12 20 453 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f727c3af49e6189da435e07c2bf803ed.mp3 b68a444242017856e1a17281af33fe4b 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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.) 01:15:48 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 Visual epistemology: a humanist perspective Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 23, 2018 by Johanna Drucker as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Drucker, Johanna, 1952- 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 2018-03-23 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 Drucker 3-23-18 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/af9e2f7a3e8e219edaab8a6491689c2b.mp3 7c26ea2a57fe5d2cf2e20bb5475729ba 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 287) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:47:01 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 Ass's Head: Translation and Metamorphosis Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 18, 1992, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992-09-18 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 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3792" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Tuck 1992-09-18 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4c7710e70d6cac9966a73a7676861252.mp3 6e6007ff4d629ff3bc2b61071fd12fe7 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 747) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:04 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 Gargantua's Games Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 16, 2009, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Tuck describes his lecture: "Gargantua and Pantagruel, by François Rabelais, is one of the great masterpieces of European literature. It was published serially, beginning in the 1530's. It is a wild, brawling, bewildering, crazily funny book, notorious in its own time for its alleged atheism and obscenity. Its influence on subsequent prose fiction has been enormous, and it was a crucial event in the formation of the modern French language. Rabelais was a hugely learned man, a humanist and a disciple of Erasmus, and his book is enthusiastically strewn with allusions to Plato, Homer, and other Greek authors that had been newly rediscovered in the early Renaissance. But few learned authors have worn their learning as lightly as Rabelais, and the book is also uncannily modern, edgy and subversive. Until recently it was a fixture on the reading list at St. John's. I hope to show that it is a book we cannot do without. The lecture will not presume any previous acquaintance with the book, and it will be R-rated (for language)." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-01-16 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_Tuck_Jonathan_2009-01-16_ac Subject The topic of the resource Rabelais, François, approximately 1490-1553? Gargantua et Pantagruel Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/5f430d854a6e8f8acd322c5b7156a325.mp3 01de2a3916aeeef3c4951ce8d7796ba9 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 708) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:59:00 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Baudelaire's Swan Song Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 13, 2006, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006-10-13 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 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3797" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Tuck 2006-10-13 Subject The topic of the resource Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/53f44ceb748e50bb2f9d5024f356698b.mp3 fb7b944aabe783f740114e6adb831c0e 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 55) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:04:59 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 Restoring Amends: Forgiveness, Philosophy, and the Shape of Shakespeare's Comedies Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 3, 2003, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003-10-03 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 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3796" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Tuck 2003-10-03 Subject The topic of the resource Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Comedies Comic, The, in literature Comedy Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0925f6bf43157991e821d8069a0139ad.pdf 127328a020940f6684ba06d27e1dd960 PDF Text Text Baudelaire's Swan Song A lecture by Jonathan Tuck Delivered at St. John's College, Annapolis-October 13, 2006 This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Brother Robert Smith. The late Reverend J. Winfree Smith, a long-time Annapolis tutor, a historian of the New Program, an Anglican priest, a scholar and a Virginia gentleman of the old school, used to assert that Charles Baudelaire was a greater poet than Homer. Winfree's view counts for quite a lot with me, but I would not go that far. I am willing to say that Baudelaire is the greatest poet of the last two hundred years or so, the first and most essential of"modern" writers and the one who best articulates our own feelings of what it is to be modern. And I think that Le Cygne is Baudelaire's greatest poem, although perhaps not his most typical one. This valuation sets the bar quite high enough for me, for this evening at least. Thus, for about the last twenty years, I have held the writing of this lecture before me as a daunting but imperative task. I have a further reason for trepidation: I believe that it's indispensable, before discussing any poem, first to read it aloud. But I am keenly aware that, unlike some of you, I am very far from a native or even a fluent speaker of French,. My hope is that in enunciating the poem aloud, I can bring out some of its metrical features through a kind of exaggeration; that may compensate you for having to hear my accented reading. So here it is-those without French can follow along on the right-hand side of the handout. [The handout, with French text and translation, is appended.] �The poem begins abruptly; let that be my excuse for doing so as well. Andromaque,je pense avous-in spite of the formal vous, the tone is oddly familiar, almost a postcard salutation. The abruptness comes partly from a metrical feature: Most of the poem will be written in classical alexandrines, twelve-syllable lines with a caesura or break in the middle-the most common meter in traditional French poetry. But this line is a "vers romantique," or "trimetre": Instead of 6+6, the syllables divide in three groups of four: I 2 3 4 I 2 3 4 I 23 4 Andromaque, lje pense avous! I Ce petitfleuve ... The trimetre adds rapidity to the opening as well as a less conventionally "poetic" tone. It is a startling opening, memorable in the same way as, say, the first line of John Donne' s "The Canonization": For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love. Andromaque, je pense avous. "Andromache, I'm thinking of you!" Despite the apparently simple directness of this address, there are complications and contradictions almost immediately. For example, in the phrase ce petitfleuve, ce could mean "this" or "that." Where is the speaker? Is he pointing to a little stream in Paris (perhaps the swan's waterless spring, or even the Seine itself), or is he remembering Andromache's stream far away? This latter seems more likely; but then how can that stream have made his memory fertile so as to make him think of her? Wouldn't he already have had to be thinking of her, in order to be thinking of the false SimoYs so as to have it fertilize his memory? And if his memory is already.fertile, why must it be feconde? The majesty of her widow's griefs is immense, etymologically, "unmeasurable"- and I should say at the outset that with Baudelaire, as with Milton in English, we should always be mindful of 2 �the Latin or Greek, or sometimes even the English etymology of a French word. The grief is immeasurable-yet the comparison of the size of the griefs mirror, that is the stream, before and after it is swelled by her tears, suggests the possibility of measurement. Paradoxically, the word majeste (etymologically, "greatness") is applied to Andromache's widowhood, when she is no longer a queen. Although the mirror is "poor" and "sad," the majesty of the sorrows has some sort of splendor: resplendit is a strong word. A mirror should give back a faithful replica of the original; but this mirror seems to enhance what it contains. In all these ways and probably more, the conversational simplicity of the opening is deceptive; when we look carefully, the details of the first stanza qualify and complexify the apparently casual trimetre of the first line. I would like to add here that it is an enduring mystery to me, and I think it should be to all of us, that a great poem is an inexhaustible source of new insights. The more we look at the stanza, the more intricate and interesting it becomes. How is it possible to go on finding more, even after the fiftieth or five hundredth reading? Does the poem change because each reading of it changes us? In this way, the poem itself may be like Andromache's little river: We water it with our tears, it grows for us, and more splendor shows through it. The use of the trimetre is primarily identified with one romantic poet, the most important literary figure in France at the time of the poem's writing: Victor Hugo, who is also the object of the poem's dedication. I say "the most important figure in France," but in fact at that time Hugo was not in France. He was on the isle of Guernsey, in political exile-a fact which is crucial for the poem. Perhaps the meter of the first line obliquely implies that the speaker is "thinking" not only of Andromache, but also of Hugo. Does he mean to suggest some sort of identification between them? We shall see this kind of 3 �indirection repeated in the poem; to think of one thing is to think of another, or of many others. Apparently distinct images are conflated, and each one seems to awaken a series of connections that is finally open-ended. The speaker is "thinking of' a literary character; in the course of the poem, this act of thinking will be extended to countless other characters, people, and animals. We will have to wonder what kind of thinking it is. Should we consider the poem a specimen of the stream of consciousness, an exercise in the association of ideas, or a Proustian study of involuntary memory? Can we reconstruct the order that leads the speaker to think of Andromache? We learn almost immediately that he refers not to the Andromache of the Iliad, nor to the Andromaque of Racine's great play. In its first publication, Baudelaire's poem bore a Latin epigraph: falsi Simoentis ad undam, "to the wave of the false Simols" (Aeneid III. 302); but even without the epigraph, several of the details of this first stanza make it clear that we are to think of an episode in Book III of Vergil's Aeneid. Aeneas and his followers have fled from burning Troy and wandered for an unspecified period of time in the Eastern Mediterranean. They land at Buthrotum, on the western coast of the Greek peninsula, near the island of Corcyra. There they learn that Andromache has come, after her enslavement by Pyrrus (also known as Neoptolemus), the son of her husband's slayer Achilles. She has been cast off and given to a new husband: Helenus, a militarily undistinguished son of Priam who has also been made a slave. Together they have built a miniature replica of Troy there on the coast of Epirus, and there they stay, almost in suspended animation, mourning the past that is gone. In Vergil's poem the episode serves as one of a number of false starts for Aeneas and the Trojans. They too must build a new city, a home to replace the Troy from which history has exiled them; but successive prophecies make it clear that they cannot simply 4 �dwell in the past. It is their fate and their burden to create a city that is both old and new, inaugurating a new era in human history. The pathos of Andromache, brooding over her memories, is a kind of trap; she is stuck in a false replica of her past happiness. The theme of building, or rebuilding, recurs in Vergil's poem. Before he flees from Troy, Aeneas is shown a mysterious vision of the gods tearing down the city's walls: He sees that the city's destruction is an unalterably fated historical necessity. After he leaves Epirus, Aeneas is driven by storm to the coast of Carthage, where he sees Dido's Tyrians building a new city. In longing for his old home and the new one so far in the future, Aeneas exclaims, 0 fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt! ("Fortunate those whose walls are already rising," Aeneid I.437). Later, in Book IV, Jupiter through his emissary Mercury will scold Aeneas for helping to build those same walls, the citadel of what will be Rome's arch-foe. Once again, as in Troy, he must forsake what he loves and abandon Dido in favor of the grim uncertainties of his Roman future. Again in Book VIII, when Aeneas and King Evander visit the site where Rome is destined to be, the poet shows us a vision of the new city, glorious in shining marble, rising in speech from its present humble origins. The present is almost illusory; what is more real is the beauty of Rome's idealized future. Yet for Aeneas, that future is impossibly remote; we are told that he will not live to see the walls of his true city rise. Part of the mood of grave melancholy that suffuses Vergil's great poem comes from the sense that fulfillment is not possible in the here and now; it is an ever-receding goal, a memory of what is lost or a glimpse of an unattainable future. Clearly it is a matter of some importance in the Aeneid what walls are built, when and where and by whom. So we must wonder when the speaker of Baudelaire's poem moves from the Vergilian Andromache to the subject of cities being destroyed and 5 �reconstructed. The new Place du Carrousel of line 6 is a part of Baron Haussmann' s vast project of urban renewal in the Paris of the 1850's. "The old Paris is no more!" In the third stanza we are given a vivid picture, in the mind's eye, of the fragmentation and dislocation during the building process. Rough-hewn capitals and shafts, the neoclassical pillars of the new Paris that will be, are heaped among the debris of the old. Little neighborhoods, huddled cozily together, must give way to imposing new squares and boulevards, wider and more vast, built in a neoclassical style reminiscent of the rebuilding of Rome by Augustus in Vergil's own time. (Augustus, it was said, "found Rome clay and left it marble.") There is much that may seem attractive about this building project. Like Washington, D.C, rising majestically out of a malarial swamp, Haussmann's building plan radiates all the confidence of the Enlightenment in the possibility of new beginnings. We remember Descartes, in the Discourse on Method, claiming that the spontaneous jumble of the old city of the mind must be razed to the ground in order to start over in a truly rational way. The Parisian project had been commissioned by Louis Napoleon, who had taken the title of Emperor Napoleon III. One of his first statements, after assuming the imperial throne, was that he wanted to be a new Augustus-to leave Paris marble. Yet many contemporary observers spoke negatively of the Haussmannisation - the Haussmannization--of Paris. Psychologically, its effect was to make the city less of a community, more depersonalized, more alienating, more of a spectacle. As might also have been said of the Augustan building plan, Louis' intentions were materially progressive but politically reactionary. Part of the point was to get the volatile, politicized poor people out of the city center, and by widening the streets to make them harder to barricade, as had been done in recent uprisings. Then, as now, "urban renewal" 6 �was also "urban removal." Apart from the political aspects of Haussman's project, the Emperor hoped to inherit some of the imperial grandeur of his great-uncle Napoleon I, the real Emperor. Louis, like the false SimoYs, is only a simulacrum, an inadequate substitute; among other protesters, Victor Hugo was exiled for saying so. In spite of all the neoclassical architecture, or perhaps because of it, there is a modem tawdriness to the new Paris, at least for Baudelaire. How would he have reacted if he could have known that in the first few years of our twenty-first century, that same Place du Carrousel would become the site of an underground shopping mall? At this point in our reading, we may think that the building theme is the precise associative link that causes the speaker to think of Andromache. Like Andromache's replica of Troy, Haussmann's building offers a false image of the past. Paris is not Rome, as the replica is not Troy; the sterility of Haussmann's neoclassicizing does not meet our human needs: La forme d 'une ville Change plus vile, helas! que le coeur d 'un mortel. (lines 7-8) But tonally, the analogy is not quite right. Andromache mourns over a likeness that seeks to preserve what is past and gone. Haussman's old/new constructions do not seek to preserve the speaker's precious memories; rather, they have displaced and supplanted them. Andromache's building project, while misguided, is an act oflove and of solidarity with the past; the same cannot be said for Haussmann. The poem carries us further in search of the image that prompted the thought of Andromache. And thus, circuitously, we arrive at the swan. 7 �At one place later in the poem-lines 36-7-the speaker seems to make it explicit that his thought of Andromache had been prompted by the image of the swan: Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m 'opprime: Je pense amon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous, Comme des exiles, ridicule et sublime Et range d'un desir sans treve! et puis avous, Andromaque ... And before this Louvre, an image oppresses me: I think of my great swan, with his crazed gestures, Ridiculous and sublime, as exiles are, And gnawed by a ceaseless desire! And then of you, Andromague ... [emphasis mine] If we take this statement as definitive, perhaps we could reconstruct the sequence of associations somewhat like this: The speaker is crossing the Place du Carrousel, the area between the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens, sometime in the late 1850's. As a selfstyled "dandy" andjldneur, he is a habitue of the streets and the squares of Paris. The Louvre too is a familiar haunt for him; he is an art critic-when he is working, that isand his descriptions in this poem bespeak a painterly eye. The Carrousel is "new" because it was newly rebuilt as the very first part of Haussmann' s project (begun in 1853, though the dismantling of the buildings on the old square had begun even in the 1830's). The poem's speaker remembers, without much fondness, the intermediate period of construction, as he recounts in the third stanza. Even before then, more than ten years before, when "the old Paris" still was, the area had been filled with the booths of petty tradesman. The little zoo from which the swan escaped was part of the motleyness of that landscape. It was then, on a cold clear morning, that he saw the swan; and that pathetic vision prompted the thought of Andromache then, or prompts it now. 8 �Visually, Andromache and the swan have little in common: She is bent downward, "hunched in ecstasy" over Hector's cenotaph, weeping into the little stream of the false Simors. Though normally a swan's head would curve gracefully downward, this swan twitches nervously and stretches his head upwards, "like the man in Ovid." In Book I of the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells us that at the creation, man was made with upright posture, in the gods' image, so that he could look up and view the heavens. It is notable that Ovid's man looks up in proud recognition and praise; the passage was much admired by the Renaissance Humanists as an emblem of human dignity. In contrast, the swan looks up frantically in an attitude of desperation and reproach. But elsewhere in Ovid's poem, there is no lack of figures that reproach the gods for injustice-and some of them are talking animals, or humans metamorphosed into animals. No fewer than three of Ovid's characters are named Cygnus or Cycnus, "swan" in Latin from the Greek KUKVoc;, and are eventually transformed into that bird. The first of these (in Met. IL36780) is a dear friend of Phaethon who pines away in grief after the boy's fall from the sun god's chariot. After graphically describing the transformation of Cygnus into an ugly, ungainly new bird, Ovid comments: fit nova Cygnus avis nee se caeloque Jovique tradit, ut iniuste missi memor ignis ab illo; stagna petit patulosque lacus ignemque perosus quae colat elegit contraria flumina flammis. He becomes a new bird, a swan; nor does he entrust himself to the sky and Jove, remembering the fiery thunderbolt unjustly hurled by him (at Phaethon); he seeks out ponds and wide lakes, and hating fire, he chooses water, fire's opposite, for his abode. (Metamorphoses II. 377-380) Although Baudelaire is unambiguous about his source in Ovid's Book I, several of the details in this passage in Book II seem to fit well with the description of the swan in the 9 �French poem-not only the grotesquerie, the pathos, and the profusion of vivid details in the physical description, but the connection of the swan with water, and his implied reproach of a god's injustice. So Baudelaire seems to have made a rather complex literary allusion: The local reference to Metamorphoses I.85-6 blurs into the passage from Book II, and thence into a more general recollection of the poem and even of its author-for Ovid too was an exile. Perhaps that is why he is mentioned by name, unlike Vergil and the other authors alluded to in the text. Or perhaps Baudelaire's leamedsounding footnote reference to Ovid is ironic; we should be suspicious ofall this literariness. If the swan does not look like Andromache, he resembles her in other ways. He has "escaped from his cage" but he is still a captive of his new environment, far from his natural home. Andromache has been freed from immediate servitude by the death of her captor Pyrrhus, but she is still a prisoner of her widowhood and the loss of Troy. The swan is referred to as la bete (line 20); in spite of his apparent possession of logos, he is a brute beast. Andromache's slavery has made her into a vii betail, a lowly chattel-an English word related to "cattle," as betail is related to bete. Her mute misery has made her into something like a dumb animal. We remember the speaker's passing comment: "The form of a city changes more quickly, alas! Than the heart of a mortal" (II. 7-8, my emphasis). There are mortals who are not humans, the swan for instance. Later in the poem, we see other animals: The list of exiles alluded to includes Romulus and Remus, who were cast out as infants and supposedly suckled by a benevolent she-wolf (line 49), as Livy and Plutarch tell us. Other orphans dry out like flowers (l. 48), while there are those who are watered with tears (l.46). Evidently the metamorphoses of sorrow can even make us into plants, as well as animals. 10 �Judging from Part II, we have been supposing that the association of ideas has led the poem's speaker from his recollection of seeing the swan to thinking of the literary figure of Andromache. But the opposite movement-from Andromache to the swanseems to be implied in the very first stanza: The little stream of the false Simols has quickened, made fecund, the already fertile memory of the speaker. This act of insemination seems to introduce the recollections of the construction site of a few years before and of the old Paris, a few years before that. The poem goes out of its way to take us from Andromache to the swan, rather than the other way around. It is only in the second part that we go from the Louvre to the swan to Andromache. Does the sequence of associations matter? It does seem to matter to Baudelaire; he emphasizes it, even though he seems to contradict himself. The swan is at the center of the poem, a mythe etrange et fatal, and the sight of him makes interpretive demands on the speaker and on us. There is a grand rhetorical build-up leading to the bird's appearance. Starting from line l 3: Las 'etalaitjadis une menagerie; La je vis, un matin, a l 'heure OU sous !es cieu:x: Froids et clairs le Travails 'eveille, ou la voirie Pousse un sombre ouragan dans I 'air silencieux Un cygne ... (ll.13-17) Notice the sound effects of the first line. The word etalait, "displayed" or "spread out," is itself splayed,_spread out by the metre, as are the four-syllable words menagerie and silencieu:x:. (Baudelaire, like so many other great poets, is a virtuoso at using polysyllabic words. An analogous case in English would be Marvell's wonderful lines, "My vegetable love would grow" and "Deserts of vast eternity.") The wordjadis, which was also used in the first stanza, is a fancy, literary word, an old-fashioned word. I rendered 11 �it as "long ago," but perhaps a better translation might be "in days of yore"; we think of Villon's great poem, "Balade des dames du temps Jadis," with its famous refrain, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" The archaic diction gives a kind of narrative dignity to the occasion. (C.S. Lewis was playing on these connotations when he used the wordjadis as the proper name for the White Witch ofNamia; unfortunately, in Anglicized pronunciation, it tends to come out sounding rather like "Gladys.") After this first line, we get the anaphoric repetition of La, and thenje vis, "I saw," using the passe simple, the past definite or the historical past, a formal tense not used in conversation. Other than here, the poem uses this tense only in the first stanza, in recounting Andromache's plight. The tale of seeing of the swan has become a momentous narrative, even a heroic one. The elaborate parenthetical characterization of the time of the day becomes almost like one of Homer's long-tailed similes. Travail is capitalized to drive it home that we are in the realm of allegorical personifications; and the road-gang, the early morning streetsweepers, are given an epic dignity with their dark hurricane of dust. Yet the prosaic word voirie strains against the ostentatious literariness of its context. (Walter Benjamin uses voirie as an example in claiming that Baudelaire was the first French poet to use the lowly, anti poetic diction of urban grunge, of the humbler parts of the life of the city.) All this while, the syntax of the sentence has been put on hold: We are still waiting, even into the enjambment between the stanzas, for an object for the verb vis. Finally and melodramatically, the swan appears. As we are told at the beginning of Part II, tout pour moi devient allegorie. These sudden, visionary encounters in the streets of Paris are meaningful-they signify things beyond themselves. Hence the notorious pun in the poem's title: cygne, C-Y-G-N-E, "swan," is indistinguishable, when pronounced, from signe, S-1-G-N-E, "sign." If Paris is 12 �a wilderness in which exiles wander, it is full of symbols and signs, like the temple of nature in Baudelaire's poem Correspondances. The narrator is like a prophet in the desert; an image is imparted to him which "oppresses" or even obsesses him, and he must give it voice. The swan, too, seems to be seeking for a sign in asking for the rain to rain and the lightning to roar. Signs are fertile; they evoke imaginings and memories. They have a private or hidden symbolic significance. Yet the words "myth" and "allegory" implicitly give a public character to the meaning of the sign of the swan. Le Cygne is one of a series of poems, in the larger volume of Les Fleurs du ma!, that have the subtitle, Tableaux Parisiens- "Parisian sketches," "scenes," "landscapes," "portraits," or "pictures." Within that subsection, it is the first of a group of four poems that focus on figures that are part of the street life of Paris. The first three are all dedicated to Victor Hugo. The second one tells of a nightmarish, visionary encounter with seven identically hideous, diabolical old men. It is this poem that begins with the lines that so fascinated T.S. Eliot: Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves, Ou le spectre en pleinjour raccroche le passant! Teeming city, city full of dreams, Where spectres in broad daylight accost the passerby! The city, where we walk alone and anonymous, presents spectacles that are wonderful and terrible. Baudelaire is the quintessential poet of the city, which accounts for much of his uncanny modernity. Like Dickens, the great novelist of urban life, he portrays the vast metropolis as an infernal region whose denizens lose their humanity; they become machines or monsters. At times the speaker of these poems seems to be a voyeur or a sensationalist, seeking out degradation, pathos and despair. The third and fourth poems that are grouped with Le Cygne show us their speakers seeking out grotesques to gaze 13 �upon in fascination: Little old ladies who walk alone, each with a story that we will never know, or blind men, sleepwalking their way through spaces that remain inscrutable to them. In these cases, the signs remain untranslated; their power lies in their very otherness, their mystery. But this poem goes beyond sensationalism or voyeurism: the other must not remain alien. We must take ownership of it, interpret it, identify with it. Hence we are offered a number of possible ways to make some translation, some public sense of the sign of the swan. First, and inevitably, it must be said that birds in general and the swan in particular provide a venerable image of the poet. In Republic X, the Myth of Er, the archpoet Orpheus chooses for his next life the form of a swan (620 A). (It's true, however, that at Phaedo 84E Socrates uses the swan's song to represent prophecy, rather than poetry.) Vergil was often referred to as "the swan of Mantua," and Ben Jonson apostrophizes Shakespeare as "sweet swan of Avon." Both birds and bards sing, of course, and perhaps equally importantly, they both fly. Socrates says in the Ion that a poet is a light thing and a winged and holy one (534B). Poetic inspiration must seem to be like flying, taking the singer closer to the heavens; perhaps this resemblance is the source of Baudelaire's poem Elevation. We might also think of Milton's adventurous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues . Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. (Paradise Lost, I. 13-16). For the swan in particular,we may refer, among other ancient sources, to Horace's Ode 11.20. Here, in the climactic last ode of the second book, the poet prophesies that he will never die; rather he will be transformed into a swan, soaring across vast distances. 14 �All of these literary swans assert the power of poetry to triumph over time and even death. They are images of ideality, pure and beautiful. And it is an indication of poetry's power over us that we do often, even usually, think of swans as beautiful birds, elegant and dignified, suited to poetic elevation. Baudelaire's great successor Mallarme appeals almost exclusively to this tradition in a famous sonnet (Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd 'hui) which is an obvious hommage to his master, Baudelaire. In it Mallarme portrays a doomed swan as frozen in a beautiful, clear, reflective lake of ice. Valery, too, among many other poets, uses the figure of the swan repeatedly to represent the ideal of la poesie pure, "pure poetry". Sometimes that ideal is challenged by the physical world; not all bird-poets are presented to us as soaring in flight. In one of his best-known poems, Baudelaire offers a memorable picture of the poet as an albatross trapped on the deck of a ship, where his huge awkward wings and ungainly gait make him an object of derision for the sailors. His native element is the air; there he is sublime (he "haunts the tempest"), but when earth-bound he is ridiculous. But once again, there seems to be a certain cognitive dissonance between literary tradition and our actual, concrete experience. As everyone knows, real swans are not particularly known for their prowess either in singing or in flying, as Ovid points out in his tale of Cygnus. Baudelaire's swan can do neither. Reminiscent of the albatross, he is described as comme les exiles, ridicule et sublime (line 35). His native element is not air but water, his beau lac natal (line 22). The unfriendly environment in which he is trapped is dry above all; the only tempest is a hurricane of dust raised by the sweepers. In that same dust he nervously "bathes" his wings, next to a stream without water. Here is another dissimilarity with Andromache: Her false Simoi"s is a real stream, at least, one which is swollen by her tears. That same stream makes fertile the speaker's memory: Is 15 �there a suggestion here of poetic inspiration? Not only do poets fly; they drink from the sacred springs of Parnassus and Helicon. The swan, ironically, is inspired to speech, if not to song, by the absence of water: Eau, quand done pleuvras-tu? Quand tonneras-tu, foudre? ). That line of speech-the swan's swan song, if you will-is metrically ugly, for dramatic purposes, but almost frantically over-rhetorical, as well as meteorologically confusing: It becomes ridiculous by straining towards the poetical sublime. Baudelaire is an ironic risk-taker here, mocking his own classical and formal bent. Perhaps it is important that despite our experience, we normally think of swans as beautiful birds, Even though there is little of this dignity in the bird that we see in Baudelaire's poem, we are meant to feel that his awkwardness here does not fully define him. How different the poem would feel if it were entitled "The Duck" or "The Goose"! The image that we actually see of the swan here is conflated with a literary tradition of sublime swans, and both images are Le Cygne. In this sense too, the swan points beyond himself, as the punning title says. The beautiful, poetically traditional swan is both present and absent. Baudelaire both affirms and subverts that tradition, and the power of poetry itself. I hope no one is surprised or disappointed to find that this poem, like most poems, is at least partly about poetry. It is as a poet that Baudelaire identifies with the albatross. May it not be as a poet that the speaker identifies with the swan? Both are exiles, like Andromache, Ovid and Victor Hugo. But unlike the swan, the speaker seems to be inspired and nourished by his sorrow. The thought of Vergil's poem makes him fertile. Perhaps he is one of those who are suckled by Sorrow, the good she-wolf. Like Andromache, too, he is an imitator: His memories make sad little replicas of his 16 �cherished past, little mirrors held up to nature. For Baudelaire as for Hesiod, recollection is an image of poetic inspiration; Memory is the mother of the Muses. In the second part of the poem, the speaker's "thinking" moves from the Louvre to the swan to Andromache. The movement seems to be away from physical experience, toward the recollection of poetic allusions; the poem is on the verge of becoming merely litterature. And indeed, the most flowery and self-consciously poetic moment in the poem comes at the third stanza of the second part (lines 37-40), with its classical parallelisms and theatrical declamation: Veuve d'Hector, helas! et femme d'Helenus! Many of the more old-fashioned commentators on Le Cygne, especially the French ones, have singled this stanza out for special praise, as a kind of emotional climax of the poem. But they are misreading it, I think. The true climax is in the shock of the real, in the next stanza. The speaker's "thinking" moves from Andromache to the unforgettable portrait of the tubercular black woman-apparently another chance meeting in the Paris streets, like the swan. In one limited way, this stanza is another literary quotation-not of Virgil or Ovid, but of Baudelaire himself. Just as the swan is a recension of his earlier image of the albatross, the portrayal of the black woman revisits an earlier poem entitled A une Malabaraise- "To a Girl of Malabar." In it, Baudelaire extols the grace and ease of the Malabar girl as she appears in her native country, lazily sensuous and devoted to her master. He implores her not to want to go to visit France, where she will only find cold, fog and isolation. Now, in Le Cygne, he imagines the fulfillment of that prophecy of future deracination and exile. Baudelaire may be quoting himself, but the picture we see does not feel like a literary stereotype or an exercise in intertextuality: Je pense ala negresse, amaigrie et phtisique, Pietinant dans la boue, et cherchant, l 'oeil hagard, Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique Derriere la muraille immense du brouillard. 17 �The harsh, brittle alliterations of pense, pietinant, and phtisique recall the jerky motions of the swan. The black woman searches "with haggard eye"-etymologically, an image drawn from falconry. As Othello says of Desdemona, If I do prove her haggard, Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings, I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind To prey at fortune. (IIl.3.260-3) The black woman's eye is keen, but wild-either because it is not domesticated, in the older sense of the word, or because it has been made wild by suffering and deprivation, in the modern, transferred usage. The object of the eye's search is expressed in a magnificent line of classic balance and self-containedness: /es cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique. The chiastic structure-noun-adjective-adjective-noun-seems to wall the beautiful coconut palms off from the haggard, searching eye. The nouns are specific: not just palms but coconut-palms, not just the tropics but Africa. But both the adjectives are oddly abstract: And why "proud Africa"? The same epithet was given to Pyrrhus in just the previous stanza. The trees are called absents, but in context the epithet does not quite make sense. The black woman does not seek the palm trees as "absent"; her hope is to find them as present. The metrical caesura after the word gives us this paradox; but if we run through the caesura and take de as "from," governed by absents, we get a different possibility: The trees she is seeking would be absent from Africa in order to be present in Paris. This makes a certain kind of sense, even if farfetched; except that it is surreal to think of the trees as having moved from Africa to Paris. Nonetheless, we seem to see the trees even though they are absents: Memory and longing give a presence even to absence. The imagination has this power to give a being to nothing. 18 �The last line of the stanza is astonishingly onomatopoetic: Derriere la muraille immense du brouillard There are three "y" sounds, each a semivowel acting as a bridge between vowels that have been crammed into a woozy, destabilizing vowel-hiatus. Like many Europeans, the French do not like two vowel sounds in succession; normally the French language avoids vowel hiatus by the practices of elision and liaison. Like the fog, the line is palpable, yet shapeless-it lacks consonantal definition. Almost all the consonants we do have are liquids-r's, l's and nasals. They make us feel the dank moisture of the vast fog bank. The wall of fog is more literally immeasurable- immense-than the majesty of Andromache's grief in the first stanza. For Baudelaire, as for T.S. Eliot or Arthur Conan Doyle, fog and smoke make the modem city-dweller isolated and anonymous, trapped in his lonely modem consciousness, moving through the dark, infernal regions of Paris or London. We remember the somber hurricane of the street sweepers, at line 16. But there, for the swan, the city was too dry and dusty-Here, for the black woman, it is too wet and chilly. (Ice, as well as fire, appears in Dante's hell.) Each of these elements-earth, air, and water-serves as a kind of prison for an exile far from home. Dryness might seem to be the more primal, archetypal image-a lack of fertility or nourishment, as in Eliot's Waste Land. But the example of the black woman shows us that absence and exile can be either wet or dry, hot or cold. The themes of moisture and nourishment are developed in the next stanza, the last but one in the poem. The speaker thinks of those who "nourish themselves with tears" and "suck the breasts of Sorrow." How can tears and sorrow nourish them? The milk from the breasts of sorrow might be thought to make us even dryer-sadder, more desolate, exiled in more of a waste land-just as a wolf would seem to be an unhealthy wet nurse for human infants. Yet, through some homeopathic mystery, Sorrow is its own 19 �solace and salt tears fertilize the dry ground. The speaker of the poem seems to welcome the sorrow that he shares, vicariously, with Andromache, the swan and the black woman. For him, at least, the role of "exile" seems almost to be assumed voluntarily. There is an ambiguity in the use of the reflexive at line 49: Ainsi, dans la Jaret ou mon esprits 'exile ... [ emphasis mine] Although the normal reading would be as I have translated it, in the passive sense ("my mind is exiled"), it is possible to read this phrase as "my mind exiles itself." Victor Hugo, by this time, was actually a voluntary exile; he had contemptuously refused an amnesty offered him by Louis Napoleon. And Baudelaire himself often seems to be selfexiled, to be his own victim. When he speaks in longing of a tropical paradise now lost, we remember in spite of ourselves that in life rather than art, his only exposure to the tropics was far from idyllic. At the age of twenty, having already shown himself to be a wastrel and an idler, Baudelaire was packed off by his stepfather to India, to serve in the colonial administration. But he got off the boat at the first available island, Mauritius, and took the next ship he could get back to Paris. So much for his longing for the sun on the sea. The tropics for which he yearned were not to be found in this world. This image of Baudelaire as a self-indulgent romantic, choking on his own selfpity, may be the one that some students take away from their sustained encounter with Les Fleurs du Mal. At his worst, he can certainly seem this way. But it seems important that in his unremitting self-scrutiny, he was fully and ironically aware of the indignity of his romantic stance. In Le Cygne, for example, the speaker associates himself with the exile of the swan after having characterized exiles as both ridicuous and sublime. 20 �Baudelaire presents himself as resembling the nervous, convulsively twitching swan or the ungainly albatross, a grotesque figure indulging in incongruously lofty flights of rhetoric. He might even claim that the duality of ridiculous and sublime, of Spleen and Ideal, is a general human trait, common to all those who long for beauty or who pine for home. Perhaps the clearest statement of Baudelaire's aesthetic theory is in Le Peintre de la vie moderne ("The Painter of Modem Life") an essay on the work of the artist Constantin Guys. Here Baudelaire asserts: Beauty is always and inevitably of a double composition. although the impression it produces is single ... [It] is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be ... the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions ... The eternal part of beauty will be veiled and expressed if not by fashion, at least by the particular temperament of the artist. The duality of art is a fatal consequence of the duality of man. Consider, if you will the eternally subsisting part as the soul of art, and the variable element as its body ... [The artist] is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity' ... He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the 1 eternal from the transitory. [The Painter of Modem Life, tr. Jonathan Mayne, pp. 3, 12) The experience of the artist is a heightened or intensified version of common human experience-the experience of "fatal duality." If we want to be schematic, we can make a table of dichotomies that correspond to this duality": Ideal Classic Soul Sublime Elevation versus versus versus versus versus Spleen Romantic Body Ridiculous Depression, or ironic disillusionment 21 �The Eternal Home There Past (or some indefinite future) Then versus versus versus versus versus the Transitory Exile Here Present Now. The "fatal duality" may be seen as a psychological or a spiritual condition; Baudelaire would probably attribute it to the Fall of Adam and Eve. We might infer that we are all self-exiled. I want to focus especially on the last item in my schematic list- "Then versus Now"-because it returns us to the theme of memory. Memory is mentioned four times explicitly in Le Cygne (at lines 5, 32, 49 and 51); but of course it is one of Baudelaire' s great subjects, one to which he returns obsessively. By my count, at least a third of his lyric poems refer to memory, and many of these take it as a principal subject, including such masterpieces as La Vie anterieure, La Chevelure, Harmonie du Soir, Le Ba/con, Une Charogne, Le Voyage, Recueillement. I call your attention especially to the remarkable (and unjustly neglected) second poem of the four which are entitled Spleen ; its first line is J 'ai plus de souvenirs que si j 'avais mi/le ans-" I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old" (LXXV). In that poem there is a striking moment where the complex relation between poety and memory is adumbrated. The speaker says: Je suis un cimetiere abhorre de la lune, Ou comme des remords se trainent de longs vers Qui s 'acharnent toujours sur mes marts /es plus chers. I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, Where like gnawing regrets, long worms drag themselves, Battening always upon my most dear dead. ( LXXV. 8-10) Here the speaker is wholly constituted of his memories, which both make him and unmake him. Through a darkly brilliant pun-vers can mean both "worms" and verses22 �he suggests that poetry is somehow parasitic upon our cherished memories. It is poetry that sucks at the breast of sorrow. In "The Swan," our memories are less destructive-regret, not remorse, is the rule here-but also less available to us. Memory is a locus of unattainable desires, of that which is lost and which can never be regained. We are forever and necessarily drawn toward the beauty and ideality of our memories, which enable our imaginations to transcend for a short while the oppression and the ugliness of the present. Thus they are a source of joy, but also of pain. Our regret for what is lost may also be a kind of guilty remorse for our failure to hold on to what was better; but finally the past is better because it is not now. Similarly in Le Voyage, the long last poem of Les Fleurs du Mal, the destination of the voyage is glamorized by remoteness. Once it is attained, it is found to be insufficient, and a new goal is proposed. A recollection or an anticipated goal is the presence of absence, the being of non-being. In Le Cygne it is epitomized by an empty tomb, a spring without water, the absent coconut palms. Andromache's ecstasy as she hunches before the tomb is also an absence; in a sense she is absent from herself. Time and change steal us from ourselves continually. In its riddling duality memory ' epitomizes human finitude, the paradox of our time-bound existence. Because we all have pasts which are unattainable, we are all in some sense exiles or captives, marooned on the island of the present, lost in its dark forest or trapped in its dry, dusty streets. This universality accounts for the widening circle of reference in the last two stanzas of "The Swan." Here, Baudelaire's speaker is not bemoaning some private grief. From the heaviness of his own memories, his own unbudging melancholy, he reaches out toward nameless hosts of others with sorrows of their own. Like him, they are nourished 23 �by their sorrow; we all feed on our pasts. The catalogue of those objects of his "thinking" is open-ended: The poem's daring last line gives a kind of gravitas to a vague, conversational gesture of inclusion. "Thinking" is no longer a mere exercise in the association of ideas; now it is a moral activity, an active sympathy and concern for all private human pain, a kind of charity. In its outward voyaging, the thinking of the speaker conflates the swan with the two women, Trojan and African; with the banished poets, Roman Ovid and French Hugo; with wandering founders of cities, Aeneas and Romulus, both founders of the same archetypal city which must be ever rebuilt; and finally with the doomed hero Roland at Roncevaux, blowing out a clarion blast on his horn. The grand allusive sweep of the poem makes it into another instance of epic, like those to which it alludes. The image of Roland's horn in the last stanza raises a number of questions. Like so many of the presences in the poem, it is a literary allusion, and doubly so: not only to the Chanson de Roland, "The Song of Roland," the great French medieval epic, but to a more recent poem, Le Cor ("The Hom") by the romantic poet Alfred de Vigny, which retells Roland's story. Roland is the great champion of the Emperor Charlemagne_ who with a small group of knights forms a rear guard to screen the passage of the Christian army in the pass of Roncevaux. Through an act of treachery they are surrounded by an overwhelming horde of Saracens and, after a gallant defense, annihilated. Roland, the last to fall, sounds his horn to call for help, but only when it is useless; Charlemagne and the Christian army arrive too late. As Vigny tells it, the melancholy sound of the hunter's horn in the wood begets a haunting but fascinating memory of Roland's fate. As in so many cases in Baudelaire's poem, what seems at first to be a mere literary allusion bursts the bounds of art and lays hold of our hearts and our memories. The poem itself is the 24 �speaker' s full blast of the horn. It summons us to think and feel for the pain of others, and to connect it with our own sorrows. Like Roland, we are all doomed-Time, the Enemy, devours our lives-but in our thinking beyond ourselves, we build a different kind of city. In one sense we are all marooned sailors, isolated and forgotten; in our modem plight it seems to us that every man is an island. But here, as seldom happens in Baudelaire's poems, the activities of memory and imagination can recall us from our exile. The sailors are mentioned as "forgotten" in the speaker's very act ofremembering them. The "others" of the last line are only other- alien- to us until we particularize them; in the act of "thinking," we bind them to ourselves. I suspect a kind of bilingual pun in the poem's last word, encor: might it not also suggest en coeur, "in the heart"? If so, this mortal's heart has changed along with the form of the city. The swan, so clinically described in the first part as a prodigy or a spectacle, becomes mon grand cygne, "my great swan." In this act of ownership, the poem' s speaker imagines a community, a fellowship of feeling that reaches across barriers of place and time, ofrace and gender and species. And in doing so, he gives the lie to his claim that his melancholy has not budged. By the poem's end, he-and we-have come a long way. "Thinking" as the poem portrays it, is one of the highest human activities. It is a combination of imagination, empathy, heroic solidarity, and perhaps even love; and through it we seem at times to transcend our human limitations. Andromache, we think of you, and we are redeemed. *********** 25 �Le Cygne The Swan A Victor Hugo Andromaque,je pense a vous! Ce petit fleuve, Pauvre et triste miroir ou jadis resplendit L' immense majeste de vos douleurs de veuve, Ce SimoTs menteur qui par vos pleurs grand it, A feconde soudain ma memoire fertile, Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel. Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville Change plus vite, helas! que le coeur d'un mortel); For Victor Hugo 4 Andromache, I'm thinking of you! That little river, Poor, sad mirror where long ago there shone The immense majesty of your widow's sorrows, That lying Simo"is which grew by your tears, 8 Suddenly made fecund my fertile memory, As I was crossing the new Place du Carrousel. The old Paris is no more (the form ofa city Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal); Jene vois qu'en esprit tout ce camp de baraques, Ces tas de chapiteaux ebauches et de fOts, Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques, Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-a-brac confus. 12 La s'etalaitjadis une menagerie; Laje vis, un matin, a l'heure ou sous les cieux Froids et clairs le Travail s'eveille, ou la voirie Pousse un sombre ouragan dans I' air silencieux, 16 Un cygne qui s'etait evade de sa cage, Et, de ses pieds palmes frottant le pave sec, Sur le sol raboteux tralnait son blanc plumage. Pres d'un ruisseau sans eau la bete ouvrant le bee 20 Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre, Et disait, le coeur plein de son beau lac natal: «Eau, quand done pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?» Je vois ce malheureux, mythe etrange et fatal, 24 Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l'homme d'Ovide, Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu, Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tete avide, Comme s'il adressait des reproches a Dieu! 28 Only in my mind ' s eye do I see that camp of huts, Those heaps of rough-hewn capitals and shafts, The weeds, the great marble blocks made green by the water of the puddles, And shining on the paving stones, the jumbled debris. There, long ago, a little zoo was displayed; There I saw, one morning, at the hour when under Cold, clear skies Labor awakens, when the street sweepers Push a dark hurricane through the silent air, A swan, which had escaped from his cage, And, with his webbed feet scratching the dry pavement, Dragged his white plumes on the uneven ground. Near a waterless spring the beast, opening his beak, Nervously bathed his wings in the dust, And said, with his heart full of his fair native lake, " Water, when will you rain? When will you thunder, lightning?" I see that unhappy one, strange, fate-bound myth, Toward the sky sometimes, like the man in Ovid, Toward the ironic sky, cruelly blue, On his convulsive neck stretching out his head in longing, As ifhe were addressing reproaches to God! �II Paris change! mais rien dans ma melancolie N'a bouge! palais neufs, echafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allegorie, Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des roes. Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime: Je pense a mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous, Comme les exiles, ridicule et sublime, Et ronge d'un desir sans treve! et puis a vous, Andromaque, des bras d'un grand epoux tombee, Vil betail, sous la main du superbe Pyrrhus, Aupres d'un tombeau vide en extase courbee; Veuve d'Hector, helas! et femme d'Helenus! Je pense a la negresse, amaigrie et phtisique, Pietinant dans la boue, et cherchant, l'reil hagard, Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique Derriere la muraille immense du brouillard; A quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve Jamais,jamais! a ceux qui s' abreuvent de pleurs Et tetent la Douleur comme une bonne louve! Aux maigres orphelins sechant comrne des fleurs! Ainsi dans la foret ou mon esprit s'exile Un vieux Souvenir sonne a plein souffle du cor! Je pense aux matelots oublies dans une ile, Aux captifs, aux vaincus!. .. a bien d'autres encor! 32 Paris is changing! But nothing in my melancholy Has budged! New palaces, scaffolding, blocks, Old neighborhoods, everything becomes allegory to me, And my dear memories are heavier than stones. 36 And before this Louvre an image oppresses me: I think of my great swan, with his crazed gestures, Ridiculous and sublime, as exiles are, And gnawed by a ceaseless desire! And then of you, 40 Andromache, fallen from a great husband's arms, A lowly chattel, under the hand of proud Pyrrhus, Next to an empty tomb hunched in ecstasy, Widow of Hector, alas! and wife of Helenus! 44 I think of the black woman, thin and coughing, Stumping in the mud, and ~eeking with haggard eye The absent coconut-palms of proud Africa Beyond the immense wall of fog; 48 Of whoever has lost what is never to be found, Never! Of those who are nourished with tears And suck the breasts of Sorrow, as of a good she-wolf! Of thin orphans drying out like flowers! 52 Thus, in the forest where my mind is exiled, An old Memory sounds a full blast of the horn! I think of mariners, forgotten on an island, Of captives, of the vanquished!. .. of many others more! -Charles Baudelaire Les Fleurs du Mal, LXXXIX 1859 � 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. 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Title A name given to the resource Baudelaire's Swan Song Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on October 13, 2006, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006-10-13 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 Tuck 2006-10-13 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3800" title="Sound recording">Sound recording</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b6bf86717f8676396b69c6ce7d8ae326.pdf 11a7921b781d5cf0ca0a4169678ee4cd PDF Text Text Restoring Amends: Forgiveness, Philosophy, and the Shape of Shakespeare's Comedies Jonathan Tuck A lecture delivered at St. John's College, Annapolis October 3, 2003 �Restoring Amends: Forgiveness, Philosophy, and the Shape of Shakespeare's Comedies [Enter wearing mask} "Bear with me a little in my folly," as Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians. Here is the program for the evening's entertainment: Through sheer grandiose, overweening hubris and self-delusion, giddiness and irresponsibility, I will proceed to make a great fool of myself. (Indeed, I have already done so: witness my intention to speak about Shakespeare, and my use of the "P"-word in the subtitle of my lecture.) Such great folly will beget wonder and interest, as well as scorn, in you, the audience. But as my foolishness runs its course, you and I will both achieve some clarification, some growth in self-knowledge. Then, in a final access of charity and reconciliation, you will forgive me my folly, and I will forgive myself. You too will forgive yourselves, for that folly which you share with me and for the scorn you felt for it. This reconciliation will be our happy ending, that which makes our evening into a comedy. Finally, the barrier between imitation and reality, between actor and audience, wtlhlisappear. My masKwtll come ofI,[raf(e of) masK] and you will recogrnze the masks that you too are wearing. Then we will all join festively, not in a dance but in a conversation where actor and audience are one. That is my lecture in a nutshell. I hope you liked it... But perhaps I had better expatiate a little. Please you, draw near. I have said that it is the happy ending that will make our evening a comedy. want to insist on this claim, because this formal characterization of comedy is more particular than other common uses of the word. Many people would prefer to say, for �example, that comedy is what begets laughter. But we may laugh for many different reasons: perhaps out of embarrassment, or nervousness, or a kind of vindictive triumph"sudden glory," as Hobbes calls it. These laughters, I want to say, are not the essence of the comic; if comedy begets laughter, it should be more a laughter of wonder or delight. Others, following Aristotle, have claimed that while tragedy portrays characters better than ourselves, comedy portrays characters who are worse. But is this our experience of Shakespearean comedy? The heroes and heroines are almost always of gentle or even of noble birth-we see Dukes (of Milan, Vienna, Illyria, and some unnamed part of France), Kings and Queens (of Navarre, Sicilia, and Bohemia). If by "worse" we mean not of lesser social rank, but rather morally or intellectually worse~ the formulation is still problematic when applied to Shakespeare. By what standard do we judge Rosalind, Viola, Beatrice, or Prospero "worse" than Macbeth or Coriolanus? In order to achieve a festive union with them at play's end, we must necessarily feel that the characters of comedy are neither better nor worse than we are. The action of the plays serves to create a fellowship between them and us, in which all are equal, whether in their folly or in their hard-won self-knowledge. Let us say, then, that what makes comedies comic is their resolution. Comedies end in marriages; in the finding of lost children, siblings, parents, lovers and spouses; in the restoration of the rightful king, especially after a period of barrenness or misrule; in the reintegration of the city; in the raising of the dead, either in fact or apparently; in the regeneration of nature through the coming of spring; in the reconciliation of enn1ities; in the forgiveness of errors, or even of sins; in the liberation of those in bondage; in the raising of the humble and the humbling of the proud; in the marvelous fulfilling of a 2 �providential plan; in the revealing of an .order, and intelligibility in the world; in the reign of charity. Most of these rubrics, with a little stretching, would fit Dante's poem called Commedia, or the Comedy. None of them is ridiculous, though all might beget a kind of laughter. We need to characterize comedy formally in this way-by means of the structure of the happy ending, what J.R.R. Tolkien calls the "eucatastrophe"-in order to remind ourselves that comedies are imitations, representations, rather than actions themselves. It is true that in ordinary language we do sometimes say that an early or accidental death is "tragic"; but I hope we do not mean it. We do not take "tragic pleasure" in hearing of such things, nor do we experience the tragic pathe ma ta of pity and fear. Strictly speaking, we are even more wrong to speak of anything laughable or droll as "comic"; for comic characters are even less "real" to us. When we are in the theater, we experience a comedy as an imitative artifact; we are always aware that the mask is a mask. The comic playwright telegraphs his punches, much like the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night 's Dream in their perfonnance of "Pyramus and This be": Then know that I as Snug___thejoiner am A lion fell, nor else no lion's dam. (MND, V.i.221-2) The happy endings of comedies are often ostentatiously artificial. The cockeyed deus ex machina of As You Like It, for example, is the "old religious man" who is said in the last scene to have brought the villainous Duke Frederick to repentance, as he and his army are about to invade the Forest of Arden. The reprieve from the king, at the end of Tartuffe, performs a similar function, annulling the legal judgment against Orgon; and .., .) �Brecht gives us a comparable hairbreadth escape in The Three-Penny Opera, where Macheath is rescued from the gallows by a hard-riding messenger who bears his royal pardon. In the latter case, the chorus-like organ-grinder ridicules the plot device, singing, to the tune of "Mack the Knife": "Happy ending, happy ending ..." Shakespeare's happy endings often feature unlikely, spur-of-the-moment marriages, either between relative strangers like Oliver and Celia, or between one willing party and one whose affections were lately otherwise engaged : Phoebe in As You Like It, Demetrius in A lvfidsummer Night's Dream, Orsino in Tw elfth Night, Angelo in Measure for Measure , Bertrand in All's Well. The very neatness of the comic resolution, tying up the loose ends, making "all this matter even," as Rosalind says (V.iv.18), seems to serve as a challenge and a provocation to the audience. We have already had to suffer numerous affronts to verisimilitude- multiple pairs of identical twins, cross-dressing disguises that fool even lovers and family members, \Vild coincidences, natural and unnatural magic of various kinds. Now, the author seems to say, here is the happy ending you asked for and anticipated, dragged in kicking and screaming so that the play will be as you like it, or what you will- Ask no questions, because all..'swell-that-ends--we.1-kJack shall have Jill, Naught shall go ill, The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well. (MND III.ii.461) Perhaps it is this neatness and artificiality of Shakespeare's comedies that makes them hard for certain readers to love: my father, for example-a great lover of Shakespeare who was educated in the early years of the twentieth century, \Vhen the romantic character-criticism of A.C. Bradley was the dominant influence on the reading 4 �of Shakespeare, and preeminently of the tragedies. My father loved the great tragic figures, especially the resounding rhetoric of their famous soliloquies. He thought the comedies were trivial and contrived, though he was capable of plucking from them a speech like the "Seven Ages of Man." The tragedies showed him the hearts and feelings of real people, with whom he could intensely identify; and thus he considered them serious and philosophically deep. The overt artificiality of the comedies was for him an evidence of their untruth, which he could not forgive. Jt is interesting that we generally find more truth, more verisimilitude, in what is grim and depressing. Which works do we call "realistic" or "naturalistic"? They tend to be about life in the coal mines, or the meat-packing plants; they are dominated by a profusion of concrete physical details and by a preoccupation with the material and economic concerns of their characters. We might ask ourselves why that world is more "real," more ;;true" than a world where there is the possibility of joy. I want to say, with Touchstone in As You Like It, that "the truest poetry is the most feigning"(IIl .iii .16). Comedy, which is overtly and self-confessedly artificial and conventional, tmds its truth m this untruth. I he mev1table t1dmess of the comic resolution has the effect of framing and enclosing the world of the comedy, and this selfcontainedness makes possible a variety of speculative enterprises, all involving the dialectical investigation of themes. The world of each play thus becomes a little laboratory, free from the contamination of the familiar world we live in. It is notable that many of the comedies are partly or wholly set in secluded, exotic or magical climes: the forest of Arden, the seacoast of Bohemia (which in fact has no seacoast), the wood outside of Athens, the fairy-tale realm of Belmont, Prospero 's isle, or the lyrical country 5 �of Illyria, which also sounds like "illusion," "delirium," and as Viola notices, "Elysium" (1.ii.4). It is from these enclaves that the resolutions will come to the problems and complications that fonn the plots of the comedies. Enclosedness can appear in time as well as in space: Several' of the comedies use finite, separated intervals of time such as holiday festivals, periods of misrule, tenns of a vow (as in Loves Labours Lost) or a legal deadline (as in Comedy ofErrors and A Midsummer Night's Dream.) Such selfcontained places and times are the correlatives and surrogates, within the fiction, for the self-enclosed space of the play itself. The play which uses this device of framing and enclosure to the greatest extent is The Tempest, whose title gestures toward time and seasonability in an etymological half-pun. (The Latin word for "time" is tempus; a tempestas is a seasonal storm.) In this play, uniquely and notoriously, the time of the action depicted is the same as the "real time" of perfonnance, and Prospero repeatedly refers to a precise timetable he must follow in seizing the auspicious occasion and orchestrating the events of the play. The enclosedness of space and time are preconditions for the providential working-out of the comic resolution. In this way, the play-b.eco.n::i.es~he \\·orld b€c--0m~-ai.±se-tfle-we-r-l4-eftfle-ftet-i-en is self-contained, it seems comprehensive while we are in it, and completely comprehensible, as the world would be if we could see it as gods. And, as the French say, to comprehend everything is to forgive everything. Northrop Frye (to whom I am pervasively indebted both for my approach in this lecture and in many other ways) distinguishes usefully between "Iliad critics" and "Odyssey critics." The Iliad critics are drawn to tragedy, realism and high seriousness, while Odyssey critics are drawn to comedy, romance and highly conventionalized forms 6 �like the pastoral eclogue and the detective story. The Iliad critics, in their high seriousness, find in tragedies a truth about the world, beyond the events of the tragic action itself. In this they agree with Aristotle, who claims that poetry is a more philosophic thing [philosophoteron] and a more serious thing [spoudaioteron] than history; for history tells what happened, and poetry what would happen (Poetics 1451 b5).. Poetry is thus a more general, more universal statement, prescinding from the literal untruth of its particulars to a truth that springs from its ideality and universality. And if a play is to speak to us on this more general level, it is already moving past the particularity of characters and into what Aristotle calls "thought" [dianoia] , into the realm of themes and ideas. Thus we might infer that if Shakespeare's comedies, through their closure, are more thematically rich than the tragedies, then Aristotle might consider them even nobler and more philosophic. Tragedies do not present us with the possibility of a world that is complete, intelligible and providentially ordered. Instead they suggest that there are higher, unknowable forces in our world that are at best indifferent to our happiness, and at worst ~heroes, hke Pascal's thmkmg reed, k.riow that they are being crushed by the dark infinitude of things; and that knowledge is their glory. The world they inhabit is open-ended, radicall y indeterminate and finally unlivable. In comedies, too, we are often made to wonder at higher, mysterious beings that impinge on our lives; but the happy ending is our guarantee that it is possible to live here: The world is more forgiving of our errors, and we in tum forgive the world its strangeness. Many of Shakespeare's comedies end with a gesture toward explanation: the cast is festively directed by one of the characters toward some off-stage destination where all the comic confusions of the plot 7 �will be explained to them, since they do not share the god's-eye-view of the a~dience. Within the comic world, complete clarification is possible, at least on the level of plot complications. By our nature as humans, we desire to know, and that philosophic desire is ritually gratified by the structure of the comedy. I do not mean to suggest that the comedies give us full clarity about the large themes that they investigate dialectically. But the happy ending suggests that such understanding is possible, or perhaps that we will be braver, wiser and freer if we continue to seek it. The most philosophically aporetic of the comedies are also those whose endings are least obviously happy-the socalled "problem comedies" such as Measure for Afeasurc and All's Well. I want to illustrate the thematic emphasis of Shakespeare's comedies with several hasty sketches of philosophical themes that are investigated within the closed compass of the several plays. It would be tempting here to use As You Like It, a play so "philosophic" that almost all of its action is pushed to the periphery, the beginning and end of the play, in order to make space for a sustained, many-voiced seminar conversation on the play's central themes of nature, love, time and education. But that would be sfiOOfingliShlnalJarrel, and 1·d rather focus on comedies less familiar to our college. Instead, I'll start with my favorite play, Twelfth Night, which I learned how to read mostly from my great teacher Stephen Booth. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare returns to the device of identical twins that he had earlier used in The Comedy of Errors. borrowing from the Roman playwright Plautus. In both plays, the ensuing confusions of identity repeatedly cause the twins themselves, and those they encounter, to suspect that they are going mad. At various times they are embroiled in fights, love affairs, financial dealings and even a wedding, all intended for the other one. In Twelfth Night, there is 8 �also the aspect of cross-dressing, as Viola disguises herself by imitating her brother Sebastian. There are several other, minor instances of disguise, imposture, and near resemblance: Feste dresses as Sir Topas, Antonio attempts to disguise himself, Maria counterfeits the handwriting of her mistress, M-0-A-I is almost Malvolio's name. The seeming madness resulting from this series of mistaken identities corresponds to the lovemadness suffered by Duke Orsino, Olivia and even Malvolio, as they are rendered giddy and inconstant by their moods and desires. Viola recognizes the analogy in this exchange with Olivia: Olivia: I prithee tell me what thou think'st of me. Viola: That you do think you are not what you are. Olivia: If I think so, I think the same of you. Viola: Then think you right; I am not what I am. (Ill.i.140-3) These lovers, in their changeability, seem to lose their former identities; as the clown Feste says to Orsino, Now the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal. I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything, ana their mtent everywhere, for that's it that always makes a good voyage of nothing. (II.iv.73-78) (We might notice in passing that the sea is associated with mutability and changes of identity. For many of the characters in this play, in The Tempest, and in The Winter's Tale, it is the sea and its storms from which rebirth comes. What seems to be a shapeless chaos of Heraclitean flux, a mad, destructive confusion of water and wind, can also be a seedbed for new life.) The fluid giddiness of the drunken revelers, Sir Toby Belch and 9 �Sir Andrew Aguecheek, also resembles madness, in Malvolio's opinion. And Malvolio himself is caged and scourged as a madman, which almost drives him into true madness. The cumulative effect of these occurrences is to raise the issue of the continuity through time of personal identity-an issue that has long engaged the attention of philosophers. It is a question of the one and the many: What is it that guarantees my individuality and keeps me from being merely a blooming, buzzing series of representations? Twins are two, but look like one; as Wallace Stevens says, "Identity is the vanishing point ofresemblance." A madman, in his inconstancy, is one but acts like two, or more. In Twelfth Night, the principal theorizer about these questions is the fool Feste, who claims to be not my lady's fool, but a professional corrupter of words, like many modem philosophers (III.i.36). Feste tends to generalize the issue of identity and make it a metaphysical one. Here is his encounter with Viola's brother Sebastian, whom he mistakes for her-that is, for Cesario, her masculine disguise: Clown: Will you make me believe that I am not sent for you? Seb.: Go to, go to, thou art a foolish fellow, Let me be clear of thee. Clown: Well held out, i' faith! No, I do not know you, nor I am not sent to you by my lady, to bid you come speak with her; nor your name is not Master Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither. Nothing that is so, is so. (IV.i. 1-8) Even in his most casual utterances, Feste shows that he and the play are preoccupied with these questions. In an ostentatious display of pseudo-learnedness as he dons the garb of the curate Sir Topas, he remarks: Clown: Banos dies, Sir Toby: for as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, "That that is, is;" so I, being Master Parson, am Master Parson; for what is "that" but "that"? 10 �and "is" but "is"? (IV.ii.13-17) Here Feste shows himself to be a corrupter of words, indeed-but a very analytical one. Later in the same scene. he moves beyond ordinary-language philosophy and into a more historical approach, involving the Presocratics. He "tests" Malvolio' s sanity in the following catechism: Mal: Clown: Mal: Clown: Mal.: Clown: ... I am no more mad than you are: make trial of it in any constant question. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl? That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. What think'st thou of his opinion? I think nobly of the soul, and in no way approve his opinion. Fare thee well: remain thou still in darkness. Thou shalt hold th'opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. (IV .ii.49-61) Feste' s "constant question" is a question about constancy: Is there one soul, persisting through various metempsychotic incarnations? Are the grandam and the wildfowl one, or two? As one might expect from a quoter of the analphabetic hermit of Prague, Feste espouses the unwritten claim of Socrates that "there is no darkness but ignorance"(IV.ii.42), and argues for metempsychosis. This is mere foolery, we might say; but the way to read Shakespeare's comedies is to look hard at their most off-hand, casual remarks. Another instance: In Twelfth Night, the dismissive phrase "that's all one," repeated at intervals by Sir Toby and Feste (l.v.130; V.i.194; V.i.372; V.i.406), takes a special, cumulative significance from this thematic exploration of sameness and identity. 11 �The two characters who are most conscious of their role-playing-and most concerned about their own identities-are the two masqueraders, Viola and Feste. Viola suffers acutely the strain of her divided existence, but finally trusts the providential agency of time, whose daughter is truth: What will become of this? As I am man, My state is desperate for my master's love: As I am woman (now alas the day!) What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe? 0 time, thou must entangle this, not I, It is too hard a knot for me t'untie. (II.ii.35-40) Viola's view of time's beneficent role, making her own occasion mellow, is endorsed by the play's happy climax, where brother and sister twin are reunited, and one is revealed as two: Duke: One face, one voice, one habit and tw0 persons! A natural perspective, that is, and is not! ... Ant.: How have you made division of yourself? An apple cleft in two is not more twin Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian? Olivia: Most wonderful! (V. l. 214-5, 220-223) Notice the oxymoron in the visual metaphor of "a natural perspective": a perspective is a glass cut in such a way as to produce an optical deception (Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon). Our way oflooking is artificially distorted, and yet the effect is "natural," which makes Olivia's "error" of loving a woman more forgivable: Seb.: So comes it, lady, you have been mistook. But nature to her bias drew in that. You would have been contracted to a maid; Nor are you therein, by my life, deceived: 12 �You are betrothed both to a maid and man. (V.i.251-5, my emphasis) Sebastian's comment does more than to reassure Olivia that he will be faithful, even though she thought she was marrying someone else. He also asserts that her error was no error at all: nature was providentially at work even through the artifice of Viola's disguise. All the errors of mistaken identity are forgiven, or rather annulled, in one grand gesture. The audience has all along known the source of the confusions; now the characters within the story partake of our wider knowledge. To me, perhaps the most wonderful thing about this comic resolution is that on stage, it always works, no matter how bad the production, no matter how· dissimilar in appearance the actors who play Viola and Sebastian. This moment has been telegraphed and anticipated for two and a half hours, and yet, when it arrives, we are filled with joy and wonder. In this respect, the scene is like another in Shakespeare's comedies, the statue scene at the end of A Winter's Tale, which always rises triumphantly above its O\m corniness and predictability. Time has triumphed, and our wonder at the strange made familiar is almost me-ffi13hysical. The consiste--nt-tfleatrical success of seene--5--l-ike---tl=le--seshows how eager we, the audience, are to collaborate with the play's artifice in contriving the comic resolution. We contribute an imaginative faith beyond what cool reason could ever require of us, forgiving and amending the blatant untruth of the comedy. But magical happy endings go only so far; the world is not always so forgiving a place. Feste remarks exultingly to the mortified Malvolio, "thus the whirligig of time brings in its revenges"(V.i. 375). In this case, time was on Feste's side; but as he says to Orsino at another point, "pleasure will be paid, one time or another" (II.iv. 70). 13 �Anything that's mended is but patched; virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with virtue. If that this simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy? As there is · no true cuckold but calamity, so beauty' s a flower. (l.v.42-49) The motley patches of the fool become an emblem of the complex, qualified and equivocal way we have no choice but to live. There~ amendment and forgiveness, but it is necessarily partial and contingent- and for this, too, we must learn to forgive ourselves, as Malvolio cannot. We are reminded that Feste is the only character in the play who speaks of the necessity of making a living by the sweat of his brow: Even in Illyria, he feels the penalty of Adam. His most complex statement about the action of time comes in the narrative of his final song, where his progression from innocence to experience seems to be a fall from festivity to the coldness of what C.L. Barber calls the world "outside the garden gate." This devolution seems to take on cosmic proportions in the last stanza: A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, But that's all one, our play is done, And we'll strive to please you every day. (V.1.404-407) The strangely melancholic tone that lurks at the edge of this, Shakespeare' s best comedy and perhaps his best play, comes to the fore here at its ending. Yet the containing power of the comic resolution is not impaired; we still have a happy ending, but we are reminded that there is a harsh world of wind and rain outside the magical boundaries of the theater. 14 �The philosophical issue of the continuity of personal identity can be put in a slightly different way: How can we know that we are not dreaming at this moment? If we are dreaming, then all that we seem to experience is merely an illusion, whether benign or malignant. Of course, this question has arisen in very many of the explicitly metaphysical works we read, from The Republic to Descartes' Meditations and onward. It arises in Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors as well, especially at moments of perplexity or confusion; but the theme of dreams and waking is far more important as an organizing principle in two others of Shakespeare' s comedies. In The Taming of the Shrew, there is an "Induction," an oft-forgotten (and seldom performed) frame around the \vell-known tale of Katherine and Petruchio. It concerns a tinker, one Christopher Sly, who has fallen into drunken sleep in an alehouse in Warwickshire. A certain Lord, passing by in the course of hunting, decides to seek amusement by making Sly "forget himself." The plan is to install him in fine clothes, in a rich bed, and pers- ade him when u he awakes that what he thought was his life as a tinker was only a dream or a madness. This manipulative Lord might remind us of the Duke and the Duchess in the Second Part Gf--I)on Qui-xe-te,'--the~ce is alsE> later used, following 8-llakespeare, by anet-her- Spanish author, Calderon, in his play Life is a Dream. But perhaps the most surprising analogue for this episode of manipulation comes in The Republic, in a part of the noble lie that we don't always remember: I will undertake to persuade first the rulers and the soldiers themselves, and then the rest of the city that all those things that seemed to them to happen in our rearing and educating them, they actually experienced only as a dream-that in fact at that time they were down under the ground being shaped and nourished themselves, and their weapons and other gear were being crafted. And vvhen they were completely wrought 15 �the earth their mother delivered them ... (Ill, 414D3-E3) Sly the tinker, awakened, pampered and attended by the Lord's servants, is indeed brought to believe that his former life was a dream, fifteen years long. The Lord and his servants must behave like actors in order to perfom1 this deception, and as a specifically Elizabethan theatrical touch, the part of Sly's lady is played by Bartholomew the page. Thus the illusionistic resources of the theater are used to persuade Sly that "reality itself' is an illusion. Once Sly is persuaded, they entertain him royally, with the performance of a play called- The Taming of the Shrew. And now we, along vvith Sly, get to behold the familiar story of Kate the Cursed and her hrutal wooer. This Induction at the play's beginning leads us to anticipate a corresponding framing effect at the play's end. Presumably the Lord and his servants would make Sly drunk again, strip him of his fine clothes and deposit him back in the gutter whence he came. It is a peculiar fact that unlike the surviving source from which Shakespeare stole his plot, the play as we have it has no such ending. After the happy ending of Katherine's "taming" a eornie-res-elution that must seetn-te-u·s-now-even more ambivalent than it would have been for Shakespeare's first audience-Christopher Sly does not reappear for his comic reawakening as a tinker. Needless to say, gallons of critical ink have been spilled on the question of why. Some have claimed that Shakespeare wrote an ending, which has since been lost; or that such an ending is lacking because the acting company did not have enough players to make it work. But these are desperate expedients. I think that we must wrestle with the absence of any epilogue or conclusion to the frame story as 16 �an int~I~tiv_e question. I have no real answer to suggest, but a few observations to make, and questions to ask. First, the act of dreaming is very explicitly connected with the act of watching a play. This play-within-a-play, which I'll call the "metatheatrical" feature of the comedy, is of course paralleled in many of Shakespeare's other plays, though it occurs far more frequently in comedies than in histories or tragedies. Such episodes always make us, the audience, more aware of our own situation as playgoers, and correspondingly less naively engaged in the suspension of disbelief. By linking theatrical experience with the dream state, Shakespeare is able to ask us indirectly whether we too, like Christopher Sly, are dreaming. We are privy to the knowledge that neither Sly' s life as a drunken tinker nor his brief life as a pampered lord is in fact a dream; but to him, at various times, each \\·ill have seemed to be one. He is not foolish to think so; we would think so too, if some pleasure-seeking lord, or evil enchanter, decided to wrench us forcibly out of our familiar routine. Secondly, the situation of the play-within-a-play involves several metatheatrical organization of Plato's Symposium, where we are insulated from Diotima's climactic discourse by several levels of metadiscourse.) Ifvve think of Petruchio's taming as involving a certain kind of play-acting, that fiction is nested within the fictive world of Padua and Verona. That world in tum is part of the play performed before Christopher Sly the "nobleman," but his transformation from tinker to nobleman is itself a performance, whose immediate audience is the Lord and his knowing henchmen . That audience in tum is part of the whole play, of which we are the primary audience. \\ ny 17 �should we not suspect that these five levels are nested within a sixth-that there is some audience, in heaven or in some outer world, for whom we are unknowingly performing? Thirdly, I wonder whether Sly's delusion is intended to make the story of the "taming" seem edgier, more slippery, more contingent, and less of a comfortable, hierarchical paradigm for Elizabethan husbands and wives. Is Petruchio ' s final " lordship" over the tamed Katherine a similar delusion, brought about by her play-acting as the submissive wife? I also wonder what is rhetorically effected by the absence of any scene of Sly's awakening and disillusionment. Are we to feel that it may be possible to dwell indefinitely in our own rapturous dreams of ennoblement, wherein our every wish is fulfilled? Would that be a happy ending for us? Or is our awareness more ironic-do we focus instead on the pathos of Sly's continued illusion? Though it seems open-ended, we know that his time as a lord, like our own lives, will be a "little life," in Prospero's words, that is "rounded with a sleep" (IV.i.157). There is a similar issue in the other of the two Shakespeare plays that thematize the problem of dreams and waking. I refer, of course, to A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of Shakespeare ·s greatest and most underrated plays-and one of his most philosophic. For several centuries, critics, readers and audiences thought of the play as a realm of gossamer, moonshine, and whimsy where dainty, miniaturized fairies minced through dreamy glades. More recently, critics like Jan Kott and directors like Peter Brook have brought out the deeply disturbing possibilities of dreaming: The four lovers are shuffled like a pack of cards; humans turned to beasts copulate with semidivine beings; simple, good-hearted workmen are terrorized by a sadistic imp. It is hard to deny that this nightmarish alternative view of the events in the forest lurks at the edge of our 18 �merriment; Shakespeare, long before Freud, knew that the land of dreams can be a perilous place. One hazard might be that, like Christopher Sly, you never wake up. That is in a sense what happens to Demetrius, the only one of the lovers to leave the wood with the magic juice still in his eyes. His return to his original love for Helena, which makes possible the comic resolution, is chemically induced, although he describes it as a sick man's being cured by nature (IV.i.173) . The play does not allow the audience to feel entirely comfortable with this transformation; even after Theseus overbears the will of Aegeus and gives Hermia to Lysander, we hear this exchange: Dem.: These things seem small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turned into clouds. Her. : Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double. He!. : So methinks; And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own, and not mine own. Dem.: Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream. (IV.i.186-193) What we experience as a dream (or a play) can have lasting consequences, for good or ill. As Hippolyta remarks, But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigur' d so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. (V.i.23-26) It is ironic that Demetrius, "this spotted and inconstant man" (I.i.110) is made constant by the fluid, transformative power of dreams. Of course, here as in the Calderon play and 19 �the other Shakespeare comedies, we've discussed, the audience knows that the characters were not in fact dreaming. Or do we? For both the title and the epilogue of Midsummer Night's Dream invite us to consider the play itself as a dream. Even the time scheme of the actions in the wood, roughly Acts II through IV, seems to be telescoped into a single night's ''accidents" (IV.i .67), in defiance of the three days enunciated in the very first scene. We then have to ask ourselves whether it is because of their frightening or unpleasant character that we want to relegate these events to merely a dream. The dismissive characterization, "only a dream," recurs frequently throughout the play in this preemptive way. We might recall the ironizing self-depreciation of Socrates, speaking to Agathon in the Symposium: "My wisdom is only paltry and disputable, as if it were a dream; while yours is shining and abundant" (l 75E). As we hear more explicitly in the Sophist (266B ff.), a dream is part of the class of image-making, like a painting, and therefore partakes of lesser reality. Theseus gives voice to this view in Shakespeare's play, in his speech about the lunatic, the lover and the poet (another Platonic reference, by the way; this time to the Phaedrus). Theseus maintains that dreams, poems, lover s fancies and other kmds of 1maginmg are all merely a way of making an apparent something out of a real nothing. But "nothing" is a slippery word in Shakespeare. The mechanicals' play of "Pyramus and Thisbe" is said by Philostrate to be "nothing, nothing in the world." The following exchange is crucial for our reception of both plays, Peter Quince·s and Shakespeare's: I will hear that play; For never anvthing can be amiss When simpleness and duty tender it. Go bring them in; and take your places, ladies. Hip. : I love not to see wretchedness o'ercharged The. : 20 �And duty in his service perishing. The. : Why, gentle sweet, you shall see no such thing. Hip. : He says they can do nothing in this kind. The. : The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing. Our sport shall be to take what they mistake: And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect Takes it in might, not merit. .. Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity In least speak most, to my capacity. (V.i.78, 81-92, 104-5 ; my emphases) By referring to the play as "anything" (line 82), Theseus has already given the lie to the claim that it is "nothing," although he seems to contradict himself on this point a few lines later. Perhaps it takes a kind of kindliness beyond mere nature, a kind of grace, to be able to see the something that is not there; what we naturally seem to believe is the teITible, reductive saying of Lear: "Nothing will come of nothing." But in this play, as in comedies generally, something will come of nothing. Like the creator god, the comic poet creates his world ex nihilo; yet it "grows into something of great constancy." The word "nothing" appears in the title of one of Shakespeare' s other comedies. In Much Ado About Nothing, and in several other places in the plays, the word is a pun on making the pun less tortured. "Noting" could gesture toward music, but far more importantly here it refers to visual perception, wfoch is a major thematic issue in Much Ado. What is the value of what Othello calls "ocular proof'? Can we, should we belieYe our eyes? The truth about the calumny of Hero is discovered by the "watch," but that word does not seem to have any necessary visual implication for Shakespeare; rather it refers to a state of vigilance or wakefulness. In fact, it is by listening, rather than looking, that the doltish watchmen learn the truth, although paradoxically none of them is able to 21 �articulate it verbally. But then the villain Borachio uses a visual metaphor when he says, "What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light" (V .i.221, my emphasis). In the last scene, Claudio must make his vow to marry before he sees the face of the veiled bride-to-be; but when she is unmasked, seeing is believing after all. She is not just "almost the copy of my child that's dead" (V.i .276); she is Hero herself. Here as in many of the comedies, the right kind of seeing begets initial disbelief, but then a joyful wonder at a truth beyond nature. If dreams are nothing, they are also noting. In A Afidsummer Night's Dream, the altered states of Lysander, Demetrius and Titania spring from an alteration in the way they see. Dreams are often called "visions," especially when they have some prophetic or transcendent power. Bottom awakes, unmasked from his interlude in the ass's head, with the following soliloquy: I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream.it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.Methought I wasthere is no man can tell what. Methought I was-and methought I had-but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called "Bottom's Dream," because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end ofa play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (IV.i.203-217) It is peculiar and perplexing that at at this moment of comic disillusionment, Bottom should use the language of St. Paul in I Corinthians, Chapter 2: 22 �We speake of wysdome amonge them that are perfecte: not the wysdome of this world, nether of the rulars of this worlde (which go to nought) but we speake the wysdome of God, which is in secrete, and lyeth hyd, which God ordeyned before the worlde, unto oure glory: which wysdome none of the rulars of this worlde kn ewe ... But as it is written. The eye hath not sene, and the ear hath not heard, nether have entred into the hert of man, the thynges which God hath prepared for them that love hym. But God hath opened them unto us by his sprete. For the sprete searcheth all thinges, ye, the botome of Goddes secretes. ( I Cor. 2:6-10. Text: the Great Bible of 1539, based on Tyndale. · The New Testament Octapla, ed. Luther A. Weigle.) It is hard to dismiss Bottom's garbling of scripture as merely more evidence that he is an ass. In his eyes, the interlude with Titania is a revelation of higher realities, of vast powers normally hidden from us. We may object that the fairy kingdom is not the kingdom of God, but the suggestion is there. The dreams and the plays of mortals-their "fond pageants" (III .ii .115)--may not be merely "fruitless visions" (III.ii.3 71) and "fierce vexations" (IV.i.68), but emblems of metaphysical and even theological truths, begetting wonder in the beholder. Wonder, that beginning of philosophy, is the proper response to gazing at visions. We might recall that a theater is a theatron, a place for seeing, from theiiomai, to look on, behold or gaze at. A theorem, a theorema, is a thing to be looked at, and a theory, a theoria. is a looking. The activity of contemplation, described by Aristotle in Book X of the Ethics, is an energeia that is theoretike ( l I 77al 8). The Latin word that comes closest to theiiomai is miror, mirari, from which we get words like "admire," "Miranda," "mirror," and '·miracle." It should not surprise us that philosophical speculation (another word with a visual metaphor) and mystical vision are both at least metaphorically linked 23 �with the sense of sight; certainly from Plato onward, seeing and intellection have been linked. Seeing is both analogous with knowing and antithetical to it, since the realm of the visible is an image of the knowable, but is itself inherently less knowable. In this way the realms of dreams and of the theater are venues for both truth and illusion. both something and nothing. Thus the self-contained artifice of comedy seems to unite mysteries that are higher than we are with follies that are lower. The moments of mystery, transcendence and wonder often seem to come at the threshold of awakening or emergence from theatrical illusion, as in Bottom's soliloquy or Prospero's speech at the end of the wedding masque-"Our revels now are ended." I have used the word "metatheatrical" to refer generally to plays within plays, but those liminal moments, often at play· send, where the mask is lifted and illusion yields to revelation, are much more properly called metatheatrical-"meta-" in the sense of after as well as beyond or outside of. And the metatheatrical moment is also the metaphysical moment, when we ask ourselYes what is and is not real. It is a moment of ascent to a higher plane of generality or a deeper wonder at what had been fam1har; for now we see through a mask darkly, but then face to face. Sometimes, as with Prospero's cloud-capped towers, there is an allusion to creation or apocalypse: As Feste sings: A great while ago the world begun, With hey ho, the wind and the rain, But that's all one, our play is done. There is no good reason, in the context of Feste's song, for him to mention the date of the world's beginning. Juxtaposed with '"our play is done," it suggests that the play itself is a little world, created from nothing, as we saw in A Midsummer Night's Dream. and 24 �ending in a moment of revelation and judgment. These moments of cosmic consciousness lift us above our former selves; we are almost like Dante in the sphere of the Empyrean, looking back down on the vile threshing floor of this earth and laughing at its folly (Paradiso XXII.133-5, 151-3; XXVII.86). The metatheatrical is metaphysical because it implicitly transports us beyond nature. These meta theatrical moments of vision, liftings of the mask, naturally tend to occur in the epilogues to the comedies. Feste's song is effectively one such. Another, less cosmic but more playful, is Rosalind's at the end of As You Like It: It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue; .yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue, nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like a beggar; therefore to beg will not become me. My way is to conjure you, and I'll begin with the women. I charge you, 0 women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you; and I charge you, 0 men, for the love you bear to women (as I perceive by your simp ' ring none of you hates them) that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman,. I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me. complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not; and I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell. (my emphasis) We should first observe that the speaker both is and is not Rosalind. She characterizes herself as a lady at the outset and curtsies like one at the end ; and in between, she appeals to dramatic decorum: unlike the King at the end of All's Well. she may not play the beggar, for she is not appropriately dressed. All this could be spoken by Rosalind, who is 25 �also something of a conjurer; but then the mask slips when we hear, "ifl were a woman." This phrase tends to fall flat in modem productions, where female parts are portrayed by female actresses; but I'd claim that it is almost Shakespeare's whole reason for including this epilogue. He wants to remind us that we have been watching a boy actor portraying a girl (Rosalind) portraying a boy (Ganymede) portraying a girl ("Rosalind"). It is one of those telling little slips of the mask, like the moment in Twelfth Night where a character says, "If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" (III.iv.119-120). Another occurs in Midsummer Night's Dream, in the rehearsal scene in the woods, where Peter Quince says, "this green plot shall be our stage, this ha\\1hom brake our tiring house" (III.i.2-4). In each case, we are forced to perform the difficult feat of viewing one thing as two, both the mask and the face it conceals. Methinks we see these things through parted eye, when every1hing seems double. The other thing we should observe about this epilogue is that it is a supplication for the favor of the audience, the Elizabethan equivalent of the "Applause" sign in a TV studio. After a comic resolution wherein the characters are reconciled in festive concord, one actor, halt m and half out of character, steps forward with a graceful depreciation of the play and a request for the onlookers' forgiveness. "No epilogue, I pray you," says Duke Theseus to the mechanicals, "for your play needs no excuse" (MND, V.i.345). But just as we all need forgiveness, so all plays need an excuse; and Shakespeare's framing play does include an epilogue, spoken by Puck. In order for the resolution to be comprehensive, it must extend beyond the fourth wall of the stage, and include the audience. We too become characters; the stage has become the world, and the world has become a stage. 26 �"The best in this kind are but shadows," says Theseus, "and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." To which Hippolyta replies, "It must be your imagination then, and not theirs" (V.i.209-12). A shadow is merely a made. image, which is its untruth; but it may be amended, paradoxically, by further image-making. When the speakers of epilogues supplicate us to give favor to their play, they are asking us for this act of charitable imagining. If we forgive the theater its untruth, we can become reconciled with the world. There is a theological element to this forgiveness , as we see in the epilogue at the end of The Tempest: Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have' s mine own, Which is most faint. Now 'tis true I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which \vas to please. Now I want Spmts to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. Why does the speaker, who seems to begin as Prospero and end as Ariel, so daringly allude to the Lord's Prayer in the last two lines ("forgive us our trespasses")? He seems to cast the audience as the new Prospero, and begs them to undergo the same transformation as the fictional Prospero: to accept that "the rarer action is/ In virtue than 27 �in vengeance" (V.i.27) and to accept their own shadow status: "we are such stuff as dreams are made on"(IV.i.156) and "this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" (V.i.275). The poet, like an alter deus, a second god, has ruled over his little universe within the fictive world of the play, as Prospero does over his island; Prospero is one of the many characters in the comedies who exerts a providence-like control over the actions of others. (For this reason, not implausibly, many have read The Tempest as Shakespeare' s farewell to his art.) The poet and the play have also ruled, during their two hours' traffic on the stage, over the imagination of the audience-but in the epilogue, this period is revealed as a holiday, a period of misrule. The audience is now the rightful king. restored to power, and as in All's Well, the former king becomes a beggar. But we can only feel our newfound nobility if we are generous, liberal and free, as rulers ought to be-that is, if we hold the actors free of any blame for their misrule, their untruth. The religious analogue to this transaction is the central therapeutic insight of Christianity: that forgiveness frees not only the forgiven, but the forgiver as well. In setting Prospero free, we ourselves are given the liberty of a larger world of inquiry and miracle. But it is high time for me to set you free as well. I'll do it with an epilogue, and appropriately, it should be an appropriation, in this case of the ending of A Midsummer Night 's Dream: If this lecture has offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: 28 �If you pardon, I will mend, And, as I am an honest Tuck, If I have unearned luck Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue, I will make amends ere long; Else the Tuck a liar call. So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Jonathan shall restore amends. ******************** 29 �Epilogues to Shakespeare's Comedies I. Twelfth Night [Clown:] When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day. But when I came to man's estate, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, ' Gainst knaves and fools men shut their gate, For the rain it raineth every day. But when I came, alas, to wive, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, By swaggering I could never thrive, For the rain it raineth every day. But when I came unto my beds, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, With tosspots still had drunken heads, For the rain it raineth every day. A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain; But that's all one, our play is done, And we'll strive to please you every day. IL All's Well That Ends Well [King:] III. The king's a beggar, now the play is done. All is well ended if this suit be won, That you express content; which we will pay With strife to please you, day exceeding day. Ours be the patience then, and yours our parts; Your gentle nands lend us, and take our hearts. As You Like It [Rosalind:] . It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue, but it is · no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ' tis true that a gooq play needs no epilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove better by the help of good ~pilogues . What a case am I in then, that am neither a · good epilogue; nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like a beggar; therefore to beg will not become me. My wa,y is to conjure you, and I'll begin with the v..·omen. I charge you, 0 women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you; and I charge you, 0 men, for the lo\'e you bear to women (as I perceive by your simp'ring none of you hates them) that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a \.YOman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased �me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not; and I am sure, as many as have good b~ards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell. IV. The Tempest [Prospero:] Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength 1 have's mine own, Which is most faint. Now 'tis true . I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes' would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. V. A A1idsummer Night's Dream [Puck:] If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you ITirvebuts1umberecttiere, Whi.le these visions did -appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: lf you pardon, we will mend, And, as I arrt an honest Puck, . If we have uri.eamed luck Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue, We will make amends ere long; El se the Puck a liar 'call. So, goodnight unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends . � 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. 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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 Restoring Amends: Forgiveness, Philosophy, and the Shape of Shakespeare's Comedies Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on October 3, 2003, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003-10-03 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Tuck 2003-10-03 Subject The topic of the resource Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Comedies Comic, The, in literature Comedy Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/62321d8559d08bce58bca9d8f05abbdb.pdf db737d081ab49afaed329019a4e2f86a 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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. 16 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 Why You Never Finished Your Essay: Montaigne and the Motion of Writing Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2001, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001-04-13 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 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3790" title="Sound recording">Sound recording</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Tuck 2001-04-13 Subject The topic of the resource Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592. Essais Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592. Literary style Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f197456014ea56b1fc47e26c95d03d79.pdf 1347fd1435e4cbd205f046a215033f45 PDF Text Text Tlie Ass's Heacf: TransCa.tion and Meta.morpFwsis 6y ] onatfian TucR. A pu6Cic (ecture de(iverecf at St. Jofin's Coffege, Annapo[is Septem6er 18, 1992 �Tfie Ass's Heacf: Translation ancC Metamorpfwsis Nick Bottom the weaver emerges from a hawthorne brake wearing an ass's head, which has been clapped on his shoulders by the fairy Robin Goodfellow. Bottom's friends and fellow amateur actors, the simple artisans of Athens, bolt through the woods in horror. In the midst of the confusion, Bottom is accosted by Peter Quince, the carpenter. Quince. "Bless thee, Bottom! Thou art translated!" Bottom does not know what has happened; "translated" provides him with an explanation says Quince's word that explains nothing, and provides me with a text, or pretext, for this lecture. In my memory, Quince's line is indelibly associated with Mr.Hugh McGrath, who delivered it to me with a lot of vibrato as I stood in my acetate donkey mask, in a Great Hall festooned with flowers and potted plants, when we performed A Midsummer Night's Dream in May of 1986. If there can be such a thing as elegant panic, Mr. Mcgrath's was it. But his drawling.emphasis on the word "trans- lated" lifted the word from its dramatic context; it brought out a set of questions about translation and transformation in Shakespeare's play-- and now, a larger set of questions about translation in general. The mystery or miracle of translation, it seems, could only be effected by some higher power, benign or malignant; and the most appropriate response to its presence is to stumble through the dark woods in blind confusion-- which is how I, for one, plan to spend most of the rest of this evening. But �2 do not fear: I think I can promise a happy ending. What does Quince mean by "translated"? that comes to mind is "carried off." The first possibility As Starveling the Tailor later says of Bottom, "He cannot be heard of. transported" (MND IV.2.3-4). Out of doubt he is The "little changeling boy" who gives rise to the play's action reminds us that the fairies are known for this sort of activity-- swapping babies in the cradle, taking a human child and leaving some sort of supernatural one. It is puzzling, however, that that changeling seems not to have been taken from his mother, since we hear of Titania's devotion to her memory: His mother was a votress of my order; And in the spiced Indian air, by night, Full often hath she gossip'd by my side; And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands, Marking th'embarked traders on the flood; When we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait Following (he~ womb then rich with my young squire) Would imitate, and sail upon the land To fetch me trifles, and return again As from a voyage rich with merchandise. But she, being mortal, of that child did die; And for her sake do I rear up her boy; And for her sake I will not part with him. (MND II.1.122-137) Here then is an instance of a changeling who has not actually been changed; we will encounter more. If "translated" is read as "carried off,'' it would follow that Quince thinks Bottom has been taken away, and this hybrid monster, a sort of centaur in reverse, put in his place. Taken away to where? Being carried off is not �3 necessarily a bad experience, even though Quince's "Bless thee" must mean something like "Heaven defend thee from harm." As we read in the Epistle to the Hebrews, "By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God" (Heb. 11: 5). This kind of translation, then, can involve being lifted up out of the flux of ·common experience and into some transcendent realm. Bottom clearly thinks retrospect that that is what happened to him: I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was-- there is no man can tell what. Methought I was-- and methought I had-- but man is but a patched fool if he will off er to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called "Bottom's Dream," because it hath no bottom; and ! will sing it in the latter end of the play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (MND IV.1.203-217) Bottom is alluding in a mangled way to Paul's words about the mysterious wisdom of the Spirit in I Corinthians 2: But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the bottom of God's secrets. (I Cor. 2: 9) in �4 The pathos of Bottom's phrase, "Methought I had ... " comes in part from his implied identification of his amatory idyll in Titania's bower with some sort of divine epiphany, perhaps even a foretaste of the pleasures which await us in the afterlife. Paul's and Bottom's insistence on the inexpressibility of their experience by normal human discourse suggests that we do not translate; rather, we are translated. Speaking in tongues is an ecstatic spirituality; those to whom it comes are translated out of their normal selves and into a realm where linguistic diversity is no bar to communication. The first such experience, at the Feast of Pentecost as recounted in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, bears a symbolic relation to the account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11: The descent of the Spirit, it seems to claim, will use the same means of speaking in tongues to bind together those whom the confusion of tongues drove apart. Perhaps the bringing of a text, or of ourselves, across a linguistic barrier, even within the humble confines of Palmieri and Milligan, might really portend the healing of the wounds of a divided humanity, redress for the narrow and self-isolating existence that seems to be the lot of mortals. But if so, it is hard to imagine the accomplishment of this task without supernatural aid. At the same time, we remember that Bottom's allusion to St. Paul is a misquotation: While it is literally true that "the eye of man hath not heard" and "the ear of man hath not seen," we are invited to conjecture that eyes might very well see, ears hear, and tongues report, the mystery of Bottom's translation-- We as �5 the play's audience have been privy to such a report. Bottom's malapropisms, which recur throughout the play, are a humble form of translation or mistranslation; to decode his intention we the audience translate them back. As Theseus says, his speech (and that of the other mechanicals, is "like a tangled chain--nothing impaired, but all disordered" (MND V.1.124); our sport will be to take what they mistake. And when we translate Bottom's soliloquy, it seems that he speaks better than he knows: Viewed another way, from the audience's privileged perspective, his transformation is no epiphany, but the mechanical result of a rather nasty prank. here is another unchanged changeling: So Bottom's rapture, his memory of having been seized and carried off in a vision to a realm of sacred otherness, both did and did not happen. He claims of his dream that "it hath no bottom," but we know better. In one sense the dream's bottom is Bottom himself. To return to Peter Quince's exclamation: We can see that it is consistent with some other things in the play to take "translated" in the mystic sense of "carried off"; but if Quince really thinks that Bottom has been carried off and a monster substituted for him, why does he address the ass's head as "Bottom"? (Analo- gously, if translation of a text involved supplanting it with something wholly other, how could we recognize it as a translation of something? Why is it not simply a new "original"? ) Surely it makes more sense for Quince to mean by "translated" something like "changed" or "transformed," as in Snout the Tinker's similar �6 speech: "O Bottom, thou art changed! What do I see on thee?" which Bottom, still unaware of his new appearance, replies: you?" To intemperately "What do you see? You see an ass's head of your own, do Later I'll remind you of Bottom's remark, for I intend to suggest that in making literary translations we all do see an ass's head of our own-- but not merely that. For the moment let's concentrate on Snout's assertion that Bottom is still Bottom, but changed. To the etymologically minded, the word "translated," whose Latin roots mean something like "carried over or across," does not easily lend itself to such a meaning as "changed"; we would expect instead a word like "transformed" or "transmuted." But we have the authority of Shakespeare's play (as well as the dictionary) for understanding the word this way: in an earlier passage, Helena says to Hermia: Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, The rest I'd give, to be to you translated. (I.1.190-1) And she goes on to speak of a number of superficial changes of shape-- eyes, voice, and so forth-- that would help her to sway Demetrius's heart. So Bottom's translation may be only a change of form or shape, a kind of metamorphosis. The usual scholarly claim is that Shakespeare's source Metamorphoses, or "The Golden Ass," for this episode is a work called by the Latin prose author Apuleius, in which the hero is turned, not into a hybrid, but fully �7 into a donkey-- after which he experiences a variety of harrowing trials and erotic adventures, esoteric divine mysteries. including the witnessing of some The Roman poet Ovid also tells a number of stories like Bottom's in his wonderful poem of the same name-Metamorphoses-- which served Shakespeare and most other European poets since Dante's time as a kind of encyclopedia, a rich compendium of mythological episodes told in swift succession and linked together in a complex design. Gods take the shapes of beasts to or humans; humans are changed flowers, to animals, even to stars. is a punishment, salvation. decreed from above; trees, to rocks, to Sometimes the shape-shifting sometimes it is a kind of Almost always it seems that the new form taken is in some way a consequence or a continuation of the previous form: Arachne was already a weaver before she was made into a spider, and Narcissus was inhumanly self-absorbed, incapable of action or mutuality, like a plant even before he was changed into a flower of the same name. The effect of the transformation is in a way to perpetuate and objectify the most salient feature of the being that is changed. Verbal translations have the same goal: to change a text in order to preserve it, to displace it in order to keep it in place. If this seems too cruel and violent a paradox-- destroying a person or a poem in order to save it-- Ovid reminds us that in the order of nature it is not an oddity but an utterly ubiquitous process: You and I and all living beings renew ourselves through �8 change. our skin is replaced each seven years, and if our bodies tried to cling to their former stuff, they would not survive. evident mortality of all things physical is not a dying, The but a prolongation of the order of things through the relinquishing of one particular set of shapes and incarnations. ·ovid's poem makes this claim explicitly in its fifteenth and last book, where the activity of metamorphosis is generalized from the artful acts of individual gods into a way of understanding all history, and all change in the created world. Everything changes; that is how it remains the same. Nee species sua cuique manet, rerumque novatrix ex aliis alias reparat natura figuras: nee perit in toto quicquam, mihi credite, mundo, sed variat faciemque novat, nascique vocatur incipere esse aliud, quam quad fuit ante, morique desinere illud idem. cum sint hue forsitan illa, haec translata illuc, summa tamen omnia constant. (Metamorphoses XV. 252-8) Nothing keeps its outward shape, but nature, renewer of all things, brings forth new forms from old. And nothing in the whole world dies-Trust me-- but changes and renews its face. "Birth" is our name for starting to be something else and "death" for ceasing to be the same. And though perhaps things are transposed hither and thither, nevertheless the whole of things abides. The word I have disgracefully rendered as "transposed" is translata-- carried over, translated. By the slightly unidiomatic use of translata, Ovid implies that apparent changes in quality are reducible to local motions, rearrangements of material. A transformation is almost like a carrying off; but the whole abides �9 --Nothing really comes into being or goes out of it. I should hasten to say that this magisterial statement of the central truth of the natural world is put by Ovid into the mouth of a certain wise man from Sames who flees to exile in Italy-- Though his name is not mentioned, we recognize him as the great Pythagoras. The passage I have cited is part of a long discourse, almost a tirade, in which he claims to be inspired by a god. sits cheek by jowl in the speech with a misinformation, Shirley But wisdom like this farrago of scientific claims about channeling and metempsychosis MacLaine, and a doctrinaire vegetarianism which, a la Ovid mischievously implies, is so rhetorically rabid that we cannot take it seriously . Clearly Ovid's Pythagoras is another flawed visionary, almost like Bottom the Weaver. Ovid's intent in so representing him seems to be part of a complex ironic strategy. Pythagoras claims, with dubious authori- ty, that the violent, dramatic, artfully caused transformations of the first fourteen books of the poem can be seen as instances of a kind of cosmic order of mutability, on the same level with the natural motions we call birth and death, growth and decay. If we appropriate this claim about physical translations and apply it to verbal translations, we find ourselves saying · that the violent and artful re-rendering of a text into a different linguistic shape-- Oedipus Englished by Jebb, for example-- is on the same level with the "natural" motions of linguistic change-- like the development of modern English out of This claim has a certain appeal. its medieval antecedents. As we read our translated seminar �10 readings, we would like to feel that there is a natural connectedness between the versions we read and their originals, so remote from us in time and space and sensibility. If we imagine the tradition of a text-- its handing down-- as flowing smoothly across interlinguistic barriers, borne by a commonality of human feeling and experience, we can almost make ourselves believe thi~- but only until the next morning in Greek class, when we struggle desperately to midwife the monstrous Sophocles. happen of English Then we are forcibly reminded that these actions do not themselves; personal agent, they a translator. become a laurel tree. English. birth of our own are violent motions Left to herself, by a Daphne will not Left to itself, the Oedipus will never be in And we do not know how to do it-- without knowing how. imparted thoug~ perhaps we do it In situations like these, Socrates usually raises the possibility of divine inspiration, taking the place of a know-how or techne-- That is to say that translators, rhapsodes and poets, are themselves translated. like We may in the end be constrained to accept this formulation in lieu of a reasoned account of how translations are possible; but matters are not so desperate yet. If Ovid's Pythagoras claims to be divinely inspired, Ovid portrays himself in deliberate contrast as a self-conscious artist and craftsman. The final, largest metamorphosis included in Ovid's poem is the making of the poem itself. But while Pythagoras argues that artfully caused shape-shiftings are part of a natural �11 order of mutability, Ovid raises on his own behalf the possibility that the personal agency of the transforming artist can create something durable, Heraclitean flux. exempt from the general, natural condition of Not long after the flawed homily of Pythagoras, the poem ends with a proud claim that may or may not also be meant ironically: Iamque opus exegi, quid nee Iovis ira nee ignis nee poterit ferrum nee edax abolere vetustas. cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi: parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam. (Met, XV. 871-879) I've finished now this work, which neither fire, Jove's wrath, nor sword, nor ravenous Old Age can ever undo. Come that day when it will which ends my life's uncertain span of years-Except over this my body, it has no power. In my better part, immortal, I'll be borne high to the stars-- My name will never die. Where Roman power stretches through conquered lands, they'll speak of me; and down through all of time if prophecies of priests and seer-bards have anything of truth, in fame I'll live. Ovid will live in fame forever, but only under two conditions: First, he will only be spoken of where the Roman Empire has imposed its military and linguistic hegemony over others; the immortality of Ovid's poem, and hence of his better part, depends on its being encountered in Latin, and not across a linguistic barrier. Ovid has missed no opportunity throughout the poem to �12 imply a deep scepticism about the value and permanence of the Augustan Empire; even as he seems to be praising it lavishly, he continues to inject disquieting and subversive details into his portraits of the gods, heroes and rulers whose power and authority are symbolically linked with that of Augustus. It would certainly delight Ovid to be told that we are now considering the subject of his immortality, in a time when no one speaks Latin and in a place to which the Roman Empire never reached. his ironically qualified claim of immortality It seems that was too timid; mediated by translation, somehow some version or , perversion of his poem still lives in our mouths. The second condition for Ovid's immortality, as he himself laid down, was that the sayings of poet-priests must have in them something of truth. He has throughout his poem repeatedly and mischievously suggested that neither priests nor poets are to be trusted, up to and including the poet Ovid himself. As in Chaucer, Cervantes and other authors we've read, a self-ironizing narrator seems to propound a kind of Liar's Paradox. Ovid's particular claim-- that he will live only if there is something of truth in the sayings of poets--can be generalized as follows: utterance will live only if it is translated, car~ied into the language and understanding of others. A text or beyond itself I speak here not only of interlingual translation, but of any sort of communication even within a single natural language. ''Something of truth" means something beyond self-reference; to be translatable words must �13 point beyond themselves. generalization of Ovid Of course I have to concede that my is an appropriation of the poem's last lines, a rather free translation, perhaps even a mistranslation. But Ovid is helping us here, and we are helping him too: Ironically, by mistranslating him we keep him alive. So the translator's art, too, aspires to preserve what might otherwise prove mortal. Like an artist, the translator operates on material and imposes a raw form on it. The material, stuff like marble or clay, suffers a change of form but endures and retains its own identity. It is what Aristotle calles the hypokeimenon, the substratum, the thing underlying the change, which survives the change and emerges in a new form. Michelangelo's David is still marble after the master has finished sculpting it. As the sculptor finds a shape hiding in the marble and brings it out to be seen, he is dependent on the persistence, and even on the material on which he operates. of the But the raw material of the translator-- the original Oedipus, respect: ~esistance, for example-- differs in this It is already far from raw. It is highly organized in a form of its own already, and the success of the translation depends not only on transforming it, but on retaining its original form somehow even in the course of changing it. The best translation is thus a hybrid, most perfected when least complete in its shapeshifting. In the same way, we might say that Bottom is the raw material for Puck's hybrid monster. As Peter Quince seems to realize, after the act of translation Bottom is still Bottom-- At least, at bottom �14 he is. The top part of him is occupied by the external adornment of an ass's head, but his bottom or underlying part is still human. In a way, he is not much changed at all: When he was all human, he was an ass- a fool- and he bore the name of ass or arse: "Bottom." Now that he is changed, we might expect him to wear a donkey's tail, but no such matter; his ass is not an ass's ass, but his head is an ass's head. What makes him most monstrous-- the incomplete- ness of his change-- is also what assures us , that he is still comically normal. another way: We know that Bottom is still himself in He takes such pleasure in acting the ass's part with such crude gusto. Surely this change is just another stage in Bottom's endless dramatic shape-shifting: he will roar you as gently as any sucking dove. Bottom's seeming plasticity, his protean ability to take on other shapes, is the consequence of the active agency of his intellect. What is most characteristically human in him enables him to translate himself into a wild profusion of hybrid beasts. As Flute the bellows-mender says, simply the best wit of any handicraft man in Athens." he is the biggest fool. imagination is so fertile, change He is, so full after all, a of embroidery, " He hath That is why weaver: His that he can himself into anything; yet under any change, at bottom he is still recognizably the same, an unchanged changeling. We might remember that our word "text" comes from the language of textiles; in origin it is a thing which is woven. woven; he is an eminently translatable text. *********** Bottom weaves and is �15 *********** So far I have been using Bottom's strange experience as a kind of allegory for the more general and difficult question of verbal translation. But a person is not a "text"-- is he? Notionally, even a literary character is supposed to have within his own world an identity apart from his identity as a signifier. There he is supposed to be what we think ourselves, in our world, to be-- a self-subsistent being beyond, tations in words, Bottom's whole body actions, or beneath, and physical his external manifesappearance. Even if and mind were changed, we might still be able to say with some confidence that the total ass that resulted from the transformation was Bottom the Weaver-- especially if we enjoyed (as we do) the privileged position of an audience that had seen the act of translation as it was done. Even if Bottom did not know himself still to be Bottom, we would think of the human body of the weaver as a kind of raw material for the artificer Puck, out of which he had wrought a product that looked quite different. In the physical metamorphosis of bodies there is clearly a "hypokeimenon" --an underlying throughout it. subject that suffers the change and endures If we turn our attention to the verbal trans- formations that we more normally call "translations," we have to ask what the underlying subject is that persists from one incarnation in natural language to another. To this question, some people have offered the following quick �16 but desperate answer: translation. Nothing is carried over in the act of In other words, translation as we usually think of it is strictly impossible. This claim needs to be examined seriously; we need to put aside not only the reductionism of "common sense" but also our deep and emphatic desire that it not turn out to be true. "Ca teacher, n 'empeche pas Charcot; d' exister," says Freud, quoting his " ... we must be humble and put sympathies and antipathies honorably in the background if we would learn to know reality in reality, this world" even the if so it should turn out, reality that there is no the truth that there is no truth, the meaning of the words "There is no meaning.'' What does it mean to say that in translation nothing is carried over? It means that every utterance is unique; that in principle paraphrase and synonymy are impossible. The supposed "translation" has the relation to its original of effect to cause, or of response to stimulus; but it has no privileged character of sameness that would link it more closely to what it hopes to mimic. reference is an illusion: perro, a dog is not a chien or a Hund or a since our cultural experience of dogs, language, "Sameness" of embedded in our varies minutely from one linguistic group to another. Besides, the different phonological features of words in different languages must affect our reception of them in ways we're not even aware of; and words in any natural language have histories that they carry along with them; even apparent cognates languages must turn out to be "false friends." in related We could go even �17 further: Why stop at interlingual translation? If all acts of interpreting, or understanding, even within the same language, can be thought of as "translations" from one private mental idiom to another, then it would follow that all acts of understanding, all "true" interpretations of "meaning," are equally chimerical. I cannot step twice into the same river of language; each separate utterance of the word "dog" is radically unique, and the supposed "reception" of the word by a listener is unavoidably different from the word that was originally spoken. Each text is purely itself; it doesn't point past itself to something else which can be carried across. Any supposed translation is necessarily a mistranslation, any supposed understanding is a private misappro- priation. But since all are equally unsuccessful, all are equally successful too. We have no standard of failure or success; we have only behavior. I think that something like this account of our verbal behavior can be garnered from the cryptic pronouncements of the French philosopher, or misosopher, Jacques Derrida. Derrida, seems . to be a set of signs Language, says or signifiers, and their signifying character depends on their difference, from one another and from that which they seem to point to or signify. words point beyond themselves? But how do It is clear that our mind is trans- ferred or carried along from a signifier to something beyond it, but why should we think there is only one path? Words are notoriously ambiguous, connotative, complex in their action on the �18 mind. And is it so clear that individual words are the elemental semiotic units in language? Can we even locate individuated elements, or is the web of context and textuality a seamless one? Where is our mind borne when we transact our passage through a text? Our attention is drawn to other signifiers, other parts of the system. there is It is sheer "logocentric" superstition to think that any unique connectedness between a signifier and one particular ''signified," that there is any closure in the activity of signifying. signif iers, there If we could escape would have to be from a the realm endless of play ideal of meaning transcending all language, or else embodied in some universal human language, of which our natural languages are mere shadowy types. Instead, says Derrida, the action of signifiers is a continual deferring, delaying or "carrying away," of the chimeric act of "meaning." In this perpetual and all-pervading activity, which he punningly calls differance, signif iers refer only to other signifiers. The word "differance," like the word "translation," has its root in the Latin verb fero, to carry, whose passive participle is latum. But for Derrida, what is "carried" is not some extralin- guistic meaning inhering in the words; rather it is we who are carried, borne along from one signifier to another. translate; we are translated. We do not Language is a labyrinth, a dark wood of signs through which we move, ever expecting to find a path that leads to an end. But there is no end, for the Derridean world is �19 constituted entirely of text. pas de hors-texte." In his memorable phrase, "il n'y a Everything is equally significant, and nothing is finally signified. Derrida is a consistently playful writer, and the nightmare vision of meaningful meaninglessness I have sketched may well be only one part of a mischievous strategy of provocation. Whether or not it is the "true" account of the Derridean view, it makes the same claim upon us; refuting it. we feel the urgency and the difficulty of One possible counterargument is the functional one: Our use of language has observable consequences in the world of actions and bodies. If Derrida is right, then how can we account for these apparently "successful" instances of understanding and even of interlingual translation? Funtionally, it is clear that one so-called mistranslation may be more successful, or less unsuccessful, than another. Every time I successfully negotiate the ordering of a meal in a foreign city, with the aid of a pocket dictionary, I am proving that something is carried over in the act of translation. thinking of But this common-sense view seems to depend on language as purely referential; the criterion for "success" in a translation is that it result in pointing out the same object in the world that the original points to, or in eliciting from another person the same action that the original elicits. Perhaps I can by this argument show the possibility of menu translations, but not of Jebb's Oedipus. Literary uses of �20 language do not seem to ref er to the world in the same way that menus do, nor do they result in actions that are observably appropriate or inappropriate. Indeed, one feature of Derrida's account of the activity of signification seems to be that the distinction between "literary" and "non-literary" language disappears; all language is equally and utterly "literary." If this claim seems perverse, its contrary would be even more so. In fact, I think it is one of the more persuasive features of Derrida's account that he does full justice irreplaceability of to our the felt mode sense of of the expression of uniqueness, any the utterance . Though all uses of language may not be purely "literary," whatever I mean by that, it seems impossible to isolate a language that could be purely non-literary, guity. or a cleansed of connotation and ambi- The inner life of language, its self-connectedness as a web forest of paths, precludes the possibility of the purely algebraic verbal code that Condillac and Lavoisier say they want. All uses of language must be partly self-referring: draws attention to itself and its uniqueness. The medium We neBd to be able to go on thinking about the stylistics of government reports, telephone books, even algebraic expressions, as well as of Shakespeare and Racine. Thus the impossibility radical of Derridean translation may claim be of , the contrary to theoretical our ordinary experience in the world of menus and phrase-books; but it is not immediately contradicted by our extraordinary experience of poems, �21 plays, novels, dialogues, perhaps even treatises. Indeed, it often happens that the more we have studied a foreign language, the less adequate any translation of its literary works will seem to us. may part language company with Derrida is essentially on the "literary"; question but of whether We all in the cases where it clearly is so, can we find any reason to think that a real translation can ever be made? Poetry, says Robert Frost, is what gets lost in the translation. What is true of poetry should also be true of all language: the noblest, most complex and successful uses of To the degree that we feel the preciousness and perfect appropriateness of the way something is said, to that degree we must feel that it cannot be re-expressed, either in its own tongue or in some other. It really seems that in these cases-- for us, perhaps the most urgent ones-- Derrida's strictures on translation might turn out to be valid. Can we give any acc?unt of what we do in our language tutorials, of how my Sophocles, or even Jebb's, can be Sophocles at all, in anything but name? We will settle for a hybrid version, but we need assurance that something can be carried across in the act of literary translation, that we are clapping an ass's head on Antigone instead of leading in a whole donkey entirely unrelated to her. I said at the start that I promised a happy ending. Many comedies have to strain for their happily-ever-afters, which arrive late and creakily, ushered in by a deus ex machina and deliberately �22 defying our sense of what is rationally expectable. Shakespeare's comedies do this partly in order to remind us that art is not allpowerful, that we must find other sources of order and reconciliation, in the world or not at all. But the happy ending of high comedy comes also from its good intentions and ours; in spite of all the evidence that our frailties and imperfections are permanent and irredeemable, we choose to forgive ourselves, even after recognizing all that is unforgivable in us. The ritualized happy ending of the comedy supplies us with a gesture, a cue, a convention . The human charity that comes through and after self-knowledge, we must supply ourselves. Now I claim that the activity of literary trans- lation conforms to this comic structure. We try and fail to render Sophocles in English, or we read the attempts, all failed in one or another degree, of the professional translators. Each of these products claims to be Oedipus or Antigone; yet each also plainly comes with the disclaimer: fact that implies we the can "This is not the real thing." recognize theoretical the shortcomings possibility of a of a truer The very translation rendering. Otherwise by what standard could we fault the one we have before us? Perhaps the translator's use of language is an intensification of the most essential activity of language in general. formulations involve both rest and motion, Verbal both same and other. The flowing, metamorphic character of language, never the same as itself, never allowing for true repetition, contrasts with the �23 seeming fixity, the tethering of consciousness in which a formulation stands apart from the thinker who originates it. As an eikon, an image, language is both like and unlike some other thing that it points to. It calls attention to the fact that it itself is not what it says-- like Magritte's portrait of a pipe bearing th~ inscription, Cec i n 'est pas une fil.o.g. Literary uses of language always remind us, to one degree or another, that we are watching a play, reading a poem or a novel; the autonomy of the verbal icon distances it from the object of its representation. A character like Bottom can only be himself by reiterating that he is not a self at all. We in the audience encounter him not in the way we meet people in the world, as external presences fully given to our senses; instead we must go out of ourselves tb encounter Bottom in some suspended middle ground of provisional, poetic "belief." He is translated to us by the plays in which he plays, and we are translated to him. The interlingual translator's "pipe" is even less of a pipe: In order to be a good translation, or even a translation at all, the new work must speak out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand it must make the outrageously false and true claim that it somehow "is" the original. liars, Traditore traduttore; but translators are traitors. poets may be Yet as Sir Phillip Sidney says, poets do not lie because they do not affirm anything; and we can add to this that translators do not betray because they always forswear their allegiance even in the act of pledging them. They �24 tell us in one way or another that this is not a pipe. The crudest way is by leaving the work, or part of it, literally untranslated-for example, English versions of Machiavelli that use the Italian word virtu. Similarly, Nabokov's version of Eugene Onegin uses footnotes after virtually every line to remind us constantly that the translation has failed. dangerously, some Slightly less crudely but perhaps more translators render "virtue'' or Plato's dairnon as "demon." Machiavelli's virtu as These are hidden refusals to translate; they fail as translations by succeeding as refusals. But even good-faith attempts have a hybrid character that acts as a disclaimer. Consider this resoundingly non-English fragment of Richmond Lattimore: "Son of Atreus, what sort of word has escaped your teeth's barrier?" or this collective masterpiece, made by committee in a recent Greek tutorial: wornb self-sister head of Isrnene." translated! them. a camel "O shared of-sarne- Bless thee, Sophocles-- thou art But I come to praise such translations, not to bury While we can still laugh at these things and yet know ourselves incapable of anything better, Sophocles is alive and safe and living in McDowell Hall. The freer Fitzgerald for example, work at two levels: translators, Robert The reader with some Greek or with some sophistication at second hand about things Greek receives from the smooth sonority of a new English blank-verse poem the necessary disclaimer: This is not a pipe. To the perfectly naive reader, Fitzgerald's new poem might well have no relation to Horner at all; but it is good in itself. It seems that the act of �25 literary translation is a collaboration in which the reader must participate by withholding full commitment from the final product. If the translation is too complete, it loses the double perspective necessary to its being. Comedies reenact the forging of a community, gration of a city in danger of fragmenting. the reinte- In the aftermath of the regrettable events at Babel, we find ourselves in need of such a happy ending. But the best I can offer conventionality of most literary comedies. is not all-powerful, but it redeems recognizing and confessing its failure. translating and being translated, clapped gracelessly on Phedre speakers of Baudelaire's poems. see them. is the contrived The translator's art itself ' mysteriously by When we ourselves are we see our own ass ·' s and Philoctetes and the heads, unnamed What is remarkable is that we do Though I have so far failed to find any reason why it should or could in principle be possible to recognize the flaws in a flawed translation, that it is in fact possible serves as a guarantee that all is not lost; something of the original can be carried over. Our deformed hybrids are saved from pure irrelevance by their very deformities. Though our attempts at translation are not imperishable works immune to the ravages of fire, sword or the wrath of Jove, their originals prove their durability by somehow surviving our attempts to change them. We learn to forgive ourselves for not getting it all, or even very much of it; to smile at the grotesqueries of our incomplete renditions; and to see past �26 them to the rich particularities of the language of their parents and originals. The mysterious and ever inchoate activity of literary translators is well expressed by Shakespeare's Hippolyta: ... all their minds transfigured so together More witnesseth than fancy's images And grows to something of great constancy But howsoever, strange and admirable. (MND V.1.24-27) ******** � 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/. 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. 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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. 27 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 Ass's Head: Translation and Metamorphosis Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 18, 1992, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992-09-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Tuck 1992-09-18 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3802" title="Sound recording">Sound recording</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/34c5572b8d8eb0c2666e476ebb7185c7.pdf 385b4500d4253d87fc02c803726f5cf7 PDF Text Text DBAD LBAVBS: ILLOSDATJ:ORS OP TBB GBllBALOGY OP TBB BP:IC POBM A lecture delivered by Jonathan Tuck at St. John's College Annapolis April 8, 1988 �Given the nature of my argument, it seems indispensable for me to acknowledge at least a few of my own literary debts. Anyone who has read the work of Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom will recognize how deeply and pervasively this lecture has been influenced by them. All translations are my own. �-1- Poems, like people, have parents--and grandparents--and a whole remote ancestry of other poems to which they owe their own begetting. Though poets may try to set themselves up as a second deity, creating from nothinqness with perfect power and freedom, still the poems they make bear ancestral markings and acknowledge their indebtedness. Each spring growth of foliage seems to remake the whole world anew: but each leaf is of a kind--a larger ·family--and also origins. ha~ more particular The leaves fall and die, but not before they transmit something of themselves to their offspring. So too the leaves of a book, pages traced vein-like with lines of verse, take part in this cycle of begetting. Poems, too, can die to the world, although not exactly as leaves or people do. Some poets claim to have made the most permanent of objects, more enduring than bronze or monuments of stone, exempt from the ravages of time. S~ch claims are typically written in dead . languages: or in any case they must have for us a quaint, antique sound. We know better: Words are winged, and if in their flight they fall on barren soil, nothing dies as fast. Their only chance for survival, for immortality, lies in their power propagate. ~o ****** In the Homeric No-man's Land, the space between the two armies, -- .. ··the Achaian hero Diomedes son of Tydeus meets Glaukos of Lycia, a Trojan ally. Diomedes has just gotten away with assaulting two of the immortal qods, despite a rebuke from Apollo: but now he grows cautious. Be is not willing to join battle with another divinity, he says, so he prudently inquires about Glaukos' identity and origins. Rnd the caution that prompts it are surprising to us: Both the question Diomedes has been busily slaughtering scores of others for some time now without �-2- any such scruple or ceremony. In his aristeia, his finest hour on the battlefield, he has shown a strength that transcends human limitations, and it is the desire to defeat those limitations that makes men fight at all--so that their glory may be a song for men to oddly, Diomedes feels hemmed in by his mortality. come~ Yet now, His strange moment -of pensiveness in the midst of the battle prompts his question to Glaukos, and the- answer at first shows the same mood of qu- escence: i .. Twtta., ~. ,,.,,, ytPf~., Jpttlw&r; of,, Tfp t/NUt»11 yuni, T'O('I 3~ ml cinpc»11. ~- N ,,i. ,,.. 4w1£Gf X~' xfo. cL\.\11 M 6' vA,, T'1f.\tld.rca f/IW1, lfJP" 3' J,,ry(yPfT'a& ~· ~' ~ yaq Jj ,U11 l/YH& Jj a• clnA~&. d a· J6'1mr ml ndirm aa,f,.a111, &;p' JlJ tlafjr ,;IUT'IP'I• ,...,.,,., nMw M ll'P haptr fcracr&r "Great son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation? Like to the generation of leaves is that of men. The leaves are dashed to the ground by the wind, but then the wood Burgeoning brings forth others, and the time of spring returns. So with the generations of men: One blossoms, another dies. Yet if you wish even so to ask and learn the facts About my family stock, it is known by many men ••• " --Iliad VI.145-151 Glaukos too seems to be oddly conscious of human insignificance. In his simile of the leaves, the chiastic order of presentation suggests a difference of emphasis between the life story of the leaves and that of men. The leaves are first dashed to the ground, but then the wood --brings forth more. New life here follows death~ while in the one line devoted to hmnan affairs the generations of men first bloom and die. ~ Syntactically the word ~'ffo).~ l''- gives the line a kind of abruption, since it here lacks its more usual complementary genitive or participle. In sound, however, it drifts away into a kind of dying fall, with the repetition of the long a sound in; 1->J..rro>.ftt.'- The tone is melancholy �-3- and detached. We might even suspect Glaukos of being afraid of Diomedes and resigned to his own imminent death; certainly he has good reason to be, given what we have seen of Diomedes' prowess. But the sentiment conveyed by the similitude of the leaves goes beyond either bitterness or quiescence: It has a kind of noble, philosophic serenity that makes the passage seem detachable from its context. In a sixteenth-century edition of the poem there might .be a little picture of a hand in the margin, with an index finger pointing out the portable sententia. There is a grandeur-in-misery here in being able to be aware of such things; like Pascal's thinking reed Glaukos seems to be finding his dignity in self-knowledge. So the shift is especially jarring to us when in the next line, Glaukos says in effect: know, my family has a proud history." "But if you really want to And then he is off into an exciting account of the noble feats of his grandfather Bellerophon. In like manner, we the audience are emotionally whiplashed by the peculiar ending of the episode. Diomedes announces in tones of delight that he and Glaukos are ~ivoc... , guest-friends, by virtue of their forbears' friendly relationship, and he proposes a separate peace: He and Glaukos will each find other men to kill; with each other they will exchange armor in token of comradeship. clasp hands, and we share in their gladness. The two men Here in the midst of ·the welter of warlike, self-aggrandizing appetites is an island of sublime, heroic good will. frenzy. Here past friendships mean more than present But we are sadly jolted by the author's last words in recounting t.he episode: But Zeus son of Kronos stole Glaukos' wits away, for he exchanged with Diomedes his armor of gold for bronze, for nine oxen's worth a hundred! (VI. 234-6) �-4So much for the timeless claims of guest-friendship. Just like Glaukos when he proceeds to recite his genealogy, Diomedes returns abruptly to the self-assertive world of present needs and desires. Perhaps we can better understand the back-and-forth movement of this episode by returning to the image of the leaves and asking the -foll.owing odd question: Why does Homer choose to compare men in their gene-rations to leaves specifically? One inunediate answer is that he is putting in the mouth of Glaukos something very like a pun: ' . Cwith a circumflex accent and one lambda), meaning "tribe, race, stock, a group of people with a conunon origin." From this latter word comes our Latinate English "phylum," used in biological classification. the ancient word , tp ~ £ c,.) , The word for "leaf" seems to come from "to teem with abundance, " while the word for "tribe" is descended from -generate." , 'f'tJ Cl) , "to bring forth, produce, beget, It is hard to doubt that the two roots are related, if not united, somewhere in their Inda-European past. - So Glaukos seems , to say jokingly, "Son of Tydeus, why do you ask me about my cp CJ~ o< (~JI£"} ;'\ my family stock? The family stocks of men C to the ground by the wind ••• • that the other word, ) are dashed Only now, in listening, do we realize cp ~>.A-4.. , was meant. But apart from its wit, the connection is very apt. We need not ask of a manis individual lineage, for men are as multitudinous and as faceless as leaves on the trees. Yet Glaukos does go on, proudly, to gi-ve his genealogy: men, like leaves, may be many but they are not all the same: They come in kinds, preserving important distinctions. This opposition of multitude to orderly variation is shown in another Homeric use of the pun on , cp ti lA ot , in Book I I of the Iliad. Nestor O1' �-5- publicly advises Agamemnon: rcpul .Wapar ICQ.TG t;t;Aci, ICQ.TG. t;~pa.r, 'AyaJUllJIOll, C:.r 4'P"1-P'1 4¥>"1-fY114'1.11 '1f1r1>71, t;v1'a. ~t ipvAo&r. "l 31 "'" &r lp'ilf rca! To& 'lr1(8w11Ta.& 'Axa.w(, y11~ l1m8' or 8' ~y1µ.&11w11 rccucor Of Tl uv A~ll ~a· . Of re' 'cr8Aof.''"". ICQ.TG ""''"f yap µ.axlo11Ta.&· "Marshal your men by tribes [ cpvA"' ] , by clans, Agamemnon, so that clan may help clan, and tribe help tribe Lq>~AA d~ cpJAoc5 1. If you do this, and if the Achaians obey you, you'll know then which of your leaders and men is a coward, and which ia worthy, each group fighting as a unit." CII.362~6) In this passage the word cp~ A al.. is used three times in the space of two lines, giving it a memorable emphasis. Nestor's advice is taken, and a bare hundred lines later we hear this: l'1'Tu ,wp(o&, ""'*"' a·· '" Tf q,V>.>..a. rca.l .W81a.u81J'()111T&C:,P?I• ~~""" &rn ylyufT'a.& They stood in the flowering meadow of Scamander, countless, as leaves and flowers blooming in season. CII.467-8) And later in the same book of the poem, the goddess Iris, disguised as Priam's son Polites, has this to say to the Trojan assembly: ~ #'ff ~ ,.GM nAA4 "4xar ,z,,rw.,, w~, · au· °' .... ~ t"OOWa. "' MO. cf.nna.· ""'" yap 1r1ato.o ,,.x.,,•ol'fPO'~'l'porl &onr. q,VAM""" ~.,, IPX,ovrm '°"'°"" "Indeed, I have gone many times into manly battle, but never yet saw such a host, so many. For they look most like leaves, or the sands of the sea as·they come to the plain to fight against our city." CII.798-801) Thus in a short space we see these two near-homophonic words used to balance off the faceless multitude of the Achaian forces, like leaves of the forest, as seen from without, against the orderly distinction in their arrangement by clans, as seen from within. �-6- The simile of the leaves carries within it another pair of opposed, yet complementary qualities. Glaukos' speech to Diomedes seems to invoke the cyclical recurrence of the leaves from one spring season to the next. If we ignore distinctions among individual leaves or_ generations of them, it would seem that the generality of leaves is immortal, at least in Diotima's sense of immortality through successive begettings and substitutions (Symposium 208 a). Yet leaves as individuals are proverbially light and fragile, playthings of the wind, and nothing can be more final than their individual death, as Achilles reminds us: au· '" To' ;p1. "'" ;11'1 ,Jya.J1 op1Co11 o,uN"",. °' "4 Taff t1'ici;rrpo11, TO '"" 1l'OTf <j>v>.>..a "'" o(OVf "'1/"f'• t11'd 3r, 11'plilTa To,J,11 l11 opftl'tr' >..t>..o,11'f11, cnia' civca81r.\1fo'n· 11'fpl yap P4 i xaA.1Cor l>..f'l/lf q,tl>..>..a Tf "'" <j>>..o&Or 1IW dTI p.w vtn 'AxciW11 Ell 11'aAdf'?11 <1>oplow' aucam>..o,, or Tf 8tf"aTtJS 11'pOS '1..0s flpt/a:r4'• llcU "But this I say, and swear a great oath to it: By this staff, which will sprout no leaves or shoots ever again, since it left its stump in the hills, nor bloom anew, for the bronze blade has stripped it of leaves and bark, and now the Achaians' sons bear it in hand as judges while they uphold the laws ordained by Zeus ••• " ( I . 233-9) When we look at the leaves from the outside, ignoring their several particularities, they seem to go on forever. In choosing to look from·· .. ·the outside, we gain a kind of god-like detachment, but we lose the urgent immediacy, the specialness of a particular set of leaves-- the cutting of the tree up in the mountains, the cruel stripping of the bronze blade. So too if we look at the·lives of human beings in the largest spatial and temporal context, all single human destinies merge into the continuing story of the race. Thus we can seem to cheat our own mortality, but the eternal life we gain is a kind of living death: �-7- in becominq part of an anonymous multitude we lose what is specifically valuable in human life. and beqettinq. We become vegetables, machines for eating So we must seem to the gods, as we learn from another of Homer's uses of the emblem of the leaves. In Book XXI of the Iliad, Apollo answers Poseidon's challenge thus: "twoalyG1.', aUIC chi I" va0q,po11t1 1-'vthJtrt1&0 flo'lo'fJIGl.t d 31, vol yt f3poTw'll fllflC4 'ffT'OAf""'W 3u.\~11. ot q,tiuoww iouc&rn cLUoTf "''" Tf (t1t/'A.cyin TEM8ovvw, apovp11r 1Ca.,,.,fo.,, l30J1Tu, ILUOTt 3t q,8Ulti8ovaw · ciA71p&o&. ci.\.\G. Tax &tTTa nw11.«a8a JUiX'lf" ol 3' a.wo& 311puula8w11." nEarthshaker, you would say that I was senseless if I were to fight with you for the sake of mortals, those wretched ones, who now like leaves are full of bloominq life, feeding upon earth's fruits, but then droop into death. So let us now quickly leave off our fight~ let them decide it.n CXXI.462-7) If on the other hand we emphasize a different aspect of the leaves, their individual fraqility and the finality of their passing, we are led inward, into an autumnal landscape of pathos and regret. So too in the story of humanity, a focus on the particular identities and valuable uniqueness of sinqle people goes alonq with an awareness of their inevitable doom. This is the view we call ntraqicn __ and in darinq to look in this way we assert our own dignity, our capacity for heroism and self-knowledqe. As Glaukos returns to recount his own particular lineage, as Diomedes returns to the world of private appetites, wa~ and thievery, so throughout the Iliad we return constantly to the pathos of the concrete. In this poem it is the death of the leaves that is finally the more important. Think in contrast of the .Q.dyssey, with its emphasis on what endures and is reborn, with its great imaqe of the bed rooted in the olive tree. But the power of the simile of the leaves is' that it holds in unresolved counterpoise ~views of human experience. Socrates claims �-8- that the same man can write both tragedy and comedy: I claim that Homer is here, with a kind of perspectivism, Writing both at the same time. In its generality, the simile seems to move above the level of the poem's battlefield narrative, making us cast our eyes forward and backward in a grand synoptic gesture of inclusion. But the inclusiveness would not be complete if we lost the particular diachronic context from which the simile arises.: It is this inclusiveness that characterizes. the poems we call nepics.n Though the human stories epics tell are fixed at a particular point in history, no human story of any consequence can be complete unless it is located in the larger world of space and time that the gods inhabit. Spatially epics 90 up to heaven and down into the underworld: temporally they go forward and backward, even to the beginning and end of human history. Yet they retain a constant rootedness, a grounding in the singularity of the human actions they tell: hence the tradition that epics begin and even end in the "middle of things." Furthermore, they have sometimes been thought of as constituting an encyclopedia of all human wisdom, a compendium of all the lores and know-hows of different trades and callings, not to mention ethical teachings, cosmologies and religious revelation. (This view of the epic poem as a repository of all knowledge helps us to understand Plato's treatment of the poets in the .!Qn. and the Republic.) In the most extre~ case, a poem like the Aeneid could be used for divination-- the book opened blindly and a finger pointing to a randomly chosen passage. The text so chosen would foretell the future or give practical advice, as many believed in the Middle Ages. It is hardly possible to imagine such a practice applied to the texts of the great lyric or dramatic poems. The sheer size and scope of the epic itself, as well as that of the subjects it takes for its province, invites us to treat it as �-9- an inspired utterance or sacred book-- perhaps even as a domain coterminous with Nature itself. So the writing of an epic is an act of enormous audacity, because such a poem aspires to swallow up all possible experience and hold it in the fixity of a human artifice. It is the binding of Proteus, or to vary the metaphor, it is a kind of rival Creation. And yet these leaves too must die. ************ A new generation of leaves, descended from these Homeric ancestors, springs forth in Book VI of the Aeneid. Aeneas and the Sibyl see the ghostly images of the dead, gathered at the shore of the infernal river: hue omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebat, matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae, impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum: quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus trans pontum fugat et terris inunittit apricis. stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum, tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore. Here a whole crowd came streaming to the banks, mothers and men, the forms with life all spent of great-souled heroes, boys and girls unmarried, Youths put on pyres before their parents' eyes: As many as in the woods, in fall's first cold leaves drop, or landward from the raging deep as many birds gather, when the season's frost drives them across the sea to sunny lands. They all stood praying to be first across, and stretched out hands in love of the farther shore. CVI.305-14) The leaves occupy only a line and a half, and the movement of the verse dramatically whirls them away into the following companion. s.i mile of the birds. This is the effect of the striking elision of the last syllable of the Latin word for "leaves," folia, after two short syllables with light, voiceless consonants at the beginning of the word: "' .., "' --"' cadunt folia, aut ad terram qurgite \I .!!S2· .!£.. "'--" - - ..._, - "' Lapsa Although the phrase ~ �-10- terram - "to the ground" or "toward land"-- belongs formally to the second simile, it serves metrically here as the destination of the leaves' swift motion. In this brief picture we feel powerfully the ephemeral lightness of the leaves, pathetically helpless against the driving wind of Virgil's hexameters. The passage is impressive enough in itself, drawing as it does upon Virgil's pictorial use of_ rhythm. But I want to claim much more: The specific power of the passage comes from our consciousness of the allusion to its Homeric antecedent in Iliad VI. At this point, remembering the well-marked dualities in Homer's treatment of the leaves, we expect a second view of them, returning in the spring after the wind has dashed them to the ground. Of course we don't get it, and our expectations are powerfully frustrated. But our continued awareness of Homer's leaves leads us further, to meditate upon the reasons for this departure from the precedent. In the first place, Glaukos spoke as he stood in the upper world, on a field of men living or dying: the Virgilian leaves however are compared to the shades of humans already dead. se~ting By his adaptation of the leaf-simile in the underworld, Virgil reminds us of his own spirituality, a spooky otherworldliness in marked contrast with Homer's rootedness in the natural rhythms of this world. Secondly, we realize that the Homeric completion of the simile in the ·11lore upbeat view of the leaves' renewal~ here in Virgil's recension of it: have its own surrogate The birds, in Virgil's second simile, are a sort of phantom stand-in for the returning leaves of spring. Superficially the point of similarity seems to be only the multitude of fallen leaves or of birds gathering on the ground: death had undone so many. too: We had not thought Of course there is a pictorial similarity The birds are leaf-like in appearance, tossed and buffeted by �-11- the wintry winds as they flutter to the ground. But these birds are also gatherinq for a .!!!U! flight, a migration across the water into the sunny warmth of their winter home, probably in North Africa. In this respect they refer us back to the souls of the dead, waiting to cross the Styx. But the crucial point, distinguishing them from the leaves, is that these .!!.!!!!. birds will presumably return northward with the followinq sprinq-- not a new generation, as with but these birds themselves. Ho~er's Leaves, It seems clear that we are being referred forward as well, to Anchises' Pythagorean account of the transmigration and reembodiment of souls, later in Aeneid VI. The sunny lands of the south recall the blessed, luminous groves of Elysium, where some fortunate souls are sent after -they "hang suspended in the empty winds" or "purge their crimes in the vast flood of the sea" CVI.740-1, where qurgite vasto is a verbal echo of gurgite passaqe). .!!?.~in line 310 of our Virqil seems to be suqgesting, in specific, self-conscious contradistinction to Bomer, that a kind of personal inunortality .!!, possible, even if only for a few: · not a derived "immortality" through the survival of one's of~sprinq, but an endurinq self, preserving one's identity and ·abidinq in the land of the blest. This happy prospect might lighten our prevailinq view of ·the human landscape of labor, mutability and death; but the few who are to enjoy it must meet .strinqent Cand very Roman) ethical standards. The melancholy ver~ longin~ felt by the others, the fallen leaves, is what Virgil returns to at the end of our passage, with the sound effects of the j~stly famous line: tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore. So far I've been arguing that Virgil's revision of the leaf-simile works in a kind of counterpoint with our memory of its Homeric source. There is even a reminiscence of Bomer in Virgil's use of rhythm. I �-12- have already described how the elision at the end of the word folia hurries us from the dying leaves to the second simile of the birds. ~ Let's look again at the movement of Homer's line: - ..., cp S.\ll.c. v I- T"~ )"Cll _Jj. , ..,. "I A, -u o w If' o1. ""\JI- 'T ~11?0) 1 cp v .i. '"' IJ ..,/- IJ I/ - "' J£ J'(J';...., }<~ot615 • The shortening of the diphthong, long by nature, at the end of the / word : }'. t £ '- . . is a metrical effect· known as "epic correption." , Here, atypically, the correption occurs at a bucolic diaeresis-- a pause after the fourth whole foot of the line. We would like to linger at such a marked break in this breathless-sounding, conspicuously dactylic line, but the shortening of I X(. (.L.. snatches us up and hurries us along, with marked enjambment, into the next generation of the leaves. The rhythmic force of this device is exactly analogous to that of Virgil's elision: and it comes at the analogous moment in the development of the similitude. Our feeling both of the correspondence between the two passages, and of the differences, is thereby sharpened. Perhaps I should apologise for dwelling on such small details in these Greek and Latin texts. I wanted to illustrate the degree of initmate familiarity that Virgil must have had wit.h Homer's poem, and that he also expects from the ideal reader of his own revisionist version. We all know about the large-scale structural ways in which -the Aeneid subsumes both the Iliad and the Odyssey: There are the references to the first lines of both Homeric poems in Virgil's first line: there are the plot parallels with the Odyssey in Aeneid I-VI and with the Iliad in VII-XII: there are the close resemblances of certain characters CTurnus, for instance, to Achilles sometimes, and other times to Hector). But such detailed imitation, allusion and pointed variation as I have tried to show goes much further: to a constant pressure, or presence of the older author .!A I - - It amounts the newer. �-13Virgil-- surely one of the most self-conscious poets who ever lived-cannot help but acknowledge his indebtedness to his master; at the same time, by varying the allusion he shows his authenticity and independence. To be writinq an epic at all means to be working in a certain tradition, to be a "son of Homer" and to admit it. In one sense this admission also grants Homer's implicit claim to have created a second world in the vastness of his artifice. Pope made. this point memorably in writing of Virgil: When first young ~ in his boundless Mind A work t'outlast Immortal ~ design'd, Perhaps he seemed above the Critick's Law, And but from Nature's Fountains scorned to draw: But when t•examine ev'ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. (Essay .2B. Criticism, 130-5) But if this should be the devours its own children. ~ast word, then epic would be a Titan that How can Virgil or anyone else write a second epic with similar aspirations of inclusiveness? A truly successful epic woul.d exhaust the conditions for the writing of another such poem. The very power of Homer's original epic forces Virgil at once to include it and to depart from it, to struggle against his own roots. The particular qualities of epic poems make it especially hard to write in a tradition, and make unavoidable the rivalry between any single epic poet and his predecessors. I have already mentioned the ·cosmic inclusiveness of epic, its encyclopedic quality that seeks to leave no subject matter remaining for any successor. Though epic poems try to embody the whole of human experience and human history, each one does so from a particular point of view. For epics tend to be •national,• to recast history in terms of the destiny of a particular nation or culture. So to acknowledge one's epic predecessor is to participate in a rivalry of cultures-- Rome versus Greece, say, or . Christian versus ·Pagan. ·.· Even more problematically, the poet is not �-14- · a mere mouthpiece for one historical or nationalistic world-view. It is true that such a view speaks through him: he is a prophet, speaking for another as the word implies, and the "Muse" is an image of the cosmic providence that seeks, through epic poets, to make itself known to humanity. But the poet is also engaged in a heroic act of ~-assertion, in daring to take up the task of writing such a work, and as a prophet of his own Muse he speaks for himself. So the family drama of poetic influence, the Oedipal conflict of the poet with his own forbears, is sharpened and maqnified by the s·p ecial demands of the epic tradition. Por Virgil, the solution to this predicament is to incorporate or subsume Homer into his own poetic universe. Cit is thus that I can speak of the presence of Homer within the text of Virgil.) His allusion to Homer's leaf•simile, for example, summons up all the specific affect of the passage in Iliad VI, where the leaves are made into a powerfully ambiquous emblem both of the pathos of mortal finitude and of the ways in which the cyclical self-perpetuation of nature transcends that finitude. Virgil, .I say, invokes all this: and then by subtly varying it, he goes beyond it, projecting this dual perspective on the natural warld into a new dialectic with the realm of the supernatural. So his poem implicitly claims that it contains and supersedes the parent poem. Homer's epic inclusiveness aspired to the swallowing-up of the ·whole natural world. it: The Aeneid shares this aspiration but adds to In addition to swallowing the primary world of nature, Virgil claims to hav~ swallowed up the secondary •world• of Homar's poem. Thus in the theoqony of the epic poem, each newly-generated Titan swallows its parents. I have said that by its nature epic locates present human actions in a larger historical context: this •epic present• is emphatically �-15the intersection of past and future. But the heroic act of writing an epic must itself be located in a similar temporal context, with poetic predecessors and successors arranged in a providential order that sets off the magnitude of the present poem. Virgil's poetic self- consciousness brings a second, self-referential story into his narrative: Behind the drama and great labor of the building of Rome there is the 4rama and the great labor of the. building of the Aeneid. Each of these two great actions comes from ·a Greek precedent which it acknowledges, incorporates and seeks to transcend. Each action also seeks to project itself indefinitely into the future: The perpetual glory of the Roman imperium is to be accompanied by the everlasting fame of Virgil's poem. But Virgil is sufficiently aware of the necessary mutability of human affairs to entertain a melancholy scepticism about the staying power, both of the empire and of the poem. He expresses his concern about his own poem's posterity by another use of the image of the leaves. In Book III, Helenus prophesies to his kinsman Aeneas about the arrival in Italy: •Arrived there, when you reach the city of Cumae, the sacred lakes and whispering woods of Avernus, youill find the frenzied seer in her deep cave who sings the fates, and notes them down on leaves. The songs the lady writes, she puts in order, leaf upon leaf, and shuts them in the cavern. There they remain untouched and in their places. But when a gentle breeze blows in the door, the hinges turn, the delicate leaves are scattered; th~n as they flutter through the cave, she never cares to replace them or remake her songs. Unhelped by Sibyl, visitors hate her halls." (III. 441-452) For this reason, when Aeneas comes in Book VI to consult the Sibyl he begs her to sing her prophecies herself, rather than entrusting them to the leaves and making them whirling playthings of the swift winds. He promises to build a temple to Phoebus and Trivia, where �-16- a shrine will be set apart to preserve the Sibyl's written prophecies, with priests as caretakers. The possessed prophetess, the Sibyl, is here a stand-in for Virgil himself. Like her, he is divinely inspired~ the underworld just as she is for Aeneas. and he is our guide into That there is a relationship between the Sibyl and the figure of the poet is also suggested by a verbal correspondence: In her prophecy the Sibyl says bella, horrida bella, et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. war, savage war I see ahead, and Tiber foaming blood. (VI. 86-7) In Book VII, speaking in his own voice in the new invocation to the Muse, Virgil says tu vatem, tu, diva, mone. dicam horrida bella, dicam acies, actosque animis in funera reges. Oh Goddess, guide your seer! I shall sing savage war battle-lines, and kings by courage driven to death. (VII. 41-2) Here the word vates, •seer• or •prophet," which has been repeatedly used to refer to the Sibyl, is applied to Virgil himself in his capacity of epic poet, and he puts into his own mouth an echo of her own phrase horrida bella, •savage wars.• And as Virgil.!!, in some sense the Sibyl- ~. he wonders if his prophetic poem will in the end, like her writings, become a "plaything of the winds.• The written word is treacherous, and perhaps any such attempt to arrest the flux of experience in the fixity of human artifice is doomed. Perhaps, as he himself has subsumed and superseded Homer, some new poet will come and swallow up Virgil's - poem too. . To be thus superseded is not annihilation, but it is a very ambiguous kind of poetic immortality. �-17It may be that the golden bough itself serves in part as an emblem for the contradictions in Virgil's view: of his poetic posterity: bough is artificial, yet a kind of second nature. The It has the durability of metal1 yet it can be plucked and then grows again of itself. To the person chosen to receive it, it serves as a ticket of admission to the realm that contains the past, the future, and the ultimate mysteries of human destiny. Yet we remember that it yielded itself only reluctantly even to the hand of Aeneas1 and if it chooses to deny itself to you, no violence can harvest its riches. It flashes an eerie glint of gold in the shadowy woods, near the jaws of foul-smelling Avernus1 and its metal leaves give off a tinny rattle against the wind. ****************** The dictionary tells us that it was only in late antiquity that the· Latin word folium, "leaf," was first used to refer to a sheet of paper or page of a book. As far as I know, the connection between the leaves of the forest and the human artifice of poetry is first made explicitly by the Roman poet Horace, a contemporary and friend of Virgil, in the critical treatise known as the .!.£!. Poetica: Ut ·silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos, prima cadunt, ita verborum vetus interit aetas, et iuvenum ritu florent modo nata vigentque. Debemur morti nos nostraque, sive receptus terra Neptunus classes Aquilonibus arcet regis opus, sterilisve diu palus aptaque remis vicinas urbes alit et grave sentit aratrum1 seu cursum mutavit iniquum fruqibus amnis, doctus iter melius: .mortalia facta peribunt, nedum sermonum stet honos et gratia vivax. When at the year's end forests change their leaves, The oldest fall first1 so with the generations of words: The former die, the newer bloom like boys. For we and all things ours are owed to death: The harbors that we build Ca royal task!)1 · The barren marshes, then a place for boats, Now drained for plowing, feeding farms nearby1 The dams that bend the river's angry course �-18- And save the crops-- These mortal works shall die, Nor shall the grace and glory of discourse live. ~ Poetica 60-69) But though this connection had been made, and though Virgil's Sibyl wrote her prophecies on leaves, the word itself probably did -not -have for Virgil the witty self-reference that its linguistic development, and the predominance of written culture, later made possible. For Dante, the closeness of the related Italian words foqlia, "leaf of a tree" and foqlio, "page in a book," makes explicit the doubleness of the drama of the leaves. In the primary world of nature, leaves die and others succeed them; in the second, rival nature that is the world of epic poems, what is said to happen out in the woods can also be referred to the successive generations of pages of verse. So Dante's use of the image of the leaves is even more explicitly self-referring, and Dante's poem is even more self-conscious than its predecessors about its context in literary history. It is appropriate, then, that the family drama of Dante's relation to his poetic father, Virgil, is internalized and made explicit within the poem's narrative: Both "Dante" and "Virgil" are characters in a poem written by the first man and pervasively influenced by the second. And their relationship as Dante depicts it certainly reflects the intense ambivalence he feels toward his great forerunner. but his guid~ce Virgil is the powerful and beloved guide; is fallible and limited in scope-- His pupil will go farther than Virgil can take him. And the most powerful indicator of all is that Virgil finally is a damned soul, one of those who have "lost the good of the intellect." As a denizen of Hell he is made to assist in an extended revisionist rewol.1cihg of his own Book VI. a Virgilian passage lies allusively behind, or within Dante's text, the implied claim is that Virgil had an inkling, partial at best, Whenever �-19of the authoritative version we get from the younger poet. is from shadowy types to truth: The movement Virgil· went forth into the night, holding a lamp behind him to aid his successors. Dante sees more and knows better, and so now does Virgil-- but too late. It is in this emotionally charged atmosphere that we see, in the . third canto of Inferno, a new generation of the leaves that first grew and died by the River s,camander, on the fields of Troy. Virgil the guide and Dante the pilgrim have come to the banks of . the Acheron, where Charon, the steersman of the livid marsh, transports across the water the souls of the damned: Come d'autunno si levan le foglie l'una appresso dell'altra, fin che 'l ramo vede alla terra tutte le sue spoglie, similmente il mal seme d'Adamo gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una, per,cenni come augel per suo richiamo. Cosi sen vanno su per l'onda bruna e avanti che sien di la discese, anche di qua nuova schiera s'auna. As in the fall the leaves are taken away Each followed by the next, until the bough Sees on the ground all its despoilments lie, In that same way the evil seed of Adam Burl themselves from the shoreline, one by one At signals, like a bird called by its lure. Thus they embark over the dusky waves, · And even before they land on the other side~ Again on this side a new crowd is gathered. (III. 112-120) Dante leaves no doubt that he is alluding to the Virgilian passage we have just .examined. The simile comes at the analogous point in the narrative-- an encounter with Charon, a passage over an infernal river into the underworld. included: Even the second simile of the birds is "At signals, like a bird called by its lur~." But having ·drawn Virgil's text into his own poem, Dante proceeds to transform it by a skilful reallocation of emphasis. The extended treatment of �-20- the leaves dwells on the consequence, the result of their fall: bough/ Sees on the ground all its despoilments lie." "The Our first thought is a kind of pity for the tree that has suffered the plundering of its spoils. Virgil gave us the pathos and vulnerability of the leaves themselves, but Dante is here speaking of their source, the tree which i - now denuded. s Still, the two passages both seem to be portraying passive victims of the force of another. So we are puzzled and disquieted at the way Dante's version continues: In that same way the evil seed of Adam !!:!£!.themselves from the shoreline ••• The violent contrast bewteen .!i, levan, "are taken away," and gittansi, "hurl themselves," heightened by the reflexive form of both, makes us doubt the aptness of the simile. Our perplexity is increased when we notice a hidden wit in the use of .!.!. levan: Levarsi can mean "to raise or lift oneself up" as well as "to be taken away." In anticipation of the moral significance of verticality in the poem, "lifting up" is set in polar opposition to "casting down." Dante is implying that leaf-like souls, unlike Virgil's passive victims, fall by their own choice in an act of deliberate violence. It is thus fitting that our sympathy is diverted, in Dante's version, from the leaves themselves to the bough of the denuded tree. is this tree? What We probably think first of the forest of the suicides in Canto XIII of Inferno, where both Pier della Vigna and an anonymous Florentine suicide, now turned into a bush, fit the picture of the bereaved plant, deprived of its foliage, staring at the ground. There too the immediate reaction, both ours and the pilgrim's, is pity• But the word spoglie, "despoilments," is used in that canto to refer to the bodies the suicides have cast off by their own act. the pilgrim we mus~ Along with learn the hard lesson that recurs throughout the �-21- Inferno: The justice of God often does not easily accord with our inunediate passions of pity and love. Our wills must be shaped anew. The suicides have offered violence to more than themselves, and we must look farther to find the tree from which the damned souls, the leaves, have torn themselves. In the thirty-second canto of Purgatorio, Dante and Statius are followinq the qreat paqeant of revelation, includ- nq the triumphal i car drawn by -the Griffin, symbol. of the incarnate Christ: ~ Si passeqqiando l'alta selva vota, colpa di quella ch'al serpente crese, temprava i passi un' anqelica nota. Forse in tre voli tanto spazio prese disfrenata saetta, quanto era.mo rimossi, quando Beatrice scese. Io senti' mormorare a tutti "Adamo'; poi cerchiaro una pianta dispoqliata di foqlie e d'altra fronda in ciascun ramo. La coma sua, che tanto si dilata pi~ quanto pi6 ~ s~, fora dall' Indi ne' boschi lor per altezza ammirata. "Beato se•, qrifon, che non discindi col becco d'esto leqno dolce al gusto, poscia che mal si torce il ventre quindi." Cosi dintorno a l'albero robusto qridaron li altri; e !'animal binato: , "Si si conserva il seme d' oqni qiusto." So, passinq throuqh the lofty forest, bare Throuqh fault of her that trusted in the serpent, The sonq of an anqel ~ept our steps in time. As far as in three shots, perhaps, an arrow Loosed from the bow would fly, so far had we Moved on our way, wnen Beatrice descended. Then from them all I heard a murmur: 'Adam'; And they formed a rinq around a tree, despoiled Of leaves and other foliaqe in each branch. Its- livinq tresses widen all the more As the tree qoes hiqher; even by the Indians In their qreat woods, its height would be admired. "Blessed are you, Griffin, since with your beak You pluck not from this tree so sweet to taste; For later on the belly wrenches from it." Thus circlinq around the miqht tree Th~ others shouted; and the animal twice~b~rn Cried: "So the seed of all just men is saved." CPurgatorio XXXII. 31-48) �-22The Griffin goes on to renew the tree laid bare by the fault of Adam. We can see that the epithet!!.!!!!. seme d'Adamo, "the evil seed of ~dam," in our original passage, was not lightly chosen. These leaves are not __ g_eneralized symbols of the condition of mortality; they are particular reminders of the human act that originated that condition. The emphasis on "seed" in Inferno III (Cf. III. 104-5), reinforced by sound effects--· .!i!!!!_lmente il mal ~ d'Adamo-- here finds justification. Though the evil seeds ironically bear no fruit, cast on the barren ground of hell, the good seed of Adam is Christ, the first fruits and the seed of all righteousness, repairing the damage fall. ~ought by Adam's By his act the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is transformed into the great tree that is an epithet for Heaven in Paradiso XVIII: l'albero che vive della cima e frutta sempre e mai non perde foglia. the tree that lives from its top and always bears fruit, never losing its leaves. (XVIII. 29-30) It seems that we have accounted for Dante's adding to his Virgilian source the detail of the tree contemplating its own despoliation. In so doing he turns the falling of the leaves into a typological image of the fall c;f humanity, and of all nature. Through .Christ's saving act, however, the leaves as well as the fruit are restored to the tree, and so the -integrity of the re&tored tree is a kind of image of the ·!ncarnation, the marriage of the human and the divine. These things are known to a Christian through the revelation of Holy Scripture; but Virgil as a Pagan has had no access to scripture, and thus he has departed by the time Dante and Statius see the tree's antitype in the pageant at the end of Purqatorio. Dante the poet's revi~ion of the simile from Aeneid VI shows both the rhetorical power and the spiritual limitations of the older poem. �-23Another image of this transformation is Dante's use of Virgil's birds. We remember that in the Aeneid the birds seemed almost as passive as the leaves: "the season's frost/ Drives them across the sea." The difference was that the death of the leaves was utterly final and definitive, while the flight of the birds left open the possibility of a cyclical return. Dante takes Virgil's migrating birds and reduces them to one hunting bird, probably a falcon ret,u rning to the falconer's lure. Here is a conspicuous revision of Virgil, for whom the points of similarity between leaves and birds were multitude and helpless passivity. Dante's bird is only £!!!t1 and its passage is a willed act of obedience to a command. Whose command? Virgil himself is made to tell us, in his capacity as guide, in Purgatory. Look up, he tells Dante the pilgrim, "li occhi rivolgi al logoro che gira lo rege etterno con le rote magne." Quale il falcon, che prima a' pie si mira, indi si volge al grido e si protende per lo disio del pasto che la il tira: tal mi fee' io. "Turn your eyes to the falcon's lure, whirled round By the Eternal King, with his mighty spheres." Then like the falcon, who looks first below Then turns to his master's call, straining ahead From craving for the food that draws him thither, Just so was I. CPurqatorio XIX. 62-671 Cf. Purq. XIV. 145-7) ···- When a soul ordained to bliss or to damnation proceeds to its eventual .. resting place, it resembles the falcon heeding the command of the falconer-that is, God. But unlike the migratory birds of the Aeneid, this falcon is on a one-way journey, propelled by its own will either for good or for evil. The damned souls which hurl themselves from the shoreline are following their appetites i,nto hell, just as the more blessed falcon of Dante's comparison in Purgatory strains ahead toward the Lord's �-24- supper. Dante's version of the simile implicitly condemns the melancholy quietism of Virgil, who makes Anchises say guisgue "Each of us endures his shadowy doom." ~ patimur manis, Even the damned souls in the commedia hurl themselves forward, instead of stretching out their arms in ineffectual longing. As Virgil revised Homer, Dante revises piety -~ Virgil~ In each case filial toward a literary parent causes the imitation: but in each case the imitated model is subverted by implicit criticism. By subsuming the source into his own poem, assimilating it into even small details of the allusive passages in the text, the succeeding poet suggests the incompleteness of the original, now fleshed out by his own still more inclusive epic vision. Virgil's revisionism is sometimes ambivalent: He seems to feel a kind of nostalgia for the simpler, more naturalistic view of history that he finds in Homer's poems, but he knows he lives too late to indulge in it. There has been a tragic fall from naive archaic heroism into the necessity of a political art. The greater self-conscious artificiality of Virgil's poem is in part an implied celebration of purposive human artifice in the building of Rome, but also in part ·an expression of Virgil's regretful awareness of the human costs of the great enterprise. As we have seen, Virgil's ambivalence emerges in his prospective view of -his own poem's posterity. In casting. · himself as the Sibyl, he appropriates to himself the authority and lasting power of divine inspiration: but in the image of the scattering of Sibyl's leaves he expresses his worry that the inclusiveness and integrity of his poem will be compromised with the passage of time. Virgil knows that when a poem is subjected to the kind of systematic and intimate textual revision that he himself performed upon Homer's work, it suffers a kind of diaspora, a tearing and scattering of the �-25unified imaginative vision of its creator-poet, wind in the Sibyl's cave. In this Virgil was a true prophet, as we recognize when we consider his treatment in the Conunedia. In ..contrast, Dante shows greater confidence in his power to subsume his predecessor and to preempt any that might come after him. To some extent this confidence results from his own self-assertive personality; but it is also the confidence of the Christian humanist that his creed is the true, valuable and permanent interpretation of the partial truths of the ancients. In the measure that Heaven is the True City, "that Rome of which Christ is a Roman" CPurq. XXXII.102) which both includes, fulfills and transcends the Rome that Aeneas labored to build, so the journey chronicled by Dante is the true Aeneid. All human descents into the underworld are types of Christ's descent to harrow Hell. All human journeys to beatitude are types of his resurrection and ascension. Thus a literal truth-- the truest of all truths, for Dante-- is incarnated into the ostensible fiction of the narrative of the Conunedia. Dante the pilgrim instantiates Christ by dying and rising with him, as the poem's.chronological scheme makes clear. (Dante descends into Hell on Good Friday of the year 1300 and emerges on Easter Sunday. ..!!!£.. I.36f., XXXIV.68, ll2f. and especially..!!!£.. XXI.112-4.) See In the same way Dante the poet claims to provide · a kind of incarnation in ·iiterary history analogous to Christ's incarnation in real human history. In the complete interpenetration of Dante's mythos and his subject, the word made flesh is made word again, as an organizing principle for experience; and then by the powerful inunediacy with which it is made present for us, it is made flesh once again. Christ the Logos is here allegorically a ratio, a master relationship between the human soul and divinity that is replicated in a kind of continuing proportion �-26- by Dante the pilgrim, by Dante the poet in his retelling, and by us, the readers. The unity and incorruptibility of Christ himself serve as a kind of guarantee of the integrity and incorruptibility of Dante's poem. We see this with extraordinary power at the end of the Conunedia, where the unity of the creation is imaged as the cohesion of a book of pages bound together: o abbondante grazia end' io ·presunsi ficcar lo vise per la luce etterna, tanto che la veduta vi consunsi! Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna, legato con amore in un volume, ci~ che per l'universo si squaderna: sustanze e accidenti e lor costume quasi conflati insieme, per tal mode che ci~ ch' i' dice un semplice lume. La forma universal di questo nodo credo ch' i' vidi, perche pia di largo, dicendo questo, mi sento ch'i godo. Un punto solo m'~ maggior letargo che venticinque secoli all' impresa che f' Nettuno ammirar l'ombra d'Argo. e O grace abounding, from which I took heart To fix my gaze upon the eternal light So long that I spent all my seeing there! Within its depth I saw that there was gathered Bound up by love into a single volume The scattered pages of the universe: Substances, accidents and their relations, As if together fused, in such a way That what I tell of is a simple light. The universal form of this complex I think I saw, because now even more In telling it, I feel my joy increase. One instant is to me more Lethe-like Than twenty-five centuries of oblivion For Neptune, marvelling at the Argo's shadow. (Paradiso XXXIII.82-96) In the phrase "bound up by love into a single volume,• the word volume is used wittily to mean both a book and anything a sphere, for example. ~~rned-- like The word is used in this second sense repeatedly in Paradiso CXXIII.112, XXVI.119, XXVIII.14). But the most important preceding use of volume comes in Inferno I, where Dante also pairs �-27- it with amore, "love." "Or se' tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte che spandi di parlar si largo fiume?" rispuos' io lui con vergognosa fronte. "O delli altri poeti onore e lume, vagliami 'l lungo studio e' 1 grande amore che m'ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume. Tu se' lo mio maestro e 'l mio autore; tu se' solo colui da cu' io tolsi lo bello stilo che m'ha fatto onore ••• " "Are you that Virgil, then, that famous spring from which pours forth so great a stream of speech?" I answered him with shame upon my face. "O light and honor of all other bards, Let the great zeal and love avail me now That long have made me .search throughout your volume. You are my master, my original; And you alone are he from whom I took The style whose beauty brings me honor too." (Inferno I.79-87) The honorific word volume, applied first to Virgil's work, refers to the epic inclusiveness that allows him to involve and encompass so vast a world within his poem. But its last use in Dante's poem, framing the Commedia at the other end, as it were, shows how much larger a claim he makes for his own volume. The time-honored of the World" is here adapted to two purposes: ima~e of the "Book It expresses the sense of integrity .and oneness that Dante the pilgrim perceived in all of creation, with the power of the vision vouchsafed to him in the highest of the heavens; but it also self-referentially implies the power of Dante's- poem to convey this same sense, though mediated by ' lanquage, to his audience. The encyclopedic claims of epic are made literal. But at the end of the passage there is a sudden reversal: One instant is to me more Lethe-like Than twenty-five centuries of oblivion For Neptune, marvelling at the Argo's shadow. The all-inclusive power of epic has also been internalized and made contingent on the visionary power and articulateness of the poet. �-28If his capacity for beatitude proves to be fleeting, as is the common case for living human beings, his volume will be in effect sguadernato-scattered in single pages throughout the universe. Remarkably, however, by locating himself and his own failure of v.ision within the narrative, Dante asserts the scope and lasting power of the vision that he admittedly fails to depict or even evoke in a lasting way. Unlike Virgil, whose survival and fame seemed to depend on the continuance of an_ earthly empire, Dante links his own poem to the eternal actuality and truth of God's empire. That he is not able to convey it directly somehow guarantees that it is there. This rhetorical strategy accounts for the great paradox of the last canto of the Commedia: that in the most successful evocation of divine presence in any work of literature, the inexpressible is expressed precisely through a failure to express it. Thus when Dante appropriates Virgil's image of the Sibylline leaves, it has a quietude and sweetness remote from Virgil's disturbing melancholy. Dante is here revising and subsuming not only Virgil's poem but his own: Qual ~ colui che somniando vede che dopo il soqno la passione impressa ·rimane, e l'altro alla mente non riede, , cotal son io, che quasi tutta cessa mia visione, ed ancor mi distilla nel cor il dolce che nacque da essa • Cosi la neve al sol si disigilla: cos~ al vento nelle foglie levi si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla. . As .-is the man who, in his dreaming, sees And then, the dream past, still its imprinted power Remains, but all the rest from him is gone, So too am I now: Almost all the vision Palls off from me apace: yet there distills Within my heart the sweetness born of it. Thus in the sun the snow unseals itself: Thus in the wind, among ·the delicate leaves, The prophecies of Sibyl went. astray. (Paradiso XXXIII.58-66) ****************** �-29- skipping over three hundred fifty years and some notable episodes in this family history, we come to a new death of leaves, newly reborn, in Milton's Paradise~· Satan, cast into hell, rears himself up from the burning lake and struggles massively to the shore. Nathless he so endur'd, till on the Beach Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and calld His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intranst Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades High overarcht imbowr: or scatterd sedge Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armd Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew Busiris and his Memphian Chivalrie, While with perfidious hatred they persu'd The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore thir floating Carcasses And Brok'n Chariot Wheels. So think bestrown Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood, Under amazement of thir hideous change. (Paradise~, I.299-313) I have time only to sketch in the most compressed and cryptic way how Milton receives and transforms this legacy of the simile of the leaves. Like Homer he locates the passage generally in a context of huge, heroic battlefield conflict. Like Virgil he compares the leaves in their multitude to the number of the fallen. Like Dante he gives us the final sight of the leaves on the ground, in the fallenness of a Christian Hell. And there are numerous other particular points of allusion as well, to these authors and others, like the epic poet Tasso, the Biblical narrator of Exodus, and most especially the prophet Isaiah: And all the h~~~ of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from a fig tree. (Is.34:4) The richness, the plenitude of this catalogue of allusion testifies to the inclusiveness of Milton's encyclopedic epic. Yet the sheer �-30- range of the field surveyed, the number of sources invoked, is dizzying to us: The leaves of these preceding volumes lie as thick as those in Vallombrosa, and we surveying them are like the fallen angels, amazed at the wild declension of images and the change from one to another. The passage becomes a kind of labyrinth, as the pun on "amazement" suggests. What are the sources of our difficulties? Perhaps we can enumerate some. First, the different sources alluded to are made to work against each other. Let me give two examples. Vallombrosa, a pretty rural convent outside of Florence, seems to provide a concrete, naturalistic, this-worldly location for the fallen leaves. That suggests that the simile will be faithful· in spirit to Homer's practice of contrasting the violent scenes of his narrative with incongruously peaceful vignettes of country life. But the place Vallombrosa is chosen for the particular reason that its name is significant: It means "Shady Valley," the Valley of the Shadow of Death, an allegorical landscape like Dante's. our satisfaction at recognizing this wordplay does not last long. At the end of the line, •Etrurian shades" adumbrates, if I may use that word, the presence of the Etruscan or pre-Roman ghosts of the Aeneid, in whose underworld there is also a valles umbrosa. gives us time to be confused~ The lineation then the enjambed remnant of the clause · inakes us realize that the word "shades" refers not . to ghosts, but metonymically to trees. We are back in the placid natural landscape again. A second example: Our awareness of the presence of Virgil and Dante within and behind Milton's text conditions us to think of spirits waiting on the near side of a body of water, preparing to cross over. It is on the hither shore that both Aeneas and Dante the pilgrim stand, contemplating the numberless dead. But here the simile of Pharoah's �-31- chariots C"Busiris and his Memphian Chivalrie") chasing the fleeing Israelites ("the Sojourners of Goshen") leaves us with no firm place to stand: At first we are with Pharoah, pursuing from the near shore: then, by the magic of a subordinate clause, our perspective . shifts to the farther shore and we are with the Hebrews, looking back. But what we are looking at is the wreck of Pharoah's army, now not on either shore- but scatter~d in or on the water; like the fallen angels. The shift from one invoked source to another enforces on us abrupt dislocations in space and time. Another source of difficulty for us comes from the unique temporal setting of Milton's story. As his poem goes on to show, the fall of Satan and the rebel angels helps to cause the fall of humanity and of all of terrestrial nature. Such phenomena as the change of seasons, the coming of storms, the death of leaves or of any other living thing-all these result from and instantiate the first coming of death that Milton depicts. It is thus incongruous for him to use these later, more familiar phenomena in similes: To do so is to compare a thing with itself, or a subset of itself, as if I were to say, "The earth's rotation on its axis is as regular as the alternation of night and day.• A~ _ Wallace Stevens once remarked, identity is the vanishing point of resemblance. Milton's implicit claim is that the primary ·truths of human history, told in his poem, are more intelligible in themselves than any poetic comparison could make them. At worst, poetic comparison will mislead us, like the inappropriately tranquil scene of Vallombrosa. In trying to reduce the subject to the narrow limits of our fallen human comprehension, poetry causes us to make mortal errors again and again. The sheer difficulty, the deception and complexity of Milton's verse are often attempts to make us aware of this repeated �-32- process. Even at best, any statement of likeness would be redundant, strictly speaking. The originating status of Milton's subject matter is so all-encompassing that no comparison can be found which is not absorbed into the thing compared to. sense is possibl~: Hence no epic simile in the ordinary If the normal action of the similes is to include other realms· of experience in an epic narrative, here we find that all of those realms are .already automatically included. we, the beholders. And so are The poem cannot offer us a god-like or privileged place to stand, from which we can contemplate in detachment the unity and comprehensiveness of creation. It is our very fallenness, our implication in the events narrated, that causes our difficulties in reading. Milton's poem thus conspires rhetorically against itself, but only after disposing of its precursors. We saw Virgil rewriting Homer and Dante rewriting Virgil: but for Milton there is no single epic forerunner, no fatherly master-poet to whom he is irretrievably indebted and whose precedent he must overcome. In place of an intricate counterpointing of two texts, we get_ from Milton an all-out assault on what he portrays as a monolithic tradition of epic poetry. As he claims in the invocation at the start of Book IX, all conventional heroic narrative is intrinsically inferior to the story that he alone is trying to tell. But he too, .of course, is fallen, dependent on the inspiration of a heavenly muse. His greatest·source of information and also of difficulty is Holy Scripture itself. A revisionist treatment of Genesis can only dramatize its >wn futility, and that of all human poetic artifice. As I've claimed, other epics try to swallow up their predecessors and preempt their successors. Milton's more radical project is to chop down the whole ~amily tree, and his own branch with it. �-33It is somewhat alarming to reflect that he may well have succeeded. Many literary historians consider Paradise epic poem in Western literature. ~ to be the last true I do not know whether this is true: if it is not, I am similarly puzzled by the question of who the legitimate heirs are, in the generations that follow. . seen suggests at least a direction: But the succession we have inward, away from the narrative representation of physical experience. As the tradition goes on, more of the poem's essential content consists, not in its self-containedness as a· text, but in its interaction with its own past and future. The burden of the successor poet is to inherit the tradition and make it new, to use an intimate familiarity with the work of another as the new material for a radically originating act. Perhaps this process . can be a paradigm for you and me, not writers of epics but readers of them. We too must remake the poems we read, approaching them with qualified piety and then dismembering them, assimilating them into ourselves. They are the true and valid sources of our self-making, lenses through which we view the whole of things, tokens of admission not only into other worlds but into our deep selves, the underworld in which we learn our destiny. If we don't appropriate what we find in these pages, making them ours by wrenching them out of their own place and time, then they are dead leaves indeed. But if they find ·new life in us, if our !:!,-vision of these received texts becomes a new mode of vision, ours and yet not ours alone-- then we too might be able to see the whole world as one place, bound up by love into a single volume, for as long as the vision lasts. � 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. 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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. 35 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 Dead leaves: illustrations of the genealogy of the epic poem Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 8, 1988 by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988-04-08 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 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3789" title="Sound recording">Sound recording</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Tuck 1988-04-08 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/13bd86e552415770807acbde01e75ac5.mp3 1a28dfa2a12278c9a4534cbed8ce29fd 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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.) 01:00:16 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 Why You Never Finished Your Essay: Montaigne and the Motion of Writing Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2001, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001-04-13 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 Tuck 2001-04-13 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3794" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Subject The topic of the resource Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592. Essais Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592. Literary style Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/53cea5e66eb420bd15258c1db655b368.mp3 e8a3f7472dae51b23a6ea2a85db0d512 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 407) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:06:56 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 Dead leaves: illustrations of the genealogy of the epic poem Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 8, 1988 by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tuck, Jonathan Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988-04-08 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 Tuck 1988-04-08 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3791" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/02c2060d67ead06fb17bb4cfc0ad2ea2.mp3 b5a5c005ba2e44f484ee925bc2de0385 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 compact disc Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:39:58 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 habit of violence Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 10, 1959 by Stringfellow Barr as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Barr, Stringfellow, 1897-1982 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 1959-01-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this recording. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Barr 1959-01-10 Friday night lecture Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/88b5656428e0b2bf5c2b9b7581a1867b.pdf 2e7b6c456101d1d6f123e279fbb0552d PDF Text Text Joe Sachs Spring, 2002 Wholes and Parts in Human Character Who are you? What are you? I'm not asking for your name or occupation, but rather for what you're made of, or what you amount to. And I'm not intending to be impolite or impertinent, but to include myself in the question, to turn the attention of all of us upon the philosophic question that touches us most closely. Thomas Aquinas is not hesitant about answering it (Summa Theol. I-II, Qu. 1, art.I, respondio): "Man differs from irrational animals in this, that he is master of his actions. Wherefore those actions alone are properly called human of which man is master. Now man is master of his actions through his reason and will." Shakespeare's Hamlet articulates the same thought in praising Horatio, and formulates the contrasting state (Act. III, scene ii, 64-75): "Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, And could of men distinguish, her election Hath sealed thee for herself... Give me that man That is not passion's slave and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee." So you amount to either a master or a slave, depending on whether reason or passion has the upper hand in your make-up. But is this contrast well-founded? David Hume doesn't think so. "Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, [he writes,] than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates." But Hume argues that reason has no power to oppose passion or produce action, and concludes that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." (A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. II, Part III, sect. III.) This deliberate paradox may be more palatable when we note that Hume is only adding force and vivacity to an earlier formulation of Thomas Hobbes, who had written that "the Thoughts are to the Desires, as Scouts and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired." (Leviathan, Part I, Chap. 8.) Hobbes and Hume agree that reason is merely instrumental to our primary mode of access to our own good, which can only be irrational. Now the weakness of reason may be granted by those who would not go along with demoting it to a subordinate role in us. Immanuel Kant 1 �reflects that "if...happiness were the real end of nature in the case of a being having reason and will, then nature would have hit upon a very poor arrangement in having the reason of the creature carry out this purpose...And in fact, we find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment." (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Academy p. 395.) Kant sides with reason, but as our guide to becoming worthy of a happiness which can never be realized in the empirical world. We are radically divided beings, in his view, and can never have it both ways. But an older sort of wisdom is articulated in Plato's Republic (esp. 439D-442B), according to which the human soul is not a duality of reason and passion, but has three parts, with the middle part giving it the possibility of wholeness. As described in the Republic this middle part is what is irrationally spirited in us, just as in a spirited horse, but capable of obeying reason, so as to be able to follow its leader like a dog. There is nothing spiritual in this sort of spirit, but there is something that can have dignity, since it appears not only in pep rallies that arouse school spirit, but also as what we call the indomitable human spirit which can rise above any adversity. The republic, that is, the regime or constitution, that Plato's Republic is about is the internal human commonwealth in which reason rules and directs the passions by joining with, and giving honor to, our spirited side. Only that third part of us is capable of loving the good and being loyal to it, and the constitution to which it submits is not the despotic one of mastery, but the political rule of persuasion. About fifty years ago, C. S. Lewis wrote a book about education called The Abolition of Man. His claim there is that all the ancient human traditions have addressed in some form the middle part of the human being, while the prevailing thinking of the enlightened twentieth century has lost touch with it altogether. If we fear all the attachments of our spiritedness as divisive or sentimental, as obstacles to progress, then we may proclaim our rationality, while in fact we come to be ruled by the lowest common denominators among our appetites, if not by mere caprice. Those progressive educators who fail to understand this may like to call themselves intellectuals, Lewis says (p. 35), but "It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so." If reason is universal and the passions are generic, then it is the spririted, honor-loving element in our 2 �make-up that most of all makes each of us what we are, and a disdain for it, with a consequent neglect of its nurture, leads to the dis-education that Lewis calls the abolition of man. Now these provisional sketches of the ways reason and passion may stand toward one another in us may serve as background to an exploration of Aristotle's thinking about the same topic. When I came to spend an extended time in close contact with the Nicomachean Ethics, I found a number of things that surprised me. After many earlier readings of the book, I would have said confidently that Aristotle believes the healthy human soul to be under the command and control of reason, and that something in us that is neither wholly rational nor wholly irrational makes that possible. As in so many other ways, that is, I thought that Aristotle had followed a path marked out by Plato, making it determinate in his own way. Now, I am not so sure of that interpretation. Some distinct and memorable passages in the Ethics seem to paint that portrait of what a human being is, but others that are more difficult, more entangled, and more central to Aristotle's inquiry seem to tell a different story. I hope to make both accounts clearer to myself, and to invite all of you to take part in assessing them, both as readings of a text and as reflections of the subject we all have an interest in knowing best. Now, anyone who has ever taken Plato's Republic seriously, and hasn't been frightened off by its lack of currently popular jargon and currently prevalent opinions, knows that the three-part soul offers a powerful way of analyzing human life. Socrates is challenged in Book II to refute the claim that ethical virtue provides a second-best life, a social compromise made among ourselves by the weak, who play it safe to achieve a mediocre and watered-down version of happiness. This argument of Glaucon (358E-359B) is in no way inferior to similar ones made two thousand years later by the social contract theorists, beginning with Thomas Hobbes. But by the end of Book N, not even halfway through the dialogue, Glaucon admits that his argument has been exposed as ridiculous, and needs no refutation (445A). What has made ethical virtue go from seeming indefensible to seeming unassailable as a thing desirable for its own sake is nothing more than the hypothesis of the three-part soul. With that hypothesis, the examination of the pursuit of happiness shifts from the conflict among human beings to the conflicts within each one of us. That permits Socrates to conclude that virtue consists in "ruling and organizing oneself and becoming a friend to oneself, and harmonizing those things, of which there are three, just like 3 �the three notes of a musical chord" (443D). But Aristotle is not comfortable with partitioning the soul at all. In Book III, Chapter 9 of On the Soul, he says one can distinguish as many parts of the soul as one wishes, and easily find parts farther apart than the three in the Republic; and even those three, he says, cannot be wholly separated, since desire is present in all three of them. In the Ethics he is willing to adopt the popular way of speaking of a rational and an irrational part, but even there he cautions that these may be no more distinct than are the convex and concave sides of the same circle ( 11O2 26-32). Aristotle's own investigation of the soul focuses on ways of being-at-work, and on the potencies for them, rather than on parts, but the purposes of an inquiry into ethics do not require that degree of precision. Why, then, if the division of the soul in any manner is merely imprecise or figurative, does Aristotle prefer to accept a two-part rather than a three-part division? Or, what amounts to the same question, why does spiritedness play so small a role in the Nicomachean Ethics? It is an explicit topic in two places, and briefly in both: in one of them it is treated as an attitude that resembles courage but is not the genuine virtue (1116b 23-1117a 9), and in the other it is described as a particular kind of lack of restraint, an oversensitivity to insults that is less harmful than a lack of restraint in one's desires (1149a 24-b 3). Desires are governed by pleasure and pain, while spiritedness is governed by honor and shame. Now over the course of the ten books of the Ethics, the topic of pleasure re-emerges more than once; as the inquiry deepens, pleasure itself is seen in new lights, and transforms itself through the growth of human character. By contrast, the topic of shame is set aside early on (Bk. IV, Ch. 9), as something appropriate only to immature and undeveloped states of character. This is one of the clearest signs that Aristotle does not consider ethics to be concerned at all with social pressures, or the imposition of social norms, but to depend upon rising above motives of that sort. He calls it absurd to credit an adult with decent motives if he refrains from certain kinds of acts only out of shame (1128b 26-28). Honor too, the positive opposite of shame, is left behind early in Aristotle's study of ethics, but it is dealt with a little more extensively, and in fact we can observe the very moment when it drops out of the developing account of human character. Very early, in the fifth chapter of the whole work, Aristotle dismisses the honor that is the highest aim of political life as too superficial a thing to be a plausible candidate for the 4 �ultimate human good (109Sb 22-30). Honor shifts with those who give it; one really wants honor from those worthy to give it, and only for things in oneself that are worthy of receiving it, so the true standards that make honor worth pursuing are some sort of virtue or excellence, and the wisdom to recognize it. A little later in the inquiry, though, honor turns up again as entangled with one of the virtues, and the account of that virtue repeats the dialectical motion of Aristotle's earlier analysis of honor, this time as a lived development within a human being. That virtue is a complicated one to understand, just because of its complex relation to honor. Aristotle calls it greatness of soul. Our times, in which so many people have attempted to deny the existence both of souls and of any form of greatness, offer us no clear equivalent of Aristotle's phrase. The old Oxford translation called it pride, which might capture the greatness of soul Homer portrays in Achilles; some translations have called it high-mindedness, which might capture, or rather caricature, the greatness of soul Plato makes visible in Socrates. The worst translation of the phrase, magnanimity, simply plugs in Latin equivalents of each of its parts, and gets a result that has a totally different meaning in English, in which generosity is the primary element. Brother Robert Smith once suggested Charles de Gaulle as the twentieth century's pre-eminent great-souled man, and generosity was no part of the reason. Outside the Ethics, Aristotle mentions both Achilles and Socrates as great-souled, the former because he tolerates no insults, the latter because he is above caring about good or bad fortune (Posterior Analytics 97b 14-26). These may seem too different to be one virtue, but Aristotle sees what they share as a correct sense of one's own worth, when this is in fact great. It is not a mere feeling of self-esteem, but something that has to be earned. But Achilles appears to have earned it by deeds on the battlefield that subdued other people, while Socrates earned it through talking and thinking that conquered nothing outside himself. The former demands honor as a thing more precious than life, while the latter disdains to claim any honor at all, and keeps insisting that his only distinction is knowing that he doesn't know anything. These examples are no more puzzling than Aristotle's account of the virtue. He says first that the great-souled man is concerned with great things (1123a 34), and then quickly decides that those great things are great honors (1123b 20-21), but it takes him only a little bit of argument to conclude that for such a person, if he is genuinely worthy of what he claims for himself, "even honor is a small thing" (1124a 19). Putting 5 �together the examples with the argument: (a) the great-souled man is obviously a lover of honor like Achilles, and (b) by being great-souled through and through, Achilles must become a disdainer of honor like Socrates. The argument that runs from 1123b 26 to 1124a 19 is one of the pivotal passages of the Nicomachean Ethics, the place in which honor stakes its maximum claim, and earns it by rising above itself. Greatness of soul is puzzling to us not because it belongs to an obsolete aristocratic culture but because it is inconsistent in itself. Aristotle takes it seriously not by way of stooping to an audience of Athenian gentlemen but because it is something serious for any serious human being at any time or place. It is one effective first stage toward the full development of human character. We might make this clearer by considering two of the prephilosophical thoughts about virtue that form part of the background of Aristotle's inquiry into ethics. One of those common opinions is a widespread acceptance that four virtues are the cardinal ones, namely wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives justice and wisdom each a book to itself, and courage and temperance together about half a book. By this crude test of length of discussion, greatness of soul gains the fifth place, as either the fifth cardinal virtue, or the ambiguous virtue that almost, but not quite, belongs among the primary elements of human character. Another piece of popular lore that Aristotle alludes to (1095b 17-19) may help us understand what gives greatness of soul both a high rank and a secondary position; it is an old Pythagorean parable of the three kinds of life. The parable likens the ways of life to the three kinds of people who go to the Olympic games. The greatest number go to buy and sell things; a smaller number go to compete. The third group, and by this account the smallest number, go simply to watch. Aristotle calls the corresponding lives those devoted to enjoyment, to politics, and to · contemplative thought. Their aims are bodily pleasure, external honors, and knowing. Now it is clear that these three lives stand behind the Republic, in which Plato's Socrates seeks to blend their three aims into one soul, understood as an interior polity or commonwealth. But Aristotle's approach seems different. Even the bodily desires are treated in the Ethics as capable of being educated and redirected, to gain a deeper satisfaction than they find in their crudest form. This is not a matter of moderating them, of making compromises with them, or of reason's holding them in check by means of its spirited ally; according to Aristotle, the temperate 6 �person has no harmful desires ( 111 9a 11-15, 1146a 11-12). Similarly, I think, the person whom Aristotle considers worthy to be called greatsouled has no craving for honor. He has, instead, internalized his standard of worthiness. The brief argument I referred to a moment ago, in which honor must abandon its claims, is Aristotle's way of showing the honor-loving person that his true satisfaction lies nowhere but in wellgrounded self-respect. I believe that Aristotle has here discovered what has come to be called a sense of honor, a meaning that the Greek word for honor never had. But Aristotle does not dwell on this discovery, but pushes it one more step, into the realization that even an internal tribunal of honor is an inappropriate standard by comparison with the virtues to which it looks. One of the most interesting things about Aristotle's treatment of greatness of soul is that it generates a new series of lives that replaces the three in the Pythagorean parable. It is the first place in the Ethics in which Aristotle finds the virtue he is discussing to be a center around which all the virtues must be arrayed. Greatness of soul is not so much one virtue as one way toward the wholeness of character. Aristotle asks, for each of the virtues one-by-one, whether it would not be completely ridiculous for anyone who lacked it to have any claim to greatness of soul (1123b 3334). To someone wrapped up in the craving for honor, Aristotle asks, in effect "do you just want to have it or do you want to deserve it?" It is strange but true that anyone who really wants honor is bound to say that he doesn't just want honor, since any other answer would lose him what honor he had. Imagine a politician saying "vote for me because I love winning elections." A serious person, who seriously craves honor, cannot help concluding that honor is not the most serious thing. Now I'm not suggesting that Aristotle thinks that all one needs to do to transform someone consumed with a drive to be honored is to ask him a couple of questions. As I mentioned before, the questions and their answers seem to reflect a lived process of discovery and development. There is an exact analogy in the life of enjoyment. When Aristotle has made his first provisional definition of happiness as activity in accordance with virtue (1098a 16-17), he observes that this has the properties sought by the life of enjoyment more fully and genuinely than does the indulgence of bodily pleasures (1099a 7-21). The difference is that those who pursue the crudest enjoyments are always chasing after pleasure as a thing external to themselves, while those who live the virtues have pleasures that are internal and durable and always present. Aristotle calls 7 �the latter the pleasures that are natural, because they are pleasant in themselves, just by being themselves. He later analyzes the cruder pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex as attempts to magnify the natural pleasure inherent in good bodily condition by violent departures from it and restorations of it (Bk. VII, Ch. 14). This sort of thing, which bar owners encourage by offering free salty snacks to make people drink more beer, can't really fool any grownup for long, and can only continue to appeal, as Aristotle says, to those who have found no other sources of pleasure (1154b 5-6). Such people are not worthy challengers to the title of happiness, entitled to the pretentious name of hedonists; they are merely failures as pleasure seekers, failures by no standard but their own. The analogy in the case of greatness of soul is evident in the contrast between chasing after externally bestowed honor and settling into a life that is inherently honorable. It is not such a stretch to say that Achilles can achieve his aim only by becoming more like Socrates. The 19th-century philosopher Frederich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, §212) believed that Socrates had pulled off a brilliant piece of oneupmanship, making himself appear superior to the aristocrats who thought they had a monopoly on superiority. But in Aristotle's view this was no transformation of values but a natural dialectic that leads the honor seeker beyond the random honors that can be won, to the life of natural and self-sustained honor that accompanies the virtues from within. This explains why Aristotle leads the discussion of greatness of soul to the need for a life that demands the whole of virtue. The honor seeker goes in search of an isolated prize, and if he perseveres, and keeps his eyes open, he finds instead a life. The next prize or the next victory accomplishes nothing more durable than would the next beer. As the latter might be the perpetually renewed object of the deluded pleasure seeker, the former perpetually enslaves the competitive athlete or politician who has not learned that he can honor himself. So, finally, we can see why Aristotle doesn't build good character on the spirited part of the soul. Good character is achieved only when spiritedness subsides, and is built not by harnessing spriritedness but by overcoming it, in letting it find its truer and deeper satisfaction. Greatness of soul is a way of life not in the sense of being, for some people, the primary aim to which all virtues are subordinated, but in the sense that it finds its end in making those virtues themselves primary. Aristotle gives greatness of soul not a static portrait, but a dynamic impulse toward its aim. But how does he do this? The appeal he makes is, 8 �oddly, neither to reason nor to spiritedness. There would be nothing unreasonable, and certainly nothing self-contradictory, about saying one wants honors more than one wants to be worthy of them, and there must be something deflating to an aroused spiritedness in accepting a giving up of competition. Defeated politicians and retired athletes talk as though being unable to keep winning things is like death to them. What Aristotle is addressing is a whole human being who is driven to achieve great honor; his question brings such a person face-to-face with his own judgment of what makes one honor greater than another. Greatness of soul is the first and lowest portrait in the Nicomachean Ethics of a complete way of life that replaces the untenable claims of the life of bodily enjoyment. It is not the last or the only portrait of such a life. The craving for honor is not a necessary precondition of the development of good character, but only one human road that gets there in the end, for anyone who is serious enough about achieving satisfaction in life. Aristotle's tactic in leading the honor-lover to virtue is no different at bottom from his means of exploding the claims of bodily enjoyment, and it is evident in the first sentence of Book I: "it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim." His tactic is not a negotiation for turf among separate parts of a soul that want their separate goods, but a constant recurring to the question, asked of the whole human being, of what end is being sought in each good object. What makes one pleasure more satisfying than another? What makes one honor greater than another? Whatever in us responded to these visible goods by pursuing them remains sovereign in judging them. The task is to free it from enslavement to the familiar and habitual, and to lift its gaze to the widest view of its possible choices. Now if this conclusion sounds plausible to you, that's remarkable. It implies, first of all, that Aristotle believes that the well-ordered human soul is ruled by desires and not by reason, and second, that he regards habits not as the source of good character but as obstructions to it. These are not standard readings of the Nicomachean Ethics, and that's putting it mildly. But we've arrived at them honestly and we're stuck with them; we have no honorable course other than to follow where they lead us. I mentioned some time ago that there are some passages in which Aristotle seems to say that reason needs to rule us. They begin very early, with his first conclusion that the minimal condition of a satisfying human life is to put to work that in us which has reason and listens to reason 9 �(1098a 3-5); and they continue very late, into his final description of the happiest life, with assertions that the intellect is the best part of us, is the part that naturally rules and leads us, and is even what a human being is most of all ( 1177a 13-15, 1178a 6-7). But in between these passages, one of the things Aristotle has done is spell out what he means by intellect, and it is not a synonym for reason. Moreover, in discussing a number of the virtues, he has stated what power in us has the ultimate say in judging what is right, and it is not reason. And most conclusively, although almost everything else he says in the Ethics is dependent on the dialectical process of inquiry that leads to it, he has along the way formulated unequivocally and categorically what constitutes a human being as a source of action, and again it is not reason. The most straightforward way one might imagine that reason should rule us is to think each of our actions should be deduced from some principle. Aristotle does talk this way at one point, but the only complete example he gives belongs to a vice rather than to a virtue: one ought to taste every sweet thing; this thing in front of me is sweet; and one more act of gluttony takes place with apodeictic necessity ( 114 7a 29-31). But one point that Aristotle makes here is that even though the major premise is a universal proposition and the conclusion is an action, the minor premise is something particular, and all such things are governed by sense-perception (1147a 26). In two places Aristotle says that there can be no rules for right action (1113a 31-33, 1137b 29-32), and in two other places he says that the judgment or decision that determines all matters of action is in the perceiving (1109b 23, 1126b 3-4). But what sort of perceiving is this? My dog might have better eyesight than I do without being able to see what's best to do in any situation. While the dog might associate past experiences with present perceptions, the human power of perception is infused with an intelligence and an imagination that lets us grasp particular things as instances of universals. Aristotle's word for this (epag6ge) is nearly always mistranslated as induction, which suggests imposing some general formulation on the thing in front of me, but he means something more direct, by which I see the thing in the first place as a thing and an example of a kind. The power in us that operates in and through our perceiving to behold the universal directly is called nous, or intellect. The intellect thus supplies the starting points of all universal reasoning (Bk. VI, Ch. 6), which are at the opposite extreme from the particulars (1142a 23-27), but at the same time grasps those very particulars (1143a 35-b 5). 10 �Practical reasoning about action, like universal reasoning about the way things are, cannot begin unless and until something in us that is not reason provides starting points to reason about. In both cases this is the intellect, the power that beholds the ultimate invariable thinkable things in contemplation but also the ultimate changeable particulars in perceiving. Jacob Klein once compared thinking to walking: taking steps is like reasoning, but having something to step off from is like intellect. Reason is ruled by intellect. Now it might sound as though I'm quibbling. When you hear the claim that reason is the proper guide and ruler of our lives, you probably understand reason to mean the whole power by which we dispassionately recognize what is evident, whether directly or through any number of steps. The important thing is that we should be led by something that is impartial or, we may wish to say, objective. But that isn't good enough. What's needed is to see things in relation to us and our ends. Aristotle says that for knowledge to accomplish its work well, it has to guide it by discerning the mean in relation to us (l 106b 5-9), which is a mean in the sense that it does not overshoot or fall short of our natural ends. That's what there are no rules for. That's what has to be perceived. That's the practical work of intellect. One of the most persistent themes of the Nicomachean Ethics is that achieving any aim in life depends upon seeing straight, seeing things the way they are. But at least five times ( 1099a 22-24, 1113a 25-33, 1166a 12-13, 1170a 14-16, 1176b 24-26), Aristotle tells us that it is only someone of good character who is capable of seeing straight. The way most people see things, he says, is distorted by the false appearance of things that promise pleasure (l 113a 3 3-b 1), and he notes that overly spirited people are too quick to perceive things as insulting when they aren't (l 149a 25-34). It is obvious that fear has the same effect, since he says the coward is afraid of everything ( 11 l 6a 2-3). In fact, one way to see what Aristotle means by virtue of character is to imagine all the ways we might be so mastered by some kind of feeling that we have no capacity to see things for what they are. The virtues of character are the stable conditions that free us, not from those feelings, but from being unable to make choices about them. A courageous person can distinguish what is worth being afraid of, and still has the option to act for an end beyond it. A temperate person can eat, drink, and be merry when he chooses to and not every time an opportunity for indulgence is present. A great-souled person can avenge an insult when his good sense and courage lead him to, 11 �and not as a reflex reaction. Some translators call these states of character moral virtues, but that misses the point. They are practical virtues; without them action is impossible. Intellect is not stronger or sharper in a person of good character, but only in such a person is it free to operate. This is a negative sort of dependence. Good character clears away the bad habits that obstruct the sight of the intellect. But there is also a positive dependence. A person of good character is not someone who is neutral about pleasant or frightening or insulting things--thinking itself moves nothing, Aristotle says (1139a 35-36). Good character combines intellect that is clearsighted with desires and aversions that are good, in the sense that they are rightly proportioned to the end of one's own happiness. Free choice of action depends not on objectivity or independence from our inclinations but on the presence and participation of all our desires. Aristotle says that for a choice to be good, one's desire must be right (1139a 30-31), but the rightness of desire is entirely analogous to the clarity of intellect. Right desire is unobstructed desire. Aristotle does not understand our desires to be a disorderly mob that needs to be ruled, but the natural components of a life in which they all must have full scope to act. Once we have taken responsibility for our own lives, we can develop what Aristotle calls active conditions of the soul, and it is these active conditions that make up character. Formation of an active condition (hexis) begins with isolated choices (1103b 14-23), such as refraining from a harmful pleasure or enduring a frightening situation. Sticking by these choices requires effort, because they go against the grain of the masses of bad habits that have already become ingrained in all of us before we have any power of choice. All deliberate and positive habituation, from parental training, the laws of the community, or the effort of self-discipline, is for the sake of cancelling out the blind and passive earliest habituation that no one intends, that comes just from the reflexive slackening of the tension of uncomfortable feelings. The active condition is fully formed when no more effort of selfrestraint is needed. Knowing how we want to be in life and action is not enough (llOSb 2-3), but being that way is still up to us (1114b 21-23). Each of the virtues of character is an active condition in relation to some of our feelings and impulses; Aristotle's claim is that for each of these active conditions there is an unimpeded way of being-at-work, and that happiness is the being-at-work of them all (1153b 9-11). When cleared, by habit, from the distortions of bad habits, our habit-free desires 12 �constitute ourselves as we are by nature; if these natural desires are thwarted our lives are stunted. Aristotle's picture of the healthy human soul is not a three-part hierarchy but an equal partnership of everything in us. The center of the Nicomachean Ethics, early in Bk. VI (1139b 4-5), is Aristotle's unequivocal definition of a human being as the source of action in the act of choice, that can be equally ·well described as intellect fused with desire or desire fused with intellect (orektikos nous or orexis dianoetike). Neither side can have the upper hand. The dictates of reason as master are as misguided as the caprices or addictions of an overmastering passion. Even a state of compromise, in which our rational and irrational sides each give up a little of what they want to get a little, misses the mark. What Aristotle is talking about is a genuine whole, in which the parts are not externally connected but internally infused with one another. Thinking and deliberating must come to be present within our desires, if they are to be directed toward their true ends, rather than toward immediate delusions. But it is equally true that intellect would be useless if it were objective or neutral, and it has to be led by desire to see things as ends, in relation to ourselves. The formation of the component parts of character is not a process of reasoning, not a discipline of the passions, and not a combination of the two; it is a gradual and mutual development of thinking and desire as enlightened by one another, each led by its partnership with the other to its own end. Now if this non-hierarchical picture of the soul strikes you as unAristotelian, your uneasiness is understandable and deserves a response. Aristotle seems always to be talking about rankings of things as higher and lower, and we saw earlier that he refers to the intellect as the best part of ourselves. And in the Politics, he says that whatever is composed of a number of things and becomes one has a ruling part and a ruled part (1254a 28-32), and he gives the very example we are exploring; he says explicitly that intellect rules desire (1254b 5-7). But he is careful to say that this is not the rule of a master or a monarch, but political rule. He explains soon afterward that by political rule he means rule over equals (1255b 20), and he later adds that political rule requires an alternation or sharing of ruling and being ruled (1277b 7-16). This is a working-out of his understanding that the political community is not merely an alliance for the sake of promoting exchange and preventing injury, but is a genuine whole. All the more so, one might suppose, is the human soul not just a bundle of capacities and desires, but a unity. 13 �It is in Bk. VII, Ch. 1 7, of the Metaphysics that Aristotle distinguishes anything that is truly whole and truly one from a mere heap (1041b 1112). His example of a genuine whole is a syllable. To see what he means, take the first syllable of the word metaphysics, and try to sound it out by parts. You will hum, and then make an exclamation that might sound either dismissive or interrogative, and then make an explosion of breath. No matter how fast you make these noises in sequence, they will not make the simple syllable met-. It is not a sum of parts but can only come into being as a whole. You cannot pronounce it at all unless you make an m sound that is already shaped by the following e, and sound the other letters similarly, not as isolated bits of noise but with the whole syllable present in each of them. When you try to remove the part from the whole it becomes something different; it is not at all like plucking one marble off the heap. Something is whole most of all, Aristotle says, when its constituent parts are distinct only potentially (1023b 32-34), and in the Politics he gives the famous example that a human being removed from political community is not human at all, but either a beast or a god ( 1253a 26-29). It follows that dispassionate reason is not the human thinking power at all, and unintelligent desires are not human desires. Remember that Aristotle cautioned us, when we first separated a rational and an irrational part of ourselves, that we might be trying to separate the convex from the concave side of the same curve. We saw earlier how the positing of external honor as the greatest of goods led back into the soul, and into Aristotle's first depiction of the virtues of character as composing one whole life. There are four more occasions in the Ethics in which Aristotle leads some partiality in the soul back to a wholeness of character. The second type of person who needs to be so led is also focused outward, but on the good of other people (1130a 3-5). Aristotle does not have a word of criticism for such a person, and even calls him the best human being. He merely points out that his aim requires the presence of all the virtues, and goes back to discussing those virtues. But when the examination of all the virtues is said and done, it is not this life that is called best, but an entirely different one. Like the assertion that honor is the greatest of external goods, that is made in Bk. IV (1123b 20-21) and quietly replaced in Bk. IX (1169b 8-10), the claim that the person devoted to doing justice to others is the best human being is also refuted just by being unable to withstand five books of further inquiry. · I find it enormously instructive that Aristotle permits justice to 14 �stake the same claim to being the highest good that honor does, and makes it fail. It is not in the long and detailed discussion of justice as one particular virtue among many that this occurs, but in a brief preface on justice as a way of life. Aristotle mentions one celebrated ancient political leader (Bias) in this connection, but a clearer example for us might be a Roman, Cato the Younger. Plutarch says of him (Lives, Modern Library, p. 920) that he was inspired and possessed by a devotion to every virtue, but especially to that "steady and inflexible justice that is not to be wrought upon by favor or compassion." He exemplifies the immersion in political life that is governed not by honor but by duty. I mention this only because it helps one see that Aristotle's ethics of character has nothing to do with impersonal duty. Aristotle is constantly speaking of what one ought to do, but for him this imperative always arises only from within, from the need to fulfill and put to work all our own powers to achieve happiness. I noted earlier that the Aristotelian virues of character are not moral virtues but practical virtues. I am suggesting that morality is a misunderstanding of Aristotle's character-based ethics. Morality, in the sense of doing right by others, follows from the practice of the virtues in the same way pleasure does, but doesn't work as its end. Why should you not be a thief? Because that is your duty to other people, or because to be one would distort your own life and make you fail to gain your own happiness? Or put it the other way around. Would you rather have a neighbor who grimly and dutifully refrains from your property even though he might covet it, or one who has found a life in which your property is of no interest to him? The third life Aristotle describes is that of practical judgment (1144b 30-1145a 6). This is usually translated as prudence or practical wisdom. It is the virtue of intellect that is a precondition of every virtue of character, but it in turn cannot come into being without the presence of all the virtues of character, which permit it to discern its ends. This mutual dependence is the clearest evidence that the intellect is not uppermost in practical life, but there are certainly people who seek not to rule others nor to serve others, but to be the guiding intelligence behind political life. William O'Grady used to say that whenever he read Machiavelli's Prince, he always wondered whether that book was more like housebuilding or flute-playing; that question is Aristotle's way of distinguishing activities with external ends from those whose ends are in themselves. Themistocles, an Athenian general described by both Herodotus and Thucydides, was a great conniver who seemed happiest 15 �when he had successfully manipulated everyone on every side of a conflict, but Aristotle says at the end of the Ethics that there has been no one up to his time who had all the requirements of the political art (1181b 12-13). As with honor and duty, his purpose seems to be to show those who aim at superior practical know-how as their highest end that the only role of the practical intellect in a successful life is a more modest one, on an equal footing with all our desires. Now the progressive overcoming of the claims of greatness of soul, justice, and practical judgment to be the pre-eminent virtue seems to exhaust all the motives for which one might call the political life the highest life. Aristotle does not collect them in this way, but he concludes in general that political life is unleisured and always aims in part at a happiness that is beyond itself (1177b 12-15). He contrasts it to a contemplative life, which he argues at length is the best and happiest human life (Bk. X, Chs. 7-8). This produces the greatest controversies among readers of the Ethics, since it seems so odd that any philosopher would devote 98% of a long and lovingly worked-out inquiry to an examination of the practical life, only to turn his back on it at the culmination of the work. Without entering into any such controversy here, I think we are in a position to see the general lines of a solution. There is no contemplative life for anyone who has not achieved a good they were character, not only because his desires would get in his way if_ not set right, but also because human nature itself is one of the unvarying things that the contemplative intellect needs to understand; in that odd way, even in its non-practical employment the intellect needs a respect for and partnership with our irrational desires, since they are among its teachers. A human being is intellect and desire, inseparably intertwined. But also, I have so far skipped the fourth of Aristotle's five depictions of the whole life of virtue. Between the three versions of political lives and the contemplative life there is an ambiguous middle life. The life of friendship in the full sense also appears to involve the practice of all the virtues of character ( 115 7a 18-19, 2 9-31). But Aristotle does not say that friendship requires the prior presence of those virtues, but that friendship itself, in its proper sense, is present to the extent that the friends possess the virtues (1156b 8-9, 1157a 30-31). He seems to mean that the friendship deepens as the characters of the friends do. As with greatness of soul, the picture seems dynamic rather than static, but not because friendship is an inadequate motive. Like contemplative wisdom, friendship seems to be a final and all-inclusive end for the whole of life; 16 �and Aristotle says it would be absurd to imagine the happiest life as one devoid of friends who are loved for their own sake (1169b 16-28, 1156b 9-11). Friendship directly supersedes greatness of soul, since Aristotle concludes that it is not honor but friends that are the greatest of external goods (1123b 20-21, 1159a 25-26, 1169b 8-10). But it is also precisely friendship that supersedes justice as the highest aim and bond of political life, since Aristotle says that where there is justice there is still a need for friendship, but where there is friendship, justice is not necessary (1155a 22-28). Even the life devoted to the exercise of the practical intellect seems to find its highest fulfillment in friendship, since Aristotle says that one can contemplate his own active life best in the actions of his friends (1169b 30-1170a 4). Everything a human being seeks in political life is found only in friendship. The relation of friendship to the contemplative life might seem to be that of second best to best, and Aristotle says just that (1178a 5-9), but this is not a case in which the lower is left behind in the achievement of the higher. As we have noted, the claims of friendship within happiness are themselves final and indispensable, and a contemplative human being does not cease to be a human being. And in a certain sense, friendship has a claim to be not only of equal rank with the pure life of intellect, but even superior to it. Aristotle argues near the end of Bk. IX that the highest life, spent in the being-at-work of our highest powers, is deficient if it is not expanded through being shared with friends (1170b 7-19). The motion throughout the Nicomachean Ethics is toward the greatest wholeness of the life of everything in us, and this can be achieved neither by a friendless life of contemplation nor by any practical life shared between friends that excludes the enjoyment of knowing. Aristotle says early on that the truth deserves higher honor than do one's friends, but he does not say that either of them ever cease to be loved for their own sake ( 1096a 16-1 7); in one of the most powerful indications of the destination of the whole work, he speaks of the truth and his friends together in the dual number, a resource the ancient Greek language had for naming things that are more than one but inseparable. So should reason, or our whole thinking power, rule the soul? Clearly Aristotle doesn't think so. Thinking guides desire, but desire guides intellect, and intellect guides thinking. Under the guidance of thinking, desire can find itself directed beyond bodily pleasures and political honors to an end in friendship. Under the guidance of desire, intellect can see the best choices before it in all their particularity. And 17 �we are, first and foremost, choosing beings--not rational animals, not political animals, though we are those things too. Choice cannot be full and unimpeded if anything in us is held back or held down or has not become fully aware of its nature. Ultimately, for us, even contemplation is a choice, in which the activity chosen and the whole desiring being that chooses it are equally necessary and ·equally sovereign. 18 � 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. 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Title A name given to the resource Wholes and parts in human character Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002-04 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered in Spring 2002 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Sachs 2002 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sachs, Joe, 1946- Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/681e6d1138cfd3c0a7131ac33b435560.pdf 999ca1a1615423716c55378fb08230a1 PDF Text Text What is a What-is Question? Once when I was talking to a senior about possible topics for his essay, he looked around, leaned forward, slid his eyes left and right, dropped his voice, and said "I'm thinking about writing on ... Wittgenstein." That was the most dramatic occasion on which I've been made aware of a rumor that seems to circulate among some students that there is a secret, wicked doctrine that is concealed from them by some unknown authority, because to reveal it would be to unmask the fact that Plato has been refuted. For, so the story goes, Wittgenstein refuted Plato. Now to make the last sentence have any meaning at all, one has to take the name Plato as shorthand for "Plato's theory of forms." And what is that? Our dean once gave a lecture called "Plato's theory of forms," and pointed out that, if the phrase was to refer to anything that could be found in the dialogues, every word in it, except "of," would need to be changed. Let us see what Wittgenstein's famous refutation actually refutes. It consists in arguing that the various things we call games are not all alike. One of them might resemble a second in some characteristics, but have different characteristics in common with a third, with pairs of games overlapping in many diferent ways, so that some two might have no characteristics in common at all, except for membership in the same extended family. You have your brother's nose, he has your mother's eyes, she has her grandfather's forehead, and so on. You are all Smiths, but "Smith" is not a word with a single meaning. There are people with the Smith chin, others with the piercing Smith gaze, but there is no Smithness, and you would never be tempted to think there was. All there is that belongs to all the Smiths is an array of family resemblances. Now if Meno had only had the chance to hear talk of family resemblances, as he had heard about effluences, the dialogue that bears his name could have been over in three pages--or could it? How would we decide when we had a list of all the relevant characteristics of all the things called virtues, to be sure there were none common to them all? And why, when Socrates gives two examples of definitions of shape (75B, 76A), does he not list characteristics at all, but set the thing he's defining as a whole in relation to something else? And have you noticed that Socrates never asks a question like "what is a game?" He often refers to a game called draughts, which footnotes tell us is something like checkers. but only as a way of sharpening by contrast the meaning of the thing he is interested in at any time. And in the Lysis, in which some friends have been wrestling, he does not use the occasion to ask about wrestling or playing, but about friendship. There is a memorable occasion in the Parmenides when the old philosopher tells the young Socrates that he is not yet completely philosophic (130E), just because he wants to inquire not about dirt but about �2 the just and the beautiful. By that standard, Socrates at the age of seventy had still not grown up as a philosopher. Plato never stated a theory of forms for Wittgenstein or anyone else to refute, but Socrates often resorted to the hypothesis that there are invisible looks that belong to intelligible things. If we want to understand what he meant, we have to pay some attention to when he turned to this hypothesis, how he followed it up, and what he was looking for on such occasions. Wittgenstein and others like him tell us to look to the use of a word, if we want to find its meaning. Socrates uses the word eidos only when he has first asked what something is, and he does not ask that question indifferently about anything and everything. We have to ask, what guides the asking of the what-is question? But where should we begin? You have read dialogues that take aim at virtue, rhetoric, and justice, to mention only the first three on the list. But something odd happens in each of them. The inquiry aimed at virtue seems to concentrate instead on what learning is, the one that asks about rhetoric shifts to a relentless asking of the question, what is the best life?, and the immense dialogue about justice seems to encompass everything in the world, but especially the question of what would be the best possible education. Like our own seminars, the conversations of Socrates never seem to keep to the opening questions, so before we've gotten anywhere with the question of what Socrates chooses to ask about, we already have to worry about why his questions don't seem to stick. Like the statues of Daedalus that Socrates mentions near the end of the Meno (97D-E), they seem to get up and run away, though perhaps they do not altogether escape, but try to lead us somewhere. This fact, that Socrates' own what-is questions always tum out to be about something else than the thing they were first asked about, is to me the most important and revealing thing about them. We will return to this soon, but first it turns out that the easiest place to begin looking at the what-is question is in a dialogue in which Socrates does not lead the discussion. In that dialogue there is someone else who has a methodical way of proceeding with such questions, and he never lets the original topic run away, but keeps battering at it so directly that it is soon impossible to tell what it is. I am speaking of the Sophist, a dialogue in which the Eleatic Stranger learns before our eyes how to ask what something is, not by witnessing or imitating Socrates, but by the reliable method of trial and error. He starts out the dialogue as a disciple of Parmenides, and in the course of it discovers, and displays to us, that Parmenides was wrong about who and what are most truly philosophic. In the first half of the dialogue he presents the orthodox Parmenidean line. that there is a universal method for getting knowledge, applicable indifferently to any topic, that cares no more about the art of the general than about the art of removing lice (227A-B). Topics of inquiry do not count �3 for philosophy; logical structures do. Philosophic discipline requires purging ourselves of any motive to care about any one thing more than any other. Once we are pure, disembodied logicians we can begin to learn. Now you may think this is what Socrates himself says in the Phaedo , but one shouldn't decide too quickly what it means to say that philosophy is nothing but the practice of dying and being dead (64A). For one thing, in both the Symposium and the Republic, Socrates likens philosophy to erotic love (210A-D, 474C-47SC). But one only needs to take one step back from the Phaedo itself to see that even there the questions about philosophy, dying, and being dead are not dispassionate but urgent ones. Socrates rebukes his friends for their grief over his dying (117C-E), but that is only because he wants to harness all that powerful feeling to what he calls keeping the logos alive (89B). Phaedo reports that those present were never far from laughter or tears, and spent the whole day in the grip of an unaccustomed experience he calls wonder (58E-59A). The philosophic approach of the Eleatic Stranger is too methodical, too patient, too relentless to let wonder or desire get in its way. The Stranger has a technique for moving from a word to the thing meant by it (218B ff), a universal strategy for capturing what anything is, the method of division. It begins by casting a net, finding some general class of things that the looked-for thing must necessarily belong to. Then, to shift the metaphor, it begins quartering the field, always dividing the class before it in two. Why should there not sometimes be a division into three parts? Because the power of logic is greatest where contradictories are concerned. The two parts of any division must be made in such a way that anything in the world must be found in one or the other of them. Black and white is an inappropriate division of colors, but black and not-black form a pair of classes that include everything there is, not even restricted to colors, since there is no possible middle ground between them into which anything could slip. To locate anything in one side of such a division, it is only necessary to assure oneself that it cannot be in the other side. In practice one might fail to make all divisions exhaustive and mutually exclusive, but it is never a very difficult matter to correct them. The method is as simple as it is universal. And if something is in the original class, and repeatedly narrowed down into smaller and smaller sub-classes, mustn't one eventually reach a class that includes it and nothing else? I think the answer has to be yes: the Stranger's method is infallible. But one only needs to read the dialogue to see that the Stranger's method fails. How can this be? We have just endorsed the law of contradiction, and now we find that something infallible fails. The problem, though, is not a collapse of logic, but a misapplication of it. Doctors can't be expected to make shoes, and logicians are not philosophers. The ancient Eleatic school and the modem analytic one are victims of the same mistake. �4 The Stranger's method of division is too logical in the sense that it is nothing but logical. It is a mechanical repetition of a logical procedure; point it in a new direction and start it up again, and it will grind on to a new conclusion. Ask it which of the two conclusions one should choose, and it is silent, because it can only get its teeth into contradictozy alternatives, but its own products can never contradict one another. The infallibility of the method is its vice, because it will always succeed in telling you what something is, no matter how often it has already given you different answers to the same question. I will remind you what the sophist turned out to be: he was a hunter of the children of the rich, a businessman who trafficked in wisdom as either a manufacturer, traveling merchant, or local retailer, a professional athlete whose sport was debate, and a purifier of souls, who opened the posssibility of learning by refuting the mistaken opinion of knowledge. The Stranger calls this result unsound (232A), but it is not mistaken. My summary of the six definitions already shows how to reduce them to four, since the retailer, travelling salesman, and manufacturer differ in only incidental ways, and perhaps we could get them down to three by saying that hunting for customers is subordinate to the purpose of transacting business with them, but now we are stuck. The sophist has to make money out of his teaching, has to be able to win arguments, and has to have an effect on his students that changes the opinions they already had. But what is he really after--money, victory, or the betterment of his students? Tell me please, by logic alone, how to answer that question. In fact I already went outside the bounds of the Stranger's method when I said that the first four definitions could be reduced to one because they all had the same purpose. Ends and means can be distinguished by human beings, but not by means of logic. From the standpoint of logic, it has to be purely arbitrary to decide whether the sophist is most properly considered a businessman, an athlete. or a healer of souls. From the standpoint of anyone who might consider entrusting the education of a son or daughter to him, it is the only question that matters. "What is a sophist?" is not answered by a list of characteristics that specify membership in classes. It is only answered when we know which of those characteristics govern the rest, and make someone a sophist How do we decide that? I don't know of any recipe, and I don't see how any answer to the question can be without risk of error. We have crossed over from the safe domain of logic to something called philosophy, and we have done so at exactly the same place that the Eleatic Stranger did. Not only was a swarm of definitions of one thing an unsound result, but the sixth definition of the sophist in particular outraged the Stranger as a human being (231A). It seemed to give the sophist more honor than he deserved. In trusting his own desire to do justice, the Stranger abandons his principle that the method of the logos must honor lice-pickers and generals equally. �5 He understands that abandoning his neutrality means giving up Parmenides as his spiritual father (2410), and that plunges him into the deepest questions about being and not-being. The dialogue seems to tell us that we can't find out what anything is unless we are willing to ask--that means abandon all our present opinions about--what everything is Let us step back and try to understand what has happened. Does the what-is question ask for a definition of a word? If so, there could not be so much at stake in asking it, and there would be nothing wrong with arbitrarily picking one definition out of many as long as everyone involved in the conversation understood it and agreed to it. But the Stranger made clear from the beginning that the point was not to draw lines around a word but to leave the word behind and find the thing meant. The definition is what makes the thing what it is. That in turn means that there must be something else involved with the thing on which we focus the question. We think of a definition as an identity, a group of words that can be substituted for a single word, but in the dialogues of Plato the what-is questions that are asked are always looking beyond the things asked about to their rootedness in the whole of things. What defines virtue? Not any group of words, but the nature of human beings. And what defines the sophist? According to the Stranger, when he has broken loose from Parmenides and is free to be Socratic, it is the nature of being itself, an irreducibly twofold structure that allows for the possibility of images. The Socratic what-is question is always the question about how things are, asked in so radical a way that it permits no ready-made opinions to remain as crutches. Now it is possible to arrive at this kind of questioning from any starting point, but it is also easy to see why Socrates only asks the what-is question about certain kinds of things. There has to be some issue that matters enough to us to make it worthwhile to call into question all the safe opinions on which we base our lives. Parmenides had it exactly backwards when he told Socrates that philosophy requires a studied indifference to its topics. Philosophy can only be about what matters to us. This also explains a common phenomenon, that the asking of the what-is question makes other people laugh. Martin Heidegger, at the beginning of a book called What is a Thing?, suggested that philosophy could be defined as that at which menial servants laugh. The snobbishness of his remark is out of place and obscures his insight. Someone who does not care about the thing in question can't see the point of suspending his prejudices, and he is as likely to be a professor as a servant. But it is even more important that this very laughter wears two faces, for it need not be the smug self-congratulation of the unexamined life, but can also be the spontaneous childlike delight we all take in the sudden appearance of wonder. Indifference seems to be the only reaction one cannot have to a philosophic question, if one is aware of it at all. And the fear that the �6 presence of desire will destroy our "objectivity" is misplaced. First of all, in the new landscape opened by the experience of wonder we lose the familiar landmarks by which our desires are ordinarily steered. What we thought we wanted may lose its appeal. Achilles and Priam gaze at each other in wonder, and no longer wish each other dead. Second, the power of wonder takes us beyond vanity, so that selfishness itself can make us give up cherished but worthless opinions. Gorgias and Thrasymachus, two of the vainest humans one could imagine, become absorbed in following the arguments of Socrates and each spends a long time willing not to be the center of attention. And finally, objectivity is static, while desire is dynamic. so if philosophy is an activity in which we can be changed, only desire can set it in motion and keep it in motion. In Plato's portrait of him, the old Parmenides is reluctant to get involved in a ·philosophic discussion, and compares himself to an old racehorse with no desire to run, and to an old man falling in love, with no desire to feel desire (137A). Now there is another character in the dialogues who is even less able to move and change than is Parmenides, and whose very name means standing-still or staying-in-place, and this is Meno. Let us look at the Meno to see an example of how Socrates asks and answers a what-is question. That's right, I said "answers," and I am not refering to the lame conclusion that virtue comes by divine lot. Socrates himself discounts this result as one in which no trust can be put because it evades the true question about virtue (lOOB). All the energy of the dialogue is in its first half, before Meno finally and irrevocably digs in his heels (86C-D). It is in that first half of the dialogue that I claim that Socrates in fact answers the question about virtue. not by giving it a genus and specific difference or any such neat package that we can thoughtlessly carry away, but by sketching a first approach to an answer that would carry the inquiry to a new plane if anyone paid enough attention to notice it, and made enough ofan effort to follow it up. Of course Meno is not the person to do either of those things, and no one else present steps forward, as often happens in other dialogues. But the dialogue remains alive for us to enter into, and when we have gotten past our first exasperation over the fact that Socrates won't tell us anything, but only ask more and more questions and claim total ignorance, we can begin to notice that he does make some direct assertions. One of the strongest of these occurs just before the discussion breaks down, and Socrates says he would fight for it in word and deed ( 86B-C). ,That is the conviction that inquiring all by itself makes us better and braver ·people. Doesn't that have to mean that self-directed, philosophic learning is at least one way that at least some virtues are acquired? Now that may seem to be a weaselly, Meno-like claim that fails to tell us what virtue is. but let's look more closely at exactly what Socrates says. He says that by believing one needs to inquire after the things one doesn't know, we are �I better, more man-like, and less inert. There are three surprising words here, that probably don't quite match your memory of the passage. Socrates does not say that the belief in question leads us to become better, but that merely believing it, we already are better. But in what respects, exactly, are we better? Now all of you know that the topic of the dialogue, virtue or excellence, is arete, and that it is related to the words aner, man, and andreios, manly or brave. But Socrates avoids by a fraction of a millimeter saying that believing in the need to inquire makes us more manly. andreioteros; instead, he uses the word andrikoteros , more man-like. And finally, the second way that we are better is by being less inert, less argos. You may recall that in the Odyssey, Odysseus has an old dog named Argos. who recognizes him after his twenty-year absence. If you are like me, you wonder, when you read it, why Odysseus' dog has the name of Agamemnon's city, but it doesn't. Argos is a common adjective meaning lazy, a contraction of a-ergos, inert. So while it is surprising that in the mere believing of something we are already better people, these are two very weak sorts of goodness that Socrates gives us credit for. We are less like lumps of rock, and more nearly resemble men. But even this approach to virtue has far-reaching implications. First, what does masculinity have to do with virtue? Just because a connection between them is built into a language, no speaker of the language is compelled to accept it, but to Meno that connection is the whole story. Meno's various efforts to say what virtue is add up to a fairly simple and coherent picture. Virtue in its strongest and most proper sense can belong only to men, and to them only in the prime of life and when not enslaved (71E); these manly fellows have the power to help their friends and hurt their enemies, for what else is human excellence but the ability to rule other people (73C-D)? He later adds that the man of virtue will help himself to gold and silver, as well as to honors and offices, since these are the beautiful things that give delight (77B, 78C-D). But instead of admiring this lovely picture, Socrates keeps raising picky objections. The most persistent one is whether any action can be good without temperance and justice (73A-B, D, 78D), but the first one is whether a woman who acted in the same way would be any less excellent than a man (72D-E). Meno, when compelled to, pays lip service to both of these pieties, but never shows any sign of believing them. But it is equally clear that Socrates is talking about a simply human excellence that has no bias toward the male. His claim is an equal-opportunity insult: none of us knows how to live well. When he says we need to be more man-like he means more like human beings. We are none of us what we are born to be and meant to be. Now I am not claiming to get all this out of one slightly unexpected adjective, but that adjective confirms a theme that is present in most of the dialogues. Socrates is always comparing the virtues to humble arts like �8 shoemaking. This makes some people climb the walls, as Callicles does (490E-491A, Gorgias ). Why is Socrates so insistent about this comparison? We come into the world without shoes, as Socrates himself displays, but we are not condemned to go barefoot and vulnerable if someone has taken the trouble to develop the capacity to fit us with shoes. Shoemaking is in us as a possibility, but it takes work and at least a little thought to get it out into the world. I think the meaning of Socrates' constant comparison is this: if we thought even as much about how we ought to live as the shoemaker does about how to protect feet, our lives would be revolutionized. We have to work to become what we are by birth and by right, and it is only in a minority of people who excel the rest of us that we even see what a human being is. And that is the reason for Socrates' faint praise when he says that believing in the possibility of learning already makes us more nearly human. Without that belief we are as inert as rocks, as static as Meno. Meno does explicitly deny that learning is possible (800), and he is literally motionless. He repeats in the center of the dialogue the same words he had flung at Socrates at the beginning, as though no conversation had gone on at all. How like some people we all know, Meno is, and how like ourselves. Between his repetitions a spectacular event has taken place, but spectacles no more than arguments have power to move him. If he had been sharp enough to see what Socrates was doing in the slave-boy scene, Meno would have been moved to anger. Socrates dangles in front of Meno a nonsensical concoction about priests, priestesses, and reincarnation, just because that's what it takes to get him interested in anything, which drops out of the dialogue with hardly a trace, but what Socrates shows to Meno is living proof that his slave is a better man than he is. Meno is immune to the insult, but we are meant to look at him and at his slave, and to wonder at the sight of a world turned upside-down. Socrates shows us that the splendid Meno is not as much of a human being as is some nameless piece of property that he owns and orders around. Now I am not claiming that the slave is a model of excellence. All he does is try to understand something. recognize that he doesn't, and try again, and all Socrates claims is that this is a motion away from the inert and toward the human. The understatement is breathtaking, and is typically Socratic. Remember that the two arts Socrates most often praises and recommends as models of the virtues are shoemaking and medicine, and that Socrates himself has no use for either of them. But even that much art would mend our lives. Let us sum up what this reading of the Meno amounts to. It says that virtue is activity that brings out our properly human capacities, that learning either is that activity or inevitably accompanies it, and that merely believing that learning is necessary and possible is the start of the acquisition of virtue. What would Socrates say about this formulation? He has in fact given us a standard to test it by, in his two sample definitions of �9 shape as the only thing that always turns out to follow along with color, and as that to which a solid reaches, or the determining boundary of a solid (75B, 76A). He tells Meno he would love to hear even that sort of statement of what virtue is, and ours does in fact resemble it It appears that virtue is the only thing that always turns out to accompany learning, and is that toward which human activity reaches, the determining boundary of human nature. This sort of answer is nothing one can rest with; in fact it is a destroyer of rest, an invigorating answer that won't let us stand still. But it explains why the dialogue that asks what virtue is dwells on what learning is. And it gives us more ammunition to understand Meno himself. When Meno won't pause even for a second to think about the definitions of shape, Socrates accuses him of hubris. Now the root sense of this word applies to a horse that won't accept confinement. Any question Socrates asks, anything definite that needs to be thought about, Meno jumps over like a fence. He will not stay within any determining boundary that would permit learning, and therefore inevitably stays within his ignorance. And twice later (80B, 81E), Socrates calls him panourgos, someone who will do anything, in the sense of stop at nothing, a shameless and unscrupulous man. When Meno wants something, he takes the shortest route to it. without stopping to wonder what he does to himself in the process. So he misses the mark of properly bounded human activity on both sides: in doing anything he can do nothing. He is panourgos and argos at the same time, since he has not begun to think about which desires he ought to satisfy, and has left himself helpless in the one arena in which his boldness and eagerness would have been of some use to him. The dialogue is so far from failing to say what virtue is, that it says it in a strong positive statement of conviction by Socrates, in the negative example of Meno, the tiny beginner's example of his slave, and, we have to add, the ever-present positive example of Socrates himself. But none of these are explicit statements. Why is the dialogue so indirect, inexplicit, and tantalizing? The fact that it is never straightforwardly explicit means that we readers have to do all the work, though Plato has handed us all the necessary tools. In the case of this dialogue, we will only see what it says virtue is if we begin enact it ourselves, to learn it without being instructed I said earlier that the what-is question is never about a word. To anyone who has experienced such a question, the suggestion that it asks how a word is used is simply childish. We looked at one side of the what-is question when we saw that it asks how a thing is defined, how it fits in with all that is. But it is equally true that the very asking of such a question begins to define us, to shape us and work us into new beings, launched into learning. But we seem not to have said anything about the eidos of virtue. At Meno's first attempt to speak about virtue, Socrates told him to keep an eye on some one look that's the same in all virtues, however many and various �10 they might be. We have gotten as far as to say that virtue always has the look of learning, and to see that learning itself does not look like Meno's ability to quote from teachers and poets, but does look like his slave's honest puzzlement and at the same time like Socrates' energetic questioning. But this is far from being able to see what makes all virtue what it is. We are about as far along that road as the slave-boy is in geometry. Socrates describes that condition as being on the borderline between knowledge and opinion, in just the way we are at the moment we are awakened out of a dream (8SC). The slave, and we, could easily go back to sleep. In the Republic especially, Socrates keeps cautioning that philosophy is a long road and hard work (43SD, S04B-D, S lSE). The dialogues as a whole are only concerned with its first step, the transition from sleep to waking, and they do have the amazing power to set us in motion, but where we go after that is up to us. But we can sketch out some directions we might choose to take. For example, how should we think of the relation between a broader form such as virtue and a narrower one such as justice? This probably sounds like a silly question. Virtue is obviously a genus of which justice is one species; broad classes contain all sorts of smaller sub-classes. But it is not a good idea to be hasty in matters of this sort, and what seems obvious here is not at all necessary. The idea of classes is one of the ways that logic can trivialize philosophy. It is precisely the mistake of the Eleatic Stranger to think that what is looked for by the what-is question can be trapped in classes without being understood. The sophist does belong to the class of hunters, and to that of salesmen, and to that of athletes, and so on, but that is just the trouble. Every characteristic he has assigns him to some class, and every one of them says something about him, but that doesn't mean we can assume that they say what he is. Some of those classes he belongs to are merely parts of what he is as a sophist, and others are incidental to what he primarily is. But suppose we found some characteristic or cluster of them that was both necessary and sufficient to his being a sophist. Because of its necessity, every sophist would have to be in that class, and because of its sufficiency, everything in that class would have to be a sophist. You will be surprised to hear that this is not good enough either. It would give us a test by which we could unfailingly identify sophists, but it still might not reveal what they are. How is that possible? Think of any proposition in Euclid about triangles, the more obscure the better. I choose 1.20, but any one will do. In any triangle, two sides taken together in any manner are greater than the remaining one. Now because this is a proven proposition, it is necessary, and if its steps are reversible, which I think they are, it is also sufficient to determine a triangle. So as a good logician, I define triangle as that of which two sides taken together in any manner are greater than the remaining one. �11 This is an infallible marker for a class that contains all triangles and only triangles, yet it completely misses the point of defining something, which is to reveal what it is. In order to think about anything worthwhile, we have to abandon the picture of classes nested within classes, and both Plato and Aristotle in fact did that. Plato really did have a theory of forms, but it is nothing like what is meant by virtually everyone who uses that phrase nowadays. The thing that Wittgenstein is said to have refuted, Plato had already refuted, in a more complex way. Plato's own theory arose out of difficulties like the one I mentioned a moment ago: how should we think of the relation between virtue and virtues? In the Protagoras, Socrates asks whether justice. moderation, and so on are not instances of virtue but parts of one whole, as the mouth, nose, eyes, and ears are parts of one face (3290). And this is a common theme in the dialogues, as Socrates always seems to force people, against common sense, to conclude that courage or justice or temperance is impossible in isolation from the rest, and from wisdom. They are as different from one another as eyes are from a mouth, and putting them together does not blend them into a homogeneous mixture. Why then shouldn't someone be brave while being unjust, intemperate, and stupid? But if Socrates' suggestion is tempting to you at all-if you suspect that real bravery is possible only in someone who is just and temperate and wisethen you have a tough problem on your hands. It used to be called the problem of the one and the many. Aristotle reports that Plato solved it by postulating that each form is put together in the way a number is (Metaphysics 987b 21-2). Four is not something that belongs to each of its units, but only to all of them together. But the forms are not mathematical numbers, with identical units, but are complexes of other forms, each distinct from the rest, but impossible outside the complex. That means we can't simply add up wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice, because none of them is anything at all in isolation from the rest. Wherever courage, say. is found, virtue as a whole is already in play. But we can't get at virtue itself, apart from the virtues, because it is nothing but the being-together of them all. We know about this theory of Plato's only because Aristotle tells us about it, and because that permits a kind of hindsight to be applied to a few very obscure passages in the dialogues. Jacob Klein and Robert Williamson ha\·e been inspired to make partial reconstructions of it. I mention it only to show that the technical and laborious side of philosophy is as much a field for imagination and wonder as is the beginning of philosophy, when the what-is question first takes hold. And I can report on yet another road one might take in the same pursuit. Aristotle follows his teacher's lead in many more respects than is usually seen, but in this one he charts a new course. It begins with the observation that we call something medical, for example, �12 in a variety of ways. (Metaphysics, Bk.IV, ch. 2) There is a medical knife, a medical book, a medical degree, a medical procedure, and a medical person. Only in the last case is the word used in its primary sense, as indicating the presence of a certain kind of knowledge and skill. The knife is an instrument of that skill, the book one of the causes of it, the degree a sign of it, and the procedure an act or effect of it. Whenever something other than a human being is called medical, it is meant in a derivative sense that points to the primary one. This structure of .meaning operates everywhere, and again, Aristotle is not interested in the way words are used, except as a pointer to the causal structure of the world. And yet again, it is not the structure of species within genus within higher and higher general classes that reveals anything about the world, but a more complex and intimate pattern that could never be found by logic alone. For example, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle asks a question he says was asked in ancient times and must always be asked and struggled with (1028b 2-4), what is being? By the end of the seventh book of that work, he has determined that being is meant in its primary and proper sense only of animals, plants, and the cosmos as a whole. They are the only things that are in their own right, and everything else is in some way derivative from them. Now this goes far beyond anything present in linguistic usage. Language doesn't even know that it is saying "being" in more than one way, but misleads us by appearing to collapse them all into one. · Aristotle is correcting the language by discovering complexity where it suggests simplicity. His thinking is moving entirely among the things at which language points, and points in an inadequate way. But it is a much greater step to single out active, organized, self-maintaining wholes as the only things in our experience that display being as such. Language claims that title equally and indifferently for tables, rocks, flowers, wood, bones, and all sorts of other things that Aristotle thinks are only beings of the second rank, beings-by-courtesy, derived from and dependent on those few things that are always at-work-staying-the-same. But what if the true beings themselves have sources and causes? If they do, then the same pattern continues, and even the primary beings in our experience are derivative beings in the true order of things. This is exactly what Aristotle concludes, as he follows the causal order upward to forms, and then to the being-atwork of forms, and finally to the divine intellect. Being is not the class that includes everything indifferently, but the activity that proceeds from one source to the organized whole of all things. Beings belong to a complex pattern that points to the highest being. Now this pattern of one primary meaning that governs the rest is found everywhere in Aristotle's writings, but even it does not serve as a method of inquiry for him. When he asks, in the Nicomachean Ethics, what is the good?, he seems to conclude that the various goods are not linked by �13 derivation from one primary good, but are all the same by analogy. (1096b 27-30) That means that the human good has to be a separate topic of inquiry, not found by derivation from a higher good. Thomas Aquinas, incidentally, uses the word "analogy" to refer to the other pattern of meanings derived from one primary instance, but for Aristotle it makes a great difference which of the two patterns is at work. For example, when we speak of a healthy diet, we mean one that contributes to the health of an animal; it is not the diet but the animal that can be healthy in the prima1y and governing sense. But suppose we speak of a healthy society? Do we mean one in which the people are physically fit and free of disease, or one in which the people co-operate in a way analogous to the parts of a healthy animal body? The former would be a case of meaning by derivation, the latter one of meaning by analogy. Aristotle's inquiries are guided by the things for which they are looking, and do not seek to fit those things into ready-made patterns of any kind. In fact, in the Physics there is yet a third and most surprising structure. that has only recently begun to become evident to me. Aristotle asks what motion is, and gives an answer that applies to four kinds: change of being. qualitative change, quantitative change, and change of place. The definition seems to apply most directly to the first two kinds, but the Physics is organized around a progressive narrowing down of all change to change of place, as the primary motion. The number of kinds of motions is reduced in stages from four to three to two to one. But the primary motion involves the least change, while the primary change is the one that turns out to be least properly called a motion. Change and motion name the same four kinds of action in two opposite ways, so that the upward scale of motions is the downward scale of changes, with birth and death at one end and change of place at the other. This in turn reflects the twofold nature of nature, as life and cosmos, in which Aristotle permits both sides to be primary at the same time. One recent book about the Physics claims that the early definition of motion is discarded when the later books are reached, but in fact that understanding of change in terms of potency and being-at-work remains dominant, even while the motion that displays it least is being found to be the primary motion. In the eighth chapter of the last book of the Physics, there is a final demonstration of what is wrong with Zeno's paradoxes, that brings the definition of motion to the forefront, and sho\\·s that all motion must be understood as change, even at the limit of mere change of place, and that all change must be rooted in the potency that goes with the nature of some being. The meaning of motion, and its relation to change, are imbedded in the way this world is organized. To get the structure of meaning straight is to come into sight of the way things are. In this case that produces a paradox beyond any that Zeno imagined, a �14 structure in which two things are simultaneously prior to and derivative from one another. So what is a game? Perhaps there is some common element present in everything we call a game. Perhaps there is not, and they only share a set of family resemblances. I can't work up enough interest in the topic to form an opinion about it. All I can say is that, as far as my own experience goes, there is no what-is question there at all. But what is virtue, or motion, or the good, or being itself? Reading Plato and Aristotle has made it obvious to me that these are questions I have a stake in pursuing, and has drawn me into the pursuit. The briefest of sketches have shown us four different structures by which the one thing asked about might be related to the many things called by its name, none of which is as crude as either of the two alternatives about games. To recapitulate them: the one thing in question might be composed of the very things that are derived from it; it might be the primary instance to which all the others point; it might be an internal relation, present in the many things by way of analogy; and it might be part of a bi-polar relationship, in which it and something akin to it jointly govern a group of things that bear both of their names. Aristotle's inquiries along the path of the what-is question are so diverse, and the theory he attributes to Plato is so unexpected, that we are in no danger of becoming Platonists or Aristotelians. Even if we wanted to, where is the method to follow, or the procedure to imitate? Philosophy of a Platonic or Aristotelian kind is nothing but activity stimulated by the what-is question, opened and reopened in wonder, led by desire, full of hard work but more enlivening than tiring, offering not doctrines and dogmas but wide-open possibilities, as broad as the human capacities we are so likely to leave unused and inert. � 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. 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Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 14 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource What is a what-is question? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993-05 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered in May 1993 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Sachs 1993-05 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sachs, Joe, 1946- Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0a1d809dc2dce0cb1c056b8729722dc8.pdf 1d347237e761e46451e2df5243fd6db7 PDF Text Text Aristotle's Poetics is a much-disdained book. So unpoetic a soul as Aristotle's has no business speaking about such a topic, much less telling poets how to go about their business. He reduces the drama to its language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic element, the story, and then he encourages insensitive readers like himself to subject stories to crudely moralistic readings, that reduce tragedies to the childish proportions of Aesop-fables. Strangely, though, the Poetics itself is rarely read with the kind of sensitivity its critics claim to possess, and the thing criticized is not the book Aristotle wrote but a caricature of it. Aristotle himself respected Homer so much that he personally corrected a copy of the Iliad for his student Alexander, who carried it all over the world. In his Rhetoric (III, xvi, 9), Aristotle criticizes orators who write exclusively from the intellect, rather than from the heart, in the way Sophocles makes Antigone speak. Aristotle is often thought of as a logician, but he regularly uses the adverb logik6s, logically, as a term of reproach contrasted with phusik6s, naturally .or appropriately, to describe arguments made by others, or preliminary and inadequate arguments of his own. Those who take the trouble to look at the Poetics closely will find, I think, a book that treats its topic appropriately and naturally, and contains the reflections of a good reader and characteristically powerful thinker. The first scandal in the Poetics is the initial marking out of dramatic poetry as a form of imitation. We call the poet a creator, and are offended at the suggestion that he might be merely some sort of recording device. As the painter's eye teaches us how to look and shows us what we never saw, the dramatist presents things that never existed until he imagined them, and makes us experience worlds we could never have found the way to on our own. But Aristotle has no intention to diminish the poet, and in fact says the same thing I just said, in making the point that poetry is more philosophic than history. By imitation, Aristotle does not mean the sort of mimicry by which Aristophanes, say, finds syllables that approximate the sound of frogs. He is speaking of the imitation of action, and by action he does not mean mere happenings. Aristotle speaks extensively of praxis in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is not a word he uses loosely, and in fact his use of it in the definition of tragedy recalls the discussion in the Ethics. Action, as Aristotle uses the word, refers only to what is deliberately chosen, and capable of finding completion in the achievement of some purpose. Animals and young children do not act in this sense, and action is not the whole of the life of any of us. The poet must have an eye for the emergence of action in human life, and a sense for the actions that are worth paying attention to. They are not present in the world in such a way that a video camera could detect them. An intelligent, feeling, shaping human soul must find them. By the same token, the action of the drama 1 �itself is not on the stage. It takes form and has its being in the imagination of the spectator. The actors speak and move and gesture, but it is the poet who speaks through them, from imagination to imagination, to present to us the thing that he has made. Because that thing he makes has the form of an action, it has to be seen and held together just as actively and attentively by us as by him. The imitation is the thing that is re-produced, in us and for us, by his art. This is a powerful kind of human communication, and the thing imitated is what defines the human realm. If no one had tbe power to imitate action, life might just wash over us without leaving any trace. How do I know that Aristotle intends the imitation of action to be understood in this way? In De Anima, he distinguishes three kinds of perception (II, 6; III, 3 ). There is the perception of proper sensibles-.colors, sounds, tastes and so on; these lie on the surfaces of things and can be mimicked directly for sense perception. But there is also perception of common sensibles, available to more than-one of our senses, as shape is grasped by both sight and touch, or number by all five senses; these are distinguished by imagin,ation, the power in us that is shared by the five senses, and in which the circular shape, for instance, is not dependent on sight or touch alone. These common sensibles can be mimicked in various ways, as when I draw a messy, meandering ridge of chalk on a blackboard, and your imagination grasps a circle. Finally, there is the perception of that of which the sensible qualities are attributes, the thing--the son of Diares, for example; it is this that we ordinarily mean by perception, and while its object always has an image in the imagination, it can only be distinguished by intellect, nous (III,4). Skilled mimics can imitate people we know, by voice, gesture, and so on, and here already we must engage intelligence and imagination together. The dramatist imitates things more ·remote from the eye and ear than familiar people. Sophocles and Shakespeare, for example, imitate repentance and forgiveness, true instances of action in Aristotle's sense of the word, and we need all the human powers to recognize what these poets put before us. So the mere phrase imitation of an action is packed with meaning, available to us as soon as we ask what an action is, and how the image of such a thing might be perceived. Aristotle does understand tragedy as a development out of the child's mimicry of animal noises, but that is in the same way that he understands philosophy as a development out of our enjoyment of sight-seeing (Metaphysics I, 1). In each of these developments there is a vast array of possible intermediate stages, but just as philosophy is the ultimate form of the innate desire to know, tragedy is considered by Aristotle the ultimate form of our innate delight in imitation. His beloved Homer saw and achieved the most important possibilities of the imitation of human action, 2 �but it was the tragedians who refined and intensified the form of that imitation, and discovered its perfection. A work is a tragedy, Aristotle tells us, only if it arouses pity and fear. Why does he single out these two passions? Some interpreters think he means them only as examples--pity and fear and other passions like that-but I am not among those loose constructionists. Aristotle does use a word that means passions of that sort ( toiouta), but I think he does so only to indicate that pity and fear are not themselves things subject to identification with pin-point precision, but that each refers to a range of feeling. It is just the feelings in those two ranges, however, that belong to tragedy. Why? Why shouldn't some tragedy arouse pity and joy, say, and another fear and cruelty? In various places, Aristotle says that it is the mark of an educated person to know what needs explanation and what doesn't. He does not try to prove that there is such a thing as nature, or such a thing as motion, though some people deny both. Likewise, he understands the recognition of a special and powerful form of drama built around pity and fear as the beginning of an inquiry, and spends not one word justifying that restriction. We, however, can see better why he starts there by trying out a few simple alternatives. Suppose a drama aroused pity in a powerful way, but aroused no fear at all. This is an easily recognizable dramatic form, called a tear-jerker. The name is meant to disparage this sort of drama, but why? Imagine a well written, well made play or movie that depicts the losing struggle of a likable central character. We are moved to have a good cry, and are afforded either the relief of a happy ending, or the realistic desolation of a sad one. In the one case the tension built up along the way is released within the experience of the work itself; in the other it passes off as we leave the theater, and readjust our feelings to the fact that it was, after all, only make-believe. What is wrong with that? There is always pleasure in strong emotion, and the theater is a harmless place to indulge it. We may even come out feeling good about being so compassionate. But Dostoyevski depicts a character who loves to cry in the theater, not noticing that while she wallows in her warm feelings her coach-driver is shivering outside. She has day-dreams about relieving suffering humanity, but does nothing to put that vague desire to work. If she is typical, then the tear-jerker is a dishonest form of drama, not even a harmless diversion but an encouragement to lie to oneself. Well then, let's consider the opposite experiment, in which a drama arouses fear in a powerful way, but arouses little or no pity. This is again a readily recognizable dramatic form, called the horror story, or in a recent fashion, the mad-slasher movie. The thrill of fear is the primary object of such amusements, and the story alternates between the build-up of apprehension and the shock of violence. Again, as with the tear-jerker, it 3 �doesn't much matter whether it ends happily or with uneasiness, or even with one last shock, so indeterminate is its form. And while the tearjerker gives us an illusion of compassionate delicacy, the unrestrained shock-drama obviously has the effect of coarsening feeling. Genuine humart pity could not co-exist with the so-called graphic effects these films use to keep scaring us. The attraction of this kind of amusement is again the thrill of strong feeling, and again the price of indulging the desire for that thrill may be high. Let us consider a milder form of the drama built on arousing fear. There are stories in which fearsome things are threatened or done by characters who are in the end defeated by means similar to, or in some way equivalent to, what they dealt out. The fear is relieved in vengeance, and we feel a satisfaction that we might be inclined to call justice. To work on the level of feeling, though, justice must be understood as the exact inverse of the crime--doing to the offender the sort of thing he did or meant to do to others. The imagination of evil then becomes the measure of good, or at least of the restoration of order. The satisfaction we feel in the vicarious infliction of pain or death is nothing but a thin veil over the very feelings we mean to be punishing. This is a successful dramatic formula, arousing in us destructive desires that are fun to feel, along with the self-righteous illusion that we are really superior to the character who displays them. The playwright who makes us feel that way will probably be popular, but he is a menace. We have looked at three kinds of non-tragedy that arouse passions in a destructive way, and we could add others. There are potentially as many kinds as there are passions and combinations of passions. That suggests that the theater is just an arena for the manipulation of passions in ways that are pleasant in the short run and at least reckless to pursue repeatedly. At worst, the drama could be seen as dealing in a kind of addiction, which it both produces and holds the only remedy for. But we have not yet tried to talk about the combination of passions characteristic of tragedy. When we turn from the sort of examples I have given, to the acknowledged examples of tragedy, we find ourselves in a different world. The tragedians I have in mind are five: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; Shakespeare, who differs from them only in time; and Homer, who differs from them somewhat more, in the form in which he composed, but shares with them the things that matter most. I could add other authors, such as Dostoyevski, who wrote stories of the tragic kind in much looser literary forms, but I want to keep the focus on a small number of clear paradigms. When we look at a tragedy we find the chorus in Antigone telling us what a strange thing a human being is, that passes beyond all boundaries 4 �(lines 332 ff.), or King Lear asking if man is no more than this, a poor, bare, forked animal (III, iv, 97ff.), or Macbeth protesting to his wife "I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none" (I, vii, 47-8), or Oedipus taunting Teiresias with the fact that divine art was of no use against the Sphinx, but only Oedipus' own human ingenuity (Oed. Tyr. 39098), or Agamemnon, resisting walking home on tapestries, saying to his wife "I tell you to revere me as a man, not a god" (925), or Cadmus in the Bacchae saying "I am a man, nothing more" ( 199), while Dionysus tells Pentheus "You do not know what you are" (506), or Patroclus telling Achilles "Peleus was not your father nor Thetis your mother, but the gray sea bore you, and the towering rocks, so hard is your heart" (Iliad XVI, 3 35). I could add more examples of this kind by the dozen, and your memories will supply others. Tragedy seems always to involve testing or finding the limits of what is human. This is no mere orgy of strong feeling, but a highly focussed way of bringing our powers to bear on the image of what is human as such. I suggest that Aristotle is right in saying that the powers which first of all bring this human image to sight for us are pity and fear. It is obvious that the authors in our examples are not just putting things in front of us to make us cry or shiver or gasp. The feelings they arouse are subordinated to another effect. Aristotle begins by saying that tragedy arouses pity and fear in such a way as to culminate in a cleansing of those passions, the famous catharsis. The word is used by Aristotle only the once, in his preliminary definition of tragedy. I think this is because its role is taken over later in the Poetics by another, more positive, word, but the idea of catharsis is important in itself, and we should consider what it might mean. First of all, the tragic catharsis might be a purgation. Fear can obviously be an insidious thing that undermines life and poisons it with anxiety. It would be good to flush this feeling from our systems, bring it into the open, and clear the air. This may explain the appeal of horror movies, that they redirect our fears toward something external, grotesque, and finally ridiculous, in order to puncture them. On the other hand, fear might have a secret allure, so that what we need to purge is the desire for the thrill that comes with fear. The horror movie also provides safe way to indulge and satisfy the longing to feel afraid, and go home afterward satisfied; the desire is purged, temporarily, by being fed. Our souls are so many-headed that opposite satisfactions may be felt at the same time, but I think these two really are opposite. In the first sense of purgation, the horror movie is a kind of medicine that does its work and leaves the soul healthier, while in the second sense it is a potentially addictive drug. Either explanation may account for the popularity of these movies among teenagers, since fear is so much a fact of that time of life. For those of us a 5 �who are older, the tear-jerker may have more appeal, offering a way to purge the regrets of our lives in a sentimental outpouring of pity. As with fear, this purgation too may be either medicinal or drug-like. This idea of purgation, in its various forms, is what we usually mean when we call something cathartic. People speak of watching football, or boxing, as a catharsis of violent urges, or call a shouting match with a friend a useful catharsis of buried resentment. This is a practical purpose that drama may also serve, but it has no particular connection with beauty or truth; to be good in this purgative way, a drama has no need to be good in any other way. No one would be tempted to confuse the feeling at the end of a horror movie with what Aristotle calls "the tragic pleasure," nor to call such a movie a tragedy. But the English word catharsis does not contain everything that is in the Greek word. Let us look at other things it might mean. Catharsis in Greek can mean purification. While purging something means getting rid of it, purifying something means getting rid of the worse or baser parts of it. It is possible that tragedy purifies the feelings themselves of fear and pity. These arise in us in crude ways, attached to all sorts of objects. Perhaps the poet educates our sensibilities, our powers to feel and be moved, by refining them and attaching them to less easily discernible objects. There is a line in The Wasteland, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." Alfred Hitchcock once made us all feel a little shudder when we took showers. The poetic imagination is limited only by its skill, and can turn any object into a focus for any feeling. I suppose some people turn to poetry to find delicious and exquisite new ways to feel old feelings, and consider themselves to enter in that way into a purified state. I have heard it argued that this sort of thing is what tragedy and the tragic pleasure are all about, but it doesn't match up with my experience. Sophocles does make me fear and pity human knowledge when I watch the Oedipus Tyrranus, but this is not a refinement of those feelings but a discovery that they belong to a surprising object. Sophocles is not training my feelings, but using them to show me something worthy of wonder. I believe that the word catharsis drops out of the Poetics because the word wonder, to thaumaston, replaces it, first in chapter 9, where Aristotle argues that pity and fear arise most of all where wonder does, and finally in chapters 24 and 25, where he singles out wonder as the aim of the poetic art itself, into which the aim of tragedy in particular merges. Ask yourself how you feel at the end of a tragedy. You have witnessed horrible things and felt painful feelings, but the mark of tragedy is that it brings you out the other side. Aristotle's use of the word catharsis is not a technical reference to purgation or purification but a beautiful metaphor for the peculiar tragic pleasure, the feeling of being washed or cleansed. 6 �The tragic pleasure is a paradox. As Aristotle says, in a tragedy, a happy ending doesn't make us happy. At the end of the play the stage is often littered with bodies, and we feel cleansed by it all. Are we like Clytemnestra, who says she rejoiced when spattered by her husband's blood, like the earth in a Spring rain (Ag. 1389-92)? Are we like Iago, who has to see a beautiful life destroyed to feel better about himself ( Ofh. V, i, 18-20)? We all feel a certain glee in the bringing low of the mighty, but this is in no way similar to the feeling of being washed in wonderment. The closest thing I know to the feeling at the end of a tragedy is the one that comes with the sudden, unexpected appearance of something beautiful. In a famous essay on beauty (Ennead I, tractate 6) , Plotinus says two things that seem true to me: "Clearly [beauty] is something detected at a first glance, something that the soul...recognizes, gives welcome to, and, in a way, fuses with" (beginning sec. 2). What is the effect on us of this recognition? Plotinus says that in every instance it is "an astonishment, a delicious wonderment" (end sec. 4). Aristotle is insistent that a tragedy must be whole and one, because only in that way can it be beautiful, while he also ascribes the superiority of tragedy over epic poetry to its greater unity and concentration (ch. 26). Tragedy is not just a dramatic form in which some works are beautiful and others not; tragedy is itself a species of beauty. All tragedies are beautiful. By following Aristotle's lead, we have now found five marks of tragedy: (1) it imitates an action, (2) it arouses pity and fear, (3) it displays the human image as such, (4) it ends in wonder, and (S) it is inherently beautiful. We noticed earlier that it is action that characterizes the distinctively human realm, and it is reasonable that the depiction of an action might show us a human being in some definitive way, but what do pity and fear have to do with that showing? The answer is, I think, everything. First, let us consider what tragic pity consists in. The word pity tends to have a bad name these days, and to imply an attitude of condescension that diminishes its object. This is not a matter of the meanings of words, or even of changing attitudes. It belongs to pity itself to be two-sided, since any feeling of empathy can be given a perverse twist by the recognition that it is not oneself but another with whom one is feeling a shared pain. One of the most empathetic characters in all literature is Edgar in King Lear. He describes himself truly as "a most poor man, made tame to fortune's blows, Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, Am pregnant to good pity" (IV, vi, 217-19). Two of his lines spoken to his father are powerful evidence of the insight that comes from suffering oneself and taking on the suffering of others: "Thy life's a miracle" (IV, vi, SS), he says, and "Ripeness is all" (V, ii, 11), trying to help his father see that life is still good and death is not something to be sought. Yet in the 7 �last scene of the play this same Edgar voices the stupidest words ever spoken in any tragedy, when he concludes that his father just got what he deserved when he lost his eyes, since he had once committed adultery (V, iii, 171-4). Having witnessed the play, we know that Gloucester lost his eyes because he chose to help Lear, when the kingdom had become so corrupt that his act of kindness appeared as a walking fire in a dark world (Ill, iv, 107). There is a chain of effects from Gloucester's adultery to his mutilation, but it is not a sequence that reveals the true cause of that horror. The wholeness of action that Shakespeare shapes for us shows that Gloucester's goodness, displayed in a courageous, deliberate choice, and not his weakness many years earlier, cost him his eyes. Edgar ends by giving in to the temptation to moralize, to chase after the "fatal flaw" which is no part of tragedy, and loses his capacity to see straight. This suggests that holding on to proper pity leads to seeing straight, and that seems exactly right. But what is proper pity? There is a way of missing the mark that is opposite to condescension, and that is the excess of pity called sentimentality. There are people who use the word sentimental for any display of feeling, or any taking seriously of feeling, but their attitude is as blind as Edgar's. Sentimentality is inordinate feeling, feeling that goes beyond the source that gives rise to it. The woman in Dostoyevski's novel who loves pitying for its own sake is an example of this vice. But between Edgar's moralizing and her gushing there is a range of appropriate pity. Pity is one of the instruments by which a poet can show us what we are. We pity the loss of Gloucester's eyes because we know the value of eyes, but more deeply, we pity the violation of Gloucester's decency, and in so doing we feel the truth that without such decency, and without respect for it, there is no human life. Shakespeare is in control here, and the feeling he produces does not give way in embarrassment to moral judgment, nor does it make us wallow mindlessly in pity because it feels so good; the pity he arouses in us shows us what is precious in us, in the act of its being violated in another. Since every boundary has two sides, the human image is delineated also from the outside, the side of the things that threaten it. This is shown to us through the feeling of fear. As Aristotle says twice in the Rhetoric, what we pity in others, we fear for ourselves (1382b 26, 1386a 27). In our mounting fear that Oedipus will come to know the truth about himself, we feel that something of our own is threatened. Tragic fear, exactly like tragic pity, and either preceding it or simultaneous with it, shows us what we are and are unwilling to lose. It makes no sense to say that Oedipus' passion for truth is a flaw, since that is the very quality that makes us afraid on his behalf. Tragedy is never about flaws, and it is only the silliest of mistranslations that puts that claim in Aristotle's mouth. Tragedy is about central and indispensable human attributes, disclosed to 8 �us by the pity that draws us toward them and the fear that makes us recoil from what threatens them. Because the suffering of the tragic figure displays the boundaries of what is human, every tragedy carries the sense of universality. Oedipus or Antigone or Lear or Othello is somehow every one of us, only more so. But the mere mention of these names makes it obvious that they are not generalized characters, but altogether particular. And if we did not feel that they were genuine individuals, they would have no power to engage our emotions. It is by their particularity that they make their marks on us, as though we had encountered them in the flesh. It is only through the particularity of our feelings that our bonds with them emerge. What we care for and cherish makes us pity them and fear for them, and thereby the reverse also happens: our feelings of pity and fear make us recognize what we care for and cherish. When the tragic figure is destroyed it is a piece of ourselves that is lost. Yet we never feel desolation at the end of a tragedy, because what is lost is also, by the very same means, found. I am not trying to make a paradox, but to describe a marvel. It is not so strange that we learn the worth of something by losing it; what is astonishing is what the tragedians are able to achieve by making use of that common experience. They lift it up into a state of wonder. Within our small group of exemplary poetic works, there are two that do not have the tragic form, and hence do not concentrate all their power into putting us in a state of wonder, but also depict the state of wonder among their characters and contain speeches that reflect on it. They are Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Tempest. (Incidentally, there is an excellent small book called Woe or Wonder, the Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy, by J. V. Cunningham, that demonstrates the continuity of the traditional understanding of tragedy from Aristotle to Shakespeare.) The first poein in our literary heritage, and Shakespeare's last play, both belong to a conversation of which Aristotle's Poetics is the most prominent part. In both the Iliad and the Tempest there are characters with arts that in some ways resemble that of the poet. It is much noticed that Prospero's farewell to his art coincides with Shakespeare's own, but it may be less obvious that Homer has put into the Iliad a partial representation of himself. But the last 150 lines of Book XVIII of the Iliad describe the making of a work of art by Hephaestus. I will not consider here what is depicted on the shield of Achilles, but only the meaning in the poem of the shield itself. In Book XVIII, Achilles has realized what mattered most to him when it is too late. The Greeks are driven back to their ships, as Achilles had prayed they would be, and know that they are lost without him. "But what pleasure is this to me now," he say~ to his mother, "when my beloved friend is dead, Patroclus, whom I cherished beyond all friends, 9 �as the equal of my own soul; I am bereft of him" (80-82). Those last words, as our dean once pointed out in a lecture, also mean "I have killed him." In his desolation, Achilles has at last chosen to act. 1'I will accept my doom," he says (115 ). Thetis goes to Hephaestus because, in spite of his resolve, Achilles has no armor in which to meet his fate. She tells her son's story, concluding "he is lying on the ground, anguishing at heart" (461). Her last word, anguishing, axrnwv, is built on Achilles' name. Now listen to what Hephaestus says in reply: "Take courage, and do not let these things distress you in your heart. Would that I had the power to hide him far away from death and the sounds of grief when grim fate comes to him, but I can see that beautiful armor surrounds him, of such a kind that many people, one after another, who look on it, will wonder" ( 463-6 7). Is it not evident that this source of wonder that surrounds Achilles, that takes the sting from his death even in a mother's heart, is the Iliad itself? But how does the Iliad accomplish this? Let us shift our attention for a moment to the Tempest. The character Alonso, in the power of the magician Prospero, spends the length of the play in the illusion that his son has drowned. To have him alive again, Alonso says, "I wish Myself were mudded in that oozy bed Where my son lies" (V, i, 150-2). But he has already been there for three hours in his imagination; he says earlier "my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded And with him there lie mudded" (III, iii, 100-2). What is this muddy ooze? It is Alonso's grief, and his regret for exposing his son to danger, and his self-reproach for his own past crime against Prospero and Prospero's baby daughter, which made his son a just target for divine retribution; the ooze is Alonso's repentance, which feels futile to him since it only comes after he has lost the thing he cares most about. But the spirit Ariel sings a song to Alonso's son: "Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange" (I, ii, 397-402). Alonso's grief is aroused by an illusion, an imitation of an action, but his repentance is real, and is slowly transforming him into a different man. Who is this new man? Let us take consel from the "honest old councilor" Gonzalo, who always has the clearest sight in the play. He tells us that on this voyage, when so much seemed lost, every traveller found himself"When no man was his own" (V, i, 206-13). The something rich and strange into which Alonso changes is himself, as he was before his life took a wrong turn. Prospero's magic does no more than arrest people in a potent illusion; in his power they are "knit up In their distractions" (III, iii, 89-90). When released, he says, "they shall be themselves" (V, i, 32). On virtually every page of the Tempest, the word wonder appears, or else some synonym for it. Miranda's name is Latin for wonder, her 10 �favorite adjective brave seems to mean both good and out-of-the-ordinary, and the combination rich and strange means the same. What is wonder? J. V. Cunningham describes it in the book I mentioned as the shocked limit of all feeling, in which fear, sorrow, and joy can all merge. There is some truth in that, but it misses what is wonderful or wondrous about wonder. It suggests that in wonder our feelings are numbed and we are left limp, wrung dry of all emotion. But wonder is itself a feeling, the one to which Miranda is always giving voice, the powerful sense that what is before one is both strange and good. Wonder does not numb the other feelings; what it does is dislodge them from their habitual moorings. The experience of wonder is the disclosure of a sight or thought or image that fits no habitual context of feeling or understanding, but grabs and holds us by a power borrowed from nothing apart from itself. The two things that Plotinus says characterize beauty, that the soul recognizes it at first glance and spontaneously gives welcome to it, equally describe the experience of wonder. The beautiful always produces wonder, if it is seen as beautiful, and the sense of wonder always sees beauty. But are there really no wonders that are ugly? The monstrosities that used to be exhibited in circus side-shows are wonders too, are they not? In the Tempest, three characters think first of all of such spectacles when they lay eyes on Caliban (II, ii, 28-31; V, i, 263-6), but they are incapable of wonder, since they think they know everything that matters already. A fourth character in the same batch, who is drunk but not insensible, gives way at the end of Act II to the sense that this is not just someone strange and deformed, nor just a useful servant, but a brave monster. But Stephano is not, I think, like the holiday fools who pay to see monstrosities like two-headed calves or exotic sights like wild men of Borneo. I recall an aquarium somewhere in Europe that had on display an astoundingly ugly catfish. People came casually up to its tank, were startled, made noises of disgust, and turned away. Even to be arrested before such a sight feels in some way perverse and has some conflict in the feeling it arouses, as when we stare at the victims of a car wreck. The sight of the ugly or disgusting, when it is felt as such, does not have the settled repose or willing surrender that are characteristic of wonder. "Wonder is sweet," as Aristotle says. This sweet contemplation of something outside us is exactly opposite to Alonso's painful immersion in his own remorse, but in every other respect he is a model of the spectator of a tragedy. We are in the power of another for awhile, the sight of an illusion works real and durable changes in us, we merge into something rich and strange, and what we find by being absorbed in the image of another is ourselves. As Alonso is shown a mirror of his soul by Prospero, we are shown a mirror of ourselves in Alonso, but in that mirror we see ourselves as we are not in witnessing the 11 �Tempest, but in witnessing a tragedy. The Tempest is a beautiful play, suffused with wonder as well as with reflections on wonder, but it holds the intensity of the tragic experience at a distance. Homer, on the other hand, has pulled off a feat even more astounding than Shakespeare's, by imitating the experience of a spectator of tragedy within a story that itself works on us as a tragedy. In Book XXIV of the Iliad, forms of the word thambos, amazement, occur three times in three lines (482-4), when Priam suddenly appears in the hut of Achilles and "kisses the terrible man-slaughtering hands that killed his many sons" (478-9), but this is only the prelude to the true wonder. Acl).illes and Priam cry together, each for his own grief, as each has cried so often before, but this time a miracle happens. Achilles' grief is transformed into satisfaction, and cleansed from his chest and his hands (513-14). This is all the more remarkable, since Achilles has for days been repeatedly trying to take out his raging grief on Hector's dead body. The famous first word of the Iliad, menis, wrath, has come back at the beginning of Book XXIV in the participle meneain6n (22), a constant condition that Lattimore translates well as "standing fury." But all this hardened rage evaporates in one lamentation, just because Achilles shares it with his enemy's father. Hermes had told Priam to appeal to Achilles in the names of his father, his mother, and his child, "in order to stir his heart" (466-7), but Priam's focussed misery goes straight to Achilles' heart without diluting the effect. The first words out of Priam's mouth are "remember your father" (486). Your father deserves pity, Priam says, so "pity me with him in mind, since I am more pitiful even than he; I have dared what no other mortal on earth ever dared, to stretch out my lips to the hand of the man who murdered my children" (503-4). Achilles had been pitying Patroclus, but mainly himself, but the feeling to which Priam has directed him now is exactly the same as tragic pity. Achilles is looking at a human being who has chosep. to go to the limits of what is humanly possible to search for something that matters to him. The wonder of this sight takes Achilles out of his self-pity, but back into himself as a son and as a sharer of human misery itself. All his old longings for glory and revenge fall away, since they have no place in the sight in which he is now absorbed. For the moment, the beauty of Priam's terrible action re-makes the world, and determines what matters and what doesn't. The feeling in this moment out of time is fragile, and Achilles feels it threatened by tragic fear. In the strange fusion of this scene, what Achilles fears is himself; "don't irritate me any longer now, old man," he says when Priam tries to hurry along the return of Hector's body, "don't stir up my heart in its griefs any more now, lest I not spare even you yourself'' (560, 568-9). Finally, after they share a meal, they just look at each other. "Priam wondered at Achilles, at how big he was and what he 12 �was like, for he seemed equal to the gods, but Achilles wondered at Trojan Priam, looking on the worthy sight of him and hearing his story" (629-32). In the grip of wonder they do not see enemies. They see truly. They see the beauty in two men who have lost almost everything. They see a son a father should be proud of and a father a son should revere. The action of the Iliad stretches from Achilles' deliberate choice to remove himself from the war to his deliberate choice to return Hector's body to Priam. The passion of the Iliad moves from anger through pity and fear to wonder. Priam's wonder lifts him for a moment out of the misery he is enduring, and permits him to see the cause of that misery as still something good. Achilles' wonder is similar to that of Priam, since Achilles too sees the cause of his anguish in a new light, but in his case this takes several steps. When Priam first appears in his hut, Homer compares the amazement this produces to that with which people look at a murderer who has fled from his homeland (480-84). This is a strange comparison, and it recalls the even stranger fact disclosed one book earlier that Patroclus, whom everyone speaks of as gentle and kind-hearted (esp. XVII, 670-71), who gives his life because he cannot bear to see his friends destroyed to satisfy Achilles' anger, this same Patroclus began his life as a murderer in his own country, and came to Achilles' father Peleus for a second chance at life. When Achilles remembers his father, he is remembering the man whose kindness brought Patroclus into his life, so that his tears, now for his father, now again for Patroclus (XXIV, 511-12), merge into a single grief. But the old man crying with him is a father too, and Achilles' tears encompass Priam along with Achilles' own loved ones. Finally, since Priam is crying for Hector, Achilles' grief includes Hector himself, and so it turns his earlier anguish inside out. If Priam is like Achilles father, then Hector must come to seem to Achilles to be like a brother, or to be like himself. Achilles cannot be brought to such a reflection by reasoning, nor do the feelings in which he has been embroiled take him in that direction. Only Priam succeeds in unlocking Achilles' heart, and he does so by an action, by kissing his hand. From the beginning of Book XVIII ( 2 3, 2 7, 3 3), Achilles' hands are referred to over and over and over, as he uses them to pour dirt on his head, to tear his hair, and to kill every Trojan he can get his hands on. Hector, who must go up against those hands, is mesmerized by them; they are like a fire, he says, and repeats it. "His hands seem like a fire" (XX, 371-2). After Priam kisses Achilles' hand, and after they cry together, Homer tells us that the desire for lamentation went out of Achilles' chest and out of his hands (XXIV, 514). His murderous, manslaughtering hands are stilled by a grief that finally has no enemy to take itself out on. When, in Book XVIII, Achilles had accepted his doom (115), it was part of a bargain; "I will lie still when I am dead," he had said, "but 13 �now I must win splendid glory" (121 ). But at the end of the poem, Achilles has lost interest in glory. He is no longer eaten up by the desire to be lifted above Hector and Priam, but comes to rest in just looking at them for what they are. Homer does surround Achilles in armor that takes the sting from his misery and from his approaching death, by working that misery and death into the wholeness of the Iliad. But the Iliad is, as Aristotle says, the prototype of tragedy; it is not a poem that aims at conferring glory but a poem that bestows the gift of wonder. Like Alonso in the Tempest, Achilles ultimately finds himself. Of the two, Achilles is the closer model of the spectator of a tragedy, because Alonso plunges deep into remorse before he is brought back into the shared world. Achilles is lifted directly out of himself, into the shared world, in the act of wonder, and sees his own image in the sorrowing father in front of him. This is exactly what a tragedy does to us, and exactly what we experience in looking at Achilles. In his loss, we pity him. In his fear of himself, on Priam's behalf, we fear for him, that he might lose his new-won humanity. In his capacity .to be moved by the wonder of a suffering fellow humap., we wonder at him. At the end of the Iliad, as at the end of every tragedy, we are washed in the beauty of the human image, which our pity and our fear have brought to sight. The five marks of tragedy that we learned of from Aristotle's Poetics--that it imitates an action, arouses pity and fear, displays the human image as such, ends in wonder, and is inherently beautiful--give a true and powerful account of the tragic pleasure. 14 �Excerpts from Aristotle's Poetics Ch. 6 A tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious and has a wholeness in its extent, in language that is pleasing (though in distinct ways in its different parts), enacted rather than narrated, culminating, by means of pity and fear, in the cleansing of these passions... So tragedy is an imitation not of people, but of action, life, and happiness or unhappiness, while happiness and unhappiness have their being in activity, and come to completion not in a quality but in some sort of action... Therefore it is deeds and the story that are the end at which tragedy aims, and in all things the end is what matters most... So the source that governs tragedy in the way that the soul governs life is the story. Ch. 7 An extended whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end. But a beginning is something which, in itself, does not need to be after anything else, while something else naturally is the case or comes about after it; and an end is its contrary, something which in itself is of such a nature as to be after something else, either necessarily or for the most part, but to have nothing else after it. ..It is therefore needful that wellput-together stories not begin from just anywhere at random, nor ~nd just anywhere at random...And beauty resides in size and order... the oneness and wholeness of the beautiful thing being present all at once in contemplation.. .in stories, just as in human organizations and in living things. Ch. 8 A story is not one, as some people think, just because it is about one person ...And Homer, just as he is distinguished in all other ways, seems to have seen this point beautifully, whether by art or by nature. Ch. 9 Now tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but also of objects of fear and pity, and these arise most of all when events happen contrary to expectation but in consequence of one another; for in this way they will have more wonder in them than if they happened by chance or by fortune, since even among things that happen by chance, the greatest sense of wonder is from those that seem to have happened by design. Chs. 13-14 Since it is peculiar to tragedy to be an imitation of actions arousing pity and fear ... and since the former concerns someone who is undeserving of suffering and the latter concerns someone like us... the story that works well must... depict a change from good to bad fortune, resulting not from badness but from some great error of someone like us, or else better rather than worse ... One must not look for every sort of pleasure from a tragedy, but for the one native to it. And since it is the pleasure �that results from pity and fear that makes the work a tragedy, and the poet needs to provide this pleasure by tne, ns of imitation, it is evident a that it must be artfully embodied in the actions (and not rely on visual effects). Ch. 16 The best sort of revelation in a tragedy is one that arises from the actions themselves, the astonishment coming about through things that are likely, as in the Oedipus of Sophocles. {A revelation, as the word indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, that produces either friendship or hatred in people marked out for good or bad fortune. The most beautiful of revelations occurs when reversals of condition come about at the same time, as is the case in the Oedipus.--Ch. 11} Chs. 24-5 Wonder needs to be produced in tragedies, but in the epic there is more room for that which confounds reason, by means of which wonder comes about most of all, since in the epic one does not see the person who performs the action; the events surrounding the pursuit of Hector would seem ridiculous if they were on stage ... But wonder is sweet... And Homer most of all has taught the rest of us how one ought to speak of what is untrue ... One ought to choose likely impossibilities in preference to uhconvincing possibilities ... And if a poet has represented impossible things, then he has missed the mark, but that is the right thing to do if he thereby hits the mark that is the end of the poetic art itself, that is, if in that way he makes that or some other part more wondrous. � 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. 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Title A name given to the resource Tragic pleasure Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered in 1994 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Sachs 1994 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sachs, Joe, 1946- Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1fc7a9d73d33697f8a2b914330ba66e6.pdf b0d4563a2f7cfb2381df9f93feaa3cd3 PDF Text Text Joe Sachs Three Little Words (Revised April, 1997) Three words that loom large over any understanding of the Nicomachean Ethics are habit, the mean, and noble. They might be said, very loosely, to refer to the efficient, formal, and final causes of moral virtue, but each of them is easy to misunderstand, and any misunderstanding at such a crucial place must carry one far away from Aristotle's intentions. This lecture is meant to be a preliminary approach toward uncovering those intentions. I will argue that all three words invite misunderstanding, the first because it is not habit but character that makes moral virtue possible, the second because it is not any quantitative adjustment to a mean that achieves that virtue, but a qualitative state that stands between obstacles, and the third because the word noble is simply a poor translation of a Greek word· that has a much richer meaning, and a straightforward English equivalent. Part I: Habit Most people, if asked to choose one word that describes the central focus of Aristotle's ethics, would be likely to say that it is habit. A faculty seminar in Annapolis a few years ago got itself mired in the opinion that Aristotle must be saying that the good life is one of mindless routine, and a recent lecture there took Aristotle to task for praising habit when so much that is important in life depends upon openness and spontaneity. But is it even plausible to think that Aristotle thought the aim of a good life is to eliminate thinking and choosing? Certainly it makes no sense to offer that opinion as a possible interpretation either of virtue or of Aristotle. But equally certainly, Aristotle says that, for the way our lives turn out, "it makes no small difference to be habituated this way or that way straight from childhood, but an enormous difference, or rather all the difference." (1103b, 23-5) But is this the same as saying those lives are nothing but collections of habits? We need to think about causes and effects. It may be that eating a good breakfast makes all the difference to your having a productive day, but that does not mean that the breakfast is the only cause of what you accomplish each day,-or that those accomplishments are only nutritional. The habits that begin in childhood, like the nutrition that begins each morning, may be indispensable to what follows without determining it. Habits are not the only effects of habituation. Now if you have read the Nicomachean Ethics in the translation of Hippocrates Apostle, you will object that Aristotle says plainly that virtues are habits. Here, though, we have run into one of the many ways in which 1 �a Latin tradition has betrayed a translator and distorted Aristotle's meaning. Aristotle says that moral virtue is a hexis, a word consisting of a noun ending attached to the root of the verb echein. The Latin habeo is equivalent to echein, and the Latin habitus is a perfectly good translation of hexis, and so, by one more easy step we get the English word habit. But this paint-by-the-numbers approach to translation carries us so far astray that every implication of the English word is wrong. A hexis is not only not the same as a habit, but is almost exactly its opposite. The meaning of the word hexis becomes an issue in Plato's Theaetetus. Socrates makes the point that knowledge can never be a mere passive possession, stored in the memory the way birds can be kept in cages. The word for that sort of possession is ktesis, something that can be owned, hoarded, and locked away like money. Socrates suggests that, whatever knowledge is, it must have the character of a hexis, an active having-andholding that depends on the effort of concentrating or paying attention. Meno, in the dialogue named for him, speaks always from habit, but cannot begin an approach to knowledge because he will not sustain an effort to say what virtue seems to him, right now, to be. The verb echein means to have something in that effortful way, or to be something in an enduring and active way, and its corresponding noun is hexis. By choosing that word, Aristotle says that a moral virtue is an active state or condition. Most translators do not make the mistake of turning virtues into habits, but instead translate hexis as disposition. But in other writings, such as the Categories (Sb, 29) and De Anima (417b 15-17), Aristotle makes it clear that the general class of dispositions includes passive states such as . heat, cold, and sickness, that are easy to remove and change, as well as active states such as perceiving and knowing, that engage the soul in its depths. The general word for disposition, diathesis, Aristotle uses only for the passive and shallow ones; for the deep and active ones he reserves the word hexis. Perceiving may seem to us, as it seemed to many of Aristotle's predecessors, to be a passive state, but he is emphatic that we are only open to the world by the effort of holding ourselves ready. And if knowledge seems to be something imposed upon us by teaching or training, we are not paying sufficient attention to the kind of learning that is called recollection in the Meno. In Book VII of the Physics, Aristotle says that children are not changed or acted upon when they begin to learn, but get straight into an active state when time or adults help them settle down out of their native condition of disorder and distraction. (247b 17248a 6) In Plato's image we draw knowledge up out of ourselves; in Aristotle's metaphor we settle down into knowing. Think of the humble example of a child's learning its native language. If we had to tell the child what to do, the task would be hopeless. We are indispensable to them, but they do all the work. The particular language they learn comes from 2 �without, but is not imposed, but is rather something that the deepest things in them reach out to grasp. This is exactly the way Aristotle understands moral virtue; in the passage cited from the Physics, he says virtues no more alter what we are than putting on its roof alters a house. It is in Book II, chapter 4, of the Ethics that Aristotle identifies moral virtue as an active state, distinguishing it from such passive conditions of the soul as feelings and impulses, as well as from the mere capacities that belong to us by nature. This way of arguing presupposes one of the central claims of the whole inquiry, that the virtue of an action resides in the doer, not in the deed. It may escape our notice that, if Aristotle is right, there is no point whatever in the sort of discussion that sets up hypothetical situations and asks what the right thing to do is. Would you press a button that would kill one person in China and avert nuclear war? That was once a popular dilemma that passed for ethical philosophy. A well-known book on ethics began with the plight of a pioneer woman who must kill her baby to save the rest of the family from being found by hostile natives. If this sort of talk strikes you as childish, it may be because you incline toward Aristotle's view that no action is good or right or just or courageous because of any quality of its own. Virtue manifests itself in action, but only when one acts while holding orieself in a certain way. In Greek, the phrase "holding oneself in a certain way" is pos echon, and the noun equivalent to it is hexis. How must one hold oneself, if one's act is to be worthy of the name virtue? Aristotle's first and most general description of this active state is that in it one holds oneself in a stable equilibrium of the soul, in order to choose the action knowingly and for its own sake. I am translating as "in a stable equilibrium" the pair of adverbs bebaios kai ametakinetos. The first means stably or after having taken a stand; the second, if it didn't have the meta between the negative prefix and the root, would mean immovably, and make the pair signify acting from a rigid stand. With the extra prefix, though, the second adverb means in a condition from which one can't be moved all the way over into a different condition. A Newton's wheel in a state of stable equilibrium is like that: however one moves it, it always comes back to rest with the weight below the center. Virtue cannot, by this account, be an inflexible adherence to rules or duty or precedent. Already, at this first step, one may see that Aristotle cannot mean by virtue what we call habit. Habitual action need not be chosen knowingly, and it does not have a flexible constancy but a mindless uniformity. Even an expert on habits can be taken unawares, as in the story told of the behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner, that a class of his once trained him always to lecture from the same corner of the room, by smiling and nodding whenever he approached it, but frowning and faintly shaking their heads when he moved away from it. Even when we deliberately 3 �impose habits on ourselves, what remains has in it nothing of the original purpose, but only a passive and mechanical response to a superficial sameness in outer circumstances. The stable equilibrium that Aristotle is talking about is not habit--ethos in Greek--but character--ethos. In this case, the change from an epsilon to an eta carries us from the cause to its effect, since Aristotle's claim is that character is the result of habit. It should now be clear, though, that the habit is no part of that character. Our task now is to understand how an active condition of the soul can arise as a consequence of a passive one, and why the passive condition is a necessary step toward the active one. I remind you that Aristotle's main examples of active states other than the moral virtues are knowing and attentive seeing. We have only to look around us, or in the mirror, to find countless examples of the passive and mindless conditions that are our habits: biting one's nails, twisting one's hair, saying "like" between every two words. Our mindless habits seem to be at the farthest remove from conditions like knowing in which we are most alive. But in fact there is another condition in us in which we are even farther removed from our active states. We all start out life governed by our desires and impulses. These conditions do not last as long as habits do, but come and go, but when present they are very strong. Listen to a child who can't live without some toy that has aroused its desire in the toy store, or its greed in another child's house, or who makes you feel like a murderer for trying to leave it alone in a dark room. How can such powerful impulses be overcome? To expect a child to let go of the desire or fear that grips it may seem as hopeless as Aristotle's example of trying to train a stone to fall upward, were it not for the fact that we all know that we have somehow, for the most part, broken the power of those tyrannical feelings. We don't expel them altogether, but we do get the upper hand; an adult who has temper tantrums like those of a two-year-old has to live in an institution, and not in the adult world. But the impulses and desires don't weaken; it is rather the case that we get stronger. Aristotle doesn't go into much detail about how this happens, but what he does say is that we get the virtues by working at them: in the giveand-take with other people, some become just, others unjust; by acting in the face of frightening things and being habituated to be fearful or confident, some become brave and others cowardly; and some become moderate and gentle, others spoiled and bad-tempered, by turning around from one thing and toward another in the midst of desires and passions. (1103b, 14-22) He sums this up by saying that when we are at work in a certain way, an active state results. This apparently unremarkable sentence seems to me to be one of the linch-pins that hold together the Ethics, and to mark the transition from the language of habit to the 4 �language appropriate to character. It says that a hexis comes into being out of an energeia. The latter word, many of you know, does not mean mere behavior, however repetitive and constant it may be. It may be translated as being-at-work, and this is the central idea in all of Aristotle's thinking. Here it ties his ethics to his whole account of nature, and to the structure of being. It is only this philosophic understanding that makes intelligible the transition out of childhood and into the moral stature that comes with character and virtue. The moral life can be, and often is, confused with the habits approved by some society and imposed on its young. You may not realize that the reason you stood when I entered this room is that Stringfellow Barr was a Virginia gentleman who always stood anyone entered or left a room. What he considered good breeding is for us mere habit. This is painfully clear in these thoughtless times when some some student who stood at the beginning of a lecture gets bored and leaves in the middle of it. In such a case the politeness was just for show, and the rudeness is the truth. Why shouldn't we think that all habituation of the young is of this sort? To test this opinion, we need to look more deeply into the soul, and to realize that there is a whole layer of habituation that precedes the encounter of any child with its elders. We all arrive on the scene of human interaction already habituated, in the habit, that is, of yielding to impulses and desires, of instantly slackening the tension of pain or fear or unfulfilled desire in any way open to us, and all this has become automatic in us before thinking and choosing are available to us at all. This is a description of what is called human nature, though in fact it is a barrier that blocks our access to our true natural state. This is why Aristotle says that "the virtues come about in us neither by nature nor apart from nature" (1103a, 24-5). What we call human nature, and Hobbes calls the state of nature, is both natural and unnatural; it is the passive part of our natures, passively reinforced by habit. Virtue has the aspect of a second nature, because it cannot develop first, nor by a continuous process out of our first condition. But it is only in the moral virtues that we possess our primary nature, that in which all our capacities can have their full development. Moral virtue does not constrain a human being but completes us as a roof completes a house The sign of what is natural, for Aristotle, is pleasure, but we have to know how to read the signs. Things pleasant by nature, he says, have no opposite pain and no excess, because they set us free to act simply as what we are (1154b, 15-21), and it is in this sense that Aristotle calls the life of virtue pleasant in its own right, in itself (1099a, 6-7, 16-17). A mere habit of acting contrary to our inclinations cannot be a virtue, by the infallible sign that we don't like it. 5 �Our first or childish nature is never eradicated, though, and this is why Aristotle says that our nature is not simple, but also has in it something different that makes our happiness assailable from within, and makes us love change even when it is for the worse. (1154b 21-32) How do we move from this first nature to a more stable and satisfying condition? Parents who care about their children's happiness have no difficulty in seeing that a child sometimes has to hear the word no, even when it might easily be given one more desired thing, or allowed to avoid one more frightening thing. If the time is out of joint, a parent might even need the same sort of help from her child. I quote from Hamlet (III, iv, 181-9): Assume a virtue if you have it not, That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat Of habits evil, is angel yet in this, That to the use of actions fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery, That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence; the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature ... Hamlet is talking to a middle-aged woman about lust, but the pattern is universal, and expresses the common experience of human beings. What is at work here that is so effective? We are in a position to see that it is not the stamp of nature that needs to be changed, but the earliest stamp of habit. We can drop Hamlet's "almost" and rid his last quoted line of all paradox by seeing that the reason we need habit is to change the stamp of habit. A habit of yielding to impulse can be counteracted by an equal and opposite habit. This second habit is no virtue, but only a mindless inhibition, an automatic repressing of impulse. Nor do the two opposite habits together produce virtue, but rather a state of neutrality. When habit is checked and balanced by habit, something else must emerge to become responsible for action. Aristotle's use of the word energeia suggests that this happens on its own, with no need for anything new to be imposed. Habituation does not stifle nature, but rather lets nature make its appearance. The description from Book VII of the Physics of the way children begin to learn applies equally well to the way human character begins to be formed: we settle down, out of the turmoil of childishness, into what we are by nature. We can now see how it is that habituation does not complete the progress toward virtue, but only begins it. Aristotle describes a motion from habit to being-at-work to the hexis or active state that can give the 6 �soul moral stature. If the human soul had no being-at-work, no inherent and indelible activity, there could be no such moral stature, but only customs. In Book I of the Ethics, when first trying to give content to the idea of happiness, Aristotle asks if it would make sense to think that a carpenter or shoemaker has work to do but a human ·being as such is inert. His reply, of course, is that nature has given us work to do, in default of which we are necessarily unhappy, and that work is to put into action the power of reason. (1097b, 24-1098a, 4) Note please that he does not say that everyone must be a philosopher, nor even that human life is constituted by the activity of reason, but that reason must come forward into our action. Later, Aristotle makes explicit that the irrational impulses are no less human than reasoning is. (llllb, 1-2) His point is that, as human beings, our desires need not be mindless and random, but can be transformed by thinking into choices, that is, desires informed by deliberation. (1113a, 11) The characteristic human way of being-at-work is the threefold activity of seeing an end, thinking about means to it, and choosing an action. Responsible human action depends upon the combining of all the powers of the soul: perception, imagination, reasoning, and desiring. These are all things that are at work in us all the time. Good parental training does not produce them, or mold them, or alter them, but sets them free to be effective in action. This is the way in which, according to Aristotle, despite the contributions of parents, society, and nature, we are the co-authors of the active states of our own souls. (1114b, 23-4) Part II: The Mean Now this discussion has shown that habit does make all the difference to our lives without being the only thing shaping those lives and without being the final form they take. The same discussion also points to a way to make some sense of one of the things that has always puzzled me most in the Ethics, the insistence that moral virtue is always in its own nature a mean condition. Quantitative relations are so far from any serious human situation that they would seem to be present only incidentally or metaphorically, but Aristotle says that "by its thinghood and by the account that unfolds what it is for it to be, virtue is a mean." (1107a, 7-8) This invites such hopeless shallowness as in the following sentences that I quote from a recent article in a philosophic journal (Ancient Philosophy Vol. 8, pp. 101-4 ): "To illustrate ... O marks the mean (e.g. Courage); ... Cowardice is -5 while Rashness is 3 .. .In our number language ... 'Always try to lower the absolute value of your vice."' This scholar thinks achieving courage is like tuning in a radio station on an analog dial. Those who do not sink this low might still think Aristotle is praising a kind of mediocrity, like that found in people who used to go to 7 �college to get gentlemen's C's. It should be clear that no sort of courage could be found in those timid souls, whose only aim in life is to blend so well into their social surroundings that virtue would never be chosen in preference to a fashionable vice. Aristotle points out twice that every moral virtue is an extreme (1107a 8-9, 22-4), but he keeps that observation secondary to an over-riding sense in which it is a mean. Could there be anything at all to the notion that we hone in on a virtue from two sides? There is a wonderful image of this sort of thing in the novel Nop's Trials by Donald McCaig. The protagonist is not a human being, but a border collie named Nop. The author describes the way the dog has to fing the balance point, the exact distance behind a herd of sheep from which he can drive the whole herd forward in a coherent mass. When the dog is too close, the sheep panic and run off in all directions; when he is too far back, the sheep ignore him, and tum in all directions to graze. While in motion, a good working dog keeps adjusting his pace to maintain the exact mean position that keeps the sheep stepping lively in the direction he determines. Now working border collies are brave, tireless, and determined; they have been documented as running more than a hundred miles in a day, and they love their work. There is no question that they display virtue, but it is not human virtue and not even of the same form. Some human activities do require the long sustained tension a sheep dog is always holding on to, an active state stretched to the limit, constantly and anxiously kept in balance. Running on a tightrope might capture the same flavor. But constantly maintained anxiety is not the kind of stable equilibrium that Aristotle attributes to the virtuous human soul. We stumbled on a more stable sort of mean condition when we saw that habits are needed to counteract other habits. This way of reaching a mean also accords with the things Aristotle says about straightening warped boards, aiming away from the worse extreme, and being on guard against the seductions of pleasure. ( 1109a, 30-b, 9) It must be our way to the mean for each of the moral virtues, but how it works is perhaps clearest in respect to temperance. The glutton, the drunkard, the person enslaved to every sexual impulse obviously cannot ever be happy, but the opposite extremes,·which Aristotle groups together as a kind of numbness or denial of the senses (1107b, 8), miss the proper relation to bodily pleasure on the other side. It may seem that temperance in relation to food, say, depends merely on determining how many ounces of cake to eat. This seems to follow from Aristotle's example of Milo the wrestler, who needs more food than the rest of us, but I think that misses the point. That example is given only to show that there is no single action that can ever be prescribed as right for every person and every circumstance, and it is not strictly analogous even to temperance with respect to food. What is at 8 �stake is not a correct quantity of food but a right relation to the pleasure that comes from eating. Suppose that you have carefully saved a slice of cake all day for your mid-evening snack, and just as you are ready to treat yourself, a friend arrives unexpectedly to visit. If you are a glutton, you might hide the cake until the friend leaves, or gobble it down before you open the door. If you have the opposite vice, and have puritanically suppressed in yourself all indulgence in the pleasures of food, the hypothesis probably fails, and you won't have cake or any other treat to offer your visitor. If the state of your soul is in the mean in these matters, you are neither enslaved to nor shut out from the pleasure of eating treats, and can enhance the visit of a friend by sharing them. What you are sharing is incidentally the 6 ounces of cake; the point is that you are sharing the pleasure, which is not found on any scale of measurement. A sign that your soul is in good shape would be the fact that the pleasure is even greater when the quantity of food is less. But to discover this pleasure, you need to be free from both the tyranny of desire, and the forcible restraint of desire. The characteristically human enhancements of life open up in the middle region. · This example demonstrates that the mean that constitutes temperance is not in anything external and measureable, but only in the soul. It is also enlightening, I think, in another way. No argument seems needed about why sharing the treat is the right thing to do. We all know it is right-don't we?--and we know it more clearly and immediately than we know any principle that it might be argued from. Aristotle says that we know such things by perception, not the perception of any one of the five senses, but the sort by which we perceive that a triangle is the last kind of figure into which a polygon can be divided. ( 1142a, 28-30) This sort of perceiving contains thinking and imagining, but what it judges, it judges by perceiving it to be so. In matters pertaining to character, our childish habits, or any traces of them that remain in us, cloud our sight, but the effect of the liberating counter-habit is to clear that sight. That is why Aristotle says that the person of moral stature, the spoudaios, is the one to whom things appear as they truly are. (1113a 30-1) Once the earliest habits are neutralized, our desires are disentangled from the pressure for immediate gratification, we are calm enough to think, and most important, we can see what is in front of us in all its possibility. The mean state here is not a point on a dial that we need to fiddle up and down; it is a clearing in the midst of pleasures and pains that lets us judge what seems most truly pleasant and painful. The other sort of mean, that requires a constant adjustment between n too much and too little indulgence, is a recognizable huma. condition, but not one that Aristotle will call virtue. This sheep-dog-like state of the soul 9 �is what Aristotle means by self-restraint or continence. In such people, who are perhaps most of us, the reasoning part of the soul is keeping the impulses reined in, but those impulses can slip the reins and go their own way, as parts of the body do in people with certain disorders of the nerves. (1102b, 14-22) Control in self-restrained people is an anxious, unstable equilibrium that will lapse whenever vigilance is relaxed. We sometimes think of life as a conflict between the head and the heart, but in such a situation there is no unity of the human being, but only truces, compromises, and temporary victories of parties with divergent interests. The virtuous soul, on the contrary, blends all its parts in the act of choice. This, I think, is the best way to understand the active state of the soul that constitutes moral virtue and forms character. It is the condition in which all the powers of the soul are at work together, making it possible for action to engage the whole human being. The work of achieving character is a process of clearing away the obstacles that stand in the way of the full efficacy of the soul. Someone who is partial to food or drink, or to running away from trouble, or to looking for trouble, is a partial human being. Let the whole power of the soul have its influence, and the choices that result will have the characteristic look that we call courage or temperance or simply virtue. Now this adjective "characteristic" comes from the Greek word character, which means the distinctive mark scratched or stamped on anything, and which to my knowledge is never used in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the sense of character of which we are speaking, the word for which is ethos, we see an outline of the human form itself. A person of character is someone you can count on, because there is a human nature in a deeper sense than that which refers to our early state of weakness. Someone with character has taken a stand in that fully mature nature, and cannot be moved all the way out of it. But there is also such a thing as bad character, and this is what Aristotle means by vice, as distinct from bad habits or weakness. It is possible for someone with full responsibility and the free use of intellect to choose always to yield to bodily pleasure, or to greed, or to ambition. Virtue is a mean, first because it can only emerge out of the stand-off between pairs of opposite habits, but second because it chooses to take its stand not in any of those habits but between them. In this middle region, thinking does come into play, but it is not correct to say that virtue takes its stand in principle; Aristotle makes clear that vice is a principled choice that following some extreme path toward or away from pleasure is right. (1146b, 22-3) Principles are wonderful things, but there are too many of them, and exclusive adherence to any one of them is always a vice. In our earlier example, the true glutton would be someone who does not just have a bad habit of always indulging the desire for food, but someone who has chosen on principle that one ought always to yield to it. In Plato's 10 �Gorgias, Callicles argues just that, about food, drink, and sex. He is serious, even though he is young and still open to argument. But the only principled alternative he can conceive is the denial of the body, and the choice of a life fit only for stones or corpses. (492E) This is the way most attempts to be serious about right action go astray. What, for example, is the virtue of a seminar leader? Is it to ask appropriate questions but never state an opinion? Or is it to offer everything one has learned on the subject of discussion? What principle should rule--that all learning must come from the learners, or that without prior instruction no useful learning can take place? Is there a hybrid principle? Or should one try to find the mid-way point between the opposite principles? Or is the virtue some third thing altogether? Just as habits of indulgence always stand opposed to habits of abstinence, so too does every principle of action have its opposite principle. If good habituation ensures that we are not swept away by our strongest impulses, and the exercise of intelligence ensures that we will see two worthy sides to every question about action, what governs the choice of the mean? Aristotle gives this answer: "such things are among particulars, and the judgement is in the act of sense-perception." (1109b 23-4) But this is the calmly energetic, thought-laden perception to which we referred earlier. The origin of virtuous action is neither intellect nor appetite, but is variously described as intellect through-and-through infused with appetite, or appetite wholly infused with thinking, or appetite and reason joined for the sake of something; this unitary source is called by Aristotle simply anthropos. (1139a, 34, b, 5-7) But our thinking must contribute right reason (ho orthos logos) and our appetites must contribute right desire (he orthe orexis) if the action is to have moral stature. (1114b, 29, 1139a, 24-6, 31-2) What makes them right can only be the something for the sake of which they unite, and this is what is said to be accessible only to sense perception. This brings us to the third word we need to think about. Part III: The Noble? Aristotle says plainly and repeatedly what it is that moral virtue is for the sake of, but the translators are afraid to give it to you straight. Most of them say it is the noble. One of them says it is the fine. If these answers went past you without even registering, that is probably because they make so little sense. To us, the word noble probably connotes some sort of high-minded naivete, something hopelessly impractical. But Aristotle considers moral virtue the only practical road to effective action. The word fine is of the same sort but worse, suggesting some flimsy artistic soul who couldn't endure rough treatment, while Aristotle describes moral 11 �virtue as the most stable and durable condition in which we can meet all of life's obstacles. The word the translators are afraid of is to kalon, the beautiful. Aristotle singles out as the distinguishing mark of courage, for example, that it is always "for the sake of the beautiful, for this is the end of virtue." (lllSb, 12-13) Of magnificence, or large-scale philanthropy, he says it is "for the sake of the beautiful, for this is common to the virtues." (1122b, 7-8) What the person of good character loves with right desire and thinks of as an end with right reason must first be perceived as beautiful. The Loeb translator explains why he does not use the word beautiful in the Nicomachean Ethics. He tells us to kalon has two different uses, and refers both to "(1) bodies well shaped and works of art...well made, and (2) actions well done." (p. 6) The latter sense is ethical, while the former is dismissed as merely "aesthetic." But we have just noticed that Aristotle says the judgement of what is morally right belongs to sense-perception. And he explicitly compares the act that springs from moral virtue to a well made work of art. People praise the latter by saying it would not be possible to add anything to it or take anything from it, and Aristotle says that virtue differs from art in that respect only by being more precise and better. (1106b, 10-15) An action is right in the sa111e way that a painting might get everything just right. Antigone contemplates in her imagination the act of burying her brother, and says "it would be a beautiful thing to die doing this." (Antigone, line 72) This is as pure an example as I know of Aristotle's description .of courage. Neoptolemus stops Philoctetes from killing Odysseus with the bow he has just returned, and says "neither for me nor for you is this a beautiful thing." (Philoctetes, line 1304) This is a recognition that the rightness of returning the bow would be spoiled if it were used for revenge. This is not some special usage of the Greek language, but one that speaks to us directly, if the translators. let it. And it is not a kind of language that belongs only to poetic tragedy, since the tragedians find their subjects by recognizing human virtue in circumstances that are most hostile to it. In the most ordinary circumstances, any mother might say to a misbehaving child, in plain English, "don't be so ugly." And any of us, parent, friend~ or grudging enemy, might on occasion say to someone else, "that was a beautiful thing you did." Is it by some wild coincidence that twentieth-century English and fourth-century BC Greek link the same pair of uses under one word? Aristotle is always alert to the natural way that important words have more than one meaning. The inquiry in his Metaphysics is built around the progressive narrowing of the word being until its primary meaning is discovered. In the Physics, the various senses of motion and change are played on like the keyboard of a piano, and serve to uncover the double source of natural activity. . The inquiry into 12 �ethics is not built in this fashion; Aristotle asks about the way the various meanings of the good are organized, but he immediately drops the question, as being more at home in another sort of philosophic inquiry. (1096b, 26-32) It is widely claimed that Aristotle says there is no good itself, or any other form at all of the sort spoken of in Plato's dialogues. This is a misreading of any text of Aristotle to which it is referred. Here in the study of ethics it is a failure to see that the idea of the good is not rejected simply, but only held off as a question that does not arise as first for us. Aristotle praises Plato for understanding that philosophy does not argue from first principles but toward them. (1095a, 31-3) But while Aristotle does not make the meanings of the good an explicit theme that shapes his inquiry, he nevertheless does plainly lay out its three highest senses, and does narrow down the three into two and indirectly into one. He tells us there are three kinds of good toward which our choices look: the pleasant, the beautiful, and the beneficial or advantageous. (1104b, 31-2) The last of these is clearly subordinate to the other two, and when the same issue comes up next, it has dropped out of the list. The goods sought for their own sake are said to be of only two kinds, the pleasant and the beautiful. (lllOb, 9-12) That the beautiful is the primary sense of the good is less obvious, both because the pleasant is itself resolved into a variety of senses, and because a whole side of virtue that we are not considering in this lecture aims at the true, but we can sketch out some ways in which the beautiful emerges as the end of human action. Aristotle's first description of moral virtue required that the one acting choose an action knowingly, out of a stable equilibrium of the soul, and for its own sake. The knowing in question turned out to be perceiving things as they are, as a result of the habituation that clears our sight. The stability turned out to come from the active condition of all the powers of the soul, in the mean position opened up by that same habituation, since it neutralized an earlier, opposite, and passive habituation to self-indulgence. In the accounts of the particular moral virtues, an action's being chosen for it own sake is again and again specified as meaning chosen for no reason other than that it is beautiful. In Book III, chapter 8, Aristotle refuses to give the name courageous to anyone who acts bravely for the sake of honor, out of shame, from experience that the danger is not as great as it seems, out of spiritedness or anger or the desire for revenge, or from optimism or ignorance. Genuinely courageous action is in no obvious way . pleasant, and is not chosen for that reason, but there is according to Aristotle a truer pleasure inherent in it. It doesn't need pleasure dangled in front of it as an extra added attraction. Lasting and satisfying pleasure never comes to those who seek pleasure, but only to the philokalos, who looks past pleasure to the beautiful. (1099a, 15-17, 13) 13 �In our earlier example of temperance, I think most of us would readily agree tha~ the one who had his eye only on the slice of cake found less pleasure than the one who saw that it would be a better thing to share it. And Aristotle does say explicitly that the target the temperate person looks to is the beautiful. (1119b, 15-17) But since there are three primary moral virtues--courage, temperance, and justice--it is surprising that in the whole of Book V, which discusses justice, Aristotle never mentions the beautiful. It must somehow be applicable, since he says it is common to all the moral virtues, but in that case the account of justice seems to be incomplete, unless it is completed in some later part of the Ethics by being brought into relation to the beautiful. This is exactly what does happen, although I read the book dozens of times before I grasped it. Justice seems to be not only a moral virtue, but in some pre-eminent way the moral virtue. It is a theme or major concern of almost every book in our freshman seminar. And Aristotle says that there is a sense of the word in which the one we call just is the person who has all moral virtue, insofar as it affects other people. (1129b, 26-7) He even quotes a line from Euripides, that "neither sunset nor sunrise is so wondetful as justice. In spite of all this, I believe that Aristotle treats justice as something inherently inadequate, a condition of the soul that cannot ever achieve the end at which it alms. Justice concerns itself with the right distribution of rewards and punishments within a community. This would seem to be the chief aim of the lawmakers, but Aristotle says that they do not take justice as seriously as friendship. They accord friendship a higher moral stature that justice. (llSSa, 23-4) It seems to me now that Aristotle does too, and that the discussion of friendship in Books VIII and IX replaces that of justice. What is the purpose of reward and punishment? I take Aristotle's answer to be homonoia, the like-mindedness that allows a community to act in concord. For the sake of this end, he says, it is not good enough that people be just, while if they are friends they have no need to be just. ( 1 lSSa, 24-9) So far, this sounds as though friendship is merely something advantageous for the social or political good, but Aristotle immediately adds that it is also beautiful. The whole account of friendship, you will recall, is structured around the threefold meaning of the good. Friendships are distinguished as being for use, for pleasure, or for love of the friend's character. Repeatedly, after raising questions about the highest kind of friendship, Aristotle resolves them by looking to the beautiful: it is a beautiful thing to do favors for someone freely, without expecting a return (1163a, 1, 1168a, 10-13); even in cases of urgent necessity, when there is a choice about whom to benefit, one should first decide whether the scale tips toward the necessary or the beautiful thing (1165a, 4-5); to use money to 11 14 �support our parents is always more beautiful than to use it for ourselves (116Sa, 22-4); someone who strives to achieve the beautiful in action would never be accused of being selfish (1168b, 25-8). These observations culminate in the claim that, "if all people competed for the beautiful, and strained to do the most beautiful things, everything people need in common, and the greatest good for each in particular, would be achieved... for the person of moral stature will forego money, honor, and all the good things people fight over to achieve the beautiful for himself." (1169a, 8-11, 20-22) This does not mean that people can do without such things as money and honor, but that the distribution of such things takes care of itself when people look to the good that is highest by nature. justice, by contrast, Aristotle says in the Politics, looks only to what is necessary, and has only the sort of beauty that necessary things can have. (1332a, 11-15) The description of the role of the beautiful in moral virtue is most explicit in the discussion of courage, where the emphasis is on the great variety of things that resemble courage but fail to achieve it because they are not solely for the sake of the beautiful. That discussion is therefore mostly negative. There is also something of a tragic feeling to it, with its ever-present paradigm of the extreme situation of war, in which nothing might be left to choose but a beautiful death. We can now see that the discussion of justice was also of a negative character, since justice itself resembles the moral virtue of friendship without achieving it, again because it does not govern its action by looking to the beautiful. The largest collection of positive examples of beautiful actions in the Ethics is in the discussion of friendship, which points to the healthy community in which civil war and other conflicts are driven away by the choice of what is beautiful in life. ( l 155a, 24-7) By the end of the ninth book, there is no doubt that Aristotle does indeed believe in a primary sense of the good, at least in the human realm, and that the name of this good is the beautiful. And it should be noticed that the beautiful is at work not only in the human realm. In De Anima, Aristotle argues that, while the soul moves itself in the act of choice, the ultimate source of its motion is the practical good toward which it looks, which causes motion while it is itself motionless. (433a, 29-30, b, 11-13) This structure of the motionless first mover is taken up in Book XII of the Metaphysics, where Aristotle argues that the order of the cosmos depends on such a source, which causes motion in the manner of something loved; he calls this source, as one of its names, the beautiful, and says it is that which is beautiful not in seeming but in being. (1072a, 26-b, 4) Like Diotima in Plato's Symposium, Aristotle makes the beautiful the good itself. I want to pause for a moment, before ending the lecture, to comment on the fact that the beautiful in the Ethics is not an object of contemplation simply, but the source of action. In a lecture on the Poetics I discussed the 15 �intimate connection of beauty with the experience of wonder. The sense of wonder seems to me to be the way of seeing which allows things to appear as what they are, since it holds off our tendencies to make things fit into the theories or opinions we already hold, or to use things for purposes that have nothing to do with them. That is why philosophy begins in wonder, as does the whole of the contemplative life. But the way I have just described the experience of wonder in a theoretical context is exactly the same as what Aristotle repeatedly says is the ultimate effect of moral virtue: that the one who has it sees truly and judges rightly, since only to someone of good character do the things that are beautiful appear as they truly are (1113a, 29-35), that practical wisdom depends on moral virtue to make its aim right (l 144a, 7-9), and that the eye of the soul that sees what is beautiful as the end or highest good of action gains its active state only with moral virtue (1144a, 26-33). That is why both right desire and right reason make their appearance only in the middle ground between habits of acting and between opposite principles of action. The experience of wonder brings thinking to a stop, but also lets it begin; similarly, the contemplation of things as they are stands apart from action, but also lets action find its aim. 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Title A name given to the resource Three little words Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997-04 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered in April 1997 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Sachs 1997-04 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sachs, Joe, 1946- Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/375004bcf90ca24eb75475d3bf07496a.pdf 6fd685f1b264043d01ad53f089f37d33 PDF Text Text AN OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT OF ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS Joe Sachs a lecture given April 11, 1980 �When Aristotle articulated the central question of the group of writings we know as his Metaphysics, he said it was a question that would never cease to raise itself. He was right. He also regarded his own contributions to the handling of that question as belonging to the final phase of responding to it. I think he was right about that too. The Metaphysics is one of the most helpful books there is for contending with a question the aski·n g, .of which is one of the things that makes us human. In our time that question is for the most part hidden behind a wall of sophistry, and the book that could lead us to rediscover it is even more thoroughly hidden behind a maze of misunderstandings. ~aul Shorey, a scholar whose not-too-bad translation of the Republic is in your collected Plato, has called the Metaphysics "a hopeless muddle" not to be made sense of by any "ingenuity of conjecture." I think it is safe to say that more people have learned important things from Aristotle than from Professor Shorey, but what conclusion other than his can one come to about a work that has two books numbered one, that descends from the sublime description of the life of the divine intellect in its twelfth book to end with two books full of endless quarreling over minor _ details of the Platonic doctrine of forms, a doctrine Aristotle had already decisively refuted in early.parts of the book, those parts, that is, in which he is not defending it? The book was certainly not written as one whole; it was compiled, and once one has granted that, must not one admit that it was compiled badly, crystallising as it does an incoherent ambivalence toward the teachings of Plato? After three centuries in which no one has much interest in it at all, the Metaphysics becomes interesting to nineteenth century scholars just as a historical puzzle: how could such a mess have been put together? I have learned the most from reading the Metaphysics on those occasions when I have adopted the working hypothesis that it was compiled by someone who understood Aristotle better than I or the scholars do, and that that someone (why not call him Aristotle?) thought that the parts made an intelligible whole, best understood when read in that order. give you some sense of how the Met~physics My main business tonight will be to looks in its wholeness, but the picture I will sketch depends on several hypotheses independent of the main one. One cannot begin to read the Metaphysics without two pieces of equipment: is a set of decisions about how to translate Aristotle's ce~tral words. one No translator of Aristotle known to me is of any help here; they will all befuddle you, more so in the Metaphysics even than in Aristotle's other works. The other �-2- piece of equipment, and equally indispensihle I think, is some perspective on the relation of the Metaphysics to the Platonic dialogues. In this matter the scholars, even the best of them, have shown no imagination at all. In the dialogues, in their view, Plato sets forth a "theory" by putting it into the mouth of Socrates. There is some room for interpretation, hut on the whole we are all supposed to know that theory. reject it. Aristotle must accept that theory or If he appears to do both it is because passages written by some Platonist have been inserted into his text, or because things he wrote when he was young and a Platonist were lumped together with other things on similar subjects which he wrote when he was older and his thoughts were different and his own. The Plato we are supposed to know from his dialogues is one who posited that, for every name we give to bodies in the world there is a bodiless being in another world, one while they are many, static while they are changing, perfect while they are altogether distasteful. Not surprisingly, those for whom this is Plato find his doctrine absurd, and welcome an Aristotle whom they find saying that being in its highest form is found in an individual man or horse, that mathematical things are abstractions from sensible bodies, and that, if there is an ideal man apart from men, in virtue of whom they are all called men, then there must be yet a third kind of man, in virtue of whom the form and the men can have . the same name, and yet a fourth, and so on. You can't stop adding new ideal men until you are willing to grant that it was absurd to"add the first one, or anything at all beyond just plain men. This is hard-headed, tough-minded Aristotle, not to be intimidated by fancy, mystical talk, living in the world we live in and knowing it is the only world there is. This Aris- totle, unfortunately, is a fiction, a projection of our unphilosophic selves. He lives only in a handful of sentences ripped out of their contexts. The true Aristotle indeed takes at face value the world as we find it and all our ordinary opinions about it--takes them, examines them, and finds them wanting. It is the world as we find it which continua+ly, for Aristotle, shows that our ordinary, materialist prejudices are mistaken, and the abandonment of those prejudices shows in turn that the world as we found it was not a possible world, that the world as we must reflect upon it is a much ri?her world, mysterious and exciting. Those of you for whom reading the Platonic dialogues was a battle you won by losing, an eye-opening experience from which, if there is no going forward, there is certainly no turning back, should get to know this Aristotle. But you will find standing in your way all those passages in which Aristotle seems to he �-3- discussing the dialogues and does so in a shallow way. Each dialogue has a surface in which Socrates speaks in riddles, articulates half-truths which invite qualification and correction, argues from answers given by others as though he shared their opinions, and pretends to be at a loss about everything. Plato never straightens things out for his readers, any more than Socrates does for his hearers. To do so would be to soothe us, to lull us to sleep as soon ·as we've begun to be distressed by what· it feels like to be awake. Platonic writing, like Socratic talk, is designed to awaken and guide philosophic thinking, by presenting, defending, and criticising plausible responses to important questions. The Platonic~socratic words have on1y done their work when we have gone beyond them, but they remain in the dialogues as a collection of just what they were intended to be--unsatisfactory assertions. Hippocrates Apostle finds 81 places in the Metaphysics where Aristotle· disgrees with Plato. It is not surprising that Aristotle himself uses Plato's name in almost none of those places. Aristotle is addressing an audience of students who have read the dialogues and is continuing the work of the dialogues. Many, perhaps most, of Aristotle's students would, like scholars today, find theories and answers in Plato's dialogues. Aristotle would not be earning his keep as a teacher of philosophy if he did not force his students beyond that position. Aristotle constantly refers to the dialogues because they are the best and most comprehensive texts he and his students share. Aristotle disagrees with Plato about some things, but less extensively and less deeply than he disagrees with every other author that he names. The Metaphysics inevitably looks like an attack on Plato just because Plato's books are so much better than anything left by Thales, Empedocles or anyone else. My first assumption, then, was that the Metaphysics is one book with one complex argument, and my second is that, in cohering within itself, the Metaphysics may cohere with the Platonic dialogues. I assume that discussions in the dialogues may be taken as giving flesh to Aristotle's formulations, while they in turn may be taken as giving shape to those discussions. One need only try a very little of this to find a great deal beginning to fall into place. For example, listen to Aristotle in'Book I, Chapter 9 of the Metaphysics: "the Forms ••• are not the causes of motion or of any other change ••• And they do not in any way help either towards the knowledge ·of the other things .• or towards their existence •.• Moreover, all .other things do not come to be from the Forms in any of the usual senses of 'from.• And to say that the Forms are patterns and that �the other things participate in them is to use empty words and poetic metaphors." A devastating attack on Plato, is it not? Or is it? Aristotle says that positing the Forms explains no single thing that one wants to know. But doesn't Socrates say in the Phaedo that to call beauty itself the cause of beauty in -beautiful things is a "safe but stupid answer"? that one must begin with it but must also move beyond it? Again, everyone knows that the Platonic Socrates claimed that the forms were separate from the things in the sensible world, off by themselves, while Aristotle insisted that the forms were in the things. call the Phaedo passage just referred to. Does not Socrates say that the cause of heat in a hot thing is not heat itself but fire? for Socrates? Re- Where, then, is the form Aristotle taught that the causes of characteristics of things were to be looked for not in a separate world of forms but in the primary instances of those characteristics right here in the world • . This doctrine may __ seem to be a rejection of Plato's chief postulate, but listen to Aristotle him) self explain it in Book II, Chapter 1 of the Metaphysics: "of things to which the same predicate belongs, the one to which it belongs in the highest degree is that in virtue of which it belongs also to the others. For example, fire is the hottest of whatever is truly called 'hot', for fire is cause of hotness in the others." Do you hear an echo? Again, Aristotle teaches that form is to be understood as always at work, never static as is the Platonic form, or is it? Do not the Stranger and Theaetetus agree in the Sophist that it would be "monstrous and absurd" to deny that life, motion, and soul belong to the intelligible things? Do they not indeed define being as a power to act or be affected? Does not Socrates in the Theaetetus entertain the same. definition when he construes the world as made up of an infinity of powers to act and be affected? dialogues do not set forth a theory of forms. Plato's They set forth a way to get started with the work of philosophic inquiry, and Aristotle moves altogether within that way. Much in his writing~ that is a closed book to those who insist on seeing him as Plato's opponent opens up when one lets the dialogues serve as the key. Then we shall not hesitate to take whatever light we can find in the dialogues and shine it on Aristotle's text at least to see if anything comes into the li~ht. And this brings me to a third assumption: substance is of no help in understanding Aristotle's word qilestion of the is ousia? the English word ousia.~~l Aristotle claims that it is the -saitre- as 'Elie question, What is being? and that it is in fact the question everyone who has ever done any philosophy or physics has been asking. Since we do not �-.::>- share Aristotle's language we cannot know what claim he is making until we find a way to translate ousia. The translators give us the word substance only ·because earlier translators and commentators did so, while they in turn · did so because still earlier translators into Latin rendered it as substantia. Early modern philosophy, in all the European languages, is full of discussions of .substance which stem from Latin versions of Aristotle. Though oral traditions keep meanings alive this written tradition has buried Aristotle's meaning irretrievably. We must ignore it, and take our access to the meaning .of ousia from Plato's use of it, but before we do so a quick look at where the word substance came from may help us bury it. The earliest Latin translations of Aristotle tried a number of ways of translating ousia, but by the fourth century AD, when St. Augustine lived, only two remained in use: essentia was made as a formal parallel to ousia, from the feminine singular participle of the verb to be plus an abstract noun ending, so that the whole would be roughly equivalent to an English translation being-ness; the second translation, substantia, was an attempt to get closer to ousia by interpreting Aristotle's use of it as something like "persisting substratum". Augtistine, who had no interest in interpreting Aristotle, thought that, while everything in the world possesses substantia~ a persisting underlying identity, the ful~ness of being suggested by the word essentia could belong to no created thing but only to their creator. Aristotle, who is quite explicit on the point that creation is impossible, believed no such thing, and Augustine didn't . think he did. But Augustine's own thinking offered two Latin words whose use had become muddled. a consistent way to distinquish Boethius, in his commentaries on Aristotle, followed Augustine's lead, and hence always translated ousia as substantia, and his usage seems to have settled the matter. And so a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the word substance only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty. notion of an I-don't-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends. What does ousia mean? It is already a quirky, idiomatic word in ordinary use when Plato gets hold of it. By a quirk of our own language one may say indeed that it means substance, but only, I repeat only, in the sense in which a rich man �is called a man of substance. You may safely allow your daughter to marry him because you know where he will be and what he will be doing tomorrow and twenty years from now. Ousia meant permanent property, real estate, non-transferable goods: possessions we are always using up or consuming but those that not the remain--land, houses, wealth of the kind one never spends since it breeds new wealth with no expense of itself. ·When Socrates asks Meno for the ousia of the bee he is not using a technical philosophical term but a metaphor: what is the estate of a bee that each one inherits simply by being born a bee? A man of substance who has permanent wealth is who he is because of what he owns. A bee is to his permanent and his variable characteristics as a man is to his permanent and his spendable wealth. virtue: The metaphor takes a second step when applied to the varying instances of virtue in a man, a woman, a slave, and the rest must all have some unvar1'ing core which makes them -virtues. There must be some single meaning to which we always refer when we pronounce anything a virtue. This is the step Socrates continually insists that Meno must take. But remember, in the slave-boy scene, Socrates twice entices the slave-boy into giving plausible incorrect answers about the side of the double square. of virtue? Is there an ousia Socrates uses the word not as the result of an induction or abstraction or definition, but by stretching an already strained metaphor. People have disposable goods which come and go and ousiatic goods which remain; bees have some characteristics in which they differ, and others in which they share; the virtues differ, but are they the same in anything but name? are, must it be a definition that they share? only a few men do. Even if they Not all men have ousia. Ordinarily The rest of us work for them, sell to them, marry them, gather in the hills to destroy them, but do not have what they have. Perhaps there are only a few virtues, or only one. The word ousia, as Plato's Socrates handles it, seems to be a double-edged weapon. It explicitly rejects Meno's way of saying what virtue is, but implicitly suggests that the obvious alternative may fail as well. If virtue is not simply a meaningless label used ambiguously for many unconnected things, that does not mean that it must names. unambiguously name the same content in each of the things it Since ousia is our metaphor, let us ask what wealth means. If a poor man has a hut and a cow and some stored-up food, are they his wealth? ·certainly not wealthy. He is On the other hand, King Lear says that "our basest beggars Are in poorest thing superfluous"; no human life is cut so fine as to lack anything beyond what satisfies bare need. The beggar, like the family on welfare, does not have the means to satisfy need, but need not for that .reason �-7forego those possessions which give life comfort or continuity. is derived from the wealth of others. His wealth The small farmer may maintain something of the independence a wealthy man enjoys, but one bad year could wipe him out. He will either accumulate enough to become wealthy himself, or his life will remain a small-scale analogy to that of the wealthy. Wealth means, first of all, only that which a few people have and the rest of us lack, but because it means that, it also, at the same time, means secondarily something that all of us possess. There is an ambiguity at work in the meaning of the word "wealth" which is not a matter of a faulty vocabulary and not a matter of- language at all: it expresses the way things are. Wealth of various kinds exists by derivation from and analogy to wealth in the emphatic sense. Indeed Meno, who spontaneously defines virtue by listing virtues, is. equally strongly inclined to say that the power to rule over men and possessions is the only virtue there is. He cannot resolve the logical difficulties Socrates raises about his answers,but they are all resolvable. Meno in fact believes that virtue is ousia in its simple sense of big money, and that women, children, and slaves can only have virtue derivatively and ambiguously. Socrates' question is one of those infuriatingly ironic games he is always playing. The ousia of virtue, according to Meno and Gorgias, is ousia. When the word ousia turns up in texts of Aristotle, it is this hidden history of its use, and not its etymology, which is determining its meaning. First of all, the word fills a gap in the language of being, since Greek has no word for thing. The two closest equivalents are ~ ~ and to chrema. · To ~ simply means whatever is, and includes the color blue, the length two feet, the action walking, and anything at all that can be said to be. To chrema means a thing used, used up, spent, or consumed; any kind of possession, namely, that is not ousia. ousia holds together, remains, and makes its possessor emphatically somebody. In the vocabulary of money, ousia is to ta chreri\ata as whatever remains constant in a thing is to all the onta that come and go. Ousia also carries with it the sense of something that belongs somehow to all but directly and fully only to a few~ The word is ready-made to be the theme of Aristotle's investigation of being, because both the word and the investigation were designed by Plato. For Aristotle, the inquiry into the nature of being begins with the observation that being is meant in many waysr subjected to It is like Meno's beginning, and it must be the same Socratic- questioning. ·- Suppose that there is· some ·one core of meaning ·to which we refer whenever we say that something is. What is its content? Hegel says of being as being: �-8- 11 it is not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination ••• it is mere abstraction ••• the absolutely negative ••• just Nothing." right, as Parmenides was before him? Leave aside all those characteristics in which beings differ, and what is left behind? being is not a universal or a genus. And isn't he To Aristotle, this means that If being is the comprehensive class to which everything belongs, how does it come to have sub-classes? to be divided with respect to something outside itself. It would have Beings would have to be distinguished by possessing or failing to possess some characteristic, but that characteristic would have to be either a class within being, already separated off from the rest by reference to something prior, or a non-being. Since both are impossible, being must come already divided: or ultimate classes of things must be irreducibly many. the highest genera This is Aristotle's doctrine of the categories, and according to him being means at least eight different things. ~· The categories have familiar names:'quality, quantity, relation, time, place, action, be~ng-acted upon. The question Socrates asked about things, What is it?, is too broad, since it can be answered truly with respect to any of the categories that apply, and many times in some of them. describe something to you: . For example, I'll it is backstage now; it is red; it is three feet high; it is lying down and breathing. I could continue telling you what it is in this fashion for as long as I pleased and you would not know what it is. It is an Irish setter. What is different about that last answer? To be an Irish setter is not to be a quality or quantity or time or action but to be a whole which comprises many ways of being in those categories, and much change and indeterminacy in them. The redness, three-foot-high-ness, respiration and much else cohere in a thing which I have named in its thinghood · by calling it an Irish setter. Aristotle calls this way of being ousia. Aristotle's logical works reflect upon the claims our speech makes about the world. The principal result of Aristotle's inquiry into the logical categories of being is, I think, the claim that the thinghood of things in the world is never reducible in our speech to any combination of qualities, quantities, relations, actions, and so on: that ousia or thinghood must be a separate category. What·happens when I try to articulate the being of a thing such as an Irish setter? a dog with certain properties. But what then is a dog? I define it as It is an animal with certain properties, and an animal is an organism with certain properties, and an organism is a thing with the property life. At each level I meet, as dog, animal, organism, what Aristotle calls secondary ousia or secondary thinghood. �-9- I set out to give an account of what makes a certain collection of properties cohere as a certain thing, and I keep separating off some of them and telling you that the rest cohere as a whole. At my last step, when I say that an organism is a living thing, the problem of secondary thinghood is present in its nakedness. Our speech, no matter how scientific, must always leave the question of the hanging-together of things as things a question. Thus the logical inquiries bequeath to the Metaphysics its central question, which we are now in a position to translate. The question that was asked of old and will always be asked by anyone who is alive enough to wonder about anything is, What is being? What is the thinghood of things? al+? in the sense, What is a thing? in the sense, What makes our world a world of things at We are here at the deepest postulate of Aristotelian philosophizing: the integrity of the world as a world and of anything in it which endures as itself for any time at all, is not self-explanatory, is something to be wondered at, is caused. We are taught that a moving thing, if nothing disturbs it, will continue moving forever. Do you believe that? It is certainly true that a heavy thing in motion is as hard to stop as it was to set in motion, and that we cannot step out of moving automobiles without continuing, for a while, to share their motions. But these are evidences of persistence of motion, not at all the same thing as inertia of motion. There is no evidence of the latter. In principle 'there cannot be, because we cannot abolish all the world to observe an u~disturbed moving thing. There is a powerful and in its way, beautiful, account of the world which assumes inertia, appealing to those experiences which suggest that motion at an unchanging speed is a state no different from that of rest. The hidden premise which leads from that step to the notion of inertia is the assumption that rest is an inert state. If it is not, the same evidence could lead to the conclusion ,that an unchanging speed is a fragile and vulnerable thing, as unlikely and as hard to come by as an unchanging anything • . How can a balloon remain unchanged? It does so only so long as the air inside pushes out no harder and no less hard than the air outside pushes in. Is the air inside the balloon at rest? at rest as long as it is performing a . task? air inside it cannot be? Can it be Can the balloon be at rest if the It can certainly remain in a place, like other apparently inert things, say a table. If you pulled the legs from under a table �-10the top would fall, and if you removed the top the legs would fall. Leave them together and leave them alone and they do not move, but is the table at rest? Surely no more so than a pair of arm wrestlers, straining every muscle but unable to budge each other, can be said to be resting. we find an inert thing anywhere in the world? rock? But can't · How about a single lump of But if I throw it in the air it will return to find a resting place. It seems to rest only when something blocks it, and if I let it rest on my hand or my head, something will make me uncomfortable. nothing? Can the rock be doing And if we cannot find inertia in a rock, where could it be? An, animal is either full of circulating and respirating or it is rotting, and the same seems true of plants. But what in the world is not animal-like, plant-like, rock-like, or table-like? The world contains living and non-living natural beings·, and it contains products of human making, and all of them are busy. From Aristotle's wondering and wonderful perspective, everything in the world is busy just continuing to be itself. Aristotle's~ This is not a "theory" of it is a way of bringing the world to sight with the questioning intellect awake. Try that way of looking on for size: ' to lose for ceasing to be taken for ~ranted. the world has nothing Consider an analogy. Ptolemy is content to say that Venus and Mercury happen to have the same longitudinal period as the sun and that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all happen to lag just as far behind the sun in any time as they have moved in anomaly. Copernicus, in the most passionate and convincing part of his argument, shows that these facts can be explained. Lucretius {whom we may substitute for Aristotle's favorite materialist, Empedocles) thought that cats and dogs and giraffes just happened to come about by accumulation, like the sands on the beach. Lucretius' failure to wonder at a giraffe, his reduction of the living to the blind and dead, is,from Aristotle's standpoint, a failure to recognize what is truly one, what is not just a heap, what is genuinely a thing. The least thoughtful, least alert way of being in the world is to regard everything which remains itself as doing so causelessly, inertly. To seek a cause for the being-as-it-is of any thing is already to be in the grip of the question Aristotle says mu~t always be asked. To seek the causes and sources of the being-as-it-is of everything that is, is to join Aristotle in his Copernican revolution which regards every manifestation of persistence, order, or recurrence as a marvel, an achievement. That everything in the world �-11- disclosed to our senses is in a ceaseless state of change, most of us would grant. That the world nevertheless hangs together enough to be experienced at all is a fact so large that we rarely take notice of it. But the two together--change, and a context of persistence out of which change can emerge~-force one to acknowledge some non-human cause at work: for whichever side of the world--change or rest, order or dissolution--is simply its uncaused, inert way, -the other side must be the result of effort. Something must be at work in the world, hidden to us, visible only in its effects, pervading all that is, and it must be e~ther a destroyer or a preserver. That much seems to me to be demonstrable, but the next step is a difficult one to take because the world presents to us two faces: and the non-living. the living The thinghood of living things consists in organized unity, maintained through effort, at work in a variety of activities characteristic of each species; but a rock or a flame or some water or some dirt or some air is a thing in a much different way, unified only by accidental boundaries, indifferent to being divided or heaped together, at work only in some one local motion, up or down. Which is the aberration, life or non-life? For Aristotle the choice need not be made, since the distinction between the two forms of being only results from a confusion. Flesh, blood, bone, and hair would seem inorganic and ina~imate if they were not organized into and animated as, say a cat. But earth, air, fire, and water, all of it, is always organized into and animate as the cosmos. The heavens enclose an organized body which has a size, a shape, and a hierarchical structure all of which it maintains by ceaseless, concerted activity. You may think that in believing this, Aristotle betrays an inn9cence which we cannot recover. But not only Aristotle and Ptolemy, but also Copernicus and Kepler believed the visible heaven to be a cosmos, and not only they, but also, amazingly, Newton himself. In our century, Einstein calculated the volume of the universe, and cosmology has once again become a respectable scientific pursuit. Moderns, for whom the spherical motion of the heavens no longer indicates that the heavens have boundaries, draw the same conclusion from the fact that there is darkness. Anyone who would take the assertion that his outlook is modern to include the denial that there is a cosmos would make a very shallow·claim, one having more to do with poetic fashion than with reasoned conviction. · The question of the cosmos has not been made obsolete, and the very least we must admit is �-12- that the appearance of an inorganic, inanimate nature is not conclusive and would result from our human-sized perspective whether there is a cosmos or not. If the world is a cosmos, then it is one more instance of the kind of being that . belong~~? evei;Y ~nimal and plant in it. And if that is so, there is nothing left to display any other kind of being. What is there? Try it: take inventory. The color red is, only if it is the color of some thing. Color itself is, only if it is some one color, and the color of a thing. The relation "taller than" is, only if it is of two or more things. What has being but is not a thing must depend on some thing for its being. But on the other hand a mere thing, mere · matter as we call it, using the word differently than Aristotle ever does, is an impossibility too. Relatively inert, rock-like being is the being of a part of what comes only in wholes--cosmos, plant, or animal. And all man-made things must borrow their material from natural things and their very holding-together from the natural tendencies of the parts of the cosmos. To be is to be alive; all other be~ng is borrowed being. Any comprehensive account of things must come to terms with the special being of animals and plants: for Lucretius, living things are not marvels . but a problem which he solves by dissolving them into the vast sea of inert purposelessness. For Aristotle, as for Plato, wonder is not a state to be dissolved but_ a beckoning to be followed, and for Aristotle the wonderful animals and plants point the way to being itself, to that being qua being which is the source of all being, for we see it in the world in them and only in them. · Thus when Aristotle begins in Book 7 of the Metaphysics to ask what makes a thing a thing, he narrows the question to apply only to living things. other being is, in one way or another, their effect. cause. All He is asking for their At that point, his inquiry into the causes and sources of being itself, simply as being, merges with the inquiry in Book 2 of his Physics, where the question is, What is nature? The answer, 'as well, must be the same, and just as Aristotle concludes that nature is form, he concludes that being is form. Does the material of an animal make it what it is? entire or even principal cause. sum Yes, but it cannot be the If there is anything that is not simply the of its parts, it is an animal . ~tis continually making itself, by snatching suitable material from its environment and discarding unsuitable material. Add some sufficiently unsuitable material, like arsenic, and the �-13- sum of parts remains, but the animal ceases to be. The whole which is not accounted for by the enumeration of its parts is the topic of the last section of ~he Theaetetus, where Socrates offers several playful images of that kind of being: a wagon, a melody, the number six, and the example discussed at most length, which Aristotle borrows;• the syflable. Aristotle ·insists that the syllable is never the sum of its letters. Socrates, of course, argues both sides of the question, and Theaetetus agrees both times. Let's try it outselves. Take the word "put", p-u-t. letters separately, as well as you can, and say them in as you can. Voice the successio~, as rapidly I think you will find that, as long as you attempt to add sound to sound, you will have a grunt surrounded by two explosions of breath. When you voice the whole syllable as one sound,· the u is already present when you begin sounding the p, and the t sound is already shaping the u. Try to pronounce the first two letters and add the third as an afterthought, and you wi!l get two sounds. I have tried all this, and think it's true, but you must decide for yourself. Aristotle says that the syllable is the letters, ) plus something else besides; Socrates calls the something else a form, while Aristotle calls it the thinghood of the thing. - ,· an~~ t~, When I pronounce the syllable "put", I must have in mind the whole syllable in its wholeness before I can voice any of its parts in such a way as to make them come out parts of it. Now a syllable is · about as transitory a being as. one could imagine: it is made of breath, and it is gone as soon as it is uttered. works the same way as a maker of syllahles. But a craftsman If he simply begins nailing and gluing together pieces of wood, metal, and leather, he is not likely to end up with a wagon; to do so, he must have the whole shape and work of the wagon in mind in each of his joinings and fittings. Even so, when he is finished, what he has produced is only held together b1 nails and glue. As soon as it is made, the wagon begins falling apart, and it does so the more, the more it is used. All the more perplexing then, is the animal or plant. It is perpetually being made and re-made after the -form of its species, yet there is no craftsman at work on it. It is a composite of material and form, yet it 1s the material in it that is constantly being used up and replaced, while the form remains intact. The form is not in any artist's imagination, nor can it be an accidental attribute of its material. In the Physics, nature �-14- was traced back to form, and in the first half of the Metaphysics all being is traced to the same source. or is it caused? But what is form? Where is it? Is it a cause Most important of all, does it have being alone, on its own, apart from bodies? Does it emerge from the world of bodies, or is a body a thing impossible to be unless a form is somehow already prese~t t:or it t _ have? o Or is there something specious about the whole effort to make fo:rm either secondary to material or primary? Are they perhaps equal and symmetrical aspects of being, inseparable, unranked? Just as ultimate or first material, without any characteristics supplied by form, cannot be, why should not a pure form, not the form of anything, be regarded as its opposite pole and as equally impossible? questions? Or have we perhaps sturilbled on a nest of unanswerable If form is the first principle of the science of physics, might it not be a first principle simply, behind which one cannot get, to which one may appeal for explanation but about which one cannot inquire? Aristotle says that if there were not things apart from bodies, physics would be first philosophy. But he calls physics second philosophy, and half the Metaphysics lies on the other side of the questions we have been posing. It consists in the uncovering of beings not disclosed to our senses, beings outside of and causal with respect to what we naively and inevitably take to be the whole world. Aristotle marks the center and turning poipt of the Metaphysics with these words: impasse. "One must inquire about (form), for this is the greatest Now it is agreed that some of what is perceptible are things, and so one must search first among these. what is better known. For it is preferable to proceed toward For learning occurs in all things in this way: what is by nature less known toward the things more known. through And just as in matters of action the task is to make the things that are good completely be good for each person, from out of the things that seem good to each, so also the task here is, from out of the things more known to one, to make the things known by nature known to him. Now what is known and primary to each of us is often known slightly, and has little or nothing of being; nevertheless, from the things poorly known but known to one, one must.try to -know the things that are known completely." (1029a 33 - b 11) The forest is dark, but one cannot get out of it without passing through it, carefully, calmly, attentively. �-15It will do no good to move in circles. The passage just quoted connects with the powerful first sentence of the Metaphysics: "All human beings are by nature stretched out toward a state of knowing." Our natural condition is one of frustration, of being unable to escape a task of which the goal is out of reach and out of sight. Aristotle here likens our frustration as theoretical beings to our condition as practical beings: unhappiness has causes-7we achieve it by seeking tjlings--and if we can discover what we were seeking we might be able to make what is good ours. Similarly, if we cannot discern the goal of wisdom, we can at least begin examining the things that stand in our way. The next section of the Metaphysics, from Book 7, Chapter 4 through Book 9, is the beginning of an intense forward motion. These books are a painstaking clarification of the being of the things disclosed to our senses. It is here that Aristotle most heavily uses the vocabulary that is most his own, and everything he accomplishes in these bpoks depends on the selfevidence of the meanings of these expressions. It is these books especially which Latinizing translators turn into gibberish. Words like essence, individual; :·and actuality must either be vague or be given arbitrary definitions. The words Aristotle uses are neither vague nor are they conceptual constructions; they call forth immediate, direct experiences which one must have at hand to see what Aristotle is talking about. They are not the kinds of words that books can explain; they are words of the kind that people must share before there can be books. That is why understanding a sentence of Aristotle is so often something that comes suddenly, in an insight that seems discontinuous from the puzzlement that preceeded it. one's gaze. It is simply a matter of directing We must try to mak- sense of Books 7-9 because they are crucial e to the intention of the Metaphysics. Aristotle has an argument independent of those books, which he makes in Book 8 of the Physics and uses again in Book 12 of the Metaphysics that there must be an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible world. And he is able to go on in Book 12 to discover a good deal about that being. One could, then, skip from the third chapter of Book 7 to Book 12, and, having traced being to form, trace form back to its source. Aristotle would have done that if his whole intention had been to establish that the sensible world has a divine source, but had he done so he would have left no �-16- foundation for reversing the dialectical motion of his argument to understand the things in the world on the basis of their sources. Books 7-9 provide that foundation. The constituents of the world we encounter with our senses are not sensations. The sensible world is not a mosaic of sensible qualities continuous with or adjacent to one another, but meets our gaze organized into things which stand apart, detached from their surroundings. I can indicate one of them to you by the mere · act of pointing, because it has its own boundaries and holds them through time. I need not trace out the limits of the region of the visual field to which I ref er your attention, because the thing thrusts itself out from,holds itself aloof from .what is visible around it, making that visible residue mere background. is ~object My pointing therefore has an object, and it because it keeps being itself, does not change randomly or promiscuously like Proteus, but holds together sufficiently to remain the very thing at which I pointed. . This way of being, Aristotle calls being a. "this". If ·I want to point out to_ you just this red of just this region of this shirt, I will have to do a good deal more than just point. A "this" as Aristotle speaks of it is what comes forth to meet the act of pqinting, is that for which • I need not point and say "not that or that or that but just this," but · need do nothing but point, since it effects its own separation from what it is not. A table, a chair, a rock, a painting--each is a this, but a living thing is a this in a special way. It is the author of its own thisness. It appropri- ates from its surroundings, by eating and drinking and breathing, what it organizes into and holds together as itself. This work of self-separation from its environment is never finished but must go on without break if the living thing is to be at all. hmnan being. Let us cons1der as an example of a living this, some one Today his skin is redder than usual, because he has been in the sun; there is a cut healing on his hand because he chopped onions two days ago; he is well educated, because, five years ago, his parents had the money and taste to send him to Harvard. belong to this human being. All these details, and innumerably many more, But in Aristotle's way of speaking, the details I have named are incidental to him: he .is .not sunburned, wounded on the hand, or Harvard-educated because he is a human being. He is each of those things because his nature bumped into that of something else and left him with some mark, more or less intended, more or less temporary, but in any case aside from what he is on his own, self-sufficiently. What he is on his own, as a result of the activity that makes him be at all, is: two-legged, sentient, breathing, �-17- and all the other things he is simply as a human being. There is a difference between all the things he happens to be and the things he necessarily is on account of what he is. Aristotle formulates the latter, the kind of being that belongs to a thing not by happenstance but inevitably, as the "what it kept on being in the course of being at all" for .a human being, or a duck, or a rosebush. The phrase ti esti? ti~ einai is Aristotle's answer to the Socratic question, What is a giraffe? Find some way of articulating all the things that every giraffe always is, and you will have defined the giraffe. of them is throughout its life, is the product at .any them, of the activity that is causing it to be. the question What is a giraffe? giraffe? are the same. ~nstant What each for any one of That means that the answer to and the answer to the quest:i,c::>n What is this Stated generally, Aristotle's · claim is that a this, which is in the world on its own, self-sufficiently, has a what-it-always-wasto-be, and is just its what-it-always-was-to-be. This is not a commonplace thought, but it is a comprehensible one; compare it with the translators' version, "a per-~ individual is identic~l with its essence." The living thing as it is present to my looking seems to be richer, fuller, more interesting than it can possibly be when it is requced to a definition in speech, but this is a confusion. All that belongs to the living thing that is not implied by the definition of its species belongs to it externally, as a result of its accidental interactions with the other things in its environment. 'l,'he definition attempts to penetrate to what it is in itself, by its own activity of making itself be whole and persist. There is nothing fuller than the whole, nothing richer than the life which is the winning and expressing of that wholeness, nothing more interesting than the struggle it is always waging unnoticed, a whole world of priority deeper and more serious than the personal history it must drag along with the species-drama it is constantly enacting. The reduction of the living thing to what defines it is like the reduction of a rectangular block of marble to the form of Hermes: less is more. Strip away the accretion of mere facts, and what is left is that without which even those facts could not have gained admittance into the world: the forever vulnerable foundation of all that is in the world, the shaping, ruling form, the incessant maintenance of which is the.only meaning of the phrase self-preservation. Indeed even the bodily material of the living thing is present in the world only as active, only as forming itself into none of the other things it might have been but just this one thoroughly defined animal or plant. to the question, What is form? definiteness of kind. And this, finally, is Aristotle's answer Form is material at work according to a persisting Aristotle's definition of the soul in De Anima, soul is �·-18- :he being-at-work-staying-the-same of an organized body, becomes the definition ~f form in Book 8 of the Metaphysics, and is, at that stage of the inquiry, his· definition of being. Book 9 spells out the consequences of this clarification of form. Form cannot be derivative from or equivalent with material, because material on its own must be mere possibility. It cannot enter the world until it has achieved definiteness by getting to work in some way, and it cannot even be thought except as the possibility of some form. is a subordinate way of being. Books 7-9 demonstrate that materiality The living body does not bring form into the world, it must receive form to come .into the world. Form is primary and casual, and the original source of all being in the sensible world must be traced beyond the sensible world, to that whic.h confers unity on forms themselves. If forms had no integrity of their own, the world and things could not hang together and nothing would be. At the end of Book 9, the question of being has become the question of formal unity, the question, What makes each form one? In the woven texture of the organization of the Metaphysics, what comes next, at the beginning of Book 10, . is a laying out of.all the ways things may be one. Glue, nails, and rope are of no use for the problem at hand, nor, any longer, are natural. shapes and motions, which have been shown to have a derivative sort of unity. All that is left in Aristotle's array of possibilities is the unity of that of which the thinking or the kn~wing is one. This thread of the investigation, which we may call for convenience the biological one, converges in Book 12 with a cosmological one. The animal and plant species take care of their own perpetuation by way of generation, but what the parents pass on to the offspring is an identity which must hold together thanks to a timeless activity of thinking. different way: The cosmos holds together in a it seems to be literally and directly eternal by way of a ceaseless repetition of patterns of locomotion. An eternal motion cannot result from some other motion, but must have an eternal, :unchanging cause. Aristotle lays out all the possibilities. undergoing a motion? think of a third? Again, What can caus.e a motion without A thing desired can, and so can a thing thought. Aristotle says that there are . O~Y. over, the first reduces to the second. these . ~, Can you and. that, more- When I desire an apple it is the fleshy apple and not the thought of it toward which I move, but it is the thought or imagining of the fleshy apple that moves me toward the apple. object causes motion only ~ an object of thought. The desired Just as the only candidate left to be the source of unity of form amorig the animals and plants was the activity of thinking, so again the only possible unmoved source for the endless �circlings of the stars is an eternal activity of thinking. Because it is dE\athless and because the heavens and nature and all that is · depend upon it, Aristotle calls t,his activity God. Because it is always altogether at work, nothing that is thought by it is ever outside or apart from it: thinking, simply. it is ever it is of Again, because it is always altogether at work, nothing of left over outside of or apart from its work of thinking: thinking, simply. it is It is the pure holding-together of the pure holdable- together, activity active, causality caused. The world is, in all its being most deeply, and in its deepest being wholly, intelligible. So far is Aristotle from simply assuming the intelligibility of things, that he requires twelve books of argument to account for it. All being is dependent on the being of things; among things, the artificial are derived from the natural; because there is a cosmos, all natural t~ings have being as living things; because all living things depend on either a species-identity or an eternal locomotion, there must be a self-subsisting activity of thinking. The fact that there are a Book 13 and a Book 14 to the Metaphysics indicates that, in Aristotle's view, the question of being has not yet undergone its last transformation • . With the completion of Book 12, the question of being " becomes: What is the definition of the world? What is the primary intelligible structure that implies all that is permanent in the world? Books 13 and 14 of the Metaphysics examine the only two answers that anyone has ever proposed to that question outside of myths. They are: that the divine thinking is a direct thinking of all the animal and plant species, and that it is a thinking of the mathematical .s ources of things. negative. The conclusions of these two books are entirely The inquiry into being itself cannot come to rest by transfering to the divine source the species-identities which constitute the world, nor can they be derived from their mathematical aspects. of the question of being is into a question. Aristotle's final transformation Books 13 and 14 are for the sake of rescuing the question as one which does not and cannot yield to a solution but insists on being faced and thought directly. Repeatedly, through the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that the deepest things must be simple. speak the truth about them, nor even ask a have no parts. which thinks. ~estion One cannot about them, because they They have no articulation in speech, but only contact with that The ultimate question of the Metaphysics, which is at once What is . all being at its roots? and What is the life of God?, and toward which the whole Metaphysics has been designed to clear the way,takes one beyond the limits of speech itself. The argument of the Metaphysics begins from our direct encounter with the sensible world, absorbs that world completely into speech, and carries �its speech to the threshold of that on which world and · speech depend. The shape of the book is a zig-zag, repeatedly encountering the inexpressible simple things and veering away. By climbing to that life which is the being- at-work of thinking, and then ending with a demonstration of what that life is not, Aristotle leaves us to disclose that life to ourselves in the only way possible, in the privacy of lived thinking. incomplete work: The Metaphysics is not an it is the utmost gift that a master of words can give. � 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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. 21 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource An outline of the argument of Artistotle's Metaphysics Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1980-04-11 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 11, 1980 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Sachs 1980-04-11 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sachs, Joe, 1946- Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b97690e1e7de938ddfd29a0e552841d6.pdf 33c7d52792adcabd25f29a3c27628fb8 PDF Text Text Joe Sachs January 17, 2004 The Heart of the Program Welcome, January freshmen. On Thursday night, your life in this college began with a seminar, the first of about 250 such occasions that you will take part in over the next few years. What you do in those seminars is going to get into your blood, and you will never willingl9 put it aside. Graduates of St. John's gather together occasionally in all the cities where more than a handful of them cluster, usually for a meal, but before or after they eat they have seminars. They come back to Santa Fe in the summers or Annapolis in the fall once in a while, and they fill their old classrooms to hold seminars. You have begun to develop a power and an inclination to use it that will always be with you; you will never be unseminared. That last word is not my invention but Shakespeare's. I will return to his use of it in a little while, but first we need to explore some other and more common ways the word seminar is used, that are not what you will come to mean by the word. I once got in the mail a written text of twenty or so pages, with a note from the sender saying "this is a seminar I gave at Wisdom College." (I've changed the name of the college to protect the innocent.) I took the writer to mean that it was a lecture he had given to a small group of advanced students sitting around a table, who were eventually allowed to speak, when he, the professor, was good and ready. That is more or less what the word means in the world of colleges and universities; it has in common with our seminars only the arrangement of the furniture. When we hold what he was calling a seminar, as we are this afternoon, we call it a lecture. Outside the academic world, there is yet another sense of the word seminar. Someone I know once said to me something like "you won't be working very hard this summer; you'll only have a seminar." He had in mind the sessions sometimes attended by doctors to talk about new techniques or pills, or by insurance agents to share the mysteries of their trade. This is probably the sort of thing most people think of as a seminar, and it has more in common with ours than do those of the usual academic variety; it is a group of peers assembled with their common experience and knowledge to speak in an unscripted way about matters of professional concern to them all. We lack the knowledge of these professionals, but at least we have more than furniture in common with them. No one lectures in our seminars, or delivers a paper, but what are we doing there? Some of you may think we're debating. It is probably true that everything said in a seminar is in some way set against something else opposed to it, and that some arguing goes back and forth, but that alone does not constitute a debate. In fact, if one of our seminars ever does degenerate into mere debate, that opposing and arguing is wasted, and fails to achieve the effect that makes it worthwhile. Debaters try to win, not to understand more. They make arguments that tend to support what they've already claimed, and not the arguments that seem best to them at the moment. They grab hold of the weakest things said by those they're debating against, which may be things of minor importance, and deflect the discussion away from bigger and better things that would undercut their own chosen positions. In a seminar that goes well, every new thing that is said adds content or depth or a new perspective to what has gone before, but if a stretch of a seminar has become a debate, the things spoken about are likely to become more narrow, more vague, and more antagonistic to any possibility of learning. Why should that be so? Why shouldn't debate, more than any other kind of discussion, clarify alternatives? One piece of evidence I can offer you to the contrary is any televised program you've ever seen on any current political issue. It is customary on these shows to seek balance by bringing in advocates of opposite extreme positions, who trade their best arguments. For the sake of seeing what's wrong with this, let's assume that neither side stoops to name-calling, ridicule, or quoting poll results. Let two thoughtful people, committed to opposite beliefs, defend those beliefs articulately. Let each have a strong incentive to win converts, which should in turn assure that all the 1 �arguments tending to support either side will eventually be discovered and presented. But what if the large spectrum of possible opinions between the two extremes has more in it worth serious consideration than either of the original sides? Neither debater has any desire to allow such positions to stand. They must either discredit these moderate positions, or try to reformulate them as belonging to their own sides. Debates exert a centrifugal force that leaves the central region vacant. But they have a worse effect even than that. Debates start with definite positions to which the debaters are committed. Both sides depend upon the formulations from which they began. When real thinking is going on, one of the most valuable things that can happen is that someone steps back and sees a pair of alternatives as a limited way of taking hold of some thought that has wider boundaries and deeper roots. When debate is going on the debaters are like boxers in a ring, forever setting out from and returning to the same corners. Is there a wider world in which to explore and learn? They will never find it, if they have once committed themselves to debating. For us, the question about the seminar is not merely whether it is or is not a debate, but what it is. We are not debating about debate, so we are free to move on to a new perspective altogether. Let us try another suggestion that I have heard, that the seminar is an exchange of ideas. This is at least a wider possibility than the previous one. The whole global economy is an exchange of goods and services, and an exchange of ideas would similarly admit as many participants as have anything to bring to it, so we are not stuck with the ping-pong-like batting back and forth of debate. The exchange admits more than two sides, and each participant might be receiving something instead of batting it away. What's more, the parties to an exchange need to put something in to get something else out, and this too accords with the nature of the seminar. A receptive openness is the first condition for learning, but little can be learned by those who don't try out their own thoughts and their own opinions about what they've gotten out of the book or the conversation. In a true exchange, the back-and-forth of the debaters is replaced by a give-and-take that does not repel an opponent but joins in a many-sided effort to gain an adequate understanding of something. So the commercial metaphor of an exchange has served us better than the athletic or pugilistic model of a debate. We might declare victory to the former and defeat to the latter, but this would mean that we were still stuck in the debater's way of thinking. Jf we suit our own speech to the second model, we could say that we have exchanged a worse opinion for a better one. And that formulation does give us an adequate understanding of why the seminar is not a debate. The debater never moves from his chosen corner; he may fortify it, but he will never be free of it. But one who has left a starting place can look out on new vistas from a new place, and continue the motion to new opinions that might be worth visiting at least, and perhaps worth dwelling with. Similarly, just by thinking about commercial exchange, we may be able to see the seminar in a new way that is still better than either of those we've considered. What is involved in the act of exchange? You have to bring something of your own into the marketplace, and you have to be willing to give it up to gain something of value. These things are both reflected in the seminar, but they may both be misleading. First, you may think that what you have to bring to the table is a finished product, an articulate and impressive interpretation of something. But the seminar takes place much nearer the origins of the production chain. Any sort of raw material of an understanding is needed and welcome. You might have only a question, and not even be sure how to ask it. You might think a certain passage is important, and not know how to say why. You might think two passages are connected, but not be sure what the connection is. You might have none of those things, but only a willingness to work, and you can always go right to work in the seminar, because you have with you the only set of tools you need, your memory of what you have read and your desire to understand it. These possibilities already suggest a division of labor and an opportunity for cooperation. Any such cooperative effort has the advantage that what it builds belongs to those who build it, because they watch every step of its development. That makes it far superior to any exchange that began with a finished product, even one delivered for our instruction by 2 �( the most famous and learned professor. We are better off in solid huts of o~r own making than trying to take up residence in such mansions, if, for all we know, their foundations may be full of holes. But what if you don't feel the need even for a new hut? Suppose you do like the place you are already, not with the fierceness or arbitrariness of a debater but with a reasonable sense that it is a good place to be. The fact that you have opinions you don't want to give up doesn't disqualify you from participating in the exchange. The currency of the seminar is opinions, and giving an opinion doesn't mean giving it away. Giving an opinion in a seminar, though, does mean giving it up for examination. If you are really participating in the seminar, nothing you say will have the belligerent or defensive tone of a debater; all of your opinions will be offered up to be worked at in common, even when you are strongly committed to those opinions. An opinion worth holding on to can never suffer by being examined, and you can never suffer by opening your beliefs to respectful examination among friends. If you do not move on to new opinions, the seminar at least will bring your old ones back to you enhanced, seen from more sides, and deepened. No opinion that enters a seminar discussion can remain merely what it was before. Even a tutor who has asked the same questions about the same books many times can never foresee what will be done with those questions by a new group of students. A tutor can direct the seminar to passages, to questions, to connections, to arguments, and to interpretations, but only the seminar as a whole can do anything at the places to which it is directed. One spontaneous response can open a door no one has ever been through, and a series of honest responses will _ construct a new world for the understanding andimagination to explore. ~ The exchange that takes place in a seminar is of a kind that commercial traders can only dream about, in which everything you give up can come back to you appreciated in value, and supplemented by new and other riches produced on the spot. How is such a thing possible? If the seminar is an exchange, it is not one of the commercial sort, but a dialectical exchange. Dialectic is something that the greatest of philosophers have all talked about and practiced. You may have heard a schematic description of dialectic as a formal process in which a thesis and antithesis yield a synthesis, which in turn becomes a new thesis with which to repeat the process. This is a superficial account of the thinking of one particular philosopher, and even he would by no means consider it accurate. In any case, genuine thinking rarely takes place in such a mechanical way. There may or may not have been an occasion in your last seminar on which you or someone else replied to a claim by saying "I think it's exactly the opposite," but something different happens hundreds of times in every seminar. And even if a statement is succeeded by its complete antithesis, the seminar may take a long road to finding a synthesis, or discover that some other line of thinking altogether is more fruitful. What does happen typically when something is asserted in seminar is that someone else responds in a way that takes it as partly right and partly wrong, or as capturing something correct, but with some crucial word that doesn't feel as though it captures it best. This sort of thing is not just disagreement dressed up in polite terms. It is the natural way thinking works. When someone articulates a thought, the rest of us try to understand it, but each of us is different. We bring different experiences and opinions to the conversation. In the mere act of construing what someone else has said, each of us is likely to bump up against a way of grasping it that seems to cohere better, or fit the text better, or lead more directly to some further insight. And now we're off and running, because that two-sided view of one overlapping thought is now twice as likely to strike off sparks in the thinking of a third person. It is perhaps here that you can see best what's wrong with debating in a seminar. If the first speaker wants to defend the original assertion, the potential third speaker is cut out of the discussion, and a seminar that might have moved on gets bogged down. A follow-up point or two can help clarify things, but only if they are offered up and let go. A seminar is a living thing that needs freedom to move, and no one knows where it is headed, because a third contribution may overlap something in the second that was not present in the first, and the whole series of interrelated observations will be something no one on earth has ever considered before 3 �in just that way. The dialectic of the seminar has the power to generate thought. An opening question may be asked about which you think you have nothing to say, but as soon as someone else responds to it, you might begin to discover opinions that are altogether yours, but weren't present for you until the conversation nudged you into conceiving them. Everything said in the seminar is seminal in that way. I mentioned earlier that Shakespeare invented the word unseminared; he uses it, in Antony and Cleopatra (Act I, scene v), in just the sense we are now considering, to describe a eunuch. Exchange no longer seems an adequate metaphor for an activity in which the giving and receiving are always generative and fertile. The seminar is not the market into which you take the products of prior learning, but a place to which you go to engage in the act of learning. That is the power you are acquiring, the power to conceive thoughts you could never come up with alone, but that no one else could ever conceive for you . The seminar is always a process of appropriation, of expanding your thinking by taking more and more possibilities into yourself. One way this process of appropriation works is by getting rid of the fancy and unfamiliar language in which thoughts might first seem most impressive, and moving ever forward into the straightforward and ordinary words that are richest in meaning. We are now at a point in this discussion at which we can enrich our own language about the seminar. When we last formulated what the seminar is, we called it a dialectical exchange, and we have just abandoned the noun. We should now be ready to abandon the adjective too. The word dialectical has served a purpose for us, but it has no magic in it, and if we rely too much on it, our thinking will be blocked from going forward. What dialectical means is "suited to conversation," or working the way conversation works. Our elaborate discussion of this remarkable instrument of learning was all along just a matter of looking closely at a certain kind of conversation. But now I have to specify the kind of conversation the seminar is. You take part in conversations all the time that generate no learning in anyone, conversations about nothing in particular, or about something in the newspaper, or even about serious topics like war or poverty. The seminar conversation is the second phase of an activity that begins with reading something, and it is not a matter of indifference what that something is. For example, there are good books available about Homer's Iliad; why shouldn't the first seminar reading be designed to give you some background and help you read the Iliad itself? An introduction of that sort might help you feel comfortable, but it would squash the very activity you need to engage in if you're going to learn anything. Books about other books are called secondary literature, and whatever else they may do, they stand between you and your own encounter with the primary text. If a book tells you what Homer's gods are, and you believe it, you will not wonder what Homer's gods are, and without such wondering, you will not call on your own resources to think about what a god might be. And the less thinking you do in your life about what a god might be, the less you will have thought about what a human being is. The Iliad is not going to fit neatly into any of the categories of thought you already have available. If you want to gain any understanding of it at all, there are two ways you can go: you can read some secondary literature, or get even that prepackaged by listening to lectures given by a professor, or you can begin to expand your own ways of thinking. You can suspend some of the assumptions you already make about things, try to see through the eyes of the poet and his characters, take the risk of making mistakes, and stretch your powers to imagine and think. An appropriate seminar reading is one that launches you into the seminar conversation with a need to stretch yourself to understand it. This stretching toward understanding is the central activity of the most important kind of learning. It cannot be done by taking over an explanation, or a theory, or a way of thinking from anyone else. We sometimes say that the teachers at St. John's are not the tutors but the program authors, but this does not mean that Homer knows something which you need to come to know. It means that Homer invites you to imagine things you've never seen and think thoughts you've never had. If you accept that invitation, you will not be replacing some twenty-first-century knowledge with some other, old- 4 �fashioned set of opinions. You will be expanding your own capacity to ev~uate and choose among the true array of possible opinions and ways of knowing. You need not begin by assuming that Homer has the truth about anything. But if you are going to learn anything by reading Homer, you do need to begin by assuming that he has something worth your effort to grasp. It happens that the second book of the Iliad contains an example of someone who is unwilling or unable to make an assumption of that kind. He is not interpreting a written work, but he is engaging in interpretation, and he is a bad reader of the things around him. His name is Thersites, and he is the first of the Achaeans to speak when the army has been reassembled after its wild rush to its ships (II, 211-278). If you remember Thersites at all, it is probably for Homer's description of him as the ugliest man who went to Troy. But his malformed body is an image of his words, which are described by Homer as lacking balance and wholeness (ametroepes, epea akosma), and by Odysseus as lacking judgment or the power to make distinctions (akritomuthos). What he says is that the only reason the army is fighting is to get gold and women for Agamemnon. Now it is a fact that thousands of men fight and die at Troy, and Agamemnon gets the pick of captured treasure and women, and it may, after all, be true that there is no purpose to the war beyond that. As someone who challenges authority and debunks any high-sounding justifications of war, Thersites may seem like an image of ourselves, and someone speaking the plain truth. But what if there is some higher reason for the fighting? Thersites does not try to understand what that reason would be, show what is wrong with it, and conclude that it is false or hollow; he is simply incapable of conceiving any motive other than greed, lust, and glorying in having more than others do. His argument is not based on Agamemnon's defects or on human nature; he just assumes everyone is like himself and argues from his own limitations. As soon as one entertains the question whether there is some better reason for the war, it becomes clear that Thersites has no insight to offer on that question one way or the other. Since he can't even conceive a good reason, he can't compare it to a bad one. Thersites has no place in a council of the Achaeans because he has no argument to make that takes in view the choices before such a council. So Odysseus replies both to the man and to the things he has said. He replies to the man by beating him, with Agamemnon's golden scepter, the sign of the king's authority, much to the delight of the men, incidentally. But Odysseus also takes up the other scepter, the staff the speakers hold in council, and replies to Thersites' speech, and in his first seven lines (284-290) he already gives three reasons for fighting that were invisible to Thersites. Agamemnon's honor is at stake, the soldiers are bound by a promise they have made to him, and their own honor is at stake if they willingly abandon that promise. He urges the men to stay, and they roar their approval. Please understand: none of this means that Odysseus is right and Thersites is wrong. Honor is one of the great themes of the Iliad and is subjected to the most challenging scrutiny, and the exact fulfillment of a promise becomes one of the most devastating events in the poem. The important thing is that such invisible motives as honor and promises come to sight, and be thought about as claims on human beings that may or may not be worth respecting. Those who read the poem and do not allow themselves to feel the claims of those motives have not even entered into the world of discourse the poet has made. But the reader who has listened attentively to Odysseus's appeal to the soldiers' honor will hear a shade of difference shortly afterward when Nestor makes the same appeal (II, 337-368). Where Odysseus had addressed them as human beings who had freely given their word, Nestor locates their honor in their courage and competence at fighting. In the Iliad, then, a soldier's honor may be at least two different things. And there may be serious reasons for subordinating one's own honor to that of the king. When Agamemnon reviews his men before battle in Book IV, he sees Diomedes and a companion at ease away from the battlefield, and tells them they are not the men their fathers were. The companion takes him literally, and recites the accomplishments by which he and Diomedes have excelled their fathers. But this companion, like Thersites, is someone who can see the facts but not the point. Diomedes replies to him (IV, 412- 5 �418): "Dear old friend, shut up," and then says that Agamemnon is the one-who has everything to gain and everything to lose. They owe it to him, not to themselves, to risk everything they might lose in battle, out of respect for one who is entitled to their respect (402). The characters in the poem who articulate their reasons for fighting are like the members of a seminar, as they take hold of the same motive from different angles, and the seminar that wants to understand the poem needs to be at least as versatile as they are. Now if you're beginning to catch on to the way the motion of the semiar works, you won't be surprised to hear that the poem might point to.,a good reason for the war that is other than, and perhaps higher than, honor of any sort. In Book Ill, the word friendship starts to be used over and over. The Trojans join the Achaeans in swearing by it (323), and among the Trojans, Paris has lost it (453), but most important (354), Menelaus attributes the war to Paris's violation of his friendship. He is referring to the special bond of friendship between host and guest. Befor~ the Greeks crossed the sea in war, Paris had crossed it in the other direction, in friendship, but ran off with Menelaus's wife. Just as Thersites cannot see any claim on himself stemming from honor, Paris saw no claim on himself stemming from the friendship of his host. But is such a claim worth the lives of thousands? How should we go about comparing things that are beyond all measurement? By now I am sure you will not be surprised to hear that Homer offers us an image in which these very things, guest-friendship and war, confront one another. In Book VI, when Diomedes encounters an enemy he doesn't recognize, and demands to know his lineage, Glaucus responds with one of the most powerful similes in literature (145-149): "Son of Tydeus, great heart, why do you ask my genesis? Like the generations of leaves are those of men. The leaves, the wind scatters on the ground, and the sprouting wood grows others, as the time of spring comes over it. So one generation of men grows and the other is no more." Many years ago, Jonathan Tuck gave a lecture called "Dead Leaves," and showed how this passage has been imitated by every major epic poet in the thousands of years of the tradition since Homer's time, and the sophomores will have discovered an almost identical image in the 40th chapter of the book of Isaiah (verses 6-8). But great as the image is, and full of the truth of human mortality, the speech of Glaucus that the image introduces refutes it. Glaucus tells the stories of three generations of his ancestors, and attests that many men know those stories. He ends by telling the reason he has joined the war: so that he might bring no shame to the memory of his ancestors. They have not become anonymous leaf-mold, rotting away as the march of generations covers them up; they still retain their distinctness, and still act to cause effects in the world. And the telling of their stories brings about another effect, and probably saves Glaucus's life, because Diomedes recognizes that Glaucus's grandfather was the guestfriend of his own grandfather, and drives his spear into the ground. He exclaims (215): "Why then you, now, are my friend, by way of our fathers, from the old times!" Instead of fighting they shake hands, and pledge hospitality to one another if they survive the war, and they exchange armor. The whole amazing interlude then closes with the lines everyone remembers best from this scene. "Zeus stole Glaucus's wits," Homer tells us, and he made an exchange of gold for bronze, of one-eleventh the value (234-236). But if you take that comment at face value, Homer has stolen your wits. That would mean that you had exchanged the opportunity to think about a beautiful and complex scene of 115 lines for a dim-witted three-line summary that might have come from Thersites. Homer's closing lines are like the leaves that sprout in the spring, and Homer has already let us see, if we were willing to think about it, that the latest sprouts do not necessarily annihilate what was generated before them. The poet let us watch human friendship span the dead generations and supercede the deadly enmities of the war. But how stupid we were to take that seriously; friendship might cost a man the price of 91 cattle. I hope you can see how many-sided an apparently simple remark can be, and how an adequate understanding of a text may call for great flexibility. Our imaginations 6 �have been drawn into a moment when the noise and dust and death of the ·battlefield have cleared away, and friendship has been sighted or at least declared. If we are swept up in the feeling of this moment, Homer suddenly pulls the rug out from under our feet, and makes us feel like gullible fools. Didn't we see that the only things that matter here are greed and anger, swindling and killing? If someone speaks to you of hereditary friendship, watch your wallet. The result is that it is up to us to restore any balance to the scene. Any defense of friendship over war will have to come from our own thinking and courage. If someone in the seminar has been very observant, though, it might appear that Homer has given us a tiny bit of help. In the long catalogue of ships and fighters at the end of Book II, Glaucus, who gave up gold armor for bronze, is the last person named, and he is called blameless, or not to be scorned. But if we look to the lines directly preceding this mention, we find someone named Nastes, whom Homer does blame and scorn, and calls silly. Why? Because this fool came to war wearing gold armor which was of no use in protecting him from death. I offer these examples not as an interpretation of the first six books of the //iad--1 have, for instance, not even mentioned Achilles, who is clearly the central figure in this poem, even when he is absent from the action. Nor am I claiming that the bits and pieces I have taken up from those first six books are necessary parts of an interpretation of them. Other passages could serve equally well to bring out the same or similar questions and possibilities about what is in front of us and how it might be understood. I have focused on some places that suggest that the meaning any passage has at face value may need to be pushed and challenged, and that the author of the poem may provide help in doing that. Thersites' argument needs to be heard, and Glaucus' bargain needs to be questioned, if either of them is ever to come back to sight within any larger vision. The more pairs of eyes there are looking for evidence, and the more imaginations there are trying out interpretations, the likelier any of us is to find something that lifts us closer to the thing we have read. Since so many parts have to be balanced and combined, it makes little difference which ones are the starting points for any particular discussion, or even which ones come to be the focus of it. I am suggesting a model of the act of interpretation that might be compared to learning how to swim. I had many weeks one summer, long ago, to think about why I couldn't even manage to float, until one day when I suddenly could do so easily, and then rapidly progressed through the sequence of skills that led from there to swimming. What I concluded is that every muscle in my body had to be involved in trying out countless combinations of tension and relaxation until they all produced one coherent performance that fit the needs of the situation. Similarly, I think, in reading a book one holds its unfolding parts in a loose grasp in which each of them might have to change many times before they begin fitting together in any convincing way. The same sort of process can be involved in writing a paper; instead of starting with an outline and a topic sentence, one might accomplish more by starting with some incomplete, not yet fully connected thoughts, and press onward through possibilities that might turn them into a coherent way of thinking about something. Reading or writing that builds up an interpretation gradually can produce a flexible solidity of understanding that is worth incomparably more than a bottom-line opinion adopted at the outset and defended like a fortress. The cost associated with the more adequate way of learning is a more-or-less constant feeling of incompleteness. The understanding sought may seem always out of reach, on a shore that may seem never to draw any nearer. But to be in the midst of genuine learning can also be exhilarating, as you realize that the solid ground you've left behind was never able in the first place to support the weight of a fully developed understanding. Now if it sounds as though I'm saying that to be learning is to be at sea, our metaphor has gone beyond its usefulness. It is not easy in practice to draw a line between learning and knowing. The one who has embarked upon learning already has a grasp of many things, but is focused on extending and improving that grasp, and the kind of knowing that is at stake is not a fixed possession but is itself a living activity. With the multiplication tables, or the capitals of the states, though they might grow fuzzy in 7 �your memory, you either know them or you don't, but with an understanding·of the Iliad, or an assessment of the place of honor in human life, learning never ends. The better you understand such things, the more they draw you on to look further and see more. To be learning is not to be at sea, and to jump to a conclusion is not to have arrived anywhere at all. There is a natural tendency, whenever a question has been raised, to want it disposed of. An unanswered question may be felt as pain, or at least annoyance, that craves relief in any plausible answer, and an impressive-sounding answer has the added allure of sophistication. Why is Achilles angry? He has low self-esteem, or a bipolar disorder. Thank you. Now we can find a new question and dispose of it. Thinking is troublesome, and thinking beyond the presuppositions one is accustomed to relying on is hard work. The forward motion of a discussion that opens up a question is always fighting a counter-tendency that seeks to close it. This is most evident in a seminar when people fight the question itself. Is Achilles right to withdraw from the war? What do you mean by "right''? This sort of counter-question is asked in good faith by someone who sees that there is more than one direction in which a good answer might be found, but who has not yet grasped that a wide-ranging question is bound to generate a better seminar than a question that can be answered conclusively by reading a line from page 24. A question in seminar presses thinking forward toward a goal, but that goal is not like a soccer net. Answers do not count as victories. Thinking needs to approach such a goal by finding a place to start from, and that is.no easy thing to accomplish. The real victories are won in the exploration that leads to the finding of a beginning. The seminar is the place where you will secure the starting-points for the thinking you will do for the rest of your life. It follows, then, that the seminar is the place where you will find the starting-points for thinking about the other parts of the program. The College catalogue has long recognized this function of the seminar by calling it the heart of the program. Some people have taken this to mean only that the seminar is the place where the focus on language or mathematics or musical analysis or laboratory observation is broadened, so that all these arts of understanding may be brought together and connections may be made with and among them. Like the heart, where blood from all the peripheral parts is united, purified, and sent back to re-invigorate those parts, the seminar does serve as a center of circulation. But the catalogue's metaphor resonates more deeply than that with us. The tutorials and laboratories do not belong to departments, and questions that arise in them may be pursued without limits, as far as those present can take them. Every class at St. John's is finally a group of people sitting around a table, reflecting on something they have all done, and trying to make as much sense of it as possible. But the seminar is the place where that activity is the sole, direct, and sustained concern of those present, all the time it's going on, every time it happens. The seminar is the heart of the program in the primary sense that it is the place where you go directly, and intensely, to the heart of the learning activity, and put all your effort into it. A text is in front of you that has brought the best out of the intellects and imaginations of many people in the past, but no presuppositions about it are required, and no questions about it are offlimits. This open approach means that you can't take refuge in translating or demonstrating, can't insist on alleged facts you've found in an introduction, can't rely on anything but your own power to grasp and put into words something that seems to you to make sense, to have evidence, to be worth believing. What should be the standards for making sense, for having evidence, and for being worth believing? Those primary questions are always up for discussion in the seminar as much as are any other topics, and you are responsible for choosing among them and defending your choices. That responsibility is shared by everyone at the table, but it is not lessened by that sharing. The learning activity, at its heart, keeps all presuppositions open to question, and all points of view open to sight. Every kind of learning is worthwhile and needed, but unseminared learning can never achieve the highest possibilities of what it means to learn. 8 � 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The heart of the program Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004-01-17 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on January 17, 2004 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Sachs 2004-01-17 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sachs, Joe, 1946- Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/24be44d0713ea7cd56c7c525a9e91dde.pdf d425b771607a247ec9d57240f79ec733 PDF Text Text Dhe Fury of Aeneas ]OE SACHS a lecture given in Santa Fe, September 18, 1981 and in Annapolis, October 2, 1981 �The Fury of Aeneas ll he story Homer tells in the Iliad begins with the eruption of the anger o.f Achilles. As the twenty-fourth book of the poem opens, that anger has reached its greatest intensity. Achilles "let fall th~ swelling tears, lying sometimes along his side, sometimes on his back, and now again prone on his face; then he would stand upright, and pace turning in distraction along the beach of the sea ... (At dawn,) when he had yoked running horses under the chariot he would fasten Hektor behind the chariot; so as to drag him, and draw him three times around the tomb of Menoitios' fallen son, then rest again in his shelter, and throw down the dead man and leave him to lie sprawled on his face in the dust . . . So Achilleus in his standing fury outraged great Hektor." (24. 9-22) The wrath which has withstood the events of twenty-three books has swollen into a rage which denies Achilles sleep, food, or the cessation of his tears, a rage which breaks forth in monotonous acts of revenge which do not relieve but frustrate and provoke. Achilles now walks the circular path at the center of anger in which it is quenchless, infinite. But the Iliad is not finally the story of the victory of anger over Achilles, because Zeus has one last scheme. He arranges for Priam to visit Achilles, to stand before him risking his wrath, to ask in person for pity. Priam kills the anger of Achilles by displacing it with the grief of Achilles, which can meet and merge with the grief of Priam and come to rest in mutual comforting. Here is Homer's description of that last and leastexpected turning point in the Iliad: as Priam ends his words to Achilles, saying, " 'I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children."' Homer continues, "So he spoke, and stirred in the other a passion of grieving for his own father. He took the old man's hand and pushed him gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos. The sound of their St. John's Lecture Series l �mourning moved in the house. Then when great Achilleus had taken full satisfaction in sorrow and the passion for it had gone from his mind and body, thereafter he rose from his chair, and took the old man by the hand, and set him on his feet again, in pity for the grey head and the grey beard, and spoke to him and addressed him in winged words ." (24 . 506-17) Book twenty-four ends with one last Homeric dawn, in which the doomed people of Troy celebrate the burial of their beloved Hector with fitting ceremonies and a glorious feast. Such was the burial of Hector, breaker of horses, only because, between his wrath and his own imminent death, Achilles rejoined the human community. The climax of the Iliad, then, is the moment when Achilles remembers his father. That moment, which pierces his heart and lets the anger drain from it, will not add a day to his life or to the survival of Troy, but it does make supportable the enormous weight of grief which was built in Achilles, in Priam, in the Trojans, and in the hearer or reader of the poem. Virgil's Aeneid is, above all else, a reply to the Iliad and Odyssey and a rejection of the kind of comfort Homer offers . I have set before you at length the moment into which Homer puts a power which counterbalances all the horror and pain of the Iliad because · Virgil frames the Aeneid with two echoes of that moment. Twice in the Aeneid, in scenes of battle, the image of Aeneas' father comes into his mind . On the first occasion, Aeneas is looking at Priam, and the memory of his father stirs him to action . The scene is in Book two, but it is a flashback to the beginning of Aeneas' story, and the memory of his father marks the beginning of his undertaking of the deeds to which he has been called. On the second occasion, Aeneas has just watched a young man die whom he killed, and whose father he is about to confront . The two characters, Lausus and Mezentius, evoke memories of Hector and Priam for the reader, and in Aeneas a memory of his father which occasions a moment of understanding. This scene is in Book ten, but it is a direct preparation for the understanding of the concluding lines and action of the Aeneid. Thus the climactic moment of the Iliad is present in the first and last events in Virgil's story, and in both cases it is put in a perspective in which its power is acknowledged but its weight is lessened. In Book two of the Aeneid we watch alongside a helpless Aeneas while Achilles' one deed of comfort and kindness is desecrated by Achilles· son. Listen as this third generation speaks to the first: "'Carry off these tidings; go and bring this message to my father, son of Peleus; and remember, let him know my sorry doings, how degenerate is Neoptolemus. Now die.' This said, he dragged him to the very altar stone, with Priam shuddering and slipping in the blood that streamed from his own son. And Pyrrhus with his left hand clutched tight the hair of Priam; his right hand drew his glistening blade, and then he buried it hilt-high in the king's side. This was the end of Priam's destinies . . . Now he lies along the shore, a giant trunk , his head torn from his shoulders, as a corpse without a name." (2. 547-58) As Neoptolemus sinks back into the horror from which his father had emerged, the words "This was the end of Priam" overtake and destroy the calm of the words "Such was the burial of Hector." 2 The Fury of Aenea~ �Aeneas can do nothing for Priam, since he watches trapped on a roofbeam of the wrecked and burning palace. But as he watches Priam die, he remembers his own father, and all his helpless loved ones whom he has left at home while he fights a useless battle to vent his rage at the conquering Greeks. It seems that the memory of his father will recall Aeneas to the deeds the ghost of Hector has asked of him: to let Troy fall, and carry himself and Troy's holy things across the sea. Like Achilles, Aeneas has been wasting himself in the effort to exact the satisfaction of revenge from his enemies, and like Achilles he is restored to himself in remembering his father. But just as we begin to expect Aeneas to return to save his father, wife, and son, and leave revenge behind, his eye lights on Helen. In that sight his father's need of him is forgotten, and a blind fury to destroy the cause of so much evil overwhelms even his capacity to keep that evil from reaching those dearest to him . As Aeneas' sword is about to fall on Helen, his goddess-mother grabs his arm. Venus sends him to save his family, after showing him that not Helen but the gods are responsible for the destruction of Troy. But the violent arresting of Aeneas' arm when it has been set in motion by the strongest longing in his heart leaves behind a feeling of frustration which is not released until the last lines of the poem. That is the beginning of the story of Aeneas' journey . Let us try to understand how it speaks to Homer. The healing of Achilles' anger is the last event in his story, and nearly the last in his life. It is enshrined forever by the structure of Homer's story, which makes it the resolution of twenty-three books of tension. Achilles' story moves out of anger, through pity, to a peace in the midst of war . But does Homer's framing of that story reveal or distort? Does his emphasis convey the true weights of things? Virgil carries Homer's story beyond Homer's ending, to submerge Achilles' humanity in the brutality of his son and Hector's glorious funeral in the hideous, headless, nameless corpse of his father. But more important, Virgil appropriates the climactic moment of the Iliad to make it a fleeting mood which has no lasting effect, none in the world and none in the heart of Aeneas . The Iliad ends with a frozen picture of a pendulum at the top of its swing: the picture is beautiful but that of which it is a picture is unstable. If only the dualities in our lives could be laid to rest by our embracing of their wholesome sides, if only the death of anger could be an overcoming, once and for all, of its power over us, then the world might be a turbulent but finally a simple good place, and evil our own fault. But dead anger rises again; the self-destructive passions can be seen for what they are and still reassert their power over us. The poet Homer can show us things that make us glad, but is that seeing what we need? The anger of Aeneas recurs throughout the Aeneid, and both its ebb and its flow are destructive. · One of the principal teachings of the Aeneid is that rage is ineradicable from the human heart, because its cure is worse than the disease. Let us watch as Aeneas' eyes are opened to this ugliest of truths, in Virgil's second echo of the climax of the Iliad. . . The worst man in the Aeneid is undoubtedly Mezentius, a tyrant who tortured his subjects for sport until they rebelled and he escaped. Thou- St. John's Lecture Serla 3 �sands of those subjects unite with Aeneas in his Italian war, solely for the chance to kill Mezentius . Without any good reason, as Virgil puts it, another thousand remain loyal to Mezentius, among them his son Lausus, called breaker of horses. When Aeneas wounds Mezentius with a spearcast, Lausus, his valor awakened by his love for his father, prevents Aeneas' sword from falling, giving his companions the chance to save Mezentius and drive back Aeneas . Fury rises in Aeneas as he is once again thwarted on the point of killing a thing of evil, but as he waits in shelter for all his enemies' javelins to.-be thrown he calms down, and shouts at Lausus to be sensible and withdraw. When Lausus insists on fighting him, a greater anger surges in Aeneas, and in that rage he kills Lausus. At whom is Aeneas angry? Can it be at Lausus, whom he has no desire to fight and for whom he has nothing but admiration? As Aeneas looks at Lausus' dying face he sees the image of his own love for his own father, and gives the dead Lausus to his companions for honorable burial. It is at this moment that the transformation in the heart of Achilles resonates most strongly in the Aeneid, but Aeneas felt his pity before Lausus was dead, and would have spared him had he not been driven to a resurgence of his dead anger. To uhderstand the killing of Lausus is, I think, to be halfway to understanding the killing of Turnus, which would be equivalent to understanding the whole Aeneid. Let us keep trying. Lausus loves a father whom no one could respect. His motive is therefore pure, irrational love, with no other support . By painting Mezentius as unrelievedly, monstrously evil, Virgil makes the central choice of Lausus' life be between love and everything that makes sense. Even further, the circumstances of the battle force Lausus to measure the strength of that love, since after he has saved his father's life he could retreat honorably, and must decide whether to do so or to throw away his life. Unrestrained love and loyalty are, for Lausus, consistent only with what is wild and reckless: to attack Aeneas and die. Both Lausus and Aeneas have a long time to think about this before it happens. There is an irrational and inescapable logic at work in the scene: the better a man Lausus is, the more is it necessary that he die in a bad cause, and the more fully Aeneas recognizes his goodness the more necessary is it that he kill him, · and not do him the insult of refusing his self-sacrifice. The rage which supplies the motive power for the killing Aeneas has no heart to commit is a rage brought about by his recognition of the way in which both Lausus and he are trapped . Achilles and Priam , suffering the worst private grief, could draw together in mutual recognition and give each other what each needed most. Priam gave Achilles deliverance from his anger, and Achilles gave Priam the means and the time to unite with his city and his dead son in one last civic festival. In the corresponding Virgilian recognition scene, it seems that Lausus can give Aeneas nothing, and Aeneas can give Lausus only death. With the image of his own father in mind, Aeneas asks the dead Lausus, "Miserable boy, what can I give you now? What honor is worthy of your character?" (10. 825-6) He gives to the corpse the weapons in which it found its only happiness, and gives the corpse itself back to its 4 The Fury of Aeneas �own people, to be mingled with the ashes and shades of its ancestors, wondering aloud if that will matter to anyone. Finally, he dedicates to Lausus the only gift in his power which can solace such a miserably unhappy death: the resolve to make his own greatness such that there will be no shame in having fallen beneath it. Thus Lausus has given something to Aeneas-the burden of another obligation to the dead. The Homeric comfort of the sharing in human community is not available either to Lausus or to Aeneas. Lausus, whom Virgil introduces in Book seven as a young man worthy to be happy, had the wrong father, and he cannot but be the son of his father. Aeneas likewise cannot escape being the man on whom Trojans, Italians, and gods depend to stand divided in war from Lausus, and be his killer. The Homeric world, whatever divisions may be within it, makes a whole; the Virgilian world is too full of purposes too deeply crossed to be composed, ever. Arn I going too far in reading in an intensely painful but small tragic event a vision of a tragic world? Is not Virgil's theme the bringing of law to the world? Are not the tragedies of Lausus and Turnus and Camilla and Nisus and Euryalus and Pallas and Evander and Amata and Dido and Palinurus the events which Virgil shapes into the transformation of the world into a place in which such things will no longer happen? It is true that the bringing of the world to peace under law is the theme of the Aeneid, but we must not let anyone but Virgil tell us what Virgil thinks about that subject. We hear of it first, early in Book one, from Jupiter . He tells Venus that Aeneas' Roman descendents will be the lords of all things, without limits in time or place, that one of them, meaning Augustus, will carry his empire to the Ocean and his fame to the stars, and in doing so allow the rough ages of the world to become gentle under law. And here are Jupiter's last words: "The gruesome gates of war, with tightly welded iron plates, shall be shut fast. Within, unholy Rage shall sit on his ferocious weapons, bound behind his back by a hundred knots of brass; he shall groan horribly with bloody lips. " (293-6) Forty lines devoted to triumph and glory seem to dissolve in four lines of ugliness. One's gaze is turned not outward, to a world finally free of the source of war, but to the struggling caged being confined within . The last words of this first picture of Rome are not of victory or victors but of a victim, Furor , and of the sights and sounds of his pain. Why is rage presented as a person? Why is a reader who is incapable of enjoying a description of torture made to sympathize with the cause of war? Three lines after this ghastly and troubling portrait we hear for the first time in the poem the name of Dido. One third of the poem of the founding of Rome is the story of Dido, and more than a third of its impact is carried by Virgil's presentation of her . One famous commentator has said that Virgil was "no master of the epic art" because he allowed such things as the sufferings of Dido to overwhelm his efforts to glorify Rome. Another has said that the Aeneid is the first wholly successful epic ever written, because it is the first to have the unity attained previously only in dramas, a unity evident primarily in ·the complete merging of the Dido St. John's Lecture Series 5 �story into that of the triumph of Rome. Each commentator is half-right. The Aeneid is unified, but not around the figure of Augustus; Dido is the most powerful figure in Virgil's composition, but not by accident . The theme of Rome's bringing of a new age of law to the world enters the poem, modulates to a strange sadness, and passes over into the story of Dido. Dido's story is deeper than Rome's, and illuminates it. Dido is, to begin with, in the same situation as Aeneas, and she has handled that situation so well that everything about her gives hope to Aeneas at a time when he has none. She too has been driven out of her own country and been responsible for the lives of a band of fellowrefugees. She too has had to find a new life in the strange and unknown lands of the West. She has won a place for her people by winning the respect of neighboring rulers, and under her leadership, her subjects are building the conditions of a healthy communal life: fortifications , houses, a harbor, a theater, a senate. Already built, in the center of the city, is a temple to Juno, filled with scenes of the Trojan War. The work under way is to Aeneas a vision of happiness, and the completed work feeds his soul. One of the other Trojans sees in Carthage a city with the power to impose justice on the proud and a ruler with the goodness to spare the defeated . We will hear almost the same words spoken in Book six as an exhortation to Rome. The story of Dido, smaller only in geographical scale, begins where the story of Rome aims . Dido's Phoenician Carthage, where Aeneas tells the tale of his long wanderings, is, like the Phaiakian Scheria of Alkinous and Arete, a city ruled by virtue and strong intellect . Dido herself, like Penelope, is a woman with the dignity to keep arrogant suitors at a distance. And the hospitality, the capacity to permit another to be at home in a place that is not his own, that is so beautifully depicted in the Odyssey , is enjoyed by Aeneas nowhere but in the home of Dido. In Virgil's re-casting of Homer's story of Odysseus, almost all its places and people are condensed into the story of Dido. Like the Iliad, Homer's Odyssey is a story of the recovery of human community. Its culmination is the restoration of political order to Ithaca . But Dido's story reverses the Odyssean motion from anarchy to order, from savagery to serenity. In the midst of his journey Odysseus is cursed by a one-eyed monster, a non-human being who lives outside all law. At the end of his stay in Carthage, Aeneas too is cursed by a being who is outside all law and community, and that monster is Dido herself. Why was Dido so successful as a ruler? I think Virgil's briefest answer can be found near the end of Book one: because her soul was in repose, because in turn her heart was out of use (resides animos desuetaque corda, l. 722). Since the death of her first husband, she tells her sister, Aeneas alone has caused her judgment to bend and her soul to totter. (4. 20-3) The empty pathways which the flame of love once burned through her have not closed or healed. The ancient flame is still within Dido, just as the living rage is still behind the gates of war which Augustus closes with force and with law. In Latin, the name of Augustus' victim and that of Dido's conqueror are the same, juror. Virgil's one brief portrait of a happy city is of Carthage under the rule of Dido for only so long as the 6 The Fury of Aeneas �furious love within her is out of use. In the Odyssey , political community is displayed as the natural and the only life which realizes what it is to be a human being. In the Aeneid, political life is presented as depending upon the inhuman constraint that Dido practices upon herself and Augustus exerts on the world. Carthage thrives on Dido's serene control, and collapses into disarray when she falls in love. Many readers have seen in the fate of Dido a dangerous example which Aeneas must see and learn to avoid. Such readers see the foundations of the political life in Aeneas' rejection of her. Like an oak tree in the Alps shaken by the North wind, Aeneas suffers from love and care for Dido, but he withstands their fury. Reason holds firm against passion and duty vanquishes desire. One pities Dido, but rejoices that Aeneas does not let his own pity become a morass in which the hopes of his son and of the world would be lost. But Aeneas is bound to Dido not just by his love for her, which is his to control if he can, but by the fact that he has allowed her to love him . That is not passion but choice, and to reverse it is not duty but betrayal. In the simile of the oak tree, it is Aeneas' mind which overcomes the care in his breast , but that is merely the overcoming of the last obstacle to a choice he has already made. The widespread interpretation according to which Aeneas' rejection of Dido is a victory of the rational and political over the passionate and personal does not stand up to a moment's scrutiny. He has already told Dido that he loves her less than he loves the remnants of Troy which he had been bidden to carry to Italy. (4 .340-7) His choice is personal through-and-through . And in setting out for the city he will build in Italy, Aeneas knows that he is leaving Carthage in wreckage. (4. 86-9) His choice is political through-and-through as well . Aeneas cannot choose otherwise than he does. He has gotten himself into a fix from which there is only one way out . But he cannot pretend that what he does is not a betrayal. Aeneas does not understand his destruction of Dido as he will later understand his destruction of Lausus, but we need not be fooled . But if Aeneas' abandonment of Dido cannot be praised as an act of Stoic virtue, must it not be given its due as an act of piety? Twice Aeneas tells Dido that his leaving her for a bride and kingdom in Italy is not by his own will but in accordance with what is fated, and we have known from the second line of the poem that Virgil is writing of a man whose deeds are compelled by fate . But what is the nature of that compulsion? What does Virgil understand fate to be? He tells us that Dido's death was not only undeserved but unfated (4. 696), and, narrating a battle in Book nine, he tells us that if Turnus had hesitated a moment to break the bolts on one gate, Rome would never have come to be (9. 757-9) . In order to understand what Virgil has written, we must conceive a fate that is both limited and fallible. The Latinfatitm contains all the meanings of our word fate, but in it they are derivative meanings. Never absent from the Latin word is its primary sense of a thing spoken or uttered. And Virgil does not present the speech which is fate as an irrevocable decree, but uses the word with verbs meaning to call or to ask. The source of fate is a mystery in the St. John's Lecture Series 7 �Aeneid, but the nature of its action is evident. Fated outcomes are known to some among the gods and the shades of the dead, but are brought about only by human beings who must be lured , persuaded, or tricked. Every device of rhetoric must be used, because fate in the Aeneid remains always and altogether subordinate to human choice. The fall of Troy in Book two, for example, is a fated event. The destruction of the city is completed by Neptune, who shakes the walls and uproots the foundations from the earth, but neither he nor any other god acts so directly until the conquest of the Trojans by the Greeks is an accomplished fact. First, an indecisive war has been carried on for ten years. Second, the Greeks have concealed their best fighters in a counterfeit religious offering left on the beach of Troy. Third, a lying story told by a Greek has aroused the pity of the Trojans and inclined them to bring the fatal horse into their city. But beyond all the strength, cleverness, and rhetorical skill of the Greeks, one more element was necessary, without which, Aeneas says years later, Troy would still be standing: The minds of the Trojans had to be made left-handed (2.54-6) ; they had to be brought confidently to trust that the divine purpose was opposite to what it truly was. One respected Trojan leader, Laocoon, priest of Neptune, would have held Troy against all the resources of Greeks and gods, had he not been made to seem to be profaning a sacred offering . Laocoon had pierced the horse with a spear, before Sinon had told the Trojans that their prosperity would depend on treating the horse with reverence. At that moment a pair of gigantic snakes came across the sea and the land, making straight for the small sons of Laocoon, and killing them and him. That horrible supernatural spectacle was the call of fate which the Trojans answered to their own ruin . That which is fated must be recognized, interpreted, assented to, and carried out by human beings, who may be mistaken or may have been deliberately deceived. Aeneas is responsible not only for his choice to answer his fate, but also for the judgment that what fate calls him to is good. The half-understood future that could be brought about by Aeneas' deeds does make a powerful claim upon him, but so does the life of Dido, which he has allowed to become dependent upon him . No one but he can make the final decision that the former claim is more worthy of respect than the latter. That Aeneas is not comfortable with his choice is obvious when he begs Dido's ghost for understanding and absolution . Her stony refusal and undying hatred make it forever impossible for anyone to say that his choice was right . And the unforgettable example of Laocoon makes it equally impossible to take any comfort in the reflection that Aeneas' choice was fated. There is a powerful presence in the Aeneid of the inescapable, but it is not the same as nor even entirely compatible with the fated . The divine call which pulls one toward the future may be refused or defeated, but the human entanglements which grasp one from out of the past cannot be escaped . Aeneas can abandon Dido, but he can never be free of the pain of the knowledge that he has betrayed the love and trust he had once accepted from her. The true fatalism of the Aeneid is not a sense of the inevi- 8 The Fury of Aeneas �table triumph of what is to be, of a healing and elevating future, but a sense of the sad burden of all that has been , of past choices and rejections that one has not gotten beyond. Readers are sometimes puzzled by a character in the Aeneid who is mentioned repeatedly but to whom Virgil seems deliberately to have given no human features or qualities. He is the closest companion of Aeneas, but we never hear either speak to the other. He is the true or trusty Achates, whose name has become an idiomatic label for a devoted friend, but he seems to be nothing more than a label; we do not know who Aeneas' friend is or what he is like. But Virgil often gives his characters names which are descriptive in Greek. A Greek soldier whom Aeneas encounters on Sicily and whose story he trusts is called Achaemenides, "still a Greek." An aging boxer who rouses himself to win one last fight is called Entellus, "mature" or "at an end." A monster who seems to delight in evil itself is called Cacus, "the evil one. " As a Greek word, Achates would name "one who grieves," one whose special or characteristic business is to grieve. Never absent from the side of Aeneas in anything he does is the true or trusty grieving one; never, in the Aeneid, does hope overcome grief. The burden of grief which one feels through the last two-thirds of the poem is thus explicitly figured in the person of Achates as Aeneas' second self. The inescapability of the past is also figured by Virgil in one of the great central images of the poem , that of the labyrinth . We hear of it first in Book five, in connection with an intricate display of horsemanship by the Trojan children, but the words are too strong for their immediate occasion. The sons of Troy are said to be entangled in "an undiscovered and irretraceable wandering" (5 .591) as in the dark and ambiguous Labyrinth of ancient Crete. Aeneas soon sees a carved image of that Labyrinth on the walls of the Sibyl's cave, when be begins his journey in Book six to the land of the dead . The Sibyl tells him that it will be easy to enter that land, but to retrace his way to the upper air, "this," she says, "is work; this is labor." (6.126-9) We are made to think of the Trojans' journey to Italy as labyrinthine, and to expect Aeneas' return from Hell to be especially so. We are startled, then, at the end of Book six, when Aeneas' return to the upper world is no trouble at all. Notoriously, that return is through the gate of false dreams. Great ingenuity has been expended by many interpreters to remove the taint of falsity from Aeneas' mission , but it cannot be done. Aeneas returns to earth with his soul burning with the love of coming fame, and that is a false exit from the land of the dead, the place of Dido. The Labyrinth image is still with us, the sense of betrayal of Dido's love has not been left behind, and the Sibyl is right: what lies before Aeneas is the true labor. He has not left the place of the dead; he will carry it with him wherever he goes. The war in Italy which occupies the last third of the Aeneid has a labyrinthine structure . When Turnus enters the Trojan camp in Book nine, he is pressed back to the walls and carried back to his comrades by the Tiber before there is any decisive outcome. In Book ten, when Turnus has killed Pallas, he and Aeneas fight toward each other, but Juno lures St. John's Lecture Series 9 �Turnus away from the battlefield with a phantom-Aeneas made of wind. In Book eleven, when there is a truce, Aeneas and Turnus are both eager to submit to single combat when a double misunderstanding makes the war resume; the two men finally catch sight of each other across a plain, just as night falls. In the last book, Turnus' goddess-sister, disguised as his charioteer, keeps carrying him away when Aeneas catches sight of him. It is only in the last lines of the poem that Aeneas reaches the center of the maze. The monster he finds there is not Turnus, now humble, resigned to death, and gracious in defeat. What is the meaning of Aeneas' last furious act of violence? What does the maze of war and frustration that stands between Aeneas and his final confrontation with Turnus have to do with the false exit from the land of the dead by which Aeneas seems to have entered his labyrinth? The strange and abrupt ending of the Aeneid collects into itself all that has gone before it. It is a vivid culmination of the theme of the labyrinth, but that image in turn takes its meaning from a chain of connected images of which it is part. The first of these images is Aeolia, the vast cave of the winds in which, we are told, angry tempests rage in indignation at the mountain which confines them (l.53-6). Unrestrained, those winds would destroy the seas, the lands, and heaven itself. Therefore Jupiter, here called the omnipotent father, confined them and gave them a king skilled to know when to loosen, when to draw in, their reins. Can the word omnipotens be intended seriously in this context? It seems that it cannot mean more than "stronger than anything else" so that even the winds can be brought under the control of the strongest one. If Jupiter were truly able to do anything, he could change the nature of the winds, or destroy them and replace them with others just as useful and not as dangerous. Could it be that one with the power to choose otherwise would judge it good to design a world in which hurricanes must sometimes be unleashed? The single word omnipotens leaves that question hanging over the poem . The second image in the poem which picks up the theme of caged fury is one we examined earlier: Furor, rage itself, removed from the world and imprisoned behind the iron gates of war. What we found strange in that picture was the presentation of rage personified as an object of pity. We saw then that the image of Furor led directly into the story of Dido, and that her story was of the unleashing of juror within her . It is in the story of Dido that the two earlier images begin to make sense. Dido is ruined because she is capable of loving without restraint. The years of her self-denial make possible the existence of Carthage, because the chiefs of the surrounding countries respect her fidelity to her dead husband, and because it gives her reign a dignity and stability under which her subjects thrive. But her sister, who loves her·, does not want Dido to continue that life. Royalty does not fulfill the longings caged within Dido. When Venus wants to bind Dido to Aeneas by means of lust, she begins by arousing in Dido tenderness for a small child. Once Dido falls in love with Aeneas, her ruin is assured, but she only becomes vulnerable to falling in love by first feeling a loving response to a child. Would· Dido 10 The Fury of Aeneas �have been better off if a child sitting in her lap could arouse no irrational longing in her childless heart? - if intimate contact with a child left her feeling no more than the general benevolence she had for all her subjects? If not, if a cold, loveless life is never choiceworthy, then the omnipotent father was right to leave the furious and destructive things in the world, and Virgil was right to grieve over the imposition of law on the earth. For even a mother's love is potentially furious, as we see it in the mothers of Euryalus and Lavinia. And the loving, irrational desire to have a child of one's own is inseparable from all the raging loves and hates within us. It is not the political life which fulfills us, if Virgil is right, but the loving attachments to particular other people, which also make us vulnerable to frenzy, madness, and war. Virgil uses the cave of the winds and the gates of war as images of the human soul, which always encloses irrational longings and loyalties capable of furious emergence into the world. Madness, as of Lausus, anger, as of Aeneas, rage of battle, as of Turnus, passionate love, as of Dido, prophetic frenzy, as of the Sybil, and poetic inspiration, as of Virgil himself: these are the meanings my small Latin dictionary gives for the word juror, the name Virgil gives to the being at the center. And what is the labyrinth which surrounds the center? It is, I think, Virgil's picture of any life which ignores or denies the furious things at the center. Aeneas leaves the land of the dead glorying in his vision of the Roman future, only to find in Italy the same intractable opposition he has left behind in Dido, and finally to yield to it in himself. And Augustus subdues the proud of all the world, only to become a monster of pride himself. In Book eight a fourth image joins the winds, the gates and the labyrinth. In the land of King Evander Aeneas sees the rock on which the Senate of Rome will one day stand, and learns that it once enclosed the home of a murderous, fire-breathing, half-human monster named Cacus. From the "proud doorposts" of this senseless killer there had always hung rotting, severed heads of his human victims . (8.195-7) Evander tells how Hercules killed the monster and exposed his dark cavern to the light of the sun. Commentators routinely take the triumphant Hercules as a "symbol" for Aeneas, who overcomes the monsters of unreason, Dido and Turnus, and for Augustus, who will overcome war itself. One who reads Evander's account not as a symbol but as a story, though, must feel some unease as Hercules, before he can kill Cacus, must become a thing of fury and frenzy himself. Hercules' triumph is not an example with which one can be quite comfortable. Book eight ends with a hundred lines describing the future glories of Rome depicted on Aeneas' shield, culminating with Au: gustus sitting in triumph over conquered peoples from all the nations of the earth. In a characteristic stroke, Virgil says that Aeneas rejoiced in the images, ignorant of the things, so that once again a portrait of Rome just fails to come into focus as a sight at which one could be glad. The attentive reader will have seen that Augustus on the shield hangs the spoils of all the world on his "proud doorposts," a phrase used only of him and of Cacus. The same spot is still the home of a monster, but the new one ravages the whole world. St. Johns L ecture Series 11 �There are two kinds of motion in a labyrinth. The outward motion is an illusion of progress away from something. It is the more pitiable, because the more ignorant, of the two kinds. It characterizes the march of imperial Rome outward over the world. It is seen in what Virgil calls in Book six the."proud soul of Brutus the punisher," expeller of the Tarquins, the first to rule as consul, who, for the sake of beautiful freedom" put love of country and praise ahead of everything else and killed his own sons. Virgil calls him "unhappy father, no matter what posterity may say of his deed." (6.817-23) And Augustus cannot escape the same human vulnerability that Brutus tried to deny. A few lines later in Book six, the entire spectacle of the shades of the heroes of Rome is immersed in grief over Marcellus, the young man Augustus adopted and named as his heir, but who died when he was twenty. No political order holds any answer for or relief from human troubles. It is after Aeneas hears the infinity of grief over Marcellus in his father's voice, that he looks back over the soul of his triumphant offspring, recovers his own love of fame, and returns to the world through the gate of false dreams. But Aeneas is no Augustus. He is too aware of the losses and pains of others for his own proud illusions ever to last for long. Aeneas for the most part moves in the other direction, inward in the labyrinth. This is the direction of "if only". If only Helen were dead; if only Dido could be made to understand; if only Lausus would see reason; if only Turnus would surrender. Aeneas never used his quest for political glory as an excuse to turn his back on a human being in distress, but he cannot relinquish that quest, on which so many others depend, and he can never quite find his way to the center of the source of distress to remove its cause. At the beginning of Book eight, the last in a long succession of divine apparitions comes to Aeneas. The old god of the Tiber tells him that his troubles are near an end, and that home and rest await him. He must fight and win a war with the Latins, but for once help will be available. Inland along the Tiber live Arcadian Greeks ruled by King Evander. They will happily join Aeneas in his fight and he can put an end once and for all to the troubles he has carried with him for so long and in which he has involved so many others. Aeneas does find welcome and help in Evander's city, Pallanteum. As in Carthage, he finds too much welcome and too much help. It turns out that Evander once met Aeneas' father, and adored him with youthful love. The gifts Anchises gave him seem to be the only signs of wealth Evander has allowed to remain in his city. (8.155-69) History repeats itself in Pallanteum, in a double sense. As with their fathers, Pallas is fired with a loving admiration for Aeneas. As he joins with him, we see in one brief, lovely scene, a greater closeness between the two than we ever see between Aeneas and his own son. (10.159-62) But Aeneas' recent Carthaginian history repeats itself at the same time: from Evander and from Pallas, Aeneas has again accepted the loving gift of a human life, entrusted to his care. Pallas seems to think Aeneas can answer the deepest questions of his life, but the two men know each other only for a day. When Pallas arrives in Latium he begins to fight, and two hundred lines 12 The Fury of Aeneas �later he is dead. Like every young man in the Aeneid, excepting only Iulus, who is deliberately kept out of the fighting, Pallas dies at the moment of his greatest valor. That is the theme of Book nine, in which, in Aeneas' absence, only young men are fighting. It is embodied in the figure of Euryalus, whose longing for glory leads him to put on the shining helmet of one of his victims, immediately to become a victim because'that shining makes him an easy target. (9. 359-66, 373-4) It is embodied, too, in the similes of Book nine, which liken the young warriors to beasts of prey which, if they are daring and successful predators, become a danger to men and an easy prey. Pallas cannot escape the Virgilian logic of glory and death. The saddest words of this saddest of poems are spoken by Aeneas to the corpse of Pallas: "The same horrible fate of war calls me from here to other tears; hail from me eternally, dearest Pallas, and eternally farewell." (11. 96-8) In the last lines of the poem, Aeneas recognizes that there is no such thing as an eternal farewell. The dead live as sources of obligation, and neither death nor any ceremony can cancel such debts. If Dido can be assimilated to a larger purpose, then she did not live. If Lausus' decision to throw away his life were not acknowledged as binding his adversary, then Lausus would not be recognized as the source of his own choices. And if Pallas can be forgotten for the sake of the living, and the greater number, then Pallas himself is accorded no worth at all. Human worth does not fit in any scales. Its claims are unconditional. We admire Aeneas in the war books of the last third of the poem because he always seeks the sanest and most sensible solutions for his enemies as well as for his own people. We rage along with him when trivial, irrational causes produce and prolong the slaughter . Aeneas longs for peace and for harmony with all the tribes in Italy. And what does Turnus fight for? For wholly selfish reasons and for the joy of fighting . Must he not be cut down like the Irrational thing he is, so decent citizens might get on with the business of living in co-operation? To see that this is not how Virgil regards Turnus, listen to this simile with which Turnus goes out to fight: "He is delirious with courage, his hope already tears the enemy: just as a stallion when he snaps his tether and flies off from the stables, free at last to lord the open plains, will either make for meadows and the herds of mares or else leap from the stream where he is used to bathing and, wanton, happy, neigh, his head raised high, while his mane sweeps across his neck and shoulders." (11.491-7) Turnus is young, strong, brave, and handsome. He is not made for submission to a foreigner who arrives saying he is destined to marry his fiancee and be his king. In the line following the simile of the stallion, Virgil brings Camilla into the poem, to fight beside Turnus. She is an instant and complete communion with Turnus. The freedom and the lordship of Italy is theirs by birth and by nature. Each of them is crushed by what Aeneas has brought to Italy, but each dies with the sentiment that something unworthy has happened. At the end, when Turnus lies wounded at Aeneas' feet, we begin to hear again the familiar echoes of the end of the Iliad , but this time they St. Johns Lecture Series 13 �are like a deceptive cadence in a piece of music. Turnus asks Aeneas to remember his own father and to return him, alive or dead as he prefers, to his father. But as Aeneas begins to relax, and we expect the gesture of reconciliation that Aeneas has tried so hard and so often to make to come finally as a healing ending to the poem, Aeneas instead remembers Pallas, and kills Turnus in fury. Why? It is his seeing the belt of Pallas, which Turnus is wearing as spoil, that precipitates the deed. What does Aeneas see when he looks at the belt? I think it is not too much to say that he sees in it everything that has happened to him through the eight years and twelve books that have gone before. The belt is carved with a legendary scene of fifty bridegrooms killed on their wedding night. It recalls the spectacle Aeneas watched from the roof of Priam's ruined palace, with its fifty bridal chambers for his sons. (2.503-4; 10. 497-9) It must, too, re-open the wound of the memory of the bridal chamber he himself shared so briefly with Dido. And as showing men cut down in their youth, it must remind him of much that has happened around· him in the war just fought. But more than anything else, it brings back to him Pallas, to whom he could not succeed in saying good-bye. As he kills Turnus, Aeneas calls Pallas "my own ." His acceptance of the call of fate prevented Aeneas from dying alongside his own people in his own city of Troy. It prevented him from remaining loyal to his own lover, Dido. But the gods have now left Aeneas alone. The last act of the poem is the first one that is unequivocally Aeneas' own, and on his own, though inclined toward a characteristic and politically sound act of kindness, Aeneas commits a furious and painful murder out of love. Turnus dies rightly feeling that his death is unworthy of him. But Aeneas, finally at the center of the labyrinth of his own life, could not let Turnus live and be worthy of the gift of Pallas' life and death. In the inevitable conflict of unconditional claims, one can only cling to one's own. Pnnted at· the St. /ohni College Print Shop In Annapolis � 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. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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. 15 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The fury of Aeneas Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1981-10-02 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on October 2, 1981 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Sachs 1981-10-02 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sachs, Joe, 1946- Friday night lecture Tutors