11 20 453 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3de7b4180c4d6f2efa49aa5381e59e33.pdf 995d746ab663358b47f5b3254100efa8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Microsoft Word Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 15 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 "In Want of a Wife..." or a Husband, in <em>Pride and Prejudice</em> Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 17, 2015, by Suzy Paalman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Paalman, Susan R. 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 2015-04-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "Make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make typescript copies of my lecture 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 Paalman_Susan_2015-04-17 Subject The topic of the resource Austen, Jane, 1775-1817. Pride and prejudice Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1a94c04f11a57246b18ececbb98a684e.mp3 506f3e1a521cfa8010d08865d020557f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:56 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 Hume on Animals Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 19, 2018, by Aaron Garrett as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Garrett, Aaron Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-01-19 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Garrett_Aaron_2018-01-19_ac Subject The topic of the resource Hume, David, 1711-1776. Treatise of human nature Animals (Philosophy) Animal rights Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e8c29e112f8c44903fbd4e653a29d8e6.pdf 0c5bafc00236043c786481b54884d7fe 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 lec Petrich 2018-11-03.pdf Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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. 24 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 Student," by Anton Chekhov: A Story Told and Glanced At Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 3, 2017, by Louis Petrich as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Petrich, Louis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-11-03 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 make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make typescript copies of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Reprinted from the St. John's Review, 59.1-2 (2017-2018). Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Petrich 2018-11-03 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/74ae5b8767d2a23385d811ecb911ae28.mp3 6e09049577776d180579fd2565fdb39f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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 audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:25:27 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 Francis Bacon and the Conquest of Nature Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 25, 1975, by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- 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 1975-04-25 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_Berns_Laurence_1975-04-25_ac Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1091" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Subject The topic of the resource Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626 Philosophy, Modern Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/67d02f35e51ffc90f962f59d11bf9f2e.mp3 38e24df66c0bd6975de3f7657c767b37 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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 388) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:04:35 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Investigating Philosophical Investigations Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on May 19, 1978, by Howard Zeiderman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Zeiderman, Howard 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 1978-05-19 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 Zeiderman 1978-05-19 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/358f5a63dd3cc59d75697d1737330648.pdf 40dd079277759286c8cbf414c4684f18 PDF Text Text Principles of Motion and the Motion of Principles: Hegel's Inverted World Peter Kalkavage St. John's College, Annapolis 15 October 2010 �Principles of Motion and the Motion of Principles: Hegel's Inverted World1 Oh, judge for yourselves: I have been concealing it all the time, but now I will tell you the whole truth. The fact is, ! ... corrupted them all! -Dostoevsky, "The Dream ofa Ridiculous Man" 2 In the Phenomenology of Spirit, late in Hegel's chapter on force and understanding, a baffling figure comes before us. It is the famous "inverted world." This figure completes the dialectic of understanding. As a result of the inverted world, consciousness-the sole but protean hero of Hegel's philosophic epic-undergoes a conversion: it ceases to put truth in objects or things and instead places it in the thinking subject. My plan is to take us through Hegel's chapter on understanding with the following questions in mind: Why, for Hegel, is understanding logically unstable? Why is force its proper object? What is the inverted world, and how does it come about? What does it show us about the nature of thinking, and the nature of nature? Finally, how does the inverted world bring about the great turn in the Phenomenology from knowledge as the consciousness of things to knowledge as grounded in self-consciousness? Understanding, Verstand, has a range of meanings in Hegel. It refers most generally to our capacity for making distinctions, our power of analysis. In his Encyclopedia, Hegel indicates the function and limit of understanding as follows: "Thinking as understanding stops short at the fixed determinacy and its distinctness vis-a-vis other determinacies." 3 In other words, understanding establishes fixed boundaries and stable identities. Fond of schematizing, it regards mathematics as the model of what it means to know. In the Phenomenology, the archetype of Verstand is the "new science" inaugurated by Galileo and Descartes and brought to its peak in the force-theories of Newton and Leibniz. The �chapter "Force and Understanding" presents a critical reflection on this science. Hegel studied the physics of his day extensively and acknowledged its impressive achievements. But it does not for him embody absolute truth; it is not science at its highest, most complete stage. Hegel's expose in the Phenomenology reveals why this is the case, why the supposedly stable principles of modem physics are ultimately unstable. Hegel's chapter is difficult even by Phenomenology standards. To guide us through its twists and turns, I have divided my presentation into six parts. The first three deal respectively with Force, Law, and Explanation. These are related as follows. There are forces at work in nature that operate according to immutable laws (for example, the law of universal gravitation). The scientist explains nature by showing how a given phenomenon (say, a body in free fall) is an instance of a force grounded in one of these laws. Hegel's account preserves this familiar interweaving of force, law, and explanation but at the same time places it in the context of a dialectical unfolding. Hegel's logic, unlike ordinary logic, proceeds genetically, like life. Concepts, stages, moments, categories, whatever we wish to call them, do not merely succeed each other, or relate to each other in the manner of different aspects, but emerge out of the evolutionary process that is thought. In the chapter before us, force gives birth to law, and together these give birth to explanation, which eventually gives birth to self-consciousness. This amazing process as a whole, this labor, defines understanding. I. Force The Phenomenology is the journey of consciousness to absolute knowing, or what Hegel calls Science. We come upon understanding at a pivotal moment in this journey: at the 2 �transition from the sensuous to the intelligible. The previous shapes of consciousness are sense-certainty and perception. Like all the shapes in Hegel's book, they embody certainty-a claim to know absolutely or unconditionally. Sense-certainty places its absolute trust in the sensuous particular, the whatever-it-is that is here and now; perception trusts the thing and its properties. Both shapes of knowing, together with their corresponding objects, prove to be self-contradictory: they negate themselves. Force is the Phoenix that rises from the ashes ofthinghood. It is an example of what Hegel calls determinate negation. This is negation that preserves and lifts up what is negated [79, 113].* Force is the proper object of understanding because it resolves the dissonance that defines the thing of perception. The thing is a One and a Many: this one thing and its many properties. To save this opposition from being contradictory, perception posits another opposition: the thing is independent or for itself and dependent or for another, that is, related to other things. In the dialectic of perception, these opposed aspects become identical: the thing is shown to be independent insofar as it is dependent, and dependent insofar as it is independent [128]. It makes no sense, then, to regard the thing as absolutely real: a thing is what it is, not through itself alone but only in relation to what it is not, namely, other things. How this ideality ofthinghood comes about does not concern us here. The relevant point is that force solves the problem at hand, the problem of substance and relation. Things as things dissolve in their essential relation to other things: they lose their substance. Force, by contrast, is substance that is relation. It is the higher category of substantial relation, the unity of being-for-self and being-foranother, of independence and dependence. 4 *Numbers in square brackets refer to paragraph numbers in Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 3 �Let us look more carefully at what this means. Force, our new object, is not something seen or heard or felt but only thought. It is the purely intelligible inner core of perceptible things. Force is not property but act, the act of self-expression. 5 In the force-world, a thing does not, strictly speaking, have a property but rather emanates what we call a property from an intense invisible center. 6 By analogy with language, force, in Hegel's terminology, is the utterance or externalization of an inner point. Hardness, for example, is not a quiescent attribute lodged in the thing but an act by which the thing asserts itself or "makes its point."7 Moreover, to act is to act upon another thing. Action implies interaction. This is how force makes it possible for individual things to be what they are through their relation to other things: their beingfor-self is a being-for-another, and their being-for-another a being-for-self. Force, Hegel says, is a movement [136]. This is not movement in space but dialectical movement-conceptual instability or transition. Consider a metal sphere. Its hardness is one of the properties by which the sphere, at the level of perception, defined itself as an independent thing. Hardness is now to be regarded as emergent from an intensive center, a center of force. Force is the transition of a given content-in this case, hardness-from inner to outer. As Hegel stresses in an earlier version of his system, force is not cause as opposed to effect but rather the identity of cause and effect. 8 The intensive center of force does not produce something other than itself but exactly itself. 9 It is a self-realizing potential. It is like an inward thought that finds faithful expression in outward speech. Dialectical movement comes into play when we attempt to spell out precisely what is happening in the transition from inner to outer. What we find is that the act of selfexpression involves negation. The hardness of the sphere, as an emergent property or 4 �effect, must come out of hiding, be released from mere implicitness or potency; but if it were simply released, set free, it would not be the hardness ofthe sphere, the expressive manifestation sprung from the intensive center of force. And so, we must conclude that as a property is affirmed or posited, it must at the same time be negated as something independent or on its own. As the property is emitted, it must remain the property ofthe thing, the expression ofthe center of force. Hegel uses the terms force proper and force expressed to distinguish the two moments involved in the action of force. Force proper refers to the intensive center (force as cause), force expressed to force as ''there" in the perceptible world (force as effect). These moments, Hegel says, are self-canceling [135]. Force proper must negate its inwardness in order to be external or manifest, and, as we saw earlier, force expressed must negate its outwardness in order to be the expression of force proper. This self-cancellation on the part of both moments of force is what it means to say that force is a movement We phenomenological observers see this dialectical truth in the movement of force, but understanding does not. It clings to the safety of stable distinctions and assumes that the movement from inner to outer occurs simply, that is, without any negation or self-otherness. Force can do what thinghood cannot: it is a deeper, more potent category. Why, then, does it self-destruct? To answer this question, we turn to the phenomenon of interaction, the real-world event in which force meets force. As we proceed, we must bear in mind that understanding claims not merely that there are forces at work in the world, but that force is the absolute truth of things-their abiding substance. Hegel will show, to our amazement, that ''the realization of force is at the same time the loss of reality" [141 ]. Like the thing, force will fail to be substantial. 5 �The self-annihilation of force results from what Hegel calls the "play" of two forces: active and reactive. This play is implicit in Newton's Third Law: "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction." Force is spontaneous and impulsive but not selfinciting. It must be inspired by the presence of another force in order to express itself [137]. Hegel here borrows terms that Leibniz uses in his analysis of collision. One force solicits, the other is solicited: one is active, the other passive or re-active. 10 This is like the human situation in which I voice my opinion, translate my inner thought into outer speech, thereby inciting you to respond with a verbal expression of your thought and opinion. Perhaps the forcefulness of my expression prompts you to an equally forceful counter-expression-an equal and opposite reaction. The play that is essential to force can be maintained as logically stable only if the difference between active and passive force, soliciting and solicited, remains clear and distinct. We must be able to say: "This force is active, that one passive." Hegel proceeds to show that this is not the case. The two opposed determinations of force-soliciting and solicited, active and passive-become identical, or pass into each other. Once this happens, force as the solid substance of things vanishes. It loses its status as a selfsubsisting entity and becomes merely ideal, what Hegel calls a moment. I I To see how this evaporation of force as substance comes about, imagine banging your fist against a wall. When you hit the wall, the wall hits back: it re-acts. At first, it seems that your fist is active and soliciting, the wall passive and solicited. But you could not hit the wall unless, at the moment of impact, the wall acted on you and solicited the hardness of your fist. This hardness is just as much solicited by that of the wall as the hardness of the wall is by that of your fist. Fist and wall have exchanged determinations, like actors 6 �who reverse their roles in mid-scene, and it is impossible to call one of them only active and the other only reactive. Each is both. Soliciting is a being solicited, and being solicited is a soliciting. Let us recapitulate the story of force. Force starts out as a mere concept in the mind of a subject who claims to know absolute truth: it is in itself or implicit, a theoretical good intention. Then it is put to work as the substance of things: it becomes for itself or actual. But in the act of making itself real, it becomes evanescent and unreal: the distinction on which its reliability as substance rests becomes a play or interchange of now-fluid determinations. As force leaves the stage of the solidly real, it assumes a new role. It reverts to being inward or conceptual, retreats from the world and goes back inside the thinking subject. We may imagine this as the act in which understanding experiences the dissolution of force, internalizes what it has experienced, and then comes up with a revised perspective. As Hegel observes, force does not return to its original ideality but advances to a new state [141]. Force falls but does not simply fall. Paradoxically, it falls up. In negating itself, it becomes a new and improved universal, a new object that stands over and against the thinking subject. This higher object, which force has generated, is the deeper inner of things. II.Law The dialectic of law will lead us to the inverted world. Law, our newly postulated absolute, will prove unstable. It will fall. This fall is more dramatic than anything we have witnessed so far in the Phenomenology. It is the collapse of the very citadel of objective truth, truth that is grounded in objects. 7 �In the fall of force and the rise of law, consciousness experiences a new relation to its object. Hegel calls it a mediated relation. Understanding now "looks through [the] mediating play offorces into the true background of things" [143]. 12 In other words, understanding sees rest within motion, sameness within difference, form within flux. Law is the eternally abiding, purely intelligible "look" or idea of the always-changing world. Verstand at this point is even more recognizable as the modem scientific understanding, which seeks laws of nature so that it may gaze upon change under the aspect of eternity. Our new object, law, is the imperturbable base and depth of the world. World, here, is the unstable play of forces, the role-reversal of our soliciting and solicited "actors." This play is appearance, as opposed to law, which constitutes the world's essence. In its perpetual self-otherness, appearance recalls the elusive "matrix" of Plato's Timaeus, where the powers ofbody--earth, air, water, and fire--constantly turn into each other, play the game of self-cancellation (49B-C). Law is different from the objects we have seen so far: the sensuous This, the thing of perception, and force as individual substance. It is a world unto itself, separate from but also governing and shining through the world of appearance. Law opens up a supersensible world set over and against the sensible world. Hegel calls it an "abiding Beyond above the vanishing present"-a Jenseits or Over There, as opposed to the Diesseits or Over Here [144]. Unlike the turbulent realm of sense, this Other World is "restful" [157]. It is the heaven of scientific theory. This two-world thesis will be the death of understanding. As Hegel will show, the waywardness of appearance, the to and fro of change, invades theoretical heaven: the Beyond will collapse into the very realm from which it was to be strictly distinguished. It will become an aspect of appearance. The certainty of understanding is that there are two 8 �worlds: the truth will be that there is only one. Intelligibility is not separate from change, like a law or a platonic Form, but is change-change as dialectical logic or what Hegel calls the Concept. The clue, then, to the discovery of concrete truth is not in some other world but in this one, not in motionless being but in unstable becoming, where opposed determinations flow into each other. This inverts our normal perspective on things, governed as that perspective is by the sober teachings of Verstand As we think our way through the inverted world, we are inverted. The conclusions I have sketched are already present in what Hegel says just before his analysis of law. He reflects on the nature of appearance, in effect telling us where the dialectic of understanding will end up. Understanding mis-understands appearance and the intelligible essence that supposedly governs it in another world. From the perspective of understanding, law is an eternal thing-like object that grounds and "saves" the appearances. But this object, the supersensible Beyond, has in fact been generated by appearance [147]. Appearance is the dialectical father, law the offspring. What understanding calls law or essence is in fact, Hegel says, appearance as appearance. To grasp the meaning of this utterance, we must observe that appearance is not sensuous presence: it is neither the This of sense-certainty nor the thing of perception. Appearance is process and play, flash and shining forth. It is not presence but fleeting presence-presence that constantly cancels itself to become absence. 13 It is becoming as the unity of coming-to-be and passing away. In his Philosophy ofNature, Hegel offers a definition of time. Time, he says, is ''that being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it is not, is; it is intuited becoming."14 Time is appearance in its most rudimentary form. It is the same process of self-negation that we saw in the Now of 9 �sense-certainty. When the Now negated itself to become the next Now, it gave birth to universality as the Now of Nows, say, an hour of minutes [107]. Appearance, through its self-negation, also begets a universal, as we have seen. This universal is law. Appearance, like time, is a process of self-transcendence, self-beyonding. The understanding erroneously treats this self-beyonding, which it has glimpsed in the selfcontradictory play of force, as a Beyond that is objectively there. It reifies process. But essence, here identical with the supersensible, is the intelligible truth of appearance, the truth that the play of force has itself generated and brought to light. As Hegel puts it, "the supersensible is ... appearance as appearance" [147]. The meaning of this pivotal sentence, to which I alluded earlier, is that essence and appearance, inner and outer, are identical. As one commentator puts it: "The essence of essence is to manifest itself; manifestation is the manifestation of essence. " 15 Appearance, in other words, is not a low but a high category. It is the self-otherness of essence, the instability of sensuous things that has come out into the open as their higher and deeper truth. In this revelation appearance proves to be not something in need of being "saved." Hegel's critique of the supersensible Beyond recalls Plato's Forms and the problem of separateness. This problem is highlighted in the dialogue Parmenides, where the old Eleatic stings young Socrates with the absurdities of his two-world theory. How is it that a Form, a separate entity off in its own world, is nevertheless manifested in its sensuous instances? Why are we able to see the original in the image? Law is like a platonic Form in that it is eternally self-same and purely intelligible. But it is unlike a Form in being a universal that governs movements, events. Law is the eternal self-sameness of perpetual self-difference. Consider Galileo's law of free fall. Expressed as an equation, this is the 10 �familiars = 112 gt, wheres is the distance a body traverses as it falls, g the gravitational constant, and t the time during which the falling takes place. For our purposes, however, the more revealing form is s ext: distance varies as the square of the time. This expresses a constant difference or otherness, as opposed to a mere identity. It helps us see what Hegel means when he says that law is "universal difference" and ''the simple in the play of force" [148]. Things as such don't come into the picture. As far as Galileo's law is concerned, it makes no difference whether the falling object is a cow or a cannonball. 16 What matters is the motion, the event. Galileo's law is the simple universal in this event. It is the perfectly general, purely intelligible form offalling. Let us now turn to the dialectic of law. Understanding has, we recall, a mediated relation to its supersensible realm oflaw. It looks through the medium of becoming, as through a veil, to glimpse being and truth in the unchanging forms of change. It imagines that it will in this way take hold of absolute knowing. Problems will emerge when understanding tries to explain how its universal laws fit the actual determinate content of appearances. Up to this point, law is only a good idea. This idea must now prove itself in the act of governing. Law must become actually true or what Hegel calls for itself. To uncover the actuality oflaw, we turn once more to Galileo, this time to his experiments with the motion of a ball rolling down an inclined plane. Assume that we have found the law that governs this movement and have expressed it mathematically. We say: "This is true; it is the law." But it isn't absolutely true. Air resistance, surface friction, and the phenomenon of rolling as opposed to sliding all come into play to qualify the law. In order for a law to be true, it must, as Hegel puts it, "fill out the world of appearance" [150]. This can happen only ifthere are many laws that apply to a given 11 �case. Here we have a sign of trouble to come. Law, by definition, is sheer universality; its glory is to be above cases and particulars. But the events to which law must apply if it is to be actual truth involve cases and particulars: phenomena have a determinate content that must somehow be subsumed under law. The world is not movement in general but this movement in these circumstances. The problem can be stated as follows: law, though stable, is general or empty, while appearances, though shifty, are full and differentiated. To overcome this asymmetry, to unite the universal and the particular, law must be on more intimate terms with the phenomenal world if it is to be the truth of that world. A single law, as we have seen, is not enough to "fill out" the appearances. We need many laws to prevent law from being an empty inner. These must be organized into one law that unifies them-a mega-law. Hegel here refers to Newton's inverse square law of attraction, which unifies the laws of planetary motion and those of ordinary mechanics. But this mega-law is, alas, the victim of its triumph over specificity. By transcending the difference among the many different laws, it becomes utterly abstract. Hegel calls it "the Concept of law itself,"17 that is, lawfulness as opposed to a law [150]. But then, what to do about all the different ways in which lawfulness manifests itself in nature? To address this problem, understanding interprets lawfulness, the pure form of law, as the "inner necessity" of all the different laws [151]. This inner necessity results in a new, more abstract version of force--force as such [152]. Earlier, force was differentiated as active and passive; law was the simple universal. Now force is the simple or undifferentiated, and law is the source of difference [152]. Gravity, for instance, is just plain gravity, a simple force of nature, whereas the law by which a body falls involves difference as distance traversed and time squared. So too, electricity is just plain electricity, whereas 12 �the law of electricity expresses the difference between positive and negative. The assumption at work here is that law will express the necessary action of simple forces. Hegel shows that this assumption is false. Force and law are in fact "indifferent" to each other, that is, fundamentally unrelated [152]. Electricity indeed manifests itself as positive and negative, but not because of any inherent necessity. The law does not express causal connection but rather what Hume called "constant conjunction." 18 It does not reveal the origin of difference, but simply states difference as a fact. It sidesteps the primordial act by which electrical force as such divides into its two opposite forms. The result, Hegel says, is that "necessity here is only an empty word" [152]. 19 Indifference shows up in yet another way for the scientific understanding. The very elements that the law combines in its formulas lack necessary connection with each other. Galileo's law of free fall, for instance, expresses a constant conjunction of distance and time. But it sheds no light on why these should be connected at all, let alone connected in this particular way. There is nothing in the concept of distance traversed that necessarily implies the concept of time squared, and nothing in time squared that implies distance traversed. As mathematical variables, s and t are logically indifferent to each other. They are quantitatively conjoined in a ratio but not conceptually united in a A.oyo~. 20 The necessity that understanding craves, we must note, would be achieved if in its world-view there were a place for inner difference, that is, the immanent selfdifferentiation of the absolutely simple. That would account for why electrical force necessarily, out of its own nature, divides itself into positive and negative. Law, in that case, would be the Concept or dialectical truth. But understanding is no dialectician. It likes its identities neat and its distinctions restful. And so, to prevent simple force from 13 �becoming (in its view) compromised, understanding takes difference into itseif[l54]. Necessity now acquires a new meaning. It ceases to be causality in the phenomena and becomes instead the necessity at work in the human subject's act of theorizing. ill. Explanation We are on the threshold of the inverted world, which is a second supersensible world [157]. Understanding will reach this extreme point of its effort once it is revealed that explanation is nothing more than the propounding of tautologies-differences that make no difference. Explanation, here, is not scientific account-giving in general but rather a species of bad argument that regularly occurs in physical science. It is the act in which understanding propounds a law that supposedly governs an appearance but ends up being identical to the appearance. In explanation, ground and grounded become the same. We saw earlier that force is the absolutely simple (electricity), whereas the law of force expresses a difference (positive and negative). Understanding uses explanation to bridge the gap between force and law, simplicity and difference. But its effort is sophistical: it distinguishes force and law, and then "condenses the law into force as the essence of the law" [154]. Hegel uses lightning to illustrate his point. Lightning occurs: it is a phenomenon. Indeed, as a flashing forth, lightning functions as the symbol for appearance as such. Understanding explains lightning by enunciating a law that supposedly expresses how the force of electricity works. Force is assumed to be simple, but the process of explaining involves positive and negative. The explanation purports to reveal the necessary ground of the phenomenon. But in fact, it just repeats what happened at the surface of the phenomenon. It says: "There was a strong electrical discharge 14 �because of positive and negative electricity." This simply says all over again what lightning as a phenomenon is. It is not something new and different, but same: a tautology. Understanding posits differences and then, once these differences disappear in the phenomenon (in this case, once the electrical discharge subsides), allows the differences to sink back into an undifferentiated simple force-mere electricity. A distinction is made only to be withdrawn. 21 In other words, the distinction is merely an artifact and formality of the process of explanation. 22 Explanation, for Hegel, borders on the absurd, or at least the comic. Why does electricity divide into positive and negative? Because that is its law. And why is that its law? Because electricity divides into positive and negative. When we ask understanding why something is the case, it pretends to show us some underlying ground but in fact only repeats the appearance that prompted our question in the first place. This sleight of hand is not confined to physics. Why are human beings the way they are? Because of their genes. What are genes? That which makes us who we are. Or, to shift to the world of Moliere: Why does opium induce sleep? Because it has a "dormitive virtue." These are all tautologies masquerading as etiologies, accounts of cause. In the earlier version of his system, Hegel summed it up nicely. All explanation, he says, ultimately reduces to the deflating admission: "That is just how it is. ,,i 3 We might be tempted to accuse Hegel of oversimplifying explanation in order to make his case. But Hegel is right. We are surrounded by explanations that purport to reveal a law, a necessary ground, for how the world works---or how the mind works, or how language and culture develop--which, when examined more closely, prove to be nothing more than tautologies. I point this out to remind us that, in reading those parts of the 15 �Phenomenology that are critical of theory-building, we must allow our scientific, as well as our pre-scientific or natural, perspective to be inverted. Hegel, we must note, inverts what we ordinarily mean by tautology. Tautology, for him, is not a static A,;A, but rather the dialectical movement in which a difference is posited and immediately canceled [155]. This recalls the play of force, in which active and passive were posited as different and then became identical. The movement of tautology is a turning point in the dialectic of understanding. It is the point at which the shiftiness of appearance "has penetrated into the supersensible world itself' [ 15 5]. In the platonic analogy, motion becomes part of the once restful realm of the Forms. IV. The Inverted World Who among us has not wondered: What if the world as it is, is the exact opposite of the world as it appears? What if what we call real is really nothing but a dream, and dream reality? What if good people are in themselves bad, and bad people good? What if, in obedience to some perverse cosmic law, being reverses seeming, inner reverses outer? To pose such questions is to set foot on the terrain of Hegel's inverted world. The dialectic of understanding is a series of postulated objective inners. The first was force. When force as the substance of things vanished, a new inner appeared: the restful realm of law. But law led to the sleight-of-hand called explanation, where differences make no difference. This movement of tautology generates another inner: the inverted world, which is the inner truth of the first supersensible world [157].24 Hegel has taken us on one long journey into the interior of appearance. But the inverted world brings us full circle, confirming the truth of La Rochefoucauld's maxim: "Extremes touch" The 16 �inverted world will obliterate the Beyond. It will collapse the distinction between essence and appearance, and make appearance the standard to which law must conform.25 Inversion is our new principle, according to which, "what is self-same repels itself from itself' and ''the not self-same is self-attractive" [156]. Hegel's language of repulsion-from-self and attraction-to-other recalls the magnet, which soon emerges as the paradigm of inversion. The first thing Hegel tells us about the inverted world is that it completes the inner world opened up by understanding [157]. We saw earlier that law failed to "fill out" the world of appearance: it lacked a principle of change or alteration. As an inverted world, the supersensible realm acquires this principle. It becomes an exact replica of the world we actually live in. This is the irony of the inverted world. Strange seeming at first, the inverted world in fact restores what is familiar to us and what had been lost in the abstractions of understanding. It lets our world be as fluid, playful, and self-contradictory as it seems. This is our perspective, not that of understanding, which clings to its abstractions and continues to think in terms of a supersensible Beyond, where every restless appearance finds its restful double. The inverted world is what the world is implicitly or inwardly, what it is in itself. Hegel offers a broad range of examples. The first ones he cites are suited to the theoretical bent of understanding. Like, under the law of the first supersensible world, becomes unlike under that of the second, inverted world; black in the first is transposed to white in the second; the north pole of a magnet in the first world is south in the second; the oxygen pole of the voltaic pile becomes the hydrogen pole, and the hydrogen the oxygen [158]. But then Hegel goes beyond theory. Revenge on an 17 �enemy in this world turns into self-destruction in the other; crime in the first turns into punishment; guilt into pardon; disgrace into honor. 26 It would be highly instructive to think through all of Hegel's examples of inversion. Let us focus on one: the magnet. This remarkable object will help us make the transition from inversion as understanding represents it to the philosophic Concept of inversion. From the perspective of understanding, the poles of a magnet are inverted in the sense that each pole has reference to a separately existing and opposite in-itself. This in-itselfthe home or, in Gilbert's phrase, the "true location"27 of the magnet's poles-is the Earth, the Ur-magnet that orients our mini-magnets. It seems strange to regard the Earth as a Beyond, but this view makes sense if Earth is the Earth of scientific theory. That the Earth is a body in no way detracts from its theoretical function as the locus of magnetic essence divorced from the things whose essence it is. In our current usage, which was also prevalent in Hegel's day, the north pole of a magnet is called north because it points to the magnetic north pole of the Earth. But as Hegel argues in his Philosophy ofNature, it is more accurate to call it "south," since, by the law of magnetism, it must point to its opposite. 28 With this in mind, we can say that each pole of our mini-magnet points to, and is defined by, the opposite pole of the Earth-magnet. North "here" has its inner truth in South ''there," and South "here" has its truth in North ''there." Hegel calls this approach "superficial" [159]-superficial because non-dialectical. Through its ingenious idea of inversion, understanding, to its credit, hits upon a great principle of nature: polar complementarity.29 But it fails to grasp the true meaning ofthis principle; its two-world thinking gets in the way. In truth, a magnet's inversion is not to be found anywhere but in itself. The magnet is self-inverting, which is to say that it 18 �contains negativity within itself, or is self-other. How do we know? Because any attempt to isolate a pole fails. If we chop off one of the poles, it simply reappears in the nowsmaller magnet. "Pole" is not a material chunk of a body but one term of an opposition. In the Phaedo, Socrates tells an Aesop-like fable about how god, seeing that Pleasure and Pain were always quarreling, tied their heads together, so that where the one was the other was bound to follow (60B). The same moral can be inferred from the magnet, where each "head" always entails its opposite. The magnet illustrates what is true in all cases of inversion. In its true meaning, the inverted world is not a Beyond but rather the intelligible form of the actual world. Inversion in this sense undoes the superstition of understanding, according to which things exist in one world but have their intelligible essence in another: "antitheses of inner and outer, of appearance and the supersensible, as of two different kinds of actuality, we no longer find here" [159]. 30 Magnetic north, as I indicated earlier, is not south somewhere else but right here: ''the north pole which is the in-itself of the south pole is the north pole actually present in the same magnet." Similarly, in the moral sphere, crime calls down on itself the law's judgment and correction, invokes its nemesis as its fulfillment, not in some other world, but right here. Crime and punishment are the inseparable poles of the moral magnet-a fact well known to Dostoevsky. Moral selfinversion, we must note, is at work even when we don't get caught. Having done something wrong, we suffer the torments of conscience and punish ourselves: we strain to negate our negation. Let us sum up what we have seen so far. Understanding embraces the principle of inversion as the true inner meaning of its supersensible law. According to this principle, a 19 �given determination finds its truth in its opposite: it is the law of all determinations to be transposed into their opposites, to move. But understanding regards this shift in a static way, as mere reference to another object-like world, another substance or medium. We see what it does not: that inversion defines appearance as such. It is the essence of all determinations in the realm of appearance to be self-inverting, to summon their opposites in a new version of the play of force. The precise meaning of the inverted world, and the corresponding critique of the supersensible Beyond, lead us to the metaphysical primacy of motion. Understanding treats motion or change as though it needed to be saved by transcendent principles and mathematical formulas, as though rest alone were intelligible. But motion, as the inverted world has revealed, is the intelligible as such, the Concept as the unity in which opposites flow into each other. In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel makes this point with respect to our friend, the magnet: "For the magnet exhibits in simple, naive fashion the nature of the Concept, and the Concept moreover in its developed form as syllogism."31 He adds in a note: "If anyone thinks that thought is not present in nature, he can be shown it here in " magnetism. " 32 Magnetism, as opposed to the thing we call a magnet, is a movement of poles toward and into each other. It is the logically structured fluency of opposite determinations present in a simple object. Magnetism brings us to the most important claim Hegel makes about the inverted world. To think the inverted world, he says, is ''to think pure change or think the antithesis within the antithesis itself, or contradiction" [160]. The inverted world, our second supersensible world, is not alongside the first, but has in fact "overarched the other world and has it within it. .. ; it is itself and its opposite in one unity" [160]. 20 �The inverted world, rightly understood, generates what Hegel calls "inner difference." This act of immanent self-differentiation is the genuine necessity that was lacking in understanding's effort to connect force and law. 33 The simple force of electricity divides itself into positive and negative because, as a simple force, it is inwardly tense, polarized with respect to itself [161]. Difference isn't something tacked on as an explanatory construct but is inherent in unity. To be one is to be self-divided, to contain rather than exclude opposition. In revisiting electrical force, Hegel applies the wisdom of the magnet: positive and negative electricity "animate each other into activity, and their being is rather to posit themselves as not-being and to cancel themselves in the unity" [161]. This is our familiar play of force, which, having been constrained by static principles and mathematical formalism, now rises up against understanding to proclaim: "I, in my instability, was the truth all along! I, pure change, am the essence of law!" V. Infmity-And Beyond Hegel gives inner difference an evocative name: infinity [161]. Infinity, here, is not indefinite ongoing-ness, which Hegel calls "bad infinity" [238]. It is neither the potential infinite of Aristotle nor those limitless mute spaces that terrified Pascal. It is rather the logical process by which opposites flow into each other. Infinity is transition as such. It is the self-negation of a finite determinateness. The magnet, with its inseparable poles, is the sensuous symbol of infinity in this sense of the term. Infinity sums up the dialectical movement we have already seen in tautology. It is the "absolute unrest of pure self-movement, in which whatever is determined in one way or another ... is rather the opposite of this determinateness" [163]. This flow of opposites into 21 �each other inverts the perspective of understanding, which is infatuated with rest and wants to keep its terms clear and distinct. Hegel makes the striking claim that infinity "has been from the start the soul of all that has gone before." It is the energy of selfnegation that was implicit in all the finite shapes of consciousness that have appeared so far-and will continue to appear. When one of these finite shapes self-destructs, refutes itself, it is experiencing the infinity, the self-opposition, that it holds within. In suffering contradiction, it is getting in touch, so to speak, with its inner magnet. Hegel identifies infinity with what he calls ''the absolute Concept" [162]. Infinity and Concept both embody the self-differentiation of the self-identical, which for Hegel is truth. This self-differentiation occurs in its purest form in Hegel's Logic. Here in the Phenomenology, Hegel calls infinity as Concept ''the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood" [162]. Infinity, he goes on to say, "pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest." This Hegel's version of the Logos of Heraclitus-the Fire that enlivens, pervades, consumes, and unifies all things. Life, soul, blood. These words suggest that the force-world we are now transcending, the world that seemed so eventful and alive, was not really alive at all. To be sure, there was motion, but not life-vis viva, but not organic being. 34 Understanding is prejudiced on behalf of physics. This is no doubt largely because the phenomena of physics, unlike those of biology, are readily reducible to the homogeneity of mathematical formalism, that is, equations. Life is the scandal of Verstand because the determinations of life are fluidly interconnected and defy rigid boundaries. To appreciate this fact, we have only to think of how animal organisms, in their embryonic development, exhibit spontaneous self-differentiation, develop their different organs and systems, wondrously,from within. 22 �Infinity, which has been generated by the inverted world, brings us to selfconsciousness. This step had already been taken in the phenomenon of explanation, our internal movement of differentiating what is simple or self-same [163]. Explaining things, Hegel observes in passing, is fun-a holiday of the mind. The reason is that in the act of explaining why the world does what it does consciousness enjoys conversation with itself, Selbstgesprach [163]. To explain is ultimately to enjoy the play of our own inner movement, our self-consciousness. Inversion, inner difference, infinity, explanation all converge in self-consciousness, which now officially comes on the scene in the Phenomenology. The truth of the magnet was the repulsion of the self-same and the attraction of the self-different. This truth is now fully revealed as the self. To be self-conscious, to be aware of myself as myself, is to be tautologous in Hegel's sense of the word. It is my act of generating inner difference that is immediately canceled or negated. Hegel describes self-consciousness as follows: I distinguish myself from myself, and in doing so I am directly aware that what is distinguished from myself is not different [from me]. I, the self-same being, repel myself from myself; but what is posited as distinct from me, or as unlike me, is immediately, in being so distinguished, not a distinction for me [164]. Hegel compares this movement of self-identity with the axial rotation of a sphere [169]. As the sphere turns, it continually generates different positions in space and continually cancels them. It is constantly returning out of the self-otherness that it constantly begets. Every move "away" is a move "toward" and back home. Hegel stresses that self-consciousness was behind the drama of consciousness all along. It was the energy of self-divisiveness that was the living soul of sense-certainty, perception, and understanding. Now it is revealed that, just as infinity is the true inner of 23 �all objects, self-consciousness is the truth of consciousness. In other words, external things are and are true only insqfar as they are and are true for a thinking subject or self. "True" means "true for me." VI. From the Play of Force to the Drama of Man How does Hegel get from the paradoxes of physics to the fight for recognition with which the drama of self-consciousness begins? This will be my closing question. I begin by observing that force is already on the verge of self-consciousness. Once physics takes force as its central concern, once it identifies force with nature itself-as happens most dramatically in the physics of Boscovich-it invites a connection between the spontaneity of inanimate bodies and the inner state of human beings. 35 Nature and human nature find their common source, their essence, in impulsiveness, or what Hobbes was the first to call conatus, striving. Force, seen in this light, is proto-will. 36 Ifwe keep in mind this connection between force and will, it becomes less surprising that Hegel's chapter on understanding begins with force and ends with self-consciousness, which, for Hegel, is our impulse or drive to self-affirmation. As I suggested earlier, the dialectic of understanding generates life as well as selfconsciousness. Life and self-consciousness come on the scene together. Both exhibit infinity as the process of self-differentiation. But for the self at this nascent stage of its development, the mingling of life and self-consciousness poses a problem. On the one hand, the self is aware of itself as being beyond body and finitude. To be an inwardly turned being is, in a sense, to experience myself as the absolute, a god. But I am also immersed in organic life, the necessary condition for self-awareness: I am aware of 24 �myself only because I am alive, rooted in this living body, which is the immediate object of my desire, care, and anxiety. And so, the self is burdened with a double being. It is both a transcendent or pure self, the self in its glory, and an empirical self caught up in the mortifying contingencies of the flesh. This incarnation of inwardness, this unhappy unity of the divine and the mortal, is the contradiction that self-consciousness must somehow resolve, the riddle of its existence. In the fight for recognition the self seeks to transcend its animality or life. "Selfconsciousness," Hegel says, "is in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it is so for another; that is, it is only as a being that is recognized" [178]. Recognition, here, is not blank awareness but honor. In winning the recognition of another, I confirm the absoluteness that I experience within. This recognition is my self-recognition, my certainty of myself as absolute, made concrete, out there, really existent. I use this other individual to accomplish my goal, which is to achieve self-certainty through the negation of my self-otherness. But this other, who is also at my stage of raw self-consciousness, wants to use me for the same reason. And so there is a fight for recognition. In this fight I seek to negate the presumed absoluteness of this other individual who confronts me. I also risk my life. I do so in order to show myself and my alter ego that I am more than an animal. I show that I am a pure self, a self that is worthy of being recognized as absolute. The two individual selves are thus bound together in what Hegel calls a "double movement" [182]. It is double because two selves are involved and because the negation each performs on itself it also performs on the other, which is itself. This reciprocal action recapitulates the dialectic of force, in which the opposed determinations of active and passive, soliciting and solicited, came to be lodged in each of the separate forces: "In 25 �this movement [of selves] we see repeated the process which presented itself as the play of forces, but repeated now in consciousness. What in that process was for us, is true here of the extremes themselves" [184]. In other words, self-consciousness, as a collision of interacting selves, is force made self-conscious. In the Phenomenology Hegel mounts a critique of force. But the poverty of force is also its potency, its impulse to develop into self-consciousness, and, after many inversions, into the mutual recognition that is spirit. Spirit, for Hegel, is the spirit of the Greek polis, the spirit of the Roman Empire, the spirit of the French monarchy, and the spirit of the German Reformation. This last, which posits the absolute testimony of the heart, sets the stage for Kant's moral world-view, conscience, and the beautiful soul. Each of these worlds is an attempt on the part of selfhood to incarnate itself so that it may know itself as the shared truth of a concrete community of selves. This communal selfhood Hegel calls the '"I' that is 'We' and 'We' that is 'I'"[l 77]. What, then, is the dialectic of force in Hegel's Phenomenology? It is the Prelude to the Great Fugue of conceptualized history, which begins with the fight for recognition and ends in absolute knowing. Endnotes 1 The first version of this lecture was given at the Spinoz:a Society in Washington, DC on 8 March 2010. 2 Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Other Stories (West Valley City, Utah: Waking Lion Press, 2006), 16. 3 The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 125. Hegel extols understanding in the Preface of the Phenomenology, where he calls the analytic "force" of Ver stand ''the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power" [32). 26 �4 Hegel identifies force with relation, Verhiiltnis, in the so-called Jena Logic (The Jena System, 1804-1805: Logic and Metaphysics, trans. John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni [Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986], 47). 5 Leibniz is the father of this idea: "Substance is a being capable of action" (Principles of Nature and Grace, G. W Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989], 207). 6 A thing's property, for Hegel, is a universal, but one that is bedingt: conditioned or be-thinged. Force, by contrast, is unbedingt-an unconditioned or unbe-thinged universal [132]. In other words, force is purely thinkable. It is not, like color, qualified and limited by a material medium. 7 See Newton's Principia, Definition 3, where body or mass is identified with the force of resistance or vis inertiae. 8 See Jena Logic, 54. 9 "Force thus expresses relationship itself and the necessity to be within itself even in its beingoutside itself, or to be self-equal" (Jena Logic, 56). 10 "A Specimen of Dynamics" in Leibniz, Principles ofNature and Grace, 121. 11 In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel at one point offers what is perhaps his most deeply revealing critique of force. This is in the context of his argument that Kepler's account of planetary motion is philosophically superior to that of Newton (Philosophy ofNature, Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970], 65-83). He remarks: "Seldom has fame been more unjustly transferred from a first discoverer to another person." (Ibid., 66.) Hegel's detailed critique elaborates the three aspects of scientific theorizing that we see in the Phenomenology: force, law, and explanation. 12 Italics Hegel's. Throughout his analysis of force and law, Hegel refers to the syllogism. The middle term of the syllogism mediates between the two extremes, not as a distinct and static tertium quid, but as the dialectical identity of the extremes. For a fuller account of the syllogism, see Hegel' s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1976), 664 ff.). 13 In his poem "The Cemetery by the Sea," Paul Valery precisely captures appearance as the dazzling unity of shining forth and evanescence: Quel pur travail de fins eclairs consume Maint diamant d'imperceptible ecume, Et quelle paix semble se concevoir! Quand sur l'abfme un soleil se repose, Ouvrages purs d'une eternelle cause, Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir. What pure labor offine flashes consumes Many a diamond with imperceptible foam, And what peace seems there to be conceived! 27 �When over the abyss a sun reposes, Pure works of an eternal cause, Time scintillates and the Dream is to know. 14 Hegel, Philosophy ofNature, 34. 15 Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 125. 16 Throughout this part of his discussion, Hegel's word for "thing" is Sache, not Ding-that is, a generalized "matter at hand" or pragma, as opposed to the thing of perception. 17 Miller's English translation reads "the Notion of law itself." In all citations from Miller the word Notion is changed to Concept wherever it appears. 18 Hegel cites his agreement with Hume on this point in the Jena Logic, 52-53. 19 The pseudo-necessity of scientific theory re-appears at the level of observational reason. For example, so-called "psychological necessity" (the supposed necessity of psychological laws) proves to be "an empty phrase" [307]. 20 A6yo, means both ratio and account. In the Philosophy ofNature, 59, Hegel gives a genuinely conceptual A.6yo' of Galileo's law of free fall. 21 More examples occur in the Jena Logic, 51. Why is the soil wet? Because it rained. What is rain? Falling moisture. Which is to say that the soil is wet because of wetness. In his Science of Logic, 458-466, Hegel identifies explanation with the sophistical "arguing from grounds." 22 Berkeley had made a similar claim: "Force, gravity, attraction and terms of this sort are useful for reasonings and reckonings about motion and bodies in motion, but not for understanding the simple nature of motion itself or for indicating so many distinct qualities" (De motu, 17, trans. A. A. Luce in Berkeley's Philosophical Writings [New York: Collier Books, 1965], 255). 23 Jena Logic, 61. 24 Donald Verene suggests that Hegel's phrase was inspired by a play of that name by Ludwig Tieck (Hegel's Recollection: A Study ofImages in the Phenomenology of Spirit [Albany: SUNY Press, 1985], 39). The inverted world is, in German, die verkehrte Welt. Verkehrt means either upside down, or twisted and perverse. Hegel uses the term with the latter meaning in a section entitled "The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit" [377]. Scholars disagree as to whether, in the context of the inverted world, verkehrt means perverse as well as upside down. Gadamer makes an interesting case for the double meaning (Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976], 35-53). 25 This fits the analysis of the inverted world in the Science of Logic, 509: ''In point of fact, it is just in this opposition of the two worlds that their difference has vanished, and what was supposed to be the world in and for itself is itself the world of Appearance." Hegel adds (510): "the world of Appearance is thus in its own self the law which is identical with itself." 28 �26 An otherworldly inversion occurs in Sophocles' Antigone. When Creon accuses Antigone of having bestowed equal honor on both her brothers, even though one was the enemy of his city and the other its defender, Antigone responds (1. 521): "Who knows if down there this is holy?" 27 William Gilbert, De Magnete, trans. P. Fleury Mottelay (New York: Dover, 1958), 26. 28 Philosophy of Nature, Addition, 166. Hegel here follows Gilbert, De Magnete, 27. 29 "There has been a lot of talk in physics about polarity. This concept is a great advance in the metaphysics of the science; for the concept of polarity is simply nothing else but the specific relation of necessity between two different terms which are one, in that when one is given, the other is also given. But this polarity is restricted to the opposition" (Philosophy of Nature, 19). 30 The first supersensible world was a theory of transposed essence, the second that of transposed reversed essence. The transposition of essence is the theoretical analogue of what Hegel calls self-estrangement (Selbstentfremdung). In the realm of pure theory, things have their essence in another world. In the more advanced, praxis-oriented stages of spirit, man's essence, the meaning of his life, will be outside of and beyond his actually present world: "In the Phenomenology, Hegel repeatedly discusses the duality he wishes to surmount, a dualism which expresses the torment of spirit obliged to live in one world and to think in the other" (Hypollite, Genesis and Structure, 382). 31 Hegel, Philosophy ofNature, 163. 32 Ibid., 165. 33 Inner difference first appeared when force split into two interacting forces [138] . 34 The closest we got to life was with magnetism, which Gilbert regarded as a kind of soul: "Wherefore, not without reason, Thales, as Aristotle reports in his book De Anima, declares the loadstone to be animate, a part of the animate mother earth and her beloved offspring" (Gilbert, De Magnete, 312). Hegel, in a similar vein, praises magnetism in the Preface: "Even when the specific determinateness-say one like Magnetism, for example-is in itself concrete or real, the Understanding degrades it into something lifeless, merely predicating it of another existent thing [the Earth], rather than cognizing it as the immanent life of the thing, or cognizing its naive and unique way of generating and expressing itself in that thing" [53]. 35 In order to save continuity in nature, specifically in the phenomenon of collision, Roger Boscovich argued that the repulsive force mutually exerted by two colliding bodies is exerted before the actual collision. All action is action at a distance, and there is never any actual contact between two bodies. Max Jammer puts it succinctly: for Boscovich, '"force' is consequently more fundamental than 'matter"' (Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Dynamics [New York: Dover, 1957], 178). 36 Schopenhauer goes even further by simply identifying force and will: "Hitherto, the concept of will has been subsumed under the concept of force; I, on the other hand, do exactly the reverse, and intend every force in nature to be conceived as will" (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, trans. E. F. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969], 111). 29 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 30 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kalkavage, Peter Title A name given to the resource Principles of motion and the motion of principles: Hegel's inverted world Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-10-15 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on October 15, 2010 by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Kalkavage 2010-10-15 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 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/35" title="Audio recording">Audio recording</a> Subject The topic of the resource Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3fdce12842c7c51d29606f82f872c0ac.pdf 6776f85e366cdd879df808d060fc8dba PDF Text Text Plato's Timaeus and the Will to Order * a lecture delivered at St. John's College Annapolis 24 :March 2000 by Peter Kalkavage �"And whoever thinks another a greater friend than his own fatherland, I say that man is nowhere." Sophocles, Antigone 182-3 * The Timaeus is the strangest of Plato's dialogues. It is so strange that one wonders whether anything in it can be taken seriously. Here conversation and inquiry are suspended, and in their place Plato gives us long speeches that take the form of myths. Socrates for the most part is silent. His silence is like the receptacle we hear about in Timaeus' speech: it provides the receptive space or chara for all the stories and images to come. 'Ve hear about Solon among the Egyptians, the lost continent of Atlantis, an Athens grmvn young and heroic, the musical construction of the soul, and the geometric construction of body. 'Ve also hear about ourselves. These are the most bizarre tales the dialogue has to offer-tall tales about our souls and bodies, about how ·we came to have a sphere-shaped head, a neck and torso, eyes and ears, liver and spleen, bone and flesh, an upright posture; about the manifold diseases that afflict body and soul; about ''\'here sex came from and how birds evolved from feather-brained astronomers. 'Vith the Timaeus, even more than ·with other dialogues, we wonder what in the world Plato is up to. '\7hat is the point of all this cosmomania? And why is Socrates silent? Since it is tempting to speak about this mysterious work in ways that are veiled and allusive, I will bluntly place before you my central thought. The silence of Socrates in the Timaeus signals the absence and withdra,val of philosophy itself, as Socrates understands it, from the day's proceedings. In particular, it signals the absence of philosophic eras. By eras I mean the philosopher's love of immortality, his striving to rise above the passing show of mortal opinion in order to enjoy a 2 �god-like vision of what eternally is. The Timaeus draws us away from this eras. It directs our attention to a form of thymos or spiritedness, which I shall call "the \\rill to order." This will is glorified in the famous likely story of Timaeus. Craftsmanship, rather than contemplation, is the hero of the story. Philosophy in a sense makes an appearance. But it tends to be understood as the mastery of distinct disciplines, the systematic presentation of theories, the building of models, and the solving of problems. It is philosophy made technical and effective-philosophy (if one may call it that) with all the divine madness taken out of it. Plato was so thorough a student of Socrates that he imagined what it "\.Vould mean to go beyond Socrates-beyond the knowledge of ignorance, the claim not to teach, the treatment of virtue as a perpetual question, and the tension behveen philosophy and the city. In the Timaeus, Plato seeks to interest us profoundly in one such experiment in going beyond Socrates. 1 He does so by crafting an amazing drama in which the love of wisdom is replaced by the will to order. The true center of the Timaeus is not its cosmology but the desire of Socrates. This is the motive force behind all the speeches to come. Socrates confesses to his desire in his longest and most important speech in the dialogue. Yesterday, Socrates gratified the desire of Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates and the absent fourth to hear .rhat Socrates thought about the best political order. He did so, he says, because he ,,1 knew he would then be able to make a demand on them (20B}. He knew that those who showed up today "\vould be compelled by justice to pay him back with a "feast of speech"-a feast that "\· ould depict the just city in the act of "\Vaging war. Socrates v expresses his desire through a simile. ".My feeling," he says, "is something like this. It's as if someone who gazed upon beautiful animals somewhere, either produced by the art of painting or truly living but keeping their peace, were to get a desire to gaze upon them moving and contending in some struggle that seemed appropriate to their bodies" (19B-C). The most striking thing about this desire is its irrationality. Socrates does not say "And so, now that we've looked at the just city at rest, it makes sense to investigate the city in motion." On the contrary, he portrays himself as a man struck by a passing fancy. It is no thought, no logic that leads to the city in motion but a mere feeling or pathos. The irrationality is heightened by Socrates' reference to chance: he 3 �just happens to feel like this (19B), the way we might just happen to want to go to the movies. Furthermore, the desire for the deeds and words of war seems to spring from thymos or spiritedness, which delights in honor and victory rather than truth. Socrates depicts himself as desiring, not a philosophic account, but an encomium or song of praise. What he seems to want from his hosts is not truth but beautification or flattery. This fits well with the dominant word of the dialogue, kosmos, which means not just order but ornament and beautiful display. It also fits with the name Timaeus, which suggests time, honor. But why would Socrates, who refuses to put up with the flattery of eros in the Symposium, here in the Timaeus compel others to engage in flattery? And how is the cosmology of Timaeus related to such a project? The Timaeus is the story of a descent into Becoming. It appears to be a sequel to the Republic. In that dialogue, Socrates and Glaucon bring the discussion to its highest point when they take up the question of philosophic education. To reveal the need for such an education, they go dov.111 into a cave. Human nature, Socrates tells us, dwells in a cave-like condition of ignorance and deception (7.514A). The word for condition in this passage is the same as the one Socrates uses here in the Timaeus to describe himself-pathos, lvhich also means feeling or affection as well as suffering or affliction. The cave is the place of political orthodoxy or "right opinion." The cave dwellers sit in a sort of prenatal position with their gaze forced up~n the cave wall. They are enthralled-that is, both fascinated and enslaved-by moving tvvo-dimensional images of three-dimensional artifacts, projected on the wall by the enforcers of the city's opinions. These projectionists are the poets, whose art of making deceptive imitations of human excellence binds the souls of the cave-citizens to the city's beliefs and customs. The prenatal position of the cave people suggests that they are in a kind of womb, which paradoxically refuses to give them birth and bring them to light, refuses to let them grow info free and upright beings. To insure their provincialism, the protective cave-mother keeps them in the dark and charms them with exciting political movies that stir the soul to praise and blame. The potential philosopher seeks freedom from this stultifying, prenatal condition or pathos. He is turned around, converted, from Becoming to Being and eventually to the study of the Good. The art of thus turning the soul around, as Socrates describes it, comes from the power of mathematics. 2 4 �Just as the Republic takes us from Becoming "up" to Being, so the Timaeus brings us back "down"-back to the cave of body, custom, opinion and change. The dialogue is a grand defense or apologia of Becoming in response to Socrates' philosophic indictment in the Republic. The will to plunge from the heights of Being into the depths of Becoming is intimately connected with the will to order. For the turn from Being to Becoming is also the turn from theory or contemplation to practicality and accomplishme:nt, to what Machiavelli in The Prince calls "effectual truth" (15). The reason is that Becoming is the realm that engages us as practical, productive beings. As creatures of Becoming, ,,ve are caught up in the doing and making of things. "\Ve are ambitious, restless beings desirous of both honor and mastery. Our hosts of today, whom Socrates praises for their reputation and accomplishment,3 have an agenda. It is to make the realm of doing and making look as good as possible. They will try to renovate the cave of Becoming in order to make it more receptive to the intentions and designs of enlightened political craftsmanship. But this political agenda requires a preliminary step: a divine sanction and a basis in the overall scheme of things. The will to order cannot accomplish politically what nature will not let it accomplish in the first place. There must be a predisposition to order. This is \vhere the cosmological myth of Timaeus comes in. Through the power of science and fiction combined, Timaeus will make Becoming stand forth as a kosmos, that is, a beautifully ordered "\\'hole. This '\'hole is not so much discovered by the cosmologist as it is made. :Mathematics, here, has a role contrary to the one it had in the Republic. Instead of turning the soul from her fixation with Becoming to the dialectical study of Being, mathematics nO\v supplies the beautifying principles in accordance with \vhich the cave of Becoming can be transformed into an enlightened home for moral correctness, political reform and scientific research. The adjective kosmios in Greek means decent and \vell-behaved. This is the quality that Timaeus \'\ ill try to infuse into the world of Becoming. He 1 will try to make the wild world of body and change seem decent and law-abiding. The turn from Being to Becoming is, in effect, the undoing of philosophic conversion. This turn is most clearly seen in the character of Critias, the spokesman in the dialogue for nomos or convention. At one point he tells Socrates that the city 5 �described on the previous day was in fact a myth, and that he, Critias, \Vi.11 carry over Socrates' merely theoretical city into what he calls "the truth" (26C7-D3). Critias identifies the truth ·with Becoming. His extreme vanity regarding his genealogy and his family connections with the great Solon confirms this fact. The ancient Athens Solon hears about from the Egyptian priests is more real than Socrates' city because it actually existed in a real terrestrial place-so Critias '\Nould have us believe. According to the vvisdom of Egypt, a wisdom Critias clearly admires, what is older is more real and authoritative than what is younger and more recent. Old ways are best. The oldest things are the most real and true, and the oldest priests are the wisest of all. Truth is a long-standing custom or nomos, and knowledge consists in the oldest hearsay about the oldest things. 4 The Timaeus is a time machine. It attempts to unearth hidden origins by taking us back to those origins in mythic time. Indeed, speech throughout the dialogue is playfully depicted as generative or originating and, in that sense, thoroughly temporal. Solon's story takes us back to a forgotten place at a forgotten time. \Vhat he hears from the Egyptian priest is about the periodic structure of time itself. And Critias, in order to retrieve this story, goes back to the time when he was very young. Timaeus, too, availing himself of the generative power of speech, playfully presents the cosmic order, not as it eternally is, but as it came to be "once upon a time." This temporalization of logos is yet another way in which the Timaeus takes us back to temporal beginnings but not "up" to eternal principles. Instead of recollection, as we hear it described in the l\1eno, the Timaeus steeps us in the shadowland of memory. Such is my prelude to the speech of Timaeus. In what follows, I shall try to show how this speech embodies the will to order. The questions I would have us keep in mind are these. \Vhat is thinking in the likely story? \\That does it mean be kosmios, cosmic, in one's thinking? What is the strength of such thinking, and ·what is the weakness? To pursue these questions, I have divided up the remainder of my account into three parts, which mirror the tripartite order of Timaeus' speech. They are, Part One: The Piety of Physics, Part Two: Space Dreams, and Part Three: The Human Condition. 6 �Part One: The Piety of Physics Timaeus introduces the phrase, "likely story," in ·what Socrates calls the prelude or preamble to the speech itself {29D). Socrates reminds Timaeus that he ought to invoke the gods according to nomos or convention. Timaeus agrees that it would be sound-minded or moderate to do so, thereby exhibiting his favorite moral virtue. But he adds an invocation that reflects his own brand of piety. "We must also invoke to hemeteron," he says, what comes from, or has to do with, ourselves, our own resources (27D). This self-invocation embodies the will to order that pervades the upcoming myth. God, as Timaeus proceeds to say, is a demiurge or craftsman. But a stronger and more daring claim seems to be at work. It is the claim that productive art, demiurgy, in some sense is our god. Timaeus begins his prelude with a sharply drawn distinction between Being and Becoming. The strictness of his distinction makes it extremely difficult to understand how a cosmos, which is the mixture of Being and Becoming, could ever come about at all. This is typical of Timaeus: he makes hard and fast distinctions and then immediately proceeds to blur them. After thus distinguishing what ahvays is from what always comes to be, Timaeus introduces his famous demi urge. This mythical figure, in ·whom the will to order is most evident, hovers between the realms of Being and Becoming. The word demiourgos means "one who ·w orks for the people or demos." It refers to anyone \vho crafts anything. 5 Now we all delight in a thing well made-a well made chair, building or piece of music. v\Te love the \vay everything fits together beautifully, and how a thing \Veil made is a thing that lasts. In the likely story, Timaeus counts on and seeks to gratify this human delight. He makes the world of nature into a well-made and long-lasting artifaet.6 . The divine craftsman is postulated, willed into being. There is no proof for .his existence. The question for Timaeus is not whether there really is such a being but what he was looking at when he made the world. \Vas it a changeable, or an unchangeable, model? Timaeus at one point expresses skepticism regarding our ability to discover the true poet and father of the \vorld (28C). He makes us suspect that the demiurge is a practical postulate that fills the gap of our 7 �theological ignorance, that he is not the true god, whom we cannot presume to know, but the god decent, intelligent people should believe in if they are to affirm the best of possible worlds. Later we hear that this divine craftsman is good and therefore ungrudging (29E). Unlike the gods of Herodotus, the divine craftsman had no envy; he did not jealously guard his divine prerogative, the fire of artful intelligence, but wished that all things should possess it to the extent that their natures allowed. 7 Artful intelligence, one might say, is always in the mode of generosity. It seeks to bestow itself on the world as a divine gift; it rejoices in seeing itself multiplied, reflected and embodied. The cosmos comes about, not through chance and necessity, nor through the sex and violence depicted in Hesiod's Theogony, but through the sober professionalism of techne or art. By presenting god as a generous craftsman, a divine being who works for the common good, Timaeus saves us from making god in the image of a tyrant. For Timaeus, the world of body and change is made in the likeness of a changeless and purely intelligible ·archetype or model. Timaeus expresses his preference for a changeless model in pious terms: it ·would be "not right," ou themis, that is, blasphemous to say otherwise (29A). Herein lies one reason why the likely story is likely. Likely, eikOs, means "has the character of a likeness." It also means probable, reasonable, and equitable or fair. Speech for Timaeus imitates the condition of its objects. Accounts of what is abiding and intelligible, he says, "are themselves abiding and unchanging" (29B), while accounts of the non-abiding and changing, accounts of mere likenesses, are afflicted with likelihood. In an echo of the divided line in the Republic, Timaeus says: "just as Being is to Becoming, so is truth to trust" (29C). Likely stories are not put forth for the sake of insight but are a kind of rhetoric. \Ve must be persuaded by them, trust them, and put up with their necessary flaws. The infirmity of speech about divine origins points to a deeper infirmity-our own human nature. Timaeus tells Socrates that he must not wonder if many of the things said about the gods and the birth of the All are self-contradictory and imprecise (29C). This is ''\'here the phrase, "likely story," first appears. Adopting the formal tone of a man about to be accused, Timaeus says: "But if 've provide likelihoods inferior to none, one should be well pleased with them, remembering 8 �that I who speak as well as you my judges have a human nature, so that it is fitting for us to receive the likely story about these things and not to search for anything beyond it" (29C-D). 8 This sentence about accepting likely stories points to the connection that physical accounts have, for Timaeus, to both piety and prudence. Timaeus draws a line beyond which prudent human beings should not go in speaking of things divine. But the drawing of this line is not just an admission of infirmity. Rather, it demarcates the realm within which human beings, precisely because they are aware of their limitations and all the contingencies of life, are all the more able to exert their powers of prudent mastery, their will to order. 9 Timaeus' defense of the inevitable shortcomings of his speech is a not-so-veiled warning against the immoderateness, the eras, of philosophy. The immoderate questioning of everything, if left to itself, would undermine the controlled play of invention with the unpredictable play of conversation. In the end, it would prevent human nature from being as masterful as it could be. Timaeus thus cautions Socrates against being Socrates, against asking questions and striving to go beyond the boundaries of plausibly established grounds. Socrates must be receptive to, and content \·vith, the likely story about divine origins. If he wants to enjoy his feast, he must mind his manners and act like a gentleman. He must control his striving to be divine and remember that as Timaeus' harshest judge, he too is, after all, only human. Socrates gets the point. He is more than happy to accept the terms on \\·hich his guest-gift is offered. In the most telling moment of the dialogue, Socrates calls the likely story, not a logos or mythos, not an account or a story, but a nomos (29D). Nomos is both la·w and song, as well as custom and convention. Timaeus is our singer and legislator for the day. He will entertain us, but he will also lay down the law. His logos is a form of music. It sings of Nature as both a divine Artifact and a divinely established nomos or Convention. It celebrates the prudent founding of the cosmic regime and invites us to join in by following all the mathematical constructions. Long before Critias gives man his Athenian citizenship in the dialogue, the physics of Timaeus '"-'ill make us dutiful citizens of the world at large-good cosmopolitans. 9 �The world for Timaeus is both image and god. 10 This is his central teaching. Unlike the images put forth by Socrates, the cosmic image does not point beyond itself. If it did so, it would cease to be a god. In the divided line, Socrates revealed the power of what he calls eikasia, imagination. It was at the bottom of the line and served as the foundation for the whole line. This is the power of recognizing images as images, likenesses as likenesses. 11 It is the power by which we are able to make our ascent up the line. In the upper, intelligible portion of the line, eikasia is the power by \vhich we move from hypotheses to non-hypothetical archai or principles. This power is absent in the Timaeus, where we have lots of image-making and imitation but no image-recognition as such, at least not the sort of image-recognition by which the soul is enabled to move from images to their noetic originals. To be sure, there are, to use 1faxwell's term, "real analogies in nature" for Timaeus. But these are all internal to the cosmos, all within the realm of Becoming. Images here do not transcend themselves, even though they are crafted in the likeness of intelligible originals. This seems to be the direct result of the fact that they are artificial: art, ·whether human or divine, conceals its foundations in order to build on them. The original points dmvn, as it were, to the image; but the image does not point back up to the original. Mathematics is no longer the prelude to "the song of dialectic/' asi it '\Vas in the Republic, 12 and the eide seem to be necessary only in the way that' a lifeless blueprint guides and points ahead to the actual building. Furthermore, '\vhen Timaeus first appeals to the intelligible model, he does so for the sake of beauty and stability rather than truth (28A-B). The model is postulated so that the cosmic edifice will be secure and beautifully built-not so that the human soul, by reflecting on the heavens, might be drawn to the super-heavenly beings that are beyond all hypothesis. The construction of the cosmic soul is the most impressive architectural feat of Timaeus' first account of origins. The soul is made out of music-a scale that stretches four octaves and a major sixth in Pythagorean tuning. This act of scalebuilding is the most revealing instance of the will to order and of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. Cosmic thinking is productive and practical rather than theoretical. It makes sturdy and beautiful wholes out of beautiful parts by 10 �negotiating its way through technical difficulties. Here the divine craftsman takes the beautiful ratios of the Pythagoreans and finds a way of fitting them together in a coherent whole. He then bends his diatonic pattern into circles and makes the orbits for the Sun, :Moon and planets. These outwardly appearing circles are then mythically presented as the inward revolutions of discursive thought, dumoia. But before he does any of this, the craftsman first makes a kind of pasta out of the forms of Being, Same and Other. He kneads them, like dough, into "one entire look." He must use force or violence, since Other is loath to mix with Same (35A-B). Here we have the most obvious example of the v1.ill to order in the dialogue. Same and Other, as Timaeus understands them, have no natural togetherness. He denies them the dialectical interweaving and participation in one another's natures that we hear about in the Sophist.13 Same and Other are simply separate ingredients, like Being and Becoming. Force is required to get them to mix. The result is not an intelligible unity but a highly useful blur. It is as though Timaeus wanted to convince us of the impossibility of ever understanding the world dialectically so that he could get on with the more productive task of flattering the world with mathematical constructs. He raises a dialectical problem only to bury it with art. At several pivotal moments in his speech, Timaeus reminds us that the cosmos is a god. The god who made the world, in other words, bestows his divinity on the '"'orld. Physical science, especially astronomy, thus becomes the truest form of piety. It is what Spinoza called "the intellectual love of God," by which he meant physics. 14 Strictly speaking, astronomy, like scale-building, is not theoretical for Timaeus but is a form of praxis. This praxis supplies medicine and therapy for the human soul. In our heads are housed the divine circuits of Same and Other (44D). These are the circuits of sound judgement or phronesis, the circuits that govern a morally healthy life. But once they are immersed in the sea of Becoming and given mortal birth, they become deformed and we grow abysmally ignorant and disordered. Witness the behavior of babies. Before our birth as mortal beings, v,re d\'\ elled with the gods, whose happy life consisted in 1 regularity, symmetry and perpetual health. This divinely healthy life Timaeus 11 �calls the form, eidos, of our "first and best condition" (42D). Astronomy is thus the great human homecoming, the happy return to our heavenly origins. It is also the medicine by which we correct and stabilize what Timaeus calls "the wander-stricken circuits in ourselves" (47C). 15 The piety, moderation and lawfulness of Timaeus set him at odds with eros and its notorious destabilizing influence over human life. His war on eros is evident throughout the dialogue. Eros, as it is described in the Symposium, is a yearning for that which one lacks, and Timaeus cannot abide lack. He is driven to structural perfection, completeness and mastery. things up. Timaeus is always filling We see him filling up the part of a missing fourth at the very beginning (17A-B), filling up the musical intervals of octave and perfect fourth (35C ff.), rejecting the existence of a void (SOC), and filling our ignorant souls with scientific explanations designed to dispel our wonder and cure our perplexity (80B-C). He is careful to make the cosmos into a non-erotic animal, an animal that feels no lack. If the cosmos is to be a "happy god," as he calls it (34B), then it must be complete and autonomous or self-related. Timaeus bestmvs on it the shape of a sphere to ensure this result (33A ff.). As a sphere, the god Cosmos neither needs nor fears anything ·whatsoever outside itself. It has no arms, no legs, no sense organs, none of the things we humans have that remind us of our condition of dependence and vulnerability. 16 This happy lack in the cosmic body is mirrored in what Timaeus says about the cosmic soul. The cosmic soul, 've are told, is the best of all begotten things (37A). Her life consists in thinking. This is not philosophic contemplation but the condition of unending, unerring sensibleness or right judgement. This judgement is mythically depicted as the inward circling of thought. Happiness, for Timaeus, is really healthiness, and the healthy process and condition of thinking are, in the end, more important than 'vhat thinking is ultimately about. If there is any pleasure in the soul's life of perpetual sensibleness, it must be the pleasure of being constantly busy gathering information. She has no leisure. Soul is the thought-energy of the 'vorld-always knmving what is going on everywhere and ahvays reporting to herself v,rhat she finds. 17 She is like the Egyptian priests described in Solon's account, and her truth, like theirs, is really factual 12 �correctness. In the complex description that Timaeus gives of the soul's intellectual activity, he avoids the metaphor of seeing. Seeing suggests the possibility of arousal and the pleasure we take in simply beholding the objects of desire. The dominant metaphor instead is that of touch, which is more amenable to a mechanical and physiological view of thinking. This absence of seeing in the cosmic soul stands in marked contrast with what we hear in the myths of the Phaedo and Phaedrus, ·where the soul's ultimate joy consists in the leisured and ecstatic vision of eternal truth. 18 Now seeing is honored in the likely story. Without our vision of the starry motions, we would never have discovered the arts of arithmetic and astronomy (47A-B). But this seeing inspires thoughts of duty rather than of love. Indeed, the stars themselves move in circles for Timaeus not, as Aristotle suggests in the Metaphysics, because they are in love with the divine mind,1 9 but because it is their assigned duty to do so. They move through piety toward a father rather than desire for a beloved. In beholding the starry motions, we indeed behold beauty. The function of this beauty, however, is not to entice or arouse but to rectify. The glory of seeing, for Timaeus, is that it leads, ultimately, to the highest form of touch: the being in toudz with our better, starry selves. To think cosmically is to align our souls with the authority and will of the heavens, especially with the all-mastering circle of the Same (36C-D). In the ·world constructed by Timaeus, to think is not to see but to obey-to obey, that is, the masterful motions of our own souls projected onto the starry sky. Part Two: Space Dreams The Timaeus is not just about order. It is also about disorder. Plato makes disorder a rich and interesting topic. It even acquires a certain dignity in the likely story. Disorder comes from chance or ·what Timaeus also calls "necessity" (47E) and "the wandering cause" (48A). This cause is present from the very beginning of the dialogue when a fourth failed to show up according to plan. Timaeus, in his very first likely story of the dialogue, asks Socrates to believe that the mysterious fourth \ \1 as absent because he came down with something, that his absence was the work 13 �of chance and necessity rather than choice. Chance and necessity are also present in the best city that Socrates summarizes. Try as the city may to vanquish disorder and keep people in their proper classes, the unpredictable sway of eras and sexual generation messes things up (19A). 20 The city can maintain its good order only by a constant and hard-to-imagine redistribution of human types. 21 But necessity is not just the spoiler of the best-laid plans. It is also the other great cause, 'vithout which the cosmos could never have been made. This is its dignity. Just as artful intelligence is the cause of the good and the beautiful, so necessity is the cause of power and effectiveness. At a pivotal moment in the likely story, Timaeus says: "for mixed indeed was the birth of this cosmos here, and begotten from a standing-together of necessity and mind" (47E-48A). He goes on to tell us that the world came about through the persuasion of necessity by mind. The world, in short, originated in a grand piece of rhetoric. Presumably, this rhetoric goes on continually, as the realm of efficient causes constantly cooperates, for the most part, \vith that of final causes. It is hard to see what Timaeus means by "persuasion" here. Nevertheless, a direct consequence of the image is that it reminds us that mind and necessity are two fundamentally different and opposed orders of causality. Even as it yields to intelligent persuasion, necessity retains, as it were, its right to do 'vhat it pleases. Timaeus thus saves the phenomenon of unpredictability. In this second founding of the cosmos, Timaeus is at pains to make Becoming sound as perplexing as possible. Becoming is the realm of unstable and illusory appearance.22 Earth, air, fire and water all appear to be constantly changing into each other. They cannot be called elements at all, since they lack integrity and steadfastness. For example, to use Timaeus' language here, you can never accuse fire of being a "this," since, no sooner do you call it "this," fire, than it changes into "that," air. It is always escaping the indictment of stability (49E). The legitimate name for any of the elements is therefore not "this" but "suchlike" or "of this sort" (49B-SOA). 23 The assumption of radical flux leads Timaeus to postulate the existence of a mysterious "in which" that is prior to body and is the abiding and underlying substrate of change. In the language of Spinoza, this "in which" is the enduring substance of \vhich earth, air, fire and water (not to mention their composites) are but passing modes. It is not really a thing at all but a force field, the medium not of 14 �determinate things but of tensions and resolutions-the field of things happening. Just as the soul seems to be the world's thought-energy, the receptacle seems to be its body-energy, energy that somehow remains self-same and "conserved" even as it assumes a variety of forms. Timaeus has many names for this field of dynamic qualities that underlies and causes change. He calls it a receptacle and wetnurse (49A, 52D), a mold (SOC), and a mother of Becoming (52D). It is simultaneously the unpredictable cause of motion and the indeterminate ground of imaging. Art and nature are continually blended in the likely story. Here this uneasy blend-one of Timaeus' many blurrings-is especially prominent. On the one hand, Timaeus likens the receptacle to gold, which is constantly being worked into different geometric shapes by a tireless goldsmith (50A-B). The curious image reminds us of Timaeus' fascination ·with ornament: even the matter out of which a cosmos is made must be thought of as artistic and golden-a beautiful medium just begging for a craftsman. On the other hand, the receptacle is clearly biological or natural-not an artificial "it" but a living "she," the cosmic womb and mother who gives birth to the four kinds and keeps them in motion. The elusive receptacle is not a merely passive substrate for form but a never-failing process that somehow differentiates itself spontaneously or from within. This self-differentiation is like the morphogenesis we witness in living things, the phenomenon studied by Driesch and Speeman. 24 body-energy, it also seems to be life-energy. If the receptacle is That is, the receptacle seems to correspond to a certain primordial understanding of soul. In spite of Timaeus' attempt to bring space down to earth through humble similes like '\vinnowing baskets (52E) and the manufacture of perfumes (SOE), the parts of his account are obscure at best and don't seem to fit together. The incoherence seems to reflect the many-wayedness and elusive character of space itself. For example, space, ch6ra, not only gives all things place; it also dislodges them from their place (52E-53A). Space, we are told, is like an instrument that causes shaking (53A). It is the underlying cause of all the circulation and turbulence in the mortal realm. It governs everything from vibrating strings to the circulation of the blood to earthquakes. lVe experience this turbulence in the constant flow of our bodies and in the passion of our souls. \Ve also witness it, or rather hear about 15 �it, in the rise and fall, the flowering and ruin, of cities and even whole civilizations. The cycles of birth and death recorded by the Egyptians are all due to the sway of space, and so are the fates of legendary Atlantis and Plato's contemporary Athens. But the most interesting thing Timaeus says about space has to do \Vith dreams. Space is neither purely intelligible nor purely sensible. It is "graspable by some bastard reasoning with the aid of insensibility,25 hardly to be trusted, the very thing we look to when we dream and affirm that it's somehow necessary for everything that is to be in some region and occupy some space, and that what is neither on earth nor somewhere in heaven, is nothing" (52A-B). This amazing description of space reminds us of Critias, who claimed to make Socrates' city real by giving it place-Athenian place. If the chOra is, as Timaeus' description seems to indicate, a seductive Siren who bewitches us into thinking that to be is to be spatial, then Critias appears to be her adoring slave and victim, her "space man." The dream-inducing power of space reminds us of the cave-mother of the Republic. Space is the cosmic counterpart and ground of our cave-condition. It is the pre-political, natural ground of our susceptibility to political indoctrination and of our unreflective rootedness in a political place. Critias first heard the story about Athens and Atlantis during the festival of Apaturia (21A-B). On this day, young Athenian boys \Vere initiated into thell:.tribe as a preparation for full-fledged citizenship. 26 The ceremony involved the singing of songs. Critias remembers singing the songs of Solon, \vhich were ne\'\" at the time. Through the festival that Critias nostalgically recalls, Plato draws our attention to the very moment in time when, through songs that are also laws, young prepolitical souls are planted in the soil and ch6ra of the motherland. The word Apaturia derives from the word pater, father. But it also points to the word apate, deception, and thus suggests a dark side to this heart-warming event. In being welcomed into the fold of tribe and city, the nascent citizens are nourished on the nomoz. These laws and customs are made sweet through song and are thus magically transformed into sentiments. The laws and customs will, from this moment on, give the young boys eyes to see with and ears to hear with. As dyedin-the-wool citizens, they will be incapable of seeing and hearing anything else, 16 �anything outside the boundaries of their protective chora. Convention will be their wisdom. Earlier, I suggested that eikasia, image-recogniton, is not present in the Timaeus. Here in the receptacle we have the sort of imagination that is present. The cosmic space that is the ground of body seems, at another level, to be the inner "space" of imagining-the phantasia of our souls. This is the faculty that does not recognize images as images but rather makes images and welcomes them unquestioningly. According to this inner sense, the receptacle is our phantasia writ large and made into a cosmic cause. When Socrates expressed his desire for animals in motion, he seemed to speak from within this very faculty. His irrational receptivity to the speeches of his hosts, the pathos that he seems to have contracted, is a playful imitation of our all-too-human susceptibility to exciting images. It is the susceptibility that allows us to be entertained and kept in the cave. Timaeus calls attention to the fact that space is like a dream-inducing drug. He also makes it clear that he posits the existence of what he calls "the unsleeping and truly subsisting nature" (52B). Presumably this refers to Being and the realm of the eide of the four elements. Timaeus at one point "casts his vote" for such beings (51D). But as we saw earlier, it is not Timaeus' intention to use cosmic images to wake us up from our space dreams so that we might transcend the cosmos through dialectic. Likely stories employ the hypothesis of the forms in order to involve us, safely and entertainingly, in the dangerous realm of body and Becoming. They are the dreams of a sly and healthy soul. Having alerted us to the fact of deception, to the poetic sophistry of space, Timaeus proceeds to manufacture deceptive dreams of his own. These are the beautiful mathematical dreams that invite us to imagine the four elements of body, four beautiful animals in motion, as though they were four regular geometric solids. Along with the construction of soul out of musical ratios, the construction of body out of geometrical figures is a paradigm of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. The demiurge is virtually absent here, and so the ingenious modelbuilding arises completely from to hemeteron, what has to do with us and our \\ill to order. The \vhole account is playfully deceptive-a grand piece of poetic sophistry, in which image-making is promiscuously fused with argument, mythos with logos. 17 �The sophistry of geometrical physics reminds us of what Timaeus had earlier called bastard or illegitimate reasoning. And the poetry or phantasia that plays the guardian to this reasoning reminds us of what he had called insensibility. Timaeus would have us believe that geometric solidity or three-dimensionality can explain the properties of physically solid bodies. Like Descartes, he attempts to explain body in terms of extension. The questionable nature of this project is underscored by Timaeus himself, who calls on "god the savior to grant us safe passage out of a strange and unusual narration to the conviction based on likelihoods" (48D). Like his mythic goldsmith, Timaeus schematizes space 'vith geometrical shapes. First, he selects the regular solids as archetypes for the four elements of body. He does so on the grounds that they are "the most beautiful bodies" (S3D). Truth seems not to be at issue, unless "is true" means nothing more than "beautifully fits the appearances." Next, he fits together or "harmonizes" the geometric solids by constructing their faces and assembling them through a kind of cut-and-paste method. This part of the construction is very childlike and unsophisticated. Finally, he assigns each solid to the elemental body or kind that seems to be most like it: the cube to earth, the pyramid to fire, the octahedron to air, and the icosahedron to water. This account of body renovates and beautifies our imagination of change. Change, the drunken spree of appearance, is nmv the elegant rearrangement of structural parts. Dionysus, it seems, has been persuaded to accept the sober gifts of Apollo. As for the dodecahedron, the god, we are told, used it to make panels for decorating the sky v.rith animals, presumably the animal figures of the zodiac and the various constellations (SSC). The apparently off-hand explanation actually reveals the point of all that has gone before: the regular solids are a kind of jewelry that beautifies and flatters the world. The mathematization of body and change makes nature more presentable and more pleasantly thinkable for decent-minded human beings. In his Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl refers to what he calls the "garb of ideas," with which modem mathematical physics dresses up nature, covers its naked truth, with the formal attire of constructs and symbols. 27 Timaeus is doing consciously and deliberately what Husserl says the modern physicist does for the most part unconsciously. He is covering up nature with a gorgeous dress of ratios and geometric figures. 18 �Through Timaeus' playful, ceremonial act of dressing up the world, Plato entertains us with a new kind of physics-a mythematical physics. The properties and behavior of fire, for example, are now traced to geometric causes. \Vhy is fire hot? Why does it bum? \Vhy, because it is a pyramid, and pyramids have sharp angles and keenly cutting sides (56E-57A). Why is earth resistant to change and motion? Why, because it is a cube, and the isosceles triangles out of which a cube's square faces are composed are not capable of being redistributed to form the equilateral triangular faces of the other solids. Furthermore, while a triangular base makes an object easy to tip, a square base makes it harder to budge. Cause here is completely analogical. To explain body, for Timaeus, is to build geometric models for body that function as beguiling analogies. Perhaps it is more correct to call them metaphors, since the noble sophistry at work here consists in identifying physical body with its geometric analogue, that is, in blurring the distinction between the model and that of which it is the model. This is what Critias says he will do with Socrates' theoretical city. He will establish a beguiling correspondence and harmony behveen that city and ancient Athens (26C-D)-a correspondence that will be so exact that one would swear that the hvo cities were one and the same. Socrates' desire was, at bottom, to be entertained by deceptive, life-like images that blur the distinction beh\'een the real and the fabricated: the animals in motion he wanted to see and hear about could be either "truly living" or "produced by the art of painting." Timaeus and Critias enact a will to order that provides Socrates with just such entertainment. Like astronomy, physics for Timaeus has a practical function. Becoming is not just something we contemplate and \Vant to get to the bottom of. It is also our lifesustaining world, the cosmic source of our coming to be and passing away. \Ve are the children of Becoming and must speak appropriately about our cosmic mother. In speaking rightly of the cosmos in general, Timaeus attempts to give physical science a moral defense and reason for being. In fact, his physics seems to be a direct response to Socrates' youthful disenchantment with physics in the Phaedo. Timaeus does \·vhat Anaxagoras had failed to do-present the phenomena of change in terms of a best of possible worlds. He re-enchants the world \\'ith intelligence, moral purpose, and a kind of piety. Mathematical physics, quite apart from ·whether 19 �or not it reveals nature itself as mathematical,28 acquires its truest vocation in making us dutiful sons of the cosmic order. In addition, it soothes our serious and turbulent lives with a decorous distraction and provides what Timaeus calls "a pleasure not to be repented of" (59C-D). The likely story teaches us how to sing noble songs of change. These songs aim at "saving the appearances." But they are also a form of consolation. They save us from despair over our world and help us to cope with, and even to enjoy, the otherwise meaningless spectacle of instability, violence, decay and death. Indeed, according to the official report of the likely story, death from old age is geometric in nature and is therefore a pleasure to contemplate. 29 This natural death is the collapse of the perpendicular or root that keeps our inner triangles erect. These triangles give ·way at last after fighting numerous battles with the alien triangles that would invade and destroy us (81D). Structure is power, and Becoming is a war of structures, all battling constantly to preserve the identity of their constitutions or regimes. All mortal things eventually lose in this war-they die. But at least likely stories furnish us human beings '\Vith intellectual armor so that we may fight in the noblest and most intelligent way. Armed with '\vhat Timaeus calls "the pmv er of likely accounts" (48D), we take on all comers vvho would disparage our cosmic place and sing a song of despair. As we go off to do battle \vi.th unhealthy opinions. about the '\· orld, we remember the songs of our cosmic Apaturia. v Part Three: The Human Condition Timaeus' role in the dialogue is assigned to him by Critias. "It seemed good to us," he says, "that Timaeus here-since he's the most astronomical of us and the one who's most made it his business to know about the nature of the All-should speak first, beginning from the birth of the cosmos and ending in the nature of mankind" (27A). Man, pre-political man, is the goal of the likely story. Timaeus achieves this goal in some of the weirdest, and funniest, moments in Plato's dialogues. In Part One we sa'\v that Timaeus was pious after a fashion, and in Part Two that he was cun.rUng. In this third and last part, we shall see that he is witty. 20 �'\Vhat is human nature for Timaeus, and why were we born in the first place? Let us take the latter question first. :tvlan comes about because the cosmos must be complete. If the world is to be perfectly filled, it must contain all the animal kinds represented in the eternal archetype that Timaeus calls "the intelligible animal" (39E). The various animals derive from the mystic number Four, which is alluded to in the dialogue' s opening. The four animate kinds correspond to the four elements of body (39E ff.). The star-gods are mostly made of fire. Then come animals that crawl on the earth, fly through the air and swim in the water. :Man is not one of these four kinds. He is rather the generator of the mortal kinds, the means by which the lower kinds come to be. In his head, man lives the life of the gods, the life of circularity and prudence. But in his torso he contains all the lower animal possibilities-the thymos and rage of a lion, and the epithymia or desire of all mortal animals. In the very shape of his body, man thus unites the two cooperating causes of cosmic order. He is the unity-in-opposition of the good and the necessary. The original humans were in some sense male, although strictly speaking they lacked sexuality. vVhen these "first men" yield to emotionality and vice, when they abuse their divine heritage, they are reborn, first as women, and then as the various sub-human animals they imitated in life (42C-D). The likely story, having begun with the stars, ends with shellfish. These animals devolve from humans who were "the most mindless and ignorant men of all" and whom the gods deemed no longer worthy of "pure breathing" (92B). The cosmos is thus completed by what Timaeus calls dike or just retribution (92C). And yet blame and punislunent seem to have nothing to do \vith it at all. Vice and ignorance are necessary if the \Yorld is to have its full complement of animals. In spite of the fact that they are said to be "punished" by cosmic justice, vice and ignorance are nevertheless useful, indeed necessary, to the cosmic purpose. l\1an completes the \· orld through his fall from v divinity into the various animal forms. Timaeus is so complete in his ·will to order that he puts even moral evil and ignorance to an artistic use, thereby completing his justification of god's ways to man. Evil, in a sense, becomes both ornament and demiurge. It is like the dissonance for which a piece of polyphony is all the s·weeter. 30 21 �Such is man's cosmic function: he perfects and beautifies the world with his evil. But what is man's nature? Here I return to the word pathos, which occurs with great frequency in the Timaeus. The frequency of this word and its cognates signals the extent to which necessity rules the dialogue and its conception of a world. The human condition is a continual state of affection and affliction, a continual suffering or ''being done to." Man suffers his birth and all his mortal baggage. His pathimata or passions are also sufferings, as Timaeus poetically reveals when he catalogues our "passions terrible and necessary." He cites "pleasure, evil's greatest lure," "pains, deserters of goods," "anger, difficult to appease," "hope, easy to seduce," all mixed together with Timaeus' archenemy, "all-venturing eras" (69C-D). Since he suffers desire, man must have arms, legs and a digestive system. He must also have a respiratory system and a circulatory system. A reproductive system is grafted onto him only later, after he has suffered his first fall. Timaeus gives a long account of breathing. Breathing is completely mechanical in nature and requires no action of the soul. It is a pathos (79A)-not something we do but something we suffer. The surprisingly long discussion of disease highlights the fact that life is suffering. It is the correlate to Timaeus' glorification of health. Ignorance, too, is a disease, the greatest of all diseases (88B), and education is therefore our greatest medicine and therapy. \Vallace Stevens once wrote, "A poet looks at the world as a man looks ' at a .... woman." 31 In Timaeus' case, "\Ve ·would have to say, "A cosmologist looks at the world as a doctor looks at a patient." Just as Timaeus reveals the nature of the cosmos in the act of showing the cosmos being made, so too man's nature is revealed through the artful making of man. 32 The likely story puts us at the scene of our mvn birth-or rather, manufacture. The gods put us together piece by piece, like benevolent Dr. Frankensteins. Since there is no intelligible model for man, they must make 'us up as they go along. The work is neither easy nor desirable. In fact, the gods make us only because they were told to do so by their father-demiurge (41C-D). The making of man, as Timaeus explicitly describes it, is a pious desecration (69D). In obedience to their father and his will to order, the gods must take the good and beautiful principle of intelligence, the principle he most embodies, and defile it "\:\rith mortal madness and complexity. Their work consists in the delicate and dangerous art of compromise. They must 22 �make us capable of unintelligent organic life while at the same time making us as good and intelligent as possible. The art of compromise is most evident when they invent our hair. Hair is a compromise between an unshielded head, which would make us very intelligent but short-lived, and a head protected by lots of flesh, which would make us long-lived but "dense" (75E-76D). The gods are provident for Timaeus. They make our parts always with an eye to the various falls we are destined to experience. They are always saving us from ourselves. They make flesh as a protective padding (74B). They make our neck to keep our intelligent heads both separate from and attached to the lower regions of our being (69D-E). They make our intestines to fend off the constant gluttony that would prevent us from engaging in philosophic research {73A). And they make our liver smooth and shiny so that the intellect can use it as a reflecting medium to frighten and pacify the desirous part of the soul with appropriate moving images, thus bringing about a condition of law and order (71A-D).33 The point of all this outrageous wit seems to be that there is moral meaning and purpose to how we are built and who we are. Through all his physiological jokes, Timaeus causes our inv.rard nature to appear right at the "surface" of our bodies. \Ve are what we look like, and our being is revealed not through a dialectical inquiry into our nature but through the scientific examination of our prudently designed structures and motions. Throughout the likely story, Timaeus gives mathematics a moral employment. In his account of man, he mathematicizes morality itself. At one point, '"'e are told, "all the good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not disproportionate" {87C). Virtue and happiness are a matter of establishing the right ratios and proportions in things. Timaeus does not seem to think that virtue is something we don't know, something about which human beings most need to ask: what is it? ~,foral education is like medicine and gymnastics. It is simply a matter of paying attention to the manifest ratios that regulate life and seeing to it that the proper ratios and regimen are established (87C-E). Thinkers should make sure they get some physical exercise, and athletes should make sure they study music and the liberal arts (88B-C). A sound mind in a sound body. Like the cosmos, '\Ve must be well-rounded . The 23 �human good is uncomplicated. It is, like the art of medicine, simply the conscientious application of sensible theory to life. It is the will to order. As we have seen, Timaeus is driven to filling things up and making them complete. But in at least one respect his cosmos is not complete. It does not contain the philosopher or dialectician. In the opinion of the likely story, Socrates, the erotic troublemaker, must be banished from the cosmos. There is no "\vorldly place, no chOra, for him. One who questions the nomos and the dreams that attach us to place must be left atopos-that is, both placeless and strange. Concluding Unscientific Postscript So v. hy is this dialogue taking place? '\Vhy has Socrates allowed himself to sit 1 passively by while his hosts entertain him with the flattery of Becoming? It seems to me that the hesychia of Socrates, his silence and his peace, is really a form of passive aggression. Socrates has set up his ambitious hosts for a Sicilian expedition in speech, that is, an ambitious project that ends in ruin. He probably knows, in general, "\vhat to expect, as he cunningly draws them out by imitating the cavedesire for moving images-a desire that is theirs rather than his. But, being an avid connoisseur as well as judge of human souls, Socrates also wants to see exactly how they will reveal themselves, and ho"\'\' far they will go, in the act of trying to defend Becoming and surpass the city in speech. In the Timaeus, Socrates has shown up, I believe, to guard the city in speech from ever coming into being in space and time. He does so to re-affirm what he said about the best city in the Republic, that it is not a blueprint for political actualization but "a model ... for the man who wants to see and found a city witlzin himself." 34 Under a deceptive flag of truce and welcoming receptivity, he draws out his hosts as though onto a field of battle. Their effort is sure to entertain Socrates and perhaps even to instruct him. But I suspect he is still more entertained, and gratified, by their ultimate failure. This failure is represented by Critias. In the dialogue that bears his name, Critias never gets to the war-story he promised Socrates. Plato cuts him off in mid-sentence, just as he is about to give the speech of Zeus that will bring divine retribution upon the Atlantians. The promised flattery of Athens is consigned to 24 �oblivion, like Atlantis itself. It is as though Critias, who had boasted so mightily of his powers of memory (26B-C),35 simply and utterly forgot. Through his failure to recover the speech in praise of Athens' heroism, Plato playfully mimics something deadly serious-the folly of forcing a city back, in deed and not merely in speech, to a purported first and best condition. In his speech to Solon, the old Egyptian priest referred to the myth about Phaethon, son of Helios. Phaethon tried to drive his father's car, the sun-chariot, in order to prove that he too was a god. The result was destruction for him and near-destruction for the whole earth (22C). The Egyptian priest tells Solon that the truth of this myth has to do with a periodically recurring alignment of the planets. The priest's piety for scientific explanation blinds him to the political significance of Phaethon. The insolence of Phaethon is the potential insolence of would-be reformers-reformers like the famous Critias, who tried to force a democratic Athens into an oligarchic mold. The will to order, \vhen infected by the love of honor and the lust for power, easily degenerates into the will to tyranny. Plato, more than any other philosopher, is constantly reminding us of the dangers of being human as well as the dangers of philosophy. Danger and safety are perhaps the most central terms of the Platonic dramas. They become central because of Plato's care for what we do and what we suffer. Through the drama of the Timaeus-Critias, Plato continues his care for the human condition. In the likely story of Timaeus, he concocts a bizarre yet healthy-minded dream about a ·world set V straight by the \Vill to order, a dream in \· hich the vwrld is saved from disorder and despair. In the vanity and ambition of Critias, he points to the diseases this will itself can contract. Shakespeare's Ulysses supplies the most fitting last word on the strength and the ·weakness of the will to order: "O, when degree is shaked,/ 'Vhich is the ladder of all high designs,/ The enterprise is sick." 36 * 25 �Endnotes Other experiments in going beyond Socrates include the Eleatic stranger from the Sophist and Statesman, and the Athenian stranger from the Laws. 1 ~For the "art of conversion or turning around," see Republic 7. 518D ff. The mathematical arts that pave the way for dialectic are, in order of appearance, arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry, astronomy and hannonics. The convcrsionary art must "draw the soul from Becoming to Being" (7. 521D). The praise of Timaeus is breathtaking (20A). He is rich, powerful, honored, and he comes from an aristocratic family. The city from which he hails is Locri, which Socrates calls "a city with the best laws in Italy." Furthermore, he has "reached the very peak of all philosophy." It is emphatically the case that for Timaeus there is no tension, as there is for Socrates, between philosophy and the city. Perhaps the reason lies in his conception and practice of philosophy. Socrates' reference to scaling the heights of "all philosophy" suggests that philosophy for Timaeus consists in intellectual accomplishment. So long as philosophy refrains from asking "What is virtue?" and busies itself with "science," it can perhaps avoid the conflict between questioning and con\'ention. But this is possible only if the scientific philosopher can somehow mask his belief that god is nature and acknowledge the gods of con\'ention. This is just what Timaeus does at 40D-41A. 3 Solon heard the story about ancient Athens in the district of Sais (2 IE). The word for district here is nomos. (Nomos comes from the ,·erb 11emei11, which means to apportion or distribute, and districts arc 4 areas of distributed land.) Plato thus combines in one word the deep connection between attachment to custom and attachment to place. The demiourgoi or craftsmen are central to Socrates' critique of imitation in Republic 10. After postulating three kinds of couches-the one produced by carpentry, the one produced by the art of painting, and the one that is in nature-Socrates playfully suggests that perhaps the couch that is in nature was also produced by some kind of craftsman, not a demiourgos but a phyTourgos or "nature-worker" (597B-D) . .:.•.: Socrates refers to a "craftsman of hea\'en" at 7. 530A. 5 Sometimes Timaeus makes the cosmos sound as though it were eternal. But there are also indications tha t, while it is very long-lasting, it is ne,·ertheless mortal. This fits with what Socrates announces in the Republic. "for e\·el)·thing that has come into being there is decay" (8. 546A). For example, time is said to come into being along with the hem·ens "in order that, haYing been begotten together, they might also be dissolved together-should some dissol11Tio11 of Them ever arise" (38B). And when the god makes the cosmic body, he saves it from old age and disea<>e but falls short of making it deathless (33A ff.). 6 The on-going presence of god' s generous artistry in the world is signaled by the fact that things other than the divine craftsman are called demi urges in the speech, and that the verb demio11rgei11, to craft, sometimes occurs as a synonym for "causes" or "brings about." Earth, for example, is called "the guardian and crafts111a11 of Night and Day" (40C); fire is at one point the craftsman of non-unifonnity in air (59A); and again, the color red is "crafted by the cutting and staining action of fire upon moisture" (80E). 7 Timaeus' use of eti, still or more, seems to echo Socrates' use of this little word at the end of his political summal)'. He asked Timaeus whether he was "still yearning for something more in ,,·hat was said" (l9A). Socrates seems to be tempting Timaeus to go beyond the boundaries of his political mentality, beyond the will to order. Timaeus has no yearning to do so. He says, "Not at all." 8 The likely story seems to foreshadow the positi\·e, practical spirit of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason-to know our theroelical limit<; is to kno\\' our practical freedom and po\\'er. Compare what Rousseau says in 9 26 �the Emile: "Man is very strong when he is contented with being what he is; he is very weak when he wants to raise himself above humanity" (tr. Allan Bloom, Basic Books, 1979, p. 81). 10 Timaeus calls the cosmos "the gcx:l who was one day to be" (34A-B) and a "happy gcx:l" (34B). See also 55D, where Timaeus says that the cosmos is "by nature one gcx:l." In the dialogue's closing sentence, the cosmos is a "sensed gcx:l" (92C). 11 Republic 6. 509C ff. For the definitive account of eikasia in the Republic, see Jacob Klein, A Commentary 011 Plato's Meno, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965, pp. 112-125. 12 Book 7. 532A. Socrates' language here is very close to the way in which he describes the likely story. He speaks of the "song itself that dialectic performs," autos... lzo nomos lwn to dialegestlzai perainei. 13 The Eleatic stranger's complex account of the interweaving of kinds begins at Sophist 253A. •~Spinoza's amor intellectualis Dei occurs in his Ethics Demonstrated in rite Geometrical Mode, Book 5, Proposition 32, Corollary and following. In connection with Timaeus' will to order, compare Spinoz.a.'s claim that will and understanding are the one and the same (Book 2, Proposition 49, Corollary). 15 At the beginning of the Critias, Timaeus prays to "the gcx:l who has just now been born through speeches" ( 106A). He identifies the just retribution of this gcx:l (dike) with medicine (plwnnakon) and this medicine with knowledge (episteme). 16 Timaeus derives his catalogue of happy prirntions from two fragments by Empedocles (29 and 134). He discretely suppresses what Empedocles in both fragments makes explicit-that the cosmic goo lacks organs of reprcx:luction. But sexuality, long suppressed in the likely story, finally bursts out at the end in what John Sallis has fittingly called Timaeus' "sex comedy" (Clzorology: 011 Beginning in Plato's Timaeus, Bloomington: Indiana UniYcrsity Press, 1999, pp. 136-138). The male organ embcx:lies the tyranny of eras. It is an autocratic animal that "attempts to master eYerything as a result of its raging desires" (91B-C). And the female organ, the womb-receptacle, "wanders eYerywhere throughout Lhe bcx:ly" and brings on physical and emotional distress, hysteria (from hysterai, the word for womb), until the desire for child-making is satisfied (91 C-D). 17 For a highly interesting discussion of soul as energy, sec Kenneth Dorler, Plato's Plwedo, An Inrerpretmio11, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982, pp. 179-191. 18 Plwedo llOB-lllC; Plwedms 247C ff. 19 The final cause of motion moves things, says Aristotle, Ms er6meuo11, "as the object of erotic lm·e" (Metaphysics 12. 7. 1072B). Sexual generation is, in fact, the cause of the decay of the best city in the Republic. The rulers will fail to perceive and calculate the marriage number, "and they will at some time beget children when they should not" (8. 546B). 20 21 This political redistribution of types foreshadows the cosmic reshuffling of the four kinds by what Timaeus later calls the clu5ra or space. Socrates e\'en uses the word clu5ra in this part of his summary. This is its first appearance in the dialogue. 22 It is worth noti ng in this context that necessity, in the form of what Timaeus cal ls "assistant causes," first began to assert itself in the likely story just as Timaeus is gi\'ing a mechanical account of the reflecti\'e, and deccpti\'e, power of mirrors (46C-D). 27 �In the simile of the goldsmith, Timaeus has a hypothetical someone ask the question "WhateYer is it?" in response to the constant "morphing" of the receptacle. The safest answer, says Timaeus, is that it's gold (SOB). This is the closest Timaeus ever gets to Socrates' What is it? question. It is very interesting that his concern for safety (which reminds us of Socrates' similar concern in the Phaedo when he recounts his "second sailing" in search of cause) and the What is it? question lead Timaeus, not to the determinate fonn whose likeness fleetingly appears in the midst of change, but to that which is itself undergoing change. His answer, in other words, already points "forward" to geometric schematization rather than ''bad.. -ward" and '<up" to the eidetic "father" of the spatiotemporal "offspring" (50C-D). 23 24 Hegel sees in the self-differentiation of the life-process the dialectical origin of self-consciousness (Phe11ome11ology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1CJ77, pp. 106-108). Hegel's account sounds remarkably like a logical articulation of Timaeus' chOra. 25 This phrase is an echo of a phrase Socrates uses in the Republic just as he is describing why the best city will in time degenerate: logismoi met· aist!zeseos (8. .546B). For more on the Apaturia, see H. W. Parke, Festivals of the Athe11ia11s, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni\·ersity Press, pp. 88-92. 26 "In geometrical and natural-scientific mathematization, in the open infinity of possible experiences, we measure the life-world-the world constantly giYen to us as actual in our concrete world-life-for a wel!fitting garb ofideas, that of the so-called objectively scientific truths" (Ibid., p. 51). The drama of the Timaeus takes place during the Greater Panathenaea., the festival in honor of Athena. The central eYent of this festival was the procession in which an elaborately embroidered peplos or robe depicting the Battle of Gods and Giants was carried to the Acropolis and draped O\'er the statue of the goddess. In his likely story, Timaeus participates in, and corrects, the Greater Panathenaea. His ceremonial Jdee11kleid or "garb of ideas," paraded before the silent Socrates, replaces the Battle of Gods and Giants with decent gods and the beautiful war of mathematical objects in motion. 27 Timaeus himself would probably have been surprised by the triumphs of modem mathematical physics. In biology, Plato's dream of a mathematical morphology is powerfully confirmed in D' Arey Thompson's 011 Growth and Fonn, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948. 28 fa·en the experience of a natural death is pleasant: "So too and in accordancewith the same rule, a death . that comes about through diseases or by wounds is painful and forced, while that which comes about with old age at an end that's in accordance with nature is the least troubling of deaths and comes about with more pleasure than pain" (81E). 29 On the other hand, once sexual eras, the "love of begetting," is in the world, it is hard to see, from Timaeus' account, how anything can possibly control it. In spite of Timaeus' attempt to make Apollo rule the world, Dionysus seems to have the last say! 30 31 Opus Postlwmous: Poems, Plays, Prose, ed. Samuel French Morse, New York: Vintage Books, 1982, p. 165. Timaeus' view that the nature of a thing is revealed in the story of its origins, in its mythical history, reminds us strongly of Vice's New Science. There Vico tells us that the natura of civil institutions is nothing but their 11ascime11to or birth (tr. Bergin and Fisch, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni,·ersity Press, 1988, p. 64). Similarly, in an echo of Spinoza's identity between will and understanding, Yico asserts that man can know with certainty only that which he himself has made (Ibid., p. 96). These are only <l few points of y connection between the weird science of Ti macus and the often equal 1 wci rd science of V ico. 32 28 �33 The two organs that most embody the nature of the receptacle are the liver and the womb. 3-1 Republic 9. 5928. The centrality of place in the Timaeus and the man who was gazing upon beautiful animals "somewhere," pou, contrast sharply with what Socrates says about the best city in this passage: '1t doesn't make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere (pou)." Jn the Critias, Critias invokes Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the divinity on whom the whole project of gratifying Socrates depends (1080). 35 36 Troil11sa11dCressida I. 3. 101-103. 29 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 29 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 Kalkavage, Peter Title A name given to the resource Plato's <em>Timaeus</em> and the will to order Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000-03-24 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 24, 2000 by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Kalkavage 2000-03-24 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 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3836" title="Audio recording">Audio recording</a> (Entitled "The political music of Plato's <em>Timaeus</em>") Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f00f411291ff7d1ff4791efca9b6cfe9.pdf 16369091f26aec4c00cd8537d96960b3 PDF Text Text Hegel's Logic of Desire A lecture delivered by Peter Kalkavage at St. John's College, Annapolis 24 March 1995 �"There is such divine harmony in the realm of 11feless nature, why this discord within the rational?· Schiller. lli Robbers To open the pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is to enter a labyrinth. The Minotaur of these regions, the Demon of Difficulty, haunts every chamber. The difficulty of Hegel is both legend and cliche. It tends to be so great and so persistent, so much a part of how Hegel thinks and speaks, that we risk losing our way at every turn. Early on, Hegel tells us that the Phenomenology chronicles no mere path of Cartesian doubt but a way of despair. And yet, how little he seems to realize that his book, intended as a ladder to the absolute, is itself a way of despair for the would-be reader. This essay is an introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. I shall try to provide a thread to guide us through Hegel's labyrinth. The center of this labyrinth is the self; it is the point around which everything else in the Phenomenology turns. The word "spirit" or Geist that appears in the title, a word that also means "mind," is just this--the condition of fully developed selfhood. Hegel's book tells us how this condition is achieved. In his commentary on Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve begins with the following definition: "Man is self-consciousness." My efforts take their cue from this definition and are devoted to an exploration of what Hegel means by the self. * Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the Miller translation, from which I have occasionally departed. �2 For the most part, I will be dealing with the chapter on self-consciousness. But before plunging in, I want to say a word about the Phenomenology as a whole and discuss a few of Hege1's basic terms. The Phenomenology belongs to a quartet of greatest works on the theme of education. The other three members of the quartet are Plato's Republic. Dante's Divine Comedy and Rousseau's tmile. Despite their profound differences, these works have important similarities. For one thing, each reflects on education through some over-arching story or muthos. In the Republic this muthos is the founding of the best city in speech; in the Divine Comedy it is Dante's journey to God; in tmile it is Rousseau's fiction of playing governor to a child not his own by nature. In the Phenomenology. too, education is not simply talked about but presented as a drama or story. It is the story of how spirit, which for Hegel is somehow both human and divine, struggles to attain self-knowledge. Another similarity is that each of these stories is a tale of liberation. Each tells of how man is freed from some bad and enslaving condition--from either a cave, or a dark wood, or the corrupting influence of society or, in the Phenomenology. from what Hegel calls "natural consciousness." Finally, and most importantly, each work in the great quartet explores the relationship between reason on the one hand and act ion and passion on the other, between man as a thinker and man as the being who acts and feels. Hegel educates the reader by initiating him into the minds of others. To use a metaphor that occurs in the final chapter, the Phenomenology is a picture gallery(492). It presents us with a colorful array of human characters or types. Hegel calls these types "shapes of consciousness: These shapes are the phenomena or appearances for which the �3 Phenomenology seeks to provide a logos or reasoned account. In the course of the book we encounter a11 manner of characters, much as we do when we read the Platonic dialogues or when we journey with Dante through his three-fold cosmos. We meet the scientist and the warrior, the Stoic and the sceptic, the unhappy consciousness and the beautiful soul. Sometimes we meet characters lifted from the realm of fiction: Faust, Karl von Moor, Don Quixote, Antigone and Rameau's crazy nephew. All have their place within Hegel's picture gallery; all are stages on the way to the fully developed selfhood of spirit. The single most important feature of this array of human types is that each embodies or personifies a specific claim to know. This claim is put forth by the character as unquestioned and unqualified, in other words, as absolute. Absolute knowing is not just in the final chapter but permeates the whole. It is present in all the preceding chapters, present not as genuine absolute knowing but as the unsubstantiated claim to know absolutely, that is, divinely. This claim to absolute or divine knowing Hegel calls "certainty." Hegel's phenomenologist is a combination of imitator and spy: he must infiltrate all these appearances of absolute knowing, enter into the spirit of their characteristic certainties, and expose them for what they are--mortal shapes or, to use one of Hegel's most beloved words, moments. The shapes that come before the phenomenologist, the shapes he has critically "taken on," are self-refuting; they are consumed in the very process of articulating themselves. In the course of witnessing this process, a process Hegel calls "experience,· the phenomenologist sees something positive: he sees the logical order of generation by which one shape gives birth to another. In this way he reconstructs the path that leads �4 to genuine absolute knowing, to the truly divine. Hegel tells us in the Introduction that the Phenomenology depicts the education of natural consciousness as it "presses on to true knowing"(49). The Phenomenology is not about the education of single human individuals. As we shall soon see, the individual is at the heart of what Hegel's book is all about; nevertheless, no single human individual traverses the stages of consciousness, becomes a Stoic at one point in his life and gets converted to scepticism at another. It is mind or spirit in its universality, what Hegel provocatively calls "the universal individual"( 16), that makes the transition from stage to stage. The universal individual manifests itself in the various epochs of world-history, epochs summed up by the characters I mentioned earlier: Antigone, for example, sums up one aspect of Greek ethical life, while Rameau's nephew sums up the perversity of the modern world of culture. The individual reader, to be sure, goes through all the stages; but he does so from the standpoint of "true knowing," that is, dialectical knowing. He enters into the labyrinth of each mode of certainty vicariously, playfully. He does not lose his way--at least, he is not expected to--and he does not share the self-ignorance and self-deception of that mode. As Hegel tells us in the Preface, philosophy in the form of science has already come on the scene. In tracing out the logical thread that runs through all the shapes of consciousness, the reader vindicates what he already possesses rather than learns what he did not know. Education in the Phenomenology. then, is the education not of conscious individuals but of consciousness, of universal mind struggling to know itself. What, then, is consciousness? Clearly, we must ask this question if we are to understand what Hegel means by self-consciousness. �5 Consciousness for Hegel is any mode of thinking that is characterized by a strict distinction between a thinking subject and an external object. "Externar here means "external to thinking." Consciousness is the subjectobject opposition. It is inwardness that is outer-oriented, outer-directed. Ordinary sense-experience offers a simple instance of consciousness. I see an apple before me. It is one thing; I am another. My gaze is directed, vector-like, away from myself and towards the apple. This is the attitude of consciousness. Consciousness does not give subject and object, perceiver and apple, equal weight. The apple is there. it exists. It would be there if I weren't looking at it. The apple is assumed by the attitude of consciousness to be the real, the substantial, the true, while the light of consciousness that falls on the apple is assumed to have nothing to do with the apple. In short, consciousness does not merely perceive the object but values or esteems it insofar as it is an object; and furthermore, it values or esteems it at the expense of the conscious subject. This may be termed the prejudice of consciousness. To educate natural consciousness is to lead it out of this prejudice that "holds up" objects and "puts down" subjects. Natural consciousness is man in an intellectual "state of nature." In this state he identifies the true with the natural. Now "natural" here means more than the apples that exist outside the perceiver. It refers to anything that is assumed to have either an immediate existence or an immediate truth. , "Naturar means "logica11y undeveloped." It refers to anything that is assumed to be true simply and solely on the grounds that it is given. This realm of the natural as the mind's undigested "other" includes not only sensuous givens like the apple but also, and more interestingly, intellectual givens like innate ideas, �6 1ntellectual 1ntu1t1on, the categor1cal 1mperative and consc1ence. Man can even adopt th1s natural att1tude towards himself. He can th1nk of himself as having a fixed "nature" like the apple, a nature that is simply given. Dialectic in the Phenomenology is the logical process by which the immediate is mediated or thought through. As the systematic destruct1on of all givenness, it embodies Hegel's attack on the merely natural. Consciousness, for Hegel, is the human condition from a certain point of view. It is a divine condition, too, a mode 1n which God as universal m1nd appears on earth, appears in and through man; but for now I want to focus on the human side of Hegel's man-God identity. In the condition of natural consciousness, man finds himself thrown, unaccountably, into a whole world of external objects. This world includes laws, customs and prohibitions as well as apples. In his natural or pre-educated condition, man regards all these things not only as objects over and against him but also as objects over and above him. With all their apparent determinateness and solidity, all their naturalness, they rise up before man like an overbearing authority figure. The attitude of natural consciousness makes the world seem that way, invests the merely given with authoritativeness. With these observations we begin to see the moral dimension of the Phenomenology. Natural consciousness is man's cave and dark wood, his condition of bondage. The education of this consciousness is the path by which man becomes fully himself or free. free of the tyranny of nature and all the undigested otherness that nature implies. Dialectic, as the mediational process by which all givenness is destroyed, is not only the path to the true; it is also the path to man's highest good in the form of freedom. As we shall see, this good can be attained only on the basis of a �7 revision of how we understand human desire. Consciousness must get beyond merely looking at the apple: it must eat the apple and then suffer the consequences. This is what happens at the level of self-consciousness. The chapter on self-consciousness is the most important as well as the most dramatic in the whole Phenomenology. It is the point at which the book finds its center and true beginning. The three preceding stages of sense-certainty, perception and understanding, important and interesting as they are, form but the prologue to Hegel's imperial theme of the self. Now the whole Phenomenology is the study of the human-divine spirit in the mode of consciousness, spirit or mind caught up in the subject-object opposition. That is why every character in the book is said to be a shape of consciousness. But the three opening stages represent consciousness in its narrower sense. Here the thinking subject places the truth squarely in a non-thinking object: sense-certainty in the sensuous This, perception in the thing and its properties and understanding in force. These stages are objective, not only because they locate truth in an object but also in the colloquial sense: they are objective in the sense of being detached or uninvolved. The subject here merely "takes" its object. The subject is neither practical nor productive; it neither acts nor makes. Nor is the object in any way a reflection of the thinking subject: it neither lives nor thinks. The "cool" detachment of these modes of certainty stands in sharp contrast with the "heat" of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is passionately involved with its objects. As we see from the opening "fight to the death," its very first manifestation is that of extreme violence. When self-consciousness bursts upon the scene in the Phenomenology. it does so 1ike Alcibiades in the Symposium--drunk, tyrannical and full of a truth it �8 does not understand. The key to the self-consciousness chapter, and indeed to Hegel's book as a whole, is the violence with which self-consciousness first appears. This violence exerts its influence over all the characters we meet in the chapter, not only the warrior and the lord, but also the Stoic, sceptic and unhappy consciousness. Hegel's technical word for this violence is negativity: the experiential word for it is desire. In the introductory section entitled "The Truth of Self-Certainty," Hegel tells us: "Self-consciousness is desire"( 105, 109). The remainder of my talk is an effort to understand this sentence. In order to get at why self-consciousness is violent, let us ask a more basic question: What does Hegel mean by the self? Towards the end of the Phenomenology. Hegel utters a surprisingly helpful answer to this question. He says: "the 'I' is not merely the self, but the identity of the self with itself"(489). The self, in other words, is a relation, the relation of identity. More precisely, it is the act of self-relation. One is tempted to coin the verb "selfing." The self is not something I have but something I fil2; and this doing is what I most deeply am. Ordinarily, when I refer to my self, I refer either to my body or to something mysteriously lodged in or attached to my body. I treat the self as though it were an object that is simply there--like the apple. To recall the three stages of consciousness, I treat the self as though it were a unique This that defies language, or a thinking thing with properties, or a psychic force. For Hegel all these ways of thinking about the self belong to natural consciousness, the condition of bondage from which philosopher and non-philosopher alike must be delivered. Self-consciousness is the spelling out of selfhood as the act of selfrelating. It is the experience of what it means to say, not just "I" but "I am �9 myself: Self-consciousness is the so-called ·1aw of identity," ·A=A", that has "bubbled up" to the surface of human experience in the form of "l·I·. My self hood, my act of relating myself to myself, is the law of identity brought to life. For Hegel, this act of self-relating is negative or self- contradictory. The reason is that, in being aware of myself, I hold myself before myself: I am both subject and object. To pursue the spatial metaphor, I generate an inner "distance" between myself and myself. In logical terms, I generate the condition of self-otherness. Were it not for this self-otherness, I could not be self-aware. But clearly I cannot stop at this moment of distance or self-otherness, for then I would not be aware that what I hold before me is myself. In order to be aware of myself as identical with myself, I must generate a distance and overcome that distance in one and the same act. Self-consciousnesss is this single act; it is the experience of being at once self-same and self-other. We have here the paradigm of what Hegel calls determinate negation. This is negation that preser\ies what it negates. In being self-conscious, I negate my simple or immediate self-identity, my naturalness, and simultaneously negate the negating. Determinate negation is negation with a positive result. In this case the result is--me as a self-conscious individual. All this explains why the "la'v'{ of identity," "1=1", is an incomplete or what Hegel calls abstract truth. It is incomplete because it conceals and even seems to deny the moment of self-otherness, without which my selfhood would be impossible. To be grasped in its wholeness, and therefore in its truth, self-consciousness must be regarded as the unity of the self-same and the self-other. If the logical dissonance within this unity ever came to be resolved in the sense of obllterated, if logical dissonance were like musical �10 dissonance, I would cease to be self-aware,! would cease to be. Earlier I said that self-consciousness was the spelling out of what it meant to say "I am myself: What are the moral consequences of defining man as self-consciousness, as the being who says "I am myself"? To address this quest ion, we must bring in one of the most important terms in Hegel's book--individuality. The chapter on self-consciousness is Hegel's exploration of what it means to be an individual. "I am myself" is the maxim of individuality, the claim that captures the individual's certainty of himself as an inward or self-relating being. No one who utters this sentence or hears it uttered can fail to note its assertive, even militant tone: "I AM MYSELF." "I am myselr- is not a mere proposition, the mere statement that I happen to be identical with myself, but an affirmation, an act of will. In saying "I am myself," I stand up for myself; I affirm the value and dignity of my being not just human but this human, my value and dignity as an individual. Furthermore, I assert that this value and dignity derive from my ability to say "I am myself," that is, from the sheer fact of my inwardness or self-consciousness. In saying "I am myself," in affirming his individuality, man says: "I am an end and not a means, a whole and not a part--and I am to be respected as such." In short, this self-affirmation, this battle-cry of the individual, is man's "declaration of independence." It is man's unwillingness to bow before any authority other than himself. The willful or militant character of "I am myself" brings us back to the violence that defines self-consciousness. The violence we witness in Hegel's drama derives from the fact that self-consciousness, as Hegel tells us, is desire. What, then, does Hegel mean by desire? And why does desire serve to define self-consciousness? �11 L1ke every other character 1n the Phenomenology. self-conscfousness starts out 1n the cond1tfon of mere certa1nty, as an unsubstant1ated clafm to absolute know1ng. Here the self 1s certa1n, not of external objects but of ftself. The most 1mmed1ate or natural form of thfs se1f-certa1nty 1s egot1sm or amour-propre. Hegel's technfcal term for th1s egot1sm fs ·stmple being-for-self"( 113). At this primitive level of selfhood, the 1ndiv1dual 1s all wrapped up in h1s own utterly pr1vate perspective on the world. He 1s, in the colloquial sense of _the word, subjective. Because of his intense concentrat1on on his exclusive selfhood, the individual 1s at war w1th the whole external world, at war w1th otherness. As consciousness, the self was mesmerized by the apparent solidity of external objects. This worship of objects vanishes with the individual's certainty of himself. To be sure, the external world is still there; but it has been demoted. No longer a regulated cosmos of independent beings, the world is now fuel for the engine of self-love. - Th1s negative attitude towards externality or otherness is what Hegel means by desire. Self-consciousness is desire because, in the cond1t1on of radical egotism, self-certainty at its most immediate level, the individual asserts himself at the expense of the world. I return to the apple of my ear11er discussion of consciousness. As a self-conscious ind1v1dual, I no longer want to look at the apple; nor do I want to understand the natural laws by which the apple grows or falls to the ground. I want to eat the apple. The desire to eat the apple, as Hegel sees it, does not der1ve from my hunger for apples. It derives instead from my belief, my certainty, that I am substantial while the apple is not. I set out to eat the apple in order to prove that this is the case, to demonstrate my being and its nothingness. �12 We recall Hegel's praise of the animals in the sense-certainty chapter: "they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and in complete certainty of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat them up"(65). Self-consciousness is deeper than consciousness because it knows the wisdom of the animals; it knows that objects are insubstantial. But, as we shall see, it is also more deeply tragic. In seeking the annihilation of the world, in giving way to desire, self-consciousness kills off the necessary condition for self-fulfillment. Hegel's logic of desire is clearly a radical departure from how we ordinarily think about desire. Desire in its ordinary sense is positive and other-d.irected. By this I mean that it is the desire for something, and that it is the desire for something other than myself. The ordinary view is echoed and elaborated in various ways by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Dante. Hegel inverts the two characteristics of desire in its ordinary use. Desire for him is negative and self-directed. It is negative because it is the impulse to destroy rather than to acquire; it is more like hatred than love. And it is self-directed because the whole point of all this negativity is the self's affirmation of itself. A necessary consequence of this inversion of desire is a radical shift in the meaning of a final cause. Man, for Hegel, is not evoked, called forth, by some being outside him, neither by the Platonic forms nor an unmoved mover nor the grace-bearing Beatrice. He is driven from within, impelled by his very self-certainty to seek the truth of that certainty through antagonism towards the external world. What man strives for, desires in the broad sense of the term, is not an object other than himself, nor a divine condition to which he aspires without ever attaining, �13 but his own full self-expression. Man, for Hegel, is his own end. This autonomy first shows itself in man's radical egotism, his simple being-for-self. Desire as the will to negate is most clearly present in the fight to the death, with which the drama of self-consciousness begins. The individual in his condition of amour-propre finds himself in a world that includes, not only external objects but also other self-conscious individuals, other beings who say "I am myself." From the individual's perspective, these other individuals must be "phonies"--thieves and usurpers of the sacred pronoun "I." Now, certain as he is of his own selfhood, the individual is also aware that that's all he has--mere certainty, the untested assurance that he is the legitimate bearer of the name ul." Out of this awareness is born the individual's insecurity and his need to "prove himself." In Hegel's language, he is driven to raise his mere certainty to truth. Positively, he must prove himself to himself, show that his self-certainty is even more important than his lffe. Negatively, he must destroy the merely apparent or false selfhood of his opponent, who, we must remember, is also driven to prove his self-worth. To say that self-consciousness is desire is to say not only that the self wishes to destroy but also that it thrives on what it destroys. If the object were irrevocably consumed, consumed once and for all, the self would have nothing to "feed off." Since self-consciousness derives its sense of self from the negation of an other, the other must somehow be preserved even as it is destroyed. In the very first experience of self-consciousness, the individual realizes that killing one's opponent is ultimately unsatisfying, that what he really wants is recognition. The individual who fights for �14 recognition desires to annihilate the otherness of his fallen opponent. He wants to deprive the other self not of his life but of his selfhood and individuality, his right to say "I am myself." He does so by making the other individual his slave. The warrior at this point loses his nobility in becoming a lord. He is now "free" to indulge his lower desires: he can eat the apple pie that the slave has made. But the slave, precisely through his subservience to his master in the form of work, rises above his master. He does so because his condition of servitude, not to mention his overwhelming fear of violent death, has stifled his former wi 11 to destroy, his former desire. The apple pie may be food to the master, but to the slave it is a work of art, an independent thing that the slave makes but is not permitted to consume. In the independence of the thing, the apple pie, the slave sees the embodiment of his own independence as a maker or producer. The pie is not just the product of his work but the objectification of the slave's act of working, the slave's investment of himself in an external object. The lord, on the other hand, remains in his condition of desire. Partly, this is because desire, once gratified, only repeats itself. I eat the pie, and an hour later I am hungry again. The result of giving in to desire is just the reappearance of the desire. But even more importantly, the lord can hardly derive much satisfaction from the recognition that comes from a debased human being, a being who lacks independence. The mastery of other selves is necessarily se 1f-def eating. The initial war of the selves cannot help but remind us of Hobbes' state of nature. Hegel appropriates Hobbes' view that man is by nature competitive or warlike and gives it a logical grounding, that is, a grounding in the logic of selfhood. What for Hobbes was a fact--the first fact--of �15 human nature, is for Hegel the logically necessary outcome of the self's dialectical identity, its dissonance of ·same· and ·other: The individual is by nature at war with other individuals because, as a self-consciousness, he is at war with himself. Earlier we saw how selfhood for Hegel was the unity of the self-same and the self-other. The clearest indication that I am a divided being is the fact that I am alive; I am a self-consciousness sustained by and rooted in an organic body. My body is an "other· that is at the same time also myself. It is also that aspect of my existence that does not have to do with dignity and worth. At its most immediate and therefore most violent level, self-consciousness, since it is obsessed with self-sameness as the sole basis for its absolute worth, is at war with its own body and life. It feels 1ts manhood undercut or rendered questionable by its animality. That is why the warring individual risks his own life in seeking to destroy the life of the other, why the fight to the death is combat rather than murder. The dual or self-divided nature of the self has profound consequences for the desire for recognition. For many authors, pagan and Christian alike, this desire, so closely connected with amour-propre. is held in low esteem. Perhaps the author who puts the desire for recognition in its worst light is Rousseau. For Rousseau this desire is not natural to man but artificial; it is acquired as a result of man's membership in civil society. Towards the end of the Second Disourse we are told that whereas natural or savage man lives "in himself," societal man "is always outside himself and knows how to live only in the opinion of others." Against Rousseau, Hegel upholds the inherent goodness of the desire for recognition. He does so by making it literally and necessarily the case that man lives "outside himself: In the fight for �16 recogn1t1on, th1s other who stands before me, strange to say, is. myself. As Hegel tells us early 1n the chapter, self-consc1ousness "has come outs1de itself" as an opposition between two individuals( 111 ). Self-consciousness 1s one universal self actually d1vided into two ind1v1dual selves. Th1s numerical dup11cation 1s the self's inner d1ssonance made actual 1n the external world. If indeed the other individual is my own selfhood thrown out in front of me, then my fate as an individual is utterly bound up with the fate of this other. I no longer have the option of saying: "It doesn't matter what other people think of me; I know my own worth." Such "self-esteem" that seeks to do without the esteem of others is meaningless; it is a falsification of one's own individuality. Hegel gives cognitive value to recognition: the violent desire for recognition is in fact the first or most immediate manifestation of my desire to complete my vision of myself in this other individual, to reconcile the two warring aspects of my own selfhood through a reconciliation with this externally existing, actual other. The desire to be known by another is in fact my desire to know myself in the context of a human community. know--because they have not yet What the combatants do not yet experienced lt--is that genuine recognition comes about only if it is reciprocal or shared, only if the one who recognizes me is not a slave but my equal. Nevertheless, this later mature stage cannot be attained without the original violence: progress for Hege 1 is made not through smooth degrees, nor through the tempering of extremes, but through the pushing of extremes to their logical and self-defeating conclusions. The Hobbesian state of war, the violence of desire, is the very principle of man's education and refinement. The negative spirit of desire continues into the second section of Hegel's �17 chapter, the sect1on ent1tled "Freedom of Self-Consc1ousness." The Sto1c, sceptic and unhappy consciousness are all instances of the will to negate the world in order to affirm the self. On the surface, the Stoic seems to be motivated by will rather than by desire. The Stoic affirms himself. He does so not in the external world--for that is the place of suffering--but in the unperturbed realm of thought. The stubborn inwardness of the Stoic, his will to be himself regardless of what happens to hls life in the external world, is what makes the Stoic violent or, in Hegel's technical meaning of the term, desirous. Scepticism is the truth of Stoicism because it unleashes this violence. The sceptic actually carries out the destruction of the world that the Stoic implies and presupposes but is too noble to carry out himself. platitudes. In the move from Stoic to sceptic, arguments replace Through his endless paradoxes, the sceptic shows that the external world is riddled with contradiction, that it is altogether insubstantial. Hegel's account of the Stoic is two-fold: it consists of both praise and blame. The Stoic's freedom is abstract, just as his talk about virtue is empty. But the Stoic seeks to express himself and his freedom in the realm of pure thinking, thinking that is no slave to pictures or images. This bond with pure, pictureless thinking does more than ennoble the Stoic; it also makes him the precursor of philosophy in the form of system, in particular the precursor of the science of logic. Unfortunately, the Stoic resolves to "think positive"; he disdains the negative activity that alone could give his thinking and freedom some filling or substance. The account of the sceptic is similarly two-fold. The sceptic frolics in negation and so holds in his hands the key to the divine logos. He, too, is a precursor of sorts. The �18 problem is that the sceptic, who is a child at heart, frolics rather than thinks; he does not see the determinate or positive character of his randomly produced negations but delights in negation for its own sake. We now come to the crowning moment of the chapter, to the character Hegel dubs "the unhappy consciousness." It is extremely important here to remember where we are in the dialectic of self-consciousness. As I mentioned earlier, self-consciousness, like every other shape in the Phenomenology. starts out in certainty and ends up in truth. The truth always contradicts the original certainty. The unhappy consciousness, in other words, is not merely the last character in the chapter but the negative truth of self-consciousness as a whole, the truth that undermines the original effort at self-affirmation. The individual started out as a proud warrior. He wanted to prove that he was simply for himself. that he was "the genuine article." In the course of Hegel's drama, the warrior falls; he is reduced to the status of the humble Christian, who lives only for Another. The amour-propre or egofism that fueled the whole project of self-affirmation at this point is transformed into the obsession with annihilating amour-propre. into the hatred of self-interest, the desire of desire. The violence of desire, formerly directed towards the external world, is now turned back on the self; negativity is now self-sacrifice, and se 1 f-certa i nty se 1 f-condemnat ion. The unhappy consciousness emerges from the dialectic of scepticism. The sceptic is self-contradictory. On the one hand, he says, "All things are relative"; on the other, he puts forth this teaching as absolute truth. This contradiction reveals that there are in fact two modes of thinking, two selves. within the sceptic. One self is defined by its contact with �19 unchanging truth; the other self is defined by thoughts that constantly fluctuate and contradict one another. Now the sceptic, in his childish way, keeps going back and forth between these two selves. He is a unity of opposites, but he does not know that he is a unity of opposites. The unhappy consciousness is the explicit awareness of this unity within opposition. It is, to quote Hegel, "the consciousness of oneself as a doubled, merely contradictory being"( 126). Ever since sense-certainty, the force of contradiction has been at work in every shape of consciousness. But only now does a shape actually experience contradiction as such. That is why the unhappy consciousness is unhappy, not because there is something outside it that it wants and cannot get, but because its "inside,· its very selfhood, has been divided and set at variance with itself. To be unhappy, for Hegel, is to be "not oneself: Hegel's account of unhappiness is logically complex. It is also steeped in Christian imagery. I will here confine myself to showing how Hegel's sentence, "Self-consciousness is desire," continues to be operative. Desire comes up in the unhappy consciousness in three guises. already mentioned. The first I've Since it is painfully aware of its own egotism or "sinfulness," the self is continually "down on itself"; it desires to be rid of its self-love, which it identifies with the unessential or fickle aspect of its being. Secondly, there are, of course, all those desires it is seeking to negate, desires that it considers "dirty." But the third guise of desire is the most interesting and important. This is the longing for union with the one true Self, the "infinite yearning,· as Hegel calls it, for God. This is the first time that God comes up in the Phenomenology. although, to emphasize God's function in the argument, Hegel prefers to call Him "the unchangeable." �20 Man started out in the self-consciousness chapter wanting to affirm himself as an individual. He tried to validate his self-certainty by negating the world. In the unhappy consciousness this negativity, the violence of desire, circles back on the self. But in this reflexive and self-defeating moment, desire has accomplished something: it has generated the new experience of infinite yearning. To the unhappy consciousness, this yearning is directed towards God as the sacred Other. The unhappy consciousness is the lover, and God the beloved object. What the self longs for is to be with God in some hoped for beyond. In other words, the unhappy individual labors under the illusion of natural consciousness; he is enchanted with some immediate given, in this case, a timeless and infinitely remote God. What the unhappy consciousness regards as an infinitely remote object is really the divine or unchangeable aspect of itself. This follows from the definition of the unhappy consciousness. The unhappy consciousness is a mortal self and a divine self in one and the same consciousness: or, as Hegel puts it, it is "the unity of pure thinking and individuality"( 130), where thinking is my self-sameness or divinity, and individuality is my otherness and mortality. If rightly understood, the divine is not a beloved object but man's own selfhood in its purely divine aspect, the moment of man's selfhood that is purely self-same. What the self-consciousness chapter dramatizes, then, is the logical generation of the divine nature out of the human, the generation of the universal self out of the particular. It shows us how man, for Hegel, is the father of God. What, then, is the true nature of the infinite longing for God? It is what we have seen all along as the abiding goal of human striving: man's inner compulsion to be himself, to be fully himself. What the unhappy con- �21 sciousness interprets as man's erotic longing to be with God is in reality man's wlll to be God, the individual's will to be universal. Self-affirmation, having fallen to the ground, rises up again, this time at a new and higher level, a level that is not characterized by desire. Hegel's name for this higher level of self-affirmation is--reason. In spite of its many subdivisions, the Phenomenology as a whole is composed of only three main parts: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and a third part, which Hegel leaves untitled. Consciousness, you recall, was the self's fascination with objects. The apple was an object of intellectual reverence rather than something to eat. At the level of self-consciousness, the individual regarded the apple only as food, regarded the whole external world with all the other selves in it only as fuel for the engine of self-love. At Hegel's third level, the individual stops trying to destroy the world in order to affirm himself. Here the individual allows the world to be substantial. He sets out, not to destroy the world but to find himself in it, to give worldly substance and solidity to his otherwise abstract and purely subjective selfhood. In this third and untitled part of the Phenomenology. the longest part by far, man's quest for selfhood is completed. Man becomes complete when the logical implications of his self-identity rise to the level of conscious experience, when man is explicitly or actually what he is implicitly or in his concept. But what is man implicitly? What is man's concept? This we have already seen in the earlier account of self-identity. Man as self-consciousness is the unity of the self-same and the self-other. Man is the being who beholds himself. How, then, is man to experience himself for · what he is? What can it possibly mean to experience the determinate �22 negation that is logically inscribed in man's self-awareness, in man's concept? With these questions, I reach the last leg of my journey through Hegel's labyrinth. Consider the title of Hegel's book: The Phenomenology of Spirit. Phenomena or appearances, whatever else they may be, are outward or showy, while spirit is inward and deep. To give a phenomenology of spirit, then, is to give a reasoned account, a logos. of what it means for spirit to appear, what it means for the inner to make itself outer, for the deep to be showy while still remaining deep. For Hegel, the inner and the outer, self and world, are both necessary to the full expression of selfhood. That is why desire failed. It failed because the individual wanted to affirm himself at the expense of the world. If there is no world, or if the world is-just a vale of tears, then there is nothing solid, nothing objective, in which I might contemplate my worth, in which I might behold myself. Just as con- sciousness, in its unreflective piety towards objects, lost sight of the true goal, so too does self-consciousness in its effort to destroy objects. Complete selfhood demands that the purity of thinking and the showiness of the world somehow come together, come together in a way that is not a mere contradiction or dissonance, as it was for the unhappy consciousness. In the account of natural consciousness I gave at the beginning of this essay, I laid particular stress on the tyranny of the external world. But that is not the only tyranny that besets man in his quest for selfhood. There is a worse monster than the external world. This monster is man's fascination wlth his own spirituality or inwardness, man's tendency to become--a beautiful soul. The beautiful soul is a more deeply tragic version of the unhappy �23 consciousness. It is also more perverse. The unhappy consciousness was a lover; it longed for union with an infinitely remote God. The beautiful soul, too, is a lover, but not of an object. It is in love with its own inner purity, in love with itself as the Holy of Holies. Whereas the unhappy con- sciousness distanced itself, infinitely, from the one true Self, the beautiful soul identifies with this Self, with God in all His purity. The unhappy consciousness found itself hopelessly worldly and carnal; the beautiful soul, on the contrary, foreswears the world and the flesh. Regarding itself as "too rich for use, for earth too dear," it treats itself as though it didn't even have a body. In Hegel's characterization, "It lives in dread of besmirching the splendor of its inner being through action and existence"(400). Having turned its back on the world, the beautiful soul simply dies for want of a life. It vanishes, Hegel says, "like a shapeless vapor into thin air"(400). The beautiful soul dies because it throws away the self-otherness that is necessary to man's self-identity. Man cannot be fully himself, cannot behold himself, unless he somehow preserves the world that stands before him as his "other," comes to regard that world as his "significant other: To fulfill the destiny of his self-otherness, man must become reconciled to the world's externality. Man's inwardness, his spirituality, must somehow come to terms with the outward and showy realm of action and existence. The phenomenon of reconciliation is the climax of Hegel's story of consciousness. At this point God comes on the scene, not as an infinitely remote beyond, but as a 11ving presence within a community of selves, as the spirit of that community. The last two chapters on religion and absolute knowing are Olympian reflections on the relation betwe.en God and time; they stand above the "way of despair," the Golgotha, which the �24 Phenomenology attempts to give rational or scientific form. In this last moment of the phenomenological journey, two individuals confront one another, as they did in the earlier fight to the death. One judges; the other is judged. The judging individual has become enchanted with his own moral austerity, his moral purity. He has looked upon the Gorgon's head of pure spirituality and has been turned to stone. His stoniness takes the form of condemning others who are not pure like him, the Napoleons of the world, who have "sold out· and traded in their purity of soul for outward show and worldly preoccupation. The self-righteous individual judges the other to be immoral, not because that other has done something wrong, but simply because he has done something, because he has allowed himself to have an outward existence and a concern for action, because he is worldly or secular. To the judgemental individual, this worldliness is the greatest betrayal of which a human being is capable, the betrayal of the sacred inwardness that alone makes us worthy of respect. The judge judges the other to be a hypocrite, someone who claims to be spiritual or inward but in fact prostitutes this inwardness by worldly action and concern. The judge is the Napoleon of pure morality, the emperor of inwardness. He is also a hypocrite, an even bigger Tartuffe than the individual he judges. The reason is that judgement, which for Hegel must take the form of outward speech, is itself an act, a moment of entrance into the external and secular world. The judge cannot pass judgement on the other individual without becoming like him. He cannot denounce hypocrisy and also remain pure. Reconclliation occurs when both individuals admit to being worldly and in that sense the betrayers of spirit. Each must confess his worldliness. This is clearly a much more dramatic and difficult moment for the judge, �25 since he has to sacrifice his purism, abdicate as the emperor of inwardness. As the judge confesses his own hypocrisy and forgives the hypocrisy of the other, he gives his blessing to the secular world he once had cursed. In this moment of reconciliation, each self sees itself in the other and admits to this seeing. Now hypocrisy is self-otherness; it is the knowing concealment of one's true selfhood, in particular, the concealment of one's worldly self-interest and amour-propre beneath a pious "front: When each self admits to seeing itself in the other, self-otherness, the moment of self-identity that had been denied for the whole course of the book up to this point, at last receives its due. The Jong-suppressed self-otherness rises to the surface of human experience. The most important feature of reconciliation is the change that takes place in the relation between self and world. With the confession of self-otherness, the external world ceases to be the inimical "other· over and against the self; it is now the home of spiritual manifestation, the place of God. Reconciliation, for Hegel, is a human experience with a conceptual or philosophical meaning. Much more is going on in this phenomenon than the individuals involved realize. In the act of forgiveness, the hard heart melts. This softening of the hard heart is, in truth, a dialectical or intellectual accomp 1ishment. The softening of the heart, the loosening of hard being-for-self, is the feeling of dialectical fluidity, the feeling of thinking. Now it is the peculiar power and sublimity of reconciliation to retain past enmlty as something that has been overcome. In other words, reconciliation is the experience of determinate negation, negation that preserves what it destroys. In this feeling of determinate negation, man can experience, at last, the complete unity of his self-identity, the being-together of the �26 self-same and the self-other. In the sect1on on revealed re11g1on, Hegel gives us his def1nltion of spirit. He says: "Spirit is the knowledge of oneself in the externalization of oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining its self-ident1ty in its otherness"(459). This is precisely the condition that has been dialectically generated in the phenomenon of reconciliation. In the confession of hypocrisy, the two selves "come out" of their private selves, become external to themselves while remaining inward or spiritual beings. There is now mutual recognition of selfhood, unlike the one-sided kind we had earlier. The individuals here have experienced the divine in time: they have become reconciled, not only to one another but also to the universal self that the individual self had unhappily fathered. All this, we must note, takes place in and through language. For Hegel, the inner must become outer. The inner is by definition the drive or compulsion to be an externalized inner, an inner that has some substance to it. The self-righteous judge must not simply think his condemnation of the other; he must utter it, indeed, throw 1t in the face of the other individual. So too, in the moment of reconciliation, the two hypocrites must confess their hypocrisy openly to one another. Now language plays a central role throughout the Phenomenology. Even sense-certainty, up to a point, speaks. But language acquires a special importance in the context of reconciliation. For Hegel, language is not mere communication but spiritual or intellectual presence. In Hegel's words, it is "the being-there or existence of spirit"(395). Simply put, language is the outward expression of inward thought. When I speak, I translate my inwardness into something outer and real. listener and also for myself. I make my thought present for my Language is thought standing in its own �27 presence, thought that beholds itself as thought. But this outward expression is not a direct and smooth translation of the inner into the outer; it is not without its moment of conflict. To speak is to betray a thought. In uttering a thought, I betray it in the negative sense that I tum against my own dear inwardness and hand it over to its enemy--the external world. To speak is to act. Now comes the magic of language, the magic that distinguishes language from every other human action. Even as I betray my inward thought by making it outer, I turn against this very betrayal and def eat the "bad effects" of extemality: I betray my thought in the positive sense that I express or reveal it as thought. In other words, language, the quintessential act of man, is the most immediate, most obvious instance of spirit as Hegel defines it--the retaining of inwardness in the very act of externalization. Like forgiveness, language is the overcoming of betrayal in its negative sense. Reconciliation is for this reason not just an instance of speech but the logic of the very act of speaking brought to the level of experience. In the phenomenon of reconciliation man experiences his true identity, experiences himself as the dialectical unity of same and other. But man is not fully himself for Hegel until he gets beyond this experience and thinks his identity, until he thinks the reconciliation of opposites at the level of pure conceptuality--thought without pictures. This is the level we reach in the final chapter on absolute knowing, the level Hegel calls science. At this level, mind, having been purged of all naturalness or anti-mind, wins the condition of complete self-identity and freedom. Mind is free to be itself, to lead the life that is completely its own. In the Phenomenology. man does not simply come to know the truth; he comes to know that he is the truth. �28 He comes to know that hls concept as a se1f-conscious individua1 is identica1 with the Concept, with the divine inte11igibi1ity, the divine Jogos. that steers its way through a11 things. This divine Jogos. the Jife of pure inte11igibi1ity, is embodied in the magnificent Science of Logic. By entering into this Jife of the mind, man enjoys the divinity that is inscribed in his se1f-consciousness. In the spontaneous unfo1ding of what Hege1 ca11s the Concept or Notion--HegeJ's analogue to the P1atonic good--man enjoys the very principle of his cherished freedom and the pure play of his self-identity. He is transported to the true heaven. But the divine Jife of thinking does not spring full-blown from the head of the philosopher. For Hege1, phi1osophy in the form of science is the product of history, the product of human self-identity working out its many contradictions in time. The Phenomenology is the history of consciousness, the history of man as a thinking being, put into rationa1 form; it is time looked at from the standpoint of mind. The world for Hegel is not a cave from which the philosopher tries to escape. For one thing, he cannot escape. As we hear in another work, The Philosophy of Right: ·each individual is in any case a child of his time: thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts"(Preface). But more importantly, the true philosopher wi11 not want to escape. As the friend of reason, he will acknowledge that the world in its historica1 unfolding, the outer wor1d of action and strugg1e, is precisely the path a1ong which wisdom is attained, or rather, generated out of man's self-consciousness. To be rationa1, for Hege1, is to give the external world its due, whi1e sti11 revering the inward purity of thought. It is to acknowledge the world as the home of thinking. This acknowledgement is the wisdom at which HegeJ's book aims. In the �29 Phenomenology the philosopher "recollects,· to use Hegel's word, the laborious process that gave rise to the philosopher's own act of thinking. As phenomenologist, the philosopher returns, knowingly, to his prephilosophical origins. He enacts what might be called intellectual gratitude, gratitude towards Time as the mother of Wisdom. I now take my leave of Hegel's labyrinth; I bid farewe11 to all its monsters and heroes. Hegel ends on a grand theological note. He speaks of time as the Place of Skulls, where spirit suffers and reveals its glory. My closing note will be far simpler. Hegel cautions us in the Preface about our enchantment with things uplifted and remote; he warns philosophy against wishing to become edifying, warns the philosopher, in other words, against ingratitude towards his worldly origins. This warning is echoed by Zarathustra, whose plea captures the spirit of Hegel's Phenomenology: "I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth: � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 30 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kalkavage, Peter Title A name given to the resource Hegel's logic of desire Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995-03-24 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 25, 1995 by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Kalkavage 1995-03-24 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 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3814" title="Audio recording">Audio recording</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d9497a6b89036d2f515b642f533d58f0.pdf 403a59d9ec3a86aa86112f1c937f6512 PDF Text Text Animals in Motion: the Flattery of Becoming in Plato's Timaeus A lecture delivered by Peter Kalkavage at St. John's College, Annapolis 27 July 1990 �"... it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth.. ." Machiavelli, The Prince XV "But whenever someone tries to make a likeness of our bodies, quickly perceiving what is defective because. of our constant familiarity with them, we become harsh critics of one who does not render all the similarities in all ways." Critias t 07d2-5 "She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made." Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West" �Towards the beginning of the Timaeus. Socrates articulates a most unusual desire. He tells Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates that he wants to see the just city go off to war. Socrates describes h1s feeling--his pathos. as he calls it--through an 1mage. Here is what he says: "It's as if someone who gazed upon beautiful animals somewhere, either fashioned by the art of painting or truly Hving but at rest, arrived at the desire to gaze upon them moving and struggling in some contest that seemed suited to their bodies: (I 9b4-c I) Socrates' desire gives rise to a barrage of questions. Why does he want such a vision? What is there about it that would gratify him? Is an animal more beautifu1--or more of an animal--when moving than at rest? And where is this someone to whom Socrates compares himself? Is he in the wild looking at real animals or only at the movies looking at their images? Is he in the sunlight or in the cave? Apparently, it makes no difference. It is the motion that counts, the motion that is the object of desire. Socrates wants to gaze upon--that is, contemplate--beautiful animals in motion. He is resting from his customary passion for inquiry. With the desire for such contemplation, the Timaeus moves us from the serene realm of being to the troubled and turbulent world of becoming. It moves us away from the speeches of the dialectician and towards those of the historian, statesman, poet, and physicist. The man who gazes upon beautiful animals is the central image of the Timaeus. If only we could understand it, we would then understand the entire dialogue. This lecture is an attempt to see how the famous likely story of Timaeus responds to Socrates' curious desire. �2 But before we get to Timaeus, let us take a quick glance at Critias. It is Critias, after all, who claims to have just the thing to gratify Socrates· desire--a story brought back from Egypt by the great Solon about the ancient war between Athens and Atlantis. It is a flattering story about an Athens made young and beautiful. Critias makes it very clear that for him the just city in speech was nothing but a fairy tale. He tells Socrates: "the city and citizens that you went through for us yesterday as in~ myth. we shall transport back into the truth (26c7-d 1). For Critias, the so-called "real world, .. the world of body and deeds, is the truth. He agrees with Machiavelli that the truth is to be found not in imagined republics nor in timeless being but in the deeds of history. Critias is the dialogue's radical spokesman for the claims of becoming, for the claim that truth is fact. Ironically, he fails to grasp the distinction between the real and the imaginary. Although the story of Atlantis is as farfetched a tale as we are likely to hear, Critias insists that it is "true in every way"(20d8). He stubbornly refers to it as a logos rather than a mythos. The Egyptian priests are the most interesting character in Critias· story. They share Critias· contempt for myth and glorification of facts. The priests are an extremely bizarre priesthood indeed--anti-priests, it would seem. They are historian-physicists, utterly materialistic and very smug, in a word, positivists. At one point, an old priest tells Solon that the nomos. the law or custom, of his region takes great care about wisdom (24b7-c I). This wisdom has to do with the study of the cosmos. In other words, wisdom is physics. The priest offers an example of his wisdom when he de-mythologizes the Greek myth about Phaethon. Phaethon tried to drive the sun-chariot in order to prove that he was divine. He succeeded �3 only in crashing the chariot and incinerating himself and a large part of the earth. It is an awfully good parable for would-be tyrants. But the Egyptian priests are too old and too sophisticated for parables. Images can teach them nothing. They look down their nose at the Greeks, who are always young in soul (22b4-7). Of the Phaethon story, the old priest says: "This thing that is told has the shape of a myth, but the truth is a shifting of what goes around the earth in the heavens and the destruction that comes about by much fire for things on the earth at long intervals of time: (22c7-d3) This is what Socrates calls "boorish wisdom" towards the beginning of the Phaedrus (229e3). It is the wisdom that takes a spoken image of the sou1 and ruins it with a scientific explanation in terms of body. In debunking the image-makers with science, the priests purge the wor1d of all human meaning. They reduce 1t to a mind1ess series of facts. Wisdom becomes the re1igious preservation of these facts, a kind of mummification. It is highly interesting that these facts are most1y catastrophes and destructions. The priests are specia1ists in death and annihilation, a concern most powerfully dramatized in their murder of human meaning. The more we reflect on the Egyptian priests, the more we feel the need to save the appearances from degenerating into mummies. We need someone who wi11 not be a boor. Timaeus is the savior of the appearances. He saves us from the nihilism of the Egyptian priests. He does so by re-instating the power of myth as the fashioner of human meaning and by grounding the cosmos in divine thoughtf u1 ness. �4 Timaeus gives two reasons why physics must take the form of a likely story. The first is that becoming, the object of physics, is inherently unstable. Whereas being is always what it is, becoming is always ceasing to be what it is and coming to be what it is not (27d5-28a4). The second reason is human nature. Listen to what Timaeus says: "But if we provide likenesses inferior to none, you should be happy with them, remembering that I who speak and you my judges have a human nature, so that for those who are receptive to the likely story, it is fitting to search for nothing more beyond it." (29c3-d3) The likely story emerges from the context of human imperfection and vulnerability. As Timaeus says later, when he mixes up the natural order of soul and body, "we who have a great share in the chancy and random do so also when we speak"(34c2-4). We recall how the dialogue opens. Socrates· ability to count the human order also allows him to know that something is missing: "One, two, three--but where, dear Timaeus, is the fourth?" Timaeus· answer is the very first likely story he gives. "Must be some infirmity," he conjectures ( 17a4). The dialogue opens, in other words, in a way that playfully mimics the world as Timaeus sees 1t--mathematically ordered but at the same time imperfect. Socrates' count mirrors the inescapable togetherness of strength and weakness in all matters pertaining to the physical world. It is a prophecy of the drama to come. The two reasons for accepting likely stories thus come together. Becoming is shaky and at times incoherent, and so are we, no doubt because we ourselves are children of becoming. This inescapable bond between �5 becoming and human nature has a specia1 meaning for the physicist. A1though he prides himse1f on being objective, the physicist is u1timate1y not detached from the conditions of his imperfect object. He speaks from within the morta1 order that he wishes to know. In gazing on the morta1, his inte11ectua1 vision and his speech take on a morta1 tinge, become assimi1ated to the condition and shape of becoming. Now the morta1ity of physics usua11y goes by a more f1attering name--progress. But what progress rea11y means is that this century's theories are the next century's antiquities. We tend not to 1ook at progress in this way because we a1ways think of ourse1ves as en1ightened moderns and our predecessors as naive ancients. The history of physics is summed up in the words of So1on: "I grow o1d 1earning many things." That is, "my 1earning shows that I am morta1," or even 1ess generous1y, "a11 this 1earning is ki11ing me." Physics, in a sense, is tragic. It strugg1es va1iant1y against the stream of becoming but ends up being carried away by it, no doubt improving but never at rest. Timaeus wi11 try to be the perfect physicist. But un1ike ordinary physicists, he wi11 acknow1edge the physicist's morta1 roots. The 1ike1y story wi11 indeed be deficient and incoherent. But in this it wi11 be a faithfu1 mirror of the fundamenta1 deficiency and incoherence of the world it imitates. The infirmity of the 1ikely story is a1so its strength. The morta1ity of physics is given an extreme1y provocative context in the Egyptian myth of eterna1 return (21e1 ff.). The Timaeus is fu11 of circ1es. We know how vita1 they are to the 1ike1y story. But we first meet circ1es in the old priest's conversation with So1on. According to the Egyptian view of time, wor1d-history is circu1ar. It is the same p1ay being enacted over huge periods of time. The motion of history bends back upon itse1f 1ike the straight Jines in Riemann's geometry, the snake that swa1- �6 lows its own tail. What we pride ourselves on as progress--in science and in civilization as a whole--is nothing more than our recovery from the last great flood or fire. As we move forward on the circle of history, we are at the same time rushing towards the next great annihilation. We are constantly re-enacting the Phaethon myth, rising up only to fall violently back down into our mortality. Long ago, the Atlanteans were the "bad guys" and the Athenians were wearing the white hats. At another time and in another place, Athens is the insolent one: she tries to enslave an Atlantis-like island named Sicily. She is brought to a horrible defeat largely through the efforts of our character Hermocrates. This ironic re-shuffling of historical roles is all brought about by what Timaeus will later call the receptacle. The myth of eternal return and its implication of reversed roles shows how foolish it is to seek flattery in becoming, to flatter ourselves with noble genealogies, as Critias is trying to do. In seeking refuge in a beautiful self-portrait, we forget our own degenerateness. When Socrates asked for a speech about the just city at war, he was not asking to be informed. It was not as though the Republic left something out. What Socrates wanted was to hear his city and citizens praised. He wanted, as he says, an encomium and confessed his inability to supply it ( 19d2). Now an encomium is just what Critias provides, namely, an elaborate flattering of his own city's glorious ancestors. But Timaeus too fits into the drama of praise. The word kosmos means not only order but also ornament. It is a word that suggests the heightening and embellishment of looks, a beautification and flattery. This is just what Timaeus does with the cosmos--he makes it look beautiful. The cosmos of Timaeus is not just an ordered whole but an animal, and not just an animal but a god. It is, he says, a happy god (34b8-9). Timaeus goes so far in his �7 beautification of the world as to deify it. The whole likely story is a hymn of praise to the god Kosmos, who, as we hear in the dialogue's closing lines, is "the greatest and best and most beautiful and most perfect" of all generated things (92c7-8). Clearly, Timaeus intends not merely to speak about the cosmos but to arouse our love and admiration for it. In the prologue, Critias refers at one point to the Koureotis (21 b2). This is the festival in which Athenian youths were welcomed into the fold of the city. The youths compete in the recitation of poems, among them the poems of Solon. We must imagine that the impressionable souls of these youths, through the music of Solon's poetry, become knit to the fabric of the city, become rooted in the nomoi of their fatherland. Something similar is happening in the likely story. In being receptive to Timaeus· speech, we are assimilating ourselves to the cosmic regime to which we belong; we are enacting the proper and respectful relationship between the human soul and the divinely established order. Socrates, it seems, was being prophetic when he called the likely story a nomos, a word that means both "law" and "song" (29d6). He seems to have divined that the music of Timaeus would have a quasipolitical end--~ towards our cosmic fatherland. The entire likely story is an act of imitation. Timaeus imitates the divine work by which the unmelodious chaos became an artfully arranged whole (30a2-6). In the first part of the story, he imitates the construction of the highest visible things--the cosmic body and soul, the circular motions of the heavens, time, and all the stars and planets. This whole first part is ruled by the supreme goodness of intelligence. Such goodness manifests itself for Timaeus in the objects of mathematics, particularly in the binding power of analogia or proportion. The mathematical objects �8 are here appointed as the guardians of all decency and good character. In giving boundaries to the world, they are to the world what laws are to the cay. They make the cosmos just. The moral goodness of the whole is rooted, mythically, in the moral goodness of Timaeus· demiurge or craftsman. This craftsman, we are told, lacked~ (29e 1-2). He did not cling to the perfection in himself but wished to pass it on to his offspring. The divine craftsman thus comes to resemble a political founder like Solon or Lycurgus. The world for Timaeus is a noble poem written by a morally wise poet-statesman. Uke any human poet-statesman, the divine craftsman must be filled wlth the love of begetting. Why else would his passion turn from seeing to making? As the craftsman gazes upon the world's intelligible archetype, he must be longing to see it become a beautiful animal in motion, an animal that will, by the way, reflect his own good looks. The lack of envy sounds suspiciously like the human desi:e to beget beautiful images of oneself. Timaeus is out to praise imitation. The method of the astronomers gives him an excellent opportunity to do so. Referring to the astronomer's attempt to plot the heavenly motions, he says: "to speak of these things without looking at their imitations is vain labor"(40d2-3). Timaeus is referring to the astronomer's mathematical hypotheses, to something like Ptolemy's eccentric circle and epicycle. These hypotheses are not meant to be taken literally, as the actual mechanisms by which the stars accomp11sh their motions. Ptolemy himself calls them "11kenesses manufactured by us" (Almagest XI 11.iO. To construct such likely stories about motion is precisely what it means to "save" the appearances. But more is being saved here than just the appearances. The human good for Timaeus is our assim11ation to the divine order. It is through astronomy that this assimi- �9 lation is brought about. In Timaeus· words, "through learning and sharing in calculations that are by nature right, by imitating the absolutely unwavering motions of the gods, we might stabilize the wanderings within ourselvesu(47c 1-4). By giving the heavens a divine soul. Timaeus gives the world interiority and good judgement. Circular motion becomes an outwardly displayed image of thinking as a turning inward upon oneself. The fact that we sometimes refer to thinking as a reflection, that is, as a bending back, betrays the implicit connection between thoughtfulness and circularity. The circles of Same and Other are the motions of good judgement (37a2-c5). When we look up at the stars at night, we are gazing not outward but inward. We are looking at the best and most precious part of ourselves. Since we originated in the stars, we are also gazing into our own glorious past. What Critias is doing in his.praise of the ancient Athenians, Timaeus is doing for everyone in the likely story. Astronomy is the true homecoming of the human soul. It returns us to what Timaeus calls "the look of our first and best condition"(42d2). As long as Timaeus stays with the heavenly things, he is in a realm that is virtually problem-free. To be sure, the heavenly motions are very complicated in how they appear to us. But in themselves they are divine motions, good motions, and are therefore friendly to mathematical inquiry. We must never forget how successful Ptolemy is in accounting for all the motions that can be seen with the naked eye. All this changes once Timaeus descends from the heavens, once he enters the realm of becoming and mortality. But he must enter this world; he must descend from the heavens or the heavens themselves will be incomplete (41 b7-8). The descent of Timaeus begins with the construction of human nature. The human condition reminds Timaeus that the whole �10 account so far has been one-sided in lts devotion to goodness and beauty. It has been naive. There is another principle or beginning, another arche, without which the world as a whole could not have been made. This principle is necessity. Timaeus ca11s 1t "the look or form of the wandering cause" (48a6-7). The realm of necessity is the unpredictable realm of power, expediency, and war. It is the realm on which Machiave11i so likes to gaze, and indeed Timaeus· wandering cause in part resembles what Machiave11i refers to as ·fortune: Timaeus has tried to bu11d the world from the top down. Now he must try to build it from the bottom up. In his new beginning--the most interesting and most problematic moment in the whole likely story--he wi11 give us a more accurate portrait of what it means to imitate. Socrates' desire was for a vision of beautiful animals in motion. He wanted to see what would happen in taking the leap from the serenity of being to the turbulence of becoming. With the excursion into necessity, Timaeus encounters becoming in its strict meaning--becoming as process. Here, more than anywhere else in the dialogue, Socrates is treated to the vision he desired. Now beauty is king of the likely story--not beauty as that which incites erotic love but beauty as the fine or noble, beauty as precisely that which restrains erotic Jove. The good is made to shine forth in the guise of beautiful mathematical order. For Timaeus, beauty is always connected with stability. To be beautiful is to be solid. that is, dependable. Timaeus strongly disagrees with the poets who would have us believe that a rose is all the more beautiful for being perishable. But becoming is pure process, pure flux. How in the world can such a thing be rendered beautiful and stable? It seems to be like trying to grab hold of Proteus, the old man of the sea. Timaeus knows that he is up against a �11 tough problem of saving the appearances. He calls on the help of Zeus the Savior (48d4-5). Timaeus uses an image to capture the fleeting look of becoming. The image is that of a new demiurge. Becoming, he says, is Jike a man who molds all possible shapes out of gold (50a5ff.). The man does not stop when a figure is completed but continually transforms every figure into every other figure. In the process of a figure's coming to be what tt is, the figure is already passing away. Its birth ts also its death. Becoming, it seems, ts the sphere of tragedy. What Timaeus ts describing here ts the transmutation of the four elements of body-earth, air, fire, and water. To give an account of becoming is to say how these four elements are involved in the continual process of turning into one another. Becoming is a perpetual magic show. It may be the sphere of tragedy, but it is also intensely fascinating. The problem of becoming is this: how to save the restless look of becoming as process while at the same time saving the distinct and quasi-stable looks of earth, air, fire, and water. The problem is that of knowing how to harmonize motion and form. That the medium of becoming is likened to gold. a beautiful and precious metal, is important. It expresses Timaeus' unremitting passion for adornment. The flattery of becoming is already underway. Timaeus first tackles the problem of the fluid medium. He refers to this medrum jn a variety of ways. He calls 1t the receptacle, hypodocne. and space, chora (51 as, 52a8). Its nature consists in its receptivity to form, its power to capture the looks of earth, air, fire, and water. It is Jike the shiny surface of a mirror or better--since Timaeus endows it with motion (53a3-4)--Jike the surface of a rippling pool. In order to reflect the looks of the elements, the receptacle must itself be pure, void of all �12 form. We might say that the onJy real looks that the receptacle has are the ones 1t steals from somewhere else. The receptacJe is like any human imitator, any poet or sophist. Again using an art that aims at flattery and beautification, Timaeus compares the receptacle to the neutral base used by the makers of perfumes (50e4-51a1 ). In his first account of beginnings, Timaeus had distinguished two factors involved in imitation--the originaJ form or archetype and the image that was patterned after it. He left out the reflecting medium. In his new beginning, he revises the account of imitation by introducing this third and necessary factor. Imitation requires three things: the image that comes to be, that from which it is likened, and that in which it comes to be. Once again Timaeus uses an image to clarify his meaning, only this time the image is that of sexual generation rather than craftsmanship: the original eidos is like a father> the receptacle like a mother. and the resulting image like their offspring (50c7-e 1). With this simile, we are being reminded that sexual generation is, among other things, a form of imitation. We are also being reminded that the word for becoming, genesis. is aJso the word for generation and birth. The receptacle not onJy provides room for all things; it also gives them their fleeting .!lll. It is the womb in which all mortal things live, move, and have their being. In descending from the stars to becoming, we are passing from one region of Jife to another, from the 1nte11ectual cycles of the heavens to the bioJogicaJ cycles of organisms. We are descending from astronomy to embryology. Timaeus braces us for his account of the elements. He calls it "strange and uncustomary" (48d5-6). I mention in passing that at this point Timaeus shifts from the phrase "likely mythosn (29d2) to "likely logoi" (48d2). Story has become account. Timaeus is starting to sound like Critias! He �13 tells us that the "account" will be even m 1ike1y than what has come before (48d3). What this means, however--as we shall see--is not that the account will be closer to the truth, but that it will be more imitative, more mythical, more removed from the truth. Timaeus' speech will be even more 1ike a beautiful animal fashioned by the art of painting, 1ife1ike but not truly 1iving. The construction of body is one of the two most impressive architectural feats in the likely story. The other is the composition of the soul out of the musical ratios. Now the soul is an intelligible being, not a body. It makes sense that an intelligible being should have an intelligible structure. What, then, are we doing when we turn our intellectual gaze to body? What does it mean to think body? Is this not a contradiction in terms? In Book IX of the Reoubl ic. Socrates commands Glaucon to mold an image of the human soul in speech. Glaucon responds: "since speech is more easily molded than wax and the like, Jet it be mo1ded"(588d 1-2). In his account of body, Timaeus takes fu11 advantage of this demonic power of human speech, this capacity for imitation. He reconstructs body, founds a body in speech. so as to make body thinkable. He treats physical body as though it were a mathematical body in motion. The "as though" is the most important thing here. Timaeus is being playful. He knows full we11 that sensed bodies cannot be built up literally out of mathematical objects. He warned us beforehand that the account of body would be strange! In mathematicizing body, in making it a fit object for gazing, Timaeus blurs the distinction between two senses of body--body as geometrical solid and body as physical solid. He defines body as that which "has depth" (53c5-6). He locates the real solidity of body in three-dimensionality rather than in impenetrability. Armed with this slippery definition, Timaeus can shuttle �14 back and forth between the properties of geometric body and those of physical body, between the body in speech and the body in deed. Mathematical physics thus comes to be founded on a pun. It is this pun that aJJows body to shine in the mind's eye. In Timaeus' earJier account of body, the four elements were beautifully arranged in a double mean proportion: fire:air::air:water::water:earth. They did not interact and waged no wars. They heJd fast to the integrity of their own forms. Most interesting was fire. Hector-1ike fire was there not violent at aJJ! It was put in its best and most serene Jight as the source of the world's visibiJity. just as earth was defined not in terms of its stubborn resistance to change but as the cause of tangibleness (31 b432c4). Air and water came on the scene there onJy for reasons having to do with order1iness, because the cosmos is soJid in shape and because a solid requires the presence of two mean proportionals. Their physical properties were compJeteJy suppressed on behalf of their mathematical function. In this first account of body, body is altogether nobJe; it is the natural friend of intelligence. Body changes its character in the second founding. The receptacle is not by nature a friend of intelligence, although it can be persuaded. as Timaeus says, to take on beautiful forms (48a2-5). The mother of becoming is susceptible to flattery. This persuasion of necessity seems to be none other than Timaeus' mathematical construction of the four elements. Timaeus· account, like the divine intellect of the story, aims at persuasion. It will attempt to eJicit our trust in beautiful images, to win us over to its poetry. The eliciting of our trust begins with the selection of the regular Platonic solids. Four of the solids are assigned to the four elements: the pyramid �15 to fire. the octahedron to air. the icosahedron to water. and the cube to earth (55d6-8). The regular solids are chosen because of their consummate beauty. They are "the most beautiful bodies" (53e 1). Next to the sphere, these bodies are the most regular of three-dimensional objects; they are the picture of lawfulness. In English the adjective "becoming" sums up Timaeus· dual use of the beautiful. When someone says, 'Those earrings are becoming,· he means both ·They suit you· and ·They flatter you: This is exactly the function of the regular solids in the likely story: they are designed to fit the appearances and also to flatter them, that is, to make them more beautiful than they really are. They are, as we say, becoming. The fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, has an extremely suggestive use in the likely story, especially when we recall Socrates' desire. The god uses it in making the zodiac or, as Timaeus puts it, "in decorating the whole with paintings of animals" (diazographon. 55c4-6). The dodecahedron is given little attention. It seems to be superfluous: there are only four elements, so therefore we need only four of the five solids. The god takes the fifth solid and-gratuitously, almost whimsically--tosses it in the sky, aligning its twelve pentagonal faces with the twelve "animals" of the zodiac. But this gratuitous use of the dodecahedron really brings out what Timaeus is doing throughout the likely story and especially in his elaborate treatment of necessrty--he is attempting to persuade us that the only world worth contemplating is one that goes beyond the useful or necessary. Quite a change from the Egyptian cosmos in which necessity alone was king! Now Timaeus discovered that he needed necessity when the gods were making our eyes (45b2 ff.). Vision exists for the sake of a noble end--the contemplation of the heavens (47a 1 ff.). But without the �16 mechanism of the eyes--wlthout the necessary powers of earth. air. fire. and water--vision cannot come into being. The noble end requires necessary means. Now why spend so much time beautifying the elements if all that really interests us are the1r powers and functions? The beautiful comes to light precisely in the gratuitous. that is. in the luxurious. in what goes beyond the useful and necessary. The dodecahedron tells us loud and clear that neither Timaeus nor Timaeus' god would have been at all happy in the city of sows. the city of "utmost necessity," in the Republic (ll.369dl 1. 372d4-5). Quite apart from how useful the receptacle and its four powers are. the receptacle's plain but supple face is simply begging for something unnecessary that would ·complete its look." No wonder Timaeus gets carried away in h_is extensive treatment of necessity. He has made necessity as such beautiful. necessity apart from the noble ends that necessity was supposed to serve. Earlier we noted that the problem posed by becoming was to save the phenomenon of transmutation while also saving the quasi-stable looks that entered into this process. Timaeus finds his solution in the regular solids. The elements can change into one another because. unlike the atoms of Lucretius. they are not simple uncuttable bodies; they have parts. A given arrangement of parts may be said to define a given element. The pyramid is a certain arrangement of triangles that now. in speech. defines the element of fire. Change the arrangement. and you change the element. In this mythical mathematics of body. the intelHgible look or cidos of an element is being located in its geometric shape. The thing's being now I ies in its structure. When that structure changes. the being or whatness changes; the element turns into a new element with altogether different properties from what it had before. This structure gives each element the �17 integrity of a high1y distinctive 1ook, in fact, a f1attering 1ook. At the same time, the structure is morta1, vu1nerab1e, in so far as it can be taken apart, decomposed. The fascinating transmutation of the four e1ements has been rationa1ized as a reshuff1ing and disp1acement of structural parts. One immediate consequence of this interpretation of being as structure is that the being of a thing now becomes readily avai1ab1e to a purely technical understanding. Timaeus' construction of body in speech e1iminates the need for a dialectical inquiry. Why ask what something is when you can make that something! The forms or eide invite the question "What is it?" because they are presumed to be ungenerated. In Timaeus· artful construction of the elements, Plato beautifully captures the "constructive" spirit of modernity, the view that equates thinking with making, just as in the character of Critias he captures the modern preoccupation with what Machiavelli aptly terms "effectual truth." He shows us how, in the turn from dialectic to technical construction, the eidos is rep1aced by what we can a concept. and noesis or the contemplation of form is replaced by the act of conceptualization. Both thinking and the object of thinking have been transformed into instances of becoming. In a strange way, modernity, precise1y because of its scientific spirit, affirms the superiority of poetry to philosophy. Timaeus· method of construction is highly interesting. It shows us the precise sense in which it is right to can Timaeus an imitator and poet. First he constructs the geometrical analogues of the four elements. Only afterwards does he show how the various affections and motions of the elements could be conceived, imagined. as the resu1t of mathematical structure. The same procedure can be found in the Almagest. Ptolemy �18 first constructs his mathematical hypotheses and afterwards fits the appearances into them. It is almost as though the appearances exist so that we might see in them the beautiful painted animal of our hypotheses. Once Timaeus constructs the regular solids, he proceeds to establish a correspondence between the geometrical properties of the one and the physical properties of the other. A11 proceeds by way of analogy. The whole account lies in this playful construction of a mathematical analogue and the establishment of correspondences between this analogue and the appearances. Here is what happens in the case of fire. The pyramid, Timaeus says, is "the element and seed of fire" (56b3-5). He reminds us that fire, although conceived as a mathematical object, is nonetheless part of a living whole. Fire is the Achilles of the elements. It is the swiftest, most penetrating, and most terrible. The reason or cause-Timaeus would have us believe--is found in fire's pyramidal shape: the pyramid has the smallest base, the smallest volume, and the most acute or "sharpest" angles (56e7 ff.). The pyramid is fire in speech, the painted image of a beautiful animal in motion. Timaeus has fashioned an image of becoming on which it would be a pleasure to gaze. At one point, Timaeus tells us that whenever we look towards space, that is, towards the receptacle, we become dreamy or, as we would say, "spaced out" (52b6 ff.). But as mortals we are constantly looking towards space. Dreaminess is our human condition. We are constantly thinking, quite unreflectively, that bodies are real and ideas are fairy tales, that bodies are "concrete" while ideas are "abstract." We fail to distinguish the dreamy and evanescent nature of body from what Timaeus calls "the truly sleepless nature" (52b7), by which he means the ungenerated and purely intelligible eidos. Bombarded by images, rocked to sleep by the swaying �19 motions of Mother Becoming, we become anaesthetized to the difference between images and originals. Because of this powerful and ceaseless anaesthesia, we do not know what it means to be truly alive. We confuse life with motion and wakefulness with being excited. We come to resemble the man in Socrates· image who does not seem to care whether life is real or imaginary so long as it is motion. The anaesthetic power of space has a special relevance for the 1ikely story itself, which, after all, is constantly directing our intellectual gaze towards space. Does Timaeus want to wake us up, convert us to the "truly sleepless nature?" To answer this question, we note what Timaeus tells us about space. Space, he says, is not apprehended through the senses. Nor is it an object of reason. It seems to hover between the senses and reason, to be in a sort of twilight zone. Timaeus says that space is apprehensible "by a kind of bastard reasoning with non-perception" (52b2). It is "barely to be trusted." The word for non-perception here is anaisthesia. the word from which we get our "anaesthesia." By non-perception, I think Timaeus means simply the imagination. Through the power of the imagination, we "see" things that are not presented to our senses. The geometric construction of the elements was non-perceptive in the sense that it generated beautiful pictures in the imagination. Indeed, the account of how space came to be mathematically ordered is really the beautification of our own imagination of body. Timaeus begins with the truly sleepless nature--that is, the purely intelligible form--but it is not his intention to lead us back there. That would be at variance with his desire to praise the god Kosmos. The mathematical disciplines in the Timaeus are not being used, as they are in the Republic. to turn us towards dialectic. They are being used to order the unruly cosmos and the warped imaginings of the �20 human soul. Timaeus is attempting to persuade us of the goodness of mathematical order, but he is also telling us to be happy with this conception of goodness and not to search beyond it. One must not step beyond the laws of one's fatherland. In being receptive to the likely story, we are still asleep, but at least we are having better dreams. As we saw earlier, the likely story of becoming is based on a noble lie. To render body thinkable, Timaeus cooks up beautiful geometrical models and then shuttles back and forth between the two senses of body. He reasons about physical body as though it were geometrical and about geometrical body as though it were physical. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Timaeus manufactures a new theoretical object that illegitimately combines the conflicting natures of the sensed and the intellected, the body in deed and the body in speech. This is a technically refined version of the bastard reasoning that for Timaeus characterizes our relation to the poetic sophistry of space. Even the noblest mathematical physicist is subject to the conditions of the world on which he gazes. In his noble beginnings, Timaeus is always very careful to draw a sharp distinction between image and original. But as he goes on--that is to say, as he descends from those beginnings to the various particulars--he becomes increasingly caught up in the pseudo-explanatory power of his bastard triangles. His disturbing playfulness takes the form of treating these triangles more and more literally. as though they actually were the cause of physical body. As the likely story unravels, the distinction between image and original is more and more blurred, the painted animal more and more confused with the truly living one. Timaeus is the poet lost in his own poem, the sophist persuaded by his own bastard reasoning. The sophistry of Timaeus· account of body is a mirror of the sophistical �21 nature of space itself. Space seduces us into thinking that to be is to be spatial (52b3-5). Let us see how Plato dramatizes the seductiveness of space in Timaeus· account of dimensionality. In his first founding, Timaeus informed us that the cosmic body was three-dimensional. It befitted the All, proseken. to be, as he said, "solidlooking," stereoeide (32b 1-2). Had it been fitting for it to be two-dimensional (note that this is a real possibility for Timaeus!), the god would have needed only one mean proportional rather than two (32a7-b 1). The second founding seeks to remain true to the the solid look of body, to body's appearance of having depth. It constructs geometrical solids. But what is the origin of their depth? When we examine the inception of the solids as Timaeus constructs them, we see that their origin is the plane: "it is a complete necessity that the plane-nature comprehend depth. And the rectilinear plane is put together out of triangles"(53c6-8). As we know, Timaeus· solids are built by stitching together their twodimensional faces. The construction seems harmless enough, yet it is worlds apart from the one we find in Euclid's Elements. Euclid begins with the sphere and proceeds to construct the solids within that sphere. That is to say, Euclid postulates a naturally existing three-dimensional space of which the plane and all plane figures may be said to be abstractions. For Timaeus, on the contrary, the nature of two-dimensionality is prior to, more natural than that of three-dimensionality: the plane, strange to say, is more comprehensive and in that sense more real than the solid. It is very important to remember that in the likely story, body is not "given;" it must be constructed. This means that the third dimension of depth, too, exists by construction, by art rather than by nature. When Timaeus introduced us to the receptacle, he compared it to gold. This flattered becom- �22 ing in two ways: flrst by making the kinetic material of becoming sound hke a precious metal, and secondly by making the receptacle sound threedimensional. To look three-dimensional and "sohd" is, after all, more beautiful than to look two-dimensional and "flat." To stick with Timaeus· gold simile, solid figures are richer than flat ones. The demiurge of this simile sounds at first hke a sculptor rather than a painter. But what shapes are made to appear in this golden medium? Timaeus gives us one example--the triangle (50b2). Here he betrays his preoccupation with the plane as opposed to the sohd. He as much as tells us that the receptacle is by nature flat--all surface, no depth. Bodily depth, then, is an illusion, and Timaeus· flattery of becoming is the technically beautiful accomodation to that illusion. The regular sohds merely seem to give depth to the receptacle. In fact, these sohds appear to be no more than a cosmetic re-arrangement of the naturally existing plane. Indeed, as we see from Timaeus' account of the human body, 1t is the triangle rather than the solld that dominates the body's motions and affections. In the warfare between inner and outer that defines metabohsm, a is our triangles that defend the body from invasion and corruption, just as it is the collapse of our triangles· structure that spells our death (81 b5 ff.). It is the triangle that is Timaeus· beautiful animal in motion. The receptacle, contrary to appearances, is not a three-dimensional container. It is a movie screen which captures the beautiful appearance but not the being of depth. In its twodimensionality, the receptacle sounds very much like the cave wall of Republic VII, the medium in which the cave-dwellers locate their exciting and solid-looking "real world." The confusion between plane and solid had been prepared, in fact, invited, by Socrates· opening image. The man who gazed on beautiful animals �23 did not care whether these animals were painted or truly living, that is, two-dimensional or three-dimensional. Socrates underlined a distinction only to erase it. Now what does it mean to be happy with the plane, to rest content with the appearance and not the reality of depth? It means to be superficial, to be content with surface and with opinions undeepened by inquiry. In the Timaeus. this contentment with surface appears as the love of praise and the concomitant suspension of dialectic. To praise something or someone is to dwell at the beautiful-seeming surface and, to quote Timaeus, "to search for nothing more beyond it." In the Symposium. Socrates tries to break through the surface preoccupation with the praise of eros in his cross-examination of Agathon. In the Timaeus. he not only does not break through the surface but encourages and even compels his hosts to be superficial, to engage in flattery. When Critias accused Socrates' city of being merely mythical, he was saying in effect that it was two-dimensional and dead, that it lacked the solidity of a really existing bodily city. Now what appears in Critias· own story is the flattest, deadest city of them all--the Egyptian city in which the depth of philosophical inquiry has been squashed down into the plane of unreflective nomos or custom, and in which a materialist physics replaces the "vertical" inquiry into cause with the mere observation of the whole's customary motions, the whole's surface. Perhaps it is only fair that those for whom Socrates is a two-dimensional animal be challenged to produce what they take to be three-dimensional, solid, and truly alive, that they be compelled to reveal their own lack of depth. Now the deepest part of Timaeus' story is his description of the receptacle apart from its mathematical ordering, the part in which Timaeus is not trying to flatter becoming with the illusion of depth but simply tries �24 to tell us what the receptacle is. As we see, the receptacle is not just the unstable context for the four elements. It is, more importantly, the medium and cause of all mortal life. Our humanness inheres in and grows out of the receptacle. It is thanks to the receptacle that individuals, families, cities and even whole civilizations come to be and pass away. It is here in the play of powers that animals fight and cities make war. In Socrates· opening image, someone gazes upon beautiful animals somewhere. pou. This somewhere is the receptacle. But where exactly is this "somewhere?" As we have seen, Timaeus· ordering of space is virtuaJJy indistinguishable from the ordering of our imagination of space. Within the mythical context of the likely story, the "outer space" of sensed body is effectively replaced by the "inner space" of the imagination. Crudely stated, it is the body in speech that counts--not deeds per se but stories about deeds, not objects but our concepts of these objects. Now it is typical of the likely story to recreate the outer as something inner, to cause the surface of body to seem imbued with the depths of soul. Througt'1 such recreation, the likely story revives the human meaning that had been murdered by the Egyptian priests. According to Timaeus· first founding, the heavenly motions are only apparently outside us, "up there" in the sky. But in the meaning conferred on them by the likely story, they become the inward thinkings of the whole. The entire realm of outer~ the so-called "external world," is actually within the all-embracing contemplation of the soul (36d8-e5). The cosmos in speech is an altogether inward world, the world as contemplated world, or more accurately, as reconstituted world. The word for sky or heaven in Greek is ouranos. which also means the palate or vaulted roof of the mouth. Timaeus takes the utterly bodily, utterly inarticulate non-cosmos of the Egyp- �25 tians and transplants it inside the human mouth, that is, withln human speech: he transforms the outer sky or heaven into the palate. The receptacle must be seen in light of the likely story's transf ormation of the outer into the inner. At its very deepest level, the receptacle is the soul in its receptivity to images. In its turbulent and eminently plastic nature we are being invited to contemplate the excitable and highly impressionable part of our own souls. One can even go so far as to see in the four elements a bodily projection of our emotiona11y charged nature: we are ambitious like fire, faithless like water, as light-minded as air, and as incorrigible as earth. In short, the four elements are bodily mythoi about the human soul. When Socrates fashloned an image of his desire and affection, he was gazing upon the just city as though it were a body capable of motion and rest. But he was also gazing within himself, contemplating the very part of the soul that desires and is affected by images of body. The "somewhere" of Socrates· image is this inner "somewhere," the emotional and unreflective "space" within us that longs to be fi11ed with moving images. The more deeply we examine the likely story, the more we see that its true object is not the cosmos but the human soul in its relation to the cosmos. Timaeus prepared us for this fact when he reminded Socrates that "I who speak and you my judges have a human nature." We recall that human nature was the goal of the likely story as announced by Critias. Timaeus was to generate the cosmos down to human nature, to make man a citizen of becoming so that Critias could then make him a citizen of ancient Athens (27a2-b6). Timaeus celebrates the Koureotis for man's cosmic indoctrination, after which Critias celebrates this same festival for his full-fledged political one. This is the drama of the Timaeus-Critias. �26 In Timaeus' flattery of becoming, human nature is given a decidedly unflattering portrait. The demiurge does not set out to make man. Man is not a natural end but rather a necessary means by which the cosmos attains its perfection (41 b7 ff.). The god washes his hands of the whole business at this point, goes into retirement, and bequeaths the unenviable task of making man to his dutiful sons (42e5-7). Timaeus defines the invention of man through an oxymoron: the gods are described as sebomenoi miainein to the1on. "being reverent to pollute the divine" (69d6). The selfcontradictory phrase captures man's ambiguous place within the whole, not to mention the ambiguous character of the whole itself. Man is a desecration of the divine who, for that very reason, accords with the divine plan. With the story of human nature, Timaeus reveals his most central paradox: the cosmos cannot be beautified, flattered to the hilt, without a descent from the beautiful to the monstrous and the grotesque. The gods put us together piece by piece, starting with our heads and working their way down to the sexual organs. The whole account is meant to impress us w i th how much forethought and artistry went into our being. But at the same time, it tends to remind us of Dr. Frankenstein stitching together his new man. Timaeus takes human nature as he understands it and does something extraordinary. He concocts an outrageous pseudo-scientific myth that compels the depth of soul to show its true colors at the surface of the body. He does humorously with the whole body what Erwin Straus does more seriously with our upright posture. In bringing depth up to the surface, Timaeus shows once more his connection with the art of painting: he projects the "deep" or "three-dimensional" soul or principle of life into the two-dimensionality of body's surface. Simply stated, he wants being to �27 appear. In the account of human nature, the tone of the likely story suffers an erosion: the noble poetry of the astronomer gives way to the black comedy of Aristophanes in the Symposium. This is especially evident in Timaeus· funny and yet not at all funny treatment of our sexuality. Timaeus· cosmos, we recall, has two archai. two principles or beginnings. The good pulls the world up towards the starry life of intelligence; the necessary pulls it down into the "mighty river" of becoming (43a6). The likely story dramatizes, in its two beginnings, this fundamental tension and incoherence within the cosmos. It mimics its object through a pun on the word arche. Now man, for Timaeus, combines the good and the necessary in his nature and his outward shape. He is the whole's necessary incoherence rendered visually explicit. His sphere-shaped head contains the circles of Same and Other, the divine circles of reflection and soundmindedness. The rest of him is elongated, the outward sign of his exile from the spherical heavens. In an unmistakable reference to the receptacle, Timaeus calls our lower passions "terrible and necessary" (69c8-d 1). They are housed in the torso--spiritedness in the chest and the desire for food and drink in the belly. The pollution of the divine is this joining of the divine and the bestial. To mitigate its bad effects, the gods cook up an invention--the neck. The neck is the only thing that holds human nature together. It anchors the head to the body but also separates the head for its divine life of astronomy. The neck is our constant reminder that our being is the sacrilegious togetherness of two things that should not be together but must be together if the cosmos is to be complete. The mouth is the clearest expression of our contradictory and profane nature. It was invented for the sake of the noble stream of speech that flows out and the necessary stream of nutriment that flows in (75d5-e5). Human nature is �28 caught in the middle of two streams flowing in opposite directions. The fact that we cannot eat and speak at the same time shows how profoundly incoherent we are. For Timaeus, to be human is to be altogether tragic. The only cure--short of death--is the study of astronomy, the study in whlch we turn away from our monstrous nature and seek refuge in the act of noble imitation, in the life of the head. The truth about Timaeus· cosmos is not contained in any of the things he says about it. It is revealed in the motion of the likely story, in the path of the construction by which the cosmos is made. The being of the cosmos lies in its becoming. This motion is downward: it is tragic motion. If Timaeus· god Kosmos had a voice, he would say with Shakespeare's Richard 11, "Down, down I come, like glist'ring Phaethon"(l 11.liO. The whole likely story is one grand descent from deathless being down to the stars and from the stars down to human nature. As the 1ike ly story moves towards its end, human nature degenerates into all the various beasts. It gives birth at last to all the animal possibilities that sleep within it. The hierarchy of beasts, born of human degeneracy, completes the whole and causes it to be in full agreement with its intelligible archetype. As the cosmos degenerates, it becomes more perfect. This is the paradoxical truth about Timaeus· cosmos. The god Kosmos, in spite of his beautiful ordering, is, in the end, a tragic hero. When Socrates announced his desire, he warned against the deficiencies of poets and sophists ( 19d3 ff.). Poets are too rooted in their own cities. That is, their tendency to imitate the familiar and conventional holds them back from contemplating a city that is good by nature. Sophists, on the other hand, wander too much. They transcend the poets' attachment to place but end up utterly placeless, that is, lacking the experience of being �29 political animals. Their failure to be political is exposed in the Gorgias. where the sophists are portrayed as teaching technique without the proper use of that technique. The sophists show us that being outside the city is not necessarily to be above it. Neither poets nor sophists, it would seem, know how to move vertically into the third dimension of "depth;" they are rooted ultimately in the "flatland" of conventional cities. The center of the likely story is the treatment of the receptacle and the four elements. It is there that we come to see what a likely story really is. We see that it shares in the natures of poetry and sophistry. It is mythos masquerading as logos. As poetry, it begets beautiful images of animals in motion. As sophistry, it uses a pseudo-science to get us to believe that its images are rea1. But Timaeus' relationship to poets and sophists runs deeper than his scientific methodology. It enforms his whole perception of the human good in relation to the intellect and the city. Timaeus is a combination of noble extremes. On the one hand, he is immersed in conventional political activity--he runs his city and enjoys its honors (20a 1-5). On the other hand, as an astronomer, he soars high above all political regimes . .. or does he? As the likely story shows, Timaeus seeks to ground our being in a new and higher regime. He seems to want to redirect our political spiritedness and piety away from conventional cities and towards the natural "city" studied by the astronomers. Instead of Solon's political poetry, we now have Timaeus· political poetry. It seems that Timaeus, even when he soars, cannot escape his political perspective. Just as he apparently cannot get beyond the love of honor, he cannot transcend the noble opinion that the highest human good is stability of character and obedience to law, qualities eminently displayed in the stars. Coming from a city with excel- �30 lent laws, Timaeus "imitates well the things on which he has been reared" ( 19d5-e2). This is the poetic deficiency of his soul. It helps us to see why Socrates calls the likely story a nomos. thereby suggesting that Timaeus, no matter how much he seems to be the lover of natural order, is still bound by the right opinion of conventional cities. The astronomical side of Timaeus is sophist-like: it wanders through the heavens with no thought for political rootedness. All cities are banished from the likely story: there is no fellowship or community among men but only the individual and the cosmos. In the character of Timaeus, Plato has painted a moving picture of the poet-sophist at his best and most magnificent, a poet-sophist who seems to be a combination of philosopher and statesman. Timaeus is at once apolitical and ultrapolitical. His noble extremes do not temper one another. There is missing that mean position in which the soul, in leading the philosophic life, soars above the political perspective without losing sight of its political rootedness. The Timaeus inevitably brings us back full circle to the Republic. the dialogue that the Timaeus had pretended to surpass. Socrates' desire was for a sophistic poem. He wanted to see beautiful animals in motion. He wanted to be fooled into thlnl<ing that these moving animals were truly alive, to Jose himself in the beautiful image in the way that we all tend to lose ourselves in a truly great poem. Socrates stressed the irrationality of his desire by repeatedly using words related to feeling and being affected. He presented himself as "pathetic," as a man at the mercy of the poets. What is Socrates doing here but imitating the souls of his hosts? articulating the desire and the pathos that is theirs? What is Plato doing through Socrates but painting a moving picture of our own nature in its Jove affair with moving pictures? �31 What, then, is Socrates· true desire? Perhaps, it is to see in what precise ways the human souls before him will show their true colors in the act of being painters. The silence of Socrates is really the contemplation of Socrates. It is the philosophical and ironic distance at which Socrates places himself with respect to the realm of all doings and makings. In being entertained, he is placing himself outside the "real world" of his hosts. As Socrates himself tells us, he is "at peace" (27a I) while his hosts go off to war, gratifying the desire that is really theirs. They are the turbulent object of his serene contemplation. In the Timaeus. Socrates is gazing, as usual, upon the human soul. He is reflecting on the animal that beautifies itself in order to forget that it is a monster. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 33 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 Kalkavage, Peter Title A name given to the resource Animals in motion: the flattery of becoming in Plato's <em>Timaeus</em> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990-07-26 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 27, 1990 by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Kalkavage 1990-04-13 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 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9fc63e1cfeb59c6d860d234e0fa6ef95.pdf 29d3d28e173aec2af1c60b9904fd87ff PDF Text Text The Song of Timaeus Peter Kalkavage T his lecture is about the strangest of Plato's dialogues, the Timaeus. I would like to focus our attention this ~ning on the famous eikos mythos, the "likely story," told by the character Timaeus. The likely story tells about the beginnings of the visible, touchable world. Our story-teller, Timaeus, takes us through the process by which the world was generated from its most radical causes and principles. Whereas the Republic dramatizes the fo~nding of regimes both in city and in soul, the likely story shows the foun~ing of the cosmic regime, the government of the world. For Timaeus, the world's founding depends to a great extent on the power of mathematics. Throughout the likely story, Timaeus draws the listener's attention to the arts of arithmetic, geometry, and especially the theory of ratio we find in the fifth book of Euclid's Elements. Timaeus' physicist is a mathematical physicist, and his bond with mathematics expresses his dream that the world be wellgoverned, that the cosmos no less than souls and cities display the virtues of stability, moderation, and wisdom. Timaeus at one point articulates the motto of such a physicist. It takes the form of a little jingle in Greek: pan de to agathon kalon, kai to kalon ouk ametron; "All the good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not measureless." 1 The physicist for Timaeus represents all that is decent, healthy, and beautifully arranged, all that is conveyed by that rich Greek word kosmos. Throughout the likely story, goodness is associated with the beautiful structures of mathematics, and badness is associated with the ugliness of disorder. Peter Kalkavage is a tutor.at St. John's College, Annapolis. T he Song of TiTTUJnJS was originally delivered as a formal lecture at St. John's College, Annapolis. in 1984. 56 I will try in this lecture to say what the world, our world, looks like through the eyes of Timaeus' motto about the good, the beautiful, and the measured. The Timaeus is the most artful and artificial of all the Platonic dialogues. There is really not anything in it that could be called conversation. And the dialogue as a whole, so plentiful in references to life and motion, seems somewhat lacking in vitality and spontaneity. The major characters-Timaeus, ·critias, and Hermocrates- meet Socrates according to a preestablished plan. Socrates appears in a most uncharacteristic way. He is dressed up, kekosmbnenos, as though he 'were going to some formal event. 2 Socrates expresses a desire for a war-movie in speech, then seems eager just to sit back and listen. The entire program is presented with extreme formality by Critias. 3 In fact, all the speeches to be given do constitute a formal event. That event is the feasting of Socrates, the dialogue's central dramatic image. The likely story of Timaeus fits well into this highly artful setting. Artfulness plays the central role in Timaeus' mythical physics. The very word kofmos suggests not only a world-order but ornamentation. Timaeus' story is composed of what Socrates calls· a prelude and a song. 4 The pair of terms also means preamble and law. The song of Timaeus, the nomos as Socrates calls it, embraces two forms of artfulness, that of music and ~hat of politics. Timaeus' speech will show us how artfully arranged the world of becoming is. His song sings the praises of the god Kosmos, who for Timaeus is the whole of all generated things. The Platonic dialogues are all imitations of live conversations. They are living images, dramas. This is true even of the Timaeus, which seems at times quite lifeless and undramatic. Very often in the dialogues something in a speech or interchange is not so much spoken about as it is playfully enacted. In the likely story, it is easy WINTER 1985 �to see what is being enacted, or rather re-enacted. It is the birth of the world as we know and experience it. The likely story is mimetic in this precise sense: it "plays at" world-building. It imitates the noble, though often risky process by which the gods made a world-order. At the beginning of the Critias, the dialogue which immediately follows the Timaeus, Timaeus calls the cosmos "the god who was born once upon a time long ago and who was just now begotten by speeches." 5 The likely story, in other words, imitates the artist-god or demiurge. It is recreational. When god makes the world-soul, we are engaged in the various constructions. When the gods make us, we are involved in the work of putting ourselves together. The world with all its structure comes to light for Timaeus in a divine activity we ourselves take part in. Timaeus calls this activity of world-building in speech "thoughtful and measured play."6 Such play for Timaeus is identical with the activity of the mathematical physicist. To read the likely story profitably, we must therefore relax our preconceptions about the serious nature of physics. We must exert our imaginations and, I think, our sense of humor. There are many obstacles the reader confronts as he reads the likely story. The story is very long and very technical. Furthermore, it cannot help but strike us as whimsical and ridiculous, a sort of prank. This is the story, you remember, that Timaeus places in the region of trust, pistis. 7 Yet what could be more unbelievable, more unworthy of our trust, than some of the explanations we get from Timaeus? Take, for example, the story of the liver. Timaeus describes the liver as a sort of moviescreen for i:he soul. And the pancreas is said to be the liver's wiper. 8 Is there anything less unbelievable, I wonder, in the apparently more scientific parts of the story? True, there is bound to be some sense behind such unbelievable accounts. But even while we see a certain sense to what Timaeus says, it is impossible not to say to ourselves "Hahl A likely story." Whatever region ihe likely story occupies, that region cannot be identified simply with trust. But th~re is anothe7 difficulty with the likely story.. The story is apparen~y incoherent. It is not one seamless narrative but is composed of three stories. Timaeus makes two radically different beginnings. And in his third story, he makes no effort to show how the two beginnings are related. This problem is the greatest occasion on which the story seems to be incoherent. Timaeus himself warns Socrates and us about this pr?blem the ~rst ti~e he uses the phrase "likely story." It is worthwhile quoting the whole passage in which the phrase first appears: Don't wonder, Socrates, if we are not able to pay you back with speeches about the birth of gods and of the All, that are not in every way in agreement with themselves and altogether precise. But you must esteem the speeches we provide as likenesses inferior to none. You must remember that I who speak and you my judges THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW have human nature. So, in order to receive the li!(ely story about these things, it is fitting not to search beyond this.9 The physics of Timaeus will be a likely story for two reasons. The first is that the world is not a being in its own right but an appearance, a moving and unstable likeness of an intelligible, stable model. Proper speech about the world must therefore take the form of imagery. Secondly, the story-teller and his listeners are human, not divine. They must know their place and not search beyond the likely story. This passage ends what Socrates refers to as Timaeus' prelude. Socrates' response to the prelude is extremely interesting. He tells Timaeus to "perform the song;' a command which can also mean "execute the law."10 Now there are many strange things about the passage I quoted. It is very important, first of all, because it is addressed explicitly to Socrates. But the most important feature of what Timaeus says is that he articulates the limitations of the upcoming myth. Socrates is being asked, as a human being, to take the likely story about the cosmos as merely a likeness, not as the truth. That is, the likely story begins with an apology and a caution. But why apologize for a likeness? Myths after all are likenesses. No one needs to be reminded of this fact. And Socrates, although he tells many stories, never feels the need to apologize for any of them. Indeed, we sometimes feel that a Socratic mythos has the power of showing us wha~ dialectical logos cannot explain to us. At the end of the Gorgias, just before the concluding myth, Soc;rates says to Callicles, "You may think it is only a myth, but I take it to be a true account." 11 I take what Socrates tells Callicles here to be true of all the Socratic myths. These myths are images without apology because, as likenesses, they aim at and in a certain sense contain truth. Likenesses in this sense do not function as boundaries. They are rather springboards for our perception of invisible, eternal truths. Socrates would never say, "You are only human; do not search beyond the likelihood of my story." For Socrates, myths appear to belong to the level of the divided line called imagination, eikasia, the level at which images take us beyond themselves to that which they image.12 As I mentioned earlier, the story of Timaeus is composed of three separate stories. The high-point of the first story is Timaeus' construction of the divine, intelligent soul. In the second story, Timaeus unveils the receptacle, the supreme condition for all body, change, and appearance. The third story is about the birth of human nature. This third story is the most bizarre and most playful story Timaeus tells. The remainder of this lecture will be divided into three parts, corresponding to Timaeus' three stories: Part I -The Story of the Soul Part II -The Story of the Body Part III-The Story of Human Nature 57 �One reminder before we begin. Timaeus is a character in the dialogue, not Plato's spokesman. Plato causes us to reflect on the problem of a world not by a direct encounter with the issues but through a human soul and its various motions, through the soul of Timaeus. We will thus have two questions before us constantly: What is· the world; and Who is Timaeus? We must be careful not to separate these questions. It is by no means clear that the likely story represents what has come to be called "Platds cosmology." Let us now turn to the likely story. Part I -The Story of the Soul T he deed imitated by Timaeus' story is the birth of the world. The story is filled with language that suggests begetting. Later in his story, Timaeus will tell us that the world is the "offspring" of a "father" and a "mother." 13 He will also tell us that the pyramid is not orily the element but also the seed of fire. 1+ Human souls are planted, originally, in their individual stars. 15 The star-gods themselves are referred to as god's "children."16 The likely story thus aims at being a likely biology as well as a likely physics. Timaeus acknowledges that the realm of becoming is also the realm of procreation. But the central, overriding image for the likely story is that of artful production, techne. God is a craftsman, a demiurge, who makes a world by giving it mathematical order. This is very different from the story in the Bible in which God says to his creatures, "Be fruitful and multiply." In the likely story, the goodness of a cosmos derives wholly from mathematical ordering. Insofar as becoming is good, it is mathematically structured. Fruitfulness is not good for its own sake. In fact, as we see at the end of the story, the ems for begetting stems from our mindless and tyrannical nature. 17 The female kind is derived from the "first men" who were cowardly and unjust. 18 Procreation comes about because the first men "fell" from their divine and orderly condition. The theme of art is central to the entire Timaeus. The dialogue takes place on the feast day of Athena, 19 and there are numerous references to Athena in both the Timaeus and the Critias. Athena is called a lover of war, wisdom, and art. 20 She is the patroness of Athens which, as Pericles reminds us, philosophizes without becoming effeminate. 21 I think that Athena, or more precisely the birth of Athena, is one of the dialogue's implied images. Athena was born out of Zeus' head. This intellectual, masculine birth takes place just after Zeus swallows up the Titan Metis, whose name means craft or cunning. The myth about Athena's birth seems to me to provide an accurate image for Timaeus' re-creation of the world through art. Timaeus seems to be imitating Zeus. Having swallowed up the mathematical. arts, Timaeus gives birth out of his head to an artfully constructed, eminently 58 masculine world. The likely story imitates Zeus giving birth to Athena; a most accurate image, I think, for the mathematical physicist and his various brain-children. Even when Timaeus introduces the "mother" of becoming later in his story, I think he retains his role as Zeus. He re-creates the womb of becoming as a dynamic medium for artful, mathematical construction. The likely story begins with the divine craftsman, the demiurge, who gazes upon a perfectly stable and utterly intelligible model of the world. The model or paradigm simply is and thus experiences no becoming. It is that peing which the cosmos imitates at the level of regular, periodic motions and the "laws of nature" which govern such motions. 2 2 As the not-yet-actual structure of a moving world, the intelligible paradigm functions for the craftsman as a kind of "cosmic blueprint;' a plan which guides the construction of the cosmos and in which the various forms of motion, power, and life find their prophecy. By consulting this model, the god tries to make Becoming as beautiful, that is as orderly, as possible. Before the divine ordering, Becoming is said to be in a state of disorder. Timaeus calls this condition "not at peace and out of tune."23 In order to regulate and tune this ugly condition, the god consults not only the cosmic blueprint but also the goodness of his own intelligence. He looks within himself in much the same way that the mathematical physicist looks within his intelligence for the mathematical principles of order. The god desires that the world imitate him as much as possible. 2+ To this end, the god constructs intelligence within the soul and soul within body. 25 The soul is that on account of which the cosmos is a living being. What Timaeus' construction means here is that the cosmos is alive for the sake of being intelligent, not because life is a good in itself. Life is present because it is impossible, says Timaeus, to make the world intelligent without also making it alive. And unless intelligence is put into the world, the world will not be the best and most beautiful of possible worlds. At this point the cosmos is said to be an animal composed of body, soul, and intelligence. The cosmos is patterned after what Timaeus calls "the intelligible animal."26 The intelligible animal contains the forms of all the animals that are really living and are contained within the sensed cosmos. The notion of an intelligible animal is one of the most perplexing notions in the likely story. It is extremely difficult to see how an intelligible dog, for example, could be called an animal. This difficulty comes up again and again for the likely story. It reappears when we are asked to accept the existence of an intelligible fire. 27 As a really living, vibrant whole with all the signs of life, the sensed cosmos appears to be more truly what it is than the original it copies. The reason is that the sensed cosmos is possessed of a soul. I think we need to remember here that, although Timaeus appeals to the image-original relationship we find in many other dialogues, this relationship has a special context in the likely story. It is in WINTER 1985 �the context of productive or demiurgic art. The artist works from a vision of perfection that appears within his intellect. So long as this vision is in the intellect alone, the perfection is uncontaminated and stable, yet unfulfilled. Fulfillment comes in the act of bringing forth the vision of perfection, actualizing it in time and space. In the context of productive art, the relationship of original to image is the relationship of blueprint to fully actualized structure. The sensed cosmos, though an image, is nevertheless the fulfillment of the idea within the mind of the demiurge. Timaeus proceeds to show, first, how the body of the world was constructed, and secondly, the soul. The body of the cosmos display.s the good and beautiful ordering of mathematics. The four elements of body- fire, earth, air, and water-are arranged in a continuous proportion. 28 The entire body of the world is then given spherical shape and the motion of rotation. Soul is constructed next. The story of the soul is one of the most exquisite pieces of architecture in the likely story. It is based on a remarkable premise - that a soul can be built. In the likely story, we are treated to a vision of a likely soul, that is, a soul whose being in speech consists in its being . constructed. This is all part of the re-creational activity of the likely story. The construction of the divine soul takes place in three stages. The god first mixes together the forms of Being, Same, and Other. This is accomplished, Timaeus says, "with force." 29 Next, the god articulates the mixture into a spine-like band, the sections of which correspond to several octaves of the Pythagorean scale. 3°Finally, he slices and bends this spine-like band into the circuits of Same and Other. 31 You know these circuits from your study of Ptolemy; Timaeus gives a two-fold meaning to the circuits. They are the outwardly appearing motions of the heavenly bodies and also the inner, invisible "revolvings" of our thinking, of our dianoia. Timaeus goes on to tell us how the circuits of Same and Other; that we see in the heavens, constitute the moving image of the eternal which we call time. The circuits of Same and Other cause the world to be measured by recurring cycles. In this way, Becoming imitates the utterly non-moving look of Being. Because of these intelligent circuits ordered according to musical ratios, the world is filled with timeliness. It is characterized by time not merely as duration, but time as a principle of "right timing" or seasonableness. Once the circuits are set in motion, the world becomes thoroughly musical as the moving structure of time. The world is enlivened and also "set straight" by the periodicity of rhythm as well as the periodicity of the musical scale. I think it makes sense to compare the soul as Timaeus constructs it to a spine. Our drawings for the cutting of a monochord certainly resemble the spine with its vertebrae. Owing to its musicality and seasonableness, the soul seems indeed to function as the backbone of a constantly moving order. It gives poise and rigor to an THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW otherwise flabby and graceless world. This is much like the way in which the Pythagorean scale gives structure to the music we hear or the way in which Timaeus' song as a whole gives backbone to our flabby conception of the world. It is important to note 'that these two contrary circuits which govern Becoming, the circuits of Same and Other, are not confined to the heavens. The soul is said to be "woven throughout" the body of the world "from center to extremity." 32 The soul ensures that the entire world is filled with the recurring patterns characteristic of music. Musical intelligibility exists everywhere. It exists not only in the heavenly motions but also in something like the vibrating string. A string vibrates periodically. It displays the togetherness of sameness and otherness. The circuits of Same and Other are therefore not confined to a place. Like music, they do not belong exclusively to the realm of body or to the realm of soul. It is impossible to say, when we are listening to a piece of music, that the music is either inside us or outside us. It seems to be everywhere. We do not "stand back" when we are really listening to a piece of music. The music penetrates and engulfs us. Timaeus' account of the soul is a powerful transformation of our ordinary experience of the world. The account requires that we see the world throu.gh the eyes of the imagination. Usually we distinguish rather rigidly between the inner and the outer; the non-extended and the extended; the soul and the body. But in the likely story the world is approached through the power of likenesses. For Timaeus the _soul's act of thinking and the world's act of turning in a circle imitate one another. Now our souls contain the divine circuits of Same and Other. In the act of thinking we too "revolve within ourselves." The circuits are housed in our heads, or more precisely, in our brains. This true self of each of us, the intelligence, is planted in a star before being submerged in the violent flux of becoming. As we gaze out and away from ourselves into the heavens, we are in fact looking upon an appearance of our most intimate selves. We are in a sense gazing within and not out towards a "beyond." Now gazing at the stars is an activity we all love. This ordinary activity so often associated with softness and romanticism has a very specific meaning for Timaeus. A star is perfectly shaped, it is always brilliant, and its motions are unwavering and thoroughly regular. Also, a star is deathless. No wonder gazing at the stars can fill us with admiration and longing. We are remembering, remembering what it was like, in our Golden Age, to be entirely healthy and well-formed. Through the study of astronomy we return to a likeness of what Timaeus calls "the form of our first and best condition."33 Astronomy is the true homecoming of the human soul. Another powerful transformation of experience occurs . in Timaeus' story of the divine soul. This transformation has to do with that special phenomenon, the physicist himself. Timaeus' story "saves" this phenomenon. That is, it shows how the activity of the physicist forms a vital 59 �part of the whole, how thinking about the cosmos is itself the world's own most essential act. The likely story "saves" the phenomenon of the physicist himself by allowing intellectual activity to permeate the whole ceaselessly. Thinking finds itself reflected in the object of thinking, especially in the heavens. This is another way of saying that logos as thoughtful speech as well as logos as ratio permeates the whole. The cosmos of Timaeus is an intelligent animal. It is always engaged in giving accounts of itself to itself. 34 The physicist, then, does sporadically, partially, and sometimes out loud what the cosmos does continually, fully, and in silence. Strange as the likely story is, it nevertheless has the power to account for the presence of physics and the physicist within the world. This should come as rio surprise to us. As I have tried to suggest in my discussion of Athena's birth, the world of Timaeus has its home in the mind and speech of the physicist. It is his brainchild. Such a world is not the world in its originality but the world as it is re-created through the powers of art. Throughout Timaeus' praise of the god Kosmos, he is praising the physicist's god-like power of re-creation, the power of bringing the world into being through speech. The world is fulfilled for Timaeus in the physicist's act of thinking. There are of course many wondrous and admirable motions which the cosmos displays. Yet its highest activity for Timaeus is clearly that of thoughtfulness or reflection. The world longs, one might say, to make itself known and articulate. Only through the powers of intelligent human speech does the world shine forth as what it most truly is - an intelligent, living embodiment of artful structure and purpose. Timaeus calls the cosmos a "happy god."35 This god would not be happy, would not be fulfilled, were it not for the human beings who tell likely stories about the world's structure. Through the recreational powers of the physicist, the world comes to possess something like a plot, a mythos. In this way, the world comes to be an object of trust. We can place our trust in the appearances only once we have saved them with the peculiar powers of a likely story. At the beginning of the story, Timaeus invoked to hbneteron, 36 that is, ourselves and our own powers of mathematical story-telling. Our trust in the likely story is also our trust in a world that we ourselves have brought into being. Part II -The Story of the Body I n Timaeus' first story of origins, time plays the central role. Time is said to be the moving likeness of eternal, changeless being. I think this means not that time as duration goes on forever, but that time is one of the world's supreme ordering principles. Timaeus agrees with Aristotle in the sense that time is conceived as the measure of motion.37 Time gives the various happenings of the world rhythm and periodicity. In the cosmic region below the heavens, the world is constantly coming together and falling apart. 60 But this region is nevertheless ruled by the ever-intelligent circuits of Same and Other. The world in a sense "knows" when to do what. In his second account of origins, Timaeus unveils the other supreme ordering principle and dimension of a world - space as the giver of place. For Timaeus, space, like. time, is a moving structure. Space shakes what is within it. 38] ust as time is associated with the world's stability, space is associated with the excitation of all things that have place. Timaeus' first account of body at the very beginning of his speech took the four elements of body as the uncuttable simples out of which body was composed. In his second story the simple-minded notion of an element proves to be insufficient. What confronts us in the region below the heavens is the change of elements into each other. Fire acts on water to beget steam, a form of air. Water evaporates, steam condenses, and fire goes out, leaving its descendants earth and smoke. The.element of fire is given special attention by Timaeus. Of all the elements, fire is the most spirited, the most ambitious, and the most desirous of gaining victory over the others. The elements, in other words, are themselves unstable. They appear in the wondrous display of appearing and disappearing. In order to "save" this perplexing phenomenon, Timaeus reconstructs the four elements out of the regular Platonic solids. 39 This ingenious construction accomplishes two highly importal)t goals. First, the elements are shown to have parts. These parts - the various sides of the regular, geometrical· solios - can be rearranged to form other elements. Timaeus' mathematical physics thus accounts for the fact that an element can have integrity and identifiability while at the same time being able to suffer transmutation. There is a second goal which is of great importance to the likely story. The regular Platonic solids are called by Ti!Ilaeus "the most beautiful bodies."•0 What this means is that Timaeus accounts for the structure of body in terms of principles that are beautiful and good. Timaeus here puts to work once more the motto of his physics that I quoted earlier: All the good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not measureless. Of course, what I have been calling an account of the elements is, like all accounts of Becoming, a likely story. It represents the attempt on the part of the physicist to construct the best of all possible worlds in speech. Timaeus constructs the . paradigms or archetypes of the four elements. He makes no attempt to deduce the real nature of body and change from the supposition of mathematical principles. Timaeus' second attempt to account for the world's beginning unveils a new cause at work in the world. Timaeus calls this cause necessity, ananlri.41 At one point he refers to this cause as "the form, eidos, of the wandering cause."42 Fire does not act on water purposefully. Fire burns because it has to, and water must evaporate whether it likes it or not. In the second beginning Timaeus makes, the world is seen as originating in the cooperation of two causes - the good and the necessary. The good is identical with intelligence, or more precisely, with the ordering power and stability of intelligence. InWINTER 1985 �telligence is said to persuade necessity to take on the beautiful structures of mathematics. 43 In his second beginning, Timaeus acknowledges the role that mindlessness and chance play in the scheme of things. This element of chance cannot be eradicated, nor can it be fully mastered. Timaeus' reference to persuasion suggests that the god's work of ordering the world according to an intelligent and intelligible design is limited oy the nature of tlie original condition in which the design is supposed to ~nhere. What we _have before us in the guise of the necessary cause is none other than the primitive and unmusical condition that exists "before" the divine ordering. By leading us back to a reconsideration of this condition, Timaeus introduces us to that dimension of a world which is distinct from the purposeful activity of an intelligent soul. This new dimension is the world of power. When the gods construct our eyes, they do so for reasons that are beautiful and good. We are given eyes so that we might learn the intelligible structure of time manifested in the heavens.++ By learning about this structure through astronomy, our souls become ordered and healthy. We become assimilated to our first and best condition as stars. But unless our eyes have the power of seeing, no good will come of them. What I think this means is that astronomy, although it functions as that through which the human soul is rendered musical, is not sufficient for our complete understanding of the world. To grasp the totality of our world, to tell the whole story of the cosmos, we must become students of violent change; we must study the world of efficiency or power. There are no good ends in the worlq unless there are powers to actualize diose ends. Intelligence by itself cannot accomplish the actualization. As Timaeus informs us, the intellect can only persuade the necessary cause to work towards the best ends. But what is ultimately responsible for this turbulent though necessary aspect of the world? What is that in whi"ch change appears? What is that in which the crafty god builds his mathematical models of the four elements? Timaeus calls this medium for appearing the receptacle. +5 He refers to it also as the mother of becoming 46 and everexisting space. 47 Timaeus makes several attempts to say what the receptacle is. This proves to be no small matter for the receptacle, as the material ground or condition for the appearance of determinate though shifting natures, does not itself possess a determinate nature. If the receptacle is said to possess a nature at all, such a nature must be located in its indetmninateness, in its character as the receptivity to form. +a Timaeus' attempts to speak about the receptacle take the form of likenesses. The receptacle is compared to gold, which receives constantly changing shapes, +9 to the neutral bare in which perfumes can be mixed,5° and to an instrument for purifying corn. 51 The use of images to explain the receptacle is well-suited to the receptacle's ·all-receiving nature. For the receptacle is not only the medium for change and the womb of becoming. It is also THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW the ground of all appearance and imaging. I c funct~ons like the surface of a mirror. As the womb of becoming, the receptacle is "impregnated" with the mathematical structures of the four elements, that is, with the regular Platonic solids. The divine craftsman gazes at the purely intelligible forms of fire, air, earth, and water. At the same time, he is said to schematize the receptacle "with shapes and numbers." 52 The purely intelligible form or eidos of each element is called by Timaeus "father." 53 In other words, the world of change and appearance is born of two "parents," the formless and all-receiving receptacle and the purely intelligible eidos. Timaeus makes it clear that the offspring which is the cosmos is something in between its two parents. The world is neither pure formlessness nor pure form but a peculiar mixture of the two. The world is the presence of intelligibility within the realm of flux. Now before the divine act of ordering, the receptacle is already filled with "traces" of the four elements. 54 What this means is that the primordial chaos could never have been ordered unless it were potentially ordered, unless it had a predisposition to be formed. Since the receptacle and its contents are in perpetual imbalance, the ghostly pre-cosmic elements are constantly vying for each other's proper places. Through its vibratory motion, the receptacle tries to send these wayward elements back to their proper places. There is a marvelous poignancy and aptness in Timaeus' account of the pre-cosmic condition. Since the dynamic interplay of receptade and contents persists once the elemental traces are schematized with shapes and numbers, this interplay may be said to characterize the world as we know it. As our experience of our world testifies, things that are made, whether by art or by nature, tend to become unmade. The world displays itself as a realm in which things that are brought to order and unity, at the same time tend to fall to pieces. The world tends both to order and to disorder, a fact seen most vividly perhaps in the founding of cities and in their constitutions, but seen no less in the history of all plants and animals. In modern theories of the cosmos this tendency is seen even in those celestial beings, the stars and planets. Timaeus' receptacle confirms our sense· that the realm of change is also the realm of mortality. Timaeus' reference to "traces," ilchni-literally "footprints" - of the elements suggests that prior to the divine schematism body does not exist. The so-called elements, stoicheia or letters of the alphabet, are not really elements at all. They are rather the result of a subtle and beautiful construction. So far are fire, earth, air, and water from the status of genuine elements, that a man who possessed just a little prudence, according to Timaeus, would not even liken them to syllables. 55 Body, then, comes into being only with the god's con- . struction of the regular Platonic solids in the medium of the receptacle, the medium of eternally unstable space. Insofar as body for Timaeus can be studied, it is indistinguishable from a mathematical object endowed with mort'ality. According to Timaeus' provocative definition, body is that which possesses the third dimension of depth, 61 �bathos. 56 The definition allows Timaen to identify bodiliness with solidity, and solidity with threedimensionality. More precisely, body's solidity derives from the dimension of depth. The depth of body takes on immense mythical significance when we remember that the cosmos for Timaeus is a living being, a being with a soul. While it might seem difficult to grasp the connection between the living character of the whole and the three-dimensionality of body, Timaeus' emphasis on depth does point to the absurdity of a two-dimensional living being. But why should a living being necessarily be "solid," that is, possessed of the third dimension of depth? The answer lies, I think, in something Timaeus says about the soul; he speaks of the soul "circling back upon herself," auti te anakukloumeni pros autin. 57 The soul or animating principle of the whole, in other words, is a principle of inwardness and reflection. One might call it a principle of "depth; without which the world would be superficial and lifeless. The depth Timaeus sees as the defining characteristic of body thus supplies a home-mythically-for the eternally reflective source of . life. I say "mythically" in order to remind us that although Timaeus' account of body dwells in the region of mathematical physics, its primary dwelling-place is the realm of stories and images. Timaeus makes no effort to derive the "real" properties of body from his mathematical principles. The likely story supplies no explanation of the descent from tP,e purely intelligible archai to the world of body and change. All takes place by way of analogy and image-making, so that the most technical constructions (like that of the musical scale or of the regular solids) hover between the invisible and true beginnings and the world as it is given to sight and touch. Fire is not a moving pyramid; it is merely like a moving pyramid. Nor does the likely story claim to be able to derive the mathematical structure of fire from the eidoJ of fire, from "fire itself by itself."58 Even at its most apparently scientific moments, the likely story retains its character as a mathematical poem, a poem that places the mathematical arts in the service of non-mathematical meaning and "depth." In the entire discussion of body and bodily change, Timaeus make several references to guarding and saving the power, the dynamis, of likely accounts. 59 Indeed, an invocation of "Zeus the Preserver"60 stands at the head of Timaeus' second attempt to speak of beginnings. In the same oreath Timaeus calls his second story about a mathematics of body "a strange and uncustomary exposition." Zeus is invoked to save us during the strange business of constructing a mathematical poem about body. He seems to be the patron god of likely stories. The account will begin in distrust, perhaps even in our laughter at such absurd hypotheses as those made by Timaeus. But our imaginations will presumably save us from distrust once we see that the mathematical hypotheses succeed in saving the appearances, once these hypotheses supply a reasonably coherent story of body and bodily change. The safety of a likely story thus stems 62 from our remembering that what we are doing is building mathematical models or analogies, that we are being recreational. The likely story in this way dramatizes for us what we now call a scientific theory. A theory must be careful not to promise what it cannot deliver. It does this by acknowledging and insisting upon its origins in a productive, imaginative intellect. Strictly speaking, theories, for Timaeus, do not belong in the realm of knowledge but in the realm of trust, pistis. For this reason, mathematical physics aims at persuasion. It is a form of rhetoric. The rhetorical connection between physics and the world is strongly implied by the fact that the divine intelligence itself is said to persuade the receptacle to assume the best and most beautiful mathematical form. 61 We must remind ourselves at this point that the entire Timaeus addresses the problem of the world in its totality. The world of all generated things - gods and men, cities, customs, reputations, and also likely stories. All such generated things reveal in their individual fates the life of the whole to which they are subject; all reveal the pervasive and inescapable workings of necessity within the receptacle. The receptacle comes on the scene in answer to questions of physics proper. Yet Timaeus' mode of speech suggests that we see the world of bodily change as revelatory of the soul, of our souls. In fact, at the end of the likely story, we find souls going up and down the scale of animality. 62 This happens in just the same way that the four elements of body go up and down in their violent change of place. The cosmos, you remember, is both body and soul. And the receptacle, as the mother of all becoming, is necessarily the place of souls as well as the place of bodies. No one can deny the power that place as well as time exerts over our lives. Time and place together have to do with the meaning of a life withi.n becoming. Such a life is unintelligible without history, or, if you will, without the story or plot of a life. Insofar as an individual life comes to be defined as a story, it is governed by the Where and the When. It is of the utmost importance to us that we have a place; and at the appropriate times it is good and necessary for us to change place. Sometimes the change of place, like the change of the elements, is not smooth and continuous but is a violent upheaval. Timaeus' account of the receptacle fits well with Critias' story about the great cycles civilizations go through and the great wars between cities. In Critias' story Athens plays the role of the great liberator of the political world. Athens fights against the insolent kings of Atlantis who attempt to enslave the entire mainland. But as we know from the account given to us by Thucydides, the Athens of Plato's day launches an insolent campaign against the great and powerful island of Sicily, a campaign which proves to be Athens' downfall. In the course of history, the roles have been reversed. What is true in the political order seems to be true in the cosmic order as well. The life of the whole cannot be identified simply with the serene motiOns of the heavens. Life is not only intellectual activity; it is also the passion and vibrancy which cause the whole to be WINTER 1985 �alive in the first place, to reach glorious moments which tend towards tragic decay. At the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates says he is filled with a desire to see the best city go to war, to a fitting and beautiful war. Socrates seems to be mimicking our fondness for life in the sense of passion and vibrancy, and also our desire to witness a beautiful show of strength. Socrates is asking to see the best city transformed into a heroic city, a feat that requires great skill in the making of lively images. Timaeus' two stories of origins - the story of the s-oul and the story of the receptacle- reflect the two senses of the term life. The divine soul, manifested as the moving structure of time, embodies life as intellectual activity. The receptacle embodies life as passion and vibrancy. Both senses of life are necessary if we are to tell the whole story about the life of the whole and our own spatiotemporal lives as well. Yet it is no easy matter to say how these two senses of life can combine to form a coherent whole. In the last third of the likely story, Timaeus attempts to "weave together" the two supreme causes of Becoming: the good and the necessary. 63 He attempts, in other words, to harmonize the two senses of life which the two stories of beginnings have uncovered. We might expect that given these two accounts of the world's founding, Timaeus in his third story will tell us how the two clifferent accounts of origination are reconciled, how it is possible for the soul to be the first and best of generated things 6 + and for the god to have constructed the elements of body first. 65 But Timaeus makes no effort to explain how the first story of origins fits with the second. He leaves us with two beginnings, two archai. This incoherence of beginnings is meaningful. It suggests that neither time nor space was constructed first. The world itself is characterized by a double beginning. Time as intelligence and space as receptacle interpenetrate but are not reducible to each other. This doubleness of goodness as intelligence and the necessity of the receptacle mikes its most dramatic appearance in Timaeus' account of human nature. For Timaeus our nature and the nature of the whole imitate one another. If we find an incoherence in our 9wn lives, a tension between our intelligent and our passionate selves, this is because such a tension exists in the world which we imitate and to which we necessarily belong. The cosmos for Timaeus is something like the human soul, and the human soul's incoherence, writ large. Part III-The Story of Human Nature W e know from the dramatic prologue to T imaeus' speech that the likely story is . intended by Critias to be a preface to Critias' own story about Athens and her day of glory. You recall that the Timaeus begins with a very watered down summary of conclusiOns we find in the Republic about the regime that would THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW be best according to nature. But Critias is not satisfied with Socrates' concern for a non-historical city, a city which had no actual birth in the realm of becoming: "The citizens and city you went through for us yesterday as in a myth we will now carry over into the realm of truth."66 For Critias, Socrates failed to given an account of the best city insofar as this city would have an actual birth in the realm of becoming and history. History- or rather the memory of past deeds- is identical with truth. Critias does not distinguish between the faithfulness of this memory and the truthfulness of what he remembers. His memory is etched with stories he heard as a young boy. Critias scrupulously avoids the word mythos when he refers to his own story. He claims boldly that his account is "true in every respect." 67 It is through Critias, in other words, that we come to be suspicious of anything that has the character of a likely story. Socrates' speech is mythical for Critias, mythical in the bad sense of the term, because it was about a city with no history. It was about form without motion and place. Critias attempts to correct this lack by transforming Socrates' best city by nature into a young and glorious Athens. But Critias needs a transition from Socrates' inquiry into Being to his own concern for a begotten and therefore genuine city. Timaeus supplies this transition. Timaeus will generate a world in which things come to be and pass away in a splendid show of beautiful structure and purpose. He will construct the cosmic background and context for the cycles of human history. As Critias says, Timaeus will generate the universe down to the birth of human nature. 6 8 What this means is that human nature is the intended goal of the likely story. Timaeus' story of human nature began just before the gods confronted die problem of the necessary cause, the cause of power. The star-gods, who are said to be the childmz of the demiurge, put us together piece by piece, organ by organ. What Timaeus shows us in this very odd and at times repellent view of human nature is that for him human nature is something neither whole, nor natural, nor especially attractive. The human animal is a creature of great vulnerability and multifarious needs, and it is to these needs that Timaeus' likely story is addressed. Our neediness is summed up by the fact that we are not spherical: we lack the self-sufficiency and general happiness Timaeus associates with the spherical cosmos. Timaeus' identification of happiness with sphericity reminds us of the myth Aristophanes tells in the Symposium. But whereas that myth attempts to ground our happiness in the love we have for other human beings, Timaeus' story grounds our happiness in the study of the heavens. It is true that our complicated bodily arrangement demonstrates how well-meaning and ingenious the gods were. Like the world as a whole, man is a sort of cosmos, an artfully arranged living order. But precisely because man is so artfully constructed in the likely story, he is also something artifical or, as we say, synthetic. There is something grotesque about him. Man is a moving network of parts and functions. There is one and only one 63 �thing about man in the likely story that is completely non-artificial and unconstructed. This is his passionate nature, the nature that is at odds with the intellect's efforts to give life order and artfulness. Human nature starts out as a head. The head contains the divine circuitry of Same and Other. To this head the gods attach a torso and limbs to serve as the head's means of transport. 69 The gods then put the mortal parts of the soul into the torso. Spiritedness and the love of winning go in the chest, and the desire for food and drink goes in the belly. 70 An amusing and plausible topology of the human soul! Timaeus describes this addition of spiritedness and desire to our divine intelligence as a pollution of the divine. 71 To minimize the bad effects the mortal parts of the soul have on the intellect, the gods construct a buffer to go between the head and the torso. That is to say, the gods invent the neck. 72 Like the belly-button of Aristophanes' myth, the neck is a constant reminder of our "fall" from sphericity and happiness. Like all the bodily constructions we find in this part of the likely story, the invention of the neck points to some invisible truth about the human soul. Timaeus' account of the neck shows us in its peculiar comic fashion that human nature is ultimately absurd and incomprehensible. There is really no logos of human nature, no reasonable explanation of how the best in use is related to the worst. This seems to be implied also by the fact that Timaeus compartmentalizes the soul: intellect goes in the head, spiritedness in the chest, and desire in the belly. One can only tell likely stories about human nature, and such stories look at man in terms of artful construction. The ingenious invention of the neck shows us that we do not cohere by natu~. Intelligence has no business mingling with the passions, but it must mingle with them if human nature is to be born at all. The neck forcibly joins the head to the rest of us and at the same time supplies some protection for the head's "private life" of thinking. In the likely story, human nature is the most mixed and most terrible of all things. We are composed of all animal possibilities the world has to offer-the highest, the lowest, and all the stages in between. Our soul in its humanness is everything .life can be. In our heads, we lead the divine life of thinking. But owing to our other parts below the neck, we partake of mindlessness. Because of this region below the neck, we run the risk of losing our human shape in our next birth. The penalty for a deficient life is transformation into a lower animal. That is, contained within our human nature is the full range of animal possibilities corresponding to the various forms of unintelligent life. This range stretches from the stars all the way down to the stupidest, most worthless animals there are. But the cosmos requires even these most worthless animals if it is to be whole. Deficiency itself seems to be necessary to the world order, and this deficiency, witnessed in the moral hierarchy of animals, is rooted in the all-encompassing nature of man. The cosmos approaches its final perfection and completeness for 64 Timaeus as the original, healthy conditior: of human nature becomes degenerate with time. In t!le closing scenes of the likely story, the cosmos receives th~ ani~al forms destined for it by the "intelligible animal:•; 3 These forms are generated, so co speak, by the need in man's nature to actualize in tim ~ all the possibilities which lurk within him and which constitute his being. For Timaeus, the cosmos is both just and beautiful: just because it seeks a harmonization between type of soul and type of body, beautiful because through such harmonization it shows itself to be a genuine kosmos, that is, a world governed by a wondrous symmetry and coherence, even for those beings farthest removed from the motions of intelligence. Divine care in this way makes a blessing even of the curses that man's nature brings upon the world. This intelligent care which orders all things and which seeks to make good out of bad, perfection out of deficiency, seems to be an instance of Timaeus' guiding song: "All the good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not measureless." The beauty and nobility of intelligence consist in its care that the good triumph in all things. This divine care for the order of all things is the same as the generosity of the demiurge. It is that goodness which Timaeus, at the very beginning of his talk, characterized as the god's lack of phthonos, envy. 7+ As we have seen, human nature in the likely story contains· within it all the animal possibilities the world has to offer. These possibilities spring from the complexity of our own nature. This complexity which makes us what we are can be looked at in the light of Timaeus' two great cosmic principles- the necessary and the good. These two principles define human life as well as the cosmic life. Timaeus associates the passionate part of us with the necessary cause, with the receptacle. As always in the likely story, goodness is associated with the orderliness of intelligence. When Timaeus introduces our non-rational nature, he calls the passions "terrible and necessary." 75 The passions belong to our necessary nature insofar as we are absorbed in the life of bodily desire, honor, and victory. The turbulence with which these passions fill us remind us strongly of the turbulence within the receptacle. The passions are necessary because without them we would not be human. To have human life at all, we must be absorbed in ·the impulsive, non-reasoning sense of life. To be sure, as long as we are men and not stars, life in this sense is a condition for the life of thinking. If we do not care for our whole human lives as human beings, our intellectual life suffers. Thinking presupposes that our lower desires are held in check and that we get enough food, sleep, and exercise. Furthermore, if we had no spiritedness we would lack the daring it takes to tackle and solve such things as mathematical problems. But the lower passions are disruptive, terrible as well as necessary. Human nature is therefore in the following quandary: the necessary condition for our happiness is also an enemy to our happiness. One might be tempted to think that the gods should WINTER 1985 �have made our passions less terrible before they pqt them into our souls. But this, I think, would deprive them of their nature and function as passions. A passion, insofar as it is a passion, cannot be anything other than consuming and measureless. Passion must contain the possibility for being terrible. I think it is this boundless and frightening character of our passions that Timaeus points to when he says that the gods mixed all the passions with "love, eros, that attempts all things." 76 Since the passions for Timaeus are causes of disorder, they must be subjugated by the force of intellect. Timaeus is clear about how the· intellect itself becomes fit to rule the soul. It becomes fit through the study of astronomy. This study restores our intellect, our circuits of Same and Other, to the originally divine and musical condition we lost at birth. As I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, the likely story takes the fonn of a song. Timaeus sings the praises of the god Kosmos. He sings the world into shape with the beautiful constructions of mathematics and harmonics. The song of Timaeus, the nomos as Socrates calls it, gives the world its musical and lawful shape. The center of the song's teaching is this: all the good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not measureless. It is now time for us to ask what we are to make of Timaeus and his song of. order. • We know from the very beginning of the dialogue that the making of order within becoming will · be the dialogue's central concern. Socrates gives us our clue in his :mathematical account of who is present. He counts people. That· is, he replaces their human identities by their general characteristic of countableness. By counting his hosts, Socrates also implies the connection between time and number so important to Timaeus' story. By asking whert the missing fourth is, he. implies the importance of place in the dialogue, reminding us at the same time that time and place always accompany Qile another. But the missing fourth remains unidentified precisely because Socrates uses numbers instead of names. Mathematics, it seems, has the power to order beings, but it is powerless to identify them. Timaeus fabricates an explanation for the absence of the fourth host. Timaeus says he must have fallen ill, for surely he would not be aQsent willingly from such a meeting. 77 A likely story! The very first time we meet Timaeus he is playing the role in life that he plays when he delivers his speech about the cosmos. The dialogue is filled with all sorts of playful references to our desire for the orderliness and beauty implied by that rich word kosmos. Even Socrates is ornamented, dressed up for the occasion. But it is in the likely story of Timaeus that all the various senses of lr.osmos find their most original place- in the world as a whole. The cosmos is thus the paradigm and source for all the ways in which order and the making of order appear in human life. In the light of what we have seen so far about the likely story, let us return to our earlier question: Who THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW is Timaeus? What sort of man tells a stoiy like the likely story? . Timaeus is described for us by Socrates. Everythmg about Timaeus is splendid, even his name which suggests time, honor. He is an honored, powerful statesman from Italy. He comes from a noble family, he is wealthy, and he rules a city known for its good laws. Socrates also says that Timaeus has "made it to the top in every philosophy."78 Timaeus is the paradigm of the worldly man, the successful worldly man. Unlike Socrates he is an eminently public man, full of worldly experience and known for his mastery of all learning. He seems too good to be true, more like a work of art than a real human being. I sometimes think this must be why, next to the historical characters in the dialogue (Socrates, Critias, and Hennocrates), Timaeus is conspicuously fictional. He seems to be a likely story, that is, an unbelievable though beautiful story. Beautiful though he is, Timaeus makes us question the virtues of a devotion to orderliness and accomplishment. Through the character of Timaeus, Plato causes us to ask· this question: Is it so clear that all the good is beautiful and that the beautiful is not measureless? Is it so clear, in other words, that orderliness and goodness are the same? Even if we follow Timaeus in identifying goodness with intelligence, it is far from clear that intelligence is good solely because it is a cause of order and decency. In the Republic we get a different view of the good,. There the good is that which yokes together the knower and the known. 79 In other words, the good is the ultimate cause of truth. The likely story is possessed of many virtues. Its greatest virtue is, I think, its effect on our imaginations. The story tunes and sharpens our ability to construct and to identify likenesses within a world we are used to thinlcing of in tenns of meaningless facts. Through the power of the likely story, the realm of body and change, the object of the physicist, becomes a realm of meaning. There are reasons for the way things are. We are thus able to find ourselves reflected in the cosmos Timaeus builds in speech. But I wonder if we are able to find ourselves accurately reflected in the likely story. In the story's devotion to a moral cosmos ruled by orderliness and art, something human seems to get lost. I think the loss is especially felt in Timaeus' treatment of our passions. For Timaeus our passions are necessary but not good. Or rather, they are good only insofar as they are necessary. The passions pull us away from the orderly life of thinking. Timaeus tells us something we know all too well from experiencethat the passions are terrible. But he does not leave room for the possibility that a terrible thing is not for that reason bad. Just as goodness is not necessarily identical with order, badness is not necessarily the same as terribleness. The terrible things in us, those things Timaeus sums up as "love that attempts all things," could very well have more of a connection with the good things in us than Timaeus is willing to admit. Is not our effort to learn 65 �the truth about all things rooted in a terrible longing, a divine madness as Socrates calls it in the Phaedrus? 80 A soul possessed by the madness of philosophy is surely not the same as a soul which has "made it to the top in every philosophy." In the likely story, the beautiful appears in one guise oilly- the guise of mathematical structure. For Timaeus this mathematical beauty is always linked with nobility or good character. It is never treated as something which could awakeri love. If longing is at all present in the likely story, it is present in our longing to return to our original condition as stars. But this sort of longing is prompted by our desire to be orderly and well-shaped. Timaeus at one point refers to the lover, the erastes, of intelligence and knowledge.81 But I think this refers simply to the man who loves his own noble activity of building mathematical models of Becoming. The absence of the sort of beauty I am talking about can be seen in Timaeus' portrait of human nature. The portrait combines the symmetry of structure with the grotesqueness of a medical operation. Let us consider for a moment the beauty of a human face. In the likely story, the face is entirely a matter of organs and their proper functioning. If, for example, you wanted to say that someone had beautiful eyes, Timaeus would point out to you that the beauty of the eyes consisted in their ability to see, especially to see the objects of astronomy. The eyes, therefore, are beautiful because they lead us eventually to the ordering of our soul. Timaeus' account of all the other facial organs follows much the same line of thought. These organs exhibit nothing more and nothing less than the gods' attempt to reconcile the demands of orderliness with those of life's necessities. But a face is not an orderly arrangement of parts that work properly. It is a single, uncuttable look, an idea. It is something that allows us to say "This is Socrates" or "This is Theaetetus." Because of the uncuttable look of the face, we can identify Socrates and Theaetetus despite the similarity of their faces. Furthermore, owing to the character of the human face, it is ridiculous to give an account of pec;>ple by counting them. Timaeus shows us that he does not know how to look at a human face. His ingenious and well-meaning gods do not care if their arrangement of facial organs also inspires longing. Or rather, if they care, they care because such longing would cause us to "lose our heads" and become disorderly and ugly. The absence of a beauty that inspires longing in the likely story is deeply connected with the absence of philosophical love. The idea or look of the human face resembles the uncuttable look of a Socratic eidos. This eidos too cannot be reduced to a proper arrangement of parts. In other dialogues, notably in the Symposium, our perception of beautiful bodies is the starting-point for our ascent to the purely intelligible region of the forms. The likely story contains no such ascent. The cosmos is our boundary and law-giver. And, as we saw earlier, we must accept the likely story and not search beyond it. 66 We never get to the true face of things in the story. We must rest content with a beautiful mathematical facade. The absence of the philosopher and the philosophical love pf the forms in Timaeus' cosmos brings up a perplexity that lies at the heart of the likely story. Timaeus often refers to the region of the forms which our cosmos imitates. He refers also to the dialectical study of the things that are always. Why then, when Timaeus constructs the cosmos and all its contents, does he leave out philosophy as the study of the truly intelligible whole? Why does astronomy rather than dialectic become the highest human activity within Timaeus' cosmos? To answer this question, we will seek guidance from the divided line of the Republic. On the divided line the level Socrates calls dianoia is situated just below the level of dialectic. To this realm belong all those activities called arts, technai. The most important of these arts are the mathematical studies arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics. Socrates distinguishes these arts from the uppermost level of dialectic in the following way. The mathematical arts, unlike dialetic, make use of hypotheses which are never questioned. Socrates compares such hypotheses to images. 82 This is wtiy Socrates says that the mathematician merely dreams the truth.83 The mathematician is intellectually asleep, and in his sleep he has beautiful dreams whose clarity and distinctness lull him into thinking that he has found the truth itself. He is asleep because he does not search for the original beings, the forms, of which his own mathematical objects are likenesses. Caught up in his dream world of beautiful structures, the mathematician beholds images, thinking all the while that the objects of mathematics are in fact the truest, most original beings. Despite "the imaginativeness characteristic of the mathematical activity, he lacks the most important kind of imagination. He is unable to see beyond the clarity of mathematical objects to the more precise, ·more original, region of the forms. While the mathematician works down from his unquestioned hypotheses to necessary conclusions, the dialectician works up and back to the vision of the forms. The philosophical education Socrates outlines in the seventh book of the Republic attempts to undo the mathematician's sleepiness, to make the mathematical studies a ladder to the higher region of dialectic. What we can say about Timaeus' likely story is that . it too works down from hypotheses. It embodies that intellectual activity Socrates calls dianoia. Unlike the mathematicians described in the &public, Timaeus begins with the realm of the forms- the forms of Same and Other, the intelligible animal, and the pure archetypes of the four elements of body. Timaeus treats the forms themselves as hypotheses from which he then descends to make a world. Notwithstanding his supposition of these forms, the motion of the likely story is away from the assumed principles rather than towards them. What this accounts for, I think, is the likeliness of the likely story. In the likely story, we descend from the region of being WINTER 1985 �to the image-world of becoming. We enter the beautiful dream world of the mathematician. We build a hypothetical re-created world in speech. As the cosmos gets filled and perfected in Timaeus' story, ~t "closes upon itself." It becomes a self-sufficient, self-contained god. As we build this hypothetical world with the powers of mathematics, we move further and further away from the realm of Being which was our starting-point. I think it is in this way that astronomy as the highest of the mathematical arts comes to replace the dialectical inquiry into first principles. This is one of the important things the likely story dramatizes - the covering up and forgetting of first principles as the true objects of inquiry. Such a covering up is vital if we are to guard and save the power of giving likely accounts, of constructing theories. In the likely story, our desire to ascend to the &public's greatest study of the good gets "swallowed up" by our attraction to the beauty of mathematical structures. Because of this, the likely story necessarily takes the form of play and diversion from serious matters. True to our familiar expression "entertaining a hypothesis," the likely story comes before us as a form of entertainment for Socrates. As we have seen, Socrates fully accepts Timaeus' conditions. He accepts the likely story as his guest-gift and does not, on this occasion, search beyond it. He thereby takes the story in just the right spirit, the spirit that shows exactly what a likely story about Becoming is. As the silent Socrates listens to Timaeus' song of law and order, we of course wonder what he is thinking. My ~ess is that he is enjoying his feast of speech, though not because he is persuaded of its teaching. I think Socrates must all the while be looking into Timaeus' face, thinking about the quality of Timaeus' soul as it is revealed in the likely story. He may be searching for some trace of philosophical longing buried beneath the clever constructions and worldly accomplishments that have 120 doubt spoiled the glorious Timaeus. Something is surely lacking in the Timaeus. This is signalled by the famous absence of the fourth host. The fourth host is perhaps the philosopher, who has no place in the dialogue or in the world as Timaeus re-creates it. The likely story offers us a strange and provocative look at the world and at ourselves. But we do not find ourselves accurately reflected in the likely world that emerges out of Timaeus' head, the world without human faces. For all its virtues of order and musicality, the likely story leaves us with a need that can be met, I think, only ·by turning back, back towards the first principles and to those Socratic stories; like the myth of recollection, which encourage us to turn back. Timaeus' cosmic song thus draws our attention to that other singer who, for now, silently listens. FOOTNOTES 1. Timaeus 8 7c4- 5 2. Ibid. 20b7-c3 3. Ibid. 27a2-b6 4. Ibid. 29d4-6 5. Ibid. 106a3 - 4 6. Ibid. 59c5-d2 7. Ibid. 29c3 8. Ibid. 71 a3 - 72d3 9. Ibid. 29c4-d3 10. Ibid. 29d6 11 . Gorgias 523al - 3 12. Republic VI, 509d6-510a4; 51 ld6-e5 13. Timaeus 50d2 - e 1 14. Ibid. 56b3-5 15. Ibid. 41c6-d3; 4le4-42a3; 42d2-e4 16. Ibid. 42e5-43a6 17. Ibid. 91a4-b7 18. Ibid. 90e6-91al 19. Ibid. 21a1-3; 26e2-27al 20. Ibid. 24c7-dl; Critias 109c7-8 21. . Thucydides, Pelopponesian Wars, II 40 22. Timaeus 83e4- 5 23. Ibid. 30a4 24. Ibid. 29e2-3 25. Ibid. 30b4 - 6 26. Ibid. 31a4-b3 27. Ibid. 51b7'-c5 28. Ibid. 32b6-7 THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. Ibid. 35a8 Ibid. 35b4-36b6 Ibid. 36t16-d7 Ibid. 36e2-3 Ibid. 4Zd1-2; 90c6-d7 Ibid. 37a2-c5 Ibid. 34b8- 9 Ibid. 27d2 Aristotle, Physics; IV, 219b1-2 Timaeus 52d2 - 53a7 Ibid. 53c4-55c6 Ibid. 53d7-e2 Ibid. 47e4-5 Ibid. 48a6- 7 Ibid. 48a2-5; 56c3-7 Ibid. 46e6- 4 7c4 Ibid. 49a6 Ibid. 50d2 - 3 Ibid. 52a8 Ibid. 51a1-b2 Ibid. 50a4-c6 Ibid. 50e4-8 Ibid. 52e5 - 53a2 Ibid. 53b4-5 Ibid. 50d2 - 4 Ibid. 53b2 Ibid. 48b5 - c2 Ibid. 53c5-6 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. .82. 83. Ibid. 37a5 Ibid. 51b8 Ibid. 48d1 -4 toe. cit. Ibid. 48a2-5; 56c3-7 Ibid. 92c1 - 3 Ibid. 68e1 -69a5 Ibid. 34b10-35al Ibid. 69b8 - cl Ibid. 26c7-d1 Ibid. 20d8 Ibid. 27a3-6 Ibid. 44d3-45a2 Ibid. 69c5-70e5 Ibid. 69d6 Ibid. 69d6-e3 Ibid. ·39e3 - 40a2 Ibid. 29e1-2 Ibid. 69c8 Ibid. 69d4-6 Ibid. 17a4-5 Ibid. 20a1 - 5 Republic VI, 508el -509a5 Phaedrus 243e9 ff Timaeus 46d7-8 Republic VI, 510b4-511a2 Ibid. VII, 533b6-c3 67 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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. 12 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 song of Timaeus Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 13, 1984 by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. (Reprinted in the St. John's Review, Winter 1985 Issue) 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 1984-04-13 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 Kalkavage 1984-04-13 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3809" title="Audio recording">Audio recording</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/33bf0fd1dc2a3b78a15695b59daa5d76.pdf f9e912afc55b3874350ee121c6c92d09 PDF Text Text FICTIONAL SELVES AND GHOSTS: ST. AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS Lecture delivered at St. John's College January 15,1988 Howard Zeiderman �In which a Book vi of the Confessions, Augustine describes an incident he observed in Northern Italy. At that .time, Augustine was still professor of Rhetoric. lover of in there who one Word. order was he was not yet a The incident occurred in Milan. He had travelled to hear the man purported to be the greatest speaker That man was Ambrose, the Archbishop. alive. man, the He was in love with words; almost Ambrose was a very busy constantly surrounded by people. It was during of his rare moments of solitude that Augustine observed him. Here is Augustine's description: For very short periods of time, when he was alone, he was either refreshing his body with food or his mind with reading. When he was reading, his eyes went over the pages and his heart looked over the but his voice sen~e, and tongue were resting. This us. We the great and in He picture might of a tired man reading alone is not unusual for well wonder why it is even mentioned. Ambrose is like the rest of us--tired, somewhat harassed, need of solitude? No. Augustine does not see the similarity. sees difference--and it startles him. bishop, for He cannot understand why the though alone, is not reading aloud. the ne'Xt explanation. Augustine fifteen Is to show that lines, but He puzzles over the sight cannot come up with a convincing In the end he must resort to the holiness of Ambrose. As says: whatever his reason for acting in this way, it would certainly be a good one. This reading that, passage silently although about startles Augustine's me. What incredulity should I at Ambrose's make of it? I understand the words, I am missing something. I feel And a �careful re-reading the passage doesn't bring me any closer to the Such a passage--and each text that we read here contains many sense. of of them-does agreement or disagreement. something understand Eventually stays not immediately occasion my approval or disapproval, my I must with me. ghost, it that move on Usually, I feel it as is if me. I understand nothing. to more familiar ground, but the passage It is like the ghost of a text. haunts so far from helping me And like a legitimate It is haunting because, through it, a remote, dead world momentarily becomes visible. Let passage. try of think are others when Sometimes for a fairly complicated activity. When I read, I Thinking and understanding are private activities. ultimately in a place I call 'inside myself'. So I tend of serious reading as an inside activity as well. Of course special or alone. they then, is words. occur there to explain what is so troubling for me about this understand. And I succeed when I am being thoughtful about the meaning to try Reading to They me are circumstances in which we read aloud, either with People read aloud when they are learning to read, or sharing with others what they've previously read. we do in fact read aloud what we have never read before, but frequently, we lose track of the passage, and have to back-track a ..-. silent Augustine's re-reading. And there are very special passages, like description of Ambrose, which we read aloud to understand what, on a previous silent reading, we had not understood. Now in this very out of the passage, I would like to claim that reading aloud plays the role for him of about Ambrose, Augustine is startled by the same opposite passage what would startle me. In order to make sense that silent reading plays for me. 2 But I can't do �that. To do so would be to turn what is inside and private - what I think of as reading - into what is outside and public. find the thing I Where would I place I called 'inside myself'? And what would happen to the call myself? 'myself' and 'me'. What on earth could Augustine mean by the words Our 'selves' don't seem to have the same boundaries. The the same difficulties arise if, instead of actually re-writing text, I simply usually Augustine same name. that I this have described from reading aloud which Ambrose and is, we know what and of what we call by the won't work either because all of the forms are modifications and that particularity the did while alone with a form However, as-I-know-it' strip interpret variations as of variations of 'reading- silent reading. We cannot reading aloud the circumstances of its dependence, and then take what results as a general case. You're open The out, I probably understanding, the and to feel lost. As these questions too begin to feel lost. In fact, I begin to lose myself. categories public beginning that are thinking, private crucialrc items implicated in these questions - reading, physical, meaning, sharing, inside, outside, - are not just peripheral to what I am. in terms of which I define myself. They are When those categories become fluid, who and what I am becomes fluid. What from a can one do in such a state? One can, of course, retreat such a passage to recover oneself and one's sanity. kind can push This is of But there is arrogance in retreating back into myself untried. Or, one forward to lose oneself completely in madness and absurdity. the path of despair, where nothing, least of all myself, has 3 �It is at just these moments, when facing this choice, that I meaning. What others. need I can not dd alone and yet must do - precisely because I am haunted - I may be able to do with others. hope I us as are be found to which is not characteristic In does or unusual, or distasteful, but rather, not only apply to passages. And this Entire texts can fact every text we read here can haunt. I will explore this through characteristic work the haunts which me the most It is this work, too, which is my favorite of the books Confessions. we wrong, This kind of uncanniness I have called 'haunting'. uncanny. haunt. just They assert something every work we read here. in Such passages and a certain kind of passage. readers between has given you a sense of a relation exploration this read here, and the one that I judge to be the greatest. Since these are more common ways of describing books, we will look at these approaches in order to approach how a book haunts. There read. Some focus are many accounts of the greatness of the texts we of these focus on the style or beauty of the work; others on the content and depth. Dante is a good example of the former, Descartes of the latter. Described differently, these two categories may be cal-1-ed rhetoric and poetry for style and beauty, and philosophy for content. through third the type connection work These are A much more serious characterization of greatness breaks perspective of between Platonic of the two categories just mentioned. characterization the how and dialogues, shows the what. and Hegel's the remarkably This intimate Examples of this sort of Phenomenology of Mind. two are obvious candidates for the third approach which looks at 4 �style and content, the poetry and philosophy, at the same time. This approach is, as I said, the most serious. I believe that all the works we here, read it. In any approaches: content, book not case, one consideration is basic to each of these three by or just the Dialogues and the Phenomenology, satisfy calling a book great - with respect to its form, its both of these combined, we are intending to describe the and not ourselves. The search for a suitable definition itself, and characterization has objectivity as its goal. At a text. with We the other end of the spectrum is the subjective approach to This, the text. course, has more to do with us as individuals than Each of the works is loved by some, hated by others. frequently admit to our friends, though not in seminar, that one or anothe.r book usually our demanding to of our favorite. This occurs with friends because friends are interested in our likes and dislikes, without 'proof'. reveal talking is my about And in their company, I may feel encouraged to try concerns, affections or disaffections. That is, in my 'favorite' book, I may reveal important things about myself, not about the text. So the characterization 'great book' speaks the book, about and the me. , ~Since, characterization 'favorite book' speaks primarily in my judgement, the Confessions is the greatest program book, use to illustrate these two categories. it categories is a haunts and may categories. since it is also my favorite program book, I will Yet, neither of these two is what I mean by a 'haunting text.' description be And ostensibly about which made here That characterization is equally about me and a text. clearer by again, pointed contrast How a text to the other two the Confessions will illustrate what I 5 �mean, because Confessions texts to it is is the most starkest book which haunting, and visibility, haunts me most. In fact, the raises . the question ·of haunting perhaps because, in it, Augustine himself is haunted. The and misread, Confessions the way is probably the easiest work on the list to we misread it is predictable. There is nothing more common this room has probably written at least one, even if only as a part of an application hard we in our world than requesting writing autobiographies. an autobiographical essay. not to read the Confessions as autobiographical. do, it great. becomes Though application essays, going life; is to see in what way the Confessions is in the to and is and be rest of the world, expect autobiographical, we do not expect seminar important not it Yet, insofar as here essays autobiography And it is very difficult we, lectures, Everyone in viewed viewed as books to be autobiographical. The an activity, or a part of one's on- usually as the record of one's activity, composed at a distance from oneself. A bit fear, work to by of history may be useful here, not, as we often rightly dismiss a work, but rather, to help us avoid dismissing a it. The Story of My Life, by Cellini, and the misconstruing Conf essionS--· by Rousseau, our autobiography. 18th notion of century attracts and autobiography list. this for And the repels to when category, us. in 1400 years after Augustine, define These works help set the stage in the emergence chose one written of There the are form of writing which both so many examples of such from--and yet none of them are on our reading reads many Augustine's Confessions as an example of respects, 6 created by Rousseau--in other �words,as course, its we might merits this but by writers are other writers, Anselm, texts which we consider great require In other words, the Confessions is considered work. other place on our list seems suspect. Of then include Augustine's Confessions not because of because particular great its autobiography~then whom we Aquinas, consider Chaucer, Kirkegaard and Rousseau, include too. Faced with our own uneasiness a work, this A few of these Luther, Montaigne, Wittgenstein. So we about the greatness of sometimes allow this kind of evidence to count. However, kind of approach can be dangerous, if we grow complacent, and put the if we Hegel, Dante, Descartes, it great . • book we on our list only for the sake of reading another work. regard incentive the to presents a not of those other great thinkers as an exploration, then we put the book on the list because it task. of questioning still evidence But This leads to what could be a hard and probing kind about ourselves and about those other thinkers, though necessarily investigating how we about and the those book we in question. It leads to consider great are different on fundamental matters of judgement or thought. Let Confessions Let us us may take describe take step to see how the greatness of the be viewed more from the inside than from the outside. three as another the approaches to perspectives the text which we can initially of Dante, Descartes, and Hegel. These three were on the list of their concerns may help direct our attention to aspects of the work which viewing In it those who were in awe of Augustine, and as autobiography makes suspect ~if not impossible. another rough characterization of these three approaches, Dante may stand for poetry, Descartes may stand for philosophy, and Hegel stands 7 �for the attempted characterization, remember poetry reconciliation of the other two. Hegel's perspective, may be obscure. This third However, if we that in Plato's dialogues, philosophy deals with being, while is enmeshed philosophy and becoming. in Seniors, essays, can intimately 'ancient feud' between poetry may be understood as the feud between being and if inform Phenomonology Plato's becoming, of are any their less here instead knowing of friends working on their that in Hegel's Mind, the two realms of being and becoming become so involved with one another that they are no longer two realms. We as will Dante's involves Virgil look at the poet's perspective first. guide the in the relations Inferno, between much Virgil's of poetry the Divine Comedy and Dante's own. does not appear as a character in the Confessions. however, Aeneid does. was glory. a Augustine source states of His Aeneid, that when he was young, reading the pleasure, and reciting it was a source of As an older man, he views his youthful devotion to the poem as a waste of his time and talents. a waste of time, he write from this effort. up in and , ~round in Rome, was something only and Virgil appears a acknowledges that he also learned to read and The question arises whether this boy who grew Carthage and who, like Aeneas, finally found his home able fertile few Yet, in spite of what he claims was to and parallels turn his memorable with the childhood love for the Aeneid into in his adult life. Aeneid I will mention to show the extent to which Virgil's fiction echoes in Augustine's account. In first the book of Aeneid, the Aeneas meets Confessions, 8 Dido Augustine in Book i. So too in the meets Dido, as Virgil's �In character. narrative to Carthage of Book ii, Dido; Aeneas Augustine In spatially. at through his captivated his wanderings And love. by account. to he So a same time moves in and out of As he speaks and Dido listens, she is his words and falls in too in Book iii, Augustine pause says the Book iii Aeneas finally finishes his account his arrival on Dido's shore. increasingly moves in and out of Carthage in his that in the love with him finally brings Carthage; like Dido, he too falls in object of his love is the idea or the account of love. In book grove, and of though he he must iv of iv of the Aeneas' Aeneid, reawakened we read of the seduction in the desire to go to second Troy-Rome, only knows of it by indirectly. In order to leave Carthage, deceive the seduction. Dido; she despairs and dies by her own hand. In book Confessions, we read that Augustine too has moved on to He writes: So for the space of nine years [in Carthage] I lived a life in which I was seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, the prey of various desires. And later in Book iv, Augustine, too, is moved by the rumor of Rome: Why was it, Lord my God, that I decided to dedicate this book to Hiereus who was an orator at Rome? seen I had never the man but had come to love him because of this very great reputation. It is at this · point Both he when Aeneas struggling and Aeneas is to in break that Augustine's desire to go to Rome emerges. set out on their journeys in Book v. the the underworld bonds 9 of viewing the shadows, Manicheans. In Book vi Augustine is That is, while �Aeneas with is seeing spirits without their bodies, Augustine is grappling the idea insubstantial as of to spiritual substance. These new ideas seem as Augustine as the shades of Hades seem to Aeneas. And in Hades Aeneas is both alive and dead, so too Augustine in Book vi says: My life in you I kept on putting off from one day to the next, but I did not put off the death that daily I was dying in myself. Aeneas leaves the underworld of shadow at the end of Book vi, but it takes Augustine many more pages to be freed. The Aeneid plays a role in the not merely a duplication Confessions, but the of a previous book. The Confessions are Aeneid twelve books, the Confessions thirteen and in many cases-- had crucial ones--the characters and incidents of the Aeneid are displaced in Confessions. the story of Dido's Confessions, and it is is, of is lament and death. In Book v of the Augustine's mother who takes on the role of Dido, in Carthage and that he acknowledges the lie he told her. these of number abandonment, is in there--not Book iv as in the Aeneid-- that he leaves her weeping both it The most startling transformation is that of the kinds of changes are the same. And The increase in the of;books and the displacement of incidents occurs because there another book which is also woven into Augustine's text. of course, Genesis - with the careful instance, Confessions reading when all that this portends. That book The last books is Augustine's treatment of Genesis, but again, a will show that Genesis pervades the entire work. For Augustine describes his mother in Carthage crying over 10 �his departure to Rome, he speaks using the language of Genesis: So she wept and cried aloud showing in herself the heritage of Eve. begun Having that it provided mark the movement by between of internal. Now continue in this attention two the Aeneid and there texts. is in fact seems beginning of at each moment an The Aeneid supplies the external Confessions Latin or Greek, something made. poem~in way, begins to take on the shape of a admiring We could the subtlety of composition and the to detail in this beautiful piece of rhetoric. At the end of would then as by And although the end of book ix Genesis, the even a list provided The events are the account, the outer facts, and Genesis fills what or might be an autobiography. patterns Genesis. the fiction, we following toward circumstances it, at the Confessions in this way, we see the end of the domination by the Aeneid and the interplay is look conceivably recounted, glosses to not could artfully to a be vindicated in not viewing it as autobiography. to We feel inclined include the Confessions on the reading work great in itself, not just as a work admired by those whom we take as great. Thi-S· little account was a sample of the lecture you might have heard on perspective also would see have prominently vii, and the Confessions as a great poem. If we now adopt the of Descartes, we can both take what we've seen further and the us Confessions focus on from the yet another angle. This perspective role of philosophy. Philosophy appears in three books of the Confessions. then, Books x and xi. 11 These are, first, Book In Book vii, where Augustine has just �entered his final struggle with the Manicheans, he discovers books of philosophy. of Reading immaterial substance, is what first leads him to the possibility not the notion of both the books interesting but external. time, distance thing x life. soul is and treated as merely theoretical. At this their And ideas in are Book represented as things Augustine keeps his vii from these books for another reason. He realizes there is one he Book as the negation of matter, or as a jus~ in Hades, but as something positive and distinct: as soul. Yet, shadow even them could not philosophy reappears, Philosophy philosophy movement no the by longer Augustine's movement a effected leads now is effects philosophy learn from them. He could not learn humility. In own activity. similar reading as a study but as a way of of to, the but And the living greater books. than, the The activity of Augustine from the outside to the inside. He begins to investigate his own soul, to search for traces of his being. The transition the activity from Aeneid, seen in the philosophy inside to of in Books x and xi marks the the narrative of external circumstances, patterned on the investigation treatment plays philosophy of into spiritual considerations, as Genesis. So we see that for Augustine, the role of the in-between. and-· outside, of flesh and spirit. It is the in-between of The role of philosophy for Augustine--as the movement from outside to inside--dictates its form. For, our faculties, of all sensation inside. which Rather, Augustine's present and first it is is not reason nor imagination nor presents itself as taking the outside into the memory. investigation, future. it which And memory becomes the locus of in turn opens the question of past, This focus on time in Book x sets the stage for 12 �the treatment of how to construe the account of beginning-- that is, Genesis--in Books xii and Confessions thus plays a that his passive xiii. The activity of Philosophy in the role which is the re-enactment of the role dependance on the books of the Platonists played in Book Seven. Such would Confessions as · a content the other of great the be great work works. sketch of This book. lecture another time on the the concern was with the itself rather than with the way the work echoes And the content--Philosophy--is not in conflict with the back on his use of the Aeneid, we can see that Augustine, like Virgil, created poetry but has a definite relation with it. For now, looking a memory, philosophy. What or a kind of story. poetry presented, Poetry has set the stage for through books, for a passive audience, philosophy makes one's own, through activity. I the or have presented two sketches for lectures on the greatness of Confessions; the first took greatness to be something in the style poetry; philosophy. the These third lecture, begin with Is and is requires a is it sketches take to something in the content or be together form a prelude for yet a the third approach to greatness. It would status of reader--how the reader passive should the reader read the as Augustine was in the Aeneid or active as he was in the philosophical exploration of memory time? his took two which the Confession~· section second It is this aspect which probably most intrigued Hegel. Phenomenology of Mind, It of all the books we read, which most the reader to supply, in response to one section of the text, transition comparable, to the next. though The role of the reader of the Confessions as different as the Hegelian dialectic is from 13 �sin. An example may bring out the course a reader undertakes in the Confessions. At no a the reader few end of the text ever forgets. friends unlike of Book ii, Augustine describes an incident which that stole fated some pears from a neighbor's tree. fruit eye, nor good to eat. asks himself it for The why When he was a boy, Augustine and in the Garden - was neither pleasing to the In fact, the boys threw the pears away. When he he did this, Augustine's only answer is that he did the sake of doing wrong - that he loved sin whole The fruit - for its own sake. description is so vivid that the incident becomes a kind of drama for the reader. In fact, the reader witnesses the wrongdoing. Thus the reader plays the role of spectator. He observes a scene in which Augustine, and not himself, plays a part. This in fact sets the stage for the next scene of the Confessions. At the opening of Book iii, when Augustine is a student in he himself Carthage, attends the witnessed are he becomes enmeshed in being a spectator. He theater, revelling in the grief, sadness, and joy that he there. He remarks again and again that these spectacles external and utterly remote from him, displayed for him insofar as is story their witness. about-· the prepared But was not this the reader's relation to the pears? What has happened here is that Augustine has a place for the reader, and then occupies that place himself within the text. There the readers must of himself, makes possible. And be some distance between the author of a text and that that yet, text. However, Augustine, by writing about separation between reader and text as extreme as we have just 14 seen how Augustine, in making the �reader play the part of spectator, has started to diminished that very distance. Elsewhere listener, between judge, place reader completely that supplied marks by the critic, external vanishes in at the Virgil's text, At admirer. and the reader adopts other roles - the text each Aeneid. of There, the diminishes. the end of Book ix. culmination step, separation This distance This is also exactly the the external at the death circumstances of Monica, Augustine's mother, Augustine's Dido, he prays. (How unlike Aeneas!) And so by means of these Confessions of mine, I pray that my mother may have her last request of me still more richly answered in the prayers of many others besides myself. In . other words, Augustine prayer, to between Augustine between me do the and invites the reader to join with him in very thing that Augustine is doing. and the not-me, reader, between Augustine dissolves if we join him in the The distance me, or and activity of prayer. Again, Augustine to very same place, at the activity. And of Book ix, what is the topic of that activity? from each what I remember, or from what you r·emember. and is And even memory, the me and the not-me differ, since each of us is different thing from the content of our memory. reader end Memory--we all have it, although what Augustine remembers different within the leaves the account of his external circumstances and goes on philosophical Memory. a at text, between me and Augustine, between been brought into the that tension moves on The tension between me and not-me has text itself here at the end of Book ix. into Book 15 And xi and the treatment of time. The �distinction between me and not-me culminates by placing the self in now there is a difference between the ·me-I-am, the me-I-was and time: the me-I-will-be. be) will it Augustine of found sin, the mother's and through It is important very important? between face, first not. is my soul and my sin. For With the treatment of time, we and in its clearest form, the inheritance of the For Adam and Eve, looking for godhead, fruit. death, and time. his reach he finally eating so distinction what is not soul is who he truly is, and the sin, although in some the his, am I the is Augustine, way what and because is the distinction between what I am (or have been or why And Augustine invites us to pray with him at If we join him in prayer at the end of book ix, death. that initial breaking of the barriers of self are able to the question of time, then we are ready, at Book xii, to enter the book of Genesis. Thus a the reader moves from passive to active. He was merely passive spectator at first, when he watched the drama of Augustine's life. If what just I responds gone d~· to the invitation to pray, then he becomes the core of that activity is precisely the difference he But active. has he and through ••• the difference between action and passion, what happens to me, or in other words, between the me and the not-me. The into a new philosophy and Yet, the account mode. is text though you have just heard takes the previous accounts For the poetry or fiction which became a stage for now so entwined with it that both the how and the what, and the reader, are revealed as temporary categories. this account is about the reader, it does not essentially 16 �touch the us. It readers lecture nine its the the books, himself Confessions audience, is subtleties, relation. And study In other words, this is still a a great Augustine The book. And in all such and the reader in the first lecturer, who has spent time making dependent on a book in studying it, reveals some of and text as like passive. passively the about not about us as individuals, but about us as of this particular text. about lectures, is invites the listeners to undertake a similar although a listener may leave the lecture and go on to with others, the effort suggested by the lecturer remains an individual and solitary one. So book in all has been the Dante, their these and focus sketched lectures, the greatness of the The approaches that I have associated with concern~ Descartes, because of Hegel, has do been not the involve text me-as-an-individual, itself. It has been with something which is not me. The other end of the spectrum from looking at the Confessions as a great book is viewing it as my favorite book. is not primarily focused on Augustine but on myself. Confessions as my ~· Instead, on favorite activities. my necessitated book In Such a perspective as And, avoiding myself. it By do book, I don't stand on the ground of the I consider the text on my own ground and as dependent my favorite fact, When I view the involves although reading it considering as the book's greatness autobiography, considering the book is intimately connected with autobiography. me in giving an autobiographical account of this, I do not intend to surge into the story of my life. But I have to give an account--as one does with friends-- of what the Confessions has meant to me as an individual. 17 It has meant many �things--the with my most life suitable and of which to address in a lecture has to do thought, and the works of two modern philosophers: Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Both 'reading' and these means the from many our world, a world where One or the other of them absorbs of our contemporaries. Their work makes them as as two thinkers can be, and yet they display two significant similarities. stage, are 'reading silently'. influences different writers For both, their work falls into an earlier and later with the latter stage being an explicit denial or rejection of former, like Augustine in the Confessions, and both wished to end philosophy. Please philosophy. That seriousness, or responsibility. separate and don't does misunderstand not autonomous mean when I say they wish to end they wished to end thought, or Rather they felt that philosophy as a activity, which they both associated with Descartes, made one thoughtless, frivolous and irresponsible. These two there was nothing They did not were 'insiders'. each failed-not thei'r and feel I outside. in than philosophy from anything outside; they were My own thought has gravitated I agree with them-I feel their desire failure. language, the of heroic efforts to end philosophy, they because the At one time, or more natural, for them to do. just once, but twice! efforts their casual about philosophy. important, spite Considering categories, natural, more criticize Yet, around never And like them, I don't feel it from the One and else and truth, for 18 the Many, was more me. In being and non-being, important, and more fact, at one time it was �life's - breath. one's Yet, at times one recognizes that what comes naturally gifts, one's abilities, even one's breath itself - causes one to suffocate. Though I had been drawn to Wittgenstein and Heidegger before that crisis, and more through my which I or disease I work, like a had of their kind of my own task artificial respirator and theirs. If might be able to avoid their failure. I In intelligence and failure, their but of fact, However, the more I thought about cleverness quite cleverness two. proposed fathom doing an autopsy on a victim of the suffering. lack In the and intelligence opposite. which caused of audience hagiography, was diagnosis all. talk. as new developed should have known The at arcane 'cano~ized' more was each not only one They failed because they were geniuses and because philosophy and which It was precisely their for an elite group the issue and comprehend certain works. technical Those a attempted and failed, the more I realized it was not a responsible. were I pathologist myself was they matter end consider could their were days, I was like a chess player studying the games of past grand masters, wha~ They intimately. scrutinized those shortness of breath involved me with their work more Instead, there of thinkers who could The result was not the was an increase of And, because Wittgenstein and Heideigger philosophers, they gave rise to a grotesque and carried on by their own disciples, who bett~r. I studied them, the more I agreed with them on their of the ailment. But the more pervasive the disease appeared. infected practitioners of were a not certain just readers philosophical 19 of school certain books, of thinking. or The �diseased were not just the intellectual inheritors of Descartes, but in fact everyone who lived in a Cartesian world--which is just a shorthand for the modern world in which we all perform every act or gesture of our 11 ves. It not was Augustine himself anyone, the horrors own gifts and Wittgenstein? and not he was not he as skilled at philosophy as anyone? for Was Was He felt, as acutely as philosophy and the hunger both for truth and discovery of that truth. And did he not only face these but succeed in resolving them in a work that was for everyone, merely Augustine's Heidegger from Heidegger his and desire own to with rhetoric his not similar burdened technical for at this moment that I remembered the Confessions. professors indictment and of intellectual philosophy and Wittgenstein failed? seeing beyond their technicians? similar to my And wasn't sense of why For their greatness prevented them greatness. Augustine recoiled fro~ philosophy because it could never teach him humility. It to the ally had Confessions. and read I was my own concerns and confusions, I needed an And I didn't turn to the Confessions because he what Aug(i·s tine, Christ's. In a friend. achieved Unlike mine, was because of these concerns and thoughts that I was drawn I was attempting. the name not a not Christian. I heard His concern and mine with differ. my mother's milk was not Christian and the task and need I felt were So I didn't read him to learn "how-he-did-it". I the Confessions as the struggles of someone similar but yet quite different from myself. In short, I read it as autobiography, and it is as autobiography that it has been my favorite book. 20 �We a have now looked at two ways of reading the Confessions - as great work and as my favorite work. scholar the would, bringing responses better of word, I to bear As a great work I read him as a a knowledge of other books he uses, other writers to his work, and must call history. what, for lack of a It is because I am familiar with the genesis of what we call autobiography, that I realize that reading the Confessions Once I hold become when in I as autobiography that tendency in would be remarkably anachronistic. check, the book opens up, and I can some sense passive as I learn from it •• read the differently. Confessions Then I read as out my of On the other hand, favorite book, I read it quite my own activity and I read it precisely the way I guarded against before. In case the out other of the I had also case I read him out of knowledge, in the second need. people, greatness on first Although are they both these ways of reading may involve primarily solitary. When I speak about the of the Confessions, I'm telling you something. I may depend work of others and even prompt you to find aspects of the work missed gain or gotten something essentially in wrong. I could, therefore, in telling you, return. solitary. In sharing with you remarks about the my another. need may be similar to mine, and you too may decide to turn to private the and time in even though Confessions. silent Milan. perspective book, our relation to each other is Confessions......· as Your favorite But But we again can become useful to one again my reading the Confessions was just like the kind of reading Both of these silent ways of reading are important, they are so different from one another. of one Ambrose did one In fact from the kind of approach, the other is suspect. 21 From the �vantage of my greatness the point of the From the need when I read Augustine as my favorite book, Confessions seems sterile, a mere diversion. perspective of my studies of Augustine, reading the work for encouragement and consolation seems undisciplined and self-indulgent. Yet, as I said, both approaches are important and even necessary. The overlaps third with approach to a text, where we are haunted by a text, these two familiar approaches and yet differs importantly from them. In the third approach to the text we may start by the silently reading this to reading essentially depend words on apart. publicly. cooperative What too merge toward begins In but rather a one to haunt us. is precisely as mean activity. Confessions read I by public reading is an this approach, not only do we one another, but knowledge and need are also no longer held They it and privately, but we must go beyond what we another. This occurs when the Need stops being my particular need, need we all feel, and the relevant knowledge is all lack. It is in this context that we no longer solitary explorers or solitary sufferers; an individual reads as preparation for what reading makes necessary--a conversation. In it as as I reading the Confessions as a great book, I withheld viewing an autobiography. wouJ:~ expectation read it read such a work written such. Though nonetheless a between these readings. in sense it one by one of our contemporaries. My in seeing such a work is that it is autobiographical and I as legitimacy, In reading it as my ·favorite book, I read it autobiography. is I said tension both and readings conflict had exists a kind of within me For is it or is it not autobiography? clear that it isn't. Well, Yet, it isn't just not- Our normal expectation on reading the Confessions, and 22 �the To label view it it often carries on its book jacket aren't just misplaced. without keeping in mind that a·man Augustine wrote about his life--and therefore its greatness but lose the life of the text. being published today. sympathetic silly, could not clearly alive. it be it need But on the whole it would be viewed as not It is a text It is a past text, a dead text--nor it is a text which is truly to describe more clearly what such a ghost text is and of The which autobiography. work, the Confessions haunts because its greatness --some I mentioned--seems expectation its intentional or have truth his replacing obviously becomes accidental, to And as the work begins to look suspect. will Fictionalization, part whether earn our criticism because fact and do with truth and not-truth. the ,earlier shape with its form as of a roughly factual account of someone's past becomes increasingly problematic. fiction incompatible Insofar as we penetrate the scope and intricacy of the fictional, The evidence, however, of this lecture, is that Augustine did indeed story in a way which we would call fictionalizing. If he is fiction to for Augustine us. By which two. written now, in our present. is haunts. aspects from or It is a ghost. I life It might gain a few readers and perhaps even a The text is an in-between text--not entirely dead nor entirely alive. how But imagine such a work or pretentious, or even irresponsible and absurd. which but review that it is autobiography--would be to fathom be for no. than fact, is he truthful? The answer seems But suppose that fact and fiction are different for us-- that truth is different for him than for this I don't mean that he holds truths different from the ones we hold, but rather, that he means something other than what we 23 �mean by What a strange suggestion--and yet it has the truth. been already word come up earlier in this lecture. For to ask about what means by truth will involve what one means by self. And then, if a one self is different, autobiography--will text we have then be ever the different read or thing from which self writes--an any autobiographical essay or written before. think this strange for right--that Augustine. But though I say this, and though I can explain why I say I don't understand what it means. Augustine Genesis. beginning analogies. such a Or vision? its earth--he first is Paul, more is contained this one's say, things, the returned the Augustine to words considers various in the first line of Genesis. startling suggestion, I come up with Or is it like to each viewer a personal and legitimate line like charity, or love, without which, are like the clanging of a bell. or truth. makes same first Love into and presents the promiSing. could line--In the the first line of Genesis like a mathematical axiom of which says about and of power that in itself it contains all other truths? painting, mean knows understand Is meaning the end, he presents his opinion, that every truth In to the heaven created reader trying a conclusion about truth in his discussion pondering God any which reaches In possibilities. In something that is of means I suggestion· this, truth a Charity This looks turns sound into meaning and, one if charity gives meaning to utterable But them true, then it seems that all utterances would truth. As I say these words, you may feel we have Paul's clanging bell. Without having resolved this riddle first line of Genesis, states that If his task had been to write such a book, he 24 let me go on to another one. �would have wanted to write it as Moses did. Is it possible that he did this very thing in writing the Confessions? Let us think confession involves resolution with between the the on an the past what we mean acknowledgment respect like inbetween about to the by of future. confession. Usually, a past action, and a Confession is a bridge, an ghost text and like philosophy was for Augustine, and the future. The security of that bridge depends commitment of the confessor. Only time can reveal that commitment. When the confession is made to another person, then that person risk entering must confession is made confessor and God. confession know to God, In of into there such it the a only confessor's can case, be no future. When the secrets between the however, those outside the what the confessor then chooses to make public. With are this much to guide us, can we say whether the Confessions addressed passionately, occurs less readers. to to or God, often, to God? referring to Augustine speaks him as 'You.' often, and And, although it he does speak both directly and indirectly to the So the answer seems to be that the Confessions are addressed both to and judge--· or us and to God. offense. we But forgiveness forgive him? against us. although Now, God can forgive contemporaries, So us would of would For To Augustine. be course, be But can we? Were we his able to forgive Augustine some personal we irrelevant what? certainly hear this confession His are not to him. his contemporaries; our But can we even presume to recorded offenses are against God, not say this another way, only God can judge or forgive. Augustine is in part 25 writing for us, he can not be �confessing affords to us the forgiveness. By us. confessing opportunity What is to the to God in our presence, Augustine listen neither alternative in judgment nor in to listening in judgement or with forgiveness. It is to listen charitably. Now have book. has what Augustine said about Genesis--that he would to liked written written have could Augustine able been mere to it If with a great charity becomes that all Somehow, Genesis was Somehow Moses was able to write such a not presume to reproduce this effort. produce But he a text which can be really read only with is read without charity, the Confessions becomes the of clanging as a book like that. through or in charity. charity. it remember a bell. We try to disguise the clanging by reading book, or as our favorite book. It is when we read it that each of its lines--like the first line of Genesis-of the truths we know. It is when we read with charity the differences between me and not me, between my truths and your truths, vanish. Do Confessions. you Its really understand what I'm saying hard for me to see how because I don't. feel that'__,.._my words shimmer before you, tempting you, yet eluding your I then you feel what I feel. am. succeed for at him. deeply another The don't And its not ignorance as lack of effort that we the from grasp, or about understand. If you You are in the presence of a ghost, Confessions are a ghost which haunts. The Confessions the task which Augustine set for himself, or which was set But what such impenetrable. And ingenious a task is and how it was fulfilled remains we do not penetrate it by learning yet aspect of the text, which might emerge from reading 26 �still more attention For when a text begins to haunt, the locus of carefully. is not the text, as it is when the·text is a great book, nor ourselves, as words, are we attention it is when neither the book is one I love or hate. In other passive nor active. Rather, the locus of is what I can best describe as what is in between us and the text--the gap between our deepest expectations and those of the text. Becoming clearer activity. insights and not for encouragement. scholars nor my as friends. about myself. private public need this haunting in-between can not be a solitary something I about and of a as conversation; At this stage, I need others to help me see To use their help, and to offer help to them, modern reflection of the sort of reading Augustine Ambrose, Confessions That is, I need others neither as solitary reading must give way to public reading. Our reading, expected others--but not for their information or is conversation. Our understanding of the a great book or as my favorite book may be enhanced by our facing it as a haunting text is absolutely dependent on conversation. A ghost most salient opportunity the ourselves. educations, in the has two interrelated functions. categories to thoughtless!y surface text of think · through determined our true ghosts. They are our our social, world. those lives. It also deepest So It elicits the affords habits us which the have a ghost text brings to the These do not reside in texts but rather in the haunting accretions of our past, economic, and political environments. our It is presence of the ghost text that these other ghosts come forth. To confront one means to confront them all. 27 �And activity so Great understanding as do these considerations have to do with our Great books are, as I once read on an envelope, great here? teachers. that what books are written by great these requires books involves minds~great understanding thinkers--and these minds. But understanding the languages in which they wrote as well understanding the other works that they produced. In other words, this effort it. If our communal task is scholarship, then our activities here are doomed to is scholarship. failure. translations, For Some of us are better, some are worse at we read only parts of books, in a variety of and make the effort to speak with one another about them in the strange format we call 'seminar'. Another them because which are approach, raise it are problem would require among unmoved raise the is hard issues. timeless of great books is to read concerns--the issues which have Among these concerns we will find some to grasp why we read our particular texts to There are hundreds of textbooks which have been to raise these timeless concerns. There, these called the problem of free-will, the problem of meaning, of anticipate. solutions those reading particular importance to each of us. But if this is our precisely concerns or of these written they to or absorbed humanity. troubled the approach justice. Our or animated And the result of this attitude is what one texts would stances. by a The evaporate. Problems and issues result is an argument or debate particular issue, with others who are having nothing much to say. The text would become either loved despised depending on whether one agrees or disagrees with Plato's politics or St. Paul's theology. 28 �These Plato's two ways of reading are like those intermediate parts of divided Reading for greatness understanding part where struggles leaves resides; opinion to belongs the part of the line where reading for the timeless issues belongs to the resides. move to beyond There is a next step in Plato where one hypotheses. What realms of personal opinion and the order line where opinion and under.standing are highlighted. I am describing also scholarly understanding in to face one's most invisible assumptions and have the courage to explore them. The this relation possible. to The truth, fiction, forces me to texts fact, attend and to I am calling haunting can make between tension which my sense of meaning, language, life what invisible. Because Confessions various Yet, does translations, not the that we read parts of works. what give an opens or the between I call texts. ghostly. matter because once but in the Confessions first my sense of these terms constitutes my world, the it ground that is so pervasive in me as to have been seem otherworldly, necessary. and that So some translation is these texts are read in true effort of translating begins me and the text. It is also alright For we are not reading authors or books, Authors and their corpuses--intact entities-- artificial appearance of life. The temptation is very great to enter into them and to substitute them for ourselves. In essential. see, may overlap make this task Though be with seen of ghosts from confronting are hard a haunting text, each of us is to see, they, like everything we different perspectives. What haunts me will but will not be identical with what haunts you . And if I that attempt to confront these ghosts, and to exorcise them, then 29 �I will need your help. If you are making that attempt, you will need Descartes, making the effort without help, so lost his sense of mine. perspective that he looked for certainty to hold onto, conflating it with knowledge. So, I uncertain fabric for of me. my own beliefs. the And are text sufficiently In questions of allowing the sense but something are radical nor sufficiently I would have circled endlessly around to haunt me, am I Only by enabled, however dimly, might be answered not by my words but by I have the entirely unphilosophical humility to hear. prospects which I have few notions how even to As bare possibilities, they shatter my pride but in the same proper way open to -~ - that between the thoughts, matters can be one us has done. neither monologue nor Rather, speech must Confession is the acknowledgment of a and the ghost-like text, and it is the commencement of the ghosts in us--those beliefs and opinions have inherited and which invisibly our The Yet one is not confessing for oneself alone nor for exploration we such if at times we do speak that way. confessional. something possibilities which my despair has foreclosed. address argument, ; even which thought is not truth, and their relation to thought. and disturbing hold chasm because they are yours and sufficiently example, Confessions will, moment of my timely, is essential because without it meaning, which explore. be absolutely the possibility that these questions may not concern thought rather These The problems we face are not timeless and decisive--neither conservative. to I need your uncertainties to help reveal to me the They universal. mine. need your certainties to risk exploring what has become desires, and our 30 lives. chart the courses of our It is when a text haunts us �that we are both ready for and in need of conversation. Every that if answer text you ask probably could we read here is such a haunting text. yourself if any of them could be written now. is that more or less they all could. The Insofar as they be written now, they are great or our favorites. Insofar as they not could be, they are opportunity to ourselves. Yet within texts can be also others. have You can see ghosts. Haunting texts afford us the make visible these most salient and elusive aspects of this realm of exploration and change, these great books, and we can love some and recoil from In fact, the same work can be all of these. Everything that I said tonight I have in some measure learned from Augustine. These remarks are to role the book. Augustinian. the Yet, measure Confessions what from I has occupied in my life as my favorite have learned and gained from him takes its true my response to those ghosts which this and other ghostly texts revealed in me. makes me recoil my That I am here to attempt this task, I owe one of and subtlety, from least purposes, and from --· it. That recoiling also makes the Confessions favorite texts. For though I learn from his ability feel see And ultimately, the ghostly quality of the text encouraged and comforted by the similarity of our myself him, ' ultimately I for the first time through our differences recoil. because his world and his God are not mine. 31 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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. 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 Fictional selves and ghosts: St. Augustine's <em>Confessions</em> Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 15, 1988 by Howard Zeiderman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Zeiderman, Howard 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 1988-01-15 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 Zeiderman 1988-01-15 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1fbe0d84d88c7a02fb7645a38bbfbebb.mp3 0c1e3b2ab456cd2bc3a3f6ef61165485 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:10:02 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Political Music of Plato's <em>Timaeus</em> Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 24, 2000, by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. 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 2000-03-24 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_Peter_2000-03-24_ac Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3841" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> (Entitled "Plato's <em>Timaeus</em> and the Will to Order") Subject The topic of the resource Plato. Timaeus Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fbd81987bada9cd1e1370ed18cfcd3b5.pdf cf28a496df6962be09124d65f62e14c1 PDF Text Text • SJC LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2016-2017 FffiST SEMESTER Date Title Speaker August 26, 2016 Mr. Joseph Macfarland Dean St. John's College Annapolis "Two Good Men in Aristotle's Ethics, or does a liberal education improve one's character?" September 2 Mr. Elliott Zuckerman Retired Tutor St. John's College Annapolis All in C Major: On the beginning of Bach's WellTempered Clavier September 9 Mr. Robert Abbott Tutor St. John's College Annapolis "The Horses of Achilles" September 16 Mr. Steven Crockett Tutor St. John's College Annapolis "Who should elect the President?" September 23 (Homecoming Weekend) The Parker Quartet Concert September 30 Dr. Leon Kass Professor Emeritus University of Chicago and Madden-Jewett Chair American Enterprise Institute "The Ten Commandments" October 7 Long Weekend No Lecture October 14 Dr. Matthew Crawford Senior Fellow and author University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture "Attention as a Cultural Problem and the Possibility of Education" 60 College Avenue I Annapolis, Maryland 21401 I 410-263-2371 I www.sjc.edu �Lecture/Concert Series - First Semester 2016-2017 Date Speaker Title October 21 (Parents' Weekend) Faculty Panel on Iliad Book 24 October 28 All College Seminar November 4 Folger Consort "Songs of Shakespeare" November 11 Dr. Jan Blits Professor School of Education University of Delaware "Deadly Virtue: Shakespeare's Macbeth" November 18 King William Players Perfonnance November 25 Thanksgiving Holiday December 2 Michael Grenke Tutor St. John's College Santa Fe "The Meaning of Rome" December 9 Dr. Shobita Satyapal Associate Professor Department of Physics & Astronomy George Mason University "The Connection between Supermassive Black Holes and Galaxies" December 16 January 8 Winter Vacation No Lectures Book 24 of Homer's Iliad �• SJC LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2016-2017 SECOND SEMESTER Date Title Speaker January 13, 2017 Julian Lage - guitar Fred Hersch - piano Jazz Concert January 20 Matthew Linck Tutor St. John's College Annapolis "Thinking about Nature" January 27 All College Seminar February 3 Long Weekend No Lecture February 10 Howard Fisher Tutor St. John's College Santa Fe "In Praise of Caloric" February 17 Richard DeMillo Mellon Grant Speaker Digital Technology "A Revolution in Higher Education: Tales from Unlikely Allies" February 24 Elizabeth Yale University of Iowa "The Books of Nature" March 3March 20 Spring Break No Lectures March 24 Chester Burke Tutor St. John's College Annapolis "Does a Single Photon Exist?" March 31 (Steiner Lecture) Lydia Polgreen Steiner Lecturer The Huffington Post "American Identity in the Age of Trump" 60 College Avenue I Annapolis, Maryland 21401 I 410-263-2371 I www.sjc.edu �Lecture/Concert Series - Second Semester 2016-2017 Date Speaker Title April 7 St. John's College Orchestra Concert April 14 Fawn Trigg NEH Chair Tutor St. John's College Annapolis with Nicolas Pellon - piano "On Some Silences in Beethoven's Piano Sonatas" April 21 (Croquet Weekend) Steven Hancoff (Alumnus) Johann Sebastian Bach and The Six Suites for Cello Solo -A Fanciful and Extravagant Allegory April 28 King William Players Performance May 5 Reality Show No Lecture May 12 Commencement Weekend No Lecture � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 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 Lecture/Concert Schedule 2016-2017 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2016-2017 Academic Year. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Zuckerman, Elliott Abbott, Robert Charles, Jr. Crockett, Steven The Parker Quartet Kass, Leon Crawford, Matthew Folger Consort Blits, Jan H. Grenke, Michael W. Satyapal, Shobita Lage, Julian Hersch, Fred Linck, Matthew S. Fisher, Howard DeMillo, Richard A. Yale, Elizabeth Burke, Chester Polgreen, Lydia St. John's College Orchestra Trigg, Fawn Hancoff, Steven King William Players Relation A related resource August 26, 2016. Macfarland, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2403" title="Two good men in Aristotle's Ethics"><span>Two good men in Aristotle's </span><em>Ethics </em></a>(typescript) September 2, 2016. Zuckerman, Elliott. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/967" title="All in C Major">All in C Major</a> (audio) September 9, 2016. Abbott, Robert. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1078" title="The horses of Achilles">The horses of Achilles</a> (audio) September 9, 2016. Abbott, Robert. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1139" title="The horses of Achilles">The horses of Achilles</a> (typescript) September 16, 2016. Crockett, Steven. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1097" title="Who should elect the President?">Who should elect the President?</a> (audio) September 30, 2016. Kass, Leon. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1254" title="The ten commandments">The ten commandments</a> (audio) December 2, 2016. Grenke, Michael. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1500" title="The meaning of Rome">The meaning of Rome</a> (audio) January 20, 2017. Linck, Matthew. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1798" title="Thinking about nature">Thinking about nature</a> (audio) January 20, 2017. Linck, Matthew. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1784" title="Thinking about nature">Thinking about nature</a> (typescript) February 10, 2017. Fisher, Howard. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1799" title="In praise of Caloric, part one">In praise of Caloric, part one</a> (audio) February 12, 2017. Fisher, Howard. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1800" title="Entropy, the new Caloric, part two">Entropy, the new Caloric, part two</a> (audio) February 17, 2017. DeMillo, Richard. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1928" title="A revolution in higher education">A revolution in higher education</a> (audio) February 24, 2017. Yale, Elizabeth. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1946" title="Books of nature">Books of nature</a> (audio) March 24, 2017. Burke, Chester. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2042" title="Does a single photon exist?">Does a single photon exist?</a> (audio) March 31, 2017. Polgreen, Lydia. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2043" title="American identity in the age of Trump">American identity in the age of Trump</a> (audio) April 21, 2017. Hancoff, Steven. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2657" title="Johann Sebastian Back and The Six Suites for Cell Solo">Johann Sebastian Back and <em>The Six Suites for Cello Solo</em></a> (audio) Friday night lecture Lecture schedule https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/010ab2b1b9e13443efcedcfb26526995.mp3 5ed3e665d11b5c629674c95f7a154aab Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:00:59 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 Are Individuals Beings? Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 20, 2018, by Hannah Hintze as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hintze, Hannah Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-20 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Hintze_Hannah_2018-04-20_ac Subject The topic of the resource Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716. Discours de métaphysique Aristotle. Metaphysics Individuation (Philosophy) Metaphysics Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fa0031f68f8a524015053fc01bd207b3.pdf f46a95e85b7fdcbda1e6f69de8885507 PDF Text Text LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2017-18 St. John’s College – Annapolis, Maryland FALL 2017 SEMESTER Date Event August 25, 2017 “Plutarch’s Swarm” Speaker: Joseph Macfarland. Dean St. John’s College, Annapolis September 1 All-College Art Discussion September 8 (Homecoming Weekend) Concert Jason Vieaux, Classical Guitar September 15 “Abraham Lincoln and the Daughters of Dred Scott: A Reflection on the Declaration of Independence” Speaker: Diana Schaub, Professor of Political Science Loyola University September 22 “Recognizing Odysseus” Speaker: Margaret Kirby, Tutor St. John’s College, Annapolis September 29 “Music and the Problem of Human Desire” Speaker: Gregory Freeman, Tutor St. John’s College, Annapolis October 6 Long Weekend No lecture October 13 Concert The Parker Quartet October 20 All-College Seminar 60 College Avenue | Annapolis, Maryland 21401 | 410-263-2371 | sjc.edu �October 27 “God and Philosophy in Descartes’ Meditations” Speaker: Henry Higuera, Tutor St. John’s College, Annapolis November 3 (Parents’ Weekend) “The Student, by Anton Chekhov: A Story About Us Told and Glanced At by Louis Petrich” Speaker: Louis Petrich, Tutor St. John’s College, Annapolis November 10 “’Be a sinner and sin boldly’ – Martin Luther and Christian Freedom” Speaker: Tom May, Tutor St. John’s College, Annapolis November 17 “At the Crossroads of the Cave: Plato and Heidegger on History and Nihilism.” Speaker: Gregory Fried, Professor & Chair Department of Philosophy Suffolk University Boston November 24 Thanksgiving Holiday No lecture December 1 “The Significance of Quantum Mechanics” Speaker: Bernhardt Trout, Professor of Chemical Engineering MIT December 8 John by Annie Baker King William Players December 15 – January 7 Winter Vacation No lectures 60 College Avenue | Annapolis, Maryland 21401 | 410-263-2371 | sjc.edu �SPRING 2018 SEMESTER Date Event January 12, 2018 “Duns Scotus’s Modal Argument for the Existence of God—An Introduction” Speaker: Jim Carey, Tutor St. John’s College, Santa Fe January 19 “Hume on Animals” Speaker: Aaron Garrett Department of Philosophy Boston University January 26 “On Aquinas” Speaker: André Barbera, Tutor St. John’s College, Annapolis February 2 Long Weekend No lecture February 9 Concert Nordic Voices February 16 “Franklin, Autobiography, and the St. John’s Program” Speaker: Matthew Davis, Dean St. John’s College, Santa Fe February 23 All College Seminar March 2 – 18 Spring Break No lectures March 23 “Visual Epistemology—A humanist perspective” Speaker: Johanna Drucker Department of Information Studies UCLA 60 College Avenue | Annapolis, Maryland 21401 | 410-263-2371 | sjc.edu �March 30 (Good Friday) Steiner Lecture “What was the Purpose of Archimedes’ Floating Bodies”? Speaker: Reviel Netz Stanford University April 6 “The Wonder in the Word ‘Open’” Speaker: Dan Harrell, Tutor St. John’s College, Annapolis April 13 Kristensen Lecture “Utopia, Ideology and Grand Strategy in the 21st Century” Speaker: Arthur Herman, Author April 20 “Are individuals beings?” Speaker: Hannah Hintze, NEH Chair, Tutor St. John’s College, Annapolis April 27 The President by Ferenc Molnar King William Players May 3 Reality Show 60 College Avenue | Annapolis, Maryland 21401 | 410-263-2371 | sjc.edu � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 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 Lecture/Concert Schedule 2017-18 Description An account of the resource Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2017-2018 Academic Year. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Office of the Dean Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2017-2018 Academic Year Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Vieaux, Jason Schaub, Diana Kirby, Margaret Freeman, Gregory A. The Parker Quartet Higuera, Henry, 1952- Petrich, Louis May, Thomas Fried, Gregory, 1961- Trout, Bernhardt L. Carey, Jim Garrett, Aaron Barbera, André Nordic Voices (Musical group) Davis, Matthew Drucker, Johanna, 1952- Netz, Reviel Harrell, Daniel M., 1961- Herman, Arthur, 1956- Hintze, Hannah King William Players Relation A related resource August 25, 2017. Macfarland, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3106" title="Plutarch's swarm">Plutarch's swarm</a> (audio) September 22, 2017. Kirby, Margaret. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3187" title="Recognizing Odysseus">Recognizing Odysseus</a> (audio) September 22, 2017. Kirby, Margaret. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3186" title="Recognizing Odysseus">Recognizing Odysseus</a> (typescript) October 27, 2017. Higuera, Henry. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3447" title="God and philosophy in Descartes' Meditations">God and philosophy in Descartes' <em>Meditations </em></a>(audio) November 3, 2017. Petrich, Louis. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3450" title="The Student, by Anton Chekhov">The Student, by Anton Chekhov</a> (audio) November 10, 2017. May, Tom. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3454" title="Be a sinner and sin boldly">Be a sinner and sin boldly</a> (audio) November 10, 2017. May, Tom. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3457" title="Be a sinner and sin boldly">Be a sinner and sin boldly</a> (typescript) November 17, 2017. Fried, Gregory. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3456" title="At the crossroads of the cave">At the crossroads of the cave</a> (audio) December 1, 2017. Trout, Bernhardt. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3461" title="The significance of quantum mechanics">The significance of quantum mechanics</a> (audio) March 23, 2018. Drucker, Johanna. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3803" title="Visual epistemology">Visual epistemology</a> (audio) March 30, 2018. Netz, Reviel. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3805" title="What was the purpose of Archimedes' Floating Bodies?">What was the purpose of Archimedes' <em>Floating Bodies</em>?</a> (audio) April 6, 2018. Harrell, Daniel. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3819" title="The wonder in the word &quot;open&quot;">The wonder in the word "open"</a> (audio) April 13, 2018. Herman, Arthur. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3828" title="Utopia, ideology and grand strategy in the 21st century">Utopia, ideology and grand strategy in the 21st century</a> (audio) April 20, 2018. Hintze, Hannah. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3832" title="Are individuals beings?">Are individuals beings?</a> (audio) Friday night lecture Lecture schedule https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/176882998d937da030589770d4de5b8a.mp3 8618d1601e8b80ee89ff4d0fbb2d3541 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:41:21 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 Wonder in the Word “Open” Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 6, 2018, by Daniel Harrell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Harrell, Daniel Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-06 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Harrell_Daniel_2018-04-06 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1fccdde1da24919a3ff547d22c51982d.mp3 4fc8184cf38688d98407960e2ad4f645 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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 260) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:07:20 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hegel's logic of desire Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 24, 1995 by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. 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 1995-03-24 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 1995-03-24 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3840" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/5e18dd954571a73627d3a66a52b81c27.mp3 e96dc6a97fe49551e764d9a9376a4cd7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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 audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:59:23 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 Dante and Ulysses: A Reading of <em>Inferno </em>XXVI Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 27, 1989, by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. 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 1989-01-27 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_Peter_1989-01-27_ac Subject The topic of the resource Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Inferno. Canto 26 Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Characters. Odysseus (Greek mythology) Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/5a488a13fa594175b55aad4aa8244228.mp3 b25fc3485ffe19d95ca5861fa1713aed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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 652 v. 1 & 2) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:12:09 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The song of Timaeus Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 13, 1984 by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. 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 1984-04-13 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 1984-04-13 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3838" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e9ac1965a106eed57927fc1feb856d20.mp3 92b935afbb39b0c76b45623197ffe0f2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:53:47 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 What was the purpose of Archimedes' <em>Floating Bodies</em>? (Steiner Lecture) Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 30, 2018 by Reviel Netz as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Netz, Reviel Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-03-30 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Netz_Reviel_2018-03-30 Friday night lecture Steiner lecture