23 20 453 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a64b896d1a0d09c64e2ced53070d68f5.mp3 6d513b314c3b39d6b6667a248ad96265 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. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:54:51 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grenke, Michael W. Title A name given to the resource What Will Heaven Be Like? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-01-18 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 18, 2013, by Michael Grenke as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Subject The topic of the resource Heaven in literature Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Grenke_Michael_2013-01-18_ac Relation A related resource <a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/29">Typsecript</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1676e43cf74c07c0fba76a0e9d7bd456.mp3 67cf9a98edd0947ec6800a445824fd92 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 CD Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:11:59 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Greene, Joshua David, 1974- Title A name given to the resource Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive Science Matters for Ethics Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-11-11 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 11, 2011, by Joshua Greene as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Greene describes his lecture: "How does the moral brain work, and how can it work better?... In this talk I'll review evidence old and new for the dual-process theory of moral judgment, according to which moral judgments are driven by both automatic emotional responses and controlled reasoning processes. I'll argue that these distinctive cognitive processes map onto competing moral philosophies, respectively typified by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. I'll then consider the respective functions of automatic and controlled processes. Automatic processes are like the point-and-shoot settings on a camera, efficient but inflexible. Controlled processes are like a camera's manual mode, inefficient but flexible. Putting these theses together, I'll argue that we often make poor use of our moral brains, using point-and-shoot morality to deal with problems it can't handle. I'll argue that when it comes to dealing with peculiarly modern moral problems, we should think more like Mill and less like Kant." Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Subject The topic of the resource Ethics Psychology. Moral and ethical aspects Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 79636 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1feb06e98eddf199ba6cd00432b64aa9.mp3 43a3c821426394d05562b9fc8d074add 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 CD Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:56:29 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Davis, Matthew K. Title A name given to the resource Is Man the Measure of All Things? Plato's Analysis of Relativism Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012-01-13 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 13, 2012, by Matthew Davis as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Subject The topic of the resource Plato. Theaetetus Relativity Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Davis_Matthew_2012-01-13_ac Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1bb7aeca3be07f8c6e7a7a3ad7abda18.mp3 db6ab2cb4ebceac24eecb3f8b45f3777 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 CD Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:51:47 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Casson, Douglas Title A name given to the resource Stabilizing Currency: Locke on Money, Morality, and Natural Law Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-04-01 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 1, 2011, by Douglas Casson as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I herby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Subject The topic of the resource Locke, John, 1632-1704. Essay concerning human understanding. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Casson_Douglas_2011-04-01_ac Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9ff8008938037cda52b6fc22810feddc.mp3 510dfd251d11e27420a8f3ffba2de557 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. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:36:15 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Casey, Dylan Patrick Title A name given to the resource Surprises and Sweet Spots: On Discovery and Recognition Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-02-08 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 8, 2013, by Dylan Casey as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Casey_Dylan_2013-02-08_ac Subject The topic of the resource Surprise Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6153a94099399c04243e0852a11b1f41.mp3 458b6f190232ae9ff3036ce7c7f5a4f4 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. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:42:47 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Burger, Ronna, 1947- Title A name given to the resource In the wilderness : Moses as founder and lawgiver Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-10-18 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 18, 2013 by Ronna Burger as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Subject The topic of the resource Moses (Biblical leader) Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 81124 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f7fe94bafdd022d99723e9c0c00c622a.mp3 1f4ce3433a83047357c2b6e828b8d191 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 CD Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:05:41 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brubaker, Lauren Title A name given to the resource Wealth, Virtue and Corruption: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-01-21 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 21, 2011, by Lauren Brubaker as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I herby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Subject The topic of the resource Smith, Adam, 1723-1790. Theory of moral sentiments. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Brubaker_Lauren_2011-01-21 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7060539b4319cc5b31a383b0ea88c34d.mp3 2b7a36e3c45c4c99e665093803f4c161 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. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:48:48 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brogan, Michael J. Title A name given to the resource Dwelling in the Land of the Confessions Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-11-22 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 22, 2013, by Michael Brogan as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Subject The topic of the resource Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. Confessiones. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Brogan_Michael_2013-11-22 Relation A related resource <a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/13">Typescript</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c24fb5eda2bebd109c9a451c5952a537.pdf 0c8b612cde616302915c56575c7e1658 PDF Text Text What does music mean? Examples from Bach, theory from Kant Matthew Caswell Is music about anything? Can music represent anything at all? That is, can it mean something besides itself? Much of our music may seem to bear meaning unproblematically, since it consists of sung lyrics. Indeed, the association of musical tones with speech is primeval and enduring: the oldest poems and prayers were at the same time songs, we are told. But if music as music can represent, it doesn't do so in the manner of its ancient companion, speech. Like musical tones, words are sounds, but these sounds are taken by us as tokens of concepts, universals which we put to use in judgment, predicating the concepts of one another. There has been great controversy across the ages over how exactly strings of words in a sentence manage to mean something, but no one doubts that words have meaning. (It would be difficult to articulate such a doubt to yourself, or to anyone else, for obvious reasons.) We are less sure about tones. Since music is not a language of signs, it cannot be translated or decoded into prose in a way that carries over its power as music. At the same time, many of us would resist the claim that music is meaningless. Beethoven inscribed on his Missa Solemnis: "from the heart, may it reach other hearts." The composer wasn't merely a deft technician able to incite feelings in others; he took himself to be a thinker- that is, someone with a communicable inner life. What is in our hearts as we make music, and what do our hearts receive upon listening? In order to begin to answer these questions, we will first survey three of the ways music can be thought to mean, or to represent, using as our sourcebook of examples Bach's St Matthew Passion. In the second part of the lecture, we will turn to the account of the meaning of beautiful art offered by Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest modern theorist of the beautiful. As we shall see, Kant's deep metaphysics of representation may be especially well-suited to making sense of the beautiful representations of music. 1 1 Kant is thought not to have been a music-lover. Nevertheless, his brief remarks on music in the Critique of Judgement are insightful. He argues that music is only beautiful in so far as it pleases through our reflection 1 �I. BACH At least three different species of musical representing can be found in the Passion. In many of the oratorio's passages, combinations of these categories are mixed and blurred; our analysis will to some extent abstract from this highly multifarious character of Bach's work. Furthermore, our examples will all be taken from the recitative portions of the work, Bach's setting of the scripture text. The recitatives, while ornate and dense with musical invention, involve less complicated poetic and musical structures than do the song-like arias, chorales, and choral numbers, making our task of analysis and organization a bit easier. Type 1: Sound Imitation Perhaps the simplest way for a musical sound to point beyond itself is by resembling some other sound from the wider world. Think here of a timpani rolling in imitation of thunder, or of a bassoon muttering in imitation of your grandfather's voice. Like a portrait of a friend is, among other things, a likeness of our friend, the timpani roll sounds something like thunder, and can therefore represent as a stand-in. This is the model of representation scrutinized by Socrates in Book 10 of the Republic: representation here stands to thing represented as image to original. Obviously, the objects artificially imitated by sound can only be things that are already audible. Let's first listen to a brief recitative passage, and then focus on an instance of sound imitation within it. The Gospel text, recounting the disciple Peter's betrayal of Christ, in English, is as follows: on its "forms"; that is, melody, harmony, and even tone itself for Kant are not mere sensations but structured objects of reflection. Even his critique of music's essential intrusiveness, and thus lack of "urbanity" (he compares the inescapable spread of sound to the spread of an odor) is perceptive. Artists like Bach were surely aware that much of their power lay in the audience's inability to "turn [its] eyes away" (KU, 330). 2 �And Peter remembered the words of Jesus to him, "Before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times." And he went out and wept bitterly. (Passion, §46, measures 5-12) Now take a look at a moment about a quarter of the way through that selection- it's the first example on your handout. In the second measure, the Evangelist hops through an arpeggiated triad on the word "kraehen" or "crow", the sound of his voice recalling the sound of a rooster's crow. [see example #1, handout: §46, measures 7-8] Directly mimetic moments like these are rare in the Passion. The tones, whose native tongue is melody, are here compelled to play the part of mere noise. Though they point to something by reminding us of it, they seem to mean little; they are not a language giving utterance, but an auditory reminder. There is also something humorous in these moments: it is the comedy of Bach's noble tones momentarily throwing on the low dress of inhuman, unspiritual sound. One of the most charming things about this technique is that the dress can be thrown off as easily and as quickly as it is put on. At the same time, it should be noted that this imitative dress is still music's own. We are not fooled into thinking a rooster has snuck into the church; Bach has pointed to the animal's call from well within his musical world. After all, the sound here hear is a dominant triad, and real roosters don't sing chords. 2 The tonal material of this imitation thematizes its artful distance from its referent, ensuring that it is heard as an imitation. 3 I also will note here that there are more complicated and richer uses of sound imitation in the Passion, but because they are not merely imitative, I'll return to their investigation a bit later. cf Kant's discussion of bird-song, and its imitation: KU, 302. Any other sound imitations in the Passion? See the alto aria "Buss und Reu": "die Tropfen meiner Zaehren" [the drops of my tears] are accompanied by a drip-dropping in the flutes (Passion, §1 0, measure 70). 2 3 3 �Type 2: Tone-painting Can music point to anything besides other sounds? Consider the following recitative section from earlier in the Passion. The Gospel text is as follows: "And they sang the hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives. Then Jesus said to them: All of you will be made to fail me in the course of this night. For its is written: I will strike the shepherd, and the flock of sheep will be scattered. But after my resurrection, I will lead the way for you into Galilee." (Passion, §20) In the first verse of this passage we find a second species of musical representation. This is the second example on the hand-out. Just as the disciples' motion up the mountain will be narrated in the text, the cello accompaniment steps up the degrees of the scale, marked staccato, through an octave. [see example #2, handout: Passion, §20, measures 1-3] The term of art for this technique is "tone-painting,"- there are in fact several of them in this section- and they each involve a deceptively simple analogy. For the tones do not actually "rise" in space. Perhaps because we feel the so-called "higher" tones more in our head, and the "lower" in our chests, we associate the change in pitch with the up-down direction. More fundamentally, tones in a melody constitute a heard order, and so are strongly analogous to a set of discrete "places" or topoi to which one might move. This fact underlies the analogical sense of our talk of musical "steps": because the scale, a determinate set of discrete pitches in order, is already implied by the melodic or harmonic context, we hear the "rising" sequence here not simply as a change in position, but as a step-by-step motion from one place to another, without skipping any places along the way. Moreover, since tones recapitulate their melodic function at the octave- as when men and women sing a tune together, they sing exactly an octave apart- , we hear that our steps have taken us as far as we can possibly go-"all the way" to top of the mountain, so to speak. 4 There are in fact two 'arrivals' at the summit here: first the accompaniment leads us from C# to the C# in the voice on the downbeat of the next measure, then the voice extends the climb to A, the root of the dominant seventh chord pointing to a resolution in D. Together, both climbs make up a harmonic "?-station", 4 4 �This sort of tone-painting is knowing and witty. While the sound imitation of the rooster's crow made use of an auditory resemblance, the tone-painting does not resemble, but analogizes. We notice the analogy between the tonal motion and the locomotion noted in the text, and smile at Bach's artistry in coordinating the two. One could imagine an entire Passion oratorio composed this way, with the text continually illuminated or decorated with musical analogies of the action. This would be an amusing, arch, and civilized work, but would suggest that music's representational power is of a decidedly second-order nature. For the musical "ascent" here tells us no more than the text already does on its own: its delight is in the artistry-the cleverness, I want to say-- used in contriving the analogy. Indeed, like musical sound imitation, tone painting is always heard as artifice. To take the melodic ascent as a representation, one must intellectually connect the two sides of the analogy, which are in themselves alien to each other. 5 Type 3: Musical ideas What about this passage, a few moments later in the Passion? Jesus is speaking to his disciples at Gethsemene, and says to them "sit you here, I will go go there and pray." This is the third example. [see example #3, handout: Passion, §24, measures 4-6] Bach has Jesus stretch out the word "bete"-- "pray", as the strings execute a beautiful cadence in the accompaniment. Is this measure of music a representation? Let's take a closer look at the music. The first three syllables of Jesus' address spell or "return" passage. 5 Tone painting typically makes use of the sort of spatial analogies music is ripe for, and therefore often (I suspect always) involves a musical analogue of locomotion. These analogies are aided by the conventions of the graphics of score-writing: when you look at the score for the above passage, you see the signs for the tones arranged up an incline. Or look at the tone painting from a moment later, where Jesus speaks of the scattering of the flock (§20, measures 8-1 0). We know that Bach did in fact devote special attention to the appearance of the St. Matthew Passion score. The fact that this visual duplication of the analogy is really only available to the musical insider with score in hand underscores tone-painting's cleverness and humor. 5 �out a triad in B-flat, with a deep B-flat chord held in the strings. But as he lands on his fourth syllable, "hier", the strings add an A-flat to this same triad, generating a mild dissonance, and leaning unmistakably forward towards the next chord. The strings then resolve the dissonance, drawing out a long, rich, major triad on E-flat, into which Jesus begins to speak the word for prayer. 6 He leans through a dissonant F on the downbeat of the measure, and then holds an E-flat through the first syllable, resting in the tonal home or center of this passage. The accompaniment here begins to cycle through a series of chords, each casting a different light on and around that same E-flat. Jesus' bass voice allows his words to be set in the middle of the pitch-range of the accompanying strings. He is thus surrounded by the chords which seem fo emanate from him. This effect is often called Jesus' "halo" of strings. The effect through the first half of this 'bete' measure is of a slowly beating oscillation of different gestures away from home. Then, just as Jesus finishes speaking, the strings finally move more dramatically to a dominant seventh chord on B-flat, rooted on the fifth degree of the scale, and featuring a poignant tritone dissonance between the top and middle voices. The dissonant chord is resolved to the home triad, completing the periodic harmonic journey. The strings form this harmonic period in four voices, the top two moving contrarily towards each other, and the bottom two moving contrarily away from each other. Contrary melodic motion helps maximize the individuality of the voices, without frustrating their harmoniousness. Indeed, the string voices in this passage seem to act on their own for the sake of each other: gracefully making way for one another, or pausing to offer friendly resistance. Here Bach compounds contraries within contraries, intensifying the harmonious diversity of the motion. The crucial dominant seventh chord, unlike the other chords in the sequence, is articulated across several overlapping rhythms, prolonging the tension in that chord as we hear each voice move into place within the leaning whole of the chord. Bach postpones the appearance of the tritone dissonance until the last possible moment. The whole passage is balanced, natural, gentle, and whole. It is a graceful motion that has its end in sight as it begins, but whose particular trajectory is not exactly determined, but rather full of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic contingency along the way. (Let's listen again.) The whole passage seeks its home in E-flat. This home was established in the immediately preceding chorale, "lch will hier bei dir stehen", which begins and ends in E-flat major. The Evangelist narration then picks up with an F-chord, which functions as a secondary dominant. The F gets its seventh with the word "Gethsemene", resolving to 8-flat, which will go on to serve as the dominant seventh in Jesus' prayer passage. 6 6 �Is this a representation of prayer? Obviously, no sound imitation, as we saw in Type 1, is at work here. Unlike our Type 2 tone-painting, the musical motion here does not resemble some locomotion, by means of an analogy between tones and place. After all, a prayer is neither a noise, nor is it a locomotion. And for this reason, we detect none of Bach's ironic authorial cleverness in the connection between prayer and this cadence. We do not smile at the artful touch: rather, we are moved by what may seem to be a glimpse of a true nature. The lack of isomorphism connects the music and the thought more intimately: we are not hearing something that sounds like a person praying, and we are not hearing prayer illustrated or decorated, we are hearing prayerfulness made audible. Here, the music-- the tones in time Jesus sings-- and the object-- a prayerful inner disposition-- are not thoroughly alien to each other, but seem rather to be of a piece. To say that the cadence "means" or "represents" prayer might be misleading. It would not be possible, without the text, to deduce what in the world the cadence was "about." At the same time, the things in the world it would be the perfect setting for are not limitless. This is not Aeneas sinking his sword into Turnus' chest; it is not Hamlet castigating his mother; it is not even Socrates cooling his feet in the stream. Although we can't spell out the rule according to which, given either the thought or the music, we could derive or compose the other, we might have the curious impression that no other moment than this one is as well captured by this particular cadence in the strings and voice. In its contingency with respect to any rule, it is particular, unlike the two previous Types of representation. The text makes the notion of prayer explicit for the listener. There are other concepts we might reach for in an attempt to articulate the meaning of the passage: above, I used the words 'graceful,' 'gentle,' 'natural,' and 'whole.' But none of these words, and not even the leading notion 'prayer' seem to get the music just right. Our concepts may be appropriate, but they do not exhaust. This feature of conceptual inexhaustibility was also missing in the sound imitation and tone painting examples. The sound imitation and the actual call of a rooster both involve a quick rising figure: to some extent, they both bear the same sound. The motion of the tones and the motion of the disciples are analogues: they are both step-wise changes in place. Here, the act of prayer and the motion of the phrase are both .... something. We need not remain silent about what that something is, but we know we won't be able to spell it out satisfactorily. There is also marked difference in the response of the listener at moments like these, compared with the cases of sound imitation or tone-painting. While we might delight in the 7 �cleverness of either of the former, pleasure is more deeply involved in our apprehension of the third type of representation. "Pleasure" is in fact not the whole story: there is a complex of pleasures and pains in our hearing this passage- pains of longing, pleasures of consummation. No one has ever been moved to tears by a sound imitation, nor by a tone-painting. Speaking of tears, I'd like to note another, more complicated case of musical representation in the Passion, one in which the first and third types are brilliantly combined. For not all imitable sounds are as cheeky as a rooster crowing. What about the sounds of the human voice, especially that voice when it is involved in the inarticulate expression of emotion- the laugh, the sigh, the sob--? Some have thought that musical meaning as such derives from the refined imitation of emotionally expressive vocal sounds. I don't think musical meaning can possibly be accounted for on such terms, but Bach will sometimes allude to expressive sound imitation, at the same time that he transcends it. Take this passage, from the close of the episode of Peter's betrayal we looked at above. It's the fourth example on your hand-out. [see example #4, handout: §46, measures 9-12] "He went out, and wept bitterly'' -- Bach sets the last two words to a weaving, sinuous melody in f-sharp minor, the key of the famous subsequent aria. On the word "weinete"-- "wept"-- the line sinks from the tonic f-sharp through the upper half of the minor scale, landing on a chromatic non-scale tone b#. This unexpected tone arrests our motion down the scale, leaning sharply back up towards the scale-tone 5 (c#) which we have just descended through. The Evangelist takes the opportunity of this unstable, hanging arrest to leap up almost an octave, and to wind even more torturously than before back to the tonic and the fifth, framing the final cadence. No one has ever wept so melodiously. Holding key tones over the beats, and making bold moves between the beats, the cry becomes a passionate dance. As the exquisite articulation of the melody takes over, and takes on a life of its own, the sound that reminded us of crying becomes something else: not an imitation of an audible sign of anguish, but a representing of the anguish of regret and penitence itself: sorrowful anguish made audible. As in Jesus' prayerful harmonic period, we here get a glimpse of the otherwise invisible. As in the earlier example, our apprehension is a complex of delectable pleasures and pains. And in both cases, the fully musical idea, unpredictable according to any thinkable 8 �rule, moves us. In the foregoing descriptions, I have in several places referred to the leaning tendency of particular tones and chords, naming the former by their scale degree, and the latter by the technical vocabulary of 'tonic, dominant, etc.' Analysis of the tonality of a piece is a crucial task in attempting to make its particular meaning clear in speech. In this sense it is similar to the analysis of the meter of poetic verse, the grammar of a sentence, or the logical figure of a proof. The phenomenon of tonality, of the heard relational structure of tones, is all-important to music, and so theoretically interesting, we might be led to say that the meaning of music is simply tonal function. In Zuckerkandl's terms, the meaning of a tone or chord would then just be its "dynamic quality." Simi·larly, music's rhythmic order in time unfolds through the cycling of upbeats and downbeats, and we might add rhythmic quality- a tone's position in the time-wave which it itself generates- as another element of musical meaning. On this interpretation, music would not represent anything beyond itself, and our thinking about a piece of music, if it were to remain non-fanciful, would be confined to reflection on the movement and structure of the musical sounds themselves. There is something incomplete in this conception of musical meaning, however. To be sure, music cannot make Peter's anguish present to us without the means of tonality and rhythm. 7 But I take it that an essential element of our understanding of such a passage, and of our pleasure in it, is that something not exclusively musical is being made present. The moving syntactic relations in time and tone enable music to 'make sense', as it were, but they do not, on their own, make it beautiful. As Zuckerkandl is well aware, a tune may establish a tonic center perfectly adequately and yet bore us to tears. In his treatment, the question of music's meaning is separated from the question of music's beauty or greatness; and thus, the word "beautiful" hardly appears in Zuckerkandl's wonderful guide into musical phenomena, The Sense of Music. An alternative approach, which we will see is Kant's, would understand the pleasure in judging the beautiful as itself the reception and contemplation of a particular sort of meaning. Accordingly, we might understand the tedium or vapidity of some music, like the sort we are subjected to in elevators, as an emptiness of meaning; while they are rhythmically and tonally intelligible, these unbeautiful tonal utterances seem to say little or nothing to us, and their deficiency of representational power is essentially linked with their What about "atonal" music? We'd have to investigate case by case to see if such music deserved the title "atonal," strictly speaking. Some allegedly atonal music may involve the search for new, non-diatonic "dynamic qualities." Some may depend upon frustrating expected tonal structures at every turn, and thus presupposing tonality as an implicit background (cf "non-Euclidean geometry"). 7 9 �deficiency in pleasure. To summarize: Deep pleasure in the apprehension of a representation whose meaning is conceptually inexhaustible, a form in sound that seems to be the natural manifestation of an inaudible truth- these are the features of what I want to call a musical idea in the fullest sense. How does music achieve this representational power? What in us is at work as we perceive it? And why does it feel so good? That is, why is it beautiful, and what does its beauty mean? Maybe Kant can help. II. KANT Kant's inquiry into taste and beauty makes up the first half of his third Critique, the Critique of Judgment. Towards the close of the investigation, the question of beauty's meaning leads Kant to a surprisingly expansive treatment of the ways in which representation can happen. Namely, he finds himself required to rethink the relation between the poles of his famous dualism of intuition and concept. The first Critique of Pure Reason developed this Kantian duality, according to which spontaneous intellectual acts (the concepts) must be brought together with given sensible forms (the intuitions) to make knowledge possible. Concepts without intuitions are "empty"-- they are mere thoughts, unable to pronounce truths or falsities about the world. Intuitions without concepts are "blind"-- they cannot be taken to represent anything, and so strictly mean nothing. Everything we can know is articulable in a judgment in which intuition and concept are thought together. What Kant now points out is that the exhibition in an intuition of a concept, the "making sensible" of a thought, is possible in two rather different ways (KU, 351). 8 The first way, familiar to readers of the first Critique, he calls "schematic:' Here we take the intuition as bearing the "monogram" or calling card of the concept, and accordingly take the particular given intuition to be an "example" of the universal concept. 9 The second way of exhibiting pure concepts Kant here calls "symbolic." He cautions the reader to observe that people usually use the word "symbol" incorrectly: the designation of a concept by a sensible sign is not an exhibition, a making sensible, of the concept at all, but a "mere characterization." In the latter, Kant writes, "the signs contain nothing whatever that belongs to the intuition of the object." The only thing linking the sensible articulation and the 8 9 References noted 'KU are to Kant's Critique of Judgement, Akademie page numbers. To be precise, in an empirical judgement, the intuition is an "example", in a priori, a "schema". 10 �referent concept, in this case, is the arbitrary or conventional act of our own intellect. The so-called "symbols" of algebra are in truth mere 'characters' or tokens in this sense. But a genuine symbol, according to Kant, is an intuition that represents by being thought in an analogous way as that which it is the symbol of. Kant offers the following example: a hand mill is a symbol of an absolute monarchy, while an organism is a symbol of a constitutional monarchy. The rules according to which we reflect on the relations in each pair are the same: the parts of the hand mill move through the mechanical force imposed by an external impulse, as the members of the absolute monarchy are coerced by fear of the king; while the parts of the organism are self-moved, according to an idea of the whole animal, as the members of the constitutional monarchy act according to their systematic roles in the legal idea of a constitution. (How much longer and more awkward that is to spell out, than it is to present in the unexplained analogy!) The hand mill and the animal allow us to see, they "submit to inspection", the different sorts of monarchy, if we are willing to take them symbolically. It may help to be annoyingly precise here, since the enmeshed relation between thing and appearance is especially knotty where analogy is concerned: There is something about the monarchy which is is also present in the handmill. It is that 'third' thing-- a sort of power relation-- that is directly 'made visible' here; in other words, both the monarchy and the mill are examples of external force. At the same time, the monarchy itself is indirectly made visible in the handmill, in so far as they both bear the relevant power relation. Thus, the one is a symbol of the other. Symbolic representation or meaning abounds in our language: a "sub-stance" doesn't literally "stand under" anything 10 , but the spatial and causal relation articulated in an empirical 'standing under' is analogous to the metaphysical relation between a thing and its accidents; just as that which "de-pends" on a cause doesn't literally "hang from" it (KU,352). It is striking that Kant's examples of symbolic language (which work in German as well as English) come from his Table of Categories, the "pure concepts of the understanding." Apparently we are unable to speak these non-sensible thoughts except by analogizing them to sensible items around us, although for most of us the symbols have petrified, and we are rarely aware of their symbolic character. If this is true, it is likely that no speech is merely "characteristic," outside of the rarified realm of modern mathematics. Kant's notion of symbolic representation will turn out to be crucial in his culminating investigation of the beautiful as the symbol of the good, even later in the Critique. But for our 10 I know this etymology is spurious. 11 �purposes, I want to direct our attention to how Kant begins the thread of aesthetic meaning a bit earlier, in his discussion of "fine" or beautiful art. There, Kant is occupied with articulating the subtle role of concepts in fine art. We don't think a work of art is beautiful because we recognize what concept it should be subsumed under. To judge that a poem is an Italian sonnet, or that a painting is an impressionist rendering of an orchard, or that passage of music contains a perfect cadence, all this tells us nothing about these works' beauty. These judgments are "schematic," for they determine the given object as an example of the class, in accordance with a rule. But judgments of beauty-- what Kant calls judgments of taste-- do not use concepts this way. The beautiful object seems ideally suited for thinking over, for contemplating, without it ever being decided once and for all what it is. It excites our minds into a maximal activity, what Kant calls "free harmony," in which our imagination traces every detail and our understanding ranges through a "wealth of thought," each activity propelling the other. This harmony is "free" in that it is not in the service of rendering a determinate sentence. Kant takes this "quickening," rather than being exhausting, to be self-strengthening, a becoming-more-alive. He often relies on the term "play" to capture the leisure, spontaneity, and energy of judging the beautiful. In Kant's conception, the beautiful is not relaxing, but stimulating. We are not transfixed by beauty, but "linger" over it. It doesn't strike at a moment, but unfolds across time in the extended activity of our reflection. 11 In this connection, it is worth noticing one of reasons Kant cites for ranking music below the other arts. He writes that while the visual arts are "lasting," in so far as their forms endure in space as we reflect on them, music is inevitably "transitory." Indeed, he observes that we tend to find musical passages which do manage to endure by "involuntarily" lodging themselves in our memory "annoying." But this criticism might be turned on its head: because musical forms vanish as we linger over them- indeed they must do so to be present to us at all- to have them in the ear is to be immediately aware that they pass us by, slip away, and evanesce. This may, after all, be the source of beautiful music's particularly heart-breaking power. Music makes intimately manifest the mortality of the "feeling of life" through which we enjoy the beautiful. Now, Although judgments of taste are free from conceptual determination, they are in fact often rich with concepts, since they always involve the understanding. A beautiful 11 Much art, and much music in particular, has the effect of transfixing us in an overwhelming moment. According to Kant, this is not art of the beautiful, but art of the sublime. Perhaps "Sind Blitze, sind Donner" (Passion, §33, measures 104 ff) provides an example of the sublime in the Passion. 12 �landscape brings to mind the interdependence of the ecological whole and the efforts of human cultivation. A beautiful horse may bring to mind the natural purposes of power and speed, or the human purpose of war. And in the case of art, the artifice of the object always gives some concrete conceptual direction to our reflection. After all, we only know it is art because someone purposefully made it (KU, 303). Of course, many artificial expressions are not beautiful. The representations of men and women on restroom doors point to a determinate purpose, we quickly see what they mean, and our grasp of their meaning is what allows us to see them as artificial in the first place. But they are not thereby beautiful, and in fact the determinate nature of their meaning prevents the free harmony through which we judge beauty from getting off the ground. Thus, beautiful art, in so far as it is beautiful, cannot have a determinate meaning, for it cannot be read as an exhibition of an example according to a specifiable rule. In his attempt to say what it is an exhibition of, to account for the in principle unaccountable, Kant introduces his notion of "aesthetic idea" (KU, 314). Readers of the first Critique know that "ideas", for Kant, are concepts of reason, in which a totality or whole is thought The world, as the cosmic whole, is an idea; as is God, as the highest being. Ideas are never given in experience, which is to say, experience always falls short of them. An "aesthetic idea" is a totality for the senses; that is, a given sensible form for which no concept is adequate. Kant describes how the poet ventures to make sensible the rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on. Or again, he takes things that are indeed exemplified in experience, such as death, envy, and all the other vices, as well as love, fame, and so on; but then, going beyond the limits of experience by means of an imagination that emulates reason by reaching for a maximum, he ventures to make these sensible with a completeness that no example in nature affords. (KU, 314) Now, by supposition, the mode of representation here cannot be "schematic," since the intuition is not definable as a case of a rule. It must, rather, be "symbolic": in our judgment of the given form, we take its elements to be related to one another in a way analogous to the relation among the elements of the non-sensible ideal. Kant quotes a minor poet: "the sun flowed forth, as serenity flows from virtue" (KU, 316). I don't know if this is really all that beautiful, but let's give Kant some slack. It is not simply the case that the sun is to its rays as moral contentment is to moral goodness. This would be a symbolic representation, but a determinate one, like the handmill and the autocracy, in which the rule instantiated on each side of the analogy could be discursively articulated. Kant's claim is that in running through 13 �the image of the sun, we find that no determinate articulation is adequate to capture the way in which it is like virtue. Rather, we range through boundless partial characterizations, stimulated towards further contemplation of the image. This is the free play of taste in the presence of the beautiful, and it feels good. Note that in this example, the poet has quite explicitly directed our reflection towards what the image is to mean. But this is not necessary for symbolic representation in aesthetic ideas. It may even be the case that the less explicit the directing of our reflection, the more stimulating that reflection will become, since its scope will be less circumscribed. On the other hand, to give too little direction risks disengaging the understanding altogether, falling back into meaninglessness. The great artist strikes this balance perfectly, convincing us that the sensible form means something, but letting that meaning escape any final determination. Kant gives an interesting example of meaningless aesthetic experience earlier in the Critique. "The changing shapes of the flames in a fire or in a rippling brook" are not beautiful, according to Kant, even though they pleasantly engage the imagination (KU, 243). These scenes, however, fail to call the understanding into activity, and so the play is one-sided. We can easily call to mind musical versions of this formless flickering and babbling. One sign of their one-sidedness is that these sorts of experiences are relaxing, they put us at ease by releasing tension. They are a sort of massage for the mind. The beautiful, on the other hand, wakes us up. For in the beautiful, the understanding is maximally active, striving to make sense of the given form, to apprehend its meaning. Recalling Kant's famous formulation in the first Critique, without concepts our aesthetic reflection is blind. Once Kant interprets the forms of fine art as "aesthetic ideas", it becomes possible to think of beautiful nature as meaningful in the same, subtle way. The real sun's streaming rays give us far less conceptual direction than the poet's somewhat pedantic metaphor, but as we take them up in a judgment of taste, our understanding is stimulated into the same sort of harmonious activity. Even though we know the sun is no work of art, we reflect on it in taste as if it were the expression of some meaning that escapes determination, as if some truth was made sensible and submitted to our inspection in the concrete appearance. The intense pleasure afforded by fine art, and by beautiful nature, lies in this delicate balance of significance and ineffability: we feel it means something, we know its meaning can't be articulated. Kant often tries to capture this tension in aesthetic judgment as such with his claim that the judgment is one of "Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck'' ("purposiveness-without-a-purpose," or, perhaps, "fittingness without a fit"). In light of the 14 �account of aesthetic ideas, aesthetic pleasure can be recast as a delight in this 'meaningfulness-without-a-meaning.' 12 If beautiful forms as such are aesthetic ideas, and aesthetic ideas always "strive toward something that lies beyond the bounds of experience," the meaning of a beautiful form must always point beyond the sensible, towards the supersensible. That is, through symbolic representation art and nature both render the supersensible, sensible. When supposedly "empirical" items like death and love are taken up by fine art, their representation directs us towards an unconditioned principle, and thus towards the unseen supersensible ground of these familiar features of life. Of course, we don't gain knowledge of these grounds by means of art. Rather, our reflection is directed towards them, as we take the beautiful form to be a glimpse of the unknowable. Some readers have thought Kant's account of fine art as the exhibition of aesthetic ideas puts so-called non-representational art beyond the scope of his theory. Instrumental music, at least in so far as it could not be reduced to sound-imitation or tone-painting, might seem to be a clear case of art that depicts nothing at all. But Kant's account is in fact a challenge to many familiar models of what "representation" is in the first place. If we think of a representation as an isomorphic stand-in, where the thing and its representation are related as original and image, then it is certainly true that much beauty, including beautiful music, is non-representational. 13 Indeed, nothing, according to Kant, is beautiful by virtue of its service as an imitative copy. However, a thing-as-it-appears is not related to that thing-as-it-is-in-itself as original to image. The appearance is not a copy. Rather, things have sensible manifestations by appearing to us. The two aspects are not distinct beings, but rather complementary standpoints. In the case of beauty, we take something supersensible as if it is appearing. The form present to our senses is not an imitation of some absent thing, but a present manifestation of the unseen, and in this Kantian sense a 'representing,' a Vorstellung. Precisely because we can't fill in the content of the reference of the appearance though aesthetic judgment, we can never say adequately what is being presented. But in our reflection, the perpetually out-of-reach reference is always pointed to, sometimes with less and sometimes with more guiding direction. In this way, all beauty is representational and One great irony of the third Critique is that while its analysis of beauty begins by privileging nature over art, Kant surprises his readers late in the book by revealing that all beauty, understood now as the exhibition of aesthetic ideas, is a sort of art. 13 Alternatively, in a more modern mood, if we think of a representation as an arbitrary token signifier, beauty is also non-representational. 12 15 �non-representational at the same time. The notion of an aesthetic idea can help us make sense of the powerful and puzzling way in which Bach's music has meaning. Jesus' cadential prayer passage is a symbol in Kant's technical sense: in our contemplation of it, we sense that our reflection on its audible elements is analogous to a reflection on the elements of an inaudible reality involving piety, gentleness, and loving sound-mindedness. In other words, Bach has found a way to make the holy, inner character of the speaker sensible, he has submitted that character to our inspection. While we might well be provoked into articulating the meaning of the passage in words, we know that just what Bach has articulated in tones will escape us. We can be told that Peter wept, we can witness a depiction of Peter weeping, but Bach's recitative measures make the invisible and inaudible interior of Peter's soul present to us in tones. This art of aesthetic ideas promises to deliver truths to its listener; we feel we are close to understanding something perhaps otherwise unknowable in listening. Because there is no rule according to which these musical passages could be constructed and classified, we are unlikely to call them "artificial", even though they are art. Rather, the sounds seem to arise from a non-sensible principle as if they were natural. Accordingly, we sense that the connection between representation and meaning is not a contrivance linking alien things, but a union of what belongs together. Our delight in the fittingness of the contingent, understood as meaningfulnesswithout-a-meaning, may help make sense of poetic pleasures and meanings as such. In a great sculpture, the posture of the figure seems just right, so very just right as to be an expression of an impossible-to-define principle. In his interview with the diabolical Smerdyakov at the bench outside their father's house, Ivan Karamazov notices his half-brother carefully drawing ,one foot along side the other, playing with the toe of his boot, and then shifting the position of his feet back again, throughout their chilling, obscurely conspiratorial conversation. Dostoevsky has worked his typical magic here: we couldn't have predicted Smerdyakov would do this, and we don't know why Smerdyakov is doing this or what it means, and yet in its unanticipatable contingency it seems so perfectly fitting that it must have its source in the unseen nature that is Smerdyakov's character. We are moved by indeterminate meaningfulness of the aesthetic idea. 14 The frozen gesture of the sculpture and narrated gesture of character have a power 14 Regarding Smerdyakov, see Kant's discussion of "the beautiful representation of the ugly." 16 �that trades on their indeterminately symbolic function: indeed, this is the way of gesture as such. In his Doctrine of Right, Kant suggests that a handshake is an attempt to make the intelligible act of a meeting of wills in a contract visible, in a symbolic gesture depicting the two-sided unity of the agreement. He goes so far as to say that the parties thereby "manifest the perplexity" of the intelligible act (MdR, 272). 15 Similarly, kneeling and bowing one's head are not natural indications of humility and supplication; they represent the latter by means of some analogy between the arrangement in space of our embodied selves and the attitude (so to speak) of our minds. We thereby make our supplication visible. Bach's music can similarly be seen as an audible gesture, a sequence of meaningful movements, giving Jesus' piety the sensible form of a heard symbol. The difference between mere motion and symbolic gesture16 helps capture the difference between tone-painting, and what I've called musical ideas. The motion of bowing one's head or taking one's knee takes place in space and time. However, Jesus' prayer cadence does not analogize this motion (that would make it a tone-painting) 17 , but symbolizes the same inner change manifested in the bodily gesture, but in tone and rhythm. Where the pitch-painting takes place in the dynamically bare axis of up-and-down, the tonal gesture's motions occur within a matrix of home, away, tension, and rest. The "fall" referred to in the term "cadence" (Latin: cadere) is not a descent in pitch, but a falling-to-rest in the tonal field of dynamic quality. Indeed some of the string voices in our prayer passage rise in pitch as they "fall" to home. The tonal-rhythmic field gives us access to a symbolic gestural power that far outstrips mere pitch-relation, and may far outstrip the material resources of every other fine art. Because music is so rich with tensions and resolutions, pullings, failings, holding still, balancing, imbalancing, and coming to rest, and because these motions and forces are distilled and disembodied in tonal and rhythmic forms, music is perhaps the most intensely and exquisitely gestural form of representation available to us. For this reason, whenever we most want to make something spiritual manifest to ourselves, we will want to hear it in music. January, 2015 MdR = Doctrine of Right, Akademie page number Note that symbolic gesture can include non-motion (striking a posture), just as music can include silence. 17 Could the "lowering" of the soprano and bass voices in the second half of the "bete" measure be a subtle painting of taking one's knee? 15 16 17 ��\ . . What does Music Mean?'Examples from Bach, Theory from Kant "Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen." -Anaxagoras, fragment B2Ja 1. '~ . -I@~ ~ gPI v gig~ ~ v) ~ H n~ a v ; q E- he dBf Hahn k:ra - hen wird, wirst du mich d:re.i-mal Ye:rleugne:p.. _ 1 2. -- ' 1\Jr " lv f)_~ Qb ., ' !. - ·Evangelist (Cho;us I) Und da hle den Lob- ge - ~ - spro-chen hat -.- sang ' \ lmgen sie h:inaus w den 01-be:r:~· )e~, I J "- ~ €. Oont. Org. f!!l ~- .., :-= ---- -w- _A_ . ~ ~ ~ m 6 6 5 I 3. . Jesus-"ii . i wL S~t.Jt euchlder, ~--. I .- J, .e & I ~ j I ""' I ' j bis .daEl ich dart-ldn is-he, und be - ~ St:r. )• . . '-' I P, I ~ .. -~ _:g. ~----- ' _:Jk-:~r~l~\. E"T1! J I ~ .:zf ~ ~~ -- ::;s -'=1- :v I ts. -= 7} 1- 1':1 ' I ~ r -5 �4. E ·~7 ~ I~~ ~ AJt I ~I Und g:ing her-.aus (L_ ~ I -t , ft ~~q~~tfn#i£guctm llnd wei - - ) ~ #-~ - {,\ 1 i "" ne-te bit- ter-lich. [i{)O] f.l " ' i f:J> 8 #-at ~='= 1#1 j_ ' . f.\ __r;-. ~- I ,.,. {} 7 . 5.b The poet ventures to make sensible the rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on. Or again, he takes things that are indeed exemplified .in experience, such as death, envy, and all the other vices, as well as love, fame, and so on; but then, going beyond the limits of experience by means of an imagination that emulates reason by reaching for a maximum, he ventures to make these sensible with a completeness that no example in nature affords. Critique of Judgment §49, 314 � 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 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 does music mean? Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Caswell, Matthew Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-01-16 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make typescript copies of my lecture 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 text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Music, Philosophy and aesthetics Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 82004 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on January 16, 2015 by Matthew Caswell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a1a0d6791f0a66dd211473862ef59adf.pdf 24d9b5455bad0c8b120efa421480cab0 PDF Text Text Michael J. Brogan November 22, 2013 Dwelling in the Land of the Confessions It's surprising that a lover of wisdom should lavish as much attention on the particulars of his own life as Augustine does in the Confessions. While any number of philosophers before him had sought to live by the maxim inscribed in Apollo's temple at Delphi-yvm8t crcaU1:6v, know thyself-none known to me had taken this as a directive to reflect on the contingencies of his own biography, let alone publish his thoughts on such intimate matters as a vexed relationship with his mother, a childish loathing of school, a troubled sexual history, or an enduring tendency to overindulge at the dinner table. In the Phaedo, Plato does have Socrates recount how he lost his youthful enthusiasm for the study of nature (96a-1 OOa), but in their exclusive attention to the evolution of his philosophical orientation, these autobiographical remarks hardly compare with the astonishingly inclusive narrative of a sinner's wandering path to God that Augustine gives us in the Confessions. Socrates, his account of his "second sailing" notwithstanding, lives out the Delphic command not by brooding over his individual history or unique identity but by enlisting dialogue partners in a collaborative search for the truth of those experiences potentially shared by us all in virtue of our common humanity. To oversimplify a bit, he's interested not so much in who he is as in what he is, not in this individual man called Socrates but in what it means to be a human being in general. Even more pronounced is the contrast between Augustine and Plotinus, the thinker who perhaps exercised a greater influence on him than any other pagan writer. The Neoplatonist's disregard for merely individual selfhood is memorably captured in the testimony of his disciple Porphyry, who writes that "Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body. So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or 1 �his birthplace."1 No mere quirk of temperament, this reticence is governed by Plotinus's overriding ambition to identify completely with the incorporeal intellect in its capacity for timeless contemplation of the divine One. It's this aspiration that motivates his refusal to share even the bare facts surrounding his origins as an embodied self. For all that he owes to the self-effacing Platonic sage, however, Augustine himself has no qualms about directing his gaze and ours to the particular circumstances and events of his unique, unrepeatable, and still-unfolding life. Quite to the contrary, he writes in the confident hope, reiterated at several key points in the Cotifessions, that by reflecting on that life, seeking out the narrative threads that bind it into a unity, he and his readers might be drawn ever closer to the eternal, divine truth. But how does a lover of wisdom--one, moreover, as indebted to Neoplatonism as Augustine acknowledges himself to be-arrive at a hope like this one? How is it that he comes to see his embodied, time-bound existence as no mere image to be forgotten as quickly as possible in the ascent to its divine original but as something worthy of the most serious and sustained attention? Now, one approach to the question immediately comes to mind. As an orthodox Christian believer, the author of the Confessions fully accepts the doctrine of the Word made flesh. God himself, on this account, took on all the characteristic features of human finitude: he was born of a particular woman at a particular time and place, spoke a particular language, practiced a particular religion, lived in relationship to particular human others-we could extend forever this list of "accidents" that individuate the incarnate beings that we ourselves are and that Christians believe God in Jesus became. While some of these properties and relationships are undoubtedly less important than others, who are we to scorn the whole lot of them if God himself has deigned to take them on? Who are we to be "ashamed of being in the body" if the Creator of all things, of corporeal substances no less than of the spiritual, saw nothing shameful in becoming incarnate? If the humanity of Jesus Christ, indeed his very flesh and blood, is indispensable to our salvation, shouldn't we at least have second thoughts about 2 �renouncing our own humanity, or attempting to locate it exclusively in a disembodied intellect that manages to shed the burdens of finitude? But of course these are very big "ifs"- too big, I think, for a community like ours whose conversation appeals to no higher authority than natural reason. While Augustine believes he can find in the writings of the Neoplatonists themselves the doctrine of the Word that was with God and that was God, not even he claims to apprehend the incarnation of that Word on any basis other than faith. My ambition tonight is to see how far we can go toward making sense of the intensely personal approach of the Confessions without appealing to postulates drawn from sacred doctrine. While I suspect that Augustine's unprecedented way of applying the Delphic maxim becomes fully intelligible only against the background of his specifically Christian commitments, we might nevertheless begin to understand the peculiar strategy he employs in the Confessions by considering the deficiencies that come to light there of a philosophy conducted in a wholly impersonal key. However dazzling a glimpse it may afford of the eternal truth, Neoplatonic introspection, we shall see, fails to open out onto what Augustine calls "the way that leads not only to beholding our blessed fatherland but also to dwelling therein" (7.20.26). 2 PART I Before examining their limitations, however, I want to begin by briefly considering why the "books of the Platonists" (7.9.13 ) were attractive to Augustine in the first place. His study of them comes directly on the heels of his disillusionment with the Manicheism he had been espousing for the better part of a decade. Disheartened by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy he has found even among the elite members of that sect, he has also come to reject their sharply dualistic vision of good and evil as coeternal principles locked in cosmic combat. Such a view, he concludes, is irreconcilable with his dawning certainty that God must be beyond all change, corruption, or violation. Nothing can harm a divinity worthy of the name, and this means that God could have no compelling reason to engage in 3 �battle with eternal forces of darkness. In fact, such forces are no more than the figments of an overheated mythic imagination: for together with being immutable, God is by nature infinite; it makes no sense, therefore, to posit a reality that would constrain in any way his power to implement his perfectly good will. With his Manichean convictions thus in tatters, Augustine finds himself not so much freed as unmoored, drifting toward a radical skepticism that, for all its philosophical plausibility, can't possibly quiet the clamor of his restless heart. It is in this state that he becomes newly open to the possibility of reconciling with the Catholic Christianity in which his mother attempted to raise him, an orthodox faith which, largely due to Bishop Ambrose's brilliant preaching on the allegorical sense of the Old Testament, he has ceased to disdain as the bastion of simple-minded literalism. He realizes, for example, that our being in God's image need not entail that he be confmed to a body like ours, as the Manichees had mocked the Catholics for allegedly believing. At this stage, however, Augustine finds he can do no better than replace such anthropomorphism with a less crude but no less materialist notion of God, now imagined as a subtle body extended throughout infinite space, permeating and exceeding a created world conceived on the analogy of a sponge submerged in a vast sea (7.5.7). To think in this way, he realizes, commits him to the absurd view that an elephant, for example, must contain more of the divine presence than a sparrow, yet he remains frustratingly unable to understand God or anything else in nonmaterial terms. He writes: ''Whatever was not extended over, or diffused throughout, or compacted into, or projected up to definite measures of space, or did not or could not receive something of this kind, I thought to be completely non-existent" (7.1. 2). It's this crucial error that the books of the Platonists enable him to overcome, not simply by introducing him to an impressive theory of incorporeal being but by showing him a path leading to nothing less than a direct experience of the purely spiritual, first within his own soul and ultimately in the divine beingjtself. Taught to shun the external and direct his gaze inward, he eventually catches sight of what he calls the "unchangeable light" above the mind. After ascending beyond bodies and the power 4 �to perceive them and onto the soul's rational faculty of judgment, he says that in realizing its own mutability, this reasoning power raised itself up to its own understanding. It removed its thought from the tyranny of habit, and withdrew itself from the throngs of contradictory phantasms. In this way it might find that light by which it was sprinkled, when it cried out, that beyond all doubt the immutable must be preferred to the mutable. Hence it might come to know this immutable being, for unless it could know it in some way, it could no wise have set it with certainty above the mutable. Thus in a flash of its trembling sight it came to that which is. Then indeed I clearly saw your "invisible things, understood by the things which are made. " (7.17. 23) Many of you will no doubt recognize the final sentence here as a citation of Paul's Letter to the Romans (1: 20). By quoting Scripture, however, Augustine does not mean to imply any essential difference between the experience he is recounting and the one described by Plotinus and his disciples. As in the writings of those philosophers, the inward turn of Confessions 7 corresponds to a movement away from absorbed attention to the particularities of the material world and toward the timeless, intellectual contemplation of the "unchangeable light" at the source of all finite things. That eternal light is one and the same for Plotinus as for Paul, for Augustine as for you or me. If our highest good is indeed to gaze upon it, it's understandable that a thinker like Plotinus would regard attending to those things that differentiate us individuals, the temporal accidents of birth and biography, as at best a distraction from our true calling. In the famous treatise known as "On Beauty," Plotinus insists that what we ought to be doing is chipping away like sculptors at everything exterior to the eternal light within us. "Do you see yourself, abiding within yourself, in pure solitude?" he asks. Does nothing now remain to shatter that interior unity, nor anything external cling to your authentic self? Are you entirely that sole true light which is not contained by space, not confmed to any circumscribed form . . . ? Do you see yourself in this state? Then you have become vision itself. Be of good heart. Remaining here you have ascended aloft. You need a guide no longer. Strain and see. 3 But what if "straining" isn't enough? What if "remaining here" proves too difficult? For all the serene confidence that marks Plotinus's writings, even he and his disciples sometimes seem to acknowledge the impossibility of simply willing the soul to arrive at and persist in its transcendent 5 �vision. Porphyry, for instance, claims to have had the experience just once, in his sixty-eighth year,4 and while Plotinus says that for comes "suddenly" him "it has happened often,''5 he also characterizes it as something that (exaiphnes)6 upon a soul that is all too quickly sent back down into the comparative dullness of mere discursive reason.7 Now, I suppose it's possible (though personally I doubt it) that if Augustine had experienced nothing worse than this inevitable slide from nous to dianoia, from pure contemplating to the difficult labor of thinking things through, and if, moreover, he had found some way to reconcile the suddenness of the introspective vision with Plotinus's confidence in the sufficiency of effort ("straining'') to bring it about, he just might have remained content with what the books of the Platonists were able teach him . But as he recounts in such compelling detail in the Confessions, his rapturous and reassuring vision of the unchangeable light is followed almost immediately by a plunge back into currents of temptation that prove to be just as irresistible as they had been before. No transformation of his life ensues, no conversion or reorientation of his misbegotten aims and ambitions follows upon the ecstatic experience that liberates his mind. "I was borne up to you by your beauty," he confesses, "but soon I was borne down from you by my own weight, and with groaning, I plunged into the midst of lower things" (7.17.23). In other words, the tyranny of habit reasserts itself immediately, and he succumbs to old patterns of feeling and acting despite seeing them more clearly than ever as obstacles in the way of his deepest desire. The good he approves unreservedly in his mind he fails to pursue with an undivided heart; unable to do what he wants, he does the very things he hates. How depressing! Wouldn't we like to think that even a pale approximation of a 'vision like the one Augustine reports would have a profound effect on the way we live our lives? Wouldn't it be easy to love the truth and to do it if we were only certain what the truth was? But this is just the sort of comforting illusion that Augustine indulged in until his ecstatic vision deprived him of what he calls "that former excuse, in which I used to look upon myself as unable to despise the world and to serve you because knowledge of the truth was still uncertain to me" 6 (8.5.11). Now, approaching thirty years �of age, he has attained the certainty he's long been seeking, and yet he discovers that he is just as enthralled to his old, enervating habits as he ever was. Able to see the truth, he still cannot draw near enough to bask in its radiance. If we are at all persuaded of the authenticity of his testimony-influenced, perhaps, by an uncomfortable awareness of our own failures to translate insight into action, to do the truth we knowwe have reason to wonder whether any mere vision, however dazzling, can set us on the sure path to the good. Understanding alone is perhaps not enough to overturn long-settled habits of self-indulgence, indolence, and despair, no matter how irrefutable the evidence becomes that these are precisely what keeps us from the happiness we seek. To use one of Augustine's favorite images, it's as if we can become enchained to ways of life we know to be toxic to our souls. He writes: For in truth lust is made out of a perverse will and when lust is served, it becomes habit, and when habit is not resisted, it becomes necessity. By such links, joined one to another, as it were-for this reason I have called it a chain-a harsh bondage held me fast. A new will, which had begun within me, to wish freely to worship you and find joy in you, 0 God, the sole sure delight, was not yet able to overcome that prior will grown strong with age. (8. 5. 10) , , Now, we call "habits" those dispositions to feeling and action that come to be in us as a result of repetition. What we do habitually we do not because nature compels us or reason convinces us but simply because we have done likewise in similar situations time and again in the past. Here's a trivial example. I'm in the habit of drinking a cup of coffee first thing every morning. I don't remember making a deliberate choice to start doing this, butif ever I did, it must have been a long time ago: at this point in my life, it's only a slight exaggeration to say that deliberate choice of any kind becomes possible for me only after I've had that first cup. I suppose if I were to summon my inner resources I could manage to break a chain now thousands of links long by choosing to have tea tomorrow instead. After all, it's not my nature that determines me to drink coffee, as it is, say, the stone's nature that causes it to fall or the fire's that makes it rise, but merely my long-settled habit-a practice become second nature, so to speak. 7 �But might there be situations in which this is a distinction without any practical difference, occasions when second nature constrains no less than first and habit takes on the character of compulsion? For Augustine there were, and we need not have suffered from any of the conventionally recognized "addictions," I think, to identify with his experience of habit as an iron chain holding him back from goods he has to come to perceive with incontestable clarity. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that, unlike those powers that are in us by nature (e.g., sense perception), the potencies for which precede our exercise of them, the virtues of character are like physical or technical abilities in that they come to be in us only after we have been engaged in the activities associated with them (1103a25f.) We become capable of courage, for example, only by repeatedly doing courageous things, meaning those things the already courageous person does, just as we become harpists by repeatedly practicing the harp under the tutelage of an accomplished player. As we grow more accustomed to being at work in them, these activities become easier for us, more pleasant, we could even say, more "natural" to us. Unfortunately, though, this is at least as true, and probably more so, of bad actions as it is of good: as Augustine knew all too well, a past defined by repeated indulgence in any kind of excess or deficiency can make a future characterized by strength of will or self-control, let alone full-fledged virtue, appear entirely out of reach. How I conduct myself today seems largely determined by what I did yesterday, even when the memory of this recent past fills me with shame and regret over having acted otherwise than I knew I should. I want to turn now to Augustine's analysis of time to see what light it might shed on this indebtedness or even enslavement of the present to the past, and also on the shape that a rehabilitated future might ultimately take. My hope is that doing this will bring us a step closer to our goal of understanding the significance of Augustine's autobiographical turn in the Confessions. 8 �PART II Though it would take all night (at least) to do justice to his fascinating and intricate meditation, the basic paradox of time Augustine identifies in Book 11 can be expressed in a few words. It seems, he observes, that the present is the only time that actually exists, since whatever the future is, it is not yet, and the past is no longer. Upon scrutiny, however, the present itself turns out to look like nothing more than an extension-less boundary between those two nonentities, the past and the future. "It flies with such speed from the future into the past," Augustine says, "that it cannot be extended by even a trifling amount" (11.15.20). Hemmed in as it is on both sides by nonbeing, the reality of the duration-less present itself falls under serious suspicion. Here is Augustine again: [I]f the present were always present, and would not pass into the past, it would no longer be time, but eternity. Therefore, if the present, so as to be time, must be so constituted that it passes into the past, how can we say that it is, since the cause of its being is the fact that it will cease to be? [11. 14.17, emphasis added] Thus it appears that neither the future, nor the past, nor even, now, the present has a sure hold on being: future and past are not, and the present is only in so far as it ceases to be. But Augustine is unwilling to conclude from this that time is mere illusion. Should we decide that it exists only in a secondary or derivative sense-a kind of moving image of eternity, as the Timaeus has it-it nevertheless remains too fundamental to our lived experience, and our ways of talking about that experience, simply to deny its reality altogether. The task is to try to understand what time is, if not in itself then at least as it is for us. What we can say for sure, Augustine thinks, is that the past and future depend for their being on the present; they "do not exist except as present things" (11.18.23), he says. It seems no less true, however, that the present itself cannot be apart from the past and the future, for what else could provide the present the "space" it needs to extend beyond the length-less and breadthless instant that exists, if it exists at all, only by rushing headlong into non-being? 9 �Characteristically, Augustine looks within himself for a way beyond the impasse. It's there, in the soul or the mind, that future and past things acquire a kind of presence (and therefore beinj), as correlates of the mind's acts of expectation and memory, respectively. It's also there that present things achieve stability by being held in attention, an act of the mind that articulates itself beyond the point like instant by looking back to a beginning and forward to an anticipated end. Whereas on initial reflection time had seemed to vanish into the nothingness of a not-yet-existent future, a no-longer existent past, and a perpetually self-destructing present, its claim to at least relative being can now be redeemed so long as we're willing to pay the price of acknowledging its dependence on the mind's own activity. The three times, Augustine says, "are in the soul ...the present of things past is in memory; the present of things present is in intuition; the present of things future is in expectation" (11.20.26). Taken as a whole, time can thus be described as a "distention of the mind" (distentio animz) (11.26.33) , a stretching or swelling of present consciousness backward into a remembered past and forward into an anticipated future. While it's certainly possible to distinguish memory, expectation, and intuition or attention as three separate acts of the mind, Augustine's analysis makes clear that to do this would be to engage in a kind of abstraction. For in our lived experience of things, memory, expectation, and attention form a single, continuous whole. The mind, he says, "looks forward, it considers, it remembers, so the reality to which it looks forward passes through what it considers into what it remembers" (11.28.37). To illustrate this dynamic, he reflects on the experience of reciting a psalm he knows by heart. Once he's formed the intention to recite and is about to carry it out, the psalm, or rather, his recitation of it, is one of the "things future," which is to say, it exists for the mind in the mode of expectation. The ray of consciousness is pointed forward, so to speak, casting its light over the whole psalm as something to be brought out into the open as an audible presence. As the recitation proceeds, the stock of expectation decreases in proportion to memory's increase, until, having reached his proposed end, the speaker falls silent and the psalm in its entirety exists by way of its resonance in the recollecting minds of its hearers. 10 �What happens between the beginning and the end of this process, namely, the ongoing transferal of expectation's funds into the account of memory, corresponds to present time in its more expansive, non-instantaneous conception. The act of the mind responsible for this making present Augustine variously calls "intuition" (contuitus), "attention" (attentio), and "intention" (intentio). Present consciousness, we come to understand, doesn't just passively register a now that arises only to perish (or, more accurately, arises only lry perishing); on the contrary, the attending or, better, the intending mind plays an active part in the unfolding of temporal events, as both Augustine's heavy reliance on words with tend(}--stretch out-at their root, as well as his pregnant choice of the recitation example powerfully suggest. About that recitation, Augustine writes: The life of this action of mine is distended into memory by reason of the part I have spoken and into forethought (expectatio) by reason of the part I am about to speak. But attention (attentio) is actually present and that which was to be is borne along by it so as to become past. (11. 28. 37, emphasis added). It's worth hearing that again: what was to be is "borne along" by attention into the past. The Latin verb here is traicitur, a passive form of traicio, which could also be rendered as "transports" or "conveys." It combines the preposition trans-"across" or "along"-with the root verb iacio, meaning "throw," so we might think of attention as the act of throwing an expected future into a recalled past. The sense of this would be to emphasize how time for Augustine is not merely something that we suffer but is also, perhaps even primarily, something that we ourselves do. It's hard to know how to say this: the mind constitutes, enacts, unfolds, or perhaps lives time, in the transitive sense of an expression like "living one's life." But whatever verb we finally settle on, the crucial thing to grasp is that the soul itself makes an indispensable contribution to the experience or even the very being of time in shouldering an expected future and bearing it along into a recalled past. If the full significance of this activity does not come fully to light in Augustine's psalm example, what he says toward the end of Book 11 leaves no doubt about the ultimately moral horizon of his 11 �analysis. After describing the temporal process by which the action of reciting the psalm reaches completion, he asserts that "[t]he same thing holds for a man's entire life, the parts of which are all the man's actions" (11.28.38). (In fact, the scope can be widened even further to take in all of history, the "whole age of the sons of men," though I'll keep our focus for now on the life of the individual.) Just as I look ahead in expectation to the psalm I am about to recite, so too do I project a practical or moral future for myself, setting about in the present on the task of converting into a happy memory what is now only an aspiration to act in accordance with my conception of the good. In this way, "that which was to be is borne along" into the past. Of course, there are many ways for our moral intentions to misfire. However completely he comes to rely on God's grace, Augustine remains sensitive to the constant vigilance, the intense daily effort required of him if he is to fulfill his divinely reordered aims. Readers of Book 10 of the Confessions know that his baptism did not render him immune to the temptation of taking it easy, of allowing himself to be swept up by the rushing current of the merely instantaneous now instead of rising to the challenge of actively living time, that is, of anticipating a virtuous future and then undertaking the arduous task of carrying it through the present and into the past. "I am a burden to myself' (10.28.39), he writes, vividly evoking his sense of this labor, the obligation imposed on us imperfect, temporal creatures not to while away the time but to strive, with God's help, to close the gap between what we are now and what we are called to be. The difficulty of that task, as our discussion of habit has prepared us to see, seems to be directly proportional to the distance separating what we will to become from what we have already been. In other words, the more radically the future we project for ourselves departs from the past we recall, the harder it is to bear that future successfully into the present. In the hopes of deepening our understanding of this phenomenon, let's return once more to Augustine's recitation example. Forming the intention to say the whole psalm from beginning to end involves calling it up to the forefront of his mind from out of what in Book 10 he had called "the great cave of memory" (10.8.13). Only because 12 �he has already learned it by heart at some point in the past can he now look forward to reciting it in the present. And this suggests, if the example is as paradigmatic of all temporal experience as I believe Augustine means it to be, that anticipation is itself grounded in recollection, in other words, that the projected future "borne along" by a present intention is first assembled by the soul from materials drawn from its past. Augustine makes the point more explicitly in Book 10. Within the memory, he says, I encounter myself and recall myself, and what, and when, and where I did some deed, and how I was affected when I did it. There are all those things which I remember either as experienced by me or as taken on trust from others. From that same abundant stock, also, I combine one and another of the likenesses of things, whether things actually known by experience or those believed in from those I have experienced, with things past, and from them I meditate uponfuture actions, events, and hopes, and all these again as though they were actually present. "I will do this or that," I say to myself within that vast recess of my mind, filled with images, so many and so great, and this deed or that then follows. (10.8. 14, emphasis added). What this passage allows us to see, I think, is that temporal life, or the activity of living time, is marked by a kind of circularity. In proposing a course of action to myself, I cannot but rely upon the "abundant stock" of past experiences, either my own or those attested by others and found credible to the extent that they are consistent with my own. In other words, before the anticipated future can be borne along into the remembered past, the past must first be launched forward into the future as the indispensable material out of which the soul shapes its expectation. Now, this is not to say that in acting in the world we only ever repeat ourselves, or that the wheel of lived time rotates around a fixed point. Augustine mentions here that as he deliberates he "combine[s] ...the likenesses of things" drawn up from memory, thereby suggesting that the soul enjoys at least some degree of creative freedom in its activity of conceiving for itself a future as something other than an exact replica of its past. But it's still no use pretending that a path of total novelty is ever open to us; the future is inescapably indebted to the past, expectation inevitably takes its stand on the ground of memory. It's not hard to grasp that this poses a grave threat to the possibility of the deep and abiding transformation the young Augustine came to recognize as his only hope for happiness. For if my 13 �memory teems with images of a life fundamentally inimical to the good; if the virtuous examples of others seem too remote from my experience to be plausible or even attractive models for me; and if the claims of the philosophers to offer an escape from time and all its woes have proved too good to be true, then my desire for the happy life, no matter how firmly rooted in a clear vision of its reality and goodness, seems fated to go unfulfilled. In their essentially timeless character, transcendent moments of insight, like those Augustine attains by way of Neoplatonic introspection, are essentially cut off from memory and expectation, mere interruptions of the circuit of lived temporality. As such, they remain no more than isolated points of light, like individual stars in a vast night sky-beautiful, to be sure, but virtually powerless to illuminate the ground beneath our feet as we stumble along in search of the way that leads not only to beholding but to dwelling in the land of our desire (7.20.26; 7.21.27). Augustine opens a window onto the potentially ruinous dependence of expectation on memory in recounting a conversation he had with himself a few years before his final decision to seek baptism. Approaching the age of thirty, he looks back with chagrin at all the time that has passed since his teenage reading of Cicero's Hortensius first set him on flre with the love of wisdom. The bitter anxieties and disappointments of those dozen years have left him more convinced than ever of the futility of a life given over to worldly ambition. His disillusionment with the rationalist pretensions of the Manichees and his deepening admiration for the philosophically sophisticated preaching of Ambrose have inclined him, as he puts it, to "fix my feet on that step where my parents placed me as a child" (6.11.18). He's going to do it, he really means it this time, he's going to put away what he calls his "vain and empty concerns" by committing himself fully once and for all to the Catholic Church. Just notyet. "[I]ime passed," he says, and still I delayed to be converted to the Lord . . I loved the happy life, but I feared to find it in your abode, and I fled from it, even as I sought it. I thought that I would be too wretched, if I were kept from a woman's arms. I did not believe that the cure for this disease lay in your mercy, for I had had no experience with that cure. I believed . 14 �that continence lay within a man's own powers, and such powers I was not conscious of within myself. (6. 11.20) Notice what's holding him back. Though he has long suspected that the cares imposed by married life are for him incompatible with the spiritual freedom he desperately desires, he also knows himself well enough to realize that he lacks the strength to live without the comforts afforded by sexual intimacy. In the terms of his metaphor, he suffers from a "disease" whose symptoms he knows how to treat but whose cure, he has learned, lies completely outside his own power to effect. Whether or not we think it makes sense to diagnose as an illness his inability to commit to celibacy, with a little imagination most of us will be able relate to Augustine's predicament here. He knows exactly what it would take for him to be happy, but bitter experience has convinced him that he's just not up to the task. Nothing he finds in the spacious caverns of his memory allows him to envision for himself a life of genuine health, and without the means to palliate the symptoms of his disease, he fears that taking up residence in "God's abode" would serve only to increase his misery. Thus he shrinks back from the decisive step, without, however, being able to resign himself to a future as fatalistically determined by the past as his own seems certain to be. Perhaps there is little we can reasonably say about the causes of Augustine's ultimate escape from this desperate situation, at least if we want to keep open the possibility that it was indeed God's grace that finally set him free. I think we can conclude, though, that whatever it was that finally lifted the terrible burden from his soul in that Milan garden, the experience he describes as "a peaceful light streaming into my heart" (8.12.29) would have been every bit as isolated and ineffectual as his Plotinian visions of the eternal truth turned out to be had it not become possible for him to discern the underlying continuity of his past life of unhappy wandering with the baptized future he was finally empowered to project for himself. For as his analysis of time has shown us, to the extent that the present remains divorced from the past that precedes it, it cannot but have the character of the instant that is only by ceasing to be, the point-like now that suddenly-exazphnes-emerges out of nothingness 15 �only to vanish again just as suddenly. From such an instant, however charged with divine presence it might be, nothing of lasting, practical significan�e is likely to follow-nothing more consequential, at any rate, than the sort of wistful memory and infinite, impotent yearning that threatened to consume Augustine in the wake of his disappointing experiments in Neoplatonic ascent. In concluding, then, I want to suggest that Augustine's passionately personal reflection on the events leading up to his fmal conversion is intended to recall and thereby reinforce the vital links between the future opened up to him on that momentous day in Milan and even the darkest periods of his youthful estrangement from himself and from his God. Though his conversion undoubtedly marks a new beginning, even a kind of rebirth, it succeeds in doing what impersonal introspection had failed to do because Augustine is enabled to see it as the culmination of a process that had begun in him long before. The call he finally answers in deciding to seek baptism is the very same call that had never ceased resounding in his heart, even when he was desperately trying to drown it out in the frantic pursuit of sensual pleasure, emotional and intellectual titillation, and worldly success. In looking back on his past, he comes to see that in the anxiety, disappointment, and doubt that marred his life of secular striving, God himself had been calling him home. You were always present to aid me, merciful in your anger, and charging with the greatest bitterness and disgust all my unlawful pleasures, so that I might seek after pleasure that was free from disgust, to the end that, when I could find it, it would be in none but you, Lord, in none but you. For you fashion sorrow into a lesson to us. You smite so that you may heal. You slay us, so that we may not die apart from you. (2.2.4) Augustine meditates on his past in the Confessions to learn again this lesson of sorrow, which is also, paradoxically, a lesson of great hope. From out of the caves of his memory he no longer draws up the despair-inducing confirmation of his own weakness that had paralyzed him as a young man, but the liberating assurance that God had always been with him, even in the depths of his sin. Recollections of events in which that divine presence now seems unmistakable nourish his expectations of future 16 �assistance, giving him the strength to stand firm against present temptation in the confidence that his conversion will turn out to have been the decisive event of his life, and not a mere prelude to another aborted attempt or humiliating failure to change his ways. But as his unsparing assessment of his present condition vividly demonstrates, he knows that nothing is guaranteed. To be sure, conversion to the truth for him comes as a gift, but that giftperhaps like all gifts-is profoundly difficult for a creature with a long history of proud self-assertion to receive. Ever present is the temptation to refuse or return it in the fatal conviction, born of pride and despair, that there is no genuine good beyond what we can obtain for ourselves. The books of the � Platonists did nothing to disabuse Augustine of this error. "Strain and see," they told him, at once puffmg him up by preaching the sufficiency of effort, and casting him down by showing him no more than the way to behold the blessed country when his heart's desire was to dwell therein. The way beyond beholding is a way of humility, and Augustine's searingly honest examination of his life is his attempt to walk it. Thank you. 1 Porphyry, "On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work," in Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. cii. 2 3 All Augustine quotations are from The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960). Enneads 1.6.9, in The Essential Plotinus, trans. Elmer O'Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett , 1964 ), pp. 43-44. 4 "On the Life of Plotinus," p. cxxii. s 6 7 Enneads 4.8.1. Enneads 6.7.34. Enneads 4.8.6. 17 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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. Text Any textual data included in the document "While Augustine believes he can find in the writings of the Neoplatonists themselves the doctrine of the Word that was with God and that was God, not even he claims to apprehend the incarnation of that Word on any basis other than faith. My ambition tonight is to see how far we can go toward making sense of the intensely personal approach of the Confessions without appealing to postulates drawn from sacred doctrine. While I suspect that Augustine's unprecedented way of applying the Delphic maxim becomes fully intelligible only against the background of his specifically Christian commitments, we might nevertheless begin to understand the peculiar strategy he employs in the Confessions by considering the deficiencies that come to light there of a philosophy conducted in a wholly impersonal key. However dazzling a glimpse it may afford of the eternal truth, Neoplatonic introspection, we shall see, fails to open out onto what Augustine calls 'the way that leads not only to beholding our blessed fatherland but also to dwelling therein.'" - excerpt from lecture 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 Dwelling in the land of the Confessions Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 22, 2013 by Michael Brogan as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brogan, Michael J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-11-22 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. Confessiones. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 81125 Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/18">Audio recording</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a1c9f2fc4240a91c117155ca8ef84126.mp3 4b3f07f1255ce76f9a2ad1c04a0bada1 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 CD Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:16 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 Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening: A Lecture for Parents and Students Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-11-04 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I herby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site." 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_Brann_Eva_2011-11-04 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 4, 2011, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/21119542993fe09fa6502a1fcc860183.mp3 3d154a276049819d519e4760350993f9 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.) 01:03:39 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 Music and the Idea of a World: On Plato and Schopenhauer Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kalkavage, Peter Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-11-06 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 83465 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 6, 2015, by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series. 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 Language A language of the resource English Relation A related resource <a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1079">Typescript</a> Subject The topic of the resource Music Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788-1860. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Plato. Timaeus Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1c0101ce28ea085841d2551fe7afa90b.pdf d472e0fafadaccca3c77b8438c426d05 PDF Text Text DEPTH AND DESIRE EVABRM-IN St. John's College Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990 �DEPTH AND DESIRE Eva Brann Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990 li5l y an old tradition the first lecture •)f the year is dedicated to lQJ the new members of our college, to the freshman students and the freshman tutors. It is a chance to tell you something about the shape and the spirit of the Program that pverns St. John's College- and not only to tell you but perhaps even to show you. I think I am right in this spirit when I begin by examining the class-name I just called you by: freshmen. A freshman, my etymological dictionaries tell me, is a person "not tainted, sullied or worn," a still-fresh human being, where "fresh" means, so the dictionary points out, both "frisky" and "impertinent." Later on in the year you will learn a weighty Greek word applicable to persons of frisky impertinence. They are said to have thymos, spiritedness or plain spunk, a characteristic necessary for serious learning. This spirited frame of mind is perfectly compatible with being shy and secretly a little scared. In fact, to my mind, it is a sign of quality in newcomers to be anxious for their own diJnity in the way that shows itself in spirited shyness. It is our business, the business of the faculty and of the more responsible upper class students, to help your spiritedness to become serious, to emerge from the shyness-- whether it be of the quiet or the boisterous sort, to help you channel your energy into a steady desire for learning and to direct your boldness toward the discovery of depth and, moreover, to help you without leaving you tainted, sullied, and worn out. I keep saying "help," because although great changes are bound to take place in you in these next years-- do but behold the seniors: unsullied, untainted, unworn and transfigured-- we none of us know who should get the most credit besides yourself: the Program, our teaching, your friendships or just plain time passing. At any rate, the spirit of the college is invested in seriousness, a certain kind of seriousness-- not dead seriousness but live seriousness, you might say. This seriousness shows itself on many occasions: in deep or heated conversations in the noon sun or at midnight, in marathons of effort and in the oblivion of sleep, in devoted daily preparation and in glorious goofing-off, in the 1 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE willingness to try on opinions and in the need to come to conclusions. What does your school do to induce this very particular kind of seriousness? When you chose to come to St. John's you were, perhaps, attracted by the fact that the mode of teaching normal in higher education is quite abnormal here. I mean lectures. Only one lecture a week is an integral part of the Program, on Fridays at 8:15 P.M. Now the chief thing about a lecture is that it is prepared ahead of time. For instance, I began working on this lecture in March. A lecture Ol!ght to be the temporarily final word, the best a speaker has to give you at the moment. It should not matter whether the surface of the speech is brilliant or drab, as long as it is a deliberate and well-prepared opening of the speaker's heart and mind to the listeners. As such it carries authority. These authoritative occasions are obviously important to the life of the school. Yet our normal way is not the prepared lecture but the focused conversation which is effervescent rather than prepared, provisional rather than authoritative, and participatory rather than reactive. Your tutors will not tell you but ask you; they will not demonstrate acquired knowledge, but the activity of learning. One reason why the teaching of new tutors-- and some of your classes will be taught by newcomers-- is often most memorable to freshmen is that their learning is genuinely original and keeps sympathetic pace with yours. There is an irresistible but false local etymology of the word tutor as "one who toots," perhaps his own horn. What the word tutor really signifies is a person who guards and watches learning. We are deliberately not called professors because we profess no special expertise. Since you will not be told things, you will have to speak yourselves. What will you speak about? The Program wiH ask you to focus your conversation on certain texts-- they might be books or scores or paintings. These texts have been selected over the years by us because they have the living seriousness I am trying to speak about. To my mind texts, like people, are serious when they have a surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill that desire. Here then, is my announced theme for tonight: the depth that calls forth desire. To delineate that depth I must once again distinguish our kind of conversation, the kind associated with such texts, from the 2 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE kind of fellowship to be found in other places. All over this country, and wherever the conditions for some human happiness exist, there are people who know all there is to know about some field that they till with a single-minded love. This is the blessed race of buffs, aficionados and those rare professionals who have had the grace to remain amateurs at heart. They study history or race stock cars or do biology or fly hot-air balloons. My own favorite fanatic is the young son of a graduate of St. John's. This boy is persistently in love with fish, with the hooks, flies, sinkers, leaders, reels and rods for catching them, with the books for studying them, with the aquaria, ponds, lakes and oceans for observing them. When I first met him he looked up at me shyly and asked if I knew what an ichthyologist was. Since I knew some Greek I knew the etymology of the word and could tell him that it is a person who can give an account of fish, so he was satisfied with me. This boy may have his troubles but he is also acquainted with bliss. This kind of concentrated bliss we cannot deliver to you, except perhaps in limited extracurricular ways. Instead we, or rather the Program, will drive you through centuries of time and diversities of opinion, while depriving you of the freedom and the serenity to till and to master a well-defined field of your own choosing. You will study Greek and invest hours in mem01 izing paradigms, but your tutorial is not a Greek class-- it is a language tutorial in which Greek is studied only partly for its own virtues, and partly as a striking and, for you, a novel example of human speecl1 and its possibilities. You will study Euclid and demonstrate rna 11y prepositions, yet your tutorial is not intended to make you geometers but to allow you to think about the activity of mathematics. In short, you will be asked to read many books carefully and to stcdy many matters in some detail only to find them passing away, becoming mere examples in the conversation. And these fugitive texts will almost all bear their excellence, their worthiness to be studied exhaustively, on their face, for we try to pick the ideal examples. This procedure is practically guaranteed to keep you off-balance, even to drive you a little crazy, since you will not often have the satisfaction of dwelling on anything and of mastering it. How do we dare do this to you? Here is a strange but unavoidable fact: Those who plow with devotion and pleasure and increasing mastery some bounded plot on the globe of knowledge often undergo a professional 3 �BRANN DEPTI-I AND DESIRE deformation. They lose first the will and then the ability to go deep. To be sure, specialists are often said to know their subjects "in depth," but that is not the depth I mean. Let me illustrate with an example I have a special affection for. I began my academic life as an archaeologist, and the first thing archaeologists do is to dig deep past the present surface of the earth, or rather they scrape it away layer by layer. But with every stratum they scrape away they find themselves at a new surface, the surface of a former age. They poke into time-- a magical enough activity--but they do not pretend to pierce the nature of things. For example, there would come up from the depths of a well-shaft an ancient pot. I would catalogue it by naming its form, say: kotvle, a kind of cup; by giving its dimensions: H. 0.108 m.; diam. 0.135 m; by describing its proportions: deep bodied, narrow-footed; by interpreting the picture painted on it: a rabbit-- this is the pot-painter being funny-- jumping a tracking hound from behind; by conjecturing about the provenance and the stylistic influences: made in Attica under Corinthian influence; and by assigning a date: third quarter of the seventh century B.C. Was I required to consider what I meant by dimensions, proportions, styles, images, funniness, influences, places? Not a bit- that would have meant time out and profitless distraction from my business, which was to know all about the looks and appearances of the pottery of Athens in early times. What this Program of ours offers you is exactly that time out, and that splendid distraction. People will say of you, when you have graduated, that you have 4 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE acquired a broad background. But your education will have been broad only in a very incidental and sketchy way-- certainly not in the fashion of a close-knit tapestry that is a continuous texture of interwoven warp and woof. Many of the books you are about to read do tie into one another. Sometimes a book written by an ancient Greek will (I am not being funny) talk back to one written by a modern American, or the opposite-- the strands that connect these books seem to run back and forth and sideways through time. But some books will stand, at least as we read them, in splendid isolation, and all in all the texts we study do not add up to a texture of knowledge: There is no major called "Great Books." How could there be competence in a tradition whose moving impulse is to undercut every wisdom in favor of a yet deeper one? There is not even agreement whether this tradition of ours advances or degenerates with time, whether its authors are all talking about the same thing, though in a different way, or in apparently similar ways about quite incomparable things. Here is what the books do seem to me to have in common: They intend to go into the depths of things. All the authors, even those subtly self-contradictory ones who claim that there are no depths but only surfaces, are deep in the way I mean. This desire for depth, then, is what will hold your studies here together. There is a word for this effort, to which it is my privilege to introduce you tonight. The word is philosophy. The term is put together from two Greek words, philos, an adjective used of someone who feels friendly, even passionate love, and sophia, which means wisdom or deep knowledge. When I say that your school is devoted to philosophy, the love of deep knowledge, I mean that all our authors want to draw you deep into their matter, whether by words, symbols, notes or visual shapes. Incidentally, in a few weeks a lecturer, a tutor from Santa Fe, will come and contradict me; he has told me that he will say that what we do needn't bear the name of philosophy at all. Let that be a subject for future discussion, and let me come to the heart of my lecture tonight. It is ;he question what depth is and how is possible. I think we are all inclined to suppose that literal, actual depth belongs to bodies and space and that people or texts are deep only by analogy, metaphor .cally speaking. I want to propose that here, as Sl often in philosophy, it is 5 �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE really the other way around: it is the body that is deep merely metaphorically, as a matter of speaking, while the soul and its expression alone are deep in the primary sense. Certainly the depth of a body or a space is elusive. If a body has a perfectly hard and impenetrable surface, its depth must be forever beyond our experience-- a kind of hard, inaccessible nothingness. On the other hand, let the physical body have a hollow in it-- such caves are powerful allegories of depth and you will in the next four years come across some famous holes: the grotto of Calypso, the underground chamber in Plato's Republic, Don Quixote's cavern of Montesinos. Now ask yourself: Where actually is the depth? The containing boundaries of the hollow are all faces of the body, and no matter how deep you seem to be inside the body, you are still on its surface, just as I argued before about archaeological excavations. Now consider matterless bodies, geometric solids. Euclid says in Book XI that a solid has length, breadth, and depth, but he gives us no way to tell which is which: it depends on your perspective-- in fact all three dimensions are lengths delineating the surfaces that he says are the extremity of the solid. What is inside that solid, what its inwardness or true depth is, he does not feel obliged to say. These are questions you might want to raise in your mathematics tutorials: Can one get inside a geometric solid? How? Bodies, I am suggesting, are either too hard or too involuted or too featureless or too empty to have true depth. Only divine or human beings and the texts they produce-- texts made of words, notes, paint, stones, what have you-- can be literally deep or profound. For I attribute depth or profundity to that which is of a truly different order from the surface that covers and hides it. And it must be the inside and foundation of just that surface, so that we can gain entrance to it through that particular outside and through no other. Every depth must be sought through its own proper surface which it both denies or negates and supplies with significance: the surface that hides its own depth is never superficial. Human beings seem to me the most obvious example of such depth. All human beings have a surface, namely the face and figure they present. I personally think that in real life almost all people also have an inside, their soul, their depth. But there are some famous novels in which characters are described who are nothing but 6 �BRANN DEPTI-1 AND DESIRE empty shells. Against their impenetrable surface those whom they attract by the insidiously unflawed beauty peculiar to facades that hide nothing break themselves, or if they tear through, they fall into nothingness. However, these are fictions, and actual human beings have by the very fact of their humanity an inner sanctum. We begin by noting, casually, their face, their demeanor. As our interest awakens we proceed to read more carefully, to watch their appearance ardently for what it signifies. If we are lucky, they may open up to us, as we do to them. If we go about it right, this interpretative process need never come to an end, for the human inside, or to give it, once again, its proper name, the soul, is a true mystery. By a true mystery I mean a profundity whose bottom we can never seem to plumb though we have a persistent faith }n its actuality. I think that for us human beings only depths and mysteries induce viable desire. For love entirely without longing is not possible among human beings. Many a failure of love follows on the-- usually false- opinion that we have exhausted the other person's inside, that there is no further promise of depth. It is not only in respect to living human beings that depth calls forth desire. This college would not be the close human community that it is if you did not get to know some human beings deeply-- which is called friendship. But such love is only the essential by-product (to coin a contradictory phrase) of our philosophical Program, a program that encourages the love of certain para-human beings. These para-human beings are the expressions of the human soul, our texts, as well as the things they talk about. Let me take a moment to ask wl>ether this particular desire for depth I keep referring to is common among human beings or even natural. I say it is absolutely natural and very common. You will see what I mean when I tell you what I think is the nature of desire. Desire seems to me to be a kind of negative form or a shaped emptiness in the soul, a place in the spirit expecting to be filled, a kind of psychic envelope waiting to be stuffed with its proper contents. Now take a long leap and ask yourself what a question is. A question is a negative form or shaped emptiness in the mind, a place in thought waiting to be filled, a psychic envelope ready to be supplied with its proper message. Questions therefore have the same 7 �BRANN DEPTII AND DESIRE structure as desires. In fact questions are a subspecies of desire: a question is desire directed upon wisdom or knowledge. Therefore I might go so far as to say that this school teaches the shaping of desire-- because here we practice asking deep questions. Now I think that very many, probably all, human beings would like to ask such questions if they only knew how. That is why the desire for depth is both common and natural. What we most often, or at least most programmatically, ask questions about are those texts I have been mentioning. As I have intimated, such a text, particularly a text of words, is a curious kind of being, neither a living soul nor a mere rigid thing. What a book might be, such that it could have genuine depth, is a question that should arise over and over in the tutorials and the seminars. That books do have depth is shown by the fact that they induce questions, the directed desire to open them up. I want to end by giving a sample of a deep text and a demonstration of the beginning of a reading, a mere knock at its gate, so to speak. The text is a saying by Heraclitus. Heraclitus flourished about 500 B.C. He was early among those who inquired into the nature of things, and he had a contemporary antagonist, Parmenides. You will see from your sheets that Heraclitus said that it is wise to agree that "All things are one. • Parmenides said things that, on the face of it, seem similar, but whether he meant the same thing as Heraclitus, or something opposite or something incomparable-- that is a matter of ever-live debate. In any case, Heraclitus and Parmenides together embody the great principle of our tradition that I mentioned before; you might call it the "the principle of responsive differentiation." However, I shall not try to talk about Heraclitus's actual wisdom tonight-- that along with the previous questions: "What is philosophy?," "What is a solid?," "What is a cave?," "What is a book?," I leave to future discussion. I shall attend only to the preliminaries with which Heraclitus surrounds his wisdom. Heraclitus's book is largely lost, though as far as we know it was not a treatise but a book of sayings. Even in ancient times it had a reputation for depth; the tragedian Euripides said of it that it required a Delian diver-- the divers from the island Delos (which means the "Manifest" or "Clear") were evidently famous for diving deep and bringing things to light. 8 �DEPTH AND DESIRE BRANN The sayi�g I have chosen goes: OVK IIJOU &:ua TOU Aoyou aKQU aaVTas 611oAoydv aoq�ov AaTw lv 1rav-Ta dva& Transliterated it reads ouk emou alia tou logou akousantas homologein sophon estin ben panta einai. On the surface this saying is in Greek and needs to be translated. Since I have argued that surfaces are, like traditional Japanese packaging, an integral part of the contents, they must be carefully and patiently undone. Now to put Heraclitus's Greek into English is, up to a certain point, not hard. Your Greek manual will tell you about the "accusative absolute" and about various infinitives, and your Greek dictionaries will give you the meaning of "listening," of "wise" (which you are already familiar with in philosophy), and of "agree." "Logos" is one of the But then you look up logos. tremendous words of our tradition, to which it is, once again, my privilege to introduce you. Without even looking it up, I can give you the following meanings: Word and speech, saying and story, tally and tale, ratio and relation, account and explanation (that was the meaning which occurred in the word "ichthyologist"), argument and discussion, reason and reasoning, collection and gathering, the word of God and the son of God. As you learn Greek you will see what it is about the root-meaning of logos that makes this great scope of significance possible. But how are you to choose? You are caught in a vicious circle: Unless you know what Heraclitus means by logos you cannot choose the right English translation, and unless you discover the right English word you cannot know what he means by his saying. However, sensible people find ways to scramble themselves out of this bind. Try a meaning that makes good immediate sense: choose "reasoning." Listening not to me but to my reasoning, it is wise to agree that all things are one. This yields a saying that is particularly pertinent to us, since 9 �BRANN DEPTII AND DESIRE it might be posted over every seminar door. For though we must look into each other's faces, we must not get stuck on personalities. Each seminar member has a right to say: "Never mind me, answer my argument." Heraclitus is introducing a great notion into the Western world here: Not who says it matters but what is said. But there is more signifying surface to the saying. Listen to its sound and notice that in the second line the word homologein sounds like logos. "Agree" is a good first meaning but it does not preserve the similarity of sound. Homologein literally means "to say the same." Let me try that, and for "my reasoning" I will substitute "the Saying." If you listen not to me but to the Saying, it is wise to say the same: that all things are one. Now what sense does that make? What Saying? Whose saying other than Heraclitus's own? Suppose the translation did make sense, then Heraclitus is saying that there is a saying that can be heard beyond his own, a speech to which we must listen, a speaking that it would be the part of wisdom to echo in what we say. What impersonal speech could that be? Heraclitus in fact tells us not what the logos is, but what it says, for he bids us to say the same: "All things are one." What if this saying, of which no human being is the author, where a power whose saying and doing were one and the same? What if its speech were an act? Let me play with a third, somewhat strange, version: Once you have listened not to me but to the Gathering, it is wise similarly to gather all things into one. Here logos is translated as gathering or collection. It is the power that gathers everything in the world into a unified whole, the organizing power we are invited to imitate by giving a comprehensive account of the universe in speech. The logos speaks primally; our logos becomes deep by imitating it. I think by now the text has begun to draw us through its surface into its depth. You can see that it demands of you the playful seriousness I mentioned at the beginning, a seriousness that calls out all your capacity for careful attention to surface detail as well as your willingness to dive into the depths. io �BRANN DEPTH AND DESIRE Here I shall stop. But although I am ending, I am not finished-- and neither, of course, are you. If you have in fact listened not only to me but also to my argument, and if you are possessed by the proper freshman spirit, now is your moment, the part of the Friday night lecture that is the true St. John's: the time for questions. 11 �A NOTE ABOUT THE TEXT This lecture was written and edited in WordPerfect 5.1. All headings, subheadings, and body text are set in Times Roman. Typesetting, editing, and printing were done at the St. John's Print Shop. � 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 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 Depth and desire Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 31, 1990 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990-08-31 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 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 57332 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Taken from the St. John's Review, Volume XXIX, Number 3, 1989-90. It was originally the opening lecture of the 1990-91 academic year at St. John's College, Annapolis. 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 Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/326">Audio recording</a> Deans Friday night lecture St. John's Review Tutors