desire to go beyond order simply to an actual ~iving order, to go ·beyond mere speech to the world of deeds. Socrates' desire is the invitation to think together orderliness, life, and war. Critias has just the story to gratify Socrates, a story about an Athens grown young and ·beautiful. This Athens, according to Critias, is Socrates' own just city brought to life. Once upon a time, this young Athens fought and defeated the insolent Atlanteans when they tried to. enslave the world. Critias says his account is no mere myth--like Socrates' speech the day be:!=ore--but is "true in every way" (20d7-31, 26c7d3). Critias' story about Solon's trip to Egypt is about far more than Athens' heroic past. It is also about the cosmic cycle of birth and death, the circle of time which governs all men and cities. Not altogether unlike Timaeus' story of circular motion, the story of Critias tells about the periodic births and deaths of great civilizations, about how what· a civilization calls progress is in fact recollection, recovery from the last destruction. Critias' story thus is an account of the eternal look, the eidos, of cosmic history. There are two things I want to mention about Critias' story. The first is that the Egyptians are important for the stories of both. Critias and Timaeus. When we first meet Solon in the story, he is showing off his memory. He tells the p:r;iests stories about what he considers to be the oldest things. He 'even tries to count the number of years ago all these things happened. But Solon is corrected by an extremely old priest. "Solon, Solon," the priest says, "you Greeks are always children • • • you are young in soul, every one of you"(22b4-8). The priest proceeds to show Solon how old everything is in the Egyptian city, how everything has been frozen in time, kept changeless through long-standing customs. Egypt is the land of conscientiousness. It is a land where the rulers are priests, scientists and historians all rolled into one. In its political structure, the Egyptian city is a bad likeness of the just city in the Republic. I t is something of a joke. The 19 �··Egyptian archives are loaded with stories about the past, stories of great deeds and cosmic annihilations. But the Egyptian city itself experiences no real change and has no history. This city seems to be. that part of the cosmos that possesses stability, order, memory, and scientific accuracy--all these things without life and passion. The Egyptian city is a dead soul writ large. The second thing I want to mention about Critias' story has to do with the history of cities, especially Athens' history, and the circle of time. Critias tells us about the Atlanteans' fall from their once god-like condition. But he does not point out how deeply relevant this lesson is for his present-day Athens. The insolent campaign of the Atlanteans surely reminds us of Athens' campaign in Sicily. We have Hermocrates in the dial0gue to remind us of that event and its outcome. Closely related to the end of the war with Sparta is the overthrow of the democracy in Athens. Critias played a very large role in this violent event. In the Timaeus, Critias reaches back in memory ·for Athens' first and best condition. As I read his story, I think of men's attempts to reach back in time in deeds as well as in memory. I think of the historical Critias' attempt to revive the rule of the few. There is a great deal in the Timaeus to remind us of the fate of Athens. Perhaps no other dialogue (with the possible exception of the Menexenus) points more beyond and outside of its own mythes to the living deeds and speeches of history. If we say, then, that the Timaeus is about the cosmos,-we must be careful that we refer to the entire realm of becoming. That means the realm of history as well as the order of nature. History and nature are put together in this dialogue. They constitute the two dimensions of what we mean by time. Timaeus' likely story, like the story of the Egyptian priest tells Solon, is about the cosmic order which gives life and death to all things within it. It is about the temporal space in· which men, gods, and cities have their being. Cri ti as gives Timaeus a piace in the feasting of Socrates. Since Timaeus is the most astronomical of all of them, he must generate the cosmos down to the birth of human nature. At this point, Critias will take over and give human nature its political stamp (27a2-b6). But Timaeus may have designs of his own quite apart from Critias' attempt to glorify young Athens. To see what these designs might be, we must look at the likely story in its own terms. Timaeus' story is about the founding of the cosmic regime. Timaeus reaches back, much farther back than the memories of either Critias or the Egyptian priest can go, to the truly first and oldest things, to the true archai. A divine craftsman or demiurge is the hero of this story. The world comes ta" be out of this god's intelligent and generous nature. The god is not a grudging god. He wants all things to be like himself as far as this is possible. · But the work of making a cosmos is also the gratification of a desire. Timaeus' story gratifies the desire Socrates had--and which we ourselves might have--to see a beautiful non-moving structure brought to life. The demiurge gazes upon this intelligible structure, this eidos of the world, and crafts a living image of it. The cosmic order also has a medicinal or curing function. It corrects and tunes a previous condition of disorder and noise. In its being as Timaeus says "not at peace," the pre-existing chaos resembles a city plagued by faction, a city out of tune with· itself. For this reason, Socrates seems to be right when he calls the likely story a nomos, that is, a law and a song(Tim. 29d4-6). There are two matters of terminology I would like to address before I attempt to lead you through Timaeus' speech. The first matter has to do with the word kosmos. The second is about that all-important phrase, eikos mythes, "likely story." · To get a sense of the word kosmos, we must remember this word's association with beautiful arrangements of all kinds and with moral splendor. If a man is kosmios, he acts and speaks in a fitting way on all occasions. Aristotle speaks of great-souledness, megalapsychia, as a kind of kosmos of the moral virtues. (Nie. Eth. IV,iii,1124al-2). And Homer tells us in the second book of the Iliad that the 20 I\ �loud-mouth Thersites knew ~ithin his heart many words but not according to a kosmos. He is ou kata kosmon, that is, indecent(Iliad II,21~). Kosmos, then, means a great deal more than the order of the physical universe. It points to the fact that human beings are in love with ornament and display. At the same time, kosmos implies the virtues connected with orderliness and decency. In its dramatic form, the Timaeus imitates the various meanings of this rich word kosmos. Plato gives our imaginations a sort of parody of this fondness in us for what is showy and beautifully arranged. The guest-gift Socrates is supposed to receive certainly seems to be "just right." His hosts are perfectly suited (so we are told) to play the part of philosopher-statesmen. Cri tias' story is just the ~hing for Socrates' desire and for the current Athenian holiday as well. Timaeus is just the man to give a speech about the cosmos. Socrates has even dressed up for the occasion. He refers to himself as kekosmemenos(Tim.20c2). Of course, the absence of the fourth host is a haunting omission from the dialogue's own kosmos. It is curious that Plato's most formal, most artificial dialogue should also contain this emphatic absence, that the Timaeus should begin with an embarrassment. The sense of the phrase "likely story" is related to what I have been saying about the word kosmos. Timaeus gives two reasons why an account of becoming must take the form of a likely story. The first is that the cosmos itself has a likely mode of being. It is an image. But Timaeus gives a second reason. He addresses Socrates by name and reminds him that we have a human nature. It is fitting for us, says Timaeus, to accept the likely story and not to search beyond it. As Timaeus reminds us, the likely sto.ry . belongs not t"o the region of Socratic inquiry but to the region of trust, pistis. Timaeus makes his point with the language of proportionality. Being, he says, is to becoming as truth is to trust(Tim.29c3). The likely story is geared to our humanness and receptivity. It is addressed not so much to our inquisitive selves but moreso to our very human selves who must at some point stop searching and take a stand. The likely story is addressed to our· spiritedness and not to a detached intellect. It furnishes us with a kind of shield of moving images in which we may safely place our trust. The story is largely about scientific matters--matters of physics, astronomy, and physiology. But it does not intend to speak to that Egyptian part of the soul that craves o}?jectivity and factual accounts. If we take the likely story on its own terms, we come to see that "likely" does not mean "merely probable," that "story" does not mean "merely a myth." In its very strangeness, the likely story has a peculiar form of power. Timaeus reminds us at one point that we must guard this power, this dynamis(48dl-4). What does this power consist in? One of the great feats of the likely story is its ability to give us an image of things in their wholeness. Nothing in Timaeus' story is cut off, abstracted from the life of the whole - not even death or disease. Everything has place and therefore meaning. Even body, in its structure and motion, is permeated with the meaningful constructions of arithmetic and geometry. Another power lies in the way Timaeus presents the various sciences. .All the sciences, especially music and astronomy, are closely connected by Timaeus with the good of the cosmos and the good of man. These sciences are shown to be moral aswell as intellectual disciplines. But. the greatest power of the -l.ikely story lies in its overall presentation of orderliness. A world~order is not something we can take for' granted if we are at all moved by Timaeus' speech. The world is the result of an extraordinary effort. The demiurge must at one point force Same and. Other together in order to make the music of the heavens. And the star-gods must wrestle with the great problem of joining the best in us to the worst if we are to have birth at all. It is true that Timaeus wishes to construct the best possible world in speech. But he fulfills this goal through the meeting and overcoming of obstacles, . obstacles which exist not just because the gods are not smart enough or powerful enough but because of the nature of things. The greatest power of the likely story consists in this ability to show us 21 �what we are up against whenever we speak and act within the world of becoming. If the story offers us a shield, a form of human safety,- it seeks no less to expose us to ·the difficulties and risks within. thii;; world. Let us return now to the· stocy itself. The cosmos comes into being in this way--the demiurge decides that his product: will be the best and most beautiful only if it possesses intelligence, nous. But since intelligence cannot be placed directly in the body, god puts intelligence in the so~l and the soul in the body(Tim.30 bl-cl). When Timaeus goes on to build the soul of all things, what he constructs is the life of the intellect. The soul is manifested in the circuitry of the heavenly motions. These outwardly appearing motions Timaeus identifies with the inner acts of thinking. They are the circles of Same and Other. The heavens, then, provide human beings with a magnificent and trusty image of the innermost self. Since our truest and intelligent selves for Timaeus originate in the stars, we may say that thinking--especially astronomical thinking--is the human soul's homecoming. Cosmos is a being in whom we see an image of ourselves. Like us the cosmos has body, soul~ and intellect. But unlike us, it is a whole and not a part. As the whole of all partial beings such as ourselves and the cosmos is not in need of anything. It is a rotating sphere. It needs no hands or feet. It suffers neither disease nor old age. It is its own best friend. The soul of the cosmos is furthermore eternally active, always touching the whole of being and be.coming and always engaged in giving accounts. It is fitting that Timaeus would call such a being a "happy god" (Tim. 34b8). With such a life as the cosmos enjoys, it is no wonder that our human good should consist in imitating this god. One point of great importance is the fact that the cosmos eternally gives accounts of itself to itself. Logos in this way becomes a life-giving feature of the whole, and our reflective activity is given its higher purpose. Men can give accounts because account-giving goes on eternally though in silence. When a human being gives an account, he taps and retrieves this silent eternal logos. He gives it voice. The fact that human beings think and speak is not a matter of indifference ·to the nature of things. Timaeus urges us to accept, to trust in a world which is fulfilled in its being only in the act of its being known and spoken about. The cosmic logos has its fruition in the human logos. Unless some human beings inquire into nature's.secrets, the cosmos will not be a "happy god." Looked at as a whole, the likely story is downward in direction. It takes us on a journey from a changeless paradigm to a living cosmos. Once we are within this cosmos, we travel from the star-gods to man and· from man to the various kinds of beasts. These beasts, like the sexual distinction, come into being because the "first men" were either cowardly, unjust, or stupid. Education is the return to our first and best star~like condition. But within the likely story's downward journey, there is a radical break. Timaeus tells us that he left out the cause that most physicists are constantly talking about. He left out the work of ananke, necessity, the work of mindless bodily interaction. To remedy this lack, he says he must begin all over again. Timaeus' second beginning is the · most dramatic moment for the likely story. Earlier in his speech, Timaeus had been victimized by necessity, by what he calls "the form, the eidos, of the wandering cause." He constructed the body before the soul, thus perverting the natural orde!r o.E first and second. He apologized by telling us that just as men's deeds are subject to what is chancy and random, so are their words (34b10-35al). What Timaeus now uncovers is that it is wrong to speak ill of necessity. For although it wanders and produces irregular untrustworthy effects, this 'cause is necessary for the construction of the whole. The gods make our eyes primarily so that we might gaze at the heavens and learn. decency from them. . But they cannot make the eyes without giving them the actual power of seeing. Contrary to its being simply identical with chance and chaos, necessity must be enlisted as a 22 �co-worker with intelligence in the making of a.world. Cosmos, says Timaeus, was in fact generated out of the systasis--the standing-together and conflict--of intelligence an~ neces~ity(47e5-48a2). • What is it, then, that is finally responsible for the production of a cosmos? What holds together the purposeful cause of intelligence and the non-purposeful cause of necessity? Timaeus' answer is one that fits an account in the region of trust. It is an answer that also fits a statesman's view of the world. The bond between intelligence and necessity is none other than persuasion. Intelligence is said to have persuaded necessity to b~ guided, for the most part, by the intellect's good intentions(48a2-5). Necessity, we see, is not entirely mindless. Like the middle part of the soul Socrates speaks of in the Republic, necessity can be made to heed. reason even though it does not possess reason. ~~ Timaeus takes on a great number of very difficult questions in his long story of necessity. One such question is "what is a body?" But the greatest question in this part of the story, and the most provocative and difficult for the whole likely story is this--What is the nature of space? What is that in which and out of which the world of body and change makes its appearance? What is that fluid and exciting surface which causes the eidos of fire, for example, to be reflected? Timaeus calls this principle of apparency the receptacle, the hypodoche. It is, he says, the mother and wet-nurse of becoming(49a4-6). The word hypodoche comes from the verb hypodechomai. Two senses of this word are of special importance for the Timaeus. The first is the sense of entertaining, being receptive to, strangers. The receptacle take·s on form the way Socrates accepts hi.s guest-gift and the way we are asked by Timaeus to accept the likely story. The second sense of hypodechomai is "to conceive or become pregnant." The receptacle is the place-giver of all things that come to be. It is their host. But it is also their life-giver. Space is not a void for Timaeus. Nor is it a merely passive medium. It is the original womb that gives appearance, motion, and life to the eide on which the demi urge gazes. Timaeus tells us a story about how god schematized space "by means of forms and numbers" (53a7-b5). He constructs the regular Platonic solids as the archetypes or perfect models of the four elements, fire, air, earth and water. But he reminds us that these geometrical objects have their home in a living order. He tells us that the pyramid for example is not only the element but also the seed of fire(56b3-6). It is wrong, then, to speak of a god who forced his will on chaos. The receptacle is not merely the absence of order. It is rather the potential for form. The receptacle, prior to the god's ordering, is filled with the traces of the four elements (53bl-5). These embryonic elements belong in their own regions of space but are constantly fighting for power in each other's territory. The receptacle is the place of this battle, this ambitious and turbulent change of place. The mother of becoming is endowed with a shaking or vibrating motion. As the elements wander and. lose their place, she attempts through this shaking motion to send them back home. As the receptacle jostles the elements, she herself is jostled. Timaeus' account of the elements' interaction is filled with. the language of cities at war. In the elemental strife, there are winners and losers, friends and enemies. The same thing is true about our bodily substances. At one point Timaeus tells us about the bad effects of bile on the whole body. If the body gets the upper hand,. he says~ bile will then be t.hrown out of the body "like fugitives out of a city in revolt" (85e2-86a2). Throughout the likely story, there are similar efforts to gratify Socrates' desire for a "fitting war." The war of elements is made fitting by Timaeus' enlistment of mathematics. In Timaeus' story of the receptacle, place and change of place are inseparable • . The regions or topoi of space are fixed. But one does not occupy a given place forever. Moreover, one cannot have place without holding on to one' s place. In order to maintain our bodily health, for example, Timaeus says we must con_stantly be 23 �.on the move. We must set up internal vibrations in order to withstand the attacks of the external, all.en. world that seeks to destroy us. We must, he says, imitate the 'receptacle(88c7-89al). The entire life of becoming depends on circulation, and this circulation in turn depends on the · warring elements. Without the perceptual instability of the receptacle and her contents, there could be no life in the cosmos. It is a great mistake to think that the life of human beings or cities can ever nave the permanence of a Socratic eidos. As Socrates reminds us in the Republic, eveb if the best city came into being, it would necessarily degenerate on account of unlucky marriages(546al-547a5). The story Solon brought back from Egypt stresses this truth, the truth that the cosmos is the divine shaker of all civilizations. In the likely story, all things change place, souls as well as bodies. If a man lives a good life and imitates the motions of the heavens, he returns to his first and best condition as a star. If he fails 'to live such a life, he is reincarnated as a beast. All the animals, says Timaeus, keep passing into one another with the loss or gain of intelligence (Tim. 92cl-3). Whenever anything in the world loses its place, the receptacle makes the necessary adjustments. Because of the receptacle, human life is ruled by the mysterious power of place. It is important to our happiness that we have place. Also it is important that we sometimes give up a place, that we change place. Ambition is the desire for a high place in the world. In the Antigone Creon curses the man who holds anything dear in place of his fatherland. He says such a man is nowhere, oudamou (Antigone 182-3). Critias displays this political attachment to place by transforming the best city into Athens, by making much of his own family, and by referring to the festival at which the young become full-fledged members of the city. Timaeus' receptacle, along with its elemental powers, does more than furnish the demiurge with building material and tools. It is the power that constantly settles and unsettles human life. After Timaeus tries to clarify the difficult and obscure eidos of space, he tells a story about the mathematical structures that space was persuaded to take on. He constructs four of the five regular solids (all but the dodecahedron) and assigns them to the four primary bodies--earth, air, fire, and water. Timaeus' mythical physics, his putting together Empedocles and Pythagoras, is stunningly imaginative and gratifying. It is the counterpart to the construction of the soul out of the musical ratios. Timaeus' story of body and change is only secondarily an attempt to account for the actual phenomena. Its primary goal is to transform the bodily into the non-bodily, into the intelligible. It seeks to persuade us that the world of body could be imagined as a world of mathematical objects in motion. The story gives the human intellect a home within the otherwise unfriendly region of body. In the concluding portions of the likely story, Timaeus shows us how we were put together by the gods. There are three things I want to say about this part of the story. First, Timaeus builds us in such a way that our nature imitates the nature of the whole to which we belong. Second, our bodies are re-interpreted for us as the outward show of inner invisible truths about us. And third, our nature comes to be defined as the tension between intelligence and necessity I spoke about earlier. This tension now takes on a specific form. It is the tension between loving the intellect and loving life for its own sake. Timaeus will attempt to do justice to both these loves. The section· about our bodies is filled with stories that are both tragic and comic. One such story concerns the neck. The neck was invented because the gods had to join the best in us to the worst in the best possible way. They have to join the head's di vine circuits to the mortal parts of the soul housed in our torso. The purpose of the neck is to join and to separate the god and the beast in us (Tim. 69d6-e3). The mouth too is defined by the cosmic dualism. It was made for the sake of the best and most beautiful stream of speech that flows out and the stream of nutrition that flows·in(Tim.75d5-e5). The story of hair is another memorable moment. If the gods did not in some way protect the head, our lives would be in great danger. 24 �·But if they covered up the head with a great deal of flesh, we would become stupid and insensitive(Tim~75e5-76d3). Hair is the comBromise between long life and intelligence. As such,· 1ike the mouth and the neck, it is a reminder of the riddle that makes us who we are. All the physiological stories. Timaeus tells us are designed to show how the soul comes to be revealed through the nature of the body. Timaeus shows us how immensely difficult it is to make a whole human being. This story of divine making in turn shows how difficult it is to be a whole human being. I have spoken very generally and very inconclusiv~ly about this amazing ·book. There is much that remains to be considered. The most important part of what remai~s does not have to do with the likely story's intricate puzzles. What we must wonder about finally is the likely story's silent listener. Has Socrates been gratified by the likely story? There is much in the story to indicate that he would be pleased with it. After all, Timaeus' speech does seem to gratify a desire Socrates had in his youth and which he speaks of in the Phaedo(Phaedo97b8-99d3). I mean the desire that the good be invoked as a cause of becoming. Before we can. understand Socrates' desire and possible gratification, we must beware of thinking that the likely story is the ultimate story for Plato. There are other stories in the dialogues, each one speaking in its own way about the cosmos and human place. I am thinking especially of the stories. about the soul's topoi in the Phaedo and the Phaedrus. To a very great extent, Timaeus' story is about the virtues of lawfulness and moderation projected into the nature of the cosmos. It is about that necessary part of human and.cosmic life that has to do with keeping one's place, with being just. The likely story is the sort of high-minded yet realistic speech one would expect from a man who was an astronomer and a great statesman. But let us remember. The recipient of the story is the erotic Socrates, a Socrates who asked to hear speeches because of his desirous nature., his love of gazing. In o't.p.er dialogues, Socrates is feisty. He is a troublemaker. In the Timaeus, he':~-~·is suspiciously well-behaved and kosmios. Socrates' desire, the true center of t'.fie T.imaeus, confronts us with an important question--whether the likely story, for all its virtues and powers, is finally just to the nature of human desire, to the whole of human nature. I said at the beginning of this lecture that the Timaeus was the Platonic story of return. Is it a true and complete return to ourselves, a true homecoming? We have the silence of Socrates to remind us of this question. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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 The Power of the Likely Story in Plato's Timaeus Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 29, 1983 by Peter Kalkavage. Mr. Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is an overview of Plato's dialogue Timeaus. He invites his listeners to dwell in particular on the aspects of homecoming and return in the dialogue and discusses the Timaeus in conjunction with Plato's Republic. (Reprinted from Energeia, Winter 1984) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kalkavage, Peter 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 1983-07-29 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-KalkavageP023 The Power of the Likely Story Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3808" title="Audio recording">Audio recording</a> Subject The topic of the resource Plato. Timaeus Plato. Republic Mythology Homecoming Socrates Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d69d250ca23c7f8714280fcab7732302.pdf ce19176cafd7ed9d3dc440ec07816aa0 PDF Text Text Joe Sachs, draft of introduction to his translation of Aristotle's Physics Delivered as a lecture for the Graduate Institute, August 6, 1983 1 INfRODUCTION Philosophic writing The activity known as philosophy did not originate among the ancient Greeks. It is a permanent human possibility, that must have arisen in all places and times when anyone paused in the business of life to wonder about the way things are. But it was among the Greeks that it was named and described, and began to be reflected in written texts. It was two thinkers who wrote during the fourth centucy B.C., Plato and Aristotle, who showed the world for all time the clearest examples of philosophic thinking. Plato's dialogues display the inescapable beginnings of philosophy in all questions that touch on how a human being should live~ and show that such questions must open up for examination all the comfortable assumptions we make about the world. Aristotle's writings trace an immense labor of the intellect, striving to push the power of thinking to its limits. Reading Aristotle, to be sure, is not at all like reading Plato. The dialogues are beautiful in style, sensitive in the depiction of living and breathing people, and altogether polished works meant for the widest public. The writings of Aristotle that we possess as wholes are school texts that, with the possible exception of the Nicomachean Ethics, were never meant for publication. The title that we have with the Physics describes it as a "course of listening." The likeliest conjecture is that these works _-. . originated as oral discourses by Aristotle, written down by students, . corrected by Aristotle, and eventually assembled into longer connected . arguments. They presuppose acquaintance with arguments that are referred to without being made (such as the "third m~"), and with �2 examples that are never spelled out (such as the incommensurability of .• i" the diagonal). They 'are demanding texts to follow, and are less interested in beauty of composition than in exactness of statement. But in the most important respect, the writings of Plato and Aristotle are more like each other than either is like anything else. Both authors knew how to breathe philosophic life into dead words on a page. In Plato's dialogues, it is the figure of Socrates, always questioning, always disclaiming knowledge, always pointing to what is not yet understood, who keeps the tension of live thinking present. Despite the efforts of misguided commentators, one need only read any dialogue to see that there is no dogma there to be carried off, but only work to be done, work of thinking into which Plato draws us. It may appear that Aristotle rejects this Platonic path, giving his thought the closure of answers and doctrine, turning philosophy into "science," but this is a distortion produced by transmission through a long tradition and by bad translations. The tradition speaks of physics, metaphysics, ethics, and so on as sciences in the sense of conclusions deduced from first principles, but the books written by Aristotle that bear those names contain no such "sciences." What they all contain is dialectical reasoning, argument that does not start with the highest knowledge in hand, but goes in quest 'of it, beginning with whatever opinions seem worth examining. Exactly like Plato's dialogues, Aristotle's writings lead the reader on from untested opinions toward more reliable ones. Unlike the author of the dialogues, Aristotle records his best ~·, efforts to get beyond trial and error to trustworthy ·conclusions. What keeps those conclusions from becoming items of dogma? The available translations hide the fact, but Aristotle devises a philosophic vocabulary that is incapable of dogmatic ·use. �3 This claim will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the lore of substances and accidents, categories, essences, per se individuals, and so forth, but if Aristotle were somehow to reappear among us he would be even more surprised to find such a thicket of impenetrable verbiage attributed to him. Aristotle made his students work hard, but he gave them materials they could work with, words and phrases taken from the simplest contents of everyday speech, the kind of language that is richest in meaning and most firmly embedded in experience and imagination. The only trouble with ordinary speech, for the purposes of philosophy, is that it carries too much meaning; we are so accustomed to its use that it automatically carries along all sorts of assumptions about things, that we make without being aware of them. Aristotle's genius consists in putting together the most ordinary words in unaccustomed combinations. Since the combinations are jarring, our thinking always has to be at work, right now, afresh as we are reading, but since the words combined are so readily understood by everyone, our thinking always has something to work with. The meanings of the words in Aristotle's philosophic vocabulary are so straightforward and inescapable that two results are assured: we will be thinking about something, and not stringing together empty formulas, and we will be reliably in communication with Aristotle; ·thinking about the · very things he intended. . We need to illustrate both the sort of thing that Aristotle wrote, and the way the translations we have destroy its effect. Consider the word essence. This is an English word, and we all know more or less how to use it. Perfumes have essences, beef stock can be boiled down to its essence, and the most important part of anything can be called its essenceo It seems to have some connection with necessity, since we occasionally �4 dismiss something as not essential. By the testimony of usage, that is about it. Essence is a relatively vague English word. If we know Latin, the word begins to have some resonance, but none of the:it has crossed over into English. So what do we do when we find a translation of Aristotle full of the word essence? We have to turn to expert help. Ordinary dictionaries will probably not be sufficient, but we will need philosophic dictionaries, commentaries on Aristotle, textbooks on philosophy, or trained lecturers who possess the appropriate degrees. In short, we need to be initiated into a special dub; it may make us feel superior to the ordinary run of human beings, and it will at least make us think that philosophy is not for people in general, but only for specialists. Medical doctors, for example, seek just those effects for their area of expert knowledge by never using an ordinary, understandable name for anything, but only a Latin derivative with many syllables. But did Aristotle want such a result? If not, writing in such a style can hardly be presented as a translation of Aristotle. What did Aristotle write where the translators put the word essence? In some places he wrote "the what" something is, or "the being" of it. In most places he wrote "what something keeps on being in order to be at all," or "what it is for something to be." These phrases brlng us to a stop, not because we cannot attach meaning to them, but because it takes some ·work to get hold of what they mean. Since Aristotle chose to write that way, is it not reasonable to assume that he wanted us to do just that? When the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes the line "Though worlds of · · wanwood leafmeal lie," everything in his words is readily accessible, though the pieces are combined in unusual ways. We recognize this sort of word-play as a standard device of poetry, that works on .us through the �5 ear, the visual imagination, and our feelings. The poet makes us experience a fresh act of imagining and feeling, at his direction. (Think of all that would be lost if he had written "Notwithstanding the fact that an immeasurable acreage of deciduous forest manifests the state of affairs characteristic of its incipiently dormant condition.") Aristotle's phrases in the present example do something that is exactly analogous to the poet's word-play, but is directed only at the intellect and understanding. Other words and phrases of his do carry imaginative content, but subordinated to the intellect and understanding. Aristotle is not a poet, but a philosophic writer, one who, like a poet, loosened and recombined the most vivid parts · · of ordinary speech to make the reader ·see and think afresh. Many philosophers have written books, but few have worked as carefully and deliberately to make the word be suited to the philosophic deed Tra.nslati.on and tradition A long stretch of centuries stands between Aristotle and us. The usual translations of his writings stand as the end-product of all the history that befell them in those centuries. For about five centuries up to 1600 they were the source of the dominant teachings of the European universities; for about four centuries since then they have been reviled as the source of a rigid and empty dogmatism that stifled any genuine pursuit of knowledge. One has to be very learned indeed to uncover all that history, but fortunately for those of us who are interested only in understanding the writings themselves, no such historical background is of any use. In fact it takes us far away from anything Aristotle wrote or meant. By chance1 when Aristotle's books dominated the centers of European learning, the common language of higher learning was Latin. When in tum later �6 thinkers rebelled against the tyranny of the established schools, it was a Latinized version of Aristotle that they attacked. They wrote in the various modern European languages, but the words and phrases of Aristotle that they argued with and about came into those languages with the smallest possible departures from the Latin. Thomas Hobbes, for example, writing in 1651 (in the next to last chapter of the last part of Leviathan), makes a common complaint in a memorable way: "I beleeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly said in naturall Philosophy, than that which is now called Aristoteles Metaphysiques...An.d since the Authority of Aristotle is onely current [in the universities], that study is not properly Philosophy, (the nature whereof dependeth not on Authors,) but Aristotelity...To know now upon what grounds they say there be Essences Abstract, or Substantial] Formes, wee are to consider what those words do properly signifie...But what then would become of these Terms, of Entity, Essence, Essential], Essentiality, that. ..are... no Names of Things... [T]his doctrine of Separated Essences, built on the Vain Philosophy of Aristotle, would fright [men] ...with empty names as men fright Birds from the Corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick." The usual translations of Aristotle are concerned most of all with preserving a continuity of tradition back though these early modem critics of Aristotle. Richard McKean, in a note to a philosophic glossary, defends this practice: "The tendency recently in translations from greek and latin philosophers, has been to seek out anglo-saxon terms, and to avoid latin derivatives. Words as clear and as definitely fixed in a long tradition of usage as privation, accident, and even substance, have been replaced by barbarous compound terms, which awaken no echo in the mind of one �7 familiar with the tradition, and afford no entrance into the tradition to one unfamiliar with it. In the translations above an attempt has been made to return to the terminology of the... english philosophers of the seventeenth century. Most of the latin derivatives which are used...have justification in the works of Hobbes, Kenelm Digby, Cudworth, Culveiwell, even Bacon, and scores of writers contemporary with them... ff]he mass of commentary on Aristotle will be rendered more difficult, if not impossible, of understanding if the terms of the discussion are changed arbitrarily after two thousand years." (Selections from Medieval Philosophers, Vol. II, pp. 422-3., Scribner's, 1930) The tendency deplored by McKeon has not made its way into any translations of the writings of Aristotle known to this writer. There was some hope of it when Hippocrates Apostle announced a new series of translations, and included the following among its principles: "The terms should be familiar, that is, commonly used and with their usual meanings. If such terms are available, the use of strange terms, whether in English or in some other language, adds nothing scientific to the translation but unnecessarily strains the reader's thought and often clouds or misleads it." (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. x, Indiana U.P., 1966) This is a sentiment worth endorsing, but Apostle respects it only to the minor extent of avoiding such pretentious phrases as ceteris paribus (Latin for "other things being equal"), and nothing in his translations would disturb McKeon. But if Apostle's general claim is correct, and if in addition Aristotle never used technical jargon in his own language, then surely to use such language to translate him is to confuse Aristotle's writings with a tradition that adapted them to purposes that were not his. And if that Latin tradition distorted Aristotle's meaning and was untrue to his philosophic spirit, until �8 all that remained was the straw man so easily ridiculed by Hobbes and every other lively thinker of his time, then to insist on keeping Aristotle within the confines of that caricature is perverse. It is never possible to translate anything from one language to another with complete accuracy, and it is especially difficult to translate an author who takes liberties with common usage in his own language. But in this case there is one simple rule that is easy to follow and always tends in a good direction, and that is to avoid all the conventional technical words that have been routinely used for Aristotle's central vocabulary. In fact, virtually all those words are poor translations of the Greek they mean to stand for. The word privation, for instance, will not be found in this translation for the simple reason that its meaning cannot be expected to be known to all educated readers of English. The commentaries on Aristotle use the word extensively, but if the Greek word it refers to has been adequately translated in the first place, you will not need commentaries to tell you what it means. Here that Greek word will be translated sometimes as deprivation, sometimes as lack, according as one or the other fits more comfortably into its context. What matters is not whether Latin or AngloSaxon derivatives are used, but whether an understandable English word translates an understandable Greek one. Accident is a perfectly good · English word, but not in the sense in which it appears in commentaries on ·Aristotle; the Greek word it replaces has a broad sense, that corresponds to our word attribute, and a narrower one that can be conveyed by the phrase "incidental attribute." In this case again, Latin derivatives are available which cany clear and appropriate meanings in English, since one does not need to know any Latin to ferret them out. It is true that adcadere has a sense that could have given rise to the meanings we attach to �9 the words "incidental" and "attribute," but it did not in fact transmit that meaning to its English derivatives. There is some pedantic pleasure in pointing out those connections, but to use the word accident in that sense is to write a forced Latin masquerading as English, guaranteed to confuse the non-specialist reader, where Aristotle used the simplest possible language in a way that keeps the focus off the words and on · the things meant by them. But to undo the mischief caused by McKeon's third example, substance, stronger medicine is required. Joseph Owens records the way this word became established in the tradition. (The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian 'Metaphysics', pp. 140-143, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1951) It is a comedy of errors in which Christian scruples were imposed upon a non-Biblical theology, and a disagreement with Aristotle was read back into his words as a translation of them. This translator ignores the contortions of the tradition and without apology uses the barbarous Anglo-Saxon compound thinghood. This is a central notion in the Metaphysics, and in all Aristotle's thought, though it occurs rarely in the Physics, and the word "substance" does nothing but obscure its meaning. Lively arguments about substance go on today in the secondary literature, but a choice must be made, and the primary texts of Aristotle are better, clearer, richer, deeper, easier to absorb, and more worth pursuing than the commentaries on them. · As it stands in the usual translations, the word "substance" is little more than an unknown x, for which meaning has to be deduced by a kind of algebra, while Aristotle shows (Metaphysics 1028b 2-7) that just asking what the thinghood of things consists in, and what is responsible for it, unlocks the highest inquiry of which philosophy is capable. For the promise of such a return, it �10 is worth risking a little barbarity. The barbarism of a word like thinghood is just the fact that it falls far outside common usage in our language, and not in a direction that needs any historical or technical special knowledge to capture it, but in one that invites the same flexibility that poets ask of us. We cannot read such a barbarism in a passive way, but must take responsibility for its meaning. This in itself, in moderation and in welljudged places, is something good, and is an imitation of what Aristotle does with Greek. It has already been remarked that the present translation does not always use the same English word for the same Greek one. This is partly because no English word ever has the same full range of meaning as any Greek word, so that such a range has to be conveyed, or unwanted connotations suppressed, by the use of a variety of near-synonyms. It is partly because a Greek word may have two or more distinct uses that differ by context; in this way, the word for thinghood will often be translated as "an independent thing." It is also partly because Aristotle always paid attention to the fact that important words are meant in more than one way. For him this was not a fault of language, but one of the ways in which it is truthful. A word often has a primary meaning and a variety of derivative ones, as a reflection of causal reiatlons in the world. A diet can be healthy only because, in a different and more governing -sense, an animal can be healthy, and there can be a medical knife only because there is a medical skill. This array of difference within sameness usUally cannot be lifted over from Greek to English, and has to be gotten at indirectly. In the Physics, every kind of change is spoken of as a motion, though the word for motion is gradually and successively limited until it refers strictly only to change of place. This progression determines the �11 main structure of the inquiry, but in English the path is not as clearly indicated by transitions of meaning within a single word. And finally, there are some words that have many translations that are equally good in their different ways. In such cases, this translation rejoices in variety; this again is an imitation of Aristotle's general practice. Where the traditional translations are marked by rigid, formulaic repetitions, Aristotle loves to combine overlapping meanings, or separate intertwined meanings, to point to things the language has no precise word for. It is the living, naturat flexible character of thinking that breathes through Aristotle's use of language, and not the artificial, machine-like fixity one finds in the translations. This last point should not be taken as a promise of smooth English, but just the reverse. Idiomatic expressions and familiar ways of putting words together conceal unthinking assumptions of just the kind that philosophy tries to get beyond. The reader will need a willingness to follow sentences to places where meaning would be lost if it were forced into well-worn grooves, and will need to follow trains of thought that would not be the same if they did not preserve Aristotle's own ways of connecting them. As far as possible, this translation follows the syntax of Aristotle's text. Montgomery Furth has followed this same procedure in a translation of part of the Metaphysics, and apologizes for the result as neither English nor Gree~ but Eek. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books Vll-X, p. vi, Hackett, 1985} Furth does this because of an interest in following Aristotle's logic faithfully, but he retains all the usual Latinized vocabulary of Ross's Oxford translation, so that the resulting language might better be called Leek. The present translation goes farther, in vocabulary and syntax both, beyond the Latin and toward the Greek, and could be called Gringlish, but for this �12 as well it comes before you without apology. Furth violates English sensibilities for the special purposes of graduate students and professional scholars; this translation violates them for the common human purposes of joining Aristotle in thinking that breaks through the habitual and into the philosophic. A philosophic physics? Now it may seem odd to combine philosophic aims with the topic of physics. It may seem that Aristotle had to speculate philosophically about the natural world because he did not have the benefit of the secure knowledge we have about it. In the current secondary literature, one sees at least some scholars who think they might learn something about thinking from De Anima, or about being from the Metaphysics, but articles on the Physics seem at most to pat Aristotle on the head for having come to some conclusion not utterly in conflict with present-day doctrines. This kind of smugness is a predictable result of the way the sciences have been taught to us. Conjectures and assumptions, because they have been part of authoritative opinion for a few centuries, are presented to us as stories, or as facts, without recourse to evidence or argument. Particular doctrines, even when they stand on theoretical structures as complex and fragile as a house of cards, or even when they presuppose a picture of things that is flatly in contradiction with itself, tend to be prefaced with the words "we know... " All the rhetoric that surrounds the physics of our time tells us . that philosophic inquiry need not enter its territory, that here the philosophizing is over and done, the best minds agree about everything, and non-experts couldn't hope to understand enough to assess the evidence in any case. Strangely, the physics of the twentieth century is �13 surrounded by the same air of dogmatic authority as was the schoolAristotelianism of the sixteenth century. But there are two kinds of support for the present-day physics that seem to lift it above dogmatism. One is a long history of experiment and successful technology, and the other is the greatest possible reliance on mathematics. These are both authorities that cannot be swayed by human preferences, and cannot lie. Their testimony can, however, be misunderstood, and can be incorporated into a picture of the world that fails in other ways. But even if the current physics contains nothing untrue, one might wish to understand it down to its roots, to unearth the fundamental daims about things on which it rests, which have been lost sight of in the onrush of theoretical and practical progress. To do this one has to stand back from it, to see its founding claims as alternatives to other ways of looking at the world, chosen for reasons. The earliest advocates of the "new physics" did just that, and the alternatives they rejected all stem from Aristotle's Physics. Martin Heidegger has said that "Aristotle's Physics is the hidden, and therefore never adequately studied, foundational book of Western philosophy." ("On the Being and Conception of ct>U:U: in Aristotle's Physics B, 1," in Man and World, IX, 3, 1976, p. 224) The physics of our time is inescapably philosophic, ifonly in the original choices, preserved in it, to follow certain paths of thought to the exclusion of others. To see that physics adequately and whole, we too need to be philosophic, to lift our gaze to a level at which it can be seen to be one possibility among many. Only then is it possible to decide rationally and responsibly to adopt its opinions as our own. But there is a second respect in which twentieth-century physics has opened its doors to philosophy, and will not be able to close them. The �14 physics that came of age in the seventeenth century, and seemed to have answered all the large questions by the nineteenth, is limping toward the end of the twentieth century in some confusion. Mathematics and technology have coped with all the crises of this century, but the picture of the world that underlay them has fallen apart. It was demonstrated conclusively that light is a wave, except when it shines on anything; then it arrives as particles. It is shown with equal certainty that the electron is a particle, except when it bounces off a crystal surface; then it must be a wave, interacting with the surface everywhere at once. Just when atomic physics seemed ready to uncover the details of the truth underlying all appearances, it began to undercut all its own assumptions. A wavemechanics that held out an initial promise of reducing all appearances of particles to the behavior of waves failed to do so, and degenerated into a computational device for predicting probabilities. The most far-seeing physicists of the century have shown that particles and waves are equally necessary, mutually incompatible aspects of every atomic event, and that physics, at what was supposed to be the ultimate explanatory level, must abandon its claim to objectivity. The physicist is always describing, in part, his own decisions to interfere with things in one way rather than another; this brings along, as a causally necessary conclusion, the collapse of the belief in causal determinism. When Hobbes laughed at Aristotle, he .was certain that he knew what a body is. Today all bets are off. But some physicists have been unwilling to give up their dogmatic habits without a fight. Even Einstein, after he had taught the world to give up the rigid Newtonian ideas of time, space, and mass, was unable to suspend his unquestioned assumption that bodies have sharply defined places, and cannot interact except by contact or by radiation. Niels Bohr �15 and Werner Heisenberg had announced the most radical of revolutions, requiring physicists to ask what knowledge is, and no longer to answer by pointing to what they do. Einstein, in a famous 1935 collaboration ("Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality be Considered Complete?", Physical Review 47), tried to hold off this final revolution, saying in effect "I know enough about the fundamental structure of the world to be certain that some things cannot happen." Experiments have revealed that those very things do happen, that the state of one particle is provably dependent on whether a measurement is performed on a distant second particle, from which no signal could have radiated. But a new and opposite tactic permits some physicists to embrace this or any other seeming impossibility without admitting the need for any philosophic re-thinking of the way things are. Listen to these words of Richard Feynman: "We always have had a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that quantum physics represents. At least I do, because I'm an old enough man that I haven't got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me...you know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there's no real problem." (quoted by N. David Mermin in The Great Ideas Today, 1988, p. 52) So if the discoveries of quantum physics make you feel an urgent need· to re-examine the presuppositions of physics, just repress that feeling for a generation or two, and it will go away. Perhaps more than any other reason for resisting opening physics to philosophic examination, there is the plain fact that there is no need for it to do anything differently. Whatever happens can be described mathematically, and new discoveries are readily incorporated into some mathematical scheme, and then predicted. Technology aQ.vances no less �16 rapidly in areas in which the explanatory ground has been cut from under our feet, than in those in which its workings are intelligible. But the new physics arose out of a desire to know, and has undeniably become a highly questionable kind of knowing. Indeed, the very fact that its picture of the world can collapse while leaving its mathematical description and practical applications intact is a powerful stimulus to wonder. While wishing physics well in all its dealings, some of us may simply want to understand what it is and what it isn't. But we cannot see how its various strands have separated without understanding what it was to begin with, so again we are thrown back to the choices by which it came into being, and thus in turn to the picture of the world that it rejected. From this standpoint, though, that is more than a quest to uncover something past and superseded. It entails the risk of being convinced that the original decisions of the seventeenth century physicists were not all worthy of our own acceptance. It is possible that parts of Aristotle's understanding of the world might serve to heal our own dilemmas and confusions. The things that are Where should an understanding of the things around us begin? It might seem that there are plain facts that could serve as uncontroversial starting points. What are some of the plainest ones? The stars circle us at night, the sun by day. Rocks fall to earth, but flames leap toward the sky. Bodies that are thrown or pushed slow down continually until they stop moving. Animals and plants belong to distinct kinds, which they preserve from generation to generation. The visible whole is a sphere, with the earth motionless at its center. These are facts of experience, so obvious that the only way to be unaware of them is by not paying attention. If you �17 disbelieve any of them it is not because of observation, but because you were persuaded not to trust your senses. No physics begins by looking at the things it studies; those things must always be assigned to some larger context in which they can be interpreted. Aristotle states this in the first sentence of his Physics by saying that we do not know anything until we know its causes. Nothing stands on its own, without connections, and no event happens in isolation; there must be some comprehensive order of things in which things are what they are and do what they do. Physics seeks to understand only a part of this whole, but it cannot begin to do so without some picture of the whole. But it has been noted earlier that none of Aristotle's inquiries begins with the knowledge that most governs the things it studies. We never start where the truth of things starts, but must find our way there. That means that we cannot dispense with some preliminary picture of things, though we must be ready to modify it as the inquiry proceeds. What is Aristotle's preliminary picture of the whole of things? It is one that permits the plainest facts of experience to be just the way they appear to us. We live at the center of a spherical cosmos as one species of living thing among many, in a world in which some motions are natural and some forced, but all require causes actively at work, and cease when those causes cease to act. The natural motions are those by which animals and . plants live and renew their kinds, the stars circle in unchanging orbits, and the parts of the cosmos-earth, water, air, and fire-are transformed into one another by heat and cold, move to their proper places up or down, and maintain an ever-renewing equilibrium. This picture is confirmed and fleshed out by Aristotle's inquiries in writings other than the Physics, but since Aristotle never writes "scientifically," that is deductively, there is no �18 necessary or right order in which they should be read. All those inquiries stand in a mutual relation of enriching and casting light upon one another, and the Physics is in an especially close relation with the Metaphysics. It is not only a picture of the whole that is assumed in the Physics, but also a comprehensive understanding of the way things are. In the Metaphysics, this latter is not assumed but arrived at by argument, through the sustained pursuit of the question, what is being? Since being is meant in many ways, Aristotle looks for the primary sense of it, being as such or in its own right, on which the other kinds of being are dependent. That primary sense of being is first identified as thinghood, then discovered to be the sort of being that belongs only to animals, plants, and the cosmos as a whole. For these pre-eminent beings, being is being-atwork, since each of them is a whole that maintains itself by its own activity. For any other sort of being, what it is for it to be is not only something less than that, but it is in every case dependent on and derived from those highest beings, as a quality, quantity, or action of one, a relation between two or more, a chance product of the interaction between two or more, or an artificial product deliberately made from materials borrowed from one or more of them. Life is not a strange by-product of things, but the source of things, and the non-living side of nature has being in a way strictly analogous to life: as an organized whole that maintains itself by continual activity. In the central books of the Metaphysics, Aristotle captures the heart of the meaning of being in a cluster of words and phrases that are the most powerlul expressions of his thinking. · In the usual translations-substance, essence, actuality, and actuality again-they not only fall flat but miss the central point: that the thinghood of a thing is �19 what it keeps on being in order to be at all, and must be a being-at-work so that it may achieve and sustain its being-at-work-staying-itself. Now the physics of our time adopts an understanding of being that is exactly opposite to that of Aristotle, in the principle of inertia. The primary beings are what they are passively, by being hard enough to resist all change, and do nothing but bump and move off blindly in straight lines. The picture of the world assumed by this physics is of atoms in a void, so there can be no cosmos, but only infinite emptiness, no life, but only accidental rearrangements of matter, and no activity at all, except for motion in space. This is ancient idea, that goes back long before Aristotle's time. Lucretius finds it appealing, as a doctrine that teaches us that, while there is little to hope for in life except freedom from pain, there is little to fear either, since a soul made of atoms will dissolve, but cannot suffer eternal torment. There are reasons of two other kinds that make this picture of things attractive to the new physics. First, it makes it unnecessary to look for causes. Just because everything is taken to be reducible to atoms and the void, every possible event is pre-explained. Mechanical necessity takes over as the only explanation of anything, so the labor of explanation is finished at one stroke. And second, this picture makes every attribute that belongs to anything, and every event that can happen, entirely describable by mathematics. The glory of the new physics is the power it gains from mathematics. The world that is present to the senses is set aside as "secondary," and the mathematical imagination takes over as our way of access to the true world behind the appearances. The only experience that is allowed to count is the controlled experiment1 designed in the imagination, with a limited array of possible outcomes that are all interpreted in advance. �20 From its beginnings, mathematical physics moves from success to success, but almost from the beginning its mechanistic picture of things fails. Newton begins his Principia with the assumption that all bodies are inert, but in the course of it shows that every body is the seat of a mysterious power of attraction. Is this simply a new discovery to be added to our picture of the world? Shall we say that there are atoms, void, and a force of gravitation? But the whole purpose of the new worldpicture was to avoid occult qualities. And where do we put this strange force of attraction? There is no intelligible way that inert matter can be conceived as causing an urge in some distant body. Shall we say that the force resides in a field? A field of what? The Principia shows that the spaces through which the planets move are void of matter. How can a point in empty nothing be the bearer of a quantity of energy? This new discovery can be described mathematically, but it does not fit into the world-picture that led to it, and cannot be understood as something added to it. Something similar happens with light, which is discovered by Maxwell to be describable as an electromagnetic wave. But a wave is a material conception: a disturbance in a string, or a body of water, or some such carrier, moves from one place to another while the parts of the body stay where they were. So when it is shown that a iight-bearing aether would need to have contradictory properties, electromagnetic radiation is left as a well-described wave motion taking place in nothing whatever. In the twentieth century, the mechanist picture underlying mathematical physics has broken down even more radically, in ways that have been mentioned above. Popularizations of physics usually tell us that the ideas of Newton and Maxwell failed when they were applied on an astronomic or atomic scale, but remain perfectly good approximations to �21 the phenomena of the middle-sized world. But in what sized world can matter be inert and not inert, and space empty and not empty? And the middle-sized world is characterized more than anything else by the presence of living things, which the atoms-and-void picture never had any hope of explaining, but only of explaining away. Shall we at least say, though, that we have learned that the world is not a cosmos? Let us listen to David Bohm: "The theory of relativity was the first significant indication in physics of the need to question the mechanist order... [I]t implied that no coherent concept of an independently existent particle is possible...The quantum theory presents, however, a much more serious challenge to this mechanist order... so that the entire universe has to be thought of as an unbroken whole. In this whole, each element that we can abstract in thought shows basic properties (wave or particle, etc.) that depend on its overall environment, in a way that is much more reminiscent of how the organs constituting living beings are related, than it is of how parts of a machine interact... [T]he basic concepts of relativity and quantum theory directly contradict each other... [W]hat they have basically in common...is undivided wholeness. Though each comes to such wholeness in a different way, it is clear that it is this to which they are both fundamentally pointing." (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark, 1983, pp. 173-6) According to Bohm, it is only prejudice and habit that keep the evidence of the wholeness of things from being taken seriously. The contrary view is not just an opinion, but one of those fundamental ways of looking, thinking, and interpreting that permit us to have opinions at all, and to decide what is and what isn't a fact. To abandon the ground beneath our feet feels like violence, especially when no new authority is at hand to assure us that there is somewhere else for us to land We t~nd to prefer to �22 live with unreconciled dualities. Descartes notoriously makes the relation of mind and body a "problem." Newton speaks in his General Scholium as though gravitation were incapable of explanation by physics, a supernatural element in the world. Leibniz speaks of two kingdoms, one of souls and one of bodies, as harmoniously superimposed (as in Monadology 79). Kant tells us that we are free, except insofar as our actions are part of the empirical world. We sometimes speak of biology as something unconnected with physics, as though what is at work in a tree or a cat is not nature in its most proper sense. We have had the habit so long that we consider it natural to regard ourselves, with our feeling, perception, and understanding, as an inexplicable eruption out of a nature that has nothing in common with us. Might it be possible to find a more coherent way to put together our experience? Perhaps it would be worthwhile to suspend, at least for a while, our notions of what can be and what it is for something to be, to try out some other way of looking. A non-mathematical physics The world as envisioned in Aristotle's Physics is more diverse than the · world described by mathematical physics, and we must accustom ourselves to a correspondingly richer vocabulary iil order to read it. Motion means one thing to us, but irreducibly many kinds of thing when Aristotle speaks of it, and the same is true of cause. We tend to use nature as an umbrella-word, a collective name for the sum of things, while Aristotle means it to apply to whatever governs the distinct pattern of activity of each kind of being. It would be possible to use different English words for these three ideas, to bring out what is distinctive in Aristotle's meanings, but here it seems best to keep the familiar words.and push their �23 limits beyond their prevalent current meanings. Nature, cause, and motion are the central topics of the Physics, and come to sight first as questions; it is important to see that Aristotle and the later mathematical physicists were ultimately asking about the same things. Nature is mathematized not as an interesting game, or to abandon a harder task in favor of an easier one, but in order that the truth of it may be found. In the Assayer, Galileo makes the famous claim that "this grand book, the universe, .. .is written in the language of mathematics." Later in the same book, in a discussion of heat, he explains why. "I suspect that people in general have a concept of this which is very remote from the truth. For they believe that heat is a real phenomenon, or property, or quality, which actually resides in the material by which we feel ourselves warmed ...Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated." But shapes, sizes, positions, numbers, and such things are not mere names, imposed on objects by the consciousness of the living creature, because "from these conditions, I cannot separate [a material or corporeal] substance by any stretch of my imagination." (Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Anchor, 1957, pp. 237-8, 274) The direct experience of the world has the taint of · subjectivity, but the mathematical imagination captures the object just as it is. Sadder but wiser physicists would no longer try to read themselves out of physics; they too are living creatures, interpreting the experience of a consciousness, with all the risk and uncertainty that accompanies such an �24 activity. But our use of language may betray our second thoughts, and pull us back to Galileo's point of view. What is motion? Do you think of something like a geometrical point changing position? What about a child moving into adolescence? Warmth moving into your limbs? Blossoms moving out of the buds on a tree? A ripening tomato, moving to a dark red? Are these other examples motions in only a metaphorical sense, while the first is correctly so called? Are the other examples really nothing but complex instances of the first, with small-scale changes of position adding up to large-scale illusions of qualitative change? For Aristotle, the differences among the kinds of motion determine the over-all structure of the Physics, but they first of all belong together as one kind of experience. The kinds of becoming correspond to the ways being belongs to anything, and being-somewhere is only one aspect of being. A thing can also be of a certain size, or of a certain sort or quality, and can undergo motion in these respects by coming to be of another size, or of a different quality, by some gradual transition. It can even undergo a motion with respect to its thinghood. One thinks first of birth and death, but eating displays the same kind of motion. A cow chomps grass, and it is no longer pa.rt of the life of a plant, and soon it is assimilated into the body of the cow. This is no mere change of quality, since no whole being persists through it to have first one, then some other quality belonging to it. Something persists, but first in one, then in another, kind of thinghood. In any encounter with the natural world, it is the kinds of change other than change of place that are most prominent and most productive of wonder. Mathematical physics must erase them all, and attempt to argue that they were never anything but deceptive appearances of something �25 else, changing in some other way. Why? Because those merely local changes of merely inert bodies can be described mathematically. But if the testimony of the senses has a claim to "objectivity," and to be taken seriously, that is at least equal to that of the mathematical imagination, then there is no necessity of such a reduction. And in fact the reduction of kinds of motion that is required is not just from four to one, but to less than one. Aristotle has considerable interest in change of place, but such a thing is possible only if there are places. Motion as mathematically conceived happens in space, and in space there are no places. Underneath the idea of motion that is prevalent today lurks this other idea, unexamined and taken on faith, that there is such a thing as space. Aristotle twice makes the argument that space, or empty extension, is an idea that results only from the mis-use of mathematics. It is the exact counter-argument to Galileo's claim that ordinary people project their nonmathematical ideas onto the world. Aristotle says that the mathematician separates in thought the extension that belongs to extended bodies. (This is sometimes called "abstraction," but the word Aristotle uses is the ordinary word for subtraction.) There is nothing wrong with this falsification of things, which makes it easier to study what has been isolated artificially, so long as one does not forget that the original falsification took place. But some people do just that, and read this extension, which they have subtracted from bodies, back into the world as though it were empty and somehow existed on its own, prior to bodies. Now, in the imagination, it is possible ~o examine this "space" and determine all sorts of things about it. It is of infinite extent, for example, and since it is entirely empty, no part of it can have any characteristic by which it could differ from any other part. If our impulse,. when thinking �26 about motion, is automatically to give it a mathematical image, that is because we have pre-supposed that the ultimate structure of the world is space. But this supposition is laden with consequences and ought not to be adopted blindly. Aristotle says that one of the reasons physics cannot be mathematical is that the mathematician abolishes motion. Physics is the study of beings that move, and motion is a rich and complex topic, but within the constraints of "space" every form of motion disappears, except for one which is diminished out of recognition. If it is in space that our examination begins, nature will be nowhere to be found (but will survive as a mere name) because space is, from the beginning, a de-natured realm. Conversely, without the imposition of the idea of space, it is possible for nature to be understood as part of the true constitution of things, because motion in all its variety can be present. But since motion is not reduced to the pre-explained realm of mathematics, it is necessary to understand what it is. Aristotle says that, so long as we are ignorant of motion, we are ignorant of nature as well. But how can one give a rational account of motion? To assign it to some other genus would seem to make it a species of non-motion. In fact, two of Aristotle's predecessors, Parmenides and Zeno, had argued that motion is completely illusory. Parmenides argued that any attempt to say that there is motion must drum that what is-not also is. And Zeno, in four famous paradoxes preserved by Aristotle, tried to show that any description of motion involves self-contradiction of some kind. It would seem that motion has to be accepted as a brute fact of experience, from which explanations can begin, but which cannot itself be explained But Aristotle, for the first and perhaps only time ever, did give motion a place not only in the world but in a rational account of the world, explaining it in terms of ideas that go deeper. The Parmenidean challenge �27 is met by Aristotle primarily in the Metaphysics, where he shows that being must be meant in more than one way. His response to Zeno's challenge spreads over the whole of the Physics, and is concentrated in his definition of motion. Aristotle defines motion in terms of potency and being-at-work. In the first book of the Physics there is a preliminary analysis of change that discovers the ultimate explanatory notions available to the inquiry to be form, material, and the deprivation of form. Material is described as that which, by its own nature, inherently yearns for and stretches out toward form. This should never be called matter, by which we mean something that stands on its own with a determinate set of properties (has weight, occupies space, preserves its state of motion in a straight line). What Aristotle means by material, on the contrary, is (1) not inert, (2) not necessarily tangible, (3) relative to its form, which may in tum be material for some other form, (4) not possessed of any definite properties, and (S) ultimately a purely "ideal" being, incapable of existing in separation, which would be rejected by any "materialist." Form, in turn, does not mean shape or arrangement, but some definite way of being-at-work. This is evident in Book II of the Physics, and arrived at by argument principally in VIII, 2 of the Metaphysics. Every being consists of material and form, that is, of an inner striving spilling over into an outward activity. Potency and being-at-work are the ways of being of material and form. The usual translations render potency as potentiality, which might suggest mere indeterminacy or logical possibility, which is never the sense in which Aristotle uses it. What is worse, though, is the rendering of being-at-work, and the stronger form of it used in the definition, being-at~ work-staying-itself, as actuality. This has some reference, by way of Latin, �28 to activity, but is a useless word that makes it completely impossible to get anything resembling Aristotle's meaning out of the definition. "The actuality of the potentiality as a potentiality" becomes a seventeenthcentury joke, the ultimate example of the destruction of healthy common sense by pretentious gobbledygook. Does it refer to the actuality that belonged to the potential thing before it changed? That's not a motion, but something that precedes one. Does it refer to the actuality that exactly corresponds to the pre-existent potentiality? That's not a motion either, but something left when the motion ends. Does it mean, though it would have to be tortured to give this sense, the gradual transformation of a potentiality into an actuality? That at least could refer to a motion, but only by saying that a motion is a certain kind of motion. Perhaps it means that motion is the actuality of a potentiality to be in motion. This is surely the silliest version of them all, but respected scholars have defended it with straight faces. An intelligent misinterpretation of the definition was put forward by Thomas Aquinas, who took it to mean that the special condition of a thing in motion is to be partly actual while partly potential, and directed toward greater actuality of that same potentiality. But this account would not distinguish motion from a state of balanced equilibrium, such as that of a rock caught in a hand, still straining downward but prevented from falling any further. The account is subject to this ambiguity because it focusses on an instantaneous condition, a snapshot of a thing in motion, which is what an actuality is, but by no means what a being-at-work is. What Aristotle said was that motion is the being-at-work-staying-itself of a potency, just as a potency. When an ongoing yearning and striving for form is not inner and latent, but present in the world just as itself, as a �29 yearning and striving, there is motion. That is because, when motion is present, the potency of some material has the very same structure that form has, forming the being as something holding-on in just that particular motion. This does not mean that every motion is the unfolding of some being into its mature form; every such unfolding can fall short, overshoot, encounter some obstacle, or interact in some incidental way with some other being. It does mean that no motion of any kind would take place if it were not for those potencies that emerge of their own accord from beings. Motion depends on the organization of beings into kinds, with inner natures that are always straining to spill into activity. Only this dynamic structure of being, with material straining toward form, and form staying at work upon material, makes room for motion that is not just an inexplicable departure from the way things are, but a necessary and · intrinsic part of the way things are. For example, consider the most uninteresting motion you can think of, say the falling of a pencil from the edge of a desk onto the floor. What is the potency that is at work, and to what being does it belong? The potency is not that of being at that spot on the floor, and the being that has it is not the pencil at all, since it is no genuine being. The potency at work here is that of earth to be down, or of the cosmos to sustain itSelf with earth at the center. No motive power belongs to the pencil as such, but it can move on its own because there is present in it a potency of earth, set free to be at work as itself when the obstacle of the desk is removed. And the motion is not defined by the position or state in which it happens to end up, but by the activity that governs its course; the former is an actuality, but is not a being-at-work. Just as Newton's laws give a set of rules for analyzing any motion, Aristotle's definition directs us in a different way to bring the �30 structure of any motion into focus: first, find the being, and then find the potency of it which the motion displays, or to which the particular motion is incidental. No motion, however random or incidental, gains entrance into the world except through the primary beings that constitute the world. Aristotle sometimes argues about a body A that moves from B to C. Our first impulse may be to let A be represented by a point, the motion by a line, and Band C by positions. But Aristotle always has in mind an A with some nature, and a motion that may be from one condition to another rather than one place to another. Even if a motion from place to place is in question, those places would not be neutral and indifferent positions, but regions of the cosmos, that might or might not be appropriate surroundings for body A. The argument might be about something like continuity, so general that the particular Band C need not be specified, but it makes all the difference in the world that they represent motion in its fullest sense, as spelled out in the definition. The mathematized sort of motion, that can be fully depicted on a blackboard, is vulnerable to the kinds of attack present in Zeno's paradoxes. Motion as Aristotle understands it, constituted by potency and being-at-work, deriving its wholeness and .· continuity from a deeper source, overcomes those paradoxes. (The particular arguments will be looked at in the commentaries on the text.) It is evident from this account of motion that material and form are understood as causes. The usual examples given for material and formal causes, an inert lump of bronze and a static blueprint, miss the point, that material meets form half-way, and form is always at work. And it is not just motions that they cause, but everything that endures. We tend to speak of causes as events that lead to other events, since that is the only �31 kind of causality that remains possible in a mathematically-reduced world, but Aristotle understands everything that is the case as resulting from causes, and every origin of responsibility as a cause. Something called the "efficient" cause has been grafted onto Aristotle's account; it means the proximate cause of motion, like the bumping of billiard balls. This is sometimes even used as a translation of one of Aristotle's four kinds of cause, but not correctly. Aristotle speaks of the external source of motion as one kind of cause, the flrst thing from which the motion proceeds. The incidental and intermediate links, that merely pass motions around without originating them, are not causes at all, except in a derivative sense. All of Aristotle's causes stem from beings, and are found not by looking backward in time, but upward in a chain of responsibility. There is a fourth kind of cause, in most cases the most important one of all, the final cause. This is often equated with purpose, but that is only one kind of final cause, and not the most general. A deliberate action of an intelligent being cannot be understood except in terms of its purpose, since · only in achieving that purpose does the action become complete. The claim that final causes belong to non-human nature becomes ludicrous if it is thought that something must in some analogous way have purposes. What Aristotle in fact means is that every natural being is··a whole, and every natural activity leads to or sustains that wholeness. His phrase for this kind of cause is "that for the sake of which" something does what it does or is what it is. Does rain fall for the sake of the crops that humans grow? No, but it does fall for the sake of the equilibrium of the cosmos, in which evaporation is counter-balanced by precipitation in a cycle of ever~ renewed wholeness. That wholeness provides a stable condition for the flourishing of plants and of humans, in lives and acts that come to �32 completion in their own ways. Aristotle's "teleology" is just his claim that nothing in nature is a fragment or a chance accumulation of parts. To grasp the final cause of anything is to see how it fits into the ultimate structure of things. But surely there are fragmentary things and chance combinations to be found around us. Aristotle finds it as strange that some thinkers deny chance altogether, as it is that others think chance governs everything. From Aristotle's standpoint, even chance always points back to that which acts for the sake of something, since it results from the interference of two or more such things. It therefore represents not an absence of final causes, but an over-abundance of them, a failure of final cause resulting from a conflict among final causes. Because such incidental interactions lead to innumerable unpredictable chance results, nature is not a realm of necessity, but neither is it a realm of randomness, since the forms of natural beings govern all that happens. Aristotle speaks of the patterns of nature as present not always but "for the most part." His way of understanding the causes of things does not need to do violence either to the stability or to the variability of the world, but affirms the unfailing newness-within-sameness that we observe in the return of the seasons and the generations of living things. It offers an example of a physics that interprets causality without recourse to mechanical necessity or mathematical law. Both the collision of billiard balls and the co-variation of the two sides of an algebraic equation are too random in their beginnings and too rigid in their consequences to . be adequate images of the natures we know. The shape of the inquiry �33 It has been mentioned above that all Aristotle's inquiries are dialectical. His writings have structures that are not rigid but organic, with parts that are whole in themselves, but arranged so that they build up larger wholes. In Book I of most of his works, he reviews what has been said by his predecessors, and here that is combined with a preliminary analysis of change, which concludes that it must always imply the presence of some material that can possess. or be deprived of form. This first analysis of everything changeable into form and material is then available as a starting point to approach any later question. Next comes the heart of the Physics, in Book II and the beginning of Book III, of which an account has been given in the last section of this introduction. It begins with a definition of nature that has all the characteristics Aristotle attributes in I, 1 to proper beginnings: it starts from what is familiar to us, is clear in its reference but unclear in its meaning, and takes its topic as a whole and in general, without separating out its parts or their particular instances. Since it defines nature as an inner cause of motion, the first task is to explore the meanings of cause and motion, not as words or logical classes, but through disciplined reflection on our experience. The result is a sharpened and deepened understanding of a way of encountering and interpreting the world. This is a more sustained use of the kind of analysis that took place in Book I, that dwells on a topic to unfold into clarity what was already present in an implicit and confused way. A second kind of analytic reasoning begins after motion has been defined, a successive examination of conditions presupposed by the presence of motion in the world. This occupies the rest of Books III and IV. Zeno had taught everyone that motion presupposes infinity, and Aristotle turns first to this. He finds a non-contradictory way to �34 understand the infinite divisibility of motion, but his conclusion that there is no infinite extended body is incomplete as it stands. It depends upon the claim that things have natural places, and so the topic of place must be e.xplored next. Place is understood as a relation to the parts of the cosmos, on but this topic in turn dependsLthe next, since the exclusive array of places in the world results from the impossibility of void. The e.xploration of the idea of void completes this sequence, since the arguments against it stand independently. But motion also entails time, to which Aristotle turns next, finding that it is not in fact a presupposition but a consequence of motion. Time is found to result from a comparison of motions to one another, that can only be carried out by a perceiving soul. Like place, time is not a preexisting container, and not graspable by the mathematical imagination. Each of them is an intimate relation amongs beings, intelligible only when the particularlity of this world is taken into account. The last four books of the Physics take up the kind of cause and the kind of motion that are least central in Book II. The formal, material, and final causes of a living thing are internal to it, and constitute its nature, and it has parents that are external sources of its motions of birth, development, and growth. But as Aristotle mentions at the end of II, 2, both other human beings and the sun beget a human being. All life is dependent upon conditions supplied by the cosmos, which seems to maintain itself primarily through cycles of local motion. Books V through VIII trace a complex argument up to the source of all change of place in the world. In its broadest outline, that argument is reminiscent of the structure of the Metaphysics. Though the Metaphysics is put together out of a large number of independent pieces, it has perhaps the clearest line of unifying structure of any of Aristotle's works. The meaning of being is �35 pursued through four most general senses, to an eight-fold array of kinds of non-incidental predications, to its primary sense of thinghood, to the source of thinghood as form, to the meaning of form as being-at-work, to the source of all being-at-work in the divine intellect. It thus culminates in the discovery of the primary being that is the source of all being, and gets there from the innocent question, which of the meanings of being is primary? A similar progressive narrowing of the meanings of motion takes place in the Physics. In Book III, motion was said to be of four kinds: change of thinghood, alteration of quality, increase and decrease, and change of place. In Book V it is argued that motion properly understood is from one contrary to another, passing through intermediate states or conditions. But coming-into-being and destruction should be understood strictly as changes not to a contrary but to a contradictory condition, abrupt changes that have no intermediate conditions to pass through. Thus in a strict sense there are only three kinds of motion. But in Book VI it is argued that there is a certain discontinuity in every qualitative change. If something black turns white, it goes through a spectrum of intermediate shades, but it can be regarded as still being black until sometime in the course of the motion. In a change of quantity or place·; once the thing is in motion it has departed from its initial condition, however much one might try to divide the beginning of the motion. So in the still stricter sense of being unqualifiedly continuous, there are only two kinds of motion. Finally, it is pointed out in Book VII that quantitative change must be caused by something that comes to be present where the changing thing is, so that it depends always upon a change of place prior to it, and it is argued in Book VIII that change of place is the primary kind of motion in �36 every sense in which anything can be primary. The analysis goes one more step, to the primary motion within the primary kind, which is circular rotation. This is the most continuous of motions, so much so that it alone can be considered a simply unchanging motion. Though the definition of motion in Book III applies to all motions, its application is most straightforward in the case of those motions most opposed to the primary kind, those that involve the greatest amount of change. Birth, development, and growth obviously unfold out of potencies that are present beforehand, and these changes point most directly to the inner natures of things that operate as formal, final, and material causes. But at the opposite extreme of the spectrum of change there is changeless circular motion. Because it moves without changing, it can be in contact with a completely unvarying cause. The last step of the inquiry in the Physics is the uncovering of a motionless first mover, acting on the cosmos at its outermost sphere. It is a source of local motion that not only holds the cosmos together, but contributes to the conditions of life by descending through the lower spheres, including that of sun, to maintain the stable alternation of the seasons. Nature is thus seen as twofold, originating in sources of two kinds, the inner natures of living things and the cause holding together the cosmos as the outer condition of iife. This is reflected in a bi-polar relation of motion and change, in which the ascending scale of motions· (leading to the first external mover), is also the descending scale of changes (starting from the coming-into-being of new beings). The twodirectionality of the scale is all-important. Aristotle does not reduce change to change of place, but traces it back, along one line of causes. But the primacy of local motion in the cosmos does not abolish the primacy of the opposite kind of change, spilling over out of potency, that guarantees �37 that even changes of place will be wholes, not vulnerable to the attacks of Zeno. The Physics has a double conclusion, displaying the continuity rooted in potency as present in the limit of mere change of place, as a final and deepest refutation of Zeno, which becomes one of the last steps in the argument that uncovers the motionless cause of motion. Acknowledgements The interpretation presented here has been stewing for almost thirty years, since my first college teacher, Robert Bart, opened my eyes to Aristotle's definition of motion in particular, and to the whole project of looking beneath and behind the presuppositions of modern science. Jacob Klein's "Introduction to Aristotle" is printed here as an appendix to help those who might wish to read further in Aristotle's writings; it was my first guide on that journey. Klein had heard Martin Heidegger lecture on Aristotle in the 1930s. This translation owes much to Heidegger's example of the possibility of reading Aristotle directly, not through the language of either the Latin tradition or the science of recent centuries. Heidegger suffers in translation almost as much as Aristotle does, but a good English version of his lectures on Book II, Chapter 1 of the Physics is cited earlier in this introduction. He is too ready to see form as presence-at-hand, uninvolved in the joining of things and emptying of one thing into another, and he is much too ready to talk about "the Greek idea of (whatever)," when discussing an insight that may have been achieved by only one or two thinkers, but as an antidote to the deadening effects of most commentary on Aristotle he is hard to beat. This translation was a gleam in my eye for about fifteen years, until it was made possible by the generosity of St. John's College, the National �38 Endowment for the Humanities, the Beneficial Corporation, and the Hodson Trust. Students and colleagues at St. john's have read drafts of it in classes and study groups. I am grateful for their conversation, and above all for encouragement given to me in 'this work, shortly before his death, by J. Winfree Smith. Whatever faults this translation may have, it had the merit of giving delight to that good man. The marginal page numbers, with their a and b divisions, are from the standard two-column Bekker edition. The line numbers between them match up with the lines of the Oxford Classical Text. Ross's text as given there is followed with a few departures into his notes of variant readings; in the first paragraph of V, 3, for example, Ross has needlessly scrambled the text, and the translation follows the manuscripts in everything but the placement of one sentence. The old Oxford translation by Hardie and Gaye, outside of Aristotle's central vocabulary, was an invaluable aid to the meaning of many words and phrases, and Ross's commentary was the source of a number of references. Ordinary parentheses in the text contain Aristotle's own parenthetical remarks; square brackets are used occasionally for my own insertions, when these go beyond repeating an antecedent of a pronoun. In one instance (at the end of IV, 8), curly brackets are used around a passage that is not in th·e early manuscripts but appears in some late sources. The text is interspersed with running commentary, and preceded by an extensive glossary, intended in part as a supplement to this introduction. This translation is not intended to stand in place of Aristotle's inquiry in pursuit of nature, but to draw you closer to it. If what you find in the translation makes you want to go further, you should consider reading Aristotle's own Greek. His grammar is elementary, and · his style is so �39 repetitious that it doesn't take long to catch on to; the only difficulty in reading him is the concentration required to keep his pronouns straight. But if that route does not appeal to you, it is still possible to join with Aristotle just by doing your own thinking about the questions he raises, in the light of the broadened and deepened array of possibilities he leads us to see. Annapolis, Maryland May, 1993 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 39 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 Introduction: Philosophic Writing Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983-08-06 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 6, 1983 by Joe Sachs s part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. Mr. Sachs is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is a draft of his introduction to his translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics. His talk compares and contrasts the writings of Plato and Aristotle and in particular the differences and similarities between the Platonic Dialogues and Aristotle's corpus. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Sachs 1983-08-06 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Philosophy Aristotle Plato Written communication Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sachs, Joe, 1946- Graduate Institute Summer lecture series Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b098fa77fe286f019d9fe50f1154d82b.pdf 3198ca38ab6c6c57142b746b6d1cf974 PDF Text Text 8 .~ i \ \ ~ : ST JoHN's CoLLEGE ANNAPOLIS. MARYLAND 21404 FouNDED 16% AS KING WtLllAM·s ScHOOL Friday Night Events: June 7 - Lecture: Summer 1985 Meno's Paradox and the Zetetic Circle Mr. Jon Lenkowski 8:15 p.m. in the King William Room June 14- Lecture: What Does-counting Presuppose? Mr. Samuel Kutler 8:15 p.m. in the King William Room June 21 -_All College Seminar: Prometheus Bound 8:00 p.m. - Rooms posted June 28- Lecture: on Aristotle's Ethics and Politics Mr. Laurence Berns 8:15 p.m. in the King William Room July 5 Mr. Douglas Allanbrook - Concert: (Program to be announced) 8:15 p.m. F.S.K. Backstage July 12 -Lecture: On Plato's Timaeus Mr. Peter Kalkavage 8:15 p.m. in the King William Room July 19 - Lecture: On Sophocles' Antigone Miss Janet Dougherty 8:15 p.m. in the King William Room July 26 -Lecture: Aristotle's Metaphysics VII, 17 Mr. Stewart Umphrey 8:15 p.m. in the King William Room August 2 - Lecture: On Lavoisier Mr. Chester Burke 8:15 p.m. in the King William Room TELEPHONE 'JOI- 263-2371 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Friday Night Events: Summer 1985 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1985, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 1985 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lenkowski, Jon Kutler, Samuel Berns, Laurence, 1928- Allanbrook, Douglas Kalkavage, Peter Dougherty, Janet Umphrey, Stewart, 1942- Burke, Chester Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/027bbd6fd80fc071c5878d01314c05bc.pdf 46c46d082b5ff675b2c287fa604c7191 PDF Text Text .,, On Finisfiing PCato's Symposium --] onatfian Tuck Though my title is "On Finishing Plato's Symposium," it might better be called "On Not Finishing Plato's Symposium"--(with "on" meaning both "after" and "about")-- since I'm going to claim that it is a particularly difficult book to finish. This is to say not onlythat the issues it raises are perennially perplexing, but also that the work itself is an open structure of such a kind that it is hard to see what sort of closure or resolution its ending could supply. I want mostly to share with you some of my confusions about this. As a beginning, perhaps I can sneak up on the ending of the Symposium by telling you a few things about the ending of another book which is less familiar to you, but perhaps almost as wonderful. That book is Il Libra del Cortegiano, The Book of the Courtier, written in about 1528 by a man named Baldassare Castiglione. It is a dialogue, set in the court of Urbino· at a time when that small Italian city-state was in full flower. The court we see-~· and we may hope that there is some truth in the picture-- is a witty, genteel gathering of noblemen and ladies, courtiers and men of letters, presided over with gentle authority by the Duchess Elisabetta of Urbino. As a recreation after supper, it is proposed that those present speak in turn of the qualities that a perfect courtier must have. As it turns out, that endeavor extends over four evenings and a great variety of topics. Much of the courtier's perfection is not specific to his social role as we might narrowly conceive of it; he must have many of the virtues of the ideal Prince, or even of the ideal man; he must be a man for all seasons or, as the cliche goes, a "Renaissance Man." Certainly he must be educated in all the activities that are helpful to soldiers and statesmen: both the "gymnastic" arts like riding, hunting and swordsmanship, and the "musical" studies of literature, singing, dancing, and graceful conversation. He must possess all the natural virtues and all the acquired graces of civility. These requirements may seem rather general, but the various speakers often enter into minute details, such as whether the Courtier should pronounce certain words in a Tuscan dialect, or which musical instruments he should play. (The wind instruments will make his face look ugly.) The conversation lingers, for example, on the subject of what sort of jokes a Courtier should tell-- and we are treated to the telling, with gusto, of many specimens of the sort he should not tell! Two principles are paramount: First, this perfect Courtier-- or Court Lady, for she too receives a lengthy scrutiny-- must never seem to expend effort in the graceful mastery of all the appropriate activities. The Courtier is himself a work of art, as it were, and the best thing for him is to use art in order to conceal its use: to cultivate a kind of nonchalance, a sprezzatura or casual disdain, a leisured equilibrium that �[Tuck--Symposium- p.2] distinguishes the Courtier's skill from the vulgar strivings of the professional. The second principle is that the Courtier should be a lover. Or should he? For the various participants disagree. It is well into the fourth night of conversation, and Signor Ottaviano Fregoso has just told eloquently of what virtuous counsel a Courtier must give to his prince. But if he is to be thus wise and mature of judgment, it almost seems that our Courtier must be an old man, and learned-- even a philosopher like Aristotle or Plato. And if so, than it is not fitting or dignified for him to be in love. Indeed the freedom from love's .compulsion is not only an advantage but a blessing. At this point, Pietro Bembo speaks up-- Bembo, the shrewd and brilliant Venetian humanist, certainly the most learned· person present. Bembo undertakes to show that old men can and should be lovers, but first he must say what love itself is; The speech which ensues is probably the most famous and popular exposition of Italian Neoplatonism, springing from the Florentine Academy of Marsilio Ficino, the most erudite and subtle of all commentators on Plato's Symposium. Love, says Bembo, is a desire for beauty. But the beautiful and the good are necessarily one, born of God and transcending the particular attachment to the physical beauties of individuals. Indeed the best lover will mount the steps of a ladder, from the beauties of sense to those of the intellect, from the many to the one, the true angelic beauty-- Beauty Itself-- passing beyond what is rationally expressible and merging finally into the divine forever. Having spoken thus far with such vehemence that he seemed almost transported and beside himself, Bembo remained silent and still, keeping his eyes turned toward heaven, as if in a daze; when signora Emilia, who with the others had been listening to his discourse most attentively, plucked him by the hem of his robe and, shaking him a little, said: "Take care, messer Pietro, that with these thoughts your soul, too, does not forsake your body. 11 "Madam, 11 replied messer Pietro, "that would not be the first miracle Love has wrought in me. " Then the Duchess and all the others began urging Bembo once more to go on with his discourse: and everyone seemed almost to feel in his mind a certain spark of the divine love that had inspired the speaker, and all wished to hear more; but Bembo added: "Gentlemen, I have uttered what the holy frenzy of love dictated to me at the moment. But now that it seems to inspire me no longer, I should not know what to say: and I think that Love is not willing that its secrets be revealed any further, or that the Courtier should pass beyond that rung of the ladder to which he has been willing to have me show him; therefore it is perhaps not permitted to speak further of this matter." [The Book of the Courtier, tr. Charles Singleton, p. 357 .] �[Tuck- Symposium- p.3] At this point we get a little bit-~ a ~ little bit-- of comic byplay between the feminist and the misogynist of the group: Can women rise to this same height in their loving: The Duchess intervenes: Signor Gasparo was on the point of replying, but the Duchess sai<;l: "Let messer Pietro Bembo be the judge of that, and let us abide by his decision whether or not women are as capable of divine love as men. But, as the dispute between you might be too long, it will be well to postpone it until tomorrow." · ' "Nay, until this evening," said messer Cesare Gonzaga. "How, this evening?" said the Duchess. Mes~er Cesare replied: "Because it is already day"; and he showed her the 1ight that was beginning to come in through the cracks at the windows. Then everyone rose to his feet in great surprise because it did not seem that the discussion had lasted longer than usual; but because it was begun much later, and, because of its delightfulness, it haci so beguiled the company that they had taken no notice of the passing of the hours; nor was there anyone who felt the heaviness of sleep upon his eyes, which happens almost always when we stay up beyond the accustomed bedtime hour. Then the windows were opened on the side of the palace that looks toward the lofty peak of Mount Catria, where they saw that a beautiful rosy dawn had already come into the east, and that all the stars had disappeared except the sweet mistress of the heaven of Venus that holds the border between night and day; from which a soft breeze seemed to come that filled the air with a brisk coolness and began to awaken sweet concerts of joyous birds in the murmuring forests of the nearby hills. [p.359] And there, in effect, the dialogue leaves us. Bembo's discourse takes only about twenty pages in a hook of over three hundred; but all the other speeches, no matter how valuable and memorable in themselves, must seem to us now to be somehow subsumed into Bembo' s vision of the ladder of love. This is Castiglione' s Symposium, and his imitative homage to Plato tells us quite plainly how he reads the older book. But as I shall argue, Castiglione is not alone. When we turn to Plato's Symposium, we can see a significant formal difference. Socrates' and Diotima's speech in praise of love ends loftily at, or near, the top rung of the ladder of love, where the true best lover may look upon Beauty itself, pure, unmixed, "not infected with human flesh and colors and much other mortal nonsense"; where he may beget true arete and win the friendship of the god. The speech ends here, but there still remains folly one-fifth of the dialogue called Symposium-- and this, I think, demands �[Tuck- Symposium- p.4] an explanation. Plato's dialogues may or may not end in philosophic irresolution, but we have ample evidence that Plato is capable of giving them a powerful sense of rhetorical closure-- Take for example the endings of the Republic and the Phaedo. Clearly the Symposium ends as it does, not through some authorial inadvertence, but by choice. This is to say that by not ending with Socrates' speech, the dialogue deliberately passes up an opportunity for the kind of sublimity and powerful generality that we saw at the end of The Book of the Courtier. Let's consider what the implication would be if the Symposium did end with Socrates' speech. How might the denouement of the dialogue read? The other guests, suitably dazzled, fall sil~nt for a brief space as Socrates finishes speaking. Perhaps the ardent, boyish Agathon cannot restrain himself longer: He bursts out in enthusiastic praise of the poem that Socrates has made; at least, that is what he calls. it, and Socrates does not demur. Aristophanes contributes a brief quip to release tension, perhaps a jab at his usual butt, the doctor Eryximachus, who points out in his reply that the dawn is breaking; they . have talked all night. Wonder seizes the participants, and as the sun, visible emblem of the Good, pours its effluence through the drawn-back curtains, the camera moves back and the music comes up. We, the audience, are left as privileged observers of a kosmos whose orderliness provides the ground and the validation of Socrates' discourse. The effect of such a conclusion would be clear: We would feel strongly--or perhaps I should say even more strongly, since many readers already feel this way-- that Socrates' version of love is the true one, the valuable core of meaning that the dialogue seeks to commend to us. And if so, what part would we say that the other speeches play? Surely they are not merely ornamental, or "dramatic foils," whatever that phrase might mean. Rather they must somehow be proleptic--dramatic foreshadowings, visions through a glass darkly of the truth that Socrates brings to light. This reading would give a very ·satisfying structural analogue, in the dialogue's form, to the ladder of progressively increasing vision and fulfillment that is, in this reading, the central matter of the dialogue. As putative evidence in favor of this way of reading, we do in fact find very many points of correspondence between each of the five preceding speeches and the speech of Socrates. Let me enumerate a few. Phaedrus says that Love is the cause of our greatest human benefits, a motive for noble behavior and a means to the favor of the gods. Socrates would surely agree with this formulation, as far as it goes. In the next speech, Pausanias appears, at least, to be distinguishing between the shameful, "popular" love he calls paiderastia --pederasty, love of young boys-- and the nobler, "heavenly" love he associates with philosophia and other pursuits of excellence. He also gives a version of Diotima's myth of Pores and Penia: The rich resources of the older, wiser lover supply thepoverty of the youthful beloved, who has only his beauty to offer. What we may think of the real motives or the larger purpose of Pausanias is quite another question; I only �[Tuck- Symposium- p .5] want to suggest that dramatically, he too is foreshadowing S~crates after a fashion, introducing themes and images that Socrates will employ later. The case of Eryximachus is clearer. In treating eros as a kind of harmony by which the cosmos is ordered, he generalizes it into a physical principie that can be used to describe any motion toward an object or goal. Socrates, similarly, would have us think that the word "love" is only very partially applied to the romantic relationship between two people. Just as the word "poetry" should be used to denote any act of making or generation, so should the word "love" point to the common activity of pursuing a goal, some real or apparent good which awakens desire. I shall presently argue that the speech of Aristophanes is in its tendency the most hostile to the cl~ims of Socr~tes and Diotima; yet even here we can find a few points of contact. Aristophanes pictures each of us as a half-person, left incomplete by a past act of rebellion against the gods. This is a forceful way of showing that love is of what one lacks, just as Socrates also emphasizes. In another dialogue perhaps we could imagine Socrates using something like Aristophanes' myth of the half-human as an image of our relation to the eide: We find ourselves born incomplete-- That which is most of value to us and which will make us happy is not within us but elsewhere. But we have a memory of it-- perhaps an ancestral memory, or one from a former lifetime-- which may serve to bring us to what we seek. The difference, of course, is that the thing sought for is not, in Socrates' account, another person. The tragic poet Agathon's rhapsodic tribute to love begins with a distinction: Others have spoken of the acts and benefactions of the love-god; he, Agathon, will first address what sort of being the god is. Here is a conspicuous point of correspondence with the discourse of Socrates, 'Yho congratulates Agathon on these opening words at the start of his own devastating cross-examination. Apart from their beginnings, Agathon and Socrates have other common ground. Agathon claims that Eros is a poet himself and the cause of poetry in others: Everyone, touched by love, becomes poetic, even if unmusical before. He goes on to say: And indeed, who will deny that the making [poiesis] of all living things is Love's wisdom, by which all creatures are begotten and come to be? Again, do we not know that in the workmanship of the arts [technai], the man whose teacher this god is becomes well reputed and famous, while the man whom Eros does not touch is obscure? (197A) Agathon appeals here to the generalized notion of "poetry," just as Eryximachus generalized "love." Socrates agrees with both men, though he goes beyond either of them in broadening both worqs and linking them together. Perhaps here, if anywhere, �[Tuck- Symposium- p.6] we could look for a truce in the war between Philosophy and Poetry that is one of the implicit themes of the dialogue. But of this, more later. So far we've seen that each of the first five speeches does proleptically participate, to use a pregnant word, in the larger whole that is Diotima' s presentation by way of Socrates. But of course a foreshadowing is still shadowy, and the points of similarity I've enumerated give only an inkling of what is to come. In my thought experiment, the speech of Socrates concluded the dialogue by commendin'g to ~s a true and universal account of a hierarchy of value in human activities. By means of love we engage in these different activities, since love in its broadest sense steers every action; but more importantly we learn by means of love to redirect our actions. We learn by loving; but what we learn is to love learning to love, until we apprehend the last best object of our love and, by apprehending, attain it. The first five accounts fall short of recognizing this truth because they are partial, in two senses of the word. They do not include enough, but also they are not impartial-- Each speaker is limited by his narrower vision. For example, each of the five shows a kind of guild solidarity, a commitment to other sophists, lawyers, doctors, comedians or tragedians. Each speaker is also characterized-some of them rather fully-- so that we get a vivid sense of the fussy, humorless Eryximachus or the shrewd sensualist Pausanias. Their several apprehensions of love are tainted by the merely personal; but the theme of Socrates' discourse is that the merely personal is exactly what we must get beyond. Recall this exchange: Agathon says," I cannot refute you, Socrates; let it be so." And Socrates replies, "It is the truth, dear Agathon, that you cannot refute; it is no great matter to refute Socrates." Implicitly Socrates claims a higher validation for his assertions, higher than his personal authority or even the authority of the mysterious Diotima, who as her significant name implies is probably not a person at all. Socrates characterizes the love of a single person or a single activity as a "mean, petty enslavement." Nor is he limited by any guild loyalty to his "trade" of philosophy, for philosophy is not a trade at all. Rather it is the paradigmatic human activity. It is true that some of the earlier speakers, especially Eryximachus and Agathon, seem to make analogous claims for their own trades; but in our hypothetical dialogue Socrates preempts their titles precisely ~ coming last. He. leads us to a height from which we may survey the ground we have traversed; and like Dante in Paradise we look back down on this vile threshing-floor, the earth, and smile in gentle contempt. Thus if we imagine a Symposium which ends as Castiglione's book does, the action of the whole dialogue is in the direction of transcending what is merely personal. The earlier speeches, the incidental comic episodes of the drinking party itself, the special radiant glamor of the occasion even as recounted many years later-- All these are inklings, fruitful contrasts that prepare us for our eventual enlightenment. One particular incident from the earlier part of the dialogue now assumes added importance: �[Tuck- Symposium- p.7] Aristodemus arrives at Agathon's house to find that he has left his companion Socrates behind. For Socrates has withdrawn into a neighboring porch and stands there, unwilling to go inside eveff at the invitation of Agathon' s servant. (In the completed dialogue which we have, of course, Alcibiades recounts· a similar occasion during the campaign to Potidaea.) This kind of abstractedness suggests Socrates' peculiar relation to the corporeal world. We may plausibly assume that in such fits of ecstasy-- ekstasis, 11 standing outside 11 himself--Socrates contemplates the higher objects of human love. From such a height there is a marked descent into the pleasantries of the drinking party. Socrates' ironic disclaimers of wisdom must seem very disingenuous when he hopes to be filled, like an empty vessel, with Agathon' s wisdom-- which he says is much brighter and more potef\t than his own, paltry and wavering as a dream. In fact the Socrates who delivers the ext~nded discourse is more assertive than questioning, and the form of his speech suggests that his wisdom can be transmitted whole, by contact, as a teaching or a religious initiation. It does not waver, though we may waver before it. Only in his brief but trenchant examination of Agathon does Socrates here resemble the "torpedo fish" of many other dialogues. Otherwise, emulating his five predecessors, he discards the treacherous fluidity of conversation and gives a lengthy exposition, which perhaps his hearers can simply assimilate from him as he did from Diotima. The dialogue I've been describing is not the one that Plato wrote, but perhaps the description was worth the effort; for I claim that this non-existent dialogue is nonetheless present as a rejected possibility within the work we do have. Or to put it more strongly, the dialogue that ends with Socrates' speech is precisely and conspicuously the one that Plato avoided writing. Instead he jostles us abruptly from the sublime to the ridiculous, as the drunken Alcibiades bursts into the party. (I intend to suggest later that this characterization, "from the sublime to the ridiculous," may be quite misleading. But for the moment, let it stand.) In a number of ways, Alcibiades' arrival signals the exact reversal of the norms of the little ·kosmos over which Socrates had been effectively presiding at the time of the interruption. The initial decision to send away the flute girl is the first to be reversed; the notes of another flute girl are he.ard, along with other noises of revelry. Next to go is the agreement to drink only moderately, and then Alcibiades disarranges the seating order to which our attention was so pointedly called by Socrates when he first came in. By sitting down between Socrates and Agathon, Alcibiades seems to disrupt a· pedagogical relationship of great significance in the foregoing part of the dialogue. Agathon was celebrating the victory of his tragedy, but in this evening's contest the prize has gone to Socrates. But we cannot simply regard Socrates' victory as a rejection of Agathon and of the claims he makes for eros and poetry. After taking great pains to interrogate Agathon about these claims, Socrates pointedly casts himself in the role of �[Tuck- Symposium- p.8] Agathon, putting the young tragedian's erstwhile errors into his own youthful mouth as he describes his own correction at the hands of Diotima. We might suppose that the education of Agathon was the purpose that called Socrates to descend from his philosophic ecstasy into the shadow world of the drinking party. This purpose Alcibiades seems to frustrate, symbolically by interposing himself between the younger man and the older, but more importantly by shifting the conversation back into the· realm of the · personal. What was once the praise of love becomes the praise of the praisers, first Socrates but then conceivably others, as we gather from the by-play that follows Alcibiades' speech. Although Socrates displays embarrassment for good and obvious reasons, his unwillingness to be praised may also bespeak a concern for Agathon's welfare: He has just been at pains to tell Agathon that it is the truth, not Socrates, that cannot be refuted. It is a form of slavery for the· student to depend upon that particular teacher from whom, or in whose presence, he receives enlightenment. How do we as readers cope with the eruption of Alcibiades into the ordered sublimity of Socrates' school of love? We might think that the pra~se of Socrates which follows, though broadly ironic at times, gives added authority to his teaching. Even Alcibiades, beautiful, brilliant and dissolute, is forced to pay a kind of homage to the teacher. It was not an accident that Diotima's portrait of Eros resembles Socrates himself in Alcibiades' portrayal; both these descriptions contribute to the raising of Socrates to a mythic status. According to this way of reading, then, the strategy of the dialogue is to glamorize the man above all, and his teaching as a consequence. In fact, the whole occasion is made illustrious by its remoteness in times from the act of recounting it. There were giants in the earth in those days, before Agathon left town for good,' before the treason of Alcibiades and the disasters in Sicily, back when Athens could still regard itself with some justification as the school of Hellas. And Socrates is the schoolmaster. As Alcibiades makes clear, he loves beauty without extravagance and wisdom without softness, in the words of Pericles; and he can even drink wine, lots of it, without inebriation. He is a man for all seasons; his claim of expertise on the subject of eros becomes , as eros is generalized, a justified claim of omnicompetence. And we, who survive in these degenerate days, are left to wonder at him. But we should be disquieted by this reading, if we hope by the heroic apotheosis of Socrates to give greater weight and authority to the teaching he expounds. Even leaving aside for a minute that teaching's argument against arguments from authority, if we are to give credence to what is said because of the authoritative stature of the man who says it, ought we not to worry that this praise of Socrates comes out of Alcibiades' mouth? And isn't it alarming that he seems at times to have a very crude if not actually mistaken sense of who Socrates is? We will be forced to say that Alcibiades spoke better than he knew, while Socrates, also ironically, minimized his own powers unjustly in referring his �[Tuck- Symposium- p.9] own teachings to the authority of some fictive Diotima. And again, if we depend at all on the figure of Socrates to validate the teaching of Socrates, th~t teaching is vitiated: we are in the realm of the personal, and the doctrine that lived by the personal power of the man Socrates may also die with him. This same dilemma goes far toward making the Phaedo one of the most problematic of the Platonic dialogues. ·To the extent that the narrative resembles a saint's life, the very reasons for canonization are paradoxically called into question. Let's entertain, for a moment, another possible response to the speech of Alcibiades. Instead of supporting the Socratic teaching about love, perhaps Alcibiades in effect undercuts it. Superficially he can do this just by being who he is: Alcibiades, the paradigm of the· corrupted youth, the alleged desecrator of sacred images, future turncoat, a· byword for license and extravagance. Furthermore, his view of Socrates is complex and disquieting, planting seeds of distrust and cynicism in us. Lavish but barbed praise is mingled with implications that Socrates has occult powers of which we should beware. Even if this is no more than cheerful irreverence, it effectively breaks the former mood of high philosophic transport. Socrates is an object of wonder, but also a slightly grotesque figure of comedy. Along the same lines we get a first-hand view of Alcibiades' effect on the tone of the gathering-- Doesn't it presage the fate of all such attempts at transcendence, possibly including the fall of Athens itself? If we are radical Platonists and humorless readers, Alcibiades is an unwelcome irritant; because we are virtuous there shall be no cakes and ale. But even if we enjoy the revelry that he brings, our more measured evaluation might be that there has been a fall from grace somehow-- or more seriously yet, that the seriousness of the gathering was suspect from the start. Were these ribald boozers ever worthy of Socrates and his invitation to raise our sights, out of the muck of corporeality? And what about us-- If we've been chuckling at Alcibiades all the while, mustn't we now pass judgment on ourselves? Perhaps no one is ready for the message of Socrates, or at least the later, more ethereal part of it. Or perhaps the message itself is thereby flawed. The contrast between the sublimity of Socrates' discourse and the festive ribaldry of Alcibiades poses these problems for our sympathies because it juxtaposes high and low, noble and base, beautiful and grotesque, general and particular, .speculative and sensual. We can see these same dualisms at work within Alcibiades' account of the man Socrates. As a Silenus he is base and repellent on the outside but full of precious and attractive things on the inside. The other eikon, of Marsyas the satyr, reverses this relationship: The siren-like piping of Socrates is superficially alluring but actually a call to a high and uncomfortable, even forbidding, way ofliving. There is a similar paradox in Alcibiades' portrayal of Socrates as erotic. The account of the younger man's attempted seduction seems to give us a Socrates who is outwardly sportive but truly and inwardly chaste-- a teaser, as it were, though perhaps without intending it. On the other hand, much of �[Tuck- Symposium- p.10] Alcibiades' jesting at Socrates' expense depends on exposing this outwardly sober philosopher as actually motivated only by his penchant for a pretty face. Socrates himself actually contributes to this impression by willingly participating in some of the bitchiness and banter before and after Alcibiades' discourse. So the contradiction is replicated just in the appearance, and replicated again just on the inside, at least according to Alcibiades. All these are paradoxes referring to the person of Socrates, but as we have seen, the same kind of paradox seems to complicate the issue of Socrates' person versus Socrates' teaching. It is not clear whether the concluding focus on the man represents a descent or an apotheosis. Because as\eaders we find our responses suspended between these two poles, we should not be entirely surprised by the way the dialogue concludes. So Agathon was getting up in order to seat himself by Socrates, when suddenly a great crowd of revellers arrived at the door, which they found just opened for some one who was going out. They marched straight into the party and seated themselves: the whole place was in an uproar and, losing all order, they were forced to drink a vast amount of wine. Then, as Aristodemus related, Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and some others took their leave and departed; while he himself fell asleep, and slumbered a great while, for the nights were long. He awoke towards dawn, as the cocks were crowing; and immediately he saw that all the company were either sleeping or gone, except Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates, who alone remained awake and were drinking out of a large vessel, from left to right; and Socrates was arguing with them. As to most of the talk, Aristodemus had no recollectio11, for he had missed the beginning and was also rather drowsy; but the substance of it was, he said, that Socrates was driving them to the admission that the same man could have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy-that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well. While they were being driven to this, and were but feebly following it, they began to nod; first Aristophanes dropped into a slumber, and then, as day began to dawn, Agathon also. When Socrates had seen them comfortable, he rose and went away-- followed in the usual manner by my friend; on arriving at the Lyceum, he washed himself, and then spent the rest of the day in his ordinary fashion; and so, when the day was done, he went home for the evening and reposed. (222B-223D) Socrates, who embraces and subsumes contradictions within himself, is shown framed symmetrically by a tragedian aqd a comedian, each presumably making a claim of �[Tuck- Symposium- p.11] exclusivity. (We are reminded of the vocational chauvinism that the early speakers of the dialogue displayed.) Our surrogate in the scene is Aristodemus; we have to suspect ourselves of having nodded off and missed something. What is the relationship between the philosophic issues that the dialogue has posed and this assertion about tragedies and comedies? We are left with this question. And Socrates having succeeded in posing yet another uncomfortable problem for us, walks calmly out of the dialogue and into the world. The relevance of Socrates' last argument may depend on how we take "tragedy" and "comedy, wha~ associations we make with these terms. I have no wish to define either of them; in most post-Aristotelian discussions of tragedy, in particular, the urge to define is symptomatic of a touching but doomed faith in the power of legislation in criticism. But perhaps we can think out loud for a minute, not about tragedy itself or comedy itself, but about the use of them as a pair. When they are put together and set off in opposition, it is usually because, roughly speaking, tragedies tend to end badly and comedies tend to end well, tragedies in deaths and the fall of princes, and comedies in marriages and the reappearance of lost children, tragedies in social disintegration and comedies in the festive creation or restoration of a just city, tragedies in the recognition that we are hemmed in by harsh necessity and comedies in the gratification of our deepest desires. It is in some such way that Dante can entitle his poem Com media. (The divine part, by the way, was a later addition.) Let us ignore for a moment the inconvenient fact that much of the surviving corpus of Greek tragedy calls this way of distinguishing genres into question; we have at least the authority of Aristotle that a tragic mythos or plot should present a change of fortune from better to worse (1453al5). Presumably Aristotle's lost treatise on comedy would flesh out this distinction by claiming that comedy is or ought to be eucatastrophic-- that is, should have a happy ending. But I think that for this passage in the Symposium we need a somewhat more complex view of the difference between tragedies and comedies. Aristotle does remark in the surviving part of the Poetics that tragedies represent men as better than they actually are, comedies as worse (1449a31). To this we may add a social distinction: Tragic characters are aristocrats and comic characters are low-born, even ludicrous and defective (l 449a31). Rhetorically speaking, ·a tragedy should be in the high literary style, avoiding crude everyday words or colloquialisms; comedy, on the other hand, should suit its style and diction to its lowly characters. Trying to pull even more out of Aristotle, we might be led to wonder what the opposite of "catharsis" is; if he associates tragedy with a kind of purgation or purification, would he be willing to say that comedy soils or taints us somehow? Or would he claim, rather, that comedy brings about the catharsis of a different set of pathemata or affections? ti ti ti �[Tuck- Symposium- p.12] While I want to retain the Aristotelian emphasis on the social distinction between tragedy and comedy, I particularly want to avoid a notion of comedy as exclusively satirical or aggressively moralistic. It seems better to think instead of the high Shakespearean comedies, with their final atmosphere of festive reconciliation and forgiveness. If comic plots do poke fun at human foibles, they also seem in a certain way to license them, or to extend to them a kind of charity. If a victim or scapegoat is excluded or driven out at the end-- a Malvolio, a Shylock or.a Jacques-- it is because he has shown a snobbish or mean-minded intolerance of the human failings of others. As an audience, we are invited to consider and accept our own ~rdinary limitations and to forgive ourselves; it may be that forgiveness is the high comic analogue to purgation. If laughter is a mark which distinguishes our response to comedies, it should be laughter with others at least as much as laughter at them, perhaps a laughter of wonder or of innocent pleasure, but not merely the laughter defined by Hobbes as "sudden glory." It might take an extensive critical wrestle with the works of the real Aristophanes for me to be able to ground this notion of comedy in actual Athenian practice; but I am hoping that the Symposium itself will eventually provide me with some justification for introducing it. Now if we apply these large, complexified terms, "tragedy" and "comedy," to what has been happening in the Symposium, possibilities and questions abound. Aristophanes the comedian and Agathon the tragedian have both given their own speeches, which at first encounter seem appropriate to their callings. The myth Aristophanes tells certainly contains grotesque and laughable elements, as well as the possibility of a final comic reconciliation; while Agathon's speech is "tragic" in the rhetorical and stylistic sense: self-consciously lofty and refined, in the style of Gorgias, as Socrates points out. (We know by the way, that Plato is willing to use the word "tragic" in this limited sense. At Meno 76E, to give one example, Socrates mocks his own definition of color "in the manner of Gorgias" as "an effluence of figure commensurable with vision and perceptible." He says of this definition, "It is a tragic [i.e., high-flown] answer, Meno--tragike gar estin. o Menon. he apokrisis -- and so it pleases you more than the one about figure.") So far, so good. It seems on this showing that our comedian has spoken comically and our tragedian tragically. But unfortunately the opposite ·pairing seems equally justified: The pathos of Aristophanes' story lies not only in our given human sense of incompleteness but also in our limited ability to find wholeness and peace in another. The offer of Hephaistos to weld the lovers together is mentioned only in a hypothetical case; it is not a real option for us. Finally we are left tragically alone, at the mercy of the gods and of necessity. Meanwhile, Agathon's speech, for all its posturing and claims �[Tuck- Symposium- p. 13] of high seriousness, might to an attentive ear have the ring of inadvertent self-parody. The pretensions of .the speech are effectively punctured by Socrates in his response. Our final judgment might be that the speech is comically inadequate, even though we are filled with good will and forgiveness for the boyish poet who makes it'. Adding it up, each of the two speeches seems to authorize a "tragic" or a "comic" reading in itself; this ambiguity gives us a preliminary illustration of the truth of the claim that the same man can ~rite both tragedies and comedies. I have noted that the two poets are finally posed symmetrically around the enigmatic Socrates, the walking paradox. It might seem that the two speeches can find some reconciliation with each other in Socrates' discourse. It is noticeable that Socrates makes use of each speech in order to refute the other. In his interrogation of Agathon, for example,. he stresses the relational aspect of love: Love is of something, something which is lacking. Therefore love cannot be good in· itself. A lover is a lover precisely because he is incomplete-"" We are forcibly reminded of Aristophanes. But Socrates, through words he attributes to Diotima, later turns on his erstwhile ally: "And certainly there runs a story," she continued, that all who go seeking their other half are in love; though by my account love is neither for half nor for whole, unless, of course, my friend, this happens to be something good. For men are prepared to have their own feet and hands cut off if they feel these belongings to be harmful. The fact is, I suppose, that each person does not cherish what is his own, unless someone should say that the good is what is familiar and one's own, and what is bad is what belongs to another. For there is nothing else that men love except the good." (205E) Here the emphasis is not on the love relation, but on the love object as definitive of love; we might almost say, not on the lover but on the beloved (Cp. 204C2). And to say that the good is the only object of love is to remind us that, speaking figuratively, eros "confers benefits" and "fosters virtues"-- just as Agathon claimed. It is noteworthy that Socrates disagrees so explicitly with the comical-tragical-mythological logos of Aristophanes; for in principle as well as affectively Aristophanes is the greatest threat to Socrates' own argument. (I have observed, for ·example, that many freshman seminars have sought to promote Aristophanes' story at Socrates' expense.) Both men recognize that human beings are seekers-- but what are we to seek? Will we find happiness in what is our own, somehow familar even if never glimpsed before? This would give our search the pathos of a homecoming and would validate our present pas'siions and frailties, �[Tuck- Symposium- p. 14] bathing them in a universal, calm charity. Or can we be happy only in striving for what is other, self-subsistent, needing neither us nor anyone? This sounds sublime, but also solitary and hazardous. There is a high mythic drama about both of these quests; but one seems to make too small a concession to human frailty while the other might seem to concede too much. By using each of the playwrights as ammunition against the other, Socrates stakes out a larger, more inclusive position. Now it is Socrates who can write both tragedy and comedy, and both at the same time, though not perhaps in the same respect. Perhaps we can see this dualism not just in his response to his two immediate predecessors, but also in a more gen.era! difficulty about our response to his argument: Which are we to emphasize in Sdcrates' doctrine, the union o.f high and low springing from the generality of eros, or the hierarchical ranking of love objects which demands that we forsake the less good for the better? It is often objected against Socrates (especially by the young) that relationships between individual people are not sufficiently valued, since the merely personal kind of love is supposed to point beyond itself. But with equal justice we could shift the emphasis and rejoice that the ladder does have a bottom rung, that ordinary human passions and experiences can find some place in the search for what is really valuable. Each of these two ways of reading will find some justification in Diotima's discourse. The "tragic" reading emphasizes the lofty, the noble, the purgative, and implies that human fulfillment may not be possible in this world. The comic reading heals us and makes us whole by containing and validating all forms of human activity, from the bodily begetting of children up to the rapturous gaze upon Beauty itself. But here a Platonist might object that we have our categories mixed up: The lofty reading is the comic reading, for it alone can have a genuinely happy ending: immortality and the friendship of the god. (Dante would say this, I think.) If so, then the more holistic, earthier reading represents a failure to choose right objects for loving, or perhaps even a hubristic attempt to remake the good in our own image, to assimilate the divine to the human. If we heed this objection and reallocate the words "tragic" and "comic" accordingly, we must make an adjustment of emphasis in the way we read the speech of Socrates; but it's striking that the same dichotomies still apply to the speech, even when the. two terms are transposed. The same man can make both tragedies and comedies-This principle persists, even though, embarrassingly, we are not too sure which of the two he is making at any given time. ti ti We have seen that it's possible to take Socrates' final, cryptic argument as a programmatic or organizing statement about the structure of several parts of the dialogue. We applied it in turn to the speeches of Aristophanes, of Agathon, and of Socrates in subsuming the first two. And the same remark about tragedies and comedies also seems to pertain to the problematic relationship we saw between Socrates' speech and that of �[Tuck- Symposium- p.15] Alcibiades. A Platonist reading would consider Socrates' description of the ladder not only as the climax of the work (Hellenists, please pardon the pun), but also as the valuable core of meaning for whose sake the dialogue is written. The remaining or Alcibiadic portion of the dialogue would then probably have to be considered as a kind of betray! or a tragic fall from good fortune into evil. But an "anti-Platonist" reading would hold that entrance of Alcibiades signals the comic reassertion of the value of earthly and even of earthy things, along with a comprehensive offer of benediction and forgiveness for human beings, who cannot stay at the height to which Diotima calls us. As things now stand, the man who can write both tragedies and comedies is not· Socrates but Plato himself, subsuming all the previous oppositions into the felt coherence of the whole dialogue. I say that Plato is this man, but you may be tempted to accuse me of attributing to him tragicomedies and comitragedies that I myself have made. Has this critical enterprise grown too perversely permissive? It is certainly worrisome that the dialogue shows itself willing to fit into each of these dichotomous structures. Perhaps we can agree on this: Socrates' last argument about tragedy and comedy is a resonant one, virtually demanding some integration with the other themes of the dialogue. Formally, the pair "tragedy" and "comedy" has the look of a universalizing doublet, like "heaven and earth," "rain or shine," "young and old," "gods and men." All these pairs by their neat contrariety imply that they are comprehensive; they seem at first glance to cover the whole domain of choices to which they pertain. I'm speaking rhetorically now; clearly in the world of mere facts, there is such a thing as middle age; there are other metereological conditions besides rain and sunshine. As to my first and last examples, it is in fact a claim of some momentousness in the Symposium that there is something in between heaven and earth, gods and men, knowledge and ignorance, beauty and ugliness, having and lacking. This intermediate ground-- to metaxu, the in-between-- is associated both with Eros, bastard child of Poros and Penia, Resource and Poverty-- and with Socrates, most erotic of men. But at the same time a certain ambiguity attaches to this intermediate position when we regard it as a thing in itself. Viewed statically, it might be some sort of mean which embraces the two extremes, reconciling them and symbolically including them. Viewed dynamically, the metaxu is neither one extreme nor the other, precisely because it is on the way from one to the other. The difficulty is augmented if the extremes themselves refuse to hold still for us. Let me give two examples. Diotima claims that just as daimones, spirits, are intermediaries between gods and men, so daimonic activities like love and, in particular; the loving of wisdom (philosophy) are in the in-between between the human and the divine. But shortly thereafter she argues that because all men desire the good, everyone is a lover and virtually all human activity is erotic. If humans are then essentially daimonic beings, we �[Tuck- Symposium- p.16] have lost one of the poles of opposition that together define the in-between. Does it make sense to say that human beings are always in between themselves and Something else? And if it should turn out that humans can attain immortality in any unqualified way, we will then have lost the other pole as well. So much for Diotima's assertion the "God with man does not mingle" (203A2). My second illustraion depends 'on a lexicaf ambiguity. Eros is said to be the child of Poros and Penia, "Resource" and "Poverty." "Resource" is a perfect translation for the.Greek poros because it reproduces an important bifurcation: Like poros, it can mean both the means to the procuring of some desired provision, or it can mean that provision itself. The first meaning might by itself be rendered as "contrivance" or "craft," the second ~.cerhaps as "wealth" or "p.lenty." {The usual antonym of penia is ploutos, "wealth.". )Probably there is more backing for the first meaning in ordinary Athenian usage, but the second meaning seems crucial to this dialogue. Just as Socrates hopes, by virtue of mere propinquity, to be filled with the overflow of Agathon's wisdom, so Penia is in fact filled with the overflow of the nectardrunk Poros. But if we do also retain the first meaning of contrivance or resourcefulness --as I think we are obliged to by Diotima's subsequent explanation-- the structural clarity of Diotima's myth is disturbed in a puzzling way. Poros the father is already as it were a means; it is thereby harder to consider him as one of the polar extremes by which to define his son Eros, the intermediary. Such moments as these in the dialogue may license us to say that the Symposium is interested in the notion of dichotomy or polar opposition and also, in how the human mind copes with it. Thus the significant universalizing doublet of comedy and tragedy at the dialogue's end alludes backward to a thematic pattern of other problematic pairings, such as lover and beloved, harmony and discord, wholeness and partiality, object and relation, lofty and base, human and divine ... (I could go on with this list a while longer.) The point is not to identify any of these doublets with comedy and tragedy, although we have seen that sometimes such an identification is suggested by one of our multiple readings. Rather I have been claiming that the dialogue provides for us a number of bipolar contexts in which to seek for kosmos and intelligibility. Initially these pairings are provided as instruments to aid our understanding of some finite question about love and other human activities. But by being problematic, the pairs themselves become the object of our attention; sometimes, as I've tried to show, the poles can exchange positions, or shift into the middle, or overlap with some other pair of categories. Eventually we as readers have to consider independently the question of how our minds cope with the fact of two-ness. This issue is clearly relevant to the general topic of eros. Do we see love as making one out of two, uniting things that are separated? Or do we see it as an activity of choice �[Tuck- Symposium- p. 17] and aspiration, concerned not with wholes but with a hierarchy of goods. These two theories of eros correspond to alternative strategies for dealing with polar dualities. We might call the first of them "both/and" and the second "either/or." The "both/and" strategy, for example, would accept without further protest the difficulty we noted before, that Socrates' speech-- or for that matter, the Symposium itself-- might with equal ease be called "comic" or "tragic." There is no reason that it cannot be both at the same time. Poetry, after all, need not, perhaps ought not to observe the principle of non-contradiction; by some accounts that is the distinguishing mark of poetry. We cal) view the work itself as an enveloping kosmos which holds such dualities in its embrace. The ordering power of art officiates at a sort of festive marriage between co!l)edy and tragedy, and the reader by giving his assent is drawn into this union. The effect of Socrates' last argument, then, is to remind us that we are invited to this lovefeast, to implicate us in the atmosphere of reconciliation and acceptance. We need not give up our particular attachments to the world of bodies and sensations; there is no final contradiction between different kinds of loving, for cannot love itself bring about a concord or harmony between one love and another? This strategy explains what many readers have felt about the Symposium: That here, perhaps uniquely among the Platonic dialogues, we find an acceptance of the wholeness and fulness of human life. The other strategy is "either/or." Though Socrates says that the same man can write both tragedies and comedies, nonetheless a tragedy is not a comedy. It is up to us to distinguish the tragic from the comic in considering the dialogue in its various aspects and parts, just as it is up to us to distinguish the high from the low, the better from the worse. The activity of reading the Symposium, then, is like the moral activity of living in the world. The artwork is not privileged; the effect of its complexity is to sharpen issues for us and project us back into the same human condition of temporality and limitation. In describing these two strategies I have implied an association of the first with what we've been calling "comedy" and of the second with what we've been calling "tragedy." It is apparently not an accident that I was able to give two and only two ways of dealing with two-ness or duality. I think it was White.head who said that there are two kinds of people: those that divide things in two's, and the others. Clearly I am .of the first kind, and so, I suggest, was Plato. But in prescinding from the more concrete pairs of opposing terms into the level of strategies for dealing with them, we have not left our dilemma behind. Can we somehow accept both "both/and" and "either/or" as ways of dealing with the dialogue, or must we choose either one or the other? Put in this way, the question sounds ridiculously derivative and hyperingenious; it doesn't seem likely that �[Tuck- Symposium- p.18] any normal person would worry about such a thing as he reads through the dialogue. But perhaps I can put the question in a way that sounds more urgent. Can we or can we not reconcile the "comic" "both/and" of poetry with the "tragic" "either/or" or ·philosophy? Both the poetic act of inclusion and the philosophic act of discrimination subject us as readers to a kind of compulsion or necessity. In the one case this compulsion appeals to our passions to command our wills to assent: in the other case it appeals to our reason. So, at least, the conventional wisdom holds; who knows?.:- perhaps it is even true. Socrates, we remember, was last depicted compelling [prosanankazein] Agathon and Aristophanes to admit that the same man could write both tragedy and comedy. (In contrast we shm.1Jd think of Diotima's words to Socrates: "Do not compel [me anankaze] what is not beautiful to be ugly, nor what is not good to be bad" [202Bl] .) Part of our predicament in reading the dialogue is to find· a loving concord between these different works of Ananke, Necessity-- since, as Agathon says, the works of Love have superseded the works of Necessity among both gods and men. It might seem strange to be claiming that in a Platonic dialogue poetry's appeal to the passions could be set up in true equipoise against the claims of reason and philosophy. The standard Platonist tack would be to subordinate the one firmly to the other. We can see this attitude at work in the common explanation given for Plato's well-known apparent self-contradiction on the subject of tragedy and comedy. In Book III of the Republic (395A2) Socrates remarks to Adeimantus that the same man cannot imitate many different things well-- not even the two forms of imitation that seem closest to each other, that is, tragedy and comedy. Therefore, he continues, all imitative arts are inferior. How do we square this with the end of the Symposium? The common explanation lays stress on the wording in Symposium 223D-- What Socrates forced them to admit was that the same man would have ~ scientific understanding (epistasthai) of the writing of comedies and tragedies, that the man who writes tragedies with art (techne) must be able to write comedies as well. Now, the argument runs, this must be the middle of a reductio proof: Since we know that this result is impossible, it follows that poetry has nothing to do with episteme or techne, but acts by divine inspiration. And therefore we are back on the familiar ground of the Ion and the Meno: By relegating poetry to the realm of inspiration, Socrates denies it the power of true knowing that philosophical activity can offer. The difficulty with this explanation is that, at least within the bounds of the Symposium, it is not clear whether it is poetry or philosophy,' or even both, that we should associate with divine inspiration. Socrates makes a point of portraying the philosopher as daimonios, "spiritual," connected with divination and prophecy, in explicit opposition to techne (203A7). Alcibiades too explicitly portrays Socrates himself as one �[Tuck- Symposium- p.19] who has the god within him and who is able to communicate its power. (The same word, katechesthai [21506], that is used here is also used about inspiration in the Ion.) We have also the endependent testimony of Socrates' ecstatic trances. Poetry, on the other hand, seems to be ranked with the other trades in that Agathon and Aristophanes take their places alongside Eryximachus and the earlier speakers in making their partial claims for their craft or crafts. Agathon, in saying that Eros is a poet, begs leave to honor his own techne just as Eryximachus did. Diotima herself applies the word·techne to poetry, in her'generalization of poiesis: "Thus," she says, "the productions of all the technai are poetries, and their craftsmen are all poets" (205Cl). --None of these considerations denies the force of the more traditional view of Plato's relative valuation of poetry and philosophy; for ·that view also there is ample evidence in the dialogue. But it is beginning to look as though both philosophy and poetry can each be seen as both artful and inspired, both rational and visceral, or either one or the other. It is getting harder to differentiate the two forces of compulsion that sway our reading; perhaps their vector resultant is perplexity and freedom. The Symposium is simply there. It does not present itself to us a either a poetic or a philosophic work, and at St. John's we pride ourselves-- rightly, I think-- on not pigeonholing books that way. Nonetheless the "poetic" and the "philosophical" may have a certain reality as categories, not only of books but of ways of reading. The dialogue itself is self-conscious about this issue, as I have all along been ,claiming; and to read it is to become self-conscious about how to read. For what we love and how we love it may determine even what we perceive as there in the intricate, Protean, magical fabric of the writing itself. John Keats wrote memorably in one of his letters about the conflicting claims of poetry and philosophy: Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel-- By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone-- though erroneous they may be fine-"'" This is the very thing in which consists poetry; and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy-- For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth. (Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 Feb.--3 May, 1819) �[Tuck- Symposium- p.20] There is great pathos in the spectacle of the youthful, doomed Keats offering up the thing he loved best. Perhaps Plato may yet force us to that choice; but in the Symposium the verdict is not clear. May there not be some truth in the eagle, some powerful, winged grace in the truth? A person may love both the truth and the eagle. Which shall we choose-- or must we choose at all? ******* [Delivered as a public lecture at St. John's College, Annapolis, Summer, 1986] � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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. 20 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 On Finishing Plato's Symposium Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered in summer 1986, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lectures Series. Mr. Tuck is a Tutor emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is about how to approach and to reapproach a reading of Plato's Symposium. He presents a variety of views from the dialogue as well as those of Castiglione and Dante to aid in diciphering Plato's dialogue on love. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan 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 1986-07 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 lec Tuck 1986 Summer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Subject The topic of the resource Plato. Symposium Philosophy Love Castiglione, Baldassarre, conte, 1478-1529. Libro del cortegiano Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/da7d2441222a6c1d419abdd145a64dfe.pdf 263ce415e70646398d57387b9ec368ae PDF Text Text ST JoHN's CoLLEGE P.O. BOX 2800 ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404-2800 FOUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIAM'S SCHOOL SUMMER COLLOQUIA 1995 Instead of the usual summer lectures, there will be a series of six collquia this summer, on Wednesday evenings at 7:30. Posters will go up in advance of each colloquium as reminders. Most of them will take place in the King William Room of the library. A member of the A colloquium is less formal than a lecture. faculty will give a short presentation, and the remaineder of the evening will be spent in open conversation. This summer's colloquia will be: June 28 Thomas May Christopher Wren and the Church of St. Stephen's WaLbrook: Grandeur, Grace, and Geometry July s July 12 Henry Higuera On Plato's Theaeteus samuel Kutler Ancient vs. MOdern Mathematics via Ptolemy's "Menelaus Theorem" July 19 Walter sterling On Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics July 26 Radoslav Datchev On August 2 Presocratic Greek Usage Elliot Zuckerman and Eric Stolzfus Beethoven: Sonata for 'Cello and Piano in A major, qp. 69 TELEPHONE 410-263-2371 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Summer Colloquia 1995 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1995, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 1995 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f3742e141a63d8de0c7824ea816d8731.pdf f0716a0672b31ede9bb5d3853fd55c21 PDF Text Text This "'.laterial may be protected by Copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code) The Greeks and Their Dogs - Jonathan Tuck [A summer lecture, given at St. John's College, July 17, 2002] After his return to Ithaca, Odysseus is a party to a number of recognition scenes. One of the most affecting involves his old dog Argos (the word means "shining"), who now lies helpless, shinging no longer, in filth and fleas at the door of the palace. Though he and Odysseus are both much changed for the worse, each recognizes the other immediately. Argos wags his tail and drops his ears, but is too weak to move toward his master. Odysseus, concealing a tear, asks his companion, the swineherd Eumaios, why such a fine-looking dog lies here amid the dung. Eumaios, still ignorant of the identity of Odysseus, answers that Argos was once a fine dog, but now no one cares for him, since his master perished in a far land. The two men move past the dog Argos to enter the palace; and the narrator tells us: But the fate of black death took hold of Argos, Having seen Odysseus again in the twentieth year. (XVII. 326-7) Clearly Argos dies of joy, at the sight of the man he has awaited for twenty years. No one else, recognizing Odysseus, gives such clear evidence of pure faithfulness and devotion. For that matter, no other human being penetrates Odysseus' disguise instantly, without tokens or persuasion. Of those that recognize Odysseus on his return, the only other character to see through his disguise is the goddess Athena, herself disguised, on the beach in Book XIII. �2 On the showing of this episode, we would likely assume that both Odysseus and Homer hold dogs in high regard. But recall another moment of recognition, this one in Book XXII: Having easily strung the bow and shot an arrow through the axeheads, Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors by killing their leader, Antinous. Still, they do not recognize him; but Odysseus puts them out of doubt, saying: 0 you dogs [~ K6vsc;], you thought I would never come again, returning home from the land of the Trojans ... (XXIl.35-6, emphasis mine) [digression on the word K6mv, KVVO<;-(use the blackboard): A third declension noun, the embarrassingly erroneous name ofthe women's soccer team ["K6vm x0rovtm"] to the contrary notwithstanding; derives from Inda-European root kwon-; etymologically related to cynic, cynosure, canine, kennel.] Isn't it puzzling that in this moment of passion, the worst thing Odysseus can call his mortal enemies, the faithless usurpers of his kingdom, his house and his marriage, is "dogs"? Has he forgotten Argos so soon? Now those among us who own both dogs and houses might argue that there is no contradiction at all in claiming that dogs are, on the one hand, utterly faithful and selfless defenders of the house, and on the other hand, utterly shameless, wanton usurpers ofit. But it seems unlikely that Odysseus was referring to the cheerful fecklessness with which dogs chew up valuable garments, destroy lawns and gardens and shed fur and other excreta on every available surface. Admittedly, dogs are slobs, but such negligence seems to be a far cry from the deep-seated malice that Odysseus attributes to the suitors. When we look at other allusions to dogs in the Homeric poems, and elsewhere in some of the Greek books we read, we will see that dogs are presented at best equivocally or �3 ambivalently. In Homer, they get a very bad press most of the time. I will return to Argos later; for the moment I only want to suggest that by looking at the Greeks and their dogs we may learn something about our attitudes towards our own animals and our own animality. Perhaps the most surprising negative characterization of dogs involves a kind of boldfaced shamelessness-surprising to me because many of the dogs I have known have seemed to display the ability to feel a very human kind of shame. Homer uses the phrase Kt>ov cioss~ - "fearless dog," in the vocative-as well as words like l(l)Vrom~-"dogfaced, or dog-eyed"-to refer to this brazen boldness. Helen uses the term of herself twice, once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey. It is also used by Hephaestus, referring to the infidelity of his wife Aphrodite (Od VIII), and applied to Athena, Artemis and Hera, as well as to the serving-girl Melantho, addressed by Penelope. A striking use of l(l)Vcom~ comes in Odysseus' colloquy with the ghost of Agamemon, in the underworld (Od XI). Agamemnon says of Clytemnestra: She, bitch-faced, turned away, and did not stay to close my eyes with her hands or to shut my mouth, though I was dying and going to Hades. So there is nothing else more fearsome [mv6rspov] or shameless ["doglike," Kt>vrspov] than a woman, who takes into her mind such deeds as these: the ugly work she devised, preparing death for her wedded husband. One interesting thing about all these occurrences of "dogfaced," meaning shameless or "bold," is that they are all applied to women, frequently in a context of sexual infidelity or the immodesty of acting in a way unbefitting a woman, especially rebelling against domestic subjugation (Clytemnestra, Hera). In Homer there is only one exception to this rule: Achilles, in Book I, addresses Agamemnon as "dogfaced" (l(l)Vc01t11~) and latter �4 accuses him of "having the eyes of a dog, but the heart of a deer." We can see that Achilles' furious taunting of Agamemnon involves an implicit sexual reference; an epithet is applied to him that is otherwise used only of women. Outrageous boldness is also represented in comparative and superlative forms of an canine-related adjective. In Book XX of the Odyssey, Odysseus is forced to restrain himself and endure watching the women of the palace behaving wantonly. His heart growls within him, the narrator tells us, as a dog growls,standing over her tender puppies, seeing an unknown man, and ready to fight. But then Odysseus strikes his breast and exclaims, "Endure, my heart! You endured a worse thing (1C6vi-spov-a "doggier" thing, a more outrageously degrading thing) on the day when the mighty Cyclops devoured my noble companions... " (Od XX.18) We get the superlative form in Iliad X, in the Doloneia, when Odysseus, after stealing the horses of the sleeping Thracians, ponders what biggest outrage (6 n 1C6vi-awv, the doggiest thing) he can do to them. This is an etymological conjecture unsupported by Chantraine, but I think the idea of dogginess might also be represented in the Greek word for a catamite, rivmoo~, one who has the rLtOOO~, the shame, of a dog-that is, none. lCLVatOSia, the abstract noun, is the word for ''unnatural lust" or "sexual perversion." But sexuality is not the only physical drive connected with dogs. Odysseus says to the Phaiakians: "But let me dine, even though I am grieving; for there is nothing more shameless [1C6vi-spov, "doglike"] than the �5 loathsome belly, which by necessity commands a man to remember, even when he is worn down and holds grief in his heart, as I do, and bids me always to eat and drink, and to forget all that I have suffered... " (Odyssey VIl.216f) So the idea that dogs are particularly shameless seems to be connected with physicality in general, both with sexual lust and with other appetites that we share with dogs and other beasts, like the need for food and drink. This association of dogs with our corporeality reminds me of some lines from the American poet May Swenson: Body my house my horse my hound what will I do when you are fallen .... How will I know in thicket ahead is danger or treasure when Body my good bright dog is dead ["Question," 11. 1-4, 11-15] That dogs stand for physicality also means that they are connected with death. As we saw, Argos' most eloquent action, the only tribute he can give to his returning master, is to die--to die like a dog, as we still say. In one way the dog is our surrogate, the body which dies; in another way the dog is purely other, a threat to the fate of our bodies after we are dead. At the very beginning of the fliad, we are told that the rage of Achilles sent the souls of many heroes to Hades, but made them themselves-that is, their bodies-a prey for dogs and the delicate feastings of birds. Dogs are feeders on carrion. It is disgraceful to become a prey for dogs, in the same way that death is disgraceful, only more so. Both death itself and becoming a feast for dogs and birds represent being reduced to mere physicality. Repeatedly, the threat of being eaten by dogs is used to �6 urge men to fight harder, or to taunt them (e.g., lliadII.393, VII.379, XVIII.179, XXII.339, etc.; Odyssey XXI.363). Ifwe care too much for the safety of our bodies, we consider ourselves to be nothing more than our bodies, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when the dogs and the birds get us in the end. Perhaps that is why both Diomedes and Achilles use the epithet "dog" in accusing Hector of cowardice: "Now once again you have escaped death, you dog, but the evil came close to you; now again Phoebus Apollo saved you. You must have prayed to him as you went among the hurtling spears. But I will make an end of you when I meet you later. .. " (fliadXI. 362 f. and XX. 449 f.) In similes, dogs are usually on the defensive, an undifferentiated group of faceless antagonists for some brilliant lion or boar who attacks the flock. Almost always it is the Trojans who are the dogs, serving as foils for some isolated Greek hero who becomes briefly godlike. Sarpedon speaks of his Trojan allies as cowering before Diomedes, in his aristeia, his moment of excellence, "like dogs around a lion" (fl. V. 476). Similarly, in the fight over the body of Patroclus: As when some mountain-bred lion, trusting in his strength snatches from the grazing herd whichever cow is best, first taking its neck in his strong jaws he breaks it, and then gulps down the blood and all the innards, and around him the dogs and the herdmen shout from a distance, but are not willing to come closer, for pale fear seizes them; so the spirit of none of them dared to go against glorious Menelaus. (XVI.61-69) We seem to have come quite a distance, from shameless boldness to shameless timorousness. But if one class characteristic underlies these various instances, I would say it is the degraded condition of dogs, the lumpish physicality that either does not or �7 ought not assert itself. If humans are halfway between gods and beasts, the particular beast that we are above is often the dog. For the Greeks ideationally, as for us orthographically, "dog" is "god" spelled backwards; to be a dog is essentially to be ungodlike, to be the gods' polar opposite (hence my whimsical, quasi-dyslexic title, which Judy Seeger says was very difficult for her to type). I infer this pattern of opposition partly from general experience. If the Homeric gods are complex, wild, free, masterful and mysterious, dogs seem to be simple, domestic, slavish and transparent. Think of Baudelaire's poem Les Chats, in which he portrays cats as divine in origin, arrogantly beautiful, and sheerly enigmatic. A cat-god makes perfect sense. Could we without laughter imagine such a poem about dogs? But in addition to general experience, I can appeal to a number of details in Homer's text. I have already mentioned that there are two recognition scenes in which Odysseus is recognized immediately, one with the goddess Athena and one with the dog Argos. Athena herself is in disguise; Argos is incapable of disguising his responses, but also too weak to express them openly enough to be a danger. He is the only loyal member of the Ithaca household that dies, and that is all he does. In all this he is the opposite of godlike. There is another episode to support the claim that Argos and Athena form a pair of sorts, framing the other, human recognition scenes. In Book XVI, Athena appears to Odysseus in the swineherd's hut in order to urge him to reveal himself to Telemachus: She came near, and she looked like a woman, tall and beautiful of body, and skilled in beautiful works. She stood against the door of the hut, appearing to Odysseus, but Telemachus did not see her in front of him or recognize her. For somehow the gods do not appear clearly to everyone. But Odysseus saw her, and so did the dogs. They did not bark, but with a whimper they went in fear to the far side �8 of the farmstead. (XVl.157-163) Here once again Athena and the dogs are symmetrically positioned on either side of Odysseus, excluding other humans. Another illustration of the notion of dogs as ungodlike: The wild dogs who are eaters of carrion are outside the human community: They are fuµocp<iym, raw meat eaters, like the Cyclops, and as such not fit to live in cities. We remember Aristotle's dictum that whoever does not live in a city is either a beast or a god. At the other extreme, the gods do not eat the roasted flesh that is offered to them; they only smell the sweet smoke of it. We humans, city-dwellers, in our medial position, we eat the cooked meat. The only Homeric dogs that constitute a clear exception, in my view, are the wonderful dogs in Phaiakia. As we hear in Odyssey VII: On either side [of the door] there were golden and silver dogs, which Hephaestus had made with skilful cunning to guard the home of greathearted Alkinous; They were deathless and ageless all their days. (VIl.91-94) This is the kind of exception that proves the rule. In magical Phaiakia, every aspect of the natural order seems to be inverted: Ships steer themselves and trees bloom and bear fruit together in every season. All the more reason to think that dogs as a class are the opposite of these splendid specimens. Speaking of dogs as the polar opposites of gods leads me straight to a semidigression on the interesting topic of Socrates' oath, "by the dog." In a learned note, E.R. Dodds, the editor of the Oxford edition of Gorgias, tells us that this oath was �9 thought by ancient commentators to be a euphemism, coined by Rhadamanthus the Just in order to avoid taking the names of the gods in vain. (It is thus almost exactly cognate with our expression "Doggone it" instead of "Goddamn it.") 1bis humorous, colloquial substitution of the name of dog for the name of god confirms my claim that dogs and gods are polar opposites. Even in its simpler, un-Egyptian form, the oath draws upon this opposition. "By the dog" is not peculiar to Socrates; Dodds cites a usage of it by a slave in Aristophanes' Wasps. (In other comedies, characters swear "by the wild goose" and "by the cabbages.") If the oath was euphemistic in origin, it does not seem to fill that role for Socrates, since he is on many occasions not averse to swearing by Zeus, by Hera, by Hercules, and so forth. I count ten uses of "by the dog," three in Republic, one each in Phaedrus, Cratylus, Apology and Phaedo, and three in Gorgias, including one special one I will come to in a moment. One might suppose that if we are right about the opposition of gods and dogs, swearing by the dog might be an indicator of a tone of pointed irony on Socrates' part, perhaps even a suggestion that he does not mean what he is attesting by his oath. But on the contrary, most of the attestations seem to be both sincere and emphatic, though qualified by a kihd of folksiness or a tone of mock surprise: - By the dog! I said, we seem accidentally to have purged the city that we said was luxurious! (Republic 399 E) ... sinceby the dog, I think these tendons and bones would long since have been in Megara or Boeotia, carried there by an opinion about the best thing, if I had not thought it juster and nobler to endure whatever punishment the city might decree, rather than to flee. (Phaedo 98E) �10 The uses of "by the dog" often accompany a personal apostrophe to the interlocutor Socrates is addressing; the oath is a gesture of familiarity, like clapping him on the shoulder in a friendly way. And by the dog, 0 men of Athens, for I must tell you the truth, I experienced something like this: Those with with best repute of wisdom seemed almost the most lacking. (Apology 22A) By the dog, Gorgias, to examine sufficiently how these things are will require a lengthy conversation. (Gorgias 461B) The special usage that begs our attention most urgently is the notorious exclamation at Gorgias 482B, "by the dog, the god of the Egyptians" or, as it is often rendered, "by the dog that is god in Egypt." As Eva Brann tells us, the allusion is to Anubis, the dogheaded Egyptian god who served in the Egyptian pantheon some of the functions of Hermes in the Greek one. Notably, and most relevant for our purposes, he was the '1'1>X01t0µ1t6~, the conductor of the souls of those who had recently died, who were being brought into the underworld to be judged. Now it seems to me that ifthere is any validity in a tradition of opposmg gods and dogs, our reading of the immediate context of this oath in Gorgias may be enriched in a number of ways. I want to claim that this use of the canine oath is not in continuity with other occurrences of "by the dog," but in pointed contrast to them. Recall that Socrates has been forcing his interlocutor Polus to concede that, since it is worse to commit wrong than to suffer it, the wrongdoer should desire and seek punishment as an expiation. Therefore, instead of using rhetoric to try to evade �11 punishment, he could only use it to accuse himself with greater eloquence-or, if it was an enemy who had done wrong, the rhetorician should try to punish his soul by pleading that his body should be let off scot-free. At this point the politician and demagogue Callicles breaks in to claim that Socrates must be joking. For, he says, if you are being serious and if these things you say tum out to be true, what else can we think but that the life of humans would be turned upside-down and that we do everything, as it seems, the opposite of how we ought to do it? (481C2-6) In response, Socrates says it is one of his two beloveds, Philosophy, that speaks thus, not he. She is more constant than the other beloved (Alcibiades), for her words are always the same. Socrates concludes: So either refute her about what I just said, show that wrongdoing and remaining unpunished for it is not the ultimate of all evils, or if you leave it unrefuted, by the dog, the god of the Egyptians, Callicles will never agree with you, 0 Callicles, but will be in discord with you for your whole life. (482B3-8) If the common opinion holds, and holds truly, that dogs are essentially and precisely not gods, then the oath "by the dog," insofar as it is intended to be recognized as an ironic euphemism, would endorse that common view. Thus it might be a suitable choice of attestation to guarantee the view that our common opinions about crime and punishment are valid ones. But Socrates, in putting forth a radically upside-down view of crime and punishment (according to the common opinion), uses his oath to point out an analogous upside-down case: In Egypt, contrary to the common opinion of the Greeks, a dog is in fact a god. Not only that, but this very dog-god aids in the dispensing of otherworldly punishments for crimes committed here. Callicles, if he does not make a rational �12 argument but nonetheless persists in his common opinion, is not just in a state of selfcontradiction; he is, remarkably, committing a kind of impiety. BUT: He would be seen as impious only in .Egym, which for Socrates is often the source of many crucial pieces of exotic ancient wisdom. To muddy the waters even further, this dog-god, regarded in Greece, where dogs are not gods, might seem to be in discord with himself, just like Calli cl es. The use of the quaint and paradoxical oath, apart from suggesting that Socrates feels a certain complacency about the point he has just forcefully made, seems to raise the stakes of the argument. The entrance of Callicles, who will be Socrates' interlocutor and antagonist for the rest of the dialogue, represents a critical moment in the discussion. At the same time, I think I want to claim that the tonal ambiguity of "by the dog, the god of the Egyptians" leaves open the possibility that Socrates will not carry the day. End of Digression. I have been making the Greek case against dogs, that they are not only ungodlike but quintessentially, shamelessly bestial. What, you may be thinking, has happened to Man's Best Friend? The dog, after all, is the proverbial domestic animal. We must beware of saying that dogs are the beasts that are unfit to live in cities. In taking the wild carrion-eating dogs as paradigms for the whole species, we are committing the error against which the Eleatic Stranger warns in Plato's Sophist. Let us not, he says, confuse the sophists with dialecticians, lest we give them too much honor. Young Theaetetus objects that the description just given seems very like them; but the Stranger replies: Yes, and indeed a wolf is very like a dog, the wildest thing like the tamest. But it is necessary for the careful man always to be on his guard [1[oU::icr0m niv q>uA.alcfJv] about resemblances, for they are the most slippery kind of things. (231A7-10) �13 As the phrase "be on his guard" reminds us, dogs are the good guys who stand on guard against wolves and sophists. We have already seen dogs guarding flocks and houses, not only poor old Argos, but those very downtrodden dogs who served as spearcarriers in the similes where the lions or boars played the starring role. And since every dog must have his day, sometimes the dogs even get the top billing: In IliadX, for example, Nestor and Diomedes go in the middle of the night to seek the other Greek leaders: And when they came in among the guards who had gathered together, they did not find the leading guards asleep; but they all sat in wakefulness with their weapons. As when dogs keep painful watch over the flocks in the fold, hearing the strong-hearted beast as he comes down through the woods among the hills, and there is a great cry against him from both men and dogs, and their sleep is destroyed; so was sweet sleep destroyed from the eyelids of the guards, watching through that terrible night. (X.179-194) In ancient Greece, a domestic dog was a working dog; as Carl Page recently reminded me, the Greeks didn't do pets. If they weren't guards or sheepherders, they might be hunting dogs, who also figure in a number of Homeric similes. We can see that these two household jobs draw to a great extent on the same doggy virtue. Dogs do not initiate, but they do perseverate; it is not for nothing that they give their name to the word "dogged," and proverbially the old ones don't learn new tricks. A guard dog is expected to repel change from without, to preserve the status quo. He needs to endure, to keep on keeping on. And so does a hunting dog, who in following a trail tries to keep the same scent in his nostrils. Both of these roles are in play in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. As early in the trilogy as the third line of the Agamemnon, the loyal watchman laments that he has to sleep on top of the palace KUvoc; ~tld]v, "in the manner of a dog." (Later in the �14 play, the Chorus uses the same phrase to describe Cassandra, sniffing out the terrible secrets of the House of Atreus.) In her disarming flattery of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra hails him as "the watchdog of the fold," the first of a string of effusively complimentary epithets. Cassandra later describes this flattery as a bitch's fawning. In the Libation Bearers, Electra complains that she is kept pent up in the house, like a dog. Later in the trilogy, the watchdogs give way decisively to the hunting dogs: The Furies are consistently portrayed as dog-like, both by themselves, by Orestes, and by Clytemnestra (and her ghost). Of course, most of these canine comparisons are somewhat ambivalent. It seems that a fawning watchdog can turn on its master; we recall that the ghost of Agamemnon in the Odyssey described Clytemnestra as a shameless bitch. Here again, the guardian of the house may also be its usurper. The Furies, in their tenacious pursuit, illustrate the virtue of a good hunting dog (though we do first see them asleep on the job). But they are complicated figures: deathless, sinister and threatening but also sort of comically dopey. They are loathsome in aspect, hated and feared by gods and men. In my problematized reading of the ending of Eumenides, it is not clear that these old hunting dogs will be able to learn the new trick of keeping beneficent watch over the city of Athens. In the same way, the maenad chorus in Euripides' Bacchae, which are also repeatedly referred to as hounds, are a kind of safety valve for the city's passions, but also potentially destructive of the city. Just as a sheepdog may revert to wildness and tear his own flock, a hunting dog may turn upon his master. The famous case, of course, is the huntsman Actaeon, who was tom to pieces by his own hounds after inadvertently seeing Artemis naked. Actaeon is mentioned in the Bacchae; Cadmus points out that �15 Pentheus was killed on Mt. Kithaeron, the same place where Actaeon died. The usual allegoresis of the story of Actaeon, in both ancient and modem times, has been that the hounds represent the passions, which will destroy the person who is subject to them. So even domesticated dogs, useful and even indispensable though they clearly are, can revert to brutish wildness. We might ask whether the canine characteristic of perseveration is better instantiated by a dog's remaining tame or by his reverting to his wilder nature. When we domesticate dogs, are we merely diverting them temporarily from a constant path? As tame dogs, they are our artifacts; we teach them to imitate us, and we take pleasure in their resemblance to us, as we take pleasure in any imitation. But a likeness is not fully assimilated to the thing it resembles. Dogs seem simple to usthey offer us a kind of trusting, unconditioned love, and hence we feel safe around them. But should we? If the patina of domestication conceals an enduring nature in opposition to it, then tame dogs are not simple but complex, and it is we that have made them so. Perhaps this is the source of the complexity and ambivalence of the Greek response to them. The possibility of a good dog gone wrong might lead us to wonder about how fully domesticated we ourselves are, whether we have been educated enough to subdue the bestial appetites within us. And by this route, we have come at last to the dogs in Plato's Republic. Here the ambivalence toward dogs, the doubt about whether they are indeed reliably tamable or educable, is thematized; and what is at stake is nothing less than the survival of the city-in-speech. Almost as soon as we leave the city of pigs, it is clear that the newly expanded city will need warriors, guardians, as Socrates calls them. And almost immediately, these guardians are likened to dogs-first through a pun (crK6A.a~, "puppy," is close to cpuA.a~, �16 "guard") and then through a consideration of the temperament required for a guardian. Like dogs of good breeding, the warrior-guardians must have a high degree of 0uµ6~, spirit, in order to be courageous in defense of the city. But can such a warrior also be a safe presence in the city he is to defend? Socrates claims at 375D to solve the problem through the likeness to dogs; he argues that since it is clear that dogs can be made tame while retaining spiritedness, it is therefore possible for one nature to have both qualities. But this supposed solution is almost immediately undercut. Socrates goes on to claim, outrageously, that dogs are not only gentle and spirited but also philosophic: Does it seem to you also that our future guardian will need, in addition to the spiritedness in his nature, to be philosophic? -How so? he said. I don't understand.-You will see this also in dogs, I said, which is something in the beast well worth wondering at.-What?-lfhe sees someone he doesn't know, he gets angry, even if he has never suffered anything bad from him. But anyone known to him he welcomes, even if he has never gotten anything good from him. Haven't you ever marveled at that?-Not much, he said, I never thought about it before now; but it's clear that he does it.-But it shows an exquisite feeling in his nature, and a truly philosophic one.How?- Why, I said, in that he distinguishes a friendly sight from an unfriendly one by nothing but having learned one and not recognizing the other. And indeed, how could it not be a love oflearning, defining what is akin to him and what is other by understanding and ignorance?It couldn't, he said.-But then, I said, aren't love of learning and philosophy the same thing?-Yes, he said. (375E-376B) Where do we begin, in attempting to deconstruct this farrago of nonsense? In the first place, pace Glaucon, it is by no means clear that this is how dogs behave. Our dog has heard and smelled the same mailman every day for years on end; yet she never fails to �17 hurl herself at the closed door with paroxysms of self-righteous barking. Or, if you prefer authority to experience, we need look no further than "the master of those that know" [Inferno N.131], Aristotle, who says in the Nicomachean Ethics: But let us observe that a lack of restraint for spiritedness is less shameful than a lack of restraint for desires. For spiritedness seems to listen to reason to some extent, but to mis-hear it, just as servants in a hurry, who rush off before hearing everything that is said, get the instructions wrong, or dogs, before looking to see if it is a friend, bark if there is merely a noise. (tr. Joe Sachs, l 149A25-30, BK. VII. Chap. 6) It's notable that the very question under discussion in this passage is the one Socrates was embroiled in: whether 8uµ6c;, spirit, can be responsive to reason. I would even surmise that Aristotle had the Republic passage in mind, and was answering it explicitly. Aristotle would seem to be a more trustworthy guide than Plato (even if Plato were in deadly earnest here) on questions of animal behavior. But let us grant, for the sake of argument, that dogs do behave as Socrates describes. Still it is clear, as Allan Bloom and other commentators have noted, that the example proves the exact opposite of what Socrates wants it to prove. Dogs do not want to learn anything or anyone new; they bark at the unknown instead of making it more known to themselves. They are masters of perseveration and old tricks; they love not what is true or good, but what is their own. If philosophy were the love of what we already know, Socrates' reasoning would be right; but if Eros is philosophic, as Diotima says, then the philosopher's love must be for the wisdom that he lacks. And it seems clear from the long quoted exchange between Socrates and Glaucon that Socrates knows this full well. Otherwise, why would he even �18 raise the question of whether it is the same thing to be cpiA.6crocpo~, a lover of wisdom, as to be cpiA.oµaSfJ~, a lover of learning? Though Socrates in this passage claims to believe that the domestication of dogs is a success story that can be paradigmatic for the taming of the high-spirited warrior, he returns to the topic later on, just after introducing the Noble Lie: It is the most fearful and shameful thing of all for the shepherds to train such dogs as helpers of the flocks, in such a way that through dissipation or hunger or bad habit those very dogs raise their hands against the sheep, to injure them, and instead of dogs to resemble wolves. (416A3-8) Socrates goes on to reiterate the importance of education to prevent this scenario. But there was really no need to raise it, out of the blue, unless it serves the dramatic purpose of betraying a kind of insecurity that the previous argument did not dispel. The issue is important enough for Socrates to go on worrying at it, as a dog gnaws away at a bone. If dogs represent the thumoeidic in humans, we have seen that there is an ample tradition of negativism about the possibility of making this brute impulse safe for the home or for the city. It seeins likely that Socrates is deliberately evoking this tradition in choosing the comparison of the guardians with dogs. What he may be implying about the attainability of the best city or of justice on earth, I will not here conjecture. I am almost finished with this cavalcade of canines, but I cannot resist adding an epilogue about the Cynics. The question of whether dogs are philosophic might naturally raise the question of whether philosophers are, or ought to be, doglike; the Cynics-the K6viKm or dog-philosophers- said yes. The founder of this school is said to have been Antisthenes, one of the most faithful followers of Socrates, according to Xenophon. After the death of Socrates, he began teaching his doctrines of virtue in the Gymnasium �19 called Cynosarges, or "white (or shining) dog." We remember poor old Argos-though the name seems not to be an allusion to him, but rather to a white dog who carried off a sacrifice which was meant for Herakles. Some information about Antisthenes is available in Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers; but it's a rather skimpy account; one pregnant detail is that one of his lost treatises was entitled, "On Odysseus, Penelope and the Dog." I wish it had survived; it would be interesting to see the Cynics' reading of Argos. The real inaugurator of the Cynic tradition was a student of Antisthenes, Diogenes of Sinope, who became a revered and semi-legendary figure among the Stoics and others; his name is often yoked by Epictetus with that of Socrates himself. Diogenes Laertius gives a lot of space to the life of his namesake, Diogenes of Sinope. It is an entertaining account full of anecdotes and vignettes, usually culminating in triumphant one-liners by the crusty dog-philosopher. Whatever the origin of the name of"Cynic," Diogenes clearly embraced the name with literalistic enthusiasm. He referred to himself as a dog: The tale goes that Alexander once came and stood next to him, saying,"! am Alexander the Great King," whereby Diogenes replied, "And I am Diogenes the Dog." And when he was buried, the Corinthians erected a statue of a dog over his grave, by the city gate leading to the Isthmus. Why did Diogenes welcome the name of dog-philosopher? What elements of the traditions I have sketched about dogs might have appealed to him? For one thing, the brute physicality of a dog's life, which to a Homeric warrior might have seemed shameful, was for Diogenes a laudable simplicity and self-sufficiency. He lived as a beggar, slept out in his cloak and tried to have as few possessions as possible. He once tried to eat raw meat, but could not digest it. When he saw a child drinking out of his �20 hands, he exclaimed that he had been outdone in plainness of living, and then threw away the drinking cup he had carried. He proudly claimed for himself a physical hardihood due to plain living: Once he hugged a marble statue to show how easily he could endure the cold. Another time, when people asked him what kind of dog he was, he replied: "When hungry, a Maltese; when full, a Molossian. Most people, while praising these, don't dare because of the labor to go along hunting with them. In the same way, you are not able to live with me out of fear of the discomforts." (Diog. Laert., Lives, Vl.55) At times this robust physicality seems to have gone over the line in its defiance of convention: As the biographer tells us, once at a feast people mockingly threw bones at Diogenes as ifhe were a dog. In response, he acted like a dog and peed on them. Actions like these were not undertaken only in momentary fits of irascibility. They were part of a program of "shamelessness"--hvaibcta-that served as a central creed, almost a doctrine, for Diogenes. The very quality that was made a proverbial reproach to dogs in the literary tradition is here considered to be a virtue, and I want to conjecture a reason for this. Again and again we hear Diogenes raising the question, "What is a man?" The story everyone has heard about him is that he went out in broad daylight with a lantern. When asked why, he said, "I am looking for a man." (Not "an honest man," as the misquotation has it.) When he was asked where in Greece he saw good men, he said, "Men nowhere, but boys in Lacedaemon." Once he called out, "Oh, people!" When people gathered, he laid into them with his stick, saying "It was people I called for, not dregs [Ka8<ipµma]." Once he was returning from the Olympic games, and someone asked him if there was a great crowd there.. "Yes, a great crowd, but few men," �21 he said. To Diogenes also is attributed the sarcastic throwing of a plucked fowl at Plato, for defining "man" as a "featherless biped." This thematizing of the question "what is man?" seems designed not only to humble our pride and preach fortitude; it goes beyond that to ask what place we as humans occupy in the ranks of animate beings. Hamlet asks, What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unused. ((IV.4.33-39) But on the other hand, Diogenes wants to remind us that philosophy must not become too abstract and speculative. If we try to deny our physical nature, we forfeit our selfknowledge. Once when Plato was discoursing about "tablehood" ['tpa7tss6'tTJ~] and "cuphood" [KUa86'tT]~], Diogenes replied, "Table and cup I see, but no tablehood and cuphood." lfwe get too fancy or lofty in our aspirations, we need to be humbled. In common with the Stoics, the Cynics seem to stress the acceptance of mortal limitations. The task of the philosopher is to prescribe an ethical way of living, teaching by example. But even so, I don't think Diogenes would have wanted the Athenians in general to emulate his doggy ways. In his public behavior, he was performing a kind of theatre to challenge them, to raise issues. Epictetus makes this point explicitly about the Cynic philosopher, quoting a passage from Plato's Chaerophon where Socrates is compared to a tragic deus ex machina: He [sc. the Cynic] should be prepared to mount the tragic stage and speak the words of Socrates: "O people, where are you bound? Miserable ones, what are you doing? You reel up and down, like the blind. You have left the real path and are going off on another one." �22 (Discourses, 3.22.26) Such a performance requires an audience, in the same way that Socrates requires a straight man to answer his prickly questions. Part of Diogenes' theatrical demeanor seems to have sprung from a kind of cranky vanity that prompts him to rail at people for no good reason. When someone asked Plato what sort of a person he thought Diogenes was, Plato replied, "LmKpaTil<; µmv6µEVo<;, A Socrates gone mad." He seems to have been an uneasy presence to have in the city. When asked why he was called a dog, he said, "I fawn on those who give, I bark at those who don't give, and I bite the wicked." This is not strictly true. Like the watchdogs Aristotle portrays, Diogenes barked at everyone, at friend and foe alike. This unlovely trait is taken up by Shakespeare in his comic portrayal of the Cynic philosopher Apemantus, in the late, unfinished play Timon ofAthens; and the same crabbiness probably accounts for the way we use the word "cynic" in ordinary language today. In his comment about himself as a dog that no one cares to go hunting with, Diogenes acknowledges the ambivalence of people's responses to him. It is a similar ambivalence to what we have seen expressed in the received tradition about dogs: In his high-spirited attack on vice, Diogenes could have represented a threat to the city, like Socrates, ifhe had not made himself into a figure of fun. It was only centuries later that he was mythologized and given a heroic stature. When in a moment of idle curiosity I embarked upon this investigation, I still harbored, as I now realize, a number of sentimental notions about dogs. I might well have agreed with Sir Walter Scott that "the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit." Or to put it in the less sloppy phrasing of Mark Twain, "If you pick up a starving �23 dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." But the bracing air ofHellas is a good antidote to sentimentality: In different ways, a number of the Greek authors we have surveyed seem to question the view of Scott and Twain. Is it that the dog is too stupid to be treacherous or deceitful? Is our capacity for deceit and disguise inseparable from our godlike use of reason? Or is the premise invalid-Will the dog turn on us, lose his patina of passive domestication and revert to a wild beast, biting the hand that feeds him? And if he cannot be made safe for the city, by discipline and education, are we sure that we can? Resemblances are slippery things, but this is the question that has dogged us all night. There must have been some dog in the monster Typhon, since he was the father of Cerberus. So it is fitting that in the Phaedrus Socrates dismisses mythography, saying I let these matters go, believing the customary things about them, as I said. I examine not these things but myself, asking whether I am a more complicated and ravenous beast than Typhon, or a gentler and simpler animal who has been allotted a nature that is humble and godly. (230Al-7) ******** � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. 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Title A name given to the resource The Greeks and Their Dogs Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 17, 2002 by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. Mr. Tuck is a tutor emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is on the Ancient Greek view of dogs through their literature. He surveys Greek works from the Illiad and the Odyssey down to Plato to attempt to uncover the place of the dog in Ancient Greek thought and literature. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan 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 2002-07-17 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 lec Tuck 2002-07-17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Subject The topic of the resource Greek literature Epic poetry, Greek Homer Dogs in literature Summer lecture series Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7dad6289b027920f9476517235999cbd.pdf a183f703914f4a2886ebefa0dac3a061 PDF Text Text " Summer 200:1 Le~turc Schedule May21 Sam Kutler "Four Favorite Irrational Numbers: The Differences between Modern and Ancient Mathematics" May28 Mark Sinnett "From Measurement to Measure, From Ratio to Real Number" June 4 Robert Goldberg On Aristotle's Politics June 11 Gary Borjesson '"Tis a point of friendship': Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV'' June 18 Jacqueline Pfeffer "The Family in Plato's Republic and Statesman" June 25 John White and friends A Conversation July 2 Walter Sterling "Some More or Less Obvious Thoughts on Why One Should be Wary of Action from Principle" July 9 David Cohen, A87 "Erotic Geometries of Time, and the Coherence of Spaces Between" July 16 John Verdi "Conversation and Community: On the Phaedo" All lectures will be given on Wednesday evening at 7:30 in the King William Room, with the exception of David Cohen's lecture, which will be given in the Conversation Room. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Summer 2003 Lecture Schedule Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2003, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 2003 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/db4caa4fbabe01200fa6928f1b2b9354.pdf e8b9c48b9ec8aad64fe32c090c483204 PDF Text Text Summer Lecture Slate 2004 S!JOHN'S College June 2 Jason Tipton "Something Fishy in Aristotle" June 9 Elliott Zuckerman "Streams, Spinning-Wheels, and Organ-Grinders. A Talk at the Piano" June 16 Joe Sachs "On Aristotle's Poetics" June 23 Christine Kalkavage On Vergil June 30 Susan Paalman " Galen, Nature, and 0 bservation" July 7 Samuel Kutler "Begitmings" July 14 Jolm Verdi "On Seeing Aspects" July 16 (Friday!) Will Williamson Louis Petrich "Othello' s Beginning, Middle, and End" July 21 Sriram Nambiar "Formal and Informal Proofs In Ancient and Modem Mathematics" ANNAP O LIS • SANTA PB OFFICE OF THE DEAN P.0. Box 28oo ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 2I404 4I0-626-25II FAX 4I0-295-6937 www.sjca. edu All lectures will be held at 7:30p.m. in the King William Room, except for Mr. Zuckerman' s performance/talk, which will be in the Hodson Room, and the Friday-night performance/discussion of Messrs. Petrich and Williamson, which will be in the Great Hall. �Summer Lecture Slate 2004 June 2 Jason Tipton "Something Fishy in Aristotle" June 9 Elliott Zuckerman "Streams, Spinning-Wheels, and Organ-Grinders. A Talk at the Piano" June 16 Joe Sachs June 23 Christine Kalkavage On Vergil June 30 Susan Paalman "Galen, Nature, and Observation" July 7 Samuel Kutler "Beginnings" July 14 John Verdi "On Seeing Aspects" July 16 (Friday!) Will Williamson Louis Petrich "Othello's Beginning, Middle, and End" July 21 Sriram Nambiar "Formal and Informal Proofs In Ancient and Modern Mathematics" "On Aristotle's Poetics" All lectures will be held at 7:30p.m. in the King William Room, except for Mr. Zuckerman's performance/talk, which will be in the Hodson Room, and the Friday-night performance/discussion of Messrs. Petrich and Williamson, which will be in the Great Hall. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 2 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource Summer Lecture Slate 2004 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2004, [sponsored by the Graduate Institute]. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 2004 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/36177aa40bac674c9caafdb610139551.pdf 5c987eb2ae8afec0e6e32aded8ddb5df PDF Text Text Summer lectures 2005 June 1 Patricia Locke and friends Reading of Philoctetes June 8 ZenaHitz Aristotle on self-knowledge and friendship June 15 David Stephenson "Mythos" and "Logos" (On the Poetics) June 22 Suzy Paalman Some Thoughts on the Book of Job June29 Anthony Seeger "Who Owns Music?" July6 Tom May "My true account:" A Tutorial Discussion about Milton's Sonnets VII "How soon hath time the suttle theef of youth," and XVI, "When I consider how my light is spent" July 13 George Russell On Republic I July20 John Verdi and friends Seminar on Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, 1-4 (980a21--985b22) and Book II (993a30--995a20) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Summer lectures 2005 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2005, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 2005 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ce1e16adc2e7155184cb9d375de06282.pdf d277422ec3a431c978519196234a496b PDF Text Text S!JOHN'S College A NN APOLI S • S A NTA PE P.O. Box 28oo SCHEDULE OF WEDNESDAY EVENTS SUMMER2006 Wednesday 7 June Agamemnon: film version, discussion to follow led by Andrew Romiti, A'06. Note: this will take place in the Hodson Room Wednesday 14 June All-College Seminar: Selection from Herodotus' History (the battle ofThermopylae). (Book VII, ch. 172 - end). Photocopies of the reading will be available in the Assistant Dean's office. Wednesday 2 1 June Bach's Suite for Solo Cello in E-flat major: a brief talk and musical performance; Eric Stoltzfus, Music Librarian and Tutor Note: This will take place in the Hodson Room Wednesday 28 June "Brotherhood in Genesis" Joseph Smith, Tutor Wednesday 5 July Amor in Virgil's Aeneid; Louis Miller, Tutor Wednesday 12 July Flannery O'Connor; Joan Silver, Tutor Wednesday 19 July The Principle ofNon-Contradiction in Aristotle's Metaphysics; a discussion led by John Verdi, Tutor Wednesday 25 July Oedipus Rex: film version, discussion to follow Location to be announced ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404 4I0-1163-237I FAX 410-626-2886 www. stjohnscollege.edu Unless otherwise noted, these events will take place in the King William Room at 7. 30 p.m. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Schedule of Wednesday Events, Summer 2006 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2006, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 2006 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c3d01b68a220a87bfa6792827ea2f304.pdf 2d621463e9b4abab28fed0c1359f6f6a PDF Text Text Dean's Office CAMPUS MAIL SUMMER 2007 LECTURES BY ST. JOHN'S TUTORS BARR BUCHANAN CENTER/WOODWARD HALL. KING WILLIAM ROOM 7:30P.M. June20 George Russell Plutarch's Alexander June 27 Patricia Locke Primordial Silence: The Silence of Chaco Canyon July 11 Jonathan Tuck Sons of Homer: The Post-Homeric Epic July 18 Faculty Study Group On Aristotle's Metaphysics On the Metaphysics July25 Daniel Harrell Does Beauty Have a Place in Liberal Education? August 1 Michael Weinman "A divided sovereignty": Metaphysics, XII.lO and the Echo of Homer K/S/Lectures/SU07 schedule � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Title A name given to the resource Summer 2007 Lectures by St. John's Tutors Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2007, [sponsored by the Graduate Institute]. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 2007 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b29875277db923138981f8612a75889b.pdf 7f378da25409427c61c12be1594c633d PDF Text Text S!JOHN'S College SUMMER 2008 LECTURES 7:30P.M. ANNAPO LI S • SANTA FE June 25 Jonathan Tuck Plato 's Epitaph to Aster July2 John White On the Principle ofNon-Contradiction (Aristotle's Metaphysics, IV.4) July 9 Chester Burke, Flute Leslie Star, oboe Eric Stoltzfus, cello Cynthia Lapp, soprano Baroque Sonatas and Arias July 16 Movie & Discussion Rash omon July 23 Faculty Study Group On Kant's Third Critique Kant' s Critique ofJudgment July 30 Christian Holland On Bernard's Summation in Woolfs The Waves August 6 William Braithwaite On Proving True Opinion (Dred Scott Decision, 1857) OFFICE OF THE DEAN P.O. Box z8oo ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404 4w-6z6-zsn FAX 4I0-295-6937 www. ~jca. edu The concert on July 9 will be held in the Great Hall. The movie on July 16 will be viewed in the Hodson Conference Room. On July 23, the faculty study group will hold their discussion in the Hartle Room. All other lectures will be held in the King William Room. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Summer 2008 Lectures Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2008, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 2008 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c26574c0e09b213e2a336eabad4bc9e6.pdf acce14cbf777e6a2a12c63a4efdd0667 PDF Text Text SUMMER2009 WEDNESDAY EVENING EVENTS June 24 Joan Silver A Reading from Flannery O'Connor's Artificial Nigger, followed by discussion July I Matthew Linck On Aristotle's Physics and Ethics July 8 Greg Recco Developing Emotions: Aristotle's Rhetoric II.2-ii July 15 Marcel Widzisz The Greatness of Early Rome According to Livy July 22 John Verdi Ambiguity in Art and Science July 29 Louis Petrich A Viewing of Kenneth Branagh's film of Shakespeare's Henry V. Followed by discussion August 5 George Russell On Lincoln The movie on July 29 will be shown in the Hodson Conference Room in Mellon Hall. All other events will be held in the Great Hall of McDowell Hall. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Summer 2009, Wednesday Evening Events Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2009, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 2009 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/084ae2575470ab90ccad07c448780e40.pdf d794d6a4d5a33a41625cc40d4a34c413 PDF Text Text SUMMER2010 "LIFE OF THE MIND SERIES" Wednesdays, 7:30p.m. June 23 Matthew Linck Some Questions about the Philosophy of Nature June 30 Felicia Martinez On Wallace Stevens' "Of Mere Being" July 7 Jeff Smith The Political Interstices of King Lear July 14 Anita Kronsberg A viewing of the film of King Lear starring Scofield Followed by discussion July 21 Matt Caswell Michael Grenke Henry Higuera Michael Weinman What is Philosophy? July 28 Eric Stoltzfus Five fables of La Fontaine, translated and set to Elliott Zuckerman music by Elliott Zuckerman, and performed by Eric Stoltzfus, tenor, accompanied at the piano. With discussion. Marcel Widzisz A reading of Medea August 4 & company The movie on July 14 will be shown in the Hodson Conference Room in Mellon Hall. All other events will be held in the Great Hall of McDowell Hall. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 1 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Summer 2010 "Life of the Mind Series" Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2010, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 2010 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/787a43724f11931491834057e7bce8b7.pdf f2dd1a9fdc0fbc2cb9b73178ab37e2a0 PDF Text Text SUMMER 2012 “Wednesday Night Lecture Series” Great Hall Wednesdays, 7:30 p.m. June 20 Jeff Black “Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are: Machiavelli on Human Nature” June 27 William T. Braithwaite Anita L. Kronsberg William Pastille John Verdi “What is ‘Political Speech’?: A Panel Discussion of Some Recent First Amendment Cases” July 4 Michael W. Grenke “The Problem of Socrates” July 11 Steven Gimbel “Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion” July 18 David Levy “Eros and Rhetoric in the Phaedrus” July 25 Paul Wilford “A Look at Kantian Theodicy: Rational Faith and the Idea of History” August 1 Lise van Boxel “Courage, Insight, Sympathy, Solitude: The Genealogy of the Noble Type in ‘Part Nine’ of Beyond Good and Evil” � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 2 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Graduate Institute Title A name given to the resource Summer 2012 "Wednesday Night Lecture Series" Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2012, sponsored by the Graduate Institute. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lecture Schedule 2012 Summer Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Relation A related resource June 20, 2012. Black, Jeff. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/10" title="Everyone sees how you appear; few touch what you are">Everyone sees how you appear; few touch what you are</a> (typescript) July 11, 2012. Gimbel, Steven. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/26" title="Einstein's Jewish science">Einstein's Jewish science</a> (audio) August 1, 2012. van Boxel, Lise. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/11" title="Courage, insight, sympathy, solitude">Courage, insight, sympathy, solitude</a> (audio) Graduate Institute Lecture schedule Summer lecture series https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6626ab6196c4611b835a97b6b7725714.pdf f4c0d71c0699e6beddf27c82d21d9f44 PDF Text Text Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 1 “Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are”: Machiavelli on Human Nature How do the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli appear to us today? There is no small risk that, whenever we crack the spines of The Prince or the Discourses on Livy, we will find these books to be boring. Full of historical details, full of admittedly colorful and even shocking anecdotes, they nonetheless appear to teach us only what we already know: the maxims of amoral, or immoral, prudence, that ‘the end justifies the means,’ or that ‘might makes right.’ To say that we already know such things does not mean that we believe them, of course. Perhaps in extreme circumstances, with lives at stake, we might grant that it is necessary to be Machiavellian; but who really expects to find himself in extreme circumstances? Most of the time, among family, friends, and fellow citizens, we try to be good, to do what is right. We might grant, while smothering a yawn, that we sometimes need to be Machiavellians. But we would not say that we are Machiavellians. And yet Machiavelli’s books are not just full of striking maxims about how we should live, like “men should either be caressed or eliminated” [P 3:10].1 They are also full of striking claims about how we do live, claims that Machiavelli offers in support of these maxims. “[M]en should either be caressed or eliminated, because they avenge themselves for slight offenses but cannot do so for grave ones” [P 3:10] – because, that is, only death can stop a human being from seeking revenge, even for a slight injury. Behind or beneath the Machiavellian maxims about how we should live, there appears to be a Machiavellian account of how we do live – an account of what human beings are, an account of human nature. Could this account be true? And if we find it to be so, are we compelled to be, not just rainy day Machiavellians, but Machiavellians �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 2 through and through? These questions, it seems to me, run a lesser risk of being boring. Tonight I will sketch this Machiavellian account of human nature, chiefly as it is found in The Prince, but with some reference to the Discourses on Livy. In concentrating on these two books, I will be following Machiavelli’s advice, at least to some extent. In the Dedicatory Letter of The Prince, he suggests that it contains all that he has learned and understood; while in the Dedicatory Letter of the Discourses he writes that it contains as much as he knows and has learned [P DL:3-4; D DL:3; compare TM, 17]. Either book on its own would presumably suffice for the experienced student of Machiavelli. But for relative beginners like ourselves, it is helpful to have the same matter given two different forms. What I hope to show by this sketch is that we underestimate Machiavelli if we consider him simply as a teacher of amoral or immoral practices that we can take or leave as we conduct our lives. To the extent that Machiavelli’s account of human nature is shared by his successors, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau – to whose thought we trace our political institutions and our understanding of ourselves – we may be forced to acknowledge his account of human nature as our own. It may turn out that deep down, where it counts, we are Machiavellians, even though we do not appear to be so, even to ourselves. This lecture will have three parts. In the first, I will offer the desire to acquire as the main element of human nature as Machiavelli depicts it, and show how in a political setting this desire ramifies into two humors, that of the great and that of the people. In the second I will sketch goodness as the excellence of the popular humor and virtue as the excellence of the humor of the great, and I will connect Machiavelli’s distinction between goodness and virtue to the famous ‘turn’ in Chapter Fifteen of The Prince from the imagination of a thing to its effectual truth [P 15:51]. In the final part I will suggest that Machiavelli’s view of human nature points to �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 3 a science of human nature without a distinctively human element – what Machiavelli calls a “science of sites” – and I will raise some difficulties with this science, difficulties that originate in Machiavelli’s own writings. I Readers who leaf through the pages of The Prince or the Discourses in search of the phrase ‘human nature’ are bound, at first, to be disappointed. As far as I can tell, Machiavelli never uses the phrase in either work. Mentions of nature, by contrast, are easy to find. In The Prince, for example, Machiavelli writes of the natures of nonliving things, like sites, mountains, low places, rivers, and marshes [P DL:4, 14:59]. He writes of the natures of living things, like beasts, foxes, and lions [P 18:69, 70; 19:78]. He writes of the natures of particular human beings, alone or in groups, like peoples, governments, ministers, emperors, princes, and cautious men [P DL:4; 6:24; 4:18; 7:30; 17:68; 19:76; 23:95; 25:99, 100]. He even writes of nature in general as something that contains things [P 7:26], and that causes particular men to incline in a certain way [P 25:100].2 But each time he writes about nature, Machiavelli sidesteps the phrase ‘human nature.’ He is willing to write as if particular beings have natures, he is willing to include particular human beings among these beings, and he is willing to imply that all beings fall within nature in some general sense; but nature in each of these cases is subhuman or superhuman – that is, not specifically human. The closest Machiavelli comes to writing about human nature in The Prince is a single claim he makes about the “nature of men” – that they are “obligated as much by benefits they give as by benefits they receive” [P 10:44]. Even there, he does not dignify the nature of men with the specific adjective ‘human.’ Nonetheless, there are plenty of hints in The Prince that Machiavelli thinks that human �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 4 beings do have a nature, if only in the sense of an abiding character. Early in the work, for example, he considers “a natural difficulty” and “another natural and ordinary necessity” that confront a new prince: that “men willingly change their masters in the belief that they will fare better,” but that “one must always offend those over whom he becomes a new prince” [P 3:8].3 In the immediate sequel Machiavelli treats these natural necessities that follow from the character of men as “universal causes” [P 3:9],4 and suggests that they contribute to an apparently permanent “order of things” [P 3:11] that endures despite the changes brought by time [P 3:13; 10:44].5 Later in The Prince he invokes “human conditions” in much the same way, to explain why a prince cannot have, nor wholly observe, all of the qualities that are held good [P 15:62]. The conditions in question can be summarized in a single phrase: men are wicked unless necessity makes them good.6 As with the other natural necessities felt by a new prince, Machiavelli implies that these conditions will never change, as long as there are human beings. If they did change, his description of the situation of the new prince, and of the political situation more generally, would cease to be true. Similar claims about the abiding character of human beings can be found in the Discourses, in a somewhat more explicit form. In that work Machiavelli warns early on against the error of thinking that men, among other things, have “varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity” [D I.P.2:6]. To the contrary, “[w]hoever considers present and ancient things easily knows that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same humors, and there always have been” [D I.39.1:83].7 Not just human beings but human things have a permanent character: they “are always in motion, either they ascend or they descend” [D II.P.2:123]. Perhaps as a result, the world has a permanent character too: “I judge the world always to have been in the same mode,” Machiavelli writes, “and there to have been as �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 5 much good as wicked in it” [D II.P.2:124]. He even flirts, indirectly, with the idea that the world is eternal. “To those philosophers who would have it that the world is eternal,” he writes, “I believe that one could reply that if so much antiquity were true it would be reasonable that there be memory of more than five thousand years – if it were not seen how the memories of times are eliminated by diverse causes, of which part come from men, part from heaven” [D II.5.1:138139]. It is reasonable, then, that there be no memory of more than five thousand years, even if the world is eternal. So is the world eternal? However this may be, Machiavelli regards the world as lasting enough that he can claim that human things have an abiding character. “It has always been, and will always be,” he announces, “that great and rare men are neglected in a republic in peaceful times” [D III.16.1:254]. Men “have and always had the same passions, and they must of necessity result in the same effect” [D III.43.1:302]. If it were to turn out that the abiding character of human beings included an element specific to human beings, an element that was a cause or principle of human motion and rest, then despite his avoidance of the term, Machiavelli could be said to have an account of a specifically human nature. The best candidate for such an element, in The Prince and the Discourses, is the desire to acquire. In The Prince this desire sets the tone for the whole book. Machiavelli mentions it in the first sentence of the Dedicatory Letter, writing “[i]t is customary most of the time for those who desire to acquire favor with a Prince to come to meet him with things that they care most for among their own or with things that they see please him most” [P DL:3]. In the particular form of the desire to acquire a principality, this desire dictates the concerns of the first half of the work, and is mentioned in three of the first fourteen chapter titles;8 while the second half, which examines “what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends” [P 15:61], can be understood as containing advice about how to keep an acquisition. But when �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 6 Machiavelli formulates this desire as a principle, he writes, “truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire” [P 3:14], without saying for whom, or for what, this is very natural and ordinary. He does continue, in the immediate sequel, “and when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the error and the blame” [P 3:14-15], but this amounts to saying that praise and blame are specifically human, not that the desire to acquire is.9 In the Discourses Machiavelli elaborates: “nature has created men so that they are able to desire everything and are unable to attain everything” [D I.37.1:78]. As a result, “human appetites are insatiable, for since from nature they have the ability and the wish to desire all things and from fortune the ability to achieve few of them, there continually results from this a discontent in human minds and a disgust with the things they possess” [D II.P.3:125]. While Machiavelli says that the insatiable appetites and the discontent and disgust that they produce are specifically human, they are also effects of a cause that is not specifically human: nature in general. Not only does Machiavelli fail to insist that the desire to acquire is specifically human; he also fails to assign the desire a specific end. In The Prince and the Discourses he depicts human beings who desire to acquire material things like cities and provinces, states and kingdoms, friends and partisans, and spiritual things like reputation, glory, and knowledge. But he never argues that these are the proper objects of the desire to acquire. Instead, he asserts in the Discourses, “each willingly multiplies that thing and seeks to acquire those goods he believes he can enjoy once acquired” [D II.2.3:132; compare II.4.2:137]. The desire to acquire can have anything as its object, then, so long as the one who acquires it believes he will enjoy it. But the omnivorousness of the desire points again to its insatiability. Since the object of the desire is nothing in particular, but rather acquisition for the sake of enjoying possession, and since �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 7 possession inspires only disgust and discontentment, the acquiring being goes from expecting future enjoyment to feeling present dissatisfaction, and the desire to acquire must seek a new object. Machiavelli is right, then, to call this desire a desire to acquire, since it aims at no object in particular, but rather at acquisition, which is to say the feeling of acquisition, in general. Human beings feel discontent and disgust with what they have; they enjoy only when they feel that what they have is increasing.10 The desire to acquire thus resembles a drive to grow, since its end is an increase in one’s own, without any intrinsic concern about whether one’s own is also good.11 Understood in this way, the desire to acquire has both external and internal consequences. Externally, this desire drives isolated human beings to acquire without limit and without exclusion – in the Discourses Machiavelli mentions that it is even possible to “acquire the world” [D I.20.1:54]. It follows from this that isolated human beings are almost entirely formless.12 Perhaps this is one reason for Machiavelli’s practice of using “matter” as a term for the human beings who are potential subjects of a prince [P 6:23; 26:102, 104]. But in a political setting, when human beings live together, their desires to acquire interfere with one another, and form arises. In The Prince, Machiavelli proclaims that in every city and every principality, “two diverse humors are found” [P 9:39; compare 19:7613]: the people and the great. These humors are defined by their characteristic appetites: “the people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people” [P 9:39].14 In the Discourses, Machiavelli calls these humors the nobles and the ignobles, and writes, “[w]ithout doubt, if one considers the end of the nobles and of the ignobles, one will see great desire to dominate in the former, and in the latter only desire not to be dominated; and in consequence, a greater will to live free, being less able to hope to usurp it” – that is, to usurp �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 8 freedom – “than are the great” [D I.5.2:18].15 Lest we think that Machiavelli means that the people or the ignobles do not desire to acquire, and that his two humors are therefore different natures,16 rather than ramifications of the desire to acquire, Machiavelli points in the Discourses to their common source. Having just characterized the difference between the nobles and the ignobles, he restates it paragraphs later as the difference between “those who desire to acquire” and “those who fear to lose what they have acquired,” and then explains that tumults are most frequently generated by those who possess, because “the fear of losing generates in [them] the same wishes that are in those who desire to acquire; for it does not appear to men that they possess securely what a man has unless he acquires something else new” [D I.5.4:19].17 Machiavelli thereby blurs the difference between the people and the great: fearing to lose has the same effects as desiring to acquire. Later in the Discourses he makes much the same point, insisting that the difference between a prince’s and a people’s way of proceeding “arises not from a diverse nature – because it is in one mode in all” [D I.58.3:117], and that the popular desire for freedom is an effect of the desire to acquire [D II.2.1:129].18 If these assertions are not enough, Machiavelli also tells a characteristic story in the Discourses about Clearchus, the tyrant of Heraclea, who, finding himself caught “between the insolence of the aristocrats… and the rage of the people,” “decided to free himself at one stroke from the vexation of the great and to win over the people to himself.” By having all the aristocrats cut to pieces, “he satisfied one of the wishes that peoples have – that is, to be avenged. But as to the other popular desire,” Machiavelli continues, “to recover freedom, since the prince cannot satisfy it, he should examine what causes are those that make [peoples] desire to be free. He will find that a small part of them desires to be free so as to command, but all the others, who are infinite, desire freedom so as to live secure” [D I.16.5:46]. Even if the humor of �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 9 the great is eliminated from a city or a principality, the remaining popular humor reforms itself into two humors: the people, and the great. These Machiavellian indications that the humors of the people and the great are ramifications of the more fundamental desire to acquire also indicate that it is political life that chiefly causes these ramifications. In isolation the desire to acquire knows only the feelings of pleasurable increase or disgusting stasis; the desire to oppress, on the one hand, and the fear of oppression on the other arise only in the political encounter with other more or less powerful desires to acquire. Machiavelli acknowledges this in his brief account of the origins of political life in the Discourses. “[S]ince the inhabitants were sparse in the beginning of the world,” he writes, “they lived dispersed for a time like beasts; then, as generations multiplied, they gathered together, and to be able to defend themselves better, they began to look to whoever among them was more robust and of greater heart, and they made him a head, as it were, and obeyed him” [D I.2.3:11].19 Thus arose the universal political struggle between the two humors, in which the great give reputation to one of their number “so that they can satisfy their appetite under his shadow,” while the people give reputation to one of the great “so as to be defended with his authority” [P 9:39].20 The desire to acquire also has internal consequences: namely, the ramification of the present into the past and the future. Like any desire, the desire to acquire involves opposing a painful, factual present to a pleasant, counterfactual future. A being animated by such a desire must be able to distinguish what it actually possesses from what it might possess, in order to direct itself away from the former and toward the latter. So a being who desires to acquire, in particular, must have memory, a continuing sense of its possessions, and foresight, a sense of what its possessions might become. In the healthy case, its memory will be the basis of its �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 10 dissatisfaction with the present, and its foresight, the basis of its hope for the future. As Machiavelli puts it in the Discourses, the insatiability of human appetites makes men “blame the present times, praise the past, and desire the future, even if they are not moved to do this by any reasonable cause” [D II.P.3:125]. It is the people or the ignobles in particular who blame the present and praise the past, since their knowledge of the past is less accurate than their knowledge of the present, and past things in general are neither feared nor envied [D II.P.1:123]. Moreover, memory supports the popular form of the desire to acquire – the fear of loss – by preserving an inaccurate but venerable past, and arguing that excellence consists in this preservation [D I.10.2:31]. Memory encourages men to honor the past and obey the present, and thereby discourages conspiracies [D III.6.1:218]. And when it involves fearsome events, memory can bring a state back to its beginnings, and so preserve it [D III.1.3:211]. Perhaps unsurprisingly, memory is therefore also an obstacle to the great or the nobles’ desire to acquire, especially when acquisition brings innovation [P 2:7, 4:19, 5:21]. It is the first concern of new sects to eliminate the memory of their predecessors, for example [D II.5.1:139]. But memory can also serve the foresight of the great: if it helps to maintain a nation in the same customs for a long time, it makes it easy for human beings to know future things by past ones [D III.43.1:302; compare I.39.1:83-84].21 Since the future is on this account the realm of hoped-for acquisition by the great, or feared loss by the people, while the present is the realm of real possession, whether unsatisfying to the great or satisfying to the people, the ramification of the present into the past and the future is also a differentiation between the factual and counterfactual worlds, or between the real and the imaginary. Taken together, the humors of the people and the great and the ramification of the present into the past and the future explain the typical progressivism of the great, who want �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 11 to live in the future that their desire to acquire foresees, and the typical conservatism of the people, who want to remain free of this future.22 Taken together, these forms of the desire to acquire explain why each of Machiavelli’s humors has its corresponding understanding of human excellence. II So far we have considered the desire to acquire as the core of human nature, according to Machiavelli. We have also sketched the chief implications of this desire, showing how in political settings it issues in a progressive great and a conservative people. Each of these humors, it turns out, also has a characteristic understanding of human excellence: for the people excellence is goodness, and for the great, excellence is virtue [D I.17.1-3:47-48; compare MV, 24-25]. We will discover, as we try next to fill in the content of goodness and virtue according to Machiavelli, that the difference between goodness and virtue is also connected to his famous distinction, made in The Prince, between the “effectual truth” and “imagined republics and principalities” [P 15:61]. Perhaps because of its focus on the perspective of the great, goodness is only mentioned twice in The Prince, both times in an ironic and disparaging way. Having begun his consideration of ecclesiastical principalities with the claim that they are maintained without virtue or fortune, Machiavelli concludes with the pious hope that “with his goodness and infinite other virtues” Pope Leo X will make the pontificate “very great and venerable” [P 11:47]. In a likeminded remark later in the book, during his survey of the fates of the Roman emperors, Machiavelli notes that Emperor Alexander was of such goodness that he never made use of summary execution. But he was also held to be effeminate, for which he was despised, �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 12 conspired against, and assassinated [P 19:77]. These examples distinguish goodness from virtue, and can hardly be said to recommend goodness to a prince. In the Discourses, by contrast, there is a fuller and less dismissive discussion of goodness. Machiavelli claims that it is the characteristic excellence of peoples, as opposed to princes, writing that if the glories and the disorders of princes be reviewed, “the people will be seen to be by far superior in goodness and glory.” Princes, he explains, are superior to peoples in ordering, but peoples are superior to princes in maintaining the things ordered – which is why they attain the glory of those who order [D I.58.3:118]. Despite having characteristically retracted half of his praise of peoples, Machiavelli leaves them with their superiority in goodness. This excellence consists, then, in maintaining what is ordered at the founding of a sect, a republic, or a kingdom, and promulgated by education [D III.1.2:209; III.30.1:280]: namely, the laws, which are maintained by being obeyed by the people. Both peoples and princes show goodness when they obey, and so are restrained by, the laws [D I.58.2:116; compare III.24.1:270, III.46.1:307]. Indeed, early in the Discourses Machiavelli asserts, “the knowledge of things honest and good” first arose out of the people’s obedience to the great. “[S]eeing that if one individual hurt his benefactor,” he explains, hatred and compassion among men came from it, and as they blamed the ungrateful and honored those who were grateful, and thought too that those same injuries could be done to them, to escape like evil they were reduced to making laws and ordering punishments for whoever acted against them: hence came the knowledge of justice [D I.2.3:11-12]. Now because goodness consists chiefly in obedience to the laws, it is closely connected to religion as the basis of the laws [D I.11.3:35; I.55.2:110, 111], and to conscience as their internal enforcement [D I.27.1:62; I.55.2:110]. Through obedience to the laws, goodness procures and defends freedom [D I.17.1:47], which as we have seen is the goal of the people’s modified desire to acquire. Lest we think that goodness consists solely in obedience to the laws, �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 13 Machiavelli mentions one example that “shows how much goodness and how much religion” were in the Roman people. When the Senate issued an unpopular edict that required the plebs to sacrifice to Apollo a tenth of the booty taken in a recent victory, “the plebs thought not of defrauding the edict in any part by giving less than it owed, but of freeing itself from it by showing open indignation” [D I.55.1:110]. Goodness consists chiefly in obedience to the laws, but perhaps more importantly, in the refusal to use fraud even when one disobeys. It is almost the same thing as honesty. Machiavelli signals, in several places, that the opposite of goodness is corruption [D I.17.1:47; I.55.1:110; III.1.2:209; III.30.1:280]. But there is reason to think that a more thoroughgoing opposite to this excellence of the people is the excellence of the great, virtue. This is not just because, as we have seen, Machiavelli is contemptuous of goodness in his book on princes, nor just because the superiority of princes to peoples in ordering means that they must destroy a prior order that others are trying to maintain. It is not just because virtue is inimical to goodness. Rather, it is because goodness can also be inimical to virtue. We see how so in one of the examples Machiavelli gives to illustrate the goodness of the matter and the orders of Rome: that of Manlius Capitolinus, who found no one to support his rebellion against the Senate and laws, and was condemned by the Roman people to death. “I do not believe that there is an example in this history more apt to show the goodness of all the orders of that republic than this,” Machiavelli concludes, “seeing that no one in that city moved to defend a citizen full of every virtue, who publicly and privately had performed very many praiseworthy works” [D III.8.1:238].23 In contrast to his account of goodness, Machiavelli’s account of virtue is developed more fully in The Prince, and in particular in the book’s second half, Chapters Fifteen and following, �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 14 where he turns to consider “what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends” [P 15:61]. This statement of what remains of his project implies that the first half of the book considered what the modes and government of a prince should be with foreigners and with enemies; and when we see that the explicit subject of the first half of The Prince is “How Many Are the Kinds of Principalities and in What Modes They Are Acquired” [P 1.T:5] – that is acquisition – this implication is confirmed. We seem to be on a firm Machiavellian footing: with foreigners and enemies the prince follows the desire to acquire, while with subjects and friends he practices virtue. The generality of Machiavelli’s opening statement on virtue might therefore come as a surprise. “A man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good,” he writes. “Hence it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity” [P 15:61]. Necessity, and not the difference between friend and enemy, or subject and foreigner, determines whether the prince should be good or wicked. The “so many who are not good” include friend and foe alike. To be able to act as necessity demands, we will learn, is virtue. Machiavelli connects his new account of virtue to his famous move from the imagination of a thing to its effectual truth, or from how one should live to how one lives [P 15:61]. Before considering this connection, though, let’s follow his development of this account of virtue in the chapter of The Prince devoted to whether a prince should be honest. Since combat with laws – what we might call the combat of the good – is often not enough, one must have recourse to combat with arms: so “it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the man” [P 18:69]. The ancients understood this necessity, and communicated it by depicting the centaur Chiron as the teacher of Achilles. “To have as a teacher a half-beast, half-man,” �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 15 Machiavelli writes, “means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures” [P 18.69]. We have mentioned that Machiavelli is willing to say that there is a nature of princes [P ED:4]: this nature now seems to be something more comprehensive than the nature of a man or the nature of a beast, if it is capable of using, or imitating [P 19:78], both of these natures. “Thus, since a prince is compelled of necessity to know well how to use the beast,” Machiavelli continues, “he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves. So one needs to be a fox to recognize snares and a lion to frighten the wolves” [P 18:69]. Each animal, then, has a single defect that is remedied by the other: the fox’s astuteness remedies the lion’s gullibility, while the lion’s fierceness remedies the fox’s contemptibility [compare P 19:79]. But if each of the two bestial natures that the prince should use has a single defect that is remedied by the other, what use does the prince have for the other component of the centaur: the nature of a man? Machiavelli has implied that this nature is needed for combat with laws, since this is “proper to man” [P 18:69]; but we would be forgiven for doubting him, since he has also claimed, six chapters earlier, that good arms are the necessary and sufficient condition of good laws [P 12:48]. We might begin to suspect that combat with arms is also sufficient, and that the prince who knows well how to use the nature of the fox and the lion has no need of the nature of man in addition – that he could be entirely inhuman, all beast. But Machiavelli has more to say. “[I]f all men were good, this teaching would not be good,” – if all men were honest, that is, there would be no snares, and it would suffice for a prince to be a lion – “but because they are wicked and do not observe faith with you, you also do not have to observe it with them” [P 18:69]. There are infinite modern examples, he claims, in which “the one who has known best how to use the fox has come out best,” because a faithless prince has ensnared the gullible. “But it is �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 16 necessary,” Machiavelli continues, “to know well how to color this nature, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple and so obedient to present necessities that he who deceives will always find someone who will let himself be deceived” [P 18:70]. The nature of the fox needs to be colored because its astuteness is limited to recognizing snares, as opposed to setting them. There is a use for the nature of man after all: it equips an otherwise brutish virtue with the specifically human ability to lie. In restating his conclusion, Machiavelli makes it clear that his discussion of “In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes” [P 18.T:68] is really a discussion of his account of all virtue, which is to say a discussion “Of Those Things for Which Men And Especially Princes Are Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61], or a discussion of human excellence in general. “[I]t is not necessary,” he writes, “for a prince to have all the above-mentioned qualities [the traditional virtues and vices] in fact, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them” [P 18:70; compare 15:62]. Lest we infer that it is necessary to have some of these qualities, he then sharpens his restatement: since “by having them and always observing them, they are harmful; and by appearing to have them, they are useful,” it is necessary to “remain with a spirit built [edificato] so that, if you need not to be those things, you are able and know how to change to the contrary” [P 18:70]. To use a nature, or to imitate a nature, turns out to mean not to have but to appear to have that nature. But to appear to have a nature one does not have is to lie. So the specifically human ability to lie seems sufficient to generate the appearance of, and therefore sufficient to make use of, all the other natures a virtuous prince might need. This reading is supported by the discussion of Severus in the next chapter of The Prince. Since Severus was a new prince whose actions were great and notable, Machiavelli wants “to show briefly how well he knew to use the persons of the fox and the lion, whose natures I say �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 17 above are necessary for a prince to imitate” [P 19:78]. These natures are now persons, things that can be impersonated. “[W]hoever examines minutely the actions of this man will find him a very fierce lion and a very astute fox” [P 19:79], Machiavelli continues, again omitting to mention the person or nature of a man. But it turns out that being like Severus is not sufficient for the best kind of prince: “a new prince in a new principality… should take from Severus those parts which are necessary to found his state and from Marcus [Aurelius] those which are fitting and glorious to conserve a state that is already established and firm” [P 19:82]. Since we know from the Discourses that those parts are called goodness, we might conclude that this is the use of the nature of a man. But Marcus was an enemy of cruelty [P 19:76], whereas Severus was very cruel [P 19:78], so the new prince who combines their parts will be neither, though he will know how to appear to be both. In other words, the virtuous desire to acquire uses the specifically human ability to lie to impersonate a man, just as much as to impersonate a lion or a fox. Understood in this way, the nature of the prince is something built, rather than something grown. But this is also true of the nature of peoples. Recall Machiavelli’s practice of referring to the people as “matter” to be formed by the prince [P 6:23; 26:102, 104], and his claims that knowledge of goodness arises from obedient gratitude to the great, and knowledge of justice from laws to protect against ingratitude [D I.2.3:11-12]. If the excellence of the people is goodness, the maintenance of orders founded by the great, then the nature of peoples is something built by the great, just as the nature of the great is something built by the great themselves. The great, we might say, and especially the prince, give form both to their own formless desire to acquire, and to that of the human beings around them. And they are guided in this formation by necessity. �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 18 Machiavelli means this foundation on necessity to justify his claim in The Prince that by departing from the orders of others in his discussion of virtue and goodness, and focusing on “the effectual truth of the thing” rather than on the imagination of it, he is writing something “useful to whoever understands it” [P 15:61]. Imaginary republics like Plato’s and imaginary principalities like Christ’s, which “have never been seen or known to exist in truth,” are used to illustrate how one should live – that is, they are used to support goodness. Real republics and principalities, by contrast, are used by Machiavelli to illustrate how one does live. That there is a difference between how one should live and how one does live is a sign of the failure of the imaginary realm to make human beings completely good, and a sign of the need to turn to the real. “Hence it is necessary for a prince,” Machiavelli concludes, “if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity” [P 15:61]. So the virtuous live in the realm of the real, according to Machiavelli, while the good live for the most part in the realm of the imaginary, or the counterfactual. The virtuous live in the present, which exists, while the good live mostly in the future, which does not. What is surprising about this conclusion is that it exactly contraries the conclusion we came to in our analysis of the desire to acquire, which had the humor of the people seeking to maintain present possessions, and the humor of the great hoping for future acquisitions. In other words, each humor of human nature, each way that the desire to acquire expresses itself in a political setting, must need the native realm of the other. The good people need an imaginary future because their desire to acquire, frustrated by the competing desires of the great, is limited in the real world to a hope for maintenance; only in another world, or in a city in speech, can they hope to avenge their subordination and become great. The virtuous great, by contrast, need the present because their �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 19 practice of lying – that is, their construction of imaginary worlds – for the sake of future acquisition needs to be informed by present necessities imposed by the people they are lying to; in other words, they require goodness for their virtue to be effectual. The difference between goodness and virtue, we could say, is the difference between an ignorant self-deception and a knowing deception of others. III Having concluded our sketch of Machiavelli’s view of human nature, understood as the desire to acquire, with its two humors and their corresponding excellences, we might begin to wonder whether this view is true. This is too big a question to explore in the final part of this lecture, though Machiavelli’s view does have the merit of explaining a common moral phenomenon: the concern of those who are trying to be good, that they might be the dupes of those who are not. Instead, this final part is devoted to a narrower, though related, question: does Machiavelli think that his account of human nature is true? Recall that in the fifteenth chapter of The Prince Machiavelli claims to turn from the imagination of a thing to its effectual truth, and from how one should live to how one lives [P 15:61]. He makes these claims right after announcing his turn to “what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends” [P 15:61], and presumably away from what his modes and government should be with foreigners and with enemies. The first chapter of The Prince, by contrast, refers in its title to the modes in which principalities are acquired [P I.T:5], and so announces the subject of the first part of the work. The suggestion in both parts of The Prince, then, is that what human beings should do follows directly from what they in fact do. What human beings in fact do provides the content of necessity, on the basis of �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 20 which virtue acts. Moreover, Machiavelli’s distinctions between foreigners and subjects, or between foes and friends, vanish from the perspective of necessity. The first part of The Prince focuses on acquisition, and so on foreigners and foes, but it treats in the same spirit how acquisitions are maintained, and so mentions subjects and friends [for example, P 7:29-30]. Similarly, the second part focuses on how the prince should treat subjects and friends, but the virtues that Machiavelli discusses in this part are needed also for dealing with foreigners and foes [for example, P 17:67-68]. Perhaps the clearest indication that these divisions vanish from the perspective of necessity is the title of the fifteenth chapter of The Prince, “Of Those Things for Which Men and Especially Princes Are Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61]. Attentive readers will remember that Machiavelli has already, much earlier in the work, said what these things are: “truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the error and the blame” [P 3:14-15]. The difference between the first and the second parts of The Prince is the difference between what human beings do to acquire, and what they ought to do. The first part of the work is chiefly descriptive, the second chiefly hortatory; and Machiavelli’s exhortation is based on his description: men should learn not to be good – that is, to be virtuous – because men are not good – that is, they are corrupt. In other words, Machiavelli’s exhortation to virtue requires two things to be true: that men are corrupt, and that there is a difference between corruption and virtue. Let’s look at each of these criteria in turn. One objection to Machiavelli’s claim that men are corrupt is that this may accidentally be so, but it is not so necessarily. As we have seen, human nature, according to Machiavelli, consists of a matter that is not specifically human, the desire to acquire, that can be formed to have specifically human excellences, goodness and virtue. In other words, human nature is �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 21 malleable. (Moreover, Machiavelli is evasive about what is specifically human in goodness and virtue: in The Prince, as we have seen, he guardedly identifies fraud, which uses or imitates brutish natures, as specifically human; but since fraud merely serves the desire to acquire, it does not serve a specifically human end.) In the Discourses Machiavelli makes this malleability more explicit when commenting on Livy’s disparaging claim that the French begin battles as more than men, but end them as less than women. “Thinking over whence this arises,” he writes, “it is believed by many that their nature is made so, which I believe is true; but because of this it is not that their nature, which makes them ferocious at the beginning, cannot be ordered with art, so that it maintains them ferocious to the last” [D III.36.1:292]. To be precise, the nature of the French makes them ferocious at the beginning of battles; it is the failure of this nature that makes their ferocity lapse. This failure can be avoided, and their nature maintained, by the order imparted by art. The Roman army, Machiavelli indicates later in the same chapter, exemplifies such ordering. Nothing its soldiers did was not regulated: “they did not eat, they did not sleep, they did not go whoring, they did not perform any action either military or domestic without the order of the consul” [D III.36.2:292]. Not only can the difference between male and female be maintained by art; art can also constrain the natural movements of growth and reproduction. This artful ordering of nature produces the excellences that Machiavelli names goodness and virtue. But Machiavelli also admits in the Discourses that there are limits to what art can achieve with its human material. He mentions two reasons why we are unable to change our natures as necessity demands: “one, that we are unable to oppose that to which nature inclines us; the other, that when one individual has prospered very much with one mode of proceeding, it is not possible to persuade him that he can do well to proceed otherwise” [D III.9.3:240]. These �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 22 reasons, which correspond to Machiavelli’s injunction in The Prince that one must both be able to change one’s nature, and know how to do so [P 18:70], suggest that the limits to malleability are imposed by the energy and the opinions of each human being.24 Since there will not always be a human being available with the needed energy and opinions to do what necessity demands in each case – and this is especially so if, as Machiavelli implies, success renders one’s opinions inflexible – art will eventually fail to order nature, with a consequent failure of virtue and of the goodness it orders. A permanently good human order, then, is not to be hoped for, despite the malleability of human nature. Corruption is necessary, and so virtue is needed. The requirement that virtue be different from corruption is trickier to establish. We have seen that both of these forms of human nature are opposed to goodness; they differ because virtue in departing from goodness looks to a different standard, necessity, whereas corruption in departing from goodness does not. The difference between virtue and corruption depends, then, on the existence of knowable necessities in human life. Now we have seen Machiavelli write as though necessities are knowable by human beings; this is what he seems to mean when he urges princes to “learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity” [P 15:61].25 In other words, Machiavelli seems to think that there is a science of necessities. But in The Prince and the Discourses taken together, Machiavelli mentions science only twice: both times in a chapter late in the Discourses that asserts that a captain must be a knower of sites, or of “the nature of countries” [D III.39.T:297; III.39.2:299]. The argument of this chapter closely parallels that of a similar chapter in The Prince, titled “What a Prince Should Do Regarding the Military” [P 14.T:58] – a chapter where, admittedly, science is not mentioned. In these two places, Machiavelli advises that princes, captains, and the great should train in hunting, part of the practical mode of the peaceful exercise of the art of war [P 14:59].26 Hunting yields �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 23 particular knowledge of the country in which one trains. “First,” Machiavelli writes in The Prince, “one learns to know one’s own country, and one can better understand its defense; then, through the knowledge of and experience with those sites, one can comprehend with ease every other site that it may be necessary to explore as new” [P 14:59]. Particular knowledge becomes general knowledge, and defensive ability becomes offensive ability, because of a “certain similarity” between the corresponding features in every country, “so that from the knowledge of a site in one province one can easily come to the knowledge of others” [P 14:59].27 Machiavelli makes sweeping claims for his science of sites. Not only is it necessary for a captain to have this “general and particular knowledge” of “sites and countries” if he wants to work anything well [D III.39.1:297-298], but it will allow a prince to know “all the chances that can occur to an army” [P 14:60]. While Philopoemen, Machiavelli’s example of a possessor of this science, led his army, “there could never arise any unforeseen event for which he did not have the remedy” [P 14:60]. As long as we have the energy to be able to act as necessity demands, the science of sites guarantees that we will know how to do so. We might grant Machiavelli’s claim that there are no supernatural kingdoms: that because all countries are alike in nature, knowledge of one leads to knowledge of all. But why does he think that a perfected science of sites allows a prince to overcome fortune? A sentence from the Discourses is helpful here. “Whoever has this practice,” Machiavelli writes, “knows with one glance of his eye how that plain lies, how that mountain rises, where this valley reaches, and all other things of which he has in the past made a firm science” [D III.39.2.298]. This talk of plains, mountains, and valleys should remind us of the comparison in the Dedicatory Letter of The Prince, between the natures of peoples and of princes, on the one hand, and the natures of mountains or high places and of low places, on the other [P DL:4]. By limiting his use of the �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 24 word “science” in The Prince and the Discourses to the science of sites, Machiavelli indicates that there is no science specific to human beings, nor even one specific to living beings. Human nature and living nature are continuous with nonliving nature, and psychology is continuous with geography – or better, with physics. The malleability of human nature, then, is great enough that nonhuman and nonliving phenomena are imitable by human beings, but not so great that human beings become incalculable as a result.28 Just as there are no superhuman kingdoms, there are no supermen – though as we have seen there are centaurs. This understanding of Machiavelli’s science of sites is puzzling, though, because it seems to require a descriptive treatment of virtue, rather than the hortatory one that we find in the second part of The Prince. If human beings are as determined and predictable as nonhuman bodies, why not describe what they do, rather than fruitlessly exhorting them to behave otherwise than they do? In particular, we would expect Machiavelli to insist that princes do learn to be able not to be good, and to use it according to necessity, to the extent that they have the most excellent form of the desire to acquire. Instead, as we have seen, he insists, “it is necessary for a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity” [P 15:61; emphasis added]. Now what sense does this condition, “if he wants to maintain himself,” make in the light of Machiavelli’s claim that all human beings, and the great above all, are driven by the desire to acquire? Since acquisition presupposes the persistence of the acquiring being, how could a prince not want to maintain himself?29 In the chapter of The Prince devoted to conspiracies, Machiavelli admits that there exist very rare human beings with “an obstinate spirit,” who do not care about death. A prince cannot avoid death at the hands of such a conspirator, because “anyone who does not care about death can harm him” [P 19:79]. Since the threat of death and the consequent loss of all one’s �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 25 acquisitions – the threat of ruin, as Machiavelli puts it – is the paramount necessity faced by human beings [for example, P 15:61], these very rare human beings apparently fall outside the scope of this necessity, and therefore outside the scope of the science of sites.30 There is no remedy available to princes for such unforeseen events. We might expect Machiavelli to try to account for the existence of such human beings by tracing their obstinacy back to the desire to acquire, saying, for example, that they do not care about death because they hope for an afterlife in which they will be rewarded. But he does not do so; instead, he says only that they are motivated by the desire to avenge a “grave injury” [P 19:79-80; see also D III.6.11:227] – a desire that can be satisfied in this life, even if one does not long survive its satisfaction. In the Discourses Machiavelli claims, “private men enter upon no enterprise more dangerous or more bold” than a conspiracy against a prince [D III.6.1:218; see also III.6.4:223]. In The Prince, by contrast, he writes, “nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of new orders” [P 6:23]. The obstinate spirit one needs to brave the greatest danger in a conspiracy is presumably also needed to brave the greatest danger in founding something entirely new, for every new foundation begins as a conspiracy against the old. We might wonder, then, whether this account of human nature is adequate to explain the activity of the new prince, or even Machiavelli’s own activity. Is Machiavelli himself motivated by the desire to acquire? We cannot seriously believe that a virtuous possessor of the science of sites, for whom, as long as he is armed, no accident can arise for which he does not have the remedy [P 14:60], could be compelled to endure a “great and continuous malignity of fortune” [P DL:4]. Machiavelli does make it seem, at the beginning of the Dedicatory Letter of The Prince, that he desires “to acquire favor with a Prince” [P DL:3]; but in the Preface to the first book of the Discourses he claims instead that he has �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 26 always had a “natural desire… to work, without any respect, for those things I believe will bring common benefit to everyone” [D I.P.1:5]. These doubts about Machiavelli’s science of sites – that it ought to preclude the hortatory character of the second part of The Prince, and that it cannot account for human beings who are contemptuous of death – suggest that the account of human nature in The Prince and the Discourses is partial, and that Machiavelli knows it.31 Through these works he means to shape human nature, to the extent that it can be shaped, by an education that claims that human nature is more malleable and more predictable than Machiavelli really thinks it is. For the sake of the common benefit, he means to persuade the great to act as if they are acting only according to necessity. This project would amount to nothing more than a curiosity in the history of political thought were it not for its remarkable success. We are the indirect beneficiaries of Machiavelli’s questionable attempt: we who believe that our natures are malleable, especially by technology; we who believe in rights founded only on necessities; we who believe ourselves great because of the dream of acquisition without limit; we who believe in progress, and in the necessity of a better future; and we who believe ourselves to be the people whose acquisitions the laws of nature and of nature’s God secure. Without attention to Machiavelli’s account of human nature we run the risk of remaining the unconscious inheritors at third hand of a partial account, of a project, posing as a science, to narrow human possibilities through education. We risk being Machiavellians without knowing it. How is this to the common benefit of everyone? Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 20 June 2012 �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 27 Notes 1 References to The Prince and to the Discourses will be given in the text, in the forms [P Chapter:page] and [D Book.chapter.paragraph:page], respectively. In these references, DL stands for dedicatory letter, P for preface, and T for title. The editions used are Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince. A New Translation with an Introduction, by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), and Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). I also refer to Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001) in the form [MNMO, page]; to Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) in the form [MV, page]; and to Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1958) in the form [TM, page]. 2 In the former passage, Machiavelli writes, “states that come to be suddenly, like all other things in nature that are born and grow quickly, cannot have roots and branches” [P 7:26], while in the latter he writes that a man cannot be found who is so prudent to accommodate himself to changes in fortune, in part “because he cannot deviate from what nature inclines him to” [P 25:100]. In two passages in the Discourses analogous to the latter passage in The Prince, Machiavelli writes that we are unable to change in part because “we are unable to oppose that to which nature inclines us” [D III.9.3:240], and “it is given by nature to men to take sides in any divided thing whatever, and for this to please them more than that” [D III.27.3:275]. In these last three passages we might expect Machiavelli to write “his nature” or “our nature,” but he does not. There is one passage in the Discourses where he refers to “the wicked nature of men” [D III.29.1:277], but he makes the reference while quoting a view with which he does not agree. 3 In nearby chapters at the beginning of The Prince, Machiavelli uses the phrases “natural prince” [P 2:7] and “natural affection” [P 4:17] to refer to the prince who inherits a principality and the affection felt for him. The natural and the ordinary are closely connected at this point in the work, and they both refer primarily to the sequence of human generation. The new prince is opposed to the natural or ordinary prince in Machiavelli’s argument, and the natural and ordinary is both an obstacle and an opportunity for him. 4 Machiavelli may mean to contrast these “universal causes” with the “superior causes” that he mentions in his discussion of ecclesiastical principalities [P 11:45]. 5 “[T]ime sweeps everything before it and can bring with it good as well as evil and evil as well as good” [P 3:13], according to Machiavelli, and “worldly things are so variable that it is next to impossible for one to stand with his armies idle in a siege for a year” [P 10:44]. There is another reference to an “order of things” much later in The Prince: “in the order of things it is found that one never seeks to avoid one inconvenience without running into another; but prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the qualities of inconveniences, and in picking the less bad as good” [P 21:91]. 6 “[O]ne can say this generally of men,” Machiavelli writes, “that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours, offering you their blood, property, lives, and children… when the need for them is far away; but, when it is close to you, they revolt” [P 17:66]. Having taught his reader later in The Prince that a prudent lord cannot observe faith, he continues, “if all men were good, this teaching would not be good; but because they are wicked and do not observe faith with you, you also do not have to observe it with them” [P 18:69]. Indeed, “men will always turn out bad for you unless they have been made good by a necessity” [P 23:95]. Machiavelli’s other claims about the apparently abiding character of men include, “men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone, touching to a few” [P 18:71], and, “men are much more taken by present things than by past ones, and when they find good in the present, they enjoy it and do not seek elsewhere” [P 24:96]. �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 28 7 Machiavelli repeats this claim much later in the Discourses, in a way that suggests an amendment. “Prudent men are accustomed to say,” he writes, “and not by chance or without merit, that whoever wishes to see what has to be considers what has been; for all worldly things in every time have their own counterpart in ancient times. That arises because these are the work of men, who have and always had the same passions, and they must of necessity result in the same effect” [D III.43.1:302]. What prudent men say by custom rather than by chance, and not without merit, is then corrected by what Machiavelli says in the immediate sequel: that it is true that the works of men “are more virtuous now in this province than in that, and in that more than in this, according to the form of education in which those people have taken their mode of life” [D III.43.1:302]. Education can shape nature, such that “Men Who Are Born in One Province Observe Almost the Same Nature for All Times” [D III.43.T:302; emphasis added]. Similarly, when investigating “Whence It Arises That One Family in One City Keeps the Same Customs for a Time” [D III.46.T:306], Machiavelli argues that this “cannot arise solely from the bloodline, because that must vary through the diversity of marriages, but it necessarily comes from the diverse education of one family from another” [D III.46.1:306]. 8 “How Many Are the Kinds of Principalities and in What Modes They Are Acquired” [P 1.T:5]; “Of New Principalities That Are Acquired through One’s Own Arms and Virtue” [P 6.T:21]; “Of New Principalities That are Acquired by Others’ Arms and Fortune” [P 7.T:25]. 9 This suggests another reason why Chapter XV, titled “Of Those Things for Which Men And Especially Princes are Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61] is also about acquisition. 10 The desire to acquire thus amounts to a desire for novelty. Later in the Discourses Machiavelli writes “men are desirous of new things, so much that most often those who are well off desire newness as much as those who are badly off. For, as was said another time [at D I.37.1:78], and it is true, men get bored with the good and grieve in the ill” [D III.21.2:263]. 11 And just as reproduction is growth by other means, so are one’s offspring and their acquisitions one’s own acquisitions, by other means. Consider Machiavelli’s hints about how Alexander VI used Cesare Borgia [P 11:46]. Death is not simply a limit of the desire to acquire. But compare note 27, below. Machiavelli does occasionally refer to a good that is the goal of acquisition. For example, in the Discourses he writes, [i]t appears that in the actions of men, as we have discoursed of another time [D I.6.3:21-22, where he wrote of “inconveniences”], besides the other difficulties in wishing to bring a thing to its perfection, one finds that close to the good there is always some evil that arises with that good so easily that it appears impossible to be able to miss the one if one wishes for the other. One sees this in all the things that men work on. So the good is acquired only with difficulty unless you are aided by fortune, so that with its force it conquers this ordinary and natural inconvenience” [D III.37.1:294]. But it is not clear that by “the good” here Machiavelli means anything other than any acquisition that can be felt and so enjoyed. Also, there are occasional hints in The Prince and the Discourses that some acquisitions can be harmful to the body that acquires them. In The Prince Machiavelli first raises the possibility of such acquisitions when he tells his reader that to keep an acquisition the prince must ensure that the acquired body becomes “one whole body” with the acquiring body [P 3:9]. If the new acquisition instead remains disparate with respect to the prince’s other possessions, then he runs the risk of losing it. A powerful foreigner can easily gain the lesser powers in a disparate province, since the lesser powers, moved by their envy of their rulers, quickly and willingly make “one mass” with the foreign invader [P 3:11]. A prince who rules a disparate state, and who fails to prevent powerful foreigners from taking advantage of this disparity, will soon lose his new acquisition, and “while he holds it, [he] will have infinite difficulties and vexations within it” [P 3:11]. So acquisitions can be harmful to the prince and his state as long as they remain disparate with his other possessions; in general, Machiavelli claims, “the disparity in the subject” explains why some conquerors hold their acquisitions while others lose them [P 4:19]. This disparity can be eliminated, and the new acquisition made into one whole body with the acquiring state, by eliminating the new acquisition’s memory of its previous way of life [P 4:19] – that is, by making the acquisition more complete. �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 29 Acquisition in Machiavelli’s account thus resembles nutrition, in that the acquired body must become like the acquiring body before it can be good for the acquiring body. As long as an acquisition remains disparate, it remains undigested, and a cause of “difficulties and vexations.” But it is not until he considers cities and principalities that live under their own laws before they are acquired that Machiavelli suggests that some acquisitions are by their nature indigestible. Considering the case of a city, he claims at first that “a city used to living free may be held more easily by means of its own citizens than in any other mode, if one wants to preserve it [P 5:20]. But Machiavelli soon admits that this is impossible: “in truth there is no secure mode to possess them other than to ruin them” [P 5:20]. The acquisition of a free city is necessarily harmful: “whoever becomes patron of a city accustomed to living free and does not destroy it, should expect to be destroyed by it” [P 5:20-21]. The indigestibility of such a city results, as we might expect, from the persistence of the memory of its way of life, despite length of time, benefits received, and anything short of destruction [P 5:21]. So the only secure way for a prince to keep such an acquisition is to eliminate it, or to live in it – that is, rather than digesting it, to be digested by it [P 5:21]. This marks the extent of Machiavelli’s admission in The Prince that some acquisitions are not good for the acquiring body. In the Discourses he writes that “[t]he intention of whoever makes war through choice – or, in truth, ambition – is to acquire and maintain the acquisition, and to proceed with it so that it enriches and does not impoverish the country and his fatherland” [D II.6.1:140]. Machiavelli thereby admits that there can be acquisitions that are not good. A later chapter title, “That Acquisition by Republics That Are Not Well Ordered and That Do Not Proceed According to Roman Virtue Are for Their Ruin, Not Their Exaltation” [D II.19.T:172], suggests that virtue might be the necessary and sufficient condition that makes acquisitions good, though Machiavelli ends the chapter by suggesting that “acquiring was about to be pernicious for the Romans in the times when they proceeded with so much prudence and so much virtue” [D II.19.2:175]. His most general remark about the goodness of acquisition in the Discourses comes in a chapter whose title proclaims its concern in part with the causes that eliminate the memories of things, where Machiavelli asserts in passing that “in simple bodies, when very much superfluous matter has gathered together there, nature many times moves by itself and produces a purge that is the health of that body” [D II.5.2:140]. But this remark about the goodness of acquisition, like the analogous discussion in The Prince, reduces goodness to similarity to the acquiring body: that is, it reduces the good to what is one’s own. It does not point to the an account in terms of a good that is independent of one’s own. 12 Almost, because the presence of other competing desires to acquire is likely not the only source of formative effects on the desire to acquire. To the extent that circumstances resist acquisition – one is not strong enough, for example, to climb the tree to reach the desired apple – the desire to acquire is also given form. But these formative effects are presumably not as lasting as political ones. If they were, then our common experience of infantile weakness would yield in everyone the humor of the people. 13 Here Machiavelli writes, “in other principalities” than the Roman empire, “one has to contend only with the ambition of the great and the insolence of the people” [P 19:76]. In the Roman empire one had to contend as well with the cruelty and avarice of the soldiers. 14 Later in the same chapter Machiavelli will reformulate this distinction, writing, “the great want to oppress and the people want not to be oppressed” [P 9:39]. The disappearance of command from his formulation calls for an explanation, and Machiavelli provides one in the sequel when he claims, “when a prince who founds on the people knows how to command,” among other things, “he will see he has laid his foundations well” [P 9:41], since “citizens and subjects” can become “accustomed to receive commands” [P 9:42]. Where oppression is concerned, the great and the people have nothing in common; but they do have something in common where command that is not oppressive is concerned. Command is thus the closest thing to a political solution to the existence of two humors. 15 One difference between the perspectives of The Prince and the Discourses is signaled by Machiavelli’s different description of the desires of the two humors in the two works. ‘Command and oppress’ in The Prince becomes ‘dominate’ in the Discourses. In the former work Machiavelli distinguishes between kinds of domination; in the latter he does not. 16 Mansfield writes that according to Machiavelli, morality �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 30 is controlled by natural temperament, by the two humors that divide all mankind and underlie all moral behavior and opinion. By speaking of humors Machiavelli indicates that they are not habits of the mind nor mental in origin but prerational dispositions. Not being rational in nature, they cannot be reconciled by speech or argument. These are two human types who do not understand each other – the one preferring security and comfort, suspicious of anyone who desires more, the other seeking risk and demanding honor, unbelieving that anyone could be satisfied with less [MV, 24]. 17 Machiavelli’s sudden shift from the plural to the singular in the course of this passage is both striking and puzzling. Could he mean to imply that men can be made to feel secure in their possession if only one man among them – their prince, for example, who in a sense has what they have – acquires something new? 18 “It is an easy thing to know whence arises among peoples this affection for a free way of life for it is seen through experience that cities have never expanded either in dominion or in riches if they have not been in freedom” [D II.2.1:129]. Moreover, if a republic “will not molest others, it will be molested, and from being molested will arise the wish and the necessity to acquire” [D II.19.1:173]. The desire to acquire is also an effect of the desire for freedom. 19 There is a similar but less detailed account in the previous and first chapter of the Discourses. Since all cities are either founded by natives or by foreigners, and all foreigners were natives elsewhere, then the original foundation of cities occurs when it does not appear, to inhabitants dispersed in many small parts, that they live securely, since each part by itself, both because of the site and because of the small number, cannot resist the thrust of whoever assaults it; and when the enemy comes, they do not have time to unite for their defense. Or if they did, they would be required to leave many of their strongholds abandoned; and so they would come at once to be the prey of their enemies. So to flee these dangers, moved either by themselves or by someone among them of greater authority, they are restrained to inhabit together a place elected by them, more advantageous to live in and easier to defend [D I.1.1:7]. 20 That the command of one of the great produces a political struggle between the two humors indicates that this command is not a perfect solution to the existence of the two humors. This is partly because the great continue to desire to acquire by oppressing the people. But it is also because the satisfaction of the people’s desire to be free of oppression cannot amount to a satisfaction of their more fundamental desire to acquire. Even a free people is compelled to recognize the superiority of the great, whose fundamental desire they share, and to see this superiority as an obstacle to the satisfaction of their desire to acquire. The result is envy: the desire that the great be deprived of their superiority. Machiavelli acknowledges this difficulty early in The Prince, when he considers the challenges a prince faces in holding a recently-acquired province that is disparate from those he already holds. “[T]he order of things is such that as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a province, all those in it who are less powerful adhere to him, moved by the envy they have against whoever has held power over them” [P 3:11]. Even or especially founders face envy [P 6:25], though Machiavelli conceals this difficulty in his concluding exhortation of a prince to seize Italy and free her from the barbarians [P 26:105]. Since envy persists among the people even when they are free from oppression by the great, and arises among the great when they elevate one of their number to command the people, Machiavelli distinguishes envy from fear [P 7:31; D II.P.1:123] and elevates it to a characteristic of human beings in the Discourses. “[T]he envious nature of men,” he writes there, “has always made it no less dangerous to find new modes and orders than to seek unknown waters and lands, because men are more ready to blame than to praise the actions of others” [D I.P.1:15]. The political solution to the existence of the two humors is not just command, but hidden command. 21 According to Machiavelli, there may be airborne intelligences, by contrast, who foresee future things by “natural virtue” [D I.56.1:114]. 22 This is not to deny that the people, and especially an oppressed people, might long for a future in which they are free from oppression. But such a future would require that the great be deprived of their superiority. The people are �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 31 typically conservative as long as they cannot imagine a satisfaction for their envy. In a chapter titled “The Multitude is Wiser and More Constant than a Prince,” Machiavelli admits that under a corrupt prince the people fear the present more than the future, while under a corrupt people they fear the future more than the present, because in the future a tyrant might emerge [D I.58.4:119]. But the corrupt case is not the typical one. Similarly, circumstances might require the great to fear the loss of their acquisitions, rather than to desire further acquisitions – for example, when threatened by a superior desire to acquire. But this is also an atypical case for the great. 23 Manlius’ fate points to another of Machiavelli’s remarks about goodness. Later in the Discourses, in a chapter partly titled “For One Citizen Who Wishes to Do Any Good Work in His Republic by His Authority, It Is Necessary First to Eliminate Envy” [D III.30.T:278], Machiavelli suggests first that “virtue and goodness” can eliminate envy, and then characteristically revises his claim by adding that “goodness is not enough” [D III.30.1:279, 280] – implying that virtue, if not sufficient, is at least necessary. 24 Extraordinary energy is needed for a prince to avoid the dangers of either being loved or being feared, according to the Discourses. “One cannot hold exactly to the middle way,” Machiavelli writes, for our nature does not consent to it, but it is necessary to mitigate those things that exceed with an excessive virtue” [D III.21.3:263; compare 22.3:266]. Perhaps most difficult is the apparently miraculous feat of ordering virtue and goodness in the same human being. In the same work Machiavelli praises the generosity of spirit of those [Roman] citizens whom, when put in charge of an army, the greatness of their spirit lifted above every prince. They did not esteem kings, or republics; nothing terrified or frightened them. When they later returned to private status, they became frugal, humble, careful of their small competencies, obedient to the magistrates, reverent to their superiors, so that it appears impossible that one and the same spirit underwent such change [D III.25.1:272]. 25 In a later formulation, Machiavelli writes that the prince “needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of fortune and variations of things command him” [P 18:70]. 26 The theoretical mode of the peaceful exercise of the art of war involves reading histories and imitating some excellent man in the past [P 14:60]. The practical and theoretical modes of the peaceful exercise of the art of war, added to the wartime exercise of this art, make up the whole art of war, which Machiavelli says should be the only art of the prince, because many times it enables men to acquire states, and it helps them to maintain them [P 14:58]. Machiavelli wrote a book called The Art of War. 27 Machiavelli repeats this reasoning in the Discourses. “Once one individual has made himself very familiar with a region, he then understands with ease all new countries; for every country and every member of the latter have some conformity together, so that one passes easily from the knowledge of one to the knowledge of the other” [D III.39.2:298]. Without this familiarization with one’s own country, one comes to know new countries either never, or only after a long time and with difficulty. 28 As Mansfield puts it, Machiavelli adumbrates the modern scientific understanding of nature that, with Bacon, abandons natural beings and begins the search for natural laws, but he does no more than adumbrate. Since he approaches the question of the nature of nature from the standpoint of what is good for human beings, he remains faithful to the fact that in morals and politics, different natures appear distinct to us, above all the difference between good and evil [MV, 21]. I mean here to fill out the content of Machiavelli’s adumbration with respect to human nature, and to point out the resulting tension between his abandonment of natural beings and his fidelity to the natural difference between good and evil. One sign of this tension is that while the science of sites seems to entail a mechanical or hydrodynamic account in which lifeless nature is primary [see, for example, P 25:98-99], the examples that Machiavelli offers for the excellent human being to imitate are chiefly living beings [compare P 25:100-101]. It is not clear whether the living or the nonliving is the primary category for Machiavelli’s comprehensive science. �Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 32 29 A reader who remembers the example of Pope Alexander VI from The Prince might object at this point that Alexander hoped to continue acquiring after his death, using his son Cesare Borgia as “his instrument” [P 11:46]. But acquisitions made through one’s offspring can be lost to death just as well as one’s own acquisitions, as long as one’s offspring are also mortal [P 7:31-32]. Also, it may necessarily be the case that a prince’s instruments are always inferior to him; had he lived, Alexander VI might not have made the errors that Cesare Borgia made [compare P 7:32-33 with 18:70]. Lastly, the pleasure of an predicted acquisition might necessarily be poorer than the pleasure of a real acquisition, if one has doubts about the possibility of enjoying it. 30 We learn by Machiavelli’s treatment of the same episode in the Discourses that the centurion with the “obstinate spirit” was not in fact the initiator of the successful conspiracy. Rather, he was the instrument of a prefect, who was himself driven to conspire against his emperor by the necessity imposed by the prefect’s fear of death [D III.6.11:227]. This elaboration does not detract from Machiavelli’s admission that some human beings cannot be compelled by the threat of death, and so his admission that his science of sites is not comprehensive. 31 There are other details in The Prince that raise similar doubts about the science of sites. For example, Machiavelli suggests that “obedience to present necessities” is what makes human beings vulnerable to being deceived [P 18:70]. He seems to mean not just that necessities can be manipulated [compare D III.12.1:247], since a human being would be no less excellent were he to be responsive to artificial necessities as well as to natural ones, nor just that necessities can be apparent rather than real, since a science of sites would distinguish only real necessities. Instead, he seems to mean to qualify his claim that it is sufficient for virtue to orient itself by necessity. In the same chapter Machiavelli also warns that “the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing”; and there is a similar passage in the Discourses where he writes, “all men are blind in this, in judging good or bad counsel by the end” [D III.35.2:291]. Again, if necessity were as knowable as Machiavelli elsewhere claims that it is, judging by the end would not be an instance of blindness or gullibility. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 32 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 "Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are": Machiavelli on Human Nature Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012-06-20 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I herby grant St. John's College permission: To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a copy of my typescript available online." Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527 Philosophy, Renaissance Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 80134 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on June 20, 2012 by Jeff Black as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. Mr. Black is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is on exactly what constitutes human nature in the work of Machiavelli. In particular, he considers how this view has affected the way we see Machiavelli's works and what it has to teach us about his writings. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Deans Graduate Institute Summer lecture series Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/428cb0237da0e28f29f37b5fd07fdea1.mp3 40ef117944dd53194f904704fa9fdc0d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Description An account of the resource The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public. For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library 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 CD Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:05:00 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gimbel, Steven, 1968- Title A name given to the resource Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012-07-11 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 11, 2012 by Steven Gimbel as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. Gimbel's lecture is on the relationship between Judaism and Einstein's scientific thinking, in particular Einstein's unique convergence of science, religion, and politics. Gimbel holds the Edwin T. Johnson and Cynthia Shearer Johnson Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where he also serves as Chair of the Philosophy Department. He received his bachelor's degree in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his doctoral degree in Philosophy from the Johns Hopkins University, where he wrote his dissertation on interpretations and the philosophical ramifications of relativity theory. 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 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. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Subject The topic of the resource Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955 Physics Religion and science Judaism--20th century Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 80142 Summer lecture series