6 20 453 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b9b0cab952e5288e9e6691b89c28abc5.pdf 30ae99d4d2b26b1bc80ae58611525323 PDF Text Text Philosophy and the Cave Wall Plato and Kant on the form of the given Would the mind’s escape from the body be a good thing? This question might arise for anyone who sees a distinction in our human nature between thought and sense. Why might one wish for such an escape? And what might warn one against such a wish? Compare these two different ways of approaching the question, each formulated by Kant: The inclinations themselves, as sources of need, are so far from having an absolute worth, that to be altogether free of them must be the general wish of every rational being. (Kant, Groundwork, 428) 1 Here, sensible appetites and aversions are a regrettable encumbrance. Of course, the annihilation of bodily needs is just a “wish”-- these impositions of nature are truly inescapable for us as long as we live in this body. But who hasn’t felt this wish, in moments of frustration, struggle, or frailty? Just as the addict can see his own addiction as something to regret, as something worth being free from, we may all sometimes see the demands our own bodies seem to make on us as regrettable, and as unfortunate. Socrates spoke of this kind of wish in the Phaedo, when he explained to his friends that a philosopher looks forward to death– the soul leaving the body– as the greatest of blessings. But here is another take on the question: The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. 2 It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty zone of pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance– meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in motion. Kant is more subtle in other works. “The inclinations, in themselves, are good” (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). Nevertheless, they do not enable our cognition of the Good itself. 2 Is there such a thing as empty space? The dove thinks so. Kant will argue that mind is absent from no place in the world (“the sum of possible experience”): it is an ideal plenum, so to speak. 1 1 �(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A5/B8) Here sensibility could be thought of as a resource, a help that makes knowledge possible for the mind. The wish of the thinker to be released from sense is mistaken, because it fails to see how, if realized, this would mean the withdrawal of that resource, the abandonment of that crucial gift. Notice how Kant relates his own thinking to Plato explicitly in the second passage, and implicitly in the first. Kant seems to be divided. In the practical sphere, where action is concerned, sense can be an obstacle, or at least an encumbrance. But in the theoretical sphere, where knowledge is concerned, Kant is in fact a champion of sensibility. Ultimately, according to Kant, it is only when we understand the epistemic resource provided by sensibility that we can see how necessary, universal knowledge of the world around us is possible. Kant aims to carry out a previously unattempted task for philosophy: to unfold the principles of sensibility. Philosophy, Kant claims, must not sprint ahead to the realm of pure reason, to what seems to it maximally intelligible. Rather, it can and must make intelligible what is not intelligible on its own– the senses. When explicated, this would be a kind of wisdom unavailable to the mere mathematician or scientist, and unheard of by the metaphysician: a philosophical apology of sense, what Kant calls a ‘transcendental aesthetic.’ Getting to read Plato and Kant every few years in an alternating cycle, it has come to seem to me that perhaps Plato, for one, did contemplate such an account. To see this thread in Plato, I will consider tonight passages from two great dialogues: the Republic, and its sibling, the Timaeus. Kant himself turns our attention in this direction by identifying Plato as the beginning of his own philosophical tradition, one that asks first and foremost: how is knowledge possible? The example of mathematics, Kant claims, convinced Plato that we have access universal, necessary truths not derived from sense experience—what Kant calls a priori knowledge. Socrates is often occupied with this sort of knowledge, as in the slave-boy’s recollection of true geometrical judgments he was never taught. To explain this sort of knowing, Socrates sometimes invokes purely intellectual, so-called forms of what is known. The pure forms somehow come to have sensible images of themselves, in our minds and in the world. That is, they are somehow participated in, or received, and it is by means of their reception that the world can be known for what it is. But how is this reception into the sensible realm possible? The problem of human knowledge, of how the given can be known, is therefore always also the problem of sensible receptivity. 2 �The lecture has four parts. We will trace a path of inquiry into receptivity through Book VI of the Republic (section 1), and then into the Timaeus (section 2), where I hope to show how Plato’s thinking reaches a kind of culmination in the account of the so-called ‘receptacle’. In the third section of the lecture, we’ll compare the Platonic approach to the problem with Kant’s account of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason. We might then be in a position to judge whether Plato and Kant are really philosophical brothers-in-arms, as Kant suggests (section 4). We will not discover that Plato and Kant held the same doctrines. Plato’s dialogic writings protect us from ascribing “doctrines” to his writings at all. Nevertheless, philosophers—even philosophers who disagree with each other-- might be colleagues in so far as they are moved by the same questions, and the same problems. It is this comradery under a question I hope to examine in Kant and Plato tonight. The Path Upward is not the Path Downward In Book VI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates asks his conversation partners to imagine a line divided into two unequal sections, each of which is divided again into two subsections (509d7 ff). Then both faculties of the soul and the objects of these faculties are mapped onto the line: the two main sections correspond to sense and understanding; the realm of sense, of what seems to be, is divided into bodily things, and their images; while the realm of the understanding, of what is, is divided into what Socrates calls the “mathematicals,” or the learnable things, and what he calls the “ideas,” or the forms. The philosopher’s authentic activity is knowing the forms, which he or she achieves by what Socrates calls “dialectic.” The category of the mathematicals, by the way, might be much broader than what we would mean by ‘mathematics,’ embracing anything that can be universally known or demonstrated: not only music and mechanics, but perhaps also several natural sciences, and even language arts like grammar and general logic-- the mathematicals, taken together, sserve as the topics of our tutorials and labs. The realm of the sensible is known by experience. Enough familiarity with the solid structures we use as houses lets a carpenter repair and construct. His or her colleague within the sensible realm is the artist who expertly paints images of the same houses that the carpenter constructs. But many aspects of housebuilding follow from geometry, which grasps universal principles about figures. The knowledge of these belongs to the understanding. Here we can see laid out three personages, three psychic activities, and three sorts of object: the 3 �painter, making images of houses by artistic imitation; the carpenter, putting his or her body into motion to bring those same houses into being as solid structures; the geometrician, demonstrating the necessary, universal figurative principles governing the house’s structure. The painting is an image of the roof’s eaves, which in turn can be thought of as images of angles. These angles can be seen “only by thought,” and raising ourselves to the level of the mathematicals reveals that human beings can have contact with universal, necessary truths beyond convention and passing opinion. They give us purchase on the truth beyond experience. But Socrates follows his construction of the divided line by posing two “reservations” to his interlocutors about mathematical knowledge. The first is that its objects are taken as “assumptions” by the thought that knows them. Geometry, for example, like all other particular sciences, must simply assume that mathematical figures exist, and are therefore available for study. It has no account of what sort of existence they have, and whether this existence has a cause or source. Second, geometry will always be at least partially immersed in sensibility, since it must always make use of sensible images in its demonstrations. In Socrates’ account, philosophy will emerge as a possible kind of knowing that could transcend these two “reservations.” Let us consider the reservations in turn. Socrates complains that the mathematicals are not truly “first principles” or beginnings, but “assumptions” But how does he know this? True, geometry does not explain how its angle exists, but could this not be a consequence of the figure’s ultimate priority? It can’t be explained by geometry, because it can't be explained at all: it is a first principle. This is a tempting defense of mathematical supremacy. (when mathematicians call themselves ‘platonists’,sometimes I think this is what they mean.) But consider carefully the difference between self-evidence and assumption: an assumed premise is not self-evident, because it leaves unsettled what sort of being on its own the object may have apart from me, who assumes it. As long as it remains an assumption, a geometrical angle, though it seemed to be real to us, might turn out to be a sort of illusion. Perhaps the reality of things is that spaciousness is not real at all, that nothing is linearly extended, and no two lines are spread out from each other in an angle. While this is perhaps disturbing to contemplate, it is not a possibility the geometer can rule out. There is nothing about the angle that renders its non-existence self-contradictory, and by hypothesis, geometry does not understand the figure’s reality to be guaranteed by some higher source. Geometricians like Euclid and Lobachevski do a great service for knowledge by identifying certain principles as unproved “postulates” or “assumptions.” But even they leave unarticulated, and therefore unexamined, the whole host of presuppositions that underlie their objects. The question, ‘how do angles exist?’ is not 4 �nonsensical, and remains. The geometer, while he or she might ask this question from time to time, cannot answer it from within his or her own science. The second reservation is, I think, more subtle. Just as geometry couldn’t “extricate” itself from its own assuming, it also can’t pull itself out of the very sensibility it is so proud of rising above. Socrates’ speech, with all its talk of higher and lower, here might sound like it is assuming a kind of low-class uncleanliness about sensibility. Or maybe he is exploiting the thumotic character of his interlocutor Glaucon, who will be pleased to look down on the uppity mathematicians who are still enmeshed in the dingy senses. But if we are not so hastily thumotic, we might wonder what is so damning about mathematics’ return to the senses. Is Socrates’ second reservation not itself an unreasoning prejudice against embodiment? In fact I think Socrates is onto something very important here. Mathematics begins by seeking an object more knowable than what presents itself to the senses. But when it demonstrates necessary truths about these objects, it finds it must turn back to sensibility to construct images of what it wants to know. 3 We all know this from our study of Euclid and his sucessors (even Lobachevski): no board or no paper, or no imaginary field in one’s mind, then no demonstration of the proposition. We think the universal we desire to prove on our own, but we turn to the board to manifest what we think about this universal, and the board helps us along, making room for the instantiation of the figure, keeping things apart from each other, letting them abide next to each other, sorting the different directions– left, right, back and forth. It is as if the board, or rather, space itself, were a partner in the demonstration. This means that geometry’s very scientific character is dependent upon sensible conditions. But these sensible conditions are not understood by geometry, and indeed, are never brought into examination by it. We might not find this situation humiliating, but we should find it intellectually unsatisfying. The point is not so much that sensibility contaminates, but that for all its crucial contribution to knowing, it remains unintelligible, a silent partner in the sciences. Socrates proposes that philosophy can rise above mathematics’ limits. “Reason may take hold” of mathematicals, he says, not as “assumptions”, but as “stepping stones,” examining from what higher principles they might proceed, by means of “dialectic.” This philosophical kind of knowing, as an extension of geometrical inquiry, would answer the question ‘how do angles exist?’ by discovering genuinely self-evident truths upon which angles depend. In this sense, its objects would not be assumptions, and it would escape the first reservation about mathematicals. The second reservation would also be escaped, because the dialectical ascent [It is not only geometry that turns back to sensibility, but arithmetic as well. Counting needs an extended field in which successive moments can be distinguished. For Kant, this is time.] 3 5 �upon the grounds of mathematical knowing would move towards fully intelligible objects of reason. Its accounts would move from reason to reason, with nothing but reason in between. In other words, it would never descend back into sensibility’s manifestations to demonstrate, but would [‘hypothetically’] infer the conditions it was after. Philosophy, like seminar, will not need to use the board. As wonderful as these philosophical successes might be if realized, Socrates’ proposal raises some crucial questions not addressed explicitly in the Republic. Remember the concern involved in the second reservation, that mathematics requires the use of sensible images. If this “use” involves epistemic contributions from sensibility not understood by mathematics, these contributions will not be any better recognized by a purely eidetic, dialectical philosophy. Rather, they will be transcended, as the mere circumstances of a lower form of knowing, perhaps not worth the attention of reason unencumbered. In this presentation of philosophy, we are encouraged to assume that sensibility is not, in fact, an epistemic resource. If the contributions to knowledge come wholly from ‘above’, so to speak, from reason alone, then this is perhaps a safe assumption. But a lover of wisdom would rather not beg this question. The image of the divided line is followed by the image of a cave, in which we are born chained to our sensible experience, which plays before us like shadows cast by models of real things outside of the cave. In this allegory, knowledge indeed comes ‘from above’: the naturally true is imitated in the figures manipulated in the cave, and these are imitated in the shadows they cast. But throughout the allegory is an unexplicated factor: each sort of knowable generates an image in some receiver– the forms of the true objects are received into the materials used to construct their likenesses, and the likenesses themselves on the cave wall that receives their shadows. Without these receivers, no chain of imitation is possible. Following the allegory, without the cave wall, no sensible experience is possible. But of what is the wall itself a depiction? Whatever it is, is it of a nature to contribute to the kind of knowing we have in our experience of the world? Socrates’ allegory might distract some readers from such a question with its narrative of “turning-around.” By pointing the aspiring philosopher ‘upwards’ towards reason’s resources, rather than ‘downwards’ towards the nature of sensibility, he is leaving at least one big question on the table. If the path upwards were pursued, what would the Socratic philosopher discover about the first principles of geometric “assumptions”? A first step still within mathematics might be the discovery that figures can be taken as images of ratios– for examples, the pentagon as a spatial flowering of the uncalculable mean and extreme ratio, and the circle, of the transcendent ratio called ‘pi.’ But these so-called “irrational” or “mute” ratios themselves might turn out to be 6 �approximations of rational, speakable– that is, arithmetic– ratios. The very first mathematical principles from which figures are derived would then be numbers, whose first still-mathematical principle might be the unit, or that by which we call something one. Now, a dialectical inquiry into the possibility of numbers-- and indeed the possibility of the unit-- might lead to purely intelligible forms such as the Same itself, the Other itself, and the One itself. This ascent leaves space behind as a sort of encumbrance. Of course, space itself is not accounted for in such a philosophical ascent. The givenness of figures, that they are outside of us, and the receptivity of both the world around us and our own imaginations to the spatial images of ultimately rational principles, is not itself given an explanation. The silent partnership of the cave wall has been left silent. The Turn to Bastard Reasoning Eric Salem once proposed in a lecture on Socrates’ allegory that the account of the cave wall is not given in the Republic, but rather might be sought in part in the Timaeus’ account of the receptacle. I want to follow his suggestion here, and so we now turn to the Timaeus. In the dialogue’s introductory section, Socrates asks to hear about his idea of a beautiful city, which had been elaborated in speech the day before, but this time set in motion, at war. His request might already indicate an interest in just what was left unexplored above: in motion, in the realm of becoming, the beautiful city will need to come down off its seat in intellectual heaven, and show how it might be given in the world of change. But it will not be Socrates who takes this path downward. Rather, the title character Timaeus speaks for the remainder of the dialogue. Before the city in motion can be discussed, however, Socrates and his interlocutors decide they want an account of the nature of the humans who will make up the city. Moreover, they want an account of the whole, moving cosmos in which these humans emerge. The remainder of the dialogue is accordingly cosmological, and then anthropological (the political question is postponed). Timaeus’ very first step in pursuing his cosmology is to offer a fundamental distinction familiar to Plato’s readers: the sensible world, he says, must be distinguished from the purely intelligible model of which it is an image. The intelligible admits of no motion, is eternal, and can never have come to be at all– it simply is. The sensible comes to be, and Timaeus pictures this coming to be as the result of a divine constructive “craftsman” (ho demiourgos) or “framer” (ho synistas). He narrates how this power might have constructed a 7 �harmonious image in imitation of the perfect model, making use of mathematical figures and ratios familiar to the sciences of astronomy and music. 4 Timaeus’ cosmos, at this point, is like a mathematician’s diagram. Compare Ptolemy’s mathematical astronomy. Its theories do not speak of where or in what the motions of the stars occur, but rather only of the stars’ motions’ knowable ratios, demonstrable in diagrams. In this way, the question of the nature of the space that receives the world-image might not arise for the merely mathematical cosmologist. 5 But several steps into the narration, Timaeus points out a problem. The divine maker constructed these mathematical models as somehow imitations of what is best—that is, as imitations of the intelligible original. But it doesn’t seem that this procedure—imitation of the best—is sufficient to account for the whole cosmos. On the contrary, Timaeus claims that the world as it is comes to be not simply from the intellect’s grasp of the good, as his story had been assuming, but also from what he now calls “necessity”: by what, if it exists, has to be the way it is. Where does this necessity come from? Despite the fact that the mathematical arts and sciences (like Ptolemy’s) are filled with insights into what is necessarily and universally true about corporeal nature, none of them can give a deduction of this necessity’s origin. For example, none of the cosmologists, Timaeus points out, have given an account of how the medium of natural change—the elements of bodies-- have come to be in the matter in which they are. 6 To theorize a changing cosmos, mathematical diagrams alone, unhindered by necessity, will not be sufficient. What is needed, Timaeus proposes, is a “new beginning,” a “retreat” to a new principle, a “third kind” of being, making sense of the world’s receptivity as such for the knowable forms. Timaeus calls this principle “the receptacle”, a co-eternal origin alongside the intellect’s model of the cosmos. Not the model itself, nor its constructed image, it is precisely that into which the model is received. With the introduction of his “third” principle, Timaeus is in fact clarifying a fundamental dualism about knowledge. The relation of original to image so dear to Socrates leaves out of account a second origin for the image, in receptivity itself. The world as it appears is different from its origin– this is the Socratic proposal. But that its origins are two is Timaeus’ thesis– by Geometry and arithmetic provide a science of ratio in general; but astronomy and music turn to appearances to discover which particular ratios and figures form a harmonious whole, either of heavenly motions, or of musical scales. Timaeus borrows the particular ratios and figures of the latter two sciences. 5 At this stage, time is given as “a moving image of eternity.” It is the outcome of ratio-metric mathematical principles, not a container in which they have being. This approach is unlike Timaeus’ conception of space. 6 If successful, an account of necessity would perhaps stave off the allegation that corporeal becoming is nothing but an unintelligible flux. 4 8 �adding his “third kind”, he uncovers that second origin, and reveals the apparent world as what he calls a “syntasis”: a combination of heterogenous sources. The multifarious shifting from stability to instability and back again that constitutes the mortal world will take place in the receptacle; but the discovery of this principle reveals that it must have been there all along, providing space even for the relatively unchanging motions of astronomy. 7 With the receptacle, astronomy can be taken as no longer merely mathematical, for its objects are not merely diagrammable ratios. Rather, they are now natural bodies with a place in the cosmos. Their astronomy belongs to physics. 8 Timaeus warns his audience that an account of the receptacle will be “strange and unusual,” because the object of study is “difficult and obscure.” His warnings indicate to us that an entirely new sort of theorizing will be taking place: for unlike the eidetic model, the receptacle is not itself intelligible. And unlike the visible world, it does not appear to the senses. If we have only intellect and sense at our disposal, with what will we know that which is in itself unavailable to either? In one of the strangest passages in Plato (the 4th passage on the handout), Timaeus tells us that the receptacle not only “shares in the intelligible in a most perplexing and hard-to capture manner”— but is “graspable by a bastard sort of reasoning, with the aid of insensibility” (52a8). The claim seems to be that the principle unavailable to our two faculties, sense and thought, will be revealed through a perverse deployment of those very same faculties. Why “bastard”? Wherefore base? This term suggests that in pursuing this account, reason will not be occupied within reason’s own, high territory of the purely intelligible, but with the supposedly baser realm of the sensible. The account to be developed takes the forms to have been mired in the sensible realm, and attempts to understand precisely their adulterated existence. Reasoning will be trying to make sense of what is not its own. And why “insensibility”? How could that help? The idea here could be that the inquiring subject has to somehow scrutinize the nature of his or her own sensible experience, while shutting out the material influence of the sensible object. Insensibility here is a sort of deep abstraction. Regard the curtains behind me, but become insensible to their color, their solidity, their texture, perhaps even their particular magnitude [imagining FSK here]. What emerges for us then is “seen dimly” as if in a “dream,” Timaeus says. Timaeus implies that the heavenly motions of astronomy are not eternal, but rather only an “image” of eternity. The demiurge remarks that “all that is bound together can be dissolved” (41b1). 8 The receptacle belongs to “the account of the whole” 48d5, and “is…before the birth of Heaven.” 52d4 7 9 �As he proceeds, Timaeus’ retreat reasons backwards towards the “nature” or “eidos” of the receptacle. That is, he infers what it would have to be like, in order to fulfill its role as the field in which the visible manifests. It can have no sensible qualities, since it must be able to take any of them on. Similarly, it cannot be pictured or diagramed, since it is the ground of all possible diagrams. It can’t be drawn on the board, since it is what makes the board available in the first place. This is what it is not, but what can be said positively about it? Timaeus calls it the “chora,” the space or room in which the world appears. He also calls it a neutral “molding stuff” for the world, and even a “wet-nurse”, and “mother.” This sequence of metaphors draws out a sense of the formal and causal power of the receptacle. The receptacle thus somehow nourishes, or pours life into things, sustaining them. These metaphors indicate how far from “empty” the receptacle is, even in itself. We might often think of space as sheer void, waiting indifferently to be filled by perceptible items. 9 But Timaeus’ space is teeming with potential life, waiting, not indifferently, but expectantly, to give birth. It is perhaps neither full, nor empty, but according to its eternal priority, the source of either of these spatial dispositions. When it gets filled by forms, it gives them the room to manifest themselves. When it gets filled by void, it holds open the room in which no forms are. Compare the blackboard: where the diagram is not drawn, indeed, in the crucial zones between the parts of the diagram, the board is not merely empty of inscription, but spread out in its blankness. The receptacle’s radical priority to experience further suggests that is matter only in a metaphorical sense. 10 For it is not literally “stuff” in the sense we know from experience– after all, it is “molded” both into our solid, present objects and into the absent spaces between them. It is thus not a source of nourishment for the world in a material sense, but perhaps rather in a formal sense. That is, it “nourishes”, so to speak, the sensible givenenness of things by sustaining them as spatial. Timaeus offers one more, especially puzzling metaphor: he calls the receptacle a “winnowing basket.” Change in sensible things, he points out, comes to be through contact between differences. The hot next to the cold, the dry next to the moist– we might add: negative charge around positive charge, north magnetic poles across from south, or ‘masses’ in a gravitational field. These different “powers”, whatever they may be, “jostle” each other, and thereby produce change. Over time, these changes generate the apparently structured world which we observe. These change-inducing juxtapositions, these jostlings, do not happen through tools of arrangement, as if parts were separated and pushed together with a hoe and a 9 Lucretius’ void. Interesting that Lucretius is such an unmathematical thinker. Aristotle and Plotinus both take the Receptacle to be “matter.” 10 10 �rake. Rather, the parts themselves act on each other, like grains in a winnowing basket. 11 The basket merely provides the venue in which this jostling can transpire– it is a passive sort of tool that does nothing more than make the reciprocal influences of the worked-upon matter possible, by providing them the room for juxtaposition. The six directions of space– left, right, back, forward, up and down– act like the grid of a basket, sorting the tendencies of material things into different directions, giving them a stage on which they can come upon their brethren. Does Timaeus’ story of the receptacle serve as the ’missing’ account of receptivity– missing, that is, from the picture of Socratic philosophy in the Republic? Recall that part [of] the vocation of philosophy described there, to ascend to the intellectual first principles of the mathematical sciences’ own starting places, would leave unexamined the non-intellectual first principles of sensibility, that is, of the receptivity in which the knowable images come to be. On the other hand, Timaeus’ oddly named “receptacle”, which has resonances in Greek of “reservoir” or “harbor,” represents receptivity as a cognitive resource. The name indicates the epistemic purposiveness of the “third kind”: the receptacle provides a welcoming cosmic hospitality for the forms, so that they may be known by us in their images. Timaeus follows his account of the receptacle with an extended speculation about the solid geometry of the elements. Certain propositions about the elements– how many there could be, how they would act upon each other, and how they could change into each other– are derivable a priori, since they arise from the demonstrably necessary geometrical character of the solids. These speculations have hypothetical—perhaps fanciful—beginnings. But the necessity involved in the geometry of his hypotheses generates an a priori, synthetic natural science. 12 Timaeus’ procedure suggests that any mathematical natural science of matter will ultimately rest upon a story about the receptacle as an ultimate condition of the possibility of extended, sensible being. Is this foundational story satisfactory as a philosophical account? But doesn’t the “sieve” itself move? I can only make sense of this in an extremely analogical way. We might be reminded here of a passage from Plato’s Parmenides, in which the elder philosopher proposes that the One– the very highest principle of all being– is both at rest, and in motion (146a). It is at rest, so to speak, Parmenides claims, because it doesn’t ever depart from being fully in itself. But it also is in motion, so to speak, because it always is in other things, making each of them one thing. The metaphysical participation of things in the One can be thought of as a kind of flowing motion of it outwards, into them. Could this conception help us interpret Timaeus’ winnowing basket? The receptacle’s motion is not a locomotion, but a “change” in which it takes on a form it doesn’t have in itself. In so far as the spatialization of these forms has consequences for how they evolve, it is as if the ‘change’ of the receptacle imparts further changes to the things in it. 11 Cf thinkers like Kepler, Maxwell, Rutherford—anyone who imagines a model, derives necessary conclusions from it, and compares these with the appearances. 12 11 �Timaeus warned his audience at the start that any cosmology of a becoming world would not be knowledge, but only a “likely story,” in so far as what becomes is not what is, but only its likeness. Philosophy seeks to rise to what is, and discover knowledge of the eternal there. Accordingly, Timaeus’ mathematical chemistry of the elements is not wisdom about the highest things. Socrates of the Republic would agree. Now, the receptacle, as the neutral field of change, can itself neither change nor come to be. However, Timaeus seems to suggest that as the eternal mother of becoming, the receptacle is itself approachable only under the guise of [a] likely story. This in part justifies his copious use of metaphor in its account. Metaphor becomes the handmaiden of ‘bastard reasoning’, with which we can articulate in speech what is not in itself intelligible. The conjunction of several metaphors– space, mother, nurse, matter, basket– raises the problem of thinking the thing coherently, since its metaphorical predicates are not simultaneously compatible. But beneath this interpretive problem is a deeper paradox: the account treats the receptacle as an eternal, self-subsistent thing, even though it is not, by hypothesis, a being. This double-speak renders the account of that which underlies all becoming even more mythic– “not less, but more likely” (48d3) -- than the playful speculations about shapes and growths that make up the rest of Timaeus’ physics. This paradox, that the receptacle is both beyond becoming and other than being, runs through Plato’s adventure along the path downward. Accordingly, the hoped-for account of the cave wall turns out to be, in Plato’s treatment, deeply enigmatic. The Form of Outer Sense Kant’s life’s work, it seems to me, was an attempt to demythologize philosophical enigmas. Where receptivity is concerned, he’s on the case. He begins in the Critique of Pure Reason with a distinction in kind between thought and sense. In the dialogues, thought was understood as the faculty that grasps the universal, which is, while sense grasps the particular, which merely seems or becomes. One of Kant’s innovations is to add to these correlations the proposal that while thought in us is active, sense is receptive. Kant names the study of the principles of knowledge belonging to thought a ‘Logic’ – the study of logos. He names the study of the principles of knowledge belonging to sensibility an ‘Aesthetic’-- the study of aesthesis. (Note that Kant’s ‘aesthetic’ has nothing directly to do with the beautiful.) An empirical aesthetic would investigate the particular senses we happen to have, and what features of the world they give us access to: color, odor and taste, sound, temperature, as well as shape, size, and duration. Perhaps what we read in Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima could be considered an 12 �empirical aesthetic. A transcendental aesthetic, on the other hand, would investigate sensibility as such, rising past or transcending the particularities our equipment for sensation. This new science’s object comes into view in two stages (described in the 5th passage on the handout): first, Kant claims that we must “isolate sensibility by taking away everything from it which the understanding thinks through its concepts.” In the second step, we “separate off from sensibility everything belonging to its impressions.” The first move resists the claim of monist thinkers like Leibniz, for whom the distinction between sensibility and understanding is a difference in degree– that is, sense is merely the obscure end of the spectrum of human representation, whose clear and distinct end is called understanding. For Leibniz, there is accordingly only one path for philosophy: towards the higher principles of the intellect, for there is properly speaking no heterogenous epistemic contribution from sensibility itself. Taken as an interpretation of the divided line, we can see that Leibniz’s Socratic conception must hold that there is no philosophical theory of the cave wall. Kant’s interest, on the other hand, is not unlike the dualist Timaeus’, for whom givenness must be traced back to a second principle. Timaeus proposed his receptacle as the ultimate ground of the givenness of things, as the reason why things can be given to the senses at all. This question reappears in a new guise in Kant’s account of “sensibility,” defined as receptivity— not, to begin with, the receptivity of the world for intelligible forms, but the receptivity of our own mode of knowing; the openness, one could say, of our minds for things as given. In its second step, the transcendental aesthetic clears out from intuition what Kant calls the “matter” of sense, leaving nothing but the “form.” Kant claims there are two sorts of sense for us: space, the form of “outer sense”, and time, the form of “inner sense.” Kant’s space, in this respect, like the receptacle, is invisible, inaudible, and impalpable. Taken together, these two steps reveal an object not properly available to either the understanding or to sensation. Rather, the philosopher must abstract from the matter of things sensed outside of us to the form of their being “outer” at all. The underlying precondition for juxtaposition, extension, and orientation is not any spatial thing, but space itself– or perhaps better, spatiality. This spatiality is not thought up by us, and is not derived from experience. It is the form or ultimate pre-intuition of whatever could be given as ‘outside.’ This form itself is a “pure manifold”– not merely many, like the spatial stuff of outer sense, but the ordered, stuff-less multiplicity of orientations in which sensations are always given, and to which they cannot themselves contribute. Recalling the warnings of the difficulty of the inquiry voiced by Timaeus, Kant tells us in the introduction of his 13 �book that “it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish [the form of knowledge] from the raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in separating it” (B1-2). This ultimate priority of space ahead of all outer things means that, like the receptacle, it cannot have come to be. And on precisely the grounds of this priority does space make necessary knowledge of the outer world possible. Our geometrical demonstrations draw their necessity from the way the pre-intuited field in which they are inscribed or imagined determines those inscriptions and images. Thanks be to the board, where we may draw our figures. But greater thanks be to space, which opens out to make room for the board, and opens out for our imaginations to spread and discover what must follow from what among our figures. It is essentially one, embracing all particular spaces. It is both given, in that we do not spontaneously think it at all, and infinite, in that no bounds can be set for its magnitude. It is empty, in that it is the container or receptacle for all sensible content, and unremovable, in that we cannot imagine it away. Timaeus introduced the receptacle, not as an aspect of particular material things, but as a single underlying whole which pre-exists them, so that it may receive them. This seems to be what Aristotle, for one, was most at pains to resist about Plato’s Timaean conception– for the later thinker, the places of things, along with their shape and their magnitude, are accidents of their individual existences: a thing is in a place as the contact boundary of what surrounds it. There is no whole receiver, only a nested series of surrounding containers. Hume’s argument reaches a similar conclusion: no impression comes to us without some spatial magnitude, he claims, and so space itself is only a subsequent abstraction made possible by the accumulation of spatial particulars. Kant, filling in argumentation absent from his ancient comrade Timaeus’ account, argues that the nature of spatiality requires independent singularity and wholeness. For, each particular place is bounded only in so far as these boundaries are between spatial regions. That is, bounded spaces are always “limitations” of the same one space. Just as what recieves limitation must be priori to the result of its limitation, so divisions into particular places presuppose the field which they limit. Accordingly, larger spaces cannot be assembled originally out of smaller ones, and so space is not an aggregate; it is rather, Kant claims, a “totum” (B466), preceding the particular parts we may carve out of it. Recall also how Timaeus brought in the receptacle as an additional “kind” to ground his mathematical science of material nature. Kant seems to have agreed that the nature of geometrical knowledge of things required a heterogenous, spatial source of knowing; indeed, he thought the necessity of mathematical sciences was the strongest evidence for his sense/thought dualism. He points out that geometrical demonstration, for example, reveals that 14 �necessary predicates about figures cannot be derived out of their concepts by analysis, but must rather be synthesized or constructed out of the intuited figures. That the third side of a triangle is shorter than the sum of the other two does not fall out of the concept of what a triangle is, but only from the determination of the sensible field in which we inscribe triangles. The blackboard must play its role. Kant here is taking Socrates’ second reservation about mathematics– that it could not extricate itself from sensible conditions– as decisive evidence that sensibility is, after all, an epistemic resource, and that human knowledge is dual. Idealism Taking up the torch of ‘bastard reasoning,’ Kant finally explains the unacknowledged source of scientific knowledge of sense objects, by reasoning back to the invisible, nonintellectual condition of sensibility. This condition, however, is– unlike Timaeus’ receptacle– not a self-subsisting, eternal being, but a mere form of our own sensibility. It is in us, not in a psychological sense, as if it were a figment of each thinker’s mind, but in a metaphysical sense, as a feature of our knowledge of things, and not of the things as they are in themselves. Space is not ‘in our heads’-- indeed, our heads are in space. But space is ‘in’ our own, human knowing of things, such as our knowledge of the heads in this room. The radically blank ‘non-thing’ that is space, therefore, does not exist in itself. Kant writes (this is on the handout) that those who “maintain the absolute reality of space” as “subsistent...(which is generally the view taken by the mathematical students of nature),... have to admit [an] eternal and infinite self-subsistent non-entity, which is there, yet without being anything real, only in order to contain in itself all that is real” (A39/B56). He was probably thinking of Newton here, but the description fits the deep cosmology of the Timaeus, as well. 13 As we saw, Timaeus’ chora made knowledge possible, but only by way of an existence which is neither being nor becoming. Like Timaeus, Kant infers that there is a determining source of knowledge in receptivity. But to elude the paradox, Kant makes clear that this source, space, is nothing but an epistemic condition. The receptivity, and thus the receptacle– the form of outer sense–, is ours. This position of sensibility– both subjective and essentially sharable– may be more familiar to us from the realm of thought. That is, when we think a concept together, each The receptacle is eternal, but Timaeus never calls it infinite. This is perhaps because qua unformed, it has no quanitity. What did Newton mean by calling space “empty” in the Principia? In the Optics, Newton writes that space is “the sensorium of God.” 13 15 �one of us shares the same universal in our thought. The mind’s concept is not a psychological event, but a form or standard. According to Kant’s account, mind is present in sensibility, as well. The space of things is not a psychological feature of their images in our minds, but rather a necessary feature of how they can known by beings like us. This is what Kant means by “the transcendental ideality of space.” Kant does declare his form of outer sense to be “empty,” which might make us think it is pure, void extension. Where is the living, expectant energy of Timaeus’ receptacle? We might say that its energy has been idealized. The expectancy, the power to hold the shape of what will come to be in it-– that is, the maternal power of space– this is in Kant’s space as well. But we can now see this power as life-like, precisely because it is a power of the mind. Space as the form of intuition is not a null void, but a manifold field ready for knowledge to be generated in. The pure manifold, the cave wall, is alive, because it is sensibility. Kant’s journey down into sensibility has none of the metaphorical images of Timaeus’. On the contrary, it strikes a scientific pose, where Timaeus’ story was only “likely.” Kant speaks in his own voice as philosophical inquirer, rather than through a fictional character whose own relation to philosophy is obscure. Kant’s account appears first in his book, as the starting place for a looming system, where Timaeus’ appears as a “revision” or “retreat” part-way through a narrative. The highly metaphorical, fictive frame of the receptacle might suggest that the receptacle as described is a poetic manifestation of knowable principles, according to which what is transcendentally ideal (space) is depicted as if it were real, in itself, but in a likeness, in a mythos. This would certainly not be the only time Plato has characters speak in a metaphorical mode, rendering as material what cannot properly speaking exist in that way. Such a depiction generates paradox, as we have seen, and this paradox raises questions about subjectivity and the knowability of the world that Plato was content to leave as questions. By demythologizing the receptacle, showing that it is not an alien, quasi-divine being outside of us, but rather a constitutive principle within us all, pulling the depiction out of the poetic sphere of the ‘likely’, Kant gives himself the opportunity to answer these questions. Whether his answers are satisfactory, is a question for us. 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/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Microsoft Word Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 16 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Philosophy and the Cave Wall: Plato and Kant on the Form of the Given Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 31, 2023, by Matthew Caswell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Caswell describes his lecture: "<span>The lecture will compare inquiries into the nature of sensibility offered by Plato, and by Kant. That </span><i>space</i><span> might be the ultimate ground of a certain kind of sensible givenness is a possibility investigated by both thinkers. What can our love of wisdom gain from pointing itself downward, into the senses?</span>" Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Caswell, Matthew Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023-03-31 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 available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804 Plato Philosophy Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Caswell_Matthew_2023-03-31 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/45e91acd49e5192a074c6c0d91ebe3b7.mp3 6cb1756cf96da69b72628c3fdd358fd9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:06:53 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 Sappho I: An Ontological Approach Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 13, 1995, by Joshua Kates as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kates, Joshua Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995-01-13 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Sappho. Works. Fragment 1 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Kates_Joshua_1995-01-13_ac Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2888e2840bda248a3f72fef4dcbde042.pdf 12e89faca4924292509e31d10438ffc3 PDF Text Text On a recent plane trip, I sat next to a young man who is currently a junior at a small college in Pennsylvania. He was very friendly, eager to tell me about his troubles with a girl who offered him a ride to a tattoo parlor, his coach’s tactics for defense, and how little he was learning in college. When he found out I was a professor he decided to help me out by telling me how he cheats on all his tests. I thanked him for the information, but told him that we don’t have tests at St. John’s. He was very interested, paused for a moment, and then asked how the party scene was. Excellent, every friday night there is a lecture. Since he was so forthcoming, I decided to ask him what he knew about Galileo. He thought that Galileo was the guy who dropped things off the leaning tower of Pisa (quite possibly true), and that Galileo argued that the sun revolved around the earth (right topic, but he had his heliocentrism and geocentrism mixed up). These two facts about Galileo, that he showed that bodies do not fall with speeds proportional to their weights and that he championed Copernicanism over Ptolemaic astronomy, are probably the two most well known features of Galileo’s corpus. And yet I’m not sure that Juniors, after studying Galileo for a week in Junior mathematics and a month in Junior Laboratory, would have learned either of these things from their study. We don’t study why Galileo rejected Aristotle and Ptolemy, we study a new science that Galileo built upon the apparent ruins of Aristotelian natural philosophy and metaphysics: a science of the actualized infinite in the mathematics tutorial, and the study of local motions described in the third and fourth days of Galileo’s last published book, The Two New Sciences. The Two New Sciences is a discourse between three friends, Simplicio, Sagredo, and Salviati that lasts four days. On the first two days, the three friends discuss a new science concerning the resistance of solid bodies to separation. While there are theorems sprinkled throughout these two days, the banter between the friends leads us, for the most part, gently and slowly through the mathematical and physical arguments. Along the way we are treated with numerous diagrams, some of them purely geometric, but many more are intricately drawn sketches of ropes with frayed edges, beams with knots and grain that look like olive not pine, and crumbling arches of brick that support not only beams but plants with branching roots that are breaking through, clumps of moss, and new sprigs with veined leaves. On the third and fourth day, where we begin our study, readers begin with the unnamed Academician’s Latin text rather than a friendly Italian conversation with our three interlocutors. The Latin text describes the locomotion of disembodied moveables that are more like mathematical points than the natural bodies in days one and two, the diagrams reminiscent of book five of Euclid rather than the drawings of olive beams, braided ropes, and crumbling arches. What we see is an academic mathematician, one who precisely defines equable motion, naturally accelerated motion, and projectile motion, then applies Euclid’s theory of proportion 1 �and Apollonius’ study of conics. The third day, in particular, is remarkably spare. Only fifteen of its more than seventy-five pages are Italian dialogue, the remainder, mathematical theorem after mathematical theorem in Latin. It is on the third and fourth day with this spare Latin text on the mathematics of motion that our Junior Laboratory begins. If one ignores nuance, the use of proportion, geometrical corollaries, and blurs one’s vision, then one could summarize our readings thus: in six theorems on equable motion, Galileo shows that speed is distance divided by time; in the next six theorems on naturally accelerated motion, he shows that the distance a body falls is one half its accumulated speed times the time of its fall squared; in the final two theorems on projectile motion, Galileo demonstrates that a body can simultaneously move with equable motion in one direction while falling with naturally accelerated motion downward resulting in a parabolic path. What we study in the third and fourth days is Galileo’s last published work, written at the sunset of a life exhausted by a revolutionary study of motion, published as his body was bedridden by disease, his eyesight failing, his person imprisoned, and his soul shattered from the death of his beloved daughter; this monument risks seeming for us an unremarkable dawn, a new beginning we could unconscionably sleep through, a dry academic Latin textbook in which two elementary equations for moving bodies are derived. But the new beginning that we study is the distillation of a lifelong argument between Aristotle and Galileo. Galileo lets us hear echoes of this argument in his dialogues by including the Aristotelian, Simplicio, among his characters. While Simplicio will argue for the Aristotelian approach tenaciously and with spirit, his understanding is often second hand, rote, and handicapped by a poor mathematical education consisting in nothing beyond book one of Euclid. Salviati and Sagredo often team up and ridicule the Aristotelian account and tend to just ignore Simplicio altogether whenever the discussion requires mathematical expertise. It often seems that Galileo is not treating the Aristotelian worldview fairly, as Simplicio himself complains, allowing Salviati to vaunt over an impoverished, dried up, rather rubbish version of Aristotelianism. If Aristotelianism is so ridiculous, why include it at all? Why have Simplicio partake in these dialogues? Galileo’s new science of local motion is now old and familiar to us. Because of this we might have a hard time seeing Galileo’s theory without first becoming strangers to it. One way to do this is to immerse ourselves in another way of thinking about motion first. This is in fact what we do in the program by studying Aristotle. By studying Aristotle we are able to not only see a cohesive, beautiful, and philosophically rich way of understanding motion, we also are put in a better position to see how our own understanding of nature is itself a theory that requires attention and thought. 2 �I think that Galileo puts Simplicio into the dialogues so that we notice that Galileo’s steps were not taken out of necessity, by habit, or from authority, but consciously taken to set himself upon a new path to understand nature. Simplicio is there so that we notice that Galileo isn’t simply doing mathematics, he is philosophizing. Simplicio is there to remind us that Aristotelian philosophy, was more than any part that Galileo might contradict, it was a whole philosophy of nature, and that this new “way of philosophizing tends to subvert all natural philosophy, and to disorder and set in confusion heaven and earth and the whole universe.”1 Simplicio is in the dialogues because Galileo is still trying to understand the significance of his disagreement with Aristotle. What is this Aristotelian natural philosophy that Galileo threatens to subvert, disorder, and set in confusion? There are countless small derisive references to the peripatetic philosophy throughout both the Two Chief World Systems and the Two New Sciences, Simplicio championing it and defending it in turn, but tonight I thought it would be worthwhile to turn to an earlier text in Galileo’s career, On Motion or in Latin De Motu. Galileo wrote and rewrote De Motu while he had a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa at the outset of his career (1589-1592). Some hypothesize that De Motu was written as notes for lectures on Aristotle, others that it was written for publication, perhaps it was both. As a young professor, he is more conservative than when he is older; he works from a foundation established by Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Galileo might remind us of Simplicio in these lectures, adhering to an Aristotelian theory without fully recognizing its consequences. Here we encounter Galileo wrestling with Aristotle rather than pumping his fist in triumph. Although he eagerly points out inconsistencies with the same iconoclastic spirit we see in the later dialogues, the apparent goal is not to refute but to improve upon Aristotle by supplementing his account with mathematical reasoning inspired by Archimedes writings on the balance, making Aristotle’s theory more consistent with our experiences of moving bodies. As Galileo develops the consequences of these changes, we will see a description of nature emerge that is at odds with the foundations: Aristotle’s definition of nature. I. Aristotle’s theory of natural motion I’ll begin with a few basic ideas from Aristotle’s natural philosophy, before giving a more detailed account of what we might call Aristotle’s science of the locomotion of bodies. Aristotle defines nature in the beginning of the second book of the Physics: “nature is a principle or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of 1 Galileo, Two Chief World Systems (trans. Stillman Drake, University of California Press, 1953, second revised edition 1967), Day I. 3 �itself and not accidentally”(192b21-22).2 Nature is not deer, trees, rivers, and soil, but the cause of motion and rest in deer, trees, rivers, and soil; the cause that belongs to these things in virtue of what they are and not accidentally. Nature is the reason something moves or something rests when it moves or rests because of itself. Nature is an internal cause of motion or rest. Nature is not the only cause of motion. Another cause that we are familiar with is force. If I lift a stone, it does not move because of nature but because of a force which I apply to the stone. All local motions will have a cause, either a natural cause which is internal and belongs to the body, or a violent cause which is usually external and is the result of a force being imposed upon the body. For Aristotle, natural motions are eminently more interesting than forced motions. Now when we turn to study nature, the internal cause of motion and rest, we are faced with two kinds of things. There are things that have life or soul and things without life or soul. In the Physics, Aristotle says that having an internal source of motion and rest is “a characteristic of life and peculiar to living things” (255a6-7)3. For Aristotle there is an intriguing puzzle about the motion of non-living things, why and how do they move themselves without soul? His account of nature needs to stretch to incorporate a kind of motion that originates in a thing without originating in a thing’s soul. In this lecture, we will call the natural motion and rest of a non-living thing, the natural motion and rest of a body. Aristotle will say two things about a body’s motion, and there is some tension between these two claims, which we will need to address. First, a body’s source of motion, a body’s nature, is ‘the heavy’ and ‘the light’ in the body. In De Caelo, Aristotle will say that bodies have “in themselves some spark (as it were) of movement”(308a2); this spark (τὁ ζωπὐρον) is ‘the heavy’ and ‘the light’.4 If we were to form an analogy we could say that soul is to an animal’s or a plant’s natural motion as spark is to a body’s natural motion. But the second claim that Aristotle makes is that the body does not move itself as an agent, the motion is pure passivity. Here is Aristotle in the Physics, “in all these cases the thing does not move itself, but it contains within itself the source of motion–not of moving something or of causing motion, but of suffering it” (255b29-31)5. Here we have Aristotle pushing against the idea that we should understand the heavy and the light as anything analogous to soul. The body’s motion is pure passivity, the spark is not a soul, but a passive potential for a kind of activity, being at rest in a particular place. The idea here is two-fold. First, while a stone resting on the ground will never move itself, if I lift that stone up and release it the stone will move. The spark 2 Aristotle, Physics (The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, translated by R. P. Hardie, Princeton University Press, 1984), Book II, ch. 1. 3 Ibid., Book VIII, ch. 4. 4 Aristotle, De Caelo (also from The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, but translated by R. K. Gaye, Princeton University Press, 1984), Book IV, ch. 1. 5 Ibid., Book VIII, ch. 4. 4 �does not turn into a roaring fire by itself, but only when one uses bellows to fan the flame. Second, the heavy and the light do not choose their place of rest and where they will move when they do move; there is no internal account for why they move where they move. Aristotle says that ultimately, “these things are moved by that which brought the thing into existence and made it light and heavy”(256a1)6. We can now turn from these few basic ideas underlying Aristotle’s natural philosophy, to some more specific claims in his account of how ‘the heavy’ and ‘the light’ can be used to describe the natural local motions of bodies. First, and of primary interest tonight, is this: Aristotle believes that bodies fall with speeds in proportion to their heaviness and lightness. In the De Caelo, Aristotle gives the following example (which is illustrated in the handout, and labeled figure 1). If we have a body that falls through line ce in a given time, and we divide both the body and the line in the same ratio, so that ab is to the whole body as cd is to the whole line, then the part of the body will complete the part of the line in the same time as the whole of the body would move through the whole line.7 This means that a stone half as big as another stone, that is with half its heaviness, will fall half as far as the bigger stone in the same time. Aristotle will give similar examples for the light as well as the heavy. A fire twice as large as another fire, will rise twice as far in the same time. Paired with this claim is a claim about how bodies fall through different mediums. If one is given a body, it will fall with a speed that is inversely proportional to the density of the medium.8 If water is twice the density of air, then a body will fall half as fast in water as it will in air. Aristotle also gives an explanation for how and why bodies naturally accelerate. In De Caelo, Aristotle says that when a body naturally falls downward or rises upward, it moves towards fulfillment and “comes into that place, quantity, and quality” which belongs to its form (310a20-35).9 The idea that something moving upwards would change not only in location but in quantity and quality, might seem strange. But we can remind ourselves that for Aristotle motion is not simply locomotion, motion is a general category, it is a becoming, an actualization of a potentiality as such. ‘The heavy’ doesn’t just move downward, it has a place in the cosmos, the center. When ‘the heavy’ is in its place it is fulfilling its purpose, it is at-work-being-itself, it is actualized. Similarly with ‘the light’. When ‘the heavy’ moves downward it is not simply changing its place, it is becoming more itself. It is, to return to the quote above, coming “into that place, quantity, and quality” which belongs to its form. This means that as the heavy moves downward it gets heavier, and because it is heavier, it moves faster. Galileo adds in the margins Thomas Aquinas’ way of putting this, “Aristotle held that the speed of motion is increased 6 Physics, Book VIII, chapter 4. On Motion, p. 263, ch. 8, and De Caelo 301a27-32. 8 Physics, Book IV, chapter 8, 215a24-215b11. 9 De Caelo, Book IV, chapter 3. 7 5 �because the weight of the body is more concentrated and strengthened as the body approaches its proper place” (ch. 19, 316)10. We now have the basic outlines of Aristotle’s account of nature and how he uses this to explain the natural motions of bodies: where a body is at rest, where it moves when it is displaced, the speed with which it moves, and why a body accelerates. But because the heavy and the light are not soul, they are not active principles, but passive principles, we can still ask the question, why does the light go up and the heavy down? To answer this question, Aristotle says that we have to look outside the bodies to “that which brought the thing into existence and made it light and heavy” (256a1).11 II. Galileo critique of Aristotle Galileo thinks that Aristotle was wrong that speed is proportional to weight. Galileo prepares many thought experiments which might not refute Aristotle, but work on the reader’s imagination so that Aristotle’s claims become more problematic. Because Galileo writes these thought experiments to persuade, I’ll focus on the one that I found most persuasive and try to explain why I found it so. Galileo instructs us to imagine two bodies of equal weight falling next to each other with equal speeds. As these bodies fall, they are shoulder to shoulder and then, at some point, they become attached. An Aristotlelian will be compelled to say that once they become attached, they will go twice as fast. Galileo concludes that it is obvious that this is not the case for anyone who “looks at the matter simply and naturally” (ch. 8, 266)12. As we reconsider the example, in an attempt to look at the matter simply and naturally, we might notice that the sudden increase in speed is coincidental with the cohesion of the two bodies. The cause of the increased speed doesn’t seem to be more weight, but the fact that a given weight is in one body rather than two. But why should this matter? How would this cohesion increase the speed? Surely the bodies will continue going the speed that they had been going, whether the bodies are rubbing shoulders or holding hands, as it were. Now, is a chunk of wood any different from two halves “holding hands”? I don’t see why it would be, so it must be that the larger chunk of wood falls just as fast as any of its parts would fall and it just so happens that all these parts are “holding hands”. Now, perhaps this is not what Galileo meant by looking at the matter simply and naturally, but I am sure that this is the sort of inner dialogue that he wanted his readers to have. There is no indication in these lectures that Galileo rejected Aristotle claims based on a field trip to the leaning bell tower in Pisa. If anything, the sorts of examples he gives indicate an approach 10 Galileo Galilei, On Motion and On Mechanics, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1960. On Motion was translated by I. E. Drabkin. Hereafter, “De Motu”. 11 Physics, Book VIII, chapter 4. 12 De Motu. 6 �that puts more weight on reason and imagination than any particular experience. The example we have just given of two bodies being joined together mid-fall, is just such an instance. How could bodies be made to do this? A few pages back, Galileo gives another counterexample to Aristotle’s claim that speed is proportional to heaviness. Here he asks his students to imagine two lead balls, one a hundred times as large as the other, both being dropped from the moon. In both cases, the examples are not the sort of thing one can put to an actual test. Despite what one will hear about Galileo being among the first experimentalists, it is clear in De Motu that his theories were not based on results from experiments.13 Rather than torturing nature for answers, he was more likely to interrogate his imagination and think through a problem theoretically. Galileo says that he likes to “employ reasoning at all times rather than examples, for what we seek are the causes of effects, and these causes are not given to us by experience”(263, ch. 8)14. The ability to guide his own imagination and reason until he sees a clear relation of cause and effect and then to convey this idea so clearly to others that they cannot possibly doubt the relation, this is one of Galileo’s greatest points of pride. In both the Two New Sciences and the Two Chief World Systems Sagredo will repeatedly complement Saviati on his ability to do just this.15 This praise which Sagredo heaps on Salviati, is really Galileo heaping praise on himself without shame. (Incidentally, Descartes in a letter finds fault with Galileo for putting self-flattery into his books in this way.) As if the shameless self-praise weren’t enough, we might recognize in it the praise that Plutarch gives to Archimedes, “god-like Archimedes” as Galileo calls him.16 Plutarch points out that Archimedes is so clear in his explanations that once you have learned something from him, you are sure you would have come to know it by yourself. Both Galileo and Plutarch are building on the idea that mathematical knowledge, at least, seems to be a kind of recollection. Galileo, putting himself in the position of Socrates or Archimedes, brags that he is particularly adept at playing the part of the midwife to our recollection of the true causes of physical phenomena. III. Galileo’s theory of motion 13 In later works, Galileo appears to rely more heavily on experiment. De Motu. 15 Here, for example, is Sagredo responding to Saviati in our readings from Junior Laboratory: Sagredo: Too evident and too easy is this reasoning with which you make hidden conclusions manifest. This great facility renders the conclusions less prized than when they were under seeming contradiction. I think that people generally will little esteem ideas gained with so little trouble, in comparison with those over which long and unresolvable altercations are waged. Two New Sciences, (Wall & Thompson, Toronto, 1989), p. 161. 16 “It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanations…. No amount of investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen, you immediately believe you would have discovered it; by so smooth and so rapid a path he leads to the conclusion required.” (Plutarch, Lives, Life of Marcellus, (trans. John Dryden, Modern Library) p. 378) 14 7 �One goal for Galileo is to improve upon Aristotle’s account of the speeds of falling bodies. Galileo is willing to reject the claim that speed is proportionate to weight, but he is not willing to reject the claim that there is some relation between speed and weight. His stubbornness might be difficult for us to understand. Doesn’t he see that the speed of falling bodies has nothing at all to do with the quantity of matter? Absolutely not. And this fact, this amazing fact, is what makes me love Galileo in De Motu. At this moment he is Simplicio. At this moment, he is a dyed in the wool Aristotelian. He believes that nature is a cause of rest and motion in a body. He believes that for bodies without soul, the nature of the body is its weight. He believes that weight must be the cause of rest and motion. But, Galileo recognizes that there are some areas of weakness in Aristotle’s account. In particular, Galileo will need to finesse the relationship between speed and weight. Galileo has a way to do this. At the age of 22, in 1586, he wrote a small little essay. A lab report, if you will. The topic of his essay, how Archimedes discovered the theft of Hiero’s crown. He thinks that the method ascribed to Archimedes by others is a “crude thing, far from scientific precision” and not befitting the divine Archimedes. In the remainder of the essay, he argues that Archimedes does not find out the fraud by immersing equal weights of gold and silver in water and measuring the different quantities of spilled water. Archimedes discovers the fraud by measuring the weight of the crown when it is immersed in water. The key is that Archimedes recognized that “solid bodies that sink in water weigh in water so much less than in air as is the weight in air of a volume of water equal to that of the body”. The body will weigh less in water by exactly the weight of the water that the body displaces. This difference in weight then serves as an accurate measure of the volume of the body, allowing one to precisely measure the differences in the quality or density of two submerged metals that are of equal weight in air. What Galileo takes away from Archimedes and wishes to apply to Aristotle is this idea: it isn’t weight but essential weight, or density, that distinguishes bodies from one another. Just as Archimedes is able to distinguish gold and silver by their essential weights, Galileo is not able to distinguish all kinds of natures from one another by considering their essential weights. And this, a body’s essential weight, this must determine its speed of fall. What a thrill for Galileo! He has figured out what nature is! He has found the key to determining the speed of any given body! The peripatetics, if they aren’t too stubborn, too tied to every last exact word of Aristotle, are going to love this! He might even get promoted! After all, and this is a common saying of the time, “ignorance of motion is ignorance of nature”, and he has found the key to motion, the real nature, essential weight. But to get this theory off the ground, he has to revisit Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Can Aristotle’s, ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ be replaced with essential weight? Can motion be explained by the outcome of a balance? 8 �Galileo begins confidently, not only sure that he can replace Aristotle’s ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ with essential weight in order to explain motion, but that doing so will improve Aristotle’s account of nature in other ways. As we saw above, Aristotle faced a puzzle in explaining the motion of non-living bodies. He was committed to explaining their motion by finding an internal cause, but because these bodies do not have soul or life, they couldn’t be agents of this motion. In one way, then, the heavy and the light explained the rest and motion of bodies, but in another way, Aristotle ends up needing to look for a principle outside the bodies to explain the principle of rest and motion. Galileo’s way of describing the situation is that Aristotle finally didn’t have an explanation for why the heavy goes down, or the light up, but instead was forced to make nature operate “according to whim and chance”17. Galileo says that he “anxiously sought from time to time to think of some cause, if not necessary, at least reasonable and useful” to determine why the heavy goes down and the light up. Here too the key was replacing the idea of heaviness and lightness with essential weight. In doing so, he realizes that nature chose to put the densest at the center and the rarest at the perimeter with “complete justice and with consummate wisdom”. In doing so, nature has distributed matter equally around the center of the cosmos. The smallest sphere which is closest to the center has equal matter but much less space than the larger spheres farther from the center. Therefore, the smallest sphere must be the place of a substance whose form causes matter to be compressed in a very narrow space, while those spheres farther from the center, must be the place for substances whose form causes matter to expand in ample space (253, ch. 2)18. Galileo’s account has supplied a formal cause for the cosmos that explains why the heavy, the dense, rests at the center, and the light, the expansive, rests away from the center. Once Galileo suggests that this principle of equality is at work in the organization or creation of the cosmos, it is natural that he should think it is at work in the preservation and restoration of the order in the cosmos. In other words, this same principle might be at work not only when bodies are at rest in a perfectly ordered world, but after bodies are disturbed, and are working to restore that order. For example, this principle is at work when, after I lift a rock and remove it from its place, I release it and it rushes downwards. For the restoration and preservation of order, nature needs more than a cosmos that was created with matter equally distributed about the center. Nature will need a way to measure inequalities and restore equality. Nature needs a balance. Here, Galileo, “it is therefore clear that the motion of bodies moving naturally can be suitably reduced to the motion of weights in a balance”(259)19. 17 De Motu, p. 15. De Motu 19 Ibid. 18 9 �Now in general, a balance measures the relative weights of two bodies. But when Archimedes’ submerged the scale in water, he was able to determine essential weights. So Galileo hypothesizes that to get an accurate measure of the nature that determines speed, the balance will need to determine essential weight. One arm of the balance might carry the body, but the other needs to take into account the medium. Here Galileo: “the body moving naturally plays the role of one weight in the balance, and a volume of the medium equal to the volume of the moving body represents the other weight in the balance”(259)20. Just as the crown submerged in water was lifted by the water to the extent that a weight equal to the weight of the water it displaced would lift it, so too Galileo imagines that any medium will lift a body to the extent that a weight–a weight equal to the weight of the volume of the medium it displaces–would lift it. Bodies don’t fall with speeds proportional to their weights, but speeds proportional to this adjusted weight, their own weight less the weight of an equal volume of the medium. Now, as it turns out, Galileo’s theory is just as inaccurate as Aristotle’s. Galileo seems to recognize this fairly quickly. Here he is working through an example: …If there are two bodies equal in volume but unequal in weight, the weight of one of them being 8, and of the other 6, and if the weight of a volume of the medium equal to the volume of either body is 4, the speed of the first body will be 4 and of the second 2. These speeds will have a ratio of 4 to 2, not the same as the ratio between their weights, which is 8 to 6. (272-273)21 In this particular example, the medium has an essential weight that is fairly comparable to the essential weight of the two bodies. The ratio of the speeds in the medium is thus larger than the ratio of the original essential weights. In fact we see that the ratio in speed could get really large if we find a medium that has an essential weight close to 6. In this case, one body would drop with some speed, while the other body would not move at all, or very slowly. This result looks pretty good. Here Galileo’s theory seems to explain why the ratios of the speeds of bodies falling in water seems to be larger than the ratio that the bodies have when falling in air. On the other hand, as the medium gets thinner, as its essential weight becomes negligible compared to the essential weights of the bodies, the ratios of the essential weights should be approximately proportional to the ratios of the speeds. In very light mediums Aristotle’s claim, speeds are proportional to weights, is analogous to Galileo’s, speeds would become close to proportional to essential weight. In other words, take equal sized balls of wood and iron, drop both from a large tower and they should fall with speeds proportional to their weights. Here Galileo: But note that a great difficulty arises at this point, because those ratios will not be observable by one who makes the experiment. For if one takes two different bodies, which have such properties that the first should fall twice as fast as the second, and if one then lets them fall from a tower, the first will not reach the ground appreciably faster or twice as fast (273).22 20 Ibid. Ibid. 22 Ibid. 21 10 �While it might not have been Gailleo’s first inclination to head to the tower, it seems like he was not opposed to making a test of his theory once it was in hand. In doing so, he must have been quite disappointed. But he is not yet able to give up the theory, he concludes in the same way that Aristotle would have: “This is not the place to consider how these contradictory and, so to speak, unnatural accidents come about (for they are accidental)”(273)23. Let’s take a step back from the details of Galileo’s theory for a moment. What Aristotle and Galileo seek to explain is how the body’s weight can explain its place of rest and its motion; they are looking for an internal cause of rest and motion. Aristotle explains this by turning to the ‘spark’ inside the body which determines its place and makes it passively suffer the motion determined for it. Galileo explains place by looking at density, and supposing a formal cause in the organization of the comsos, ‘the equal’. Galileo explains motion by having us imagine how a balance tips when bodies of unequal essential weights are placed on its arms. Galileo has asked us to supplement the internal principle of motion and rest, the bodies essential weight, with two additional principles, a principle of equality, and the principle of the balance. But what is the principle of the balance? What is it that makes it move? Does the balance have a nature? Certainly not (says Aristotle). But the balance does have some sort of law governing it. This is not just a law of equality, it is not an equation merely telling us that two quantities are equal. The balance is dynamic, it is telling us something about forces. Galileo puts it this way: “a heavy body tends to move downward with as much force as it is necessary to lift it up”. On each side of the balance a body pushes down, but on each side a body is also being pushed upwards. The principle of the balance is that every downward force is transformed into an equal and upward force. Balances work because they pair opposing forces. Galileo seems to think that this principle of the balance is not just present in a balance, but is present everywhere and always. In addition to the internal principle of rest and motion, the body’s essential weight, Galileo has introduced two additional principles: a principle of equality and a principle of equal and opposite forces. Neither of these principles belongs inside a body. Both are principles about how one body relates to another body. In fact, the principle of the balance, is best understood as a principle about opposition between bodies, about the forces that bodies exert on one another, about violence. This is a problem for an Aristotelian, a natural motion is being given an unnatural explanation. 23 Ibid. 11 �Galileo acknowledges the difficulty himself: “It is therefore clear that this kind of motion may be called ‘forced’, although commonly…called ‘natural’”(259, ch. 6).24 Galileo does not flinch. In what follows there is no apology, and no explanation for this radical consequence. By introducing a formal cause, ‘the equal’, by explaining motion and speed with the balance, Galileo has not improved the Aristotelian account, he has undermined it. Natural motion has gone from being internal to the body to being caused by a relation between one body and another body. Motions which were once the actualization of the potentiality of a single body are now understood to be violent outcomes of contests of forces between bodies. Galileo has shown himself to be a wolf in sheep’s clothes. The principle of equality and the principle of the balance are not compatible with Aristotle’s definition of nature. Archimedes might move the science of motion forward, but the science won’t be compatible with Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Nature is no longer the principle of motion or rest within a body. Nature has been replaced by a balance, a contest between quantities of matter. IV. Inclined Planes Despite his failure to explain the speeds of falling bodies, Galileo charges onward. He now wants to use the principles of equality and of the balance to solve a problem: how fast do bodies fall along inclined planes. Below, I will quote a larger passage, which is not particularly remarkable, apart from his palpable excitement and, not unrelatedly, how many times he uses the word “problem”. Here’s Galileo: The problem we are now going to discuss has not been taken up by any philosophers, so far as I know. Yet, since it has to do with motion, it seems to be a necessary subject for examination… And it is a problem no less necessary than neat and elegant. The problem is why the same heavy body, moving downward in natural motion over various planes inclined to the plane of the horizon, moves more readily and swiftly on those planes that make angles nearer a right angle with the horizon; and, in addition, the problem calls for the ratio of the speeds of the motions that take place at the various inclinations. The solution of this problem, when first I had tried to investigate it, seemed to require explanations that were by no means simple. But while I was examining it more carefully, and was trying to analyze its solution into its basic principles, I finally discovered that the 24 Ibid. In fact, I’m not sure that Aristotle could consistently maintain that the principle or cause of motion of bodies is simply in each body because of what we will see in the next section: he thinks the speed of fall of a body is inversely proportional to the density of the medium. It seems like both he and Galileo think that some aspects of motion will need to depend on something besides the body itself. 12 �solution for this problem, as of others which at first glance seem very difficult, depended on known and obvious principles of nature. (296, Ch, 14)25 In past junior laboratory classes, I have sometimes wondered whether we are studying nature, machines, nature as a machine, or machines as if they were nature. This passage led me to have a new way of thinking about this question. With Galileo, maybe in this very passage, the subject matter is shifting. The balance stands midway between nature and machines, it is not unnatural, for Galileo it reveals nature, in fact it has become the principle of motion and rest. But the balance, with intelligent use, very quickly becomes a lever, a machine. The balance brings together nature and machines allowing us to create problems, problems that are no longer simply mechanical problems for artisans in the shipyard, but problems that are now demonstrations of how nature works. The instruments of the shipyard, are no longer for the artisans alone, they are now the instruments the philosophers and the mathematicians will need to use in the laboratory to reveal how nature works. Galileo moves from understanding nature as an individual principle inside a body, to thinking about nature as a beautiful, intricate, tapestry of problems, infinite interconnected balances each in delicate equilibrium, systems of equations joined by the weights, speeds and forces of individual bodies. Here we only see the introduction of a single problem, but the excitement, the repetition, makes me think that Galileo is no longer seeing individual natural bodies, he is seeing a web of bodies connected and revealed by the balance, an infinite and infinitely intricate machine, giving rise to the promise of problems everywhere. Right now, we have only a single problem, how fast will a body go down planes of different inclinations. The known and obvious principle of nature which will play an essential role in his solution: the balance. Galileo will show how he can weigh the body on different tracks and thus predict how fast the body will go. It takes a bit of geometry, a few diagrams, and maybe some gestures towards our laboratory equipment to see how Galileo imagines the balance at work in his study of inclined planes. In the handout, you will see an enlargement of Galileo’s diagram (figure 2). The circle represents two things. First, it represents a circular track on which a body could fall on its concave surface from d to b. Second, it is a balance, like the “Newton’s wheels” that we study in Freshman Laboratory. The axle of the wheel, the fulcrum of the balance, is at a. We are to imagine two things happening in tandem, a body is falling down the track from d to b, and at each moment we can pause it and ask what is the weight of the body at c, that will balance the falling body at that moment. 25 Ibid. 13 �The problem Galileo is investigating concerns the planes that are tangent to the circular track, the planes that are inclined to the horizon. We only have three such planes drawn, but obviously there are an infinite number of these planes that we could have drawn. Galileo, as we saw above, is interested in this problem: to find the ratio of the speeds of the motion that take place at the various inclinations of planes inclined to the horizon. For example, he is interested in finding the ratio of the speeds of the body falling down the vertical plane ef to the sharply inclined plane gh. Galileo reiterates the principle of the balance: “a heavy body tends to move downward with as much force as it is necessary to lift it up.” Weight, as measured by a balance, will allow us to see how much force is necessary to lift a body up, and thus measures the force of a body’s tendency downward, and its speed. The circular balance is there to determine how the weight of the body varies with the different inclinations of the planes so that we can determine the speeds along any inclined plane. The balance will give us the solution to our problem. At point d, furthest away from the center of the circle towards the right, the tangent to the circle is vertical, and the track does not lighten the weight of the body. The weight needed at c to balance the body at d, is equal to d’s weight. As we travel down the circumference, we come to point s. At point s, Galileo suggests that the body is not as heavy as it was at point d, the body has been lightened by the ramp. What weight at c is necessary to balance a weight at s? Galileo believes that we can set aside circular ramps and the inclined planes, and simply consider the balance. The body has moved from d to s on the wheel. As we know from freshman lab, we need to draw a perpendicular from s up to cd, to determine the horizontal distance of the body from the fulcrum. This distance is ap, which is less than the previous distance ad. Because the body at s is now closer to the fulcrum, we will need a smaller weight to balance it at c. The ratio of the new smaller weight to the previous weight, is ap to ad. Galileo concludes that the ratio of these weights is the ratio of the downward tendencies of the body and so the ratio of the speed along these various planes. The inference that Galileo makes, that the weight the body has on the balance at a point is the same weight that the body would have on the track with an incline tangent to that point remains unexamined and unexplained. While the circular balance is very much present in this diagram, the balance is not present when we have a simple inclined plane. 14 �And yet, Galileo seems to think that it is. Every time a body falls, we could explain the speed of its fall by recognizing that a balance is at work. The weight that would be necessary to balance this body, is the force with which the body tends downward, and therefore proportional to the speed with which the body will fall. While the balance isn’t visible, the principle of the balance is everywhere at work. The balance is woven into the relations that exist between bodies. And yet, for me, the pattern still floats above the fabric of nature. It is clearly meant to be woven in, but how and why the balance is attaching itself to the ramp, to the body, to the medium remains murky. What we would like to know is why it is that the balance should succeed in measuring how these ramps lighten the weight? Perhaps there is some clue in what follows. Galileo continues his exposition with what appears to be a superfluous explanation that directs our attention outside the circle towards a triangle that is geometrically similar to the ones that are inside the circle (triangle aps, for example), but is not at all associated with the balance, the similar triangle spq. About this, Galileo notes that “as da is to pa, so is qs to sp, i.e., the length of the oblique descent to the length of the vertical drop”. That is, the ratio da to pa which stood in for the ratio of the weights necessary to balance our body on the vertical and oblique incline gh have the same ratio as qs to sp. But when we take two inclined planes of the same height, or a drop and an inclined plane of the same height, it turns out that we will get this ratio. With his analysis of the exterior triangle, Galileo directs our attention away from the balance, and towards the ratio of the paths which two bodies will take when they are released from the same height but along different inclines. He says that the speed of fall is inversely as the lengths of the planes. Here the ratio of speeds is not derived from the heaviness of the body, but has something to do with the height from which the body falls and the lengths of the planes having those equal heights. Galileo has given us not one, but two ways to see how this same ratio emerges from the diagram. Because of this he also seems to be suggesting two explanations, one based on the bodies’ weights, the other on the bodies’ heights and paths. Which account of the ratio would give us a better explanation for the difference in the speed? Or, do these two explanations have some relation to one another? Galileo started the essay believing that weight caused speed, but his analysis here seems to hint at a new openness to explaining speed in other ways, perhaps something having to do with the height from which a body falls and the path that it takes. Perhaps he thinks there is a way in which something associated with speed is causing weight. Galileo does not help us, he leaves these two expositions, these two similar triangles, these two equal ratios, side-by-side. 15 �This juxtaposition of two mathematically equivalent ratios might remind us of the third chapter of the third book of Ptolemy’s Almagest, where Ptolemy gives the reader two hypotheses that will result in identical phenomena. Just as Ptolemy gives us mathematically equivalent eccentric and epicyclic diagrams of the motion of the heavenly bodies, Galileo gives us mathematically similar triangles one made from the distances to a fulcrum, the other by the paths of the moving bodies. Galileo’s first triangle, suggests that the speed down more sharply inclined planes can be explained by greater weight. The second triangle suggests that the speed down inclined planes can be explained by considering the height from which the body falls, since taking a common height between two planes will give us the correct ratio of speeds. Ptolemy’s circles and Galileo’s triangles could be carving at the joints of nature, but they could also be mathematical tools, seductive geometric figures that invite us to imagine physical structures. After giving his account, Galileo is eager to share all manners of “problems” that can be solved with his method. The one he culminates his discussion with is this: given two bodies of different essential weights which fall at different speeds, how to construct a ramp so that the faster body falling down the ramp will fall in the same time as the slower body in free fall (301, ch. 14)26. For example, presuming that the steel ball will fall faster than the wooden ball, Galileo would like to construct a ramp for the steel ball, so that it will roll down the inclined plane in the same time that it would take the wooden ball to fall freely. Here, he seems eager to use the inclination of ramps to “balance speeds” in the same way that a balance uses the distance from a fulcrum to balance weights. Ptolemy was incredibly successful in “saving the appearances”; he used the circle to effectively predict where heavenly bodies would be and when they would arrive. Galileo finds that he is much less successful in “saving the appearances”. But, he doesn’t acknowledge any doubt in his theory, instead he uses the same excuse we saw above, “accidental factors”(302, Ch. 14)27. The problems that Galileo solves are constructions, but merely mental constructions. When these constructions are realized in the world he does not despair when the consequences he has derived are not seen to be true. Unlike Ptolemy, Galileo is not yet able to save the appearances. IV. Conclusion, looking forward to what Galileo will do and will discover. Galileo might have been wrong that essential weight is the cause of motion and rest in bodies, but in developing this idea he introduced two principles inspired by his study of Archimedes: the principle of equality, and the principle of the balance. Both are enormously influential in the subsequent study of physics. Neither of these principles reside in bodies, they are instead principles that govern the relations between bodies. They are principles equally at home in 26 27 Ibid. Ibid. 16 �political philosophy as natural philosophy. We can see this in Galileo’s language. He appeals to equality, prudence, justice, and harmony in his explanation for the natural place and position of rest for bodies. Galileo then appeals to the balance, a symbol we use for the weighing of injustices, in his explanation of motion. These principles from Archimedes that Galileo introduces to his study of nature are not internal principles of motion, they are not compatible with an Aristotelian account of nature. When Galileo turns to study astronomy, he will not begin by trying to improve upon Aristotle’s account. Instead he starts all over from the beginning. The source of motion is not where you think it is: this radical departure from Aristotle is the beginning point. It is as if Galileo once fell for an enormous cosmic prank and is willing to risk imprisonment to prove to the cosmos that he won’t fall for it again: he once thought the principle of motion is in the things that appear to move, but now when he sees the sun rise and set and the stars revolve around his head, he knows better than to think the principle of motion is in those bodies. In Jacob Klein’s essay on modern rationalism he says the following: “mathematical physics is the most important part of our entire civilization and actual life. …the principles of mathematical physics are basic to our whole way of thinking and behavior”(57)28. At the conclusion of the same essay he points to the vast machinery of our society and the indirectness of our contact with the world, direct contact replaced by a symbolic unreality. Klein claims that “Our work, our pleasures, even our love and our hatred are dominated by these all-pervading forces which are beyond our control (64)29. These are radical claims. After rereading Klein’s essays this Fall, I had the opportunity to talk with Eva Brann, a longtime friend of Klein’s. I got up the courage to ask her, “was Klein exaggerating?” Did he really think that “mathematical physics is the most important part of our entire civilization and actual life”? That our work, pleasure, love and hatred are dominated by these all pervading forces? Her answer, “Oh yes.” After studying De Motu and watching Galileo struggle to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy of nature with Archimedes’ mathematics, I’m less incredulous of Klein’s claim. The movement that I see in Galileo’s early study of the natural motion, the move away from thinking about nature as a principle of rest and motion in individual bodies, towards thinking about nature as a contest between bodies and eventually thinking of all motion as the consequence of forces that originate entirely outside oneself, is quite familiar. The way we love and hate, the way we think about happiness, the way we make choices, personal, professional, and political, the way we participate in athletics, the way we understand economic life, in all these ways we repeatedly 28 Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, “Modern Rationalism”, eds. Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman, St. John’s College Press, 1985. 29 Ibid. 17 �appeal to equality, to the balance. Equality is a democratic value we all hold dear in some way; the balance is a symbol of justice and rectitude, of progress and scientific learning, of a life lived well, a symbol emblazoned on our school seal. But in studying Galileo’s use of the balance, we see how it transformed his thinking about nature. Where Aristotle’s nature is the principle of motion and rest in individual substances which are at work becoming more fully themselves, more like their own forms, Galileo’s nature is a system of balances, at first glance embodying principles of equality, prudence, justice and harmony, but on closer inspection these principles merely adjudicate an underlying opposition between bodies. The move from Aristotle to Galileo, is a move from nature as a cause inside an individual substance that is at work becoming more fully itself, to nature as a system of laws governing the underlying violent opposition between bodies. Ptolemy can say the following about his study of astronomy, “with regard to virtuous conduct in practical actions and character, this science, above all things, could make men see clearly; for the constancy, order, symmetry and calm which are associated with the divine, it makes its followers lovers of this divine beauty, accustoming them and reforming their natures, as it were, to a similar spiritual state”(Almagest 1.1)30. I don’t think a physics based on Galileo’s De Motu could say the same. Galileo sees earthly bodies moving according to principles of tension and opposition, any rest, order, symmetry, or calm, supervenes on a tenuous equilibrium that masks underlying tension and opposition. The equal and opposite forces that are inspired by his study of Archimedes, are forces that lead to moments of apparent peace but these mask a perpetual war between bodies. Perhaps this explains why he turns away from the discussion of causes in Two New Sciences, contenting himself with studying what is orderly, symmetrical, and calm, the measurement of motions. Here he finds the peace he was not able to find when he sought after the causes of the motions of bodies. 30 Ptolemy, Almagest, translated by G. J. Toomer, Princeton University Press, 1998. 18 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. 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Title A name given to the resource On Motion Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on February 24, 2023, by Leah Lasell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Ms. Lasell describes her lecture: "The new science of motion presented in the last two days of <i>The Two New Sciences</i> is Galileo's last word in a lifelong argument with Aristotle.  Galileo lets us hear echoes of this argument by including the Aristotelian, Simplicio, among his characters.  While Simplicio will argue for the Aristotelian approach tenaciously and with spirit, his understanding is often second hand, rote, and handicapped by his poor mathematical education which consists of nothing beyond book one of Euclid.  Salviati and Sagredo often team up and ridicule the Aristotelian account and tend to just ignore Simplicio altogether whenever the discussion requires mathematical expertise.  It often seems that Galileo is not treating the Aristotelian worldview fairly, as Simplicio himself complains, allowing Salviati to vaunt over an impoverished, dried up, rather rubbish version of Aristotelianism. <p class="x_MsoNormal"><span></span></p> <p class="x_MsoNormal"><span class="x_contentpasted0"><span>In order to better understand the argument between Galileo and Aristotle, we will look at one of Galileo's early unpublished works, <i>De Motu, </i>or <i>On Motion.  </i>Here, Galileo works within the Aristotelian framework, his own outlook a bit like Simplicio's. His goal is not to refute but to improve upon Aristotle by supplementing his account with mathematical reasoning inspired by Archimedes writings on the balance, making Aristotle’s theory more consistent with his experiences of moving bodies.  But as Galileo attempts to bring together Aristotle, Archimedes, and his own experiences of moving bodies, two different and conflicting understandings of nature emerge.<br /><br />The lecture should be of interest to the whole community: Galileo will lead us through a consideration of Aristotle's philosophy of nature, Archimedes' balance, and Galileo's inclined planes."</span></span></p> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lasell, Leah Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023-02-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642. Di motu. English Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Lasell_Leah_2023-03-27 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2f4c6970da0823d39796f012856ad085.pdf 6f4d08f7ce54c59217defad0bb95c00b PDF Text Text Remarks on the Inauguration of President Nora Demleitner Citizenship, Undergraduate Education, and Great Books It is a distinct honor to be speaking at St. John’s on the occasion of the inauguration of President Demleitner, the 25th president of St. John’s Annapolis campus, the ninth since the inception of the current program of study in 1937, and its first female president. She carries forward an extraordinary tradition of exceptional educational distinction that dates back to 1696. Her selection to lead the Annapolis campus is an illustration of how academic excellence can adapt to new circumstances and yet simultaneously maintain fidelity to a worthy tradition. The theme I have chosen for my talk is the relationship between the unique educational mission of St. John’s and the preservation of democracy here in the United States. I acknowledge at the outset that it is not immediately obvious how a very special curriculum that focuses with intense concentration on the great works of the past can speak to the contemporary dilemmas of self-government in 21st century America. But I choose this theme because it is so pressing. Many of us, myself included, have been taken aback by how fragile and endangered our �democracy has become. We are apprehensive about its precarious state, and we believe that it is of the utmost importance to take steps to protect it. So the question I am putting on the table is how the essentially political project of preserving our democracy might be connected to the distinguished educational curriculum of St. John’s, which focuses on understanding masterpieces of the past. How can a conversation with bygone figures help us with today’s pressing problems? I ask this with some urgency. Outside the serene and peaceful world of St. John’s, the world is burning. There are of course literal flames in the Amazon rainforest. But there is also a brutal war in Eastern Europe, and a serious threat of war in the Pacific. Wanton violence sweeps the globe, from Teheran to Mali to Lima. Democracies from Hungary to India teeter on the verge of totalitarian excess. We suffer constantly from the fierce storms, droughts and displacements of an overheating planet. Each year, our world seems to grow more dangerous and more threatening. And the United States is not exempt from these challenges. When I grew up in the 1950s, America felt, somehow, beyond the rough and 2 �rapid whitewaters of history that seemed forever to engulf other countries. But no longer. In my lifetime, I do not think I have ever witnessed a political atmosphere more angry, more poisonous, or more baleful. There are no doubt many causes of our political distemper, including two years of covid, growing inequality, the loss of blue color manufacturing work, gaping cultural divides between rural and urban communities, and an explosive resurgence of bigotry and prejudice. But this afternoon I want to focus on one particular dimension of our political crisis, which is the rise of extreme partisanship. American political life is now divided into camps so mutually antagonistic that ordinary political life has become all but impossible. We no longer seem to be able to wheel and deal, to compromise and construct. We tear down, we troll, we attack, we bluster, we become outraged. But we do not reach across the aisle. The storming of the Capitol seems merely the physical symbol of the underlying disorder. Our politics has become a scene of war, reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s corrosive definition of politics as an existential confrontation between friends and enemies. 3 �A 2014 study by two political scientists found that “hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters’ minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race.” In a frightening conclusion, the study notes that elites now have a greater incentive “to engage in confrontation . . . than [in] cooperation.” Just to give you some sense of how profoundly divisive our political life has become, consider that in 1960 only about 5 percent of Americans expressed a negative reaction to the prospect of their child marrying someone from the opposite party. By 2010 this figure had risen eightfold to 40 percent, including both Republicans and Democrats. It is plain, I think, that our politics has become personal; it has become a matter of identity. It is experienced as a matter of survival. During the 2016 presidential election Michael Anton of the Claremont Institute, wrote a famous essay entitled The Flight 93 Election. The first sentence of that essay read: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.” 4 �What worries me is that such extreme identitarian division is potentially fatal in a nation like ours. A heterogenous country like America can be held together only by successful politics. But such politics is impossible if we remain balkanized by narrow, tribal attitudes. The reason is explained in a very old story told to us by Thucydides, the great Athenian general and historian from the fifth century BC, whom you study here at St. John’s. Thucydides recounts the tale of the disastrous Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. All of Greece at the time was broken into two political parties. One party advocated for an aristocratic oligarchy; the other favored democracy. The struggle between these two parties was violent and fanatic, and the result, Thucydides recounts, was that “society became divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion.” This partisanship could not be ended, says Thucydides, because “no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to 5 �feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves.” The upshot of this breakdown of trust among the Greeks was that atrocity followed atrocity. Men became beasts. In words that should be remembered forever, Thucydides lamented the loss of what he called “the ordinary conventions of civilized life.” This was because Greeks had begun “the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of . . . remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.” Putting to one side the ever-present possibility of mass slaughter by a deranged killer armed with an AR-47, we are not, I hope, in danger of actual atrocities. But we are certainly in danger of losing trust in those general laws of humanity that allow us to work together despite our disagreements, however passionate those disagreements might become. The loss of trust in our society is corrosive and every day it becomes more and more widespread. Nearly fifty years ago, almost half of all 6 �Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted”; but today that number has fallen to less than one in three. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans said that they trusted the federal government to do what is right at least most of the time; 1 but in 2019 that number had tumbled precipitously down to 17 percent. In 1974, 71 percent of Americans had a great deal or a fair amount of trust in our Supreme Court. In 2022 that number has shrunk to 47 per cent. When asked, Americans report a lower opinion of Congress than of root canals, colonoscopies, Brussel sprouts or traffic jams. It is small comfort that Congress did manage a higher approval rating than telemarketers, North Korea, or the Ebola virus.2 This is tragic. Consider: we live in a representative democracy. Our government represents us. The House of Representatives is the People’s House. If we detest our own government, what does that say about us? Do we loathe ourselves, or do we despise our neighbors? If we disavow our own institutions of governance, we confess our own inadequacy and vulnerability. 1 http://www.npr.org/2015/11/23/457063796/poll-only-1-in-5-americans-say-they-trustthe-government 2 http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/01/congress-somewhere-belowcockroaches-traffic-jams-and-nickleback-in-americans-esteem.html 7 �Without institutions of governance, we become vulnerable because we cannot act together. We cannot build a common future or ensure our common security. Institutions of governance, and the laws that establish and guide them, are necessary if we are to enjoy the immense goods of cooperation. Excessive partisanship undercuts the social trust required for the political processes that underwrite both governance and law. Whatever kind of society you wish to build, whether it is conservative or liberal, it must be accomplished through political processes that depend upon trust. Thucydides described the hell created by the erosion of that trust. Thucydides said: “Human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, show[s] itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, [and as] the enemy to anything superior to itself.” Without trust, observed Thucydides, there can be no law, no justice, no security. There is only self-preservation. There is only a dreadful war of all against all. The question is not whether we should trust the particular decisions of government, which can be right or can be wrong. The question is rather 8 �whether we have any option but to trust the political processes by which we engage, each to the other, to determine how we shall act together and how we shall make our laws. I know that these very political processes can often be perversely slow and slanted and unresponsive. They may even at times be corrupt. But these political processes are all we have, and therefore we must, paradoxically, use them to make these very processes better and fairer. Politics in a democracy are necessarily open to all. This means that one cannot enter politics without encountering those who disagree with us, and who perhaps disagree radically. It is therefore essential that we find a way to structure such encounters in a manner that does not involve excessive partisanship. Thucydides gave us a clue about how this delicate balance might be maintained. He put his thoughts into the mouth of Pericles, the great Athenian leader. In his famous funeral oration for the Athenian war dead, Thucydides has Pericles praise Athens as “a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.” In Athens, says Pericles, “we are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect.” 9 �Athenians respected the law because they were all involved in fashioning the law. So Pericles pointedly observes: Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well informed on general politics—this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. Politics in fifth century Athens was a deadly serious business, far more so than in the United States today. Failed politicians could be exiled or ostracized or worse. But Pericles nevertheless summoned Athenians to full participation in the political process, arguing “that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.” Being free means being self-governing; it means having the capacity to fashion our own future according to our own ideals. It is a miraculous and wonderful thing to enter democratic politics in order to realize our 10 �convictions. But to the extent that we loathe our political adversaries and seek to exclude them from the common political space that the Greeks called the agora, we abandon the possibility of a shared future. It is not possible to sustain a democracy that includes “the whole people” if we refuse to deal with our adversaries. Democracy fails if we seek advantage only for ourselves, or only for our own tribe or only for our own party. Of course it is possible that our adversaries may be so awful that we come to believe that we cannot share a future with them. This happened during the American Civil War. But such times must necessarily be very rare, which is why Carl Schmitt was wrong to analogize politics to war. Politics is the art of living together despite differences. In war we seek to exterminate the other. But in politics we abjure violence, which is to say we seek to win while remaining bound to the rules, to the law, that define appropriate political engagement. In war, our opponents are our enemies, whom we seek to destroy. In politics, our opponents are our agonists, over whom we seek to triumph but with whom we are bound to live and with whom we are bound obey a common set of rules. Enemies become agonists only when both sides of a 11 �controversy acknowledge mutual allegiance to a shared polity. That means that both sides acknowledge that they are bound to a common destiny, a shared fate that defines the identity of a country. That is what holds together a polis or a nation. Civil war looms when we rupture that shared fate and decide to go our separate ways. Pericles emphasizes that democracy requires courage. Democracy requires the courage to persist in pursuing our ideals while at the same time resisting the temptation to an excessive partisanship that excludes our agonists from the agora, which is to say from the possibility of a shared democratic politics. This is a rare kind of courage. It requires patience and endurance. It must be maintained even as democratic politics seems repeatedly to fail, and even as it seems to fall under the control of those who oppose our deepest ideals. The poet in the 20th century who most tellingly articulated what it might mean to lose faith in a common political future was the Nobel Laureate Czeslaw [Tchesluff] Milosz [Meewosh]. Milosz was a Lithuanian who wrote in Polish. He tried to understand the havoc caused by World War II. He believed that Eastern Europeans had lost trust in one another and 12 �hence that they had abandoned the possibility of shared political engagement. In his monumental poem Child of Europe, Milosz [Meewosh] describes the cynical world created by the War in Eastern Europe: We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires On which the winds of endless autumns howled, We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared in paroxysms of pain. We, saved by our own cunning and knowledge. . . . Having the choice of our own death and that of a friend We chose his, coldly thinking: Let it be done quickly. We sealed gas chamber doors, stole bread Knowing the next day would be harder to bear than the day before. . . Europeans, Milosz [Meewosh] writes, learned all the wrong lessons from calamity of the war: 13 �Love no country: countries soon disappear Love no city: cities are soon rubble. . . . Do not love people: people soon perish. Or they are wronged and call for your help. . . . In these chilling lines, Milosz [Meewosh] evokes what it is like to inhabit the bleak and cruel world long ago described by Thucydides. It is a world in which persons are out for themselves alone. It is a world in which cunning and calculation reign. It is a world without trust and therefore without hope for a future. It is a world without politics, because no bargains can be struck. It is a world in which all are at war with all. No one would freely choose to live in such a world. As he grew older, Milosz [Meewosh] began slowly to heal from the mighty blows of the War. In his poem What I Learned from Jeanne Hersch, he enumerated some of the lessons that he had painfully gleaned from his formidable historical experience. The poem consists of 12 numbered propositions, but I will read you only three: 14 �2. That they have been wrong who undermined our confidence in reason by enumerating the forces that want to usurp it: class struggle, libido, will to power. . . . 5. That the proper attitude toward being is respect . . . . 12. That in our lives we should not succumb to despair . . . for the past is never closed down and receives the meaning we give it by our subsequent acts. I pick these three propositions because they contain profound insights that are worth pausing for a moment to consider. They are insights that offer us a way out of the hell created by mistrust and polarization. And they are insights that allow us to understand the importance of St. John’s College. First, Milosz [Meewosh] tells us that that we must have confidence in our reason. Think now, about St. John’s and your curriculum. Here at St. John’s College you read great texts. Why do you do that? It is because these texts reach out to us from the past. But how exactly do they do that? 15 �Without question an important connection between us and these texts is our reason. You study texts from the finest thinkers that humanity has ever produced. And, lo and behold, the ideas of these long-dead thinkers challenge you. They speak to you in ways that inspire conversation and dialogue. No one could be more distant from you in customs, traditions, language, or life than Aristotle. And yet in your classrooms, through the medium of your reason, you reach across the millennia and converse with an ancient Greek. It is your reason that enables this miracle. The curriculum of St. John’s is filled with texts that reward this kind of rational engagement. Rational engagement is essential not merely for the truths that it reveals, but also for the forms of connection that it requires. At St. John’s you learn from texts not merely the lessons that they have to teach, but also, more fundamentally, what it means to converse with a stranger, whose ideas are radically different than yours. Reason is a remarkable thing, because it can thrive only under conditions of respect. To reason with another is to take in their ideas, and to counter in a way that evinces trust that reason will matter to them as well as to you. 16 �This means that when we reason with one another, we model the trust that is necessary for democracy. To reason with another is not to lose track of your own commitments. It is instead to maintain these commitments despite another’s disagreement, and yet, miraculously, to perform these commitments within a relationship that acknowledges and trusts that reason should matter to all involved, to both yourself and to the other. Second, Milosz [Meewosh] reminds us that it is necessary to use our reason to fashion ideals worth pursuing. Milosz [Meewosh] tells us that one of the most important of these ideals is that we respect being, which means that we respect the facticity of the world. The world is as it is, regardless of what we might wish it to be. We must have humility before the facts of the world. One of the most important functions of our reason is to protect us from that most tempting of fantasies, which is to believe that the world is merely what we wish it to be. A world at the mercy of fantasies is a world at the mercy of power. Reason, respect for the gritty, irreducible facticity of the world, is the antidote to our own incessant will to power. 17 �Milosz [Meewosh] lived in Eastern Europe, which suffered unspeakable horrors because, in the ideology of both the Nazis and the Soviet Union, facts counted for nothing. The world could be reshaped at will. In a poem called Faith, Milosz [Meewosh] rejects this perspective: The word Faith means when someone sees A dew-drop or a floating leaf, and knows That they are, because they have to be. And even if you dreamed, or closed your eyes And wished, the world would still be what it was, And the leaf would still be carried down the river. Respect for being requires faith that there is a world outside of us and that that world matters. The world is what it is and cannot be remade merely to accord to our desires. No matter what your wishes, the leaf will still be carried down the river. This is a particularly important insight when it comes to other people. Other people are also facts in the world, and they must be respected just as all other facts are respected. One expression of this respect is to engage other 18 �people through politics, as distinct from simply obliterating them through war, or simply excluding them from the agora in the hope that they will vanish. Other people will not disappear even if we close our eyes and wish them away. This is true even when other people have opinions that we regard as obnoxious or wrong-headed or violently incorrect. Respect for being means accepting the fundamental alterity of others, which is the foundation of all politics. Politics, says the political theorist Hannah Arendt presupposes men, not Man. Politics requires plurality. Without politics, none of us can be free. We are thrown willy-nilly into a common lifeboat. We flourish together or we do not flourish at all. That is why political ideology counts for much, but not for everything. Excessive partisanship denies this basic truth. And, I remind you, this is also why race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and all such categories, count for a great deal, but they do not count for everything. If they did, our common lifeboat would break into fragments and be swamped. 19 �You know this at St. John’s. Your curriculum is fabulously diverse. You study figures as different as Lucretius and Dante; Kepler and Maimonides; Machiavelli and Proust; Mozart and the Bhagavad Gita; Ralph Ellison and Richard Feynman. If here at St. John’s, with a curriculum as various and far-ranging as this, you cannot learn to honor the plurality of the world, to respect its fabulous facticity, you cannot learn it anywhere. The third and last proposition in What I Learned from Jeanne Hersch to which I want to call your attention is that we should not despair of the present. I know that the present may, at times—and especially in these times—appear bleak. But we must nevertheless maintain hope for the future. And hope, St. Augustine instructs us, “has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” Where there is hope, the present is never fixed. Paradoxically, we can refashion the present by changing the future. Consider this beautiful poem by the German poet Rilke, which is called “A Walk”. Rilke writes: 20 �My eyes already touch the sunny hill, going far ahead of the road I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has its inner light, even from a distance-- and changes us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave... but what we feel is the wind in our faces. To change our idea of the future--to hope, to aim, to aspire—is to change the present. That is why respect for being is not a recipe for passivity. It does not demand that injustices be endured. Milosz [Meewosh] ends his own poem Faith with these remarkable lines: Look, see the long shadow cast by the tree; And flowers and people throw shadows on the earth: What has no shadow has no strength to live. 21 �Our strength to live is a fact of our being. It must be respected. We must cast our shadows upon the earth. We must love our country; love our city; love one another. We must engage in politics to make our country and our city, respectable and whole. Whatever future we may hope to create, however, we have no choice but to inhabit it together. We must live with those whom we might otherwise oppose. And this means that we must stand firmly balanced in the tension between our own ideals and our respect for the alterity of others. It is an equilibrium as fragile, and as delicate, and yet as inevitable, as a shadow falling on a leaf floating down a river. How can we maintain this remarkable equilibrium? How can we stand rooted in ourselves and yet retain a posture of respect for others whom we believe to be quite wrong and fraught with danger for the country? What model do we have for such a paradoxical form of connection? Think of the educational miracle that is St. John’s. You study the great texts of the past, and yet you prepare students to live in the present. How is it 22 �possible to stand in the shadows of the gigantic thinkers that you study, the finest in the history of mankind, and yet to have your own thoughts? Notice that across the ages, the thinkers that you study engage each other. As they do so, they display both respect for the views of their interlocutors and at the same time the determination to assert their own ideas. Every day, in your study, you see exemplified exactly the miraculous and difficult equilibrium that democracy demands of its citizens. At St. John’s you model—you enact—at the very highest level, the difficulties and contradictions of inhabiting a democratic polis. You study great books of the past, but you know full well that the authors of these books differ among themselves, and that, as you explain in your Statement of the St. John’s College Program, these “great books” in the end serve as prompts for students to struggle “together with fundamental questions,” so that “students and their teachers” can “learn from their differences and discover more deeply their shared humanity.” At St. John’s students learn to assert their own ideas in the very teeth of the most challenging and magnificent figures of the past. But they learn to do so using their reason, 23 �which means with respect and the acknowledgment of the possibility of difference. What are you trying to achieve here in this precious community of St. John’s, if not that fragile, inexpressibly vulnerable but necessary equilibrium, that balances using reason to achieve a self-respecting view of one’s own, but that nevertheless maintains a genuine other-directed respect for the views of interlocutors, however mistaken? That is the paradoxical equilibrium of which Milosz [Meewosh] writes. That is the equilibrium necessary for democracy. That is the equilibrium that will restore our trust in our fellow citizens, so that together we can walk forward in confidence, filled with an inner light that will illuminate the possibility in the present of a common future that, in grasping us, will transform our dismal present into a scene of hope for us and for our nation. In his recent wonderful book entitled College, Columbia literature professor Andrew DelBanco asks “What is College for”? In answer, he quotes from a manuscript diary composed in 1850 by a student at a small 24 �Methodist college, Emory and Henry, in southwest Virginia. The student writes: “Oh that the Lord would show me how to think and how to choose.” In learning how to think, you will put your trust in reason. In learning how to choose, you will cast shadow on the world. And, most important of all, at a college like St. John’s, you will learn these things together, in a common conversation. That is to say, you will learn how to think and to choose in the context of respect for those who think and choose differently. You will learn, that is, how to be citizens of a great democracy. You will become inoculated against the violent forms of polarization that threaten now to tear us apart and to foreclose our future. It is in this way that St. John’s, by maintaining faith in its past, also maintains faith with our democratic destiny. As St. John’s adapts the great ideas of the past to the terrible contingencies of the present, it creates hope for the future. This is an occasion to celebrate the educational ideals of St. John’s, and to express our own hope that they will extend long into the future. 25 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 25 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Remarks on the Inauguration of President Nora Demleitner: Citizenship, Undergraduate Education, and Great Books Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 24, 2023, by Robert Post as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />The lecture was the first President's Law and Society lecture and was part of the events celebrating the inauguration of Nora Demleitner. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Post, Robert, 1947- Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023-03-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic--United States Books and reading--United States Citizenship--United States Demleitner, Nora V., 1966- St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Post_Robert_2023-03-24 Friday night lecture Inauguration President's Law and Society lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b4ccaa67447dd146eaa040a8b1ada172.pdf a7defdefa7114cd33acc482cfc216759 PDF Text Text Friday Night Lecture St. John's College, Annapolis September4, 1998 What, then, is Time? Eva Brann When our dean asked me to lecture this September it was because he had heard that I'd just completed a book on time, and he thought I might like to talk about it. He was right, and here are three possible kinds of profit that, on thinking it over, I figured might come to you and to me if I gave what I guess one might call a book report. First, even if the writing of books is a few decades off for most of you here tonight, it turns out that writing papers and annual essays is not so different from writing books, and I thought I might be able to tell you something useful. In fact I'll do it right now. \Vhen the time comes to write, whether it's a small paper or a long annual essay, never think: "I've got to write this thing! Help! I need a paper!" Instead search your soul for a question you have nursed for quite a while, whether articulately or inarticulately, somethingj:hat bothered and puzzled you, something that might be very intimate but is capable of public expression. Then flip mentally through the books you've studied, or the music you've sung, or the theorems you've proved, or the experiments you've re-enacted, and ask yourself which have a bearing, taken in the largest sense, on your issue. What will happen next is the result of a mixture of concentration and luck: some paradox or analogy or some other significant array will jump out at you. Seize that and slowly pummel, stroke, and shape it into an articulate order. Of course, none of that can happen at 1 �the last minute. For looking into yourself, for calling on your studies, for finding a crystallizing moment, for working all of it into a well-shaped' whole, time is of the essence. My second thought was that time is one subject concerning which it does not matter whether one is a freshman finishing the second week at the college or a senior beginning the fourth year, or even a tutor who has taught most of the program. Stormy love is not a pressing issue to all ages, nor is looming death, but there is, I think, no one, at any time of life, for whom time does not become a problem in some way or other. I know this from experience. Of the things that have urgently interested me from time to time, the mention of Being and Non-being, for example, provokes mostly stupefied non-interest, the mention of the Imagination elicits an account of people's favorite fantasy series, but the mention of Time gives rise to intelligently companionable puzzlement. People have a different relation to the question concerning time than to other deep matters, which they are either willing to bypass as too obscure for their taste or to treat with the most unreflective but familiar particularity. The title of this lecture -- and of my book -- is "What, then, is Time?" It is a quotation from the most famous sentence ever written on time by the man who was most deeply immersed in its elusive familiarity, Augustine. It comes from the eleventh book of his Confessions, which we read in the sophomore year. Here is the \vhole sentence: What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to the questioner, I do not know. My own concern with time started from two ends at once, intellectual puzzlement and deepfelt irritation, and it developed, as really good questions do, from annoyed fascination to serious interest. The intellectual puzzlement was just that expressed by Augustine: What sort of a being, if it was a being, could be so handily familiar in daily usage and so fugitive to the grasp of thought? Here I did as all my fellow humans do: I make time, kill time, manage my time, waste time. To be sure, I've never "done" time, though but for the grace of God I might have. I know that time heals all wounds and ravages all the beauties of the world. 2 But if I ask myself what it is that does this, I �see and touch nothing and think of less. That is at first just a puzzling and then an engaging state of affairs. The irritation I experienced had a superficially different source. In all the departments of life people talk of time as a force or a power, not just in the sort of dead metaphor that makes up the unconscious poetry of popular usage, as in all the phrases cited above. No, they mean it literally, especially when they are talking of the so-called "phases" of time. "Phase" will be the most important word in this lecture. It is my word -- different authors use different words -- for the three parts of time, past, present, future. Perhaps I should have said the three parts of human time, for I will argue that only human, or human-like, beings have pasts and presents and futures. It is the future with which these people mostly play infuriating havoc. They say and they inean that there is a future coming and our business is to form a reception committee for it. Some see this Future with a capital Fas a doom, as in Yeats's great poem, "The Second Coming": And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Far more of our contemporaries see it cheerfully as a benefactor, though a totally manipulative one: It is the Information Age or the Global Age or the Age of Megacorporations, you name it, and our duty is to be ready or to be run over by time. They engage in what I call to myself proactive passivity. This time-mode -- the adjective, incidentally, is "temporal," so I will say, this temporal mode -- strikes me as paralyzing the human will, and that is one form of immorality. So besides the intellectual desire to understand the nature of time and whether it is a being or a nothing, I also began to think about time in its human effects. Almost everyone who has lived for some time has neat observations about these effects. For example, I have been at this college forty-one years or almost fifteen thousand days. Sometimes it seems like forever and sometimes it seems like a day. What accounts for this mad elasticity of time? But besides these timernminations there is also that sense I have of the important moral consequences of not thinking about the nature of time, about accepting what seem to be abuses of our phase-nature. In fact, a new hero of mine, Octavio Paz (whom I did not in fact discover for myself but through one of our 3 �Mexican alumni, Juan Villasenor) put my thought much more expansively than I would have had the courage to do. He says in his book on India: I believe that the reformation of our civilization must begin with a reflection on time. Recall that I am still laying out the possible profit of telling you about my book, and here is the last one, chiefly to myself. Imagine what a pleasure it will be to come on campus and to be able to fall easily into a conversation about this magical subject with some proportion of the people that live and learn here -- with the more virtuous part, I might add, those who come to Friday night lectures. Now let me tell you of two discoveries or devices -- it's always hard to tell whether it's one or the other -- about which the book crystallized. One was the discovery -- and I became persuaded that it was a discovery, was really there to be found-- that writers on time who lived millennia apart in time and who were worlds apart in thought were at crucial moments driven into the same understanding, or at least the same problem. Once I had discovered one such pair of time-twins I came on three others. And finally I came to believe that amongst them they pretty well established the perennial possibilities and the pertinent problems concerning time. In a moment I will tell who these writers are and what deep notion each pair shares. But let me say here that it ' was a blessing to find such a principle of selection. For it is hard for most of us to think about these enigmas without help. The trouble is, there is too much help on offer. I own a bibliography of time which tells of nearly two hundred thousand books and articles written between 1900 and now. Of course, much of it is piffling, but much of it is, I am sure, though!1'ul. I chose four great writers, and they paired quite naturally with four more, and by good luck these are the eight among the ancient and modern writers generally agreed to have the deepest theories. The pairs, then, are Plato and Einstein, Aristotle and Kant, Plotinus and Heidegger, Augustine and Husserl. Since many of you will not have read them, though all but Husserl are on the Program (and he ought to be), I'll present their time-theories as simply and as unencumbered by terminology as possible. But I'll omit completely telling you about one pair, Plotinus and Heidegger, because it is too tricky 4 �to do, although their similarity on the point of time is most spectacular in view of their diametric opposition on everything else that matters. The other discovery was that a human effect which never ceases to enchant me, namely the images that arise before the mind's eye in our imagination, had a certain remarkable similarity with our sense of time, a formal sort of similarity. Images are absent presences or present absences; they are not what they are, they are made of Being and Non-being. What I mean is that any image, but particularly a mental image, presents someone or something not actually present. To imagine an absent friend is to have him there, but not really. Time as well, it turns out, has this curious character of being and not-being, of being there but not really, of being present only in its absence. My all-time favorite time-saying is by the priceless Yogi Berra. When someone asked him: "What time is it?" he replied: "You mean now?" It is the wisest of answers, because you can't tell time, and yet we do. It is always and never Now. So the book began to have two parts. One part was a study of these eight philosophers for the purpose of seeing what kinds of answers could be given to the question "What is time?" and what problems were inherent in the answers. But studying, while a help to thinking, and for most of us an indispensable help, is not thinking, since to understand what others think is simply a different activity from the thinking that goes directly, without intermediary, to the question. So in a second part I tried to go directly to the question, having absorbed all the help I could. Therefore in this lecture, too, after telling what some of the best writers I could find have thought about time, I will try to tell what I think. I should say right now, lest you be disappointed, that what I conclude first and last is that it is a true mystery. I mean a potent effect whose characteristics are poignantly clear but whose nature is finally unfathomable. You can specify a mystery but you can't resolve it. If you have a huge field of apparently possible answers to a question, it clears the decks somewhat to begin by removing the answers that are simply unacceptable. In thinking about the ways time is spoken of, it seemed to me that whatever else is said, time is spoken of either as 5 �occurring in nature or as being within the human being. Time is either external or internal, or perhaps both. External time has attracted by far the greater interest. Time is written of in religion, where it is a great question how an eternal God acts in created time. Time is treated in history, where it is a great question whether the times make history or people do. But above all time is a great subject in physics, where the best-grounded and most remarkable theories of time are developed. Without question, the physicist who has done most to make other physicists and people in general think about time is Einstein. The work I chose to examine is his 1905 paper on what came to be known as the Special Theory of Relativity. \Vhat struck me first was that every mention of time was in quotation marks. This habit conveyed to me that I was dealing with the most careful and thoughtful of writers, one who knew that time in physics is a most problematic notion. Einstein says right away: It might appear possible to overcome all the difficulties attending the definition of "time" by substituting "the position of the small hand of my watch" for "time." And in fact such a definition is satisfactory .... At least it is satisfactory when we are talking only of time here and now. Before Einstein, physicists had believed what everyone believes: that it is the same time throughout the world, that every other Here simply has the same Now as my Here. This situation was called simultaneity and was regarded as a chief feature of external, I mean natural, time. Einstein goes on to show that for any stationary Here far away from my own, it takes some calculating to synchronize our watches. And when we are moving relative to each other one of our most entrenched senses about time is overthrown, namely that what time it is is independent of our state of rest or motion. Einstein's theory turns out to have to do entirely with the measurement of time -- what my local clock and your local clock tell under different physical conditions. That is why Einstein puts "time" in quotations: He is warning us that not the nature of time but its measurement is at issue. Now I'll jump back two and a half millennia and quote to you what is the most famous, . most often cited definition of time. It comes from Plato's dialogue called Timaeus. Timaeus is a 6 �made-up character, a visiting physicist. He and some of Socrates' friends have planned an amusement for him. On the day before Socrates had produced for them a picture in words of the ideal political community -- some people think it is the one set out in the dialogue called The Republic. Now Timaeus will reciprocate by painting for Socrates' entertainment the cosmos, the ordered world within which such an ideal city might fit. In the course of giving a mathematical account of such a cosmos, Timaeus says this about the way the maker of the world introduced time into it: He planned to make a movable image of eternity, and as he ordered heaven into a cosmos, he made an image of that eternity which stays one and the same, an eternal image moving according to number. And that is what we call time. What Timaeus is saying is that the heavens move like a great cosmic dial and that this motion allows us to tell time. So the mythical early physicist and the greatest of modem physicists are saying the same thing: Time is what the clock tells, in one case the cosmic clock, in the other a local watch. And so say all working physicists in between. It is a working, a so-called operational definition of time, and it works just fine -- until you begin to think about it. That time is what the clock tells is what one might call a dispositive definition. It disposes of time as an issue. But if you turn it around and try to say that the clock tells time you're in trouble. Time never appears on the face of a clock. Nor does it appear anywhere else in nature, ever. All other natural phenomena appear somehow to sight or hearing or touch. Of time not a trace. What does appear is motion. An analog clock is a standard cyclical motion. A digital clock " is a standard progressive motion. Clocks are calibrated motions. There is no time actually used in physics and none that actually appears in nature. There is much more to be said about this shocking claim, and I'm sure you'll want to argue it out in the question period. Among other points then to be made, the seniors, who have read Newton, might want to point out that Newton, at least, does stipulate true natural time, an equable flux that comes before motion. And I would answer that it is not only as physicist but also as theologian that Newton 7 �puts time into nature. For this so-called absolute time, which has no <:>bservable features, is probably not so much in nature as in God's mind, in that part of God's mind, called his "sensorium," with which he is receptive to all of nature, its infinite spaces, its primary forces, its ultimate bodies. My point at the moment is, however, only to reinforce a conclusion I came to: Wherever time is seriously considered, mind, soul, consciousness and sensibility come on the scene. Time can only be internal, meaning within a mind, possibly God's mind. So I disposed to my own satisfaction of the vast majority of theories of time. Intricate and interesting as they are, they are really theories of motion, not of time, and they don't tell what time is. But time is the sort of subject for which every settling of the mind in one respect is punished by a complementary problem popping up in another. You can, and I think you have to, take time out of nature, b·ut I am not so perverse as to claim that the outside world isn't full of variations: locomotions, processes, alterations. The mystery that has now popped up is that we have no idea what is really going on in this time-deprived world. Let me show you what I mean. Human time, internal time, will be distinguished by its phases, past, present, future. But nothing in nature, except perhaps the near-human mammals, apes and dolphins, has a past or a present or a future. Edwin Muir says in a poem called "The Animals": But these have never trod Twice the familiar track, Never turned back Into the memoried day. All is new and near In the unchanging Here .... Animals and sticks and stones do not have a past, though they might be scµd to be their past. But I, for one, just cannot imagine what it is like to live in the unchanging Here and not the have memory, how such a being gets itself into and out of existence, in short how anything can change without having phases of time. But then again the effort is love's labor lost: Hmv could I have empathy with, feel my way into, that which has no inside? So the outer world becomes in this 'fespect opaque, and this is the price to be paid for making a philosophical choice. In corning to conclusions in philosophical inquiries, I want to say as an aside, it is always a matter of what we 8 �can best live with for the time being -- which is why all philosophy as carried on by human beings is ultimately moral philosophy. There is perhaps a solution to the timelessness of nature. It is a commonplace for writers o.n time that there are two kinds of time. They might be called succession-time and phase-time. Phase-time is dynamic in the sense that the human present, about which time breaks into past and . future, continually shifts -- as Yogi Berra's counter-question, "You mean now?" makes clear in its unavoidable absurdity. Succession-time, on the other hand, is static. It is merely the endless chain of before-and-after, established once and for all. It' is time all by itself, no one's time, the time of all events taken only with relation to their succession and to nothing and nobody else. Perhaps nature does have its time, succession-time. But even the successions of nature tum out to be more intelligible as causal than as temporal sequences. This is the moment to introduce Aristotle, who produced the first extensive treatment of time ever, in Book Four of his Physics. Here is what he says time is: Time, then, is not motion but that by which motion has number. Aristotle seems to be making spectacularly short shrift of that mysterious power, time. It is nothing but an attribute of motion . Then he says what sort of attribute: Time ... is the number of motion with resnect to before and after. L 'What th~ deep meaning of all this is can't come out unless we follow up what Aristotle means by motion, number, before-and-after. But we might guess at two problematic elements of this understanding of time. . The first, which is by far the less deep of the two but is endlessly dis~ussed, is this. If time is the number of motion as a progression in which the parts come before and after, if it is in fact the succession-time I just introduced, it must somehow share in a chief feature of motion, namely continuity. Physical motion borrows this feature from the fact that it takes place over distance. Distances are representable as mathematical lines, and these lines, as the freshmen have just begun to see, must be continuous -- no elements can be missing. So time, as Aristotle himself 9 �emphasizes, is continuous, like a line. Wherever you cut the line you get a point that belongs to both parts of the cut. This point is the Now. Time is in every way like a line of geometry: It lies upon its points, each of which is a Now. The only difference is that the geometric points are static, whereas the Now moves forward, ever the same in its features, ever different in temporal location. But as you know by now, a point is that which has no parts, so the Now has no parts . .Therefore it has no extent, no bulk, no force, no presence. Therefore the point-Now of the mathematical model of time is as far removed as anything can be from the humanly experienced present, which is vivid, full, and altogether the most impressive phase of time. Insofar as time is continuous it is not very human. But then Aristotle has also said that which will make time totally discontinuous. For time is a number by which motion is counted, and a number is a collection of completely discontinuous units -- there is no way one unit can be tangent to another. Motion, locomotion at least, is bound to distance and borrows from that fact its continuity. But number is bound to something else which reinforces its discontinuity. Many things in the world are collections of items. Aristotle mentions herds of horses and flocks of sheep. Other things, such as distances of all sorts, can be marked off into artificial units. All these things have a number that belongs to them. But nothing in nature gets its number unless someone is counting. Aristotle says that it is the soul that counts. So time, in order to be the number of motion, requires a wide-awake counting soul. Now I shall say a sentence, or rather a question, which is underlined in my typescript: When the soul is countin2. does it take time to do it? Does it get its numbering from some motion? What distance does that psychic motion cover? Aristotle is in big - and I must say unacknowledged - trouble. Time in nature is only the number of motion, but what is the counting that announces that number? I don't think he knew, but perhaps in the question period someone will make his case. Now let me leap two thousand plus years ahead. For Aristotle time originates with the counting soul. To my mind, Aristotle's true modem successor, the one who takes Aristotle's 10 �thought and turns it thoroughly and precisely upside down, is Kant. Here is an aside: This kind of inversion of thought, so that it is the same in name but utterly different in significance, is the chief moving force of the philosophical tradition we study at this college. By "force" I don't mean some magical attribute of the passage of time, but the way of proceeding that is congenial to those immersed in this tradition. At any rate, whatever time is, if it has power it has it only as an aspect of human consciousness. Back to Kant. You will be relieved to hear that I do not plan to tell you what is in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's founding book, although everything in there. is sooner or later related to time. In any case, the Juniors will be studying it in spring, and it is that which makes February a month of delights. Instead I will focus on a few sentences which show what it is that brings Kant so very close to Aristotle in the letter, though he is worlds apart in meaning. Kant regards time as a constitutional part of our receptive capacity, our ability to take in what is given to us. Such a capacity is called "sensibility," and we are so made that whatever comes to us, the world of nature especially, comes in the form of temporal sensibility. The Critique is a great work of philosophical art, and I omit the many factors that feed beautifully into rounding this notion out, in order to concentrate on just one thing: When we ask what it means that nature comes to us in the form of time, the answer is that whenever we think about nature we begin by noticing quantities, and we do that first of all by numbering-- not top-of-the-head counting, but a deeply interior kind of beating out of units that add up into a number. Here is Kant's word on what is happening in this counting: "I generate time itself .... " So Aristotle and Kant agree that time is a kind of psychic beating or counting. It does not save Kant from the question I asked of Aristotle that he calls time a form of the sensibility. Is this form, I now ask, itself static or is it fluid? If it is static, how does it produce the psychic flow of pulses? If it is fluid, is there yet another time behind Kant's deep constitutional time? Let me say right now that all the authors who put time within the soul run into this trouble. And those who put the origin or ground of time outside of the soul run into other and worse troubles. 11 �Both Aristotle and Kant have been primarily interested in what I have called successiontime, the steady chain of before-and-afters found in nature, though apprehended by our counting. Now is the time to speak of human time, phase-time. To my mind, Augustine is the greatest writer on time -- and the most beautiful one. Here's another aside: Very broadly speaking, philosophers come in two kinds, those who inquire serenely and hopefully into a subject they long to know and believe they can approach and those who question severely and disenchantedly a matter they think is ultimately hopeless. Augustine certainly has travails of the soul, and I would not be unfair to call Husserl, who takes up two millennia later exactly where Augustine had left off, a fusspot. But both are not so much driven as led by faith in their subject, and I want to say that these are the philosophers I trust and prefer to be with. Augustine wants to know what time is because it is the human counterpart of God's eternity, the eternity of the God he has just found and acknowledged. But there is nothing exalted about his questioning -- it is very down-to-earth. He loves to sing hymns, and the question is: How do I measure times, the long and short syllables, the lengths of the stanzas? Distances are easy to measure. They stay put while you lay a measuring stick alongside them. But the moment slips away, the past is no longer, the future not yet, and there is no way to lay a time-stick along an elapsed time. Lengths measure lengths, motions measure motions -- what measures time? Here is his answer, as I said, to my mind the most illuminating thing ever uttered about time, a new discovery, as he himself says: Time is nothing else but a stretching out, though of what I do not know. Yet I marvel if it be not of the mind itself. Our mind or soul is distended and that makes it capable of holding time, so to speak. How distended, how stretched? Here is Augustine again: This then is clear and plain, that neither things to come nor things past are, nor should we properly say: "There are three times, past, present, and future." But probably we should say: "There are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future" .... The present of things past is memory, 12 �the present of things present is sight [or perception], the present of things future is expectation. So we can measure times gone by and times to come because they are now present to us. But the solution of the measuring problem is the least of it. What Augustine has done is to tell what makes a human being temporal, how time is in us. To be human is to be present and to have things present before or within. Yet another aside: Certain so-called postmodern writers, ta19ng their departure from Heidegger, think that this is a very derivative way of approaching human Being and that to think of human beings as containing presences within and confronting things present without demeans the originality of existence. But Augustine does think that to exist is both to be in the present and to be in the presence of things. Augustine's book on time in the Confessions is preceded by a book on memory, and this book is the indispensable preparation for his understanding of time. For there he shows how we can also be in the presence of absent things: We have the whole spacious world, its fields and palaces, within us, not, however, the things themselves but their images. Here you can see how the imagination, as a power for making the absent present, is essential to our inner sense of time. For with it we can have memory of past times and also expectation of future things, since expectation is a forward-directed imagination. And since much of what has happened to us is now present to us or is now recoverable, we can not only measure time somewhat as we do space, which is all there simultaneously. We can also see how our mind is a temporal image of God's mind, who holds all creation toget~er there at once, in the eternal Now. a To be human, then, is to have mind so stretched that it encompasses in its present both memory and foresight. One way to depict that condition is in a diagram like a coordinate system. The horizontal axis is the time of the world, of Creation; it is succession-time. God knows how it works; we don't. Astride of this horizontal coordinate sits a vertical stretch of line, our mind. ·Where the two intersect is the moment of sight, of perception, our point of intake for the world. The segment below 'represents remembered events, dropped out of sight but not out of mind. The 13 �part above represents the dreams and plans we now have for the future -- and that is all the future that actually exists. As the world passes by, our memory line grows longer and our expectation line shortens. Then one day it ends. Husserl, who actually draws diagrams of this sort, in fact marks one of his lines as the "tug towards death." It is not, however, one of the axes he is marking in this way, but one of the oblique lines with which he connects the horizontal axis of succession-time and the vertical axis of phase-time. These oblique lines show how each perception offered by the horizontal successionline sinks away into vertical memory in an orderly and continuous manner, without any scrambling or dislocation. Husserl's time-diagrams are clever and complex, and I had a lot of fun -- fun bordering on agony, that is -- working them out. But I didn't give you any handouts, because then you'd be trying to figure them out now instead of listening; I should know. Many of you will not have heard of Husserl, and I'll say just enough for my purpose. He is the founder of a way of inquiry called Phenomenology. Its chief feature is that is excludes all questions of existence and reality, such as whether time is real. Instead a Phenomenologist pays attention to the appearances within consciousness, articulating and ordering them. Our sense of time is a perfect subject for Phenomenology and Husserl's lecture-series known as The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is the great first-fruit of his method. Husserl makes hundreds of acute observations, but his main advance on Augustine is to puzzle seriously over the extent of the present. Recall that the point-Now of mathematics is too skimpy to live in, but consider also that an extended present is going to be part past, part future. Husser! finds a way, fairly technical, to show that there is a discernible immediate past and an immediate future that are so bound in with the present as to give room, so to speak, for perception, so that there is time for a time-sequence, say a melody, to be taken in. He shows how the present has time for the world to impress itself on us. One last word about Husserl. The horizontal axis, which represented the world's time for Augustine, represents an internal time-flux, a continuous sort of subjective succession-time, for 14 �Husserl. For he is withholding all claims about the reality of the world and its time, and attending only to our inner experience, to our internal time-consciousness. In trying to understand this internal flow Husserl is drawn into questions beyond Phenomenology. The question that finally preoccupies him is the familiar one: How can this flux, which is one aspect of our sense of time and for him the deepest, be spoken of? Are we fluid through and through, or is this flux grounded in a stable form? But how can a fixed form be the source of a flow? Husserl, a man who is willing to admit ultimate perplexity without losing faith in the worth of his problem, says: For these things we have no names. · Now is the time for me to say what I think time is -- maybe it would be more sensible to say "how time works." I thiiik that phase-time is the fountain and origin of all time. Every phenomenon of time is derivative from the fact that we have past, present and future. To me the most astounding circumstance of our temporal life, surpassingly strange but apparently unavoidable, is the crux and center of the three phases: the present. All that is ever real for us, all that is really there, really present; occurs in these point-by-point moments of presence. This is the instant of perception when we see and hear and touch the world. The rest, the long stretches behind and before, is absence -- what has gone by and what is yet to come. Human life would therefore be very pointillistic and poor if present existence were all we had. Happily there are ways of being that are even more potent than present reality and momentary existence. There is the actuality of imaginative memory and of imaginative expectation. The present of perception is the point of intake for the novelties that the world offers to our senses, but the past and the future are also present to us as images, as memories of things past and plans for things to come. These are the present actualities, the powerfully present absences that give coherence and resonance and significance to the moment They also make it possible for us to measure time directly, not by observing external motions as of the hands of the clock which never displays time at all, but by the thickness of the image-pictures we flip through or leap over to get to 15 �moment from which we want to estimate a stretch of time. Our memory is like a laminate of transparencies or a carousel of slides, and my claim is that this accumulation we call the past and this projection we call the future is what produces our inner sense of time. And this thickening of the present by past and future is what Augustine calls "the stretching of the mind." Now note that I have described the present as punctual, instantaneous, momentary. And this description seems to be supported by the observations of all kinds of people, perhaps poets above all. The Nows that matter are somewhat isolated - instants of recognition, moments of meaning. In his book The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz calls the Now "explosive and orgiastic" and wonders how it fits into ordinary historical passage. But much of the time of our lives passes in seeming continuity, and this sort of time, the time that seems like a continuous passage, usually called duration, has to be accounted for as well. I think it works as follows. Our present appears punctuated by the ever-varying world and our perception of it. Now . we see our friends, now they've disappeared around the. corner; now we hear one note, now another. But there is another time experience that we become conscious of when we are deprived of most external sensation or when our inner images are pushed out of sight by fear and anxiety. Or we can deliberately close off our senses and empty our minds to concentrate simply on our inner duration. What then comes to the fore is a sort of inner pulsing, the very beat of our mere consciousness, empty life itself. I am trying to describe the soul's aboriginal counting that both Aristotle and Kant discovered. This inner beat then is the origin of that succession-time that is mirrored in the before-and-after of physical motion and that plays so large a role in our practicaL life. Now most of the time we are not taking note of this pulse, or paying much attention to our inner life at all. The beats recede and merge as in a long perspective; time's passage appears continuous and acquires all the characteristics and problems of a line in space. Then, 16 �retrospedively, time is thought of -- not felt -- as a continuum that is continuously cut by a pointlike Now, the kind of Now in which nothing can happen. So my description of time, which leaves time as what I call "a well-specified mystery," ends with the point-Now. And that is where a review of the various pathologies people attach to the phases of time begins. I'll give the sketchiest summary of our time-troubles, partly because time is short, partly because every one of us has a lot of personal experience with this aspect of time, and it will make a good subject for the question period. One way, then, to think of the way people wreak havoc with the perceptual present is that they treat it as a mere, point-like Now, monotonously empty and featureless, while racing unrestrainably forward. To try to live in this Now is to long to fill it with strong stimulation and increasing novelty. Now-life is the pathological counterpart of present-life. Similarly some people deprive themselves of the image-filled memory that gives the present its anchor of significance by rushing to keep up with novelty and trashing not only their own past but that past which their communities have in common, their external memories. And finally, some people are so dominated by a future that is supposedly coming at them that they give up what they really care about to make themselves into ready servants of this oncoming power. But according to my understanding the future is nothing but the dreams and plans we currently have, and as far as the humanly-made world is concerned, nothing is coming but what we actively or passively agree to. It is that passivity which is, to my mind, the greatest time-pathology. Arid now time's up. 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.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 17 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource What, Then, Is Time? Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 4, 1998, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Brann's lecture is based on her book <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780847692927/What-Then-Is-Time">What, Then, Is Time?</a>, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 1999. <br /><br />The typescript of the lecture was reprinted in <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/553">The St. John's Review, volume XLV, number 3 (2000)</a>. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998-09-04 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Time Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Brann_Eva_1998-09-04 Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fd3b37ccf37cda39acc2c51d4037265b.mp3 827475f3faf89363e548a9d65516a45c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:11 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 1001 Nights of Marcel Proust Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 11, 2011, by Patricia Locke as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Locke, Patricia M. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-02-11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received giving blanket permission to make recordings of lectures and to make them available in the library and online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. À la recherche du temps perdu Arabian nights. Selections Storytelling Sleep. Stages Sleep. Psychological aspects Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Locke_Patricia_2011-02-11_ac Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d47e09bbb0112de63adc5f0dbe66e805.mp3 925e7465e43f2d6e537f3b14082e8435 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:59:09 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Another "Lollere in the Wynd"? Chaucer, His Miller, and Nicholas' Door Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 30, 2007, by Christina von Nolcken as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nolcken, Christina von Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-03-30 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission received Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400. Miller's tale Bible--Translating--History Bible--Versions--History Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Nolcken_Christina_Von_2007-03-30_ac Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c9ac81b7f2b1d788470b5182a25fb71b.mp3 e831dff12ad13f3f17bfbbbbe9754434 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:59:45 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Ancient Agony to Contemporary Ecstasy: The Gospel at Colonus Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 18, 2008, by Theophus "Thee" Smith as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Smith, Theophus Harold Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008-01-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission received Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Gospel at Colonus (Choreographic work) Religion and drama African American Pentecostal churches Tragedy--Greek influences Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Smith_Theophus_2008-01-18_ac Alumni Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2546af82b5c97bb1c25a03b83e1b7fe8.mp3 ade347419384b68d6e591be897954869 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:51:05 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 Form and Figure in Greek Art: Ideal Beauty, Individualism, and Political Space in Greek Architecture and Sculpture Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 16, 2007, by Camille Paglia as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Paglia, Camille, 1947- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-02-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library. Make a recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Architecture, Greek Sculpture, Greek Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Paglia_Camille_2007-02-16_ac Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/183cd0fe79202198a9f2578b8412c32f.pdf 7f4619dc22798d76a2a293414d431ed8 PDF Text Text THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE In Book One of his A1emorabilia, Xenophon reports Socrates conYersing \vith the sophist Antiphon. Towards the end of their comrersation, Socrates speaks of sharing wisdom with one's friends: ... just as someone else takes pleasure in a good horse or dog or bird, so I take even more pleasure in my good friends, and should I possess anything good I teach it, and I recommend my friends to others from whom I believe they \vill receive some benefit regarding \'Utue. And the treasures of the wise men of old that they have left written down in books, unfolding the scrolls, I carefully go through them in common with my friends; and should we see anything good, we single it out, and we consider it great gain should \Ve [thus] become helpful to one another. (1.6.14) Xenophon comments: ''\Vhen I heard these things, he certainly seemed to me a supremely happy man and someone to conduct those heeding him into a good and noble life." Xenophon's testimony to the ,·alue of books in their relation to friends is striking, gi\·en his upright character and worldly competence-a man fully capable of successfully leading others in the grimmest of life and death circumstances. He must have had rather special books in mind. \Vhat, then, is im,olved in reading Plato's dialogues together as friends, carefully turning their pages, seeking out the treasures that hmre been written down by a wise man of old? What ought 1.ve be after? What \voul<l Plato ha\·e us find? \Vhat would he ha\'e happen, as the result of our reading? The ans\ver to such questions cannot be straightforward, but the dialogue form of Plato's writings-graciously and thankfully-makes unm·oidable our consciousness of what it means to read them. Looked at a little more carefully, they also make unavoidable the question of what it means to speak, ,-1:rite, or read in the name of philosophy, and-from another angle-they encourage meditation on what it means to speak, read, or write at all. To presume that we already know what a dialogue is for, \vhat philosophical speech really aims at, and what we should be getting out of reading Plato, is therefore to ignore, perhaps even to violate what I shall be suggesting to you are Plato's wise and manifold purposes. In particular, your single greatest practical failing as readers of Platonic dialogue \vill regularly be the assumption that you can remain spectators of its dialectical drama, disinterested onlookers, that you can remain aloof from its proceedings to pick and choose among the thoughts you imagine the drama to be presenting to you. Your single greatest theoretical failing \Vill regularly be to suppose that you know the nature of the philosophical life. I do not doubt that Plato both understood and allO\ved for the fact that many people would easily make both these sorts of mistake, each in his O\vn way, but that should not lessen your resolve to be counted among the readers he most wished for. �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-:! Tonight I want to assemble some reminders to help stop you falling short of Plato's potential friendship. I hope to do that, principally by recalling hO\v thoroughly strange the dialogues are and by reflecting a little on why that might be. From the n:ry start, therefore, you can see that my speech \Vill be far more practical and erotic, i.e., aimed at nudging your habits and ideals, than it \Vill be doctrinal and theoretic-which is to say, aimed at informing you of something. Jn this respect, my speech about Platonic dialogue reduplicates the central character of the dialogues themselves. A few procedural obsetTations. First, my main design is to present a vie\v of Plato and his philosophical activity, rather than to justify my interpretation of them. I confine myself to presentation, partly because of ti.me, but mostly because I think justification comes up as a serious question only after one is convinced that something is interesting enough to warrant that sort of effort-should circumstances require. It is the interest I would like to pro,-oke first. My second note is a confession. Although much of \vhat follO\vs could be called methodological, I often find myself impatient and ungenerous with such reflections, with abstract worries about how one ought to do things instead of getting on with doing them. Methodology, critique, and meta-theory tend to be airy and undisciplined, they lend themsefres to indecisi,-e, apparently endless bickering, they e:acourage an odious sort of intellectual smugness, and their attention to matters of form is frequently at the cost of return to the concrete content (whose understanding they were originally supposed to serve). N e\-ertheless, any serious \vell-directed \vork does need orientation, does need some understanding of what it's about, and this is especially important for those who have only just begun. In philosophical matters, the Delphic injunction to know oneself looms as large over Socrates as it does over Kant, notwithstanding their disagreements over how best to fulfill the responsibility. It seems, therefore, one must at some point or other run the risks of transcendental narcissism for the sake of self-knowledge. Third, some of the topics I shall explore \Vill sound like nriations on the familiar, perhaps eYen tired old Straussian themes of esotericism, noble lies, persecution of philosophy, and the rest. But not e\·eryone here has heard these important refrains. I intend to repeat my \Trsions of a few of them eloquently and incisively, along with a couple of riffs I hope no one has heard before. I deliberately refer to "my \'ersions" of these refrains because I disagree with an underlying assumption commonly at work in their interpretation: that philosophy is by nature politically alienated and must therefore exercise a condescending accommodation, compelled by necessity, to the city and to ordinary human life. Some of my reasons for this deep disagreement are \VOYen into \vhat follows, though I do not make them thematic. One last introductory word. I shall not hesitate-rather shamelessly perhaps-to speak on philosophy's behalf. By my acknowledging this presumption in advance, you can at least see that I appreciate what might be questionable about my immodesty. THE ODDITIES OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE A moment ago I hinted that there is something important in the very fact of Platonic dialogues, something that goes beyond and maybe even upsets the conventional meanings �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-3 typically associated with philosophy books and their academic study. This needs to be made explicit. PU.TONIC ANONYi\IITY. The dialogues arc fully dramatic, i.e., they portray logoi in action and deeds of speech but never disembodied assertions. This form is unusual and was noted by Aristotle near the beginning of the Poetics, \vhere he speaks of "the Socratic conversation,'' classing it together \vith the mimes of Sophron and his son Xenarchus (1447b10). Sophron was a fifth-century Syracusan writer, reputedly admired by Plato. His mimes were dramatic renderings in \'erse of everyday people, designed to be revelatory of their characters. Plato's dialogues are either directly performed, simply narrated, or narrated within a performed frame, but in all cases not a \vord is said in Plato's own voice, except the titles. The dialogues not directly performed permit external comment by their narrators, but there is neYer-unlike the passage from Xenophon with \vhich I began-any authorial comment from Plato himself. In this respect, the Platonic corpus is like the body of Shakespeare's plays. Just as \Ve must wonder exactly how far Prospero, for example, can be taken to speak for the Tempest's author, or I Iamlet or Lear, so too must we wonder hO\v far Socrates or Parmcnides or the Eleatic Stranger or Timaeus or the Athenian Stranger can be taken to speak for Plato. This question was known to Diogenes Laertius in the third century A.D., though many contemporary readers seem to have forgotten it. Despite the unremitting anonymity, hO\vever, it must be added that the dialogues are known to be Plato's and were circulated from the start under his authorship. We arc therefore meant to notice that the dialogues contain no direct word of Plato's O\vn. He addresses us, but he does not declare himself. Ancient rumours of secret Academic teachings notwithstanding, in his own time Plato was just as reticent about his ultimate insights and purposes, providing almost no other clues but the dialogues themseh'es. They are like "the lord, \vhose oracle is at Delphi,'' that "neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign" (Heraklcitos, Frag. 93) and, like the sibyl herself, '\vith ra\·ing lips, uttering things unlaughable, unbeautiful, and unperfumed, they reach \Vith their \"oice across a thousand years, because of the god" (cf. Herakleitos, Frag. 92). So, Plato whispers an intriguing name into our ears-Phaedms (\vhom e\·eryonc knows to be very beautiful), Theaetetm (whom everyone knmvs to be very clever), Afeno (whom everyone knows to be very bad); either such names or sometimes a provocative title-Socrates' Defense Speech, An Intimate Drinking Par!J, Cizilized Order, Reg11lations,-then he draws the curtain back, to disappear, not off-stage but behind the masks, bringing life to each and every one of his drama/is personae-the personae Platoms. LOGICAL DERANGEMENT. The god-inspired oracle at Delphi uttered things "unlaughable, unbeautiful, and unperfumed," the very same qualities we meet with in Plato's oracular dialogues. Before fully realizing that strange fact, an experienced and competent reader might well approach the dialogues assuming that philosophy is meant to be or at least ought to include the art of telling, insightful speeches, that a philosopher's discourse should be more accurate, more illuminating, more comprehensive, and more self-conscious than any of our other ways of talking. Plato's dialogues, ho\vc\•er, present quite a different face, despite their being finished works and despite how plainly philosophy is their centre of l l :!I) / I) 8 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAG E -4 gra,·ity. Individually and as a whole they are, at first sight, if not a conceptual chaos at least a tangle of conflicting and unrcsoh'ed accounts, often at cross-purposes with one another, and sometimes in ways their speakers seem not even to appreciate, let alone understand. I list the most ob,·ious features. Many of the dialogues are aporetic, i.e., they lose their way and never seem to find it again, no matter how serious the resoh·e with \vhich they began. One tends to get used to this, but the failure of comfortable closure~,·cn in the manifestly great works, such as the Rep11b/ic-reliably irritates any classroom of first-time readers; as, indeed, it should. Some of the dialogues that seem more doctrinally committed, more like "proper" philosophy, e.g., Parmenides, Sophist, are experienced by many competent readers, at least initially, as rather boring through much of their length, occasionally to the point of unreadability. A good handful of dialogues hardly seem like dialogues at all, if "dialogue" be understood as an earnest effort at inquiry in common. At crucial points in almost all of them, the philosophical argument relics on images and metaphor, conwntionally the tools of poetry. Worse still, poetry itself seems regularly to be denounced, while nonetheless used throughout. fa·en writing itself is declared some sort of mistake. Also at crucial points, the speech will sometimes turn with utter logical seriousness to myth, to what are acknowledged within the com·ersation as fanciful talcs (Repuhlzi.~ Gorgias, Phaedo, Phaednd). And yet, all these myths and images rub cheek by jowl with the most abstruse forms of technical argumentation and intricately developed analyses, sometimes lasting for pages and pages-pages that cause painful conceptual squinting, e,·en for the most discursi,·ely facile of readers. Yet again, logical precision can at almost any moment gi,·e \vay to outrageous fallacy, blatant non-sequitur, and shameless ad hominem attack. Occasionally, the whole show seems a logical farce-as in the Crary/11s, the E11th)'demm, and parts of the Protagoras for example-yet everyone in the dialogue keeps a completely straight face. There seems to be no overall plan to the dialogues as a totality; one more or less would not seem to ruin their effect, and there is no single dialogue that might count as their culmination or key. Nevertheless, many are linked dramatically \vith one another, both temporally and topically. Worse still, some topics seem to be treated inconsistently across different dialogues, and worse again, the topical coherence of individual dialogues has seemed to many readers to lea,•e much to be desired (Rep11blzi.· and Phaedms have gi,·en this impression for centuries). Neither can one help but wonder at the apparent naivete with which the interlocutors so often proceed, only infrequently stopping to "define their terms"-as \VC like to say--often plainly making large and questionable assumptions, sometimes agreeing not to pursue deeper investigations, and so on, all the while talking about precision and whether we really know what we think we know, how different knowledge and opinion are from one another, and what indispensable value there is in self-knowledge. Finally, as if it were n ot sufficient that \VC never hear directly what Plato himself thinks, the character of Socrates-clearly a protagonist, though not for that reason equinlcnt to Plato-is depicted \vithin the dialogical drama as notorious for hir irony. Let me say straightaway, ho,ve,·cr, that Socrates' irony docs not mean that he isn't serious in what he does say or that he says the opposite of what he thinks, either for amusement or �CARL PAGE T H E POWER & GLORY OF PLATONI C DIALOGUE PAGE-5 social co1wenience. Socrates' irony is that he kno\vingly ne,·er says all that he has in mind, and that he will on occasion knowingly let his speeches and his deeds contradict one another, both in the present and across dramatic time. Plato's irony is similar, if not identical, in spirit. It is an irony that Aristotle described as "graceful and generous," an a,·oidance of pretension, especially in matters that are " unclear and apt to cause no small impediment" (Nicomachean Ethics 1127b22-31). In sum, the logical or account-gi,·ing, truth-telling face o f the dialogues presents a confusing, sprawling, eclectic, thoroughly unsystematic gallimaufry of irritatingly teasing hints at philosophical depth and meaning. Beware of becoming blind to this obtrusive fact. Everyone has heard that the whole of Western philosophy is nothing but footnotes to Plato, so the dialogues must be magnificently crafted speeches. Right? Well, they are, but not in the way you might expect. Their ,·cry ugliness, their rebarbati,·e outward appearance is itself a manifestation of the greatest craft. It is great, because we haYe all-by which I mean all serious readers since Plato wrote-kept coming back in amazement and expectation to these astonishingly ugly things. You \vill often hear it said that Plato is a master stylist, and indeed he is. He is a master stylist because he can and regularly does with facility and com·iction imitate eYeryone else perfectly, from Aristophanes' humour, to G o rgias's nai\·e urbanity, from Lysias's oratory to Protagoras's logic, from Hippias's vanity to Alkibiades' disarmingly attractiYe hubris. Yet the dialogues themselves remain lopsided, ungainly, "unbeautiful and unperfumed." They are nothing that we expect, either as ordinary readers or as readers with m ore sophisticated views about the nature and tasks of philosophy. Plato's intensely ironic dialogues, then, are just like the ironic Socrates, \Vhom Alkibiades describes for us in the Symposium. Completely ugly on th e outside- short, snub-nosed, goggle-eyed-yet nonetheless suffused with a hidden harmony. Like the Silenus figures Alkibiades goes on to mention, the dialogues are cleverly contrived statuettes, ugly satyrs of undisguised desire on the outside but on the inside filled with images of gods. Alkibiades saw the gods in Socrates, but on account of his hubris tic ambition to command Socrates' eros, he failed to make those gods his own. Like\visc, the reader of Platonic dialogues must abandon the urge to possess. Blundering, thoughtless lonrs, groping after the satisfaction of their O\Vn, preconceived lusts, \Vill get nowhere. Socrates seems to b e a sort of conversational vulture, always hanging around to see if he can tum the carrion of ordinary conversation into a philosophical feast. More particularly, he seems to be a sort of psychic vampire as well, circling around all the promising young men, always whispering with some one o r a few of them off in a corner, as Kallikles fo r example accuses him in the Gorgias. In both cases the hope and promise seem ne,·er fulfilled. There is simply no Platonic dialogue between two mature philosophers; Zeno and Parmenides happen to be present together with an immature Socrates in the Parmenides, while the mature Socrates is present but does not engage the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophisl and Stalesman. As for any dialogue that acti,·ely engages truly potential philosophers, one might look to the Republic but Plato's dialogues furnish no clue as to the later fate of either Glaucon or Adeimantus, while in the case of the Parmenides, the promising Socrates is for the m ost part an onlooker-th o ugh he is THE ABSENCE OF :tl!ATURE PHILOSOPHY. l l / ;! I) / 9 8 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-6 undoubtedly educated both by what he sees and by the brief exchange that crushes his fledgling account of Ideas. It is fair to say overall, then, that while Socrates is forever interested in getting philosophy going and that as a mature philosopher he is clearly superior to all those he actively questions, \Ve ne\'er really see philosophic conversation underway in full sail, top-gallants flying. Moreover, this omission is explicitly brought to our attention in the Sophist, whose intriguing prologue leads the eager reader to expect a third dialogue Philosopher once Sophist and Statesman arc done. The apparent promise, however, remains unfulfilled. There ne\'er was such a dialogue published, and we are provoked to wonder if it ever could have been written. We are also invited to think about why sophist and statesman should be the topics to eclipse so bright a sun as that. The common spectacle of the Platonic dialogues is at least the deferral of fully realized philosophy and more often than not the outright failure of philosophy even to show signs of a healthy beginning. On the other hand, Plato himself is standing somewhere beyond that absence and failure, a position he underlines for us by \vriting himself out of a scene in which everyone would most have expected him to appear-and where he was no doubt present in fact-namely Socrates' swan-song and death, the scene that Plato dramatized in the Phaedo. Whate\'er else, therefore, that Plato takes his own philosophizing to be, it cannot be what is represented in the drama of his dialogues. In particular, philosophy as Plato means it to be understood cannot be a simple equivalent to "Socratic conversation." I mean that last assertion to be a little shocking. The dialogues are often thought to be mirrors or representations of real, li,·ing communications, or at least of some idealized version of foring, philosophic communication. i\foreover, this mirror image is by itself somehow supposed to dra\v us too into the same sort of living communication, as if the imitation became the deed in us by our seeing it. But Plato did not seek to encode the living communication of philosophy by imitating it via the drama that is constructed in and as the dialogue. This is worth stating bluntly: Plato did not write dialogues because he thought that the proper form of philosophy \Vas the Socratic flim-flam that takes up so much of them. The dialogues are designed to make up for the fact that Plato cannot be here to talk with us as he would most desire. They are the monological half of a philosophical communication that must compensate for the fact that one of the interlocutors, perhaps the wisest one, is absent. The dialogue is first and foremost a logos, Plato's logos. That it is dramatic and so on, is all internal to the fact of its having been written dO\vn and published as an artfully contrived speech by one man to the entire world. This does not sit well with a common contemporary view that there is nothing else that should emerge from Socratic inquiry except more Socratic inquiry, that the full, mature form of philosophy--disappointingly but somehow only accidentally missing from the dialogues-would be a conversation between Socrates and his equal in logical refutation. To cut a very long and depressing story short, current intellectual orthodoxy claims that the best reasons available to human beings are ahvays and in principle immanent to the contingent circumstances of their inquiries, that our deepest thoughts cannot but be fully conditioned by tradition and circumstance in \vays that make them inevitably finite and parochial, that all insight can never be more than a single perspective, a point of vie'v taken from within a 11 / :!(1 / 9 8 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-7 limited horizon. This posture has the following peculiar result: to the extent that there is nothing absolute available in the contingent play of opinions, to that extent it starts to seem absolutely better to be able to refute an opinion than to assert or maintain it. Human life on the practical le\Tl no doubt calls for provisionally acceptable conclusions, but on the philosophical or theoretical level all assertions turn out to depend on the critically complacent failure to have discovered their refutations, \vhich if not around today surely will be tomorrow--or so the fallibilist predicts and insists with alarmingly fanatical, not to say incoherent conviction. It thus also follows that the theoretically open mind ought to be an empty mind, a mind fortified with a sturdy arsenal of techniques for preventing any opinion from lodging within it. To ha\'e any opinion at all is to risk the embarrassing accusation of intellectual naivete. Whatever its own merits, this is not the view represented by Plato's Socrates or his dialogues. Although Socrates claims to lack \visdom-in the teeth of the fact that no one, either inside or outside the dialogues, belie\·es him when he does so-it is still \visdom that he loves, not the lack of it. Contemporary critical thinkers love the lack, and this tempts them into making a fetish of transcendental detachment and to indulge an infinite, unfalsifiable suspicion for what Socrates in the Apology calls his "human wisdom" and \vhich elsewhere turns out to be the science, note that word, the science of erotics. There is, hmvever, a more substantial point of comparison. Although both Socrates and the contemporary critical thinker agree that most people are unhelpfully opinionated (which is by no means the same as to say that all their opinions are \vrong), the critical thinker imagines that the fitting response is to work hard on disinterested mind-skills for keeping all tempting beliefs up in the air, for keeping the naivete of commitment at arm's length. For Socrates, on the other hand, the fact that most people are opinionated is a much deeper, murkier problem, tied up \vith what souls most deeply want and what they most deeply fear they can't get. The examination of genuine opinions, i.e., the deep-seated convictions you ha,·e about what is true, good, and beautiful, the com·ictions \vhose belief is not a matter of choice, the examination of those sorts of opinions is a far more delicate matter than testing for reasonableness----e,·en if self-styled logicians kne\v precisely what that really is, which they obviously don't. I say that so confidently because I have never yet heard of a logician helping anyone understand Plato, or Hegel, or Nietzsche, for example-all of whom I take to be entirely reasonable thinkers. They haven't done much for Aristotle either. Plato makes the need for something else especially clear by having his Socrates talk about two unusual and hitherto unrecognized arts: psychic midwifery in the Theaetetus and philosophical rhetoric in the Phaedms. The reader is also meant, of course, to notice how often those same arts are portrayed at \vork throughout the dialogues, both by the characters and by Plato himself. Philosophical inquiry turns out to be a far more complex acti,·ity than tying people in argumentative knots or never being at a loss for a clever or merely correct reply. It includes a moral, soul-tending dimension that pays attention to pedagogical, rhetorical, ethical, and political matters as well, in addition to the surface dimensions oflogic, analytic technique, and epistemic responsibility. TRA...:"JSITION. I have briefly considered Plato's artfully contri\·ed anonymity, the constant baffling of our logical expectations, and the dramatic absence of philosophy in a l 1 :!o _: 9 B �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-8 mature form. These obsenrations, together with the phenomena of irony, both Platonic and Socratic, plus a glimpse into certain soul-tending arts, all point to the partially hidden yet systematically intrusive presence of philosophizing in a more complex, shadowy form than Socrates' public \vrestling matches or the Eleatic Stranger's diacritical gymnastics. Plato speaks through indirection and means to indicate that philosophy cannot and ought not to speak as straight as one might at first suppose. This initially unsettling conclusion finds several well-known echoes in the Platonic epistles. "There is no composition by Plato, nor will there e,·er be one, but those now said to be his belong to a Socrates grown young and beautiful" (314c). And then in a great and famous passage from the Seventh Letter. But this much I can certainly declare concerning all these writers, or prospective writers, who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my judgment at least, that these men should understand anything about this subject. There does not exist, nor will there e\·er exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith. For it does not admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul of a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter nourishes itself (341 b) Nevertheless, Plato wrote dialogues all his life, taking astonishing pains m·er their intricate construction. He cannot therefore ha,·e thought them superfluous or trivial, despite his recognition of their necessary limits. By all normal standards of truth-telling coherence the dialogues are manifestly deranged; my task now is to address the partly hidden method in their apparent madness. PHILOSOPHY IN THE IRONICAL MODE According to the reports of antiquity, Aristotle wrote Platonic-style dialogues in the earlier part of his career. They are, regrettably, lost-all the more regrettably, seeing that Cicero praised them as golden (though what else should we expect from someone \vho spent the greater part of his early years in the Academy teaching rhetoric?). What we ha,·e from Aristotle are documents that may reasonably be thought of as treatises or at least notes to treatise-like expositions. As it happens, there is nothing in the Aristotelian corpus as we have it that can confidently be taken as published "\vriting in the manner of Plato's dialogues and it is certainly the case that much of what we do have presents an aporetic, tentative, less than declarative face. Even so, and with all due allmvance for hints at even Aristotelian indirection in what seem to be far more straightforward texts, the Aristotelian writings bear witness through much of their bulk to an expository, more recognizably academic style of philosophical speech than the baffling Platonic form. The comparison shO\vs that Plato perfectly well understood what it would mean to write philosophy in that more straightforward mode-and that Aristotle kne\v perfectly well \Vhat it would mean to write in the ironic, self-deprecating dialogical mode. In neither case, then, is the form a stylistic quirk 11 / :!O /9 8 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC D!ALOGUE P AG E-9 or an historically dictated necessity. Moreo,·er, for both Aristotle and Plato it was a conscious decision to write at all, since Socrates, just as self-consciously did not. DIALOGUE YS. TREATISE. What is at stake in this stylistic difference between dialogue and treatise? At first glance, the Aristotelian style of telling, philosophical speeches gives one reliably direct ways of talking about and thinking about the ordered, eidetic structure of things, both human and non-human. E\Tn if one accepts none of his specific metaphysical results or if one prefers to emphasize the open-ended, aporetic character of certain of his inquiries, Aristotle's noetic tools and categories have proven themseh·es of permanent worth. The notions of substance, essence & accident, form & matter, actuality & potentiality, together with Aristotle's interpretative specifications of aitia, arche, kinesis, p!Jche, phronesis, epzsteme, and praxis are all ingenious and Yirtually indispensable devices for anyone interested in the peculiar business of philosophical articulation. Aristotle's insights constitute a huge fraction of our philosophical patrimony, and amount to a legacy we should receive \Vith both gratitude and respect. While at least equally deserving of gratitude and respect, Plato's ironic form of philosophical telling does not emphasize in the same way the ordered structures that may be seen and understood. Rather, Plato points to \Vhat it is like to be seeing structure, what it is like to be moved by truth, to be astonished by beauty, to aim at and hope for the good. Not only that, Plato also indicates the manifold \Vays in \vhich human beings variously fail and fall short in their attempts to be knowing and wise. Actuality and achievement rule in Aristotle's philosophic art, eros and lack in Plato's. The one emphasizes what may be understood, the other the fragile, unsteady soul that does the understanding. Aristotle is thus the philosopher of detachment, Plato the philosopher of integrity. Correspondingly, the danger of Platonic philosophizing is self-obsession and the narcissism of intelligent desire, while the danger of Aristotelian philosophizing is selfforgetfulness and the indulgence of theoretical hubris. Strange as it may seem, although Aristotelian exposition puts a premium on truth-telling, in the end it is more guarded. Aristotle tends to suppress the erotic, the madness of self-transcendence and the nuances of self-knowledge. In particular, he muffles what is dangerous about philosophy, whereas Plato is comparatinly open about it. Aristotle prm·ides many theoretical insights for which one can be very thankful, yet it is \VOrth recalling that on the death of Alexander he had to flee Athens, pursued by an indictment for impiety. For help in understanding that disturbing fact, one will find more extensive guidance in Plato. In distinguishing an eidetic emphasis from an erotic one, I do not mean to say that the two modes are rigidly correlated with dialogues and treatises, as if Plato never really presented a philosophical idea or Aristotle never worried about the integrity of thinker and thought. Platonic dialogues can in places be as expository as Aristotelian treatises can in places be ironic and full of finesse. Both modes have their relative purposes and merits. Sometimes, one is simply ready to hear an idea, to be told how it is \vith things, to be shown where the joints of the world are. At other times, and for different reasons on different occasions, one needs to understand the circumstances of such truth-telling. "Aristotelians" and "Platonists" have quarreled over these matters for centuries and \vill, doubtless, brawl for centuries more. As a matter of temperament, different human beings find themseh·es 11/:!I) / l)8 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC D!ALOGUE PAGE-10 favouring one emphasis rather than the other, but both dialogue and exposition are equally flexible in the hands of masters. In fact, I am quite sure that philosophic masters need to be masters of both. Let me just state then that masterful philosophical articulation, in thought or in speech, requires equal command of \Vhat I shall call eiddics and erotics. As just suggested, eidetics correspond to the objects of contemplation, the intelligible nature, structure, and wholeness of things. The dimension of erotics includes how the soul is disposed to think and to act, and how responsible it remains to itself and its conditions as it engages both. As it happens, i.e., just as a matter of historical fact, the artful irony of Plato's dialogues as we have them communicates far more about philosophical eros-and its failings-in relation to the truth than do the Aristotelian writings we have. No doubt Aristotle could have told us more, and has probably told us more than is usually realized, but I think that the matter of fact rests on a matter of principle, namely, that Platonic dialogue is truer to the manifold needs and realization of lucid, philosophical existence. In particular, it is Platonic dialogue that can more reliably save us from ourselves, since it is \vith respect to the erotic dimension of human endeavour that \Ve keep getting in our own way, that we are the originating sources of our O\Vn unnecessary wanderings and corruption. Eidetics tend, in comparison though by no means mindlessly, to take care of themseh-es--one sign of \vhich is that they're more teachable. Plato hides, though not with complete invisibility, behind his characters. Chief among them is a character, namely Socrates, not only notorious among his fellow players for his irony but plainly to us his spectators coy, manipulative, and far from even-handed. Taking courage from the apparent straightforwardness of Aristotelian exposition, we can hardly forbear an exasperated cry: Why all the fuss? Why the teasing, not to say irritating indirection? What prevents philosophy from speaking forthrightly, from saying all she means? Must philosophy ahvays play false, or perhaps play games, with our truth-telling hopes and ambitions? In short: what, if anything, calls for Platonic irony? If we cannot answer such questions, then Plato can be left to his idiosyncratic, sibylline whimsies. Unsurprisingly, the dialogues themselves furnish many clues to a more generous understanding. Gi\Tn that writing dialogues cannot be all there is to the philosophical life, it \Vill be helpful to consider such writing in light of that li"\·ing \Vhole. As I read the dialogues, actual philosophical life has four principal domains of responsibility: work, pedagogy, guardianship, and civics. By work I mean master-work, the full, unimpeded realization of philosophical insight. By pedagogy I mean the husbandry of potential and apprentice philosophers. By guardianship I mean the preservation of philosophy against both external assault and internal corruption. By civics I mean philosophy's citizenly life and duty within the larger human community that gives it birth. All four domains suggest good reasons for philosophical indirection, for less than unqualified truth-telling, though I shall not here be able to pay full attention to them all. ORIGINS OF IRO:t\TJ:'. The most common initial excuse offered for Platonic irony, for \vhy the dialogues seem so ugly and manipulative and confusing, appeals to pedagogy, to the requirements, as it is commonly formulated, of getting readers to think for themselves. Certainly, in any worthwhile education and a fortiori any philosophical education, mere instruction is not 11. :o / 9 8 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-II sufficient for understanding. Instruction alone leaves us, as Nietzsche put it, with a bellyful of undigested knowledge-stones; enough to calm our hunger for a while perhaps, yet ultimately unable to nourish and satisfy. To the extent, therefore, that the dialogues aim at guiding and training potential philosophers, it can safely be expected that they do more than instruct, that they challenge when we get lazy, inspire when we are daunted, and that they somehow aid proper noetic digestion. As usually understood, however, this encouragement "to think for oneself'' is interpreted as the development of critical thinking skills, skills that may permit you to grind down those knowledge-stones but which do nothing to help you assimilate whatever truth they may have contained. One must also be wary of supposing that such pedagogical aims, even when understood in the best sense, exhaust the possible reasons for dialogical irony, that teaching determines the boundary of Plato's communicative intent. It does not. There is another, deeper difficulty with the idea of thinking for oneself. Namely, that everyone already does; it's part of the problem, not the solution. To quote from Herakleitos once more: "though the logos is common, the many live supposing themselves to have a special understanding" (Frag. 2). At the most important level, then, irony or stimulating indirection is a proper part of philosophical pedagogy not so much because young learners need tricky help with the hard work of assimilation-which they certainly do-but because we human knowers are constantly prone to collapse into that state of consciousness Hegel identified as self-certainty. Once in such a state, we can usually only be levered out again with well-meaning, i.e., noble, lies. Being in the know, the natural condition of the human soul, is so obviously our greatest adaptive advantage that we keep getting entranced by partial realizations of our wonderful capacity, we keep generalizing our local insights into global wisdoms. But how is such self-satisfied conviction to be m oved, led out of itself, educated? How does one come to recognize that one does not know? Hegel's dialectic, to the extent that it may be thought of as containing a pedagogical response to the problem, is a logical bludgeoning that has turned out to be all but useless, except in the case of a uniquely motivated not to say perverse few. Socrates, in contrast, seduces many a complacent soul-though not every one--out of its proclivity to noetic self-satisfaction with all manner of charms and deceits, as does Plato in tum at another level of refinement. The essential psychagogical trick in most cases is to make the higher truth look somehow attractive within the perspective of the lower, more confined horizon. Plato's Eleatic Stranger classifies such tricks as belonging to that species of the image-making art that works with phantoms (fantastics) rather than with likenesses (eikastics). The distinction is made in a dialogue entitled Sophist (236c). Philosophy's strictly educative concerns, however, have definite limits, since not every soul is capable of fully realizing her promise. We moderns do not like to hear things like this, partly because we tend to think that reason ought by and large to be perfectible by methods universally available to all and partly because we h ate to think that possibilities are limited or that freedom alone might not suffice for realizing the good. Plato is more hardheaded. Serious attraction to philosophy is no guarantee at all of its fulfillment, as may be seen, for example, in Apollodorus of the Symposi11m, who was at least wise enough to know 11 / 20/98 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-12 this fact about himself. Furthermore, while Socrates will converse with whoever comes his way, he does not undertake to teach everyone. Some souls he passes on to others, often guided by the admonitions of his daimonion, his "divine sign." His daimonion, of course-his little daimonic thing-is an inflection of the daimon eros, in whose affairs he is expert. So Socrates will sometimes help and sometimes tum aside those who will never be able to manage all that philosophy requires. As with most serous matters, it is a risk-y sort of discrimination, easily incurring public odium. In Socrates' case, that risk is the essential meaning of the historical accident that wrapped his erotic daimonion up into the civic charge of impiety, of importing new-fangled gods, an innovation partly responsible for his execution. As a final point it needs to be noted that infatuations with philosophy are not always so benign as Apollodorus's. The tyrannical ambitions of Alkibiades and Kritias, for example, both gifted intellectually, were blamed on their association with Socrates, while Plato's Seventh Letter--from which I have already quoted--exists principally on account of the havoc wreaked on philosophy's public, indeed international, reputation by Dionysius the Younger, Tyrant of Syracuse, in his efforts to make Plato's wisdom his own. My guiding question is whether or to what extent the irritating indirection of Platonic dialogue can be understood as exercising philosophical responsibility. The particular demands of teaching provide some plausible grounds, but there are others. Some of these are rather easy to overlook, once inside the comforts provided by contemporary academic freedoms. But not only are those freedoms hard-won and in need of constant maintenance (a task for which philosophy, in virtue of its disciplinary competence regarding the relation of theory to practice, is the proper guardian), neither is peace the uniform condition within our necessarily parasitic Republic of Letters. Academic politics is notorious for its pettiness and intolerance-itself a hardly accidental fact-but more significant are the manifold theoretical disputes over demarcation, hierarchy, and methodology across and between the various disciplines. Regarding these foundational and procedural reflections, philosophy's competence and even presence is held in deep suspicion by the positive disciplines. Within the so-called university, faction it would seem is the norm-no matter what ideals one might prefer or hope to see there. Not everyone can be fully philosophical, you might think that's a shame; not everyone wants to be philosophical; well, that's their choice; but not everyone wants philosophy around. That's dangerous. Hence the need for what I called philosophical guardianship. Both philosophy and what is philosophically best in all of us cannot rely on being left alone. In either the personal or the political case, there are several intrusive challenges to philosophy's well-being within its larger community: the psychic community of manifold desires on the one hand; the civic community of individual agents on the other. The fights in both cases depend on a hunger fo~ wisdom. The Platonic dialogues emphasize two main sources of intrusive challenge, and though I shall discuss them mostly in terms of the civic paradigm, the Rep1Jb!ic's own brilliant likeness of city to soul should keep the psychic paradigm equally in mind. According to Plato's dialogical imagery, then, the challenges come (1) from the other men of logoi, of whom the two main classes are poets and sophists, and (2) from the men of the city, who share with philosophy an ambition for the noble but 11 /20 / 9 8 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-13 disagree on the location of its highest form. The latter challenge also has two arms : that philosophy subverts decent, conventional politics (Anytus, Kleitophon), and that philosophy is adolescent, laughable, and unmanly (Kallikles, Thrasymachus). Adeimantus, who stands for what is necessary and best within the large yet still limited horizon of the city, bluntly restates these two accusations in the middle of the Rep11blic: philosophers are either useless or depraved. They therefore deserve no place in human community, let alone to be enthroned as its only competent kings. Perhaps the clearest overall Platonic symbol of the political challenge is the dialogue entitled Socrates' Defense Speech, while an emblem for the challenge from the men of logoi may be found in that gigantomachy mentioned in the Sophist, that never-ending battle between the hard-headed, aggressive "motion men"-whose general, so we learn in the Theaetet11s, is Homer-and the gentler, more generous "friends of the forms." Plato's implied account of the nature and grounds of these several challenges, I cannot examine in detail here but it is, I think, tolerably clear that the predicaments are, in all cases, serious and abiding ones. Astute Protagorean prudence, Hippian technical competence, and effective Gorgian rhetoric all seem far more beneficial-both in themselves and certainly to their practitioners-than Socratic elenchus could ever be. Socrates' wisdom appears only to numb people and make them angry or unhappy. Homer, Sophocles, and Aristophanes all seem more inspiring and companionable than philosophy's austere explanations and deflations, from which the gods are missing and in which, if the divine be mentioned at all, it seems aloof and indifferent to human concerns. Too much talk, and talk for talking's sake are indeed shameful and unmanly, while delving too deeply into the origins of things does indeed run risk of undermining civic loyalty, familial respect, and even the self-confidence that is a necessary condition for any worthwhile deed. All these tensions have a symbolic focus in that disturbing scenario at the end of the Rep11blic's most memorable image: the philosopher returning to the Cave would be set upon and killed by those still shackled there, if they could get hold of him. Their opinions are not so true as they imagine them to be, formed as they are by the shadows cast from artifacts and statues of real things carried above and behind them by poets, sophists, and politicians, and they would react with hostile fear if they knew. Yet the lesson is not that the Cave-dwellers are all contemptibly ignorant and wicked; it is that pure wisdom is unbearable to the incompletely enlightened soul. I say "incompletely enlightened" because too bright a light is unbearable, only to those who can already see. There is both a fire and muted daylight in Plato's Cave. Athens that prided itself on its freedom of discourse, its accomplishment in tragedy and its welcome to the sophists, nonetheless executed Socrates and indicted Aristotle. Philosophy cannot be an unqualified human good, because it is not unqualifiedly safe to tell the truth. We all know this already. Frankness is a gift and honour reserved for close friends, and even there it's difficult. Nor should we be surprised to learn that the truth is dangerous, if-as we hear so often-that knowledge is power. Socrates let himself be executed to vivify these sorts of unsettling facts for all thoughtful souls to come, knowing that Plato was there to write about it in a way that would keep the recognition safe within the memory of subsequent generations. 11/20/98 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY Of PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-14 The several differences between what is philosophical and what is not are none of them merely qualitative; they are fraught with threat and anxiety of an order that civility alone cannot control because their roots lie deeper than the city. Furthermore, Plato's sustained attention to the various assaults on philosophy suggests that none are to be regarded as accidental, that there are good if incomplete reasons why philosophy should suffer from them and it is therefore incumbent upon those pursuing her to understand the justice within such fates. To the extent that the assaults are not accidental, the need for irony in dealing with them is more than politic accommodation. Philosophy needs to make a peace with politics and poetry, with the healthy decency of civic life and with the consoling charms of comedy and tragedy, but such peace is at best a very unstable friendship of unequals. Moreover, the instability is reproduced within the individual soul as well. Each of us must make his uneasy peace both with the needs of practical life and with the enchantments of art, if we are to live as thoughtfully as possible. The ironical Socrates in Plato's ironical dialogues can be seen constantly negotiating these inequalities and their attendant dangers. Budding philosophers can be thankful for the tips. Guardianship and pedagogy deal, respectively, with the privations and the potentials of philosophizing. Actual or fully-fledged philosophizing remaius. Insofar as irony entails in some sense a playing false, it might seem that irony could at best be only conducive to and never constitutive of philosophy's focal activity-which might for the moment be characterized as consorting with the truth. Yet irony belongs here too, I think, at the heart of philosophy's defining concern. Philosophical account-giving or truth-telling has to be ironical to the extent that what philosophy is obliged to mean cannot in principle be given all at once. Philosophical comprehensiveness entails primacy, universality, and lucidity, i.e., its truth-telling must be a self-illuminated knowledge of ultimate principles in relation to what is. Among other things, this implies that any philosophical account aims at simultaneous knowledge of the conditions that make possible and justify its thematic claims; it must not only tell the truth, but somehow also tell the truth of its telling as well. These conditions for the possibility of a speech, however, cannot be given along with the content of the speech-at least not in the same, linear, thematic way. Hence the logical necessity for a two-faced mode of speaking: one aspect to declare what one wants to say, the other aspect to show that one knows exactly how and why one can say it. Such a two-faced mode of speech is properly called ironic because it cannot state all that it means at once, though it is not thereby prevented from evoking the wholeness of the understanding it articulates--on the condition, that is, of a generous listener with an eye for reading between the lines. Failure to appreciate that philosophy requires at least this sort of irony easily leads to measuring its discourse by a mathematical standard, since the latter is a reasonable measure for interim, though never for primary, insightfulness. Similar failures have also been responsible for many a foolish trek across the transcendental desert in search of presuppositionless beginnings. One further consequence is that philosophical speech, because both primary and comprehensive, cannot be univocal in principle. This is the deep ground of philosophy's ancient quarrel with poetry and why metaphorical speech is so emphatically integral to the texture of Plato's dialogues. 11/20/98 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-15 I have just argued that fundamental speech, and this would be in whatever situation we find ourselves moved to give it, has to be two-faced. It follows that univocal speech-i.e., the speech that gives the appearance of managing to say all that it means-is not only secondary but also contingent upon that primary equivocation. Univocal speech is therefore radically unstable, bounded and made possible in its qualified way by a tacit agreement not to press inquiry beyond a certain point. Part of our human experience of this fact is the disturbing discovery that plausible arguments can apparently be made on both sides for virtually anything-the so-called dissoi logoi of the ancient sophists-and that almost no one is ever persuaded by rational, i.e., purely univocal, words alone. In the absence of philosophy or fundamental speech, any assertoric stand thus depends as much on the will to maintain it, on agreement to abide by the axioms that make it possible, as it does on the content of those axioms themselves. Perversely, then, it becomes possible to take a stand in words without the corresponding insight and so too without the corresponding resolve or choice that deemed the axiom worthy--or, rather, one takes a stand with an alternative, unspoken resolve. That's why Aristotle said that the difference between the sophist and philosopher lies in their resolve, their proairesis, not in the arguments they give. Yet note that even philosophy cannot logically repair the breach caused by any such willful detachment of speech from the soul's orientation and insight. In other words, philosophy cannot in words alone compel the sophist to come out of hiding. This is an important lesson of Plato's Sophist and it is also the reason Thrasymachus blushed. That is, Thrasymachus eventually had to betray his sophistry once he had committed himself to the theoretical probity of "precise speech." It was a noble and educative blunder. In sum, therefore, human logoi can never by themselves reveal the soul that makes them-and so we must pay as much attention as we can to deeds as well. One of the most important resources of Platonic dialogue is, I suggest, their ability to let us see how speeches are anchored in a soul's resolve, despite the fact that a soul's true love cannot in principle be deduced from the things it says. TRANSITION. Philosophical insight depends on a complex of conditions, both extrinsic and intrinsic, to which I have pointed under the topics of work, pedagogy, guardianship, and civics. In their light, I have sketched several ways in which irony is native to how philosophy must deal with what is non-philosophical, with what is potentially philosophical, and with the truth itself. Unlike Athena, human wisdom does not actually spring fully formed from the head of Zeus-though what the myth means to say is that wisdom, once she has arisen, cannot be fully explained in terms of genealogy alone. Also unlike Athena, human wisdom has no nectar and ambrosia with which to fortify itself against the many forms of mortal decay. This means that no matter how like a goddess, pure theorizing on its own is by definition irresponsible. It also follows that no part of erotics can be set aside on the plausible yet mistaken grounds that eidetics are philosophy's only proper concern. Socrates' erotic science may be shady and ironic, yet it nevertheless belongs to philosophical life quite as essentially the rest. With this granted, however, it will always remain to consider when and to what extent one need or ought to talk out loud about such things. I accept, therefore, that my entire speech, no matter how correct it may be, remains 11/20/98 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-16 vulnerable to being judged either tactless, or trivial-to the extent that it does not emphasize eidetic content. WHY PLATO WROTE DIALOGUES Philosophical truth-telling,. the sustaining activity of philosophical life, has to be twofaced. Hegel's impressive dialectical logic is a concerted effort to smooth out this acknowledged need for irony, an attempt to resolve self-illuminating insight into a special sort of discursive linearity, into a proof that manages to demonstrate its axioms as it deduces its theorems. His experiment in philosophical discourse is weak, however, on two main counts. First, the logic of Hegel's proof is in the end not as methodical as hoped for, indeed required. Ingenuity is still needed in order to make the crucial transitions, an ingenuity that Hegel from time to time facilitates with quite remarkable philosophical poetry. A further sign of this same weakness is his embarrassment over giving introductions, which he knows he should not in all strictness use but which he writes anyway. Moreover, since the introductions are where Hegel encodes the suppressed erotics of his philosophic art, i.e., what he means to be doing as a man here and now in love with philosophy, that's exactly \vhy everyone finds them so intriguing and often more interesting than what follows. Plato avoids the dialectical inconsistency of such introductions, remaining truer to Hegel's own insight that philosophy cannot ever in principle begin to prove itself, that it cannot put itself on trial before the tribunal over which it presides as judge. Perhaps Hegelian dialectic comes as dose as philosophical discourse ever can to an exhaustive, rationally systematic, univocal self-explicitation. The question, though, is when or whether we really need such a thing. Plato wrote a defense speech for philosophy, but he quite deliberately named it after Socrates, not himself. The second major weakness of Hegelian dialectic is it's being so forbidding and dull. This is an important criticism. It says that H egel's philosophy by and large fails, as I noted earlier, to seduce, fails to enflame theoretical eros, fails sufficiently to help us make insight our own. Platonic dialogue, in contrast, is remarkably seductive-the unattractive patches notwithstanding. In fact, part of its seductiveness is to make itself confusing and exciting by turns, whereas Hegelian dialectic plods along in the same old difficult way page after page. Knowing that Plato can be wonderfully lucid and inspiring from time to time, forces the reader to seek a reason and so too a meaning for the times when the text is experienced differently. There is nothing more inspiring than the suspicion of a hidden life, 1me vie inconnue, half-hidden depths in which we might swim if only we can prove strong enough. Platonic dialogue is a complex three-dimensional speech, rather than a linear, discursive one. Its axes are drama, argument, and character, all three of which follow their independent but mutually interpenetrating logics. Take book one of the Republic. Why does Polemarchus interrupt? How does his account of justice follow up on the account his father, Cephalus, seemed to give? What is the relationship between Polemarchus and Cephalus? Who is the better man and why? What things seems good and best to Polemarchus? What things most noble? What is there in a man like Polemarchus that inclines him to think of justice and friendship in the way he does? H ow exactly did he get 1 1 / 20 / 98 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-17 talked into agreeing that justice is trivial and base? Are his mistakes consistent with the partial goods for which he stands? What do Socrates' examples tell us about Polemarchus's mistakes? What is Socrates trying to do for Polemarchus? To what extent, if any, is he successful? Why does he care about Polemarchus at all? Why does Socrates argue so fallaciously in proving that justice does no injury? What did he understand about Polemarchus to know he could get away with the fallacy? Why is Polemarchus so enthusiastic in his final agreement to be a "partner in battle" with Socrates? How does all this relate to Polemarchus's action at the very beginning, when he waylays Socrates and Glaucon? How does it fit with his later interruption, in book five, when he objects to women and children in common? What is Plato showing 11s about the limits of Polemarchus's understanding of justice? About its merits? Why is Polemarchus there, between Cephalus and Thrasymachus? And so on. Not until you have some reasonable answer to all of these sorts questions, and scores besides, can you have begun to understand Plato's meaning, his logos, in these four or five pages. You need to become proficient in a multivariable calculus that simultaneously integrates along the three dimensions of drama, argument, and character to produce a shimmering hologram of meaning. This dimensional complexity allows the dialogue to mean more than what it says in its arguments and to reveal more than its narrative depicts. It opens up a maximum of triangulation between uncertain souls and their shifty speeches. Aporia, then, is superficial. It belongs to only one or two of the relevant dimensions and is therefore only an aspect of the whole. The characters may be in perplexity, and maybe the reader is too, but Plato is not. His pictures of perplexity are too finely drawn to be themselves expressions of the depicted anxieties; they are too precisely located and elaborated not to be the subject of a higher-order interpretation. What foolishness would impel Ol!JOne to spell out ignorance and error so intricately, and with such great pains at so great a cost of time, if he did not have a view of what they meant? For all the reasons examined above Plato conveys his interpretations obliquely, but that does not mean the dialogues bear out no logos. On the other hand, Plato's logos is a delicate and subtle thing, not easily separable from the theatre it animates. It is a sure sign of having failed to understand Plato fully when one is forced to leave or dismiss any single part of the dialogue as incidental, as wrapping, as form rather than content. Plato does not dress up otherwise independent, philosophically sober propositions in gaudy, entertaining dramatic garb, as if through some aesthetic quirk he liked to do it that way. There is indeed the thing that he means to say, but it is not captured by the naked propositional bodies you might take to be under the theatrical fancy-dress. As I have just indicated, for example, the philosophical meaning of Polemarchus is more than the partially correct proposition that justice is doing good to friends and harm to enemies. Among other things, he casts significant light on how and why the proper discipline of spiritedness is integral to philosophy, and why friendship is the soul of justice. Quite in accord with a principle Socrates announces in the Phaedms, everything in the dialogue is meaningful and everything serves the overall meaning Plato would communicate. 11/20/98 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY Of PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-18 This raises yet another matter of philosophical tact. According to what I have just said, it should be possible to spell out Plato's meaning in non-dramatic terms. To be a correct translation, part of such an exposition would have to be ironical and it would have to encompass at least the sense of all the implied erotic elements as well as the eidetic ones. Nothing obvious prevents such a gloss, yet even if correct, it remains to ask whether such a flattened out account could do all or even much of the work Plato intended and which the dialogues have, in fact, done and continue to do. The answer would have to be, I think, no. In one sense, Ideas-by which I mean the fundamental an:hai and intelligible structure of all things-are just not a problem; the predicament is that human souls for the most part fail to be ruled by them. That's something no amount of theory can fix. I asked the question: what, if anything, calls for the strangeness of Plato's dialogues, what could justify their indirection? A natural instinct, on first hearing such a question, is to look for reasons that might force or compel the response, reasons why things could not be done in any other way. In the present case, however, the instinct is misleading. The serious grounds for Platonic indirection I have considered do not, I think, necessitate the dialogue form. Without being necessitated, however, Plato's dialogues are a beautifully effective response to the many things philosophy always finds needing to be done. In my own view, they are the most beautifully effective response we have yet witnessed. A beautiful, noble, and effective response to abiding necessities is certainly grounds for praise, but this is not all there is to admire. By the ambiguous testimony of his letters and by the seamless consistency of his dialogical irony, Plato could not have been writing as an intellectual to express his thoughts or as a scientist to circulate his results. Perhaps it is hard to imagine there could be any reason for writing left, besides vanity or madness. Yet, Plato worked at something, and no one has ever doubted, despite the derangement and indirection of the texts, that they are all somehow for the sake of philosophy. I add: for the sake of keeping philosophy alive and well. Plato wrote for the love and care of philosophy, for its realization and well-being in living souls as well as in real cities. He saw clearly in what senses its husbandry, preservation, defense, and even its central truth-telling activity called for-though without necessitating-something like his two-faced books. Among other things, he aimed at philosophy's survival as a cultural entity in the tradition we think of as Western civilization. In this he was successful. Unbelievably successful, as may be seen in the fact that two-and-a-half thousand years later: here we all are, still vitally interested in what Plato had to communicate, in what a man like Plato understood the life of wisdom to be. Moreover, we keep being affected by his enigmatic communication, both directly as we study and through myriad historical reverberations at work behind the scenes of our own present educations. Even after all this time, we keep taking good things away from his amazing gift. The dialogues, then, are the instruments of Plato's mega!opsuchia, the unhurried means of a rare but great and noble deed, the sort of deed yearned for by all men of the highest human excellence. Plato's great-souled project was to create the real, on-going world in which we are all now able to carry on with philosophy; he cleared the space, he gave the laws, he holds up the firmament. ll /2 0 i 98 �CARL PAGE THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE PAGE-19 As a great-souled man, all honour and praise are Plato's due but we cannot expect him to be impressed by such external rewards. His ambition was for a deed large, beautiful, and impressive in itself. The reward for such deeds is the overwhelming pleasure of actually doing them, though that too is hardly the central reason for which they are undertaken. No great-souled deed can be great, if it cannot be described in terms of a single-minded devotion that transcends selfish purpose. Yet it does not follow from this that devotion to such an end is purely selfless. The great-souled man is himself fi1!filled by his devotion to what transcends ordinary ambition. Thus, Plato wrote not only for others. He also wrote for the love and care of philosophy in regard to himself, in regard to his own glories and satisfactions as a wise, superior, and fortunate man. He also wrote his dialogues as an exhibition of prowess, and for the sake of joy in the exhilarating exercise of his own powers and command. In the end, Plato wrote dialogues for the same reason God created the world: because he co11/d. No one, absolutely no one, has come anywhere near matching him since. 11 /2 0 / 98 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 19 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Power and Glory of Platonic Dialogue Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 20, 1998, by Carl Page as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Page, Carl, 1957- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998-11-20 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission has been given to make this 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 Plato. Dialogues Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Page_Carl_1998-11-20 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1176638aef26848076e4450c2e331fc9.mp4 fb1925d797cb535111e69991a235216a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp4 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:46:55 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 Difference and Belonging in the Histories of Herodotus Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered on October 14, 2022, by Angel Parham as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ms. Parham is an associate professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. She offers this description of her lecture: "One of the great gifts of antiquity is that its writers provide a window for us into ways of seeing the world that differ from what we take for granted today. In this lecture we consider how the chronicles and stories of Herodotus frame ways of thinking about difference and belonging that provide insight into human societies both past and present." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Parham, Angel Adams Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-10-14 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Herodotus. History Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Parham_Angel_2022-10-14_ac Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4cf2d001991ea4fced6e2ff9f66e25c0.mp3 c39b5cf879c26518d77b0f616d64de74 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:50:31 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Virtuality Is Its Own Reward Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 12, 1997, by Sven Birkerts as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Birkerts, Sven Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997-09-12 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission has been given to make this available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Digital media--Social aspects Literature and technology Books and reading--Technological innovations Internet--Social aspects Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Birkerts_Sven_1997-09-12_ac Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b1025d8e4bfcbb52bc6895a8529005d0.pdf 79685e97afd3bd2affa6b8f365b90fe6 PDF Text Text HOW OPERA BEGAN (AND WHY IT BEGAN IN FLORENCE) Note: Numbers in red refer to the accompanying powerpoint slides; the symbol [+] indicates an addition to the preceding slide. [ 1] My goal today is to acquaint you with the circumstances leading to the advent of opera and to discuss the culture and events that surrounded its origins in Florence around the year 1600. But, in addition to summarizing HOW opera began (a subject which has already been very well documented in print), I should also like to explore a question that is less often asked - [2] that is, WHY opera began. And more specifically, [+] Why did it begin in Florence? and [+] Why did it begin when it did, at the end of the Renaissance? [3] The Florentine composer Marco da Gagliano (maestro di cappella to the Medici court from 1609 until his death in 1643) provides a useful and accurate outline of "how." [+] In the preface to his opera La Dafne, performed and printed in 1608, he relates the circumstances ofthe genre' s experimental beginnings.' La Dafoe was Gagliano' s own first effort in the new genre, examples of which he called, simply, spettacoli. (The word opera, which means "work" in Italian, only came into use later.) [4] His Dafne was a reworking and expansion of an earlier Dafoe, from the previous decade-the first completely sung musical play. Gagliano relates how that first Dafne came about. He says that, after a great deal of discussion took place concerning the way the ancients had performed their tragedies and about what role music had played in them, the court poet Ottavio Rinuccini began to write the story ([avo/a) of Dafoe, [+] and the learned amateur Jacopo Corsi composed some airs on part of it. In order to see what effect a completely sung work would have on the stage, [+] Rinuccini and Corsi approached the skilled composer and singer Jacopo Peri, who finished writing the music and probably premiered the role of Apollo at the first performance. Gagliano tells us that it took place at "an evening entertainment" during the Carnival season of 1 �1597/8. In the invited audience on that occasion were Don Giovanni de' Medici and (he says) "some of the principal gentlemen" of Florence? [5] Let me quickly fill in the events between 1598 and 1608. Encouraged by the success of the experiments that resulted in La Dafne, [6] in 1600 Rinuccini and Peri collaborate on a second production, which is first performed during the festivities honoring the maniage of Maria de' Medici to Henry IV ofFrance? [+] Rinuccini ' s libretto for this work, L 'Euridice, is printed first, probably as a souvenir of the occasion, and it tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. [+] In his preface (dated 4 October), Rinuccini explains that the work was partly motivated by the belief of some scholars that the ancient Greeks and Romans sang their tragedies on stage in their entirety. We understand from this (and other things he and Peri say) that they are interested more in the manner of performance of the new genre- its rhetorical delivery- than in reproducing the content of the ancient plays. We also recognize that their ambition is no less than the revival on stage of the ancient manner of declamation. Now another singer-composer also has a hand in composing L 'Euridice for the wedding celebrations-namely Giulio Caccini, the protege of Count Giovanni dei Bardi; and he has already been promoting a new rhetorical singing style since the meetings of Bardi's Camerata in the 1580s, decades earlier. The rivalry between Caccini and Peri becomes so intense that, [+] at the first performance of L 'Euridice (October 6), Caccini does not allow his pupils to perform any music composed by Peri. The result is that Peri, in the role of Orfeo, sings music that he wrote while his bride, Euridice, sings Caccini's music! (Not a very good start to a marriage patinership! No wonder Orfeo couldn't keep his bride!) [7] Meanwhile, around this same time, Emilio de' Cavalieri, supervisor of the Florentine festivities, [+] publishes his score of the Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo) [+] performed earlier that year in Rome; and by the way, take special note of the generic title- Rappresentazione- which I' ll come back to) . But despite Cavalieri' s claims of primacy, this 2 �work is usually discounted in nanatives of opera' s origins because, even though it is sung throughout, its style is far from Peri's declamatory recitar cantando (the Italian expression for what we now call recitative- a style of singing midway between speech and song) and it has a spiritual subject (a 4 dialogue between the Soul and the Body). Such subjets later became the purview of oratorio. [8] A few days after L 'Euridice, [+] Caccini' s opera Il rapimento di Cefalo is premiered (set to a libretto by another prominent com1 poet, Gabriella Chiabrera). This work is, by all accounts, the blockbuster event of the weeklong festivities, but its grandness is not well suited to Caccini's intimate style of solo singing, so it is not favored with publication and is now lost except for the libretto. [9] Not to be outdone, however, [+] Caccini quickly finishes his setting of L 'Euridice and rushes it into print a month before [+] Peri's score gets published early in 1601. 5 [10] But Caccini' s completed version doesn't premiere [+] until late in the following year (1602), after his collection of solo songs, [+] Le Nuove musiche, puts him on the map as a composer. Then, Rinuccini goes to France in the entourage of Maria de' Medici, Cavalieri stays in Rome, and Peri and Caccini remain in Florence, which soon takes a back seat in operatic developments. But their personal rivalries, fueled by the printers who quickly published their works, and the public competition among p1inces to garner attention with their patronage, are some of the factors that fostered the endurance of the first completely sung musical tales and their spread to other urban centers- Mantua, Rome, Venice, and elsewhere, both inside and outside the Italian peninsula. [11] Within the decade, the masterful madrigal composer Claudio Monteverdi (156?-1643) [+] makes his debut in the field with Lafavola d'Orfeo (1607), in Mantua, the first opera to achieve a place in the modern repertory. [1 2] The following year, Rinuccini, by this time back from France, collaborates with Monteverdi to create [+] L 'Arianna-now lost except for the Lament, which was destined to become the most famous piece of music of the seventeenth century. L 'Arianna completely eclipses 3 �L 'Orfeo; judging by all the descriptions of its performance, it is the work that brings the development of opera to its first great peak after only one brief decade, and makes all previous efforts look pale by comparison. [An aside: I don't know how many of you saw NY Times critic Anthony Tommasini's list of his top ten classical composers published in the Times earlier this year, but Monteverdi didn't make it onto the list; no composer before Bach did. In an effmi to placate some outraged readers, though, Tommasini conceded Monteverdi' s greatness, saying "Though Monteverdi did not invent opera, he took one look at what was going on in Florence in 1600 and figured out how this opera thing should really be done."] [13] Let's now hear the opening section of Monteverdi ' s Lament of Arianna, the only surviving piece from the opera. Listen especially to the way Monteverdi allows the phrases of text to dictate the contours and rhythms of the melody-expanding the range of the second phrase for emphasis; and in the next phrase, how he makes the melody rise Gust as in speech) to express Arianna 's rhetorical question (Who can console me); and on the return ofthe opening words, how Monteverdi rubs our noses in what was for its time a very strong dissonance between voice and bass to express the rawness of Arianna' s emotion. [Play] The Lament continues for another 7 or 8 minutes, during which Arianna conveys a gamut of emotions ranging from anger and scorn at Theseus ' s betrayal to tenderness and resignation. [ 14] So now, having seen that Florence was the birthplace of opera, let' s ask why. [1 5] Why Florence? [+] First of all, Florence had a long tradition of musical theater in the sixteenth century, principally in the productions known as intermedi that were staged between the acts of spoken plays. Intermedi were only one of many types of theatrical entertainment produced by courts all over Europe. [+] But the Medici outdid all the rest in 1589 by staging the most magnificent and extravagant spectacle ever seen in order to celebrate the marriage of Grand Duke Ferdinanda of Tuscany to the French Princess Christine of Lonaine, a union that had been in negotiation for nearly 4 �a year. The intermedi that were produced for this event climaxed a monthlong sequence of public and courtly pageantry that combined all the intellectual, artistic, and administrative forces of Tuscany at the height of its wealth, power, and cultural prestige. One court chronicler wrote, "Their splendor cannot be described, and anyone who did not see [the production] could not believe it." [ 16] Next, unlike other cities, Medicean Florence also had a particularly rich history of [+] "civic humanism" 6-which means that its more educated citizens were involved in a network of formal and informal academies that were engaged in studying the Greek and Latin texts of the ancients. [1 7] Bardi' s so-called Florentine Camerata, where Caccini was groomed, was only one of many such groups. Bardi was also a member of the Alterati, to which Rinuccini and Corsi belonged, and Corsi probably also had his own circle, the group that ultimately produced the first Dafne . We can think of them as satellite courts, surrounding and drawing inspiration from the brlliant Medici rulers. And their members all interacted in the planning and production of the 15 89 intermedi, which was largely Bardi' s brainchild but which required everyone else to contribute their efforts as well. [18] Finally, as Gary Tomlinson and others have suggested, [+] Florence was the center of a particular Renai ssance worldview that saw music as having a "magical" role in the cosmos and in mankind 's interaction with it. 7 This particular worldview was rooted in Platonic thought, which held that the individual was connected to the entire universe through harmony. [+] Therefore, it followed that the best way to express this connection was by giving voice to song. So, in the court culture of Florence during the late fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth, singing-and especially solo singing- took on very special significance. Before moving on, I want to look more closely at each of these three elements- intermedi, humanism, and musical magic- in order to see how they came together at the end ofthe sixteenth century and resulted in Florence becoming the birthplace of opera. 5 �[19] The Florentine intermedi were lavishly produced pageants involving sumptuous costumes, special effects, instrumental music, dance, and song. They were produced as entr' actes to comedies or pastoral plays at court and served to separate the divisions of the spoken drama, since there was no curtain to be dropped. The 1589 intermedi were planned and rehearsed months in advance, and their cost and impact dwarfed that of the main drama [Bargagli 's play La Pellegrina] , so that absolutely no doubt remained in the minds of the invited guests about their host's wealth, . an d power. 8 generosity, [20] A huge team of artists, artisans, poets, musicians, architects, and technicians was assembled under the intellectual guidance of the prominent Florentine aristocrat and military leader [+] Giovanni de ' Bardi (1 53 4-1612), who formulated the underlying conception of the inte1medi, 9 served as stage director, and coordinated all the thematic and antiquarian aspects of the project. As the moving spirit behind the program, Bardi worked closely with the court poets, [+] principally Ottavio Rinuccini ( 1562- 162 1), who wrote most of the text of the intermedi and later wrote the verse for the first opera libretto, La Dafne. 10 [+] Emilio de ' Cavalieri (c.1550-1602), the recently appointed superintendent of music at the ducal court who had been in F erdinando ' s retinue while he was still a cardinal residing in Rome, became the show's musical director. [+] The court architect-engineer Bernardo Buontalenti (c.1531-1608), who had constmcted for the Medici the first permanent indoor theater with a modem proscenium arch only a few years earlier, remodeled it for the occasion, and designed the sets and costumes. 11 [ +] The music was largely composed by court organist Cristofano Malvezzi and madrigalist Luca Marenzio, with individual contributions by the young composersinger Jacopo Peri (1561 -1633), by Bardi' s protege Giulio Caccini (15 5 1- 1618), and by Bardi himself, among others. 6 �[21] Bardi conceived the set of six intermedi as "a sort of mythological history ofmusic," 12 very suitable for a wedding celebration because it depicts the descent of Harmony as a gift from the gods and predicts a new Golden Age to be inaugurated by the newlyweds. Moreover, the individual tableaux are loosely unified by the literary theme of the power of music, a topic of longstanding interest to the Florentines, as we shall see. The opening intetmedio contemplated the harmony of the spheres. The next, by representing a song contest between the Muses and their rivals the Pierides, dwelt on the virtues and virtuosity of song. [22] The third enacted the combat between Apollo and the Pythic serpent, prefiguring the opening scene from Rinuccini ' s and Peri ' s first opera, La Dajne. So it actually introduced the first operatic hero, [23] Apollo-god of music and of the sun, and, according to some accounts, father of the legendary musician Orpheus, who became in tum the protagonist of several early opera libretti. (That' s Apo llo swooping down to attack the dragon.) [24] The fifth intetmedio gave a prominent role to Jacopo Peri, who composed and performed his first piece for solo voice to portray another poet-musician of antiquity, Arion; according to myth, Arion was saved from drowning by a dolphin attracted by the dazzling power of his song. [25] In the concluding intetmedio, harmony and rhythm are given to mere motials, represented by the nymphs and shepherds of Arcadia, who are instructed by the gods in the mi of dancing during an elaborately choreographed ballo. [26] The 1589 intermedi had many of the same players and almost all the ingredients of opera-gorgeous costumes and scenery, [27] stage effects (for example, the life-size fire-spitting dragon slain by Apollo), 13enthralling solo singing, colorful instrumental music, large concerted numbers, dance-everything except a unified action and the rhetorical style of dramatic singing yet to be created. It remained for a few pioneering individuals to shape these elements into opera, a new 7 �and quite "noble style ofperfmmance" 14 that, by emulating ancient theater, would revive the power of modem music to move the emotions. [28] Now let' s turn our attention to the second of the three elements that contributed to making Florence the birthplace of opera: [+] HUMANISM. In its narrowest sense, humanism was an interest in the culture and texts of antiquity on the part ofthe city' s more educated or elite citizens- those who joined the network of academies I mentioned earlier. As we' ve seen, the first opera librettist, Rinuccini, maintained that his joint experiments with Corsi and Peri were motivated by the belief of some scholars that the ancient Greeks and Romans sang their tragedies on the stage in their entirety. 15 In fact, Renaissance scholars disagreed among themselves about the role of music in ancient tragedy, but what matters in our narration is that Rinuccini and his associates gave credence to the idea. [29] A modem scholar of musical humanism (Gary Tomlinson) has called attention to three different but related types of humanism. There was philological humanism, which fostered the transmission, translation and interpretation of ancient texts. [+] The person who comes to mind in this regard is Girolamo Mei, the very erudite philologist who transmitted his ideas about language and ancient music to Bardi and became a sort of mentor to the Florentine Camerata. [+] Then there was rhetorical humanism, modeled on the principles of persuasive oratory, which Renaissance men of letters adapted to their own debates and writings. [+] An example of this type of humanist might be Vincenzo Galilei, who wrote his treatise for the Camerata (Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna, 1581) in the conventional Renaissance fmm of a dialogue-a conversation between two friends (one of whom is named after Count Bardi) debating the merits of ancient and modem music . (More about this in a moment.) [+] And finally, there was what Tomlinson calls " ordinary-language humanism," - a view that underlay "the whole late-Renaissance exaltation of music 's affective 8 �powers"; 16 and, in one way or another, this view accounts for the great importance that all of Renaissance musical culture placed on expressing the meaning of the text. Ordinary-language humanism credited language itself- the very sound and shape of the words rather than the eloquence with which they were arranged-with the ability to communicate meaning and emotion. Now, it must have been possible to subscribe to all three types of humanism, and no doubt someone like Mei did. [+] But it seems to me likely that the court poet Rinuccini, and his collaborators Corsi and Peri, who did not know Greek or Latin and were not trained as scholars, nevertheless adopted this ordinary-language humanism as their type of Greek revivalism, and one that motivated them to create the first opera. Where did these ideas come from? [30] Rinuccini belonged to the Alterati Academy- its very name (Academy of the Altered Ones) acknowledged the ability of ideas to effect change in human beings. The Alterati membership included the widely read and accomplished Count Bardi, already a member of long standing by the time Rinuccini was initiated in 1586, three years before they collaborated on the elaborate wedding intermedi. Another member was the remarkable scholar Girolamo Mei (1519-94), who was Florentine by birth, but worked in Rome and made known the results ofhis research into Greek music in his letters to Bardi and the other academy members. A brilliant philologist, Mei promoted theories about language that were in fact as central to the genesis of the new dramatic style of singing as his convictions about Greek music were essential to the origins of opera; for Mei believed not only that poems and plays were always sung in ancient times, whether by soloists or chorus, but also that they were sung monophonically- using one melody at a time, without competing lines-so that the words as sounding structures could act on the listeners' souls. And finally, the Alterati also counted among its members another Florentine nobleman, Jacopo Corsi (1561-1602), 17 the enthusiastic amateur who partially composed, and fully sponsored, 9 �the production of the first completely sung play, La Dafne, in 1597/8. 18 [+] So it is with good reason that the Alterati of Florence have been called by one modem scholar (Claude Palisca) "pioneers in the theory of dramatic music." 19 [3 1] Now, Count Bardi also had his own circle of friends with similar humanist and musical interests, a more informal academy that met in his palace and came to be known as the (Florentine) Camerata. 20 As the coruiier chiefly responsible for organizing entertainments for the Grand Duke, Bardi naturally became interested in theatrical or dramatic music and eagerly cultivated his relationship with Mei.21 [32] These two, then, were key players in both the Alterati Academy and the Camerata, and it is obvious that both groups shared a concern with musical humanism. Bardi 's inner circle also included the singer-lutenist-composer Giulio Caccini (whom he involved in the 1589 intermedi) as well as Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1530-9 1), another talented singer-lutenist-composer in his employ. Galilei, father of the revolutionary thinker and astronomer Galilee, had studied with the most famous counterpoint teacher of the age, Gioseffe Zarlino, and had already published a text on how to arrange polyphonic music for so lo voice and lute til Fronimo, 1568), a medium that became increasingly popular during the last quarter of the century. 22 Under the influence ofBardi and Mei, [33] Galilei wrote his Dialago della musica antia e della moderna, 1581 ,23 which soon became the Camerata' s radical manifesto, for it ruiiculated the principles of ordinary-language humanism in the most radical way imaginable for a sixteenth-century musician: do away with vocal counterpoint altogether and revert to a type of nonpolyphonic composition combining words, melody, and simp le accompaniment (which we now call monody). Galilei reasoned that only monody was capable of imitating nature- that is, the "natural language" of speech, through which a person's character and states of soul are reflected. Mei, his mentor, taught that ancient music had always presented a single affection embodied in a single 10 �melody.24 He believed that melody alone could convey the message of the text through the natural expressiveness of the voice-via the register, rhythms, and contours of its utterance-and it could do this far better than the contrived delivery of a polyphonic texture? 5 Like Mei , Galilei was convinced that counterpoint was ineffective because it presented contradictory infmmation to the ear. When several voices simultaneously sang different melodies and words-pitting high pitches against low, slow rhythms against fast, rising intervals against descending ones- the resulting web of sotmds was incapable of projecting the semantic meaning or emotional message of the text. Only by returning to an art truly founded on the imitation of human nature rather than on contrapuntal artifice would it be possible for modem composers to realize the acclaimed effects of ancient music. Plato had taught that song (melos) was comprised of words, rhythm, and pitch, in that order. From that concept followed two important humanist ideas. First, music and poetry were two sides of a single language; second, song arose from an innate harmony within the words that was muted in normal speech but manifest in heightened speech. [34] For this reason, Galilei advocated the art of rhetoric as a model for modem musicians, urging them to imitate the manner in which successful actors delivered their lines on stage: Kindly observe in what manner the actors speak, in what range, high or low, how loudly or softly, how rapidly or slowly they enunciate their words ... how one speaks when infuriated or excited; how a married woman speaks, how a girl, how a lover ... how one speaks when lamenting, when crying out, when afraid, and when exulting with joy?6 For Galilei, it is clear that "how one speaks" (or declaims) the words reveals their underlying emotion. For the composers of monody and theatrical song, by extension, it then became a question of" how one sings" the words to disclose their innate significance? 7 (35] In order to see the important role that singing had in Florentine culture, I want to return to the third element in my discussion of why Florence was the bitthplace of opera: [36] Musical 11 �Magic. More than a century before the first experiments in opera, [+] Angelo Poliziano had dramatized the myth of Orpheus for the Florentine cultural elite. His Orfeo (1480), the earliest secular play in Italian, received numerous editions during the sixteenth century and became, in effect, a Medici literary classic, popularizing through the Orpheus legend the marvels of ancient music and musicians. 28 [+] The musicianpar excellence of antiquity, Orpheus had been able to tame the beasts of nature and charm the infernal gods into allowing him to lead Eurydice out of the Underworld-all by means of the power of his spellbinding incantation. [37] Poliziano himself was a member ofthe Neoplatonic circle (+] sunounding Lorenzo de' Medici (known as the "Magnificent" because ofhis brilliance and erudition). The main intellectual figure in his informal academy was [+] another erudite Florentine, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), a humanist well versed in Platonic thought. As early as 1489, Ficino postulated a "music-spirit" theory which explained the peculiar power of music by the fact that sound, unlike other sensual stimuli, is canied by air and is therefore similar to spiritus, the substance that mediated between body and sou1. 29 Ficino also believed that the human voice, through music, provided the link between the earthly world and the cosmos. Because Platonic thought held that the individual was connected to the entire universe through harmony, it followed that the artful singer could express psychological and moral reality through his voice and could use his rhetorical powers to make that reality present to others. 30 By employing certain patterns of conespondence between micro- and macrocosm, between the motions of the human soul and the hidden harmony of the cosmos, the singer could manipulate the listener's responses- a notion very much in keeping with the Aristotelian concept of imitation or mimesis. The composer-singer, then, in the guise of the legendary Orpheus, became the expressive agent of that artistic power. And Florentine Neoplatonism, in the artistic manifestation ofPoliziano' s Orfeo- 12 �a spoken drama with interpolated song3 1-helped to stimulate a century-long fascination with the expressive powers of music. So, in the court culture of Florence during the late fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth, singing-and especially solo singing- took on very special significance and it is easy to understand how Mei, Bardi, Caccini, Peri, and Rinuccini, being products of a culture steeped in Neoplatonic musical thought, were heirs to these Renaissance ideas about the magical effects of song. Mei shared some of Ficino ' s "music-spirit" theories, particularly those which held hearing to be superior to the other senses in its ability to act on the soul ' s passions. 32 As we have seen, Bardi' s program for the 1589 intermedi revolved around the power of song while his protege, Caccini, revitalized the Renaissance ideal of incantatory solo singing for the Camerata in his madrigals for solo voice he later collected and published as Le nuove musiche (1602). 33 ln creating the first opera libretto, Rinuccini, under the weight of Florentine and Medicean tradition, [+] looked back to Poliziano 's fable of Orfeo. Not only was Orpheus a fitting protagonist for a completely sung music drama aiming to demonstrate the power of song, but also, as Tomlinson points out, the fable ' s outcome and that of the other earliest tales of opera [quote] "vindicated the occult harmony of the cosmos . . . : [38] in the answer to Daphne' s just prayers by her magical transformation [into a laurel tree] , [39] in the alleviation of Ariadne' s woes by the miraculous descent of Bacchus, [40] and in the transformative power of song in . .. [the] Orpheus librettos." 34 Like Ovid' s tales of metamorphoses from which they were drawn, these early opera were fabrications or fables (favole) and, by focusing on timeless myths involving love and loss, they sought to dramatize, externalize, or represent human sentiment. And what better way was there of realizing the transformative power of song and Orfeo' s vocal magic than through musical speech? This was at the heart of the notion of the representational style (stile rappresentativo). Peri' s invention of the dramatic and rhetorical style of singing known as 13 �recitative, then, was rooted in the conviction that musical speech was capable of transmitting an inner, emotional reality and could therefore represent human affections on stage. The communication of affections on stage in opera by singing and acting bodies can only be experienced in the presence of both actors and listeners; and it can only be explained in the context of the location and the actual moment of the performance- the rappresentazione. The defining nature ofthe location or space makes the listener a component part of the musical process. In this way, early opera depended on both the sense of sight and hearing as no other musical art form (except the intetmedi and court ballets) had done before. In fact, only a few years before the 1589 Florentine intermedi, [41] the court architect-engineer Bemardo Buontalenti had constructed for the Medici the first petmanent indoor theater with a modem proscenium arch. This is significant because the proscenium arch not only frames a view into the illusionary depths ofthe representation, but also allows the performance taking place to be directly addressed to the viewer. And this is precisely what painting had been striving to do since the advent of perspective in the Renaissance. All of which finally brings me to the last of my concerns: [42] why opera began when it did- f+] around the year 1600, at the end of the Renaissance. The short answer (but one that r will elaborate upon in the remaining time) is this: it was the consummation of an idea that reigned supreme during the Renaissance- namely, that the sister arts of painting, music, and poetry all had the ability, through imitation, to portray some sort of psychological and moral reality; what's more, they all had the power-even the obligation-through rhetorical means to make that reality present to others. This view had long been held about the verbal arts, but the rivalry between poetry and painting during the sixteenth century, deriving from Horace's famo us simile ut pictura poesis (as painting is, so is poetry), led painting to acquire the status of a liberal art, one that deserved equally serious consideration as that given to poetry. [43] Roger de Piles (1635-1709), one of the most influential art 14 �theorists of the next century, was unequivocal in this matter: "One must think of painting as a kind of stage on which each figure plays its role." He also tells us that the "principal end" of the painter is "to imitate the mores and actions of men. " 35 And we have seen that humanism demanded no less from composers and musicians. A moment ago, I remarked that the communication of affections on stage, in opera, by singing and acting bodies, can only be experienced in the presence ofboth actors and listeners or viewers, and now I want to concentrate on the viewers. For, if the aim of the sister arts was to communicate the affections or passions-to imitate or represent affections in order to stimulate passions in the viewer-then the audience was clearly an important part of the process. It seems to me that painting offers a very instructive example of how all the arts, but especially opera at the beginning of the I i 11 century, defined themselves by the effect they had on the spectators. [ 44] In a book about The Origins of the City of Florence and Its Famous Citizens (De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus, 1381 -2), the Florentine humanist and chronicler Filippo Villani describes the many-faceted accomplishments of Florentine culture. His main theme was that this culture had declined in his own age (late 14th century), and that Florentines needed to be reminded of the greatness of such earlier citizens as Dante and Giotto and others of their generation. But Villani also included an entire chapter on painters and what I find noteworthy is that his remarks about Giotto make clear his belief that painting should aspire to the condition of theater: [+] Images formed by [Giotto 's] brush agree so well with the lineaments of nature as to seem to the beholder to live and breathe; and his pictures appear to perform actions and movements so exactly as to seem from a little way off actually speaking, weeping, rejoicing, and doing other things, not without pleasure from him who beholds and praises the talent and skill of the a11ist. [45] Villani could have been talking about this painting from the series by Giotto in the Arena chapel. 15 �Two generations later, in Florence, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a famous treatise on painting (Dellapittura, 1435-6), which reveals that his conception ofthe art grows directly out ofrhetorical humanism. [46]He bases his theory of pictorial composition-the way in which a painting can be organized so that each plane surface and each object plays its pmi in the effect of the whole--on the model of rhetorical compositio, or the way that a sentence is built up from a hierarchy of elements. Words are fitted together to make phrases, phrases to make clauses, and clauses to make sentences. In pictorial composition [use pointer], the pmis of the nanative are bodies, the parts of the body are members, and the members are made up of plane surfaces. Compositio, according to Alberti, is that method of painting which composes or puts all these interdependent elements together in the work of mi. And again, his way of speaking of the work suggests a theatrical performance: [47] "In my view," he says, " there is no painted nanative so filled with so great a variety of events that nine or ten persons will not be capable of acting them out quite fittingly." 36 Alberti hirnselfrefers his readers back to Giotto 's work, but the mid-fifteenth-century painter perhaps most influenced by Alberti [48] was Andrea Mantegna, who produced the finest visual models of Alberti ' s ideas about composition. One of them is this engraving of the Entombment. The maximum ten figures are evident. Their planes or gatherings of drapery are formed into members- their various limbs or body parts; the members are hmmonized to create bodies or whole figures ; and the ten different bodies are intenelated to form the nanative. Now, it was also the Florentine school of painting that worked out the principles of linear perspective, and their fust theorist was again Alberti. [49] Here ' s a medieval Last Supper, a manuscript illustration from about the year 1200. Its two-dimensional style of spatial representation makes the picture face the viewer like a flat wall, generally excluding us from what appears as a selfcontained, closed world. [50] With central perspective, however, the relation to the viewer changes. 16 �In Leonardo 's Last Supper, painted in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the figure of Christ is placed in the center of the composition, which is at the same time its vanishing point. The frontally oriented table and back wall support the majesty and stability of the principal figure, whereas "the side walls and ceiling swing outward, as though in a gesture ofrevelation." 37 [51] A modem diagram of the painting's perspective makes it clear that the principal structural lines are a system of beams coming from a focus within the picture space and breaking through the frontal plane as they move forward, opening the picture like a flower toward the viewer. This explicit acknowledgment of the viewer is the visual expression of the fact that the world represented in the picture is being sighted. In other words, the image presents a world seen from the viewpoint of an individual observer, and therefore changes the pictorial conception of space in a way that invites a new level of awareness on the part of the spectator. [52] The Renaissance architect Palladia detennined that the vanishing point should be placed in the center in order to give any picture maesta and grandezza, and indeed the symmetry of Leonardo' s painting lends a certain gravitas to its style and subject. But as the stylistic outlook changes in the later sixteenth century, so does painting's relation to the viewer. Perhaps the painter most emblematic of the style changes that took place in the early seventeenth century was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 -1610). [56] Among his very early works, Boy Bitten by a Lizard dates from approximately the same years as Peri' s and Caccini's first operas, La Dafne and L 'Euridice. Scholars explain the picture mainly as a study of extreme expression, and essentially realistic in its intent. Indeed, the painting should more appropriately be called Boy Being Bitten by a Lizard because [57] it depicts the very instant when the lizard emerges from the fruit on the table to bite his finger and, at the same time, demonstrates the artist's skill in representing (and I use that word very purposefully) the fleeting moment of the boy's reaction, as his 17 �expression registers the surprise and sharp pain ofthe lizard ' s attack. [58] The painting is therefore a study of both physical action and psychological reaction- as are many Baroque representations that portray instantaneous and violent action as well as the expression of the emotions resulting from that action. We need only think of Eurydice' s death by snakebite and Orfeo' s subsequent stunned reaction to fmd fitting parallels. Just as Caravaggio captured the immediacy of the boy' s reaction, Peri, Caccini, and (of course) Monteverdi in their footsteps, managed to convey Orfeo's intense emotion in the expressive recitative which he sings ("Non piango, e non sospiro ") in reaction to Eurydice's death. Modern commentators have stressed the forcefulness with which Caravaggio's paintings at all stages of his career thematize or otherwise draw attention to their relation to the viewer. I suggest that the early operas similarly thematize or draw attention to their relation to the listener-by representing both action and reaction, making them present to the listener via the new musico-theatrical device of recitative. It is as though atiists and musicians are exploring the whole issue of spectatordom in both painting and music at precisely the same historical moment, around the year 1600. [59] Another work from this period that calls attention to the depiction of action and reaction as well as to the issue of spectatordom is Judith Beheading Holo.f§r_nes (ca. 1620) by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653). In the destabilizing flow and counterflow ofthe painting, Judith's maidservant (in the center) struggles with the victim' s thrusting arms as Judith herself concentrates on her deadly action; she performs the deed at arm's length as though she were at the same time reacting by distancing herself in disgust from her victim 's gushing blood. [60] Notice how similar are Judith' s features to Artemisia' s, which we see in the painter' s self-portrait. That allows us to think of Judith-the-executioner as a stand-in for Artemisia the painter-not only because they look alike but also because they are both initiating their actions (Judith is slaying Holofernes, Artemisia is 18 �painting her own portrait). [6 1] We also see how Holofemes is looking out at us, as though pleading with us to intervene as we try to avoid being splattered with his blood. In this way, we viewers are being drawn into the action as well. What I'm suggesting, therefore, is that the work itself masterfully evokes both the making and the viewing of the picture, both for the benefit of the spectator. And in this way, by so forcefully merging their subjects with the viewer's environment, early modem artists sought to act upon and move the emotions of the spectator. The key phrase here is "merging the subj ect with the environment," creating the illusion that the spectator is part of the action or even part of the scenery. [62] The court architect Buontalenti had already achieved this when he completed in the 1580s and 90s the spectacular grotto for the Medici princes in the Boboli gardens behind their apaJtments in the Pitti Palace. f63 ] Here, a decade before opera began, is a bucolic fantasy land, a retreat full of partly sculpted and partly frescoed images replicating the pastoral grottoes of Tasso 's Aminta or the Pastor jido (the Fait~fitl Shepherd by Guarini). [64] The spectator enters through the fa9ade, under the Medici coat of arms, and [65] steps into a mythical world fabricated for the imagination, in which the viewer becomes a faithful shepherd or a sylvan nymph, surrounded by the companions of Arcadia. [66] He or she is completely contained within an illusory world. [67] As far as I know, the grotto was never used as a theater; rather, it was a playground for the courtiers and their guests, who could take refuge from the f68] garden ' s midday sun and refresh themselves in the grotto' s cool shade. [68] In his important book From Art to Theatre, George Kernodle states that "modern theatre grew out of the desire to see and hear with living actors the romantic stories and allegorical fancies already portrayed by the painters." 38 [69] If we substitute (+] the words early opera and [+] singing actors, we can understand how the new favola tutta in musica was also an entirely logical outcome of the whole development of Renaissance rut and music in Florence. In other words, opera was the sonic 19 �realization in three dimensions of the fonns and conventions of its painting, sculpture, poetry, and song. The Florentine school had worked out the principles of linear perspective in two dimensions; [70] Renaissance architects like Baldassare Peruzzi (whom Vasari credits with the development of perspective scenery) reproduced the effects of painting in three dimensions, bringing the settings and backgrounds of the pictures to life on stage. The resulting illusionistic set designs, when framed by the new proscenium arch, reproduced a spectacular and complex unified painting through which the action could be addressed directly to the viewer. An exact relation, unknown before, was established between audience, actor, and setting which promoted the spectator's sense of being surrounded by or merging with the theatrical setting, an effect that Buontalenti later realized in the Boboli grotto. And when the scenery enclosed actors who were presenting the new recitative forged by Florentine composers and singers-that sui generis style of solo singing that heightened the delivery of speech but was more naturalistic than song-they realized Galilei's ideal of the actor who delivered his lines so as to reveal the emotions that lay behind the words, engaging the listener as never before. So, the integration of the sister arts in this way invested the new art fmm with a rhetorical power that could not be matched by any ofthem individually. [71] Since we don' t have any sets that survive from the earliest court operas, I'd like to close by looking at a much earlier painting sometimes attributed to the young Titian, and dating from the early 16111 century, but depicting the same subject as that which interested the early opera poets and composers. Eurydice appears in the foreground, having been stopped in her tracks by the serpent' s venomous bite. [72] I suggest that the shepherd in the middle ground is Aristaeus, from whom Eurydice was fleeing in Ovid's original story. Further to the right is perhaps one of Eurydice' s companions, who is running off to tell Orpheus about his sudden reversal of 20 �fortune. Of course, [73] the bucolic scene presents an entirely different problem in terms of perspective than an urban setting. Titian tried to create a sense of depth by duplicating a series of similar forms on successive planes of the picture, one behind the other. So the central cavernous structure which seems to be inhabited by ghostly heads is repeated further back, where its fiery opening certainly suggests Hades and behind that one, another furnace-like structure smokes in the distance. Did Titian imagine that Orpheus would have to go through a series of Underworld landscapes to retrieve his bride? Granted, Titian's painting is not a stage set; but if you were trying to reproduce it or any sort of pastoral setting in the theater, you can see the problems that might present themselves. [74] The absence of a single strong focal point of the sot1 that court architects could devise for their street settings, which brought the viewer into the actors' illusory world-the absence of such a focal point might lead you to rely more urgently on the sense ofhearing than the sense of sight in order to sunound the viewer. [75] Therefore, the representation of an entirely sung play in an Arcadian setting (such as La Dafoe or L 'Euridice) may in part have been motivated by the desire to surround the spectators with a sonic environment-a rappresentazione tutta in musica- that helped to bridge the gap between reality and the mythical world they were being invited to experience. In conclusion, I want to leave you with the idea that opera was, from its beginnings in Florence around the year 1600, a socially shared experience irt which acting and singing-and particularly singing in the new, recitative style, about love and loss-was the culmination of a certain rhetorical type of speaking picture that had long been nurtured by the Renaissance imagination. Its aim was to revive the humanist ideals of incantatory singing so admired by the Florentine Neoplatonists and the style of theatrical declamation believed to have been so effective in ancient drama. It brought the spectator into a new relationship with the stage, heightening the immediacy of 21 �its illusions and acting on the emotions through the sense of hearing as well as seeing. With Monteverdi, it spread to Venice and then throughout the Italian peninsula as well as elsewhere in Europe and the Americas. The collaborators of the first operas believed they were creating a geme in which music and poetry, in order to serve the drama, were fused into an inseparable whole, a language that was in a class of its own-midway between speaking and singing. Looking ahead, briefly, to the decades and centuries that followed, an increasing separation between recitative and aria (or between musical declamation and outright song)-with recitatives becoming more perfunctory and arias more elaborate-the balance between these elements repeatedly shifted to favor music and singing at the expense of text and dramatic integrity, only to be brought back into relative equilibrium by various "reforms." But in the main, opera as it was envisioned at the dawn of the seventeenth century by a few Florentine noblemen and musicians has endured, uninterrupted, in Western culture for 400 years and counting. Barbara Russano Hanning March 25, 2011 ' Marco da Gagliano, preface to La Dafne (Florence, 1608; facs. Bologna, 1970). The translation used here is based on that of Carol MacClintock, Readings in the History of Music in Performance (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979); see 188. 2 Gagliano, ibid; see MacClintock, 188-89. The full text with an English translation (by Tim Carter) may be seen in Composing Opera: From "Dajne" to "Ulisse errante," ed. Tim Carter and Zygmunt Szweykowski (Cracow: Musica Iagellonica, 1994), 46-67. 22 �3 Claude V. Palisca, "The First Performance of Euridice," in the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Festschrifl (193 7-62) [of Queens College], ed. Albert Mell (New York: Queens College of the City University of New York, 1964), 1-23; repr. with a new introductory headnote in Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory, 432-51 . Further on Euridice see, inter alia, T. Carter, " Jacopo Peri 's Euridice (1600): A Contextual Study," The Music Review 43 (1982) 83-103, repr. in Carter, Music, Patronage, and Printing; Kelley Hamess, "Le tre Euridici: Characterization and Allegory in the Euridici of Peri and Caccini," Journal ofSevententh-Century Music 911 (2003) http://sscmjscm.press.uiuc.edu/jscm/v9no 1; Bojan Bujic, " Figura poetica molto vaga": Structure and Meaning in Rinuccini 's Euridice," Early Music History 10 (1991), 29-62; and Gaspare de Caro, Euridice: Momenti dell ' Umanesimo civile fiorentino. 4 La rappresentazione di anima, et di corpo novamente pasta in musica dal sig. Emilio del Cavalieri per recitar cantando (Rome, 1600). This judgment of Cavalieri's work was suggested by the Florentine man of letters Giovanni Battista Doni (1595-164 7), perhaps the first historian of early opera. Further on Cavalieri see Claude V. Palisca, "Musical Asides in the Diplomatic Correspondence of Emilio de' Cavalieri," Musical Quarterly 49 (1963), 339-55, repr. in Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory, 389-407. For a defense of Cavalieri' s contribution to the creation of opera, see Warren Kirkendale, Emilio de' Cavalieri, 'Gentiluomo Romano ': His Life and Letters, His Role as Superintendent ofAll the Arts at the Medici Court, and His Musical Compositions (Florence, 2001 ), 185-212. 5 L 'Euridice composta in musica in stile rappresentativo da Giulio Caccini detto Romano (Florence, 1601 ; facs. Bologna, 1968). In the dedication to Bardi, Caccini lays claim to "having been the first to give to the press like kind of songs, and the style and manner ofthem, .. . composed by me more than fifteen years ago at various times, since I have never used in my works any other a11 than the imitation of the sentiments of the words, ..." (referring to his new score as well as to the monodies yet to be published in Le nuove musiche). The dedication is printed and translated in Carter, Composing Opera, 35-41 , and trans. in Strunk, Source Readings, 606. Caccini' s complete score, however, was not performed in its entirety until 1602. (The 1600 performance had been largely of Peri' s music.) 6 The concept of civic humanism was elaborated in Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1955; rev. 1966) and Eugenio Garin's Italian Humanism : Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (New York, 1965); see Gary Tomlinson, "Renaissance Humanism and Music," European Music, 1520-1640, ed. James Haar (Woodbridge, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2006), 1-19, esp. 9-10. Also see the more recent study of Florentine civic humanism as it concerns the birth of opera: Gaspare De Caro, Euridice: Momenti dell 'Umanesimo civile fiorentino (Bologna: Ut Orpheus edizioni, 2006). 7 Gary Tomlinson, " Pastoral and Musical Magic in the Birth of Opera," Opera and the Enlightenment, eds. Thomas Bauman and Marita McClymonds (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7-20. Also see D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1958) and Ruth Katz, Divining the Powers of Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Origins ofOpera (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), esp. 87ff. 23 �8 James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as "Theatrum Mundi" (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 2. For a summary account of the intermedi, see Alois M. Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964, 58-69. The relevant documentation is also illustrated in a recent exhibition catalogue: Maria Adelaide Bartoli Bacherini, "Per un regale evento ": Spettacoli nuziali e opera in musica alia corte dei Medici (Florence, 2000). For an edition, see Les Fetes du marriage de Ferdinand de Medic is et de Christine de Lorraine (Florence, 1589), I: Musique des intermedes de "La Pellegrino," ed. D.P. Walker (Paris, 1963 ). 9 Further on Giovanni de' Bardi, see Tim Carter, "Per cagione di bene, et giustamente vivere: Some Thoughts on the Musical Patronage of Giovanni de' Bardi," Neoplatonismo, musica, letteratura nel Rinascimento: I Bardi di Vernia e l'Accademia della Crusca; atti del Convegno lnternazionale di Studi, Firenze-Vernio, 25-26 settembre 1998. Edited by Piero Gargiulo, Alessandro Magini and Stephane Toussaint (Paris: Societe Marsile Ficin, 2000) 137-46; Claude V. Palisca: "The Musical Humanism of Giovanni Bardi," Poesia e musica nell'estetica del xvi e xvii secolo, ed. H. Meyvalian (Florence, 1979), 45-72; and Wanen Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate oft he Medici (Florence, 1993). 10 On Ottavio Rinuccini see, inter alia, Barbara Russano Hanning, Of Poetry and Music's Power: Humanism and the Creation of Opera (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980), esp. chap. I (119): "Rinuccini and the Power of Music"; and Hanning: "Glorious Apollo: Poetic and Political Themes in the First Opera," Renaissance Quarterly 32 (1979), 485-513. 11 Detlef Heikamp, "Il Teatro Mediceo degli Uffizi," Bolle tina del Centro lnternazionale di architettura Andrea Palladia !6 (1974), 323-32; Nino Pin·otta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; Italian orig., Turin, 1969, rev. 1975), 365-83. 12 The phrase is Richard Taruskin's; see his Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 13 The pythic creature is described as greenish-black and covered with sparkling minors. It "was constructed in separate units of papier-mache modeled over clay forms and assembled on a wooden framework," and it was operated by a stagehand from inside (Saslow, 231-32). 14 Rinuccini's phrase ("si nobil maniera di recitare"), from the dedication (to Maria de' Medici) of his libretto L 'Euridice (Florence, 1600); Italian text and translation in Carter, Composing Opera, 16-17. 15 Le musiche di Jacopo Peri sopra L 'Euridice (Florence, 1600 [but 1601, modern style]), facs. Rome, 1934 and Bologna, 1969; performing edition, ed. Howard Mayer Brown (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1981 ). 16 Tomlinson, "Renaissance Humanism," 18. 17 On Jacopo Corsi see Tim Carter, "Music and Patronage in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence: The Case ofJacopo Corsi (1561-1602)," iniTatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance I (1985), 57-104, 24 �repr. in Carter, Music, Patronage and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence (Variorum Collected Studies Series), (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000). 18 William V. Porter, "Peri and Corsi's Dajne: Some New Discoveries and Observations," Journal of the American Musicological Society 18 (1965), 170-96. 19 Claude V. Palisca, "The Alterati of Florence, Pioneers in the Theory ofDramatic Music," in William W. Austin, ed., New Looks at Italian Opera: Essays in Honor of Donald J Grout (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 9-38; repr. in Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 408-31. 2 ° Claude V. Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); esp.l-11. 21 Mei's correspondence to the Camerata is published in Claude V. Palisca, Girolamo Mei (15191594): Letters on Ancient and Modern Music to Vincenzo Galilei and Giovanni Bardi: A Study with Annotated Text (Musicological Studies and Documents, American Institute of Musicology, 1960, 2/1977). 22 Claude V. Palisca, "Vincenzo Galilei's Arrangements for Voice and Lute", in Essays in Musicology in Honor of Dragan Plamenac on His 701h Birthday, eds. Gustav Reese and Robert .T. Snow (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), 207-32; repr. in Palisca, Studies ... , 36488. 23 Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica e/ della moderna (Florence, 1581 ); repr. Monuments of Music and Music Literature in Facsimile, second series, no. 20 (New York: Braude Brothers [1967]); English trans. with introduction and notes, by Claude V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, c.2003). 24 Mei had definitively established that the ancient Greek modes were different from the church modes by being essentially the same arrangement of tones transposed higher or lower on the Greek gamut; thus, depending on their register, some modes were more relaxed, others more intense, much like our modern scales. See his "Letter to Vincenzo Galilei, 8 May 1572," in Palisca, The Florentine Camerata, 66-67. 25 Further on Mei's theories, see Hanning, OfPoetry and Music's Power, 31-41. 26 Translated excerpts from Galilei's Dialogo may be found in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed. by Leo Treitler (New York and London, 1998), and in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York: Schirmer, 1984), 166-68. The passage quoted above is taken from the latter, 167-68. 27 Compare the following passage from Bardi's Discourse on Ancient Music and Good Singing (Sopra Ia musica antica e 'l cantar bene) addressed to Caccini: "Those great philosophers and connoisseurs of nature understood well that in the low voice is slowness and sonmolence, in the 25 �medium quiet, majesty, and magnificence, and in the high shrillness and lament. Now who does not know that the drunken and the somnolent usually speak in a low tone and slowly, and that men of great affairs converse in a medium voice, quiet and magnificent; ... that in the rhythms are the portraits of anger, mildness, strength, temperance, and of every other moral virtue, as well as of all those qualities which are their contraries, ... " (quoted and translated in Hanning, Of Poetry and Music's Power, 37-38). The entire discourse is printed and translated in Palisca, The Florentine Camerata, 90-131. Further on Caccini' s relations with Bardi, see Claude V. Palisca, "The Camerata fiorentina: A Reappraisal," Studi musicali I (1972), 203-36. 28 Pirrotta, "Orpheus, Singer of strambotti," in Music and Theatre, 3-36. 29 See D.P Walker, "Ficino's Spiritus and Music," Annates musicologiques I (1953), 131-50. For a more extensive treatment of these ideas, see Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. I 01-44. °Ficino wrote: "Remember that song is the most powerful imitator of all things. 3 For it imitates the intentions and affections of the soul ... "; quoted and trans. by Walker from the third book ofFicina's De triplici vita in "Ficino's Spritus and Music," 139. 31 On the precise role of music in Poliziano's Oifeo, see Pirrotta, "Orpheus," 19-36. 32 Hanning, Of Poetry and Music's Power, 27. 33 Giulio Caccini, Le nuove musiche (Florence, 1601 [1602, modern style]), facs. Rome, 1934; critical and performing edition, edited with a translation ofCaccini's important Preface by H. Wiley Hitchcock in Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, vol. 9 (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1970). 34 Tomlinson, "Pastoral and Musical Magic," 17. Tomlinson also argues that "early opera was not a specific version of pastoral drama"; rather, both genres "arose from a culture whose world still offered magical realms' and grew out of 'the esotericism that burgeoned in Renaissance thought in the wake of the fifteenth-century revival ofNeoplatonism" (Joe. cit.). 35 Quoted in Christopher Braider, Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 156. 36 Leon Battista Alberti, Dells Pittura [On Painting], trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966/R\971); see especially 72-76. 37 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, the New Version (Berkeley: Univsity of California Press, 1974/R 2004), 295ff. 38 George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theater: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 216. 26 �HOW OPERA BE6AN Agostino Carracci, Orpheus and Euridice 1594-97 HOW OPHRA BH6AN AND WHY OPHRA BH6AN Florence -why THERE? ca.1600 - why THEN? �Marco da GAGLIANO 1608: Wrote Preface describing opera's origins 3 1597/98: Favola by Ottavio RINUCCINI (conrt poet) Music begun by Jacopo CORSI ("learned amateur") Completed by Jacopo PERI ("skilled composer and singer") 1608: Marco da GAGLIANO Expanded original libretto Composed new music Wrote Preface describing opera's origins 4 �1597198: Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi La Dafne 1608: Gagliano I Rinuccini La Dafne 5 1597198: Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi La Dafne 1600 Marriage of Marie de' Medici Oct. 4 Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed (Preface) Oct. 6 Peri I Caccini, L 'Euridice first performed 1608: Gagliano I Rinuccini LaDafne 6 �1597198: Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi La Dafne 1600 Feb. Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome Oct. 4 Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed Oct. 6 Peri I Caccini L 'Euridice first performed Oct. 6? Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published 1608: Gagliano I Rinuccini, La Dafoe 1597198: Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi La Dafne 7 1600 Feb. Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome Oct. 4 Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed Oct. 6 Peri I Caccini L 'Euridice first performed Oct. 6? Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published Oct. 9 1608: Caccini, II rapimento di Cefalo performed Gagliano I Rinuccini, LaDafne 8 �1597198: Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi 1600 Feb. Oct. 4 Oct. 6 Oct. 6? Oct. 9 Rinuccini, L "Euridice libretto printed Peri I Caccini L 'Euridice first performed Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published Caccini, II rapimento di Cefalo performed La Dafne Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome 1601 Jan. Caccini L 'Euridice score published Feb. Peri L 'Euridice score published 1608: Gagliano I Rinuccini, LaDafne 1597198: Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi La Dafne 9 1600 Feb. Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome Oct. 4 Oct. 6 Oct. 6? Oct. 9 Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed Peri I Caccini L 'Euridice first performed Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published Caccini, II rapimento di Cefalo performed 1601 Jan. Caccini L 'Euridice score published Feb. Peri L 'Euridice score published 1602 Feb. Caccini, Le nuove musiche Dec. 5 Caccini, L 'Euridice first performed 1608: Gagliano I Rinuccini, LaDafne 10 �1597/98: Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi La Dafne 1600 Feb. Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome Oct. 4 Oct. 6 Oct. 6? Oct. 9 1601 Jan. Feb. 1602 Feb. Dec. 5 Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed Peri/ Caccini L 'Euridice first performed Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published Caccini, 11 rapimento di Cefalo performed Caccini L 'Euridice score published Peri L 'Euridice score published Caccini, Le nuove musiche Caccini, L 'Euridice first performed 1607 Monteverdi I Striggio, Lafavola d'Orfeo 1608: Gagliano I Rinuccini, LaDafne 11 1597/98: Rinuccini/ Peri/ Corsi LaDafne 1600 Feb. Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome Oct. 4 Oct. 6 Oct. 6? Oct. 9 1601 Jan. Feb. 1602 Feb. Dec. 5 1607 Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed Peri/ Caccini L 'Euridice first performed Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published Caccini, II rapimento di Cefalo performed Caccini L 'Euridice score published Peri L 'Euridice score published Caccini, Le nuove musiche Caccini, L 'Euridice first performed Monteverdi/ Striggio, L '01jeo 1608 1608: Monteverdi/ Rinuccini, L'Arianna LaDafne Gagliano I Rinuccini, 12 �Lasciatemi morire, Let me die, lasciatemi morire; e che volete voi che mi conforte in cosi dura sorte, in cosi gran martire? Let me die! And who do you think could console me in so dreadful a fate, in such great torment? Lasciatemi morire, Lasciatemi morire. Let me die! Let me die! 13 WHY FLORENCE? 14 �WHY f'LORENC£? 1. Long tradition of musical theater - INTERMED I 15 �WHY f'LOR£NC£? 1. Long tradition of musical theater- INTERMEDI 2. Network of academies- CIVIC HUMANISM Bardi's Camerata 0 Alterati Academy Medici court Corsi's circle 0 17 �1589 INT£RSM£DI The Team: Giovanni de' Bardi, artistic director Ottavio Rinuccini, poet Emilio de' Cavalieri, musical director Bernardo Buontalenti, costume and stage design Music by Cristofano Malvezzi and Luca Marenzio, with contributions from Jacopo Peri, Giulio Caccini, and Giovanni de' Bardi 20 �1lNT£RM£DI '1 (1: 1lNT£RM£DI �INT£RM£DI INT£RM£DI 24 �IlNT£RM£DI IlNT£RM£DI 26 �IlNJTERSMEDI 27 , __ : _.,_.-_-_, :·: _""--' _: __ --,,-_ ':~::_-:::~ ~c:: c:·:____ ---~----=-=-=-":~-':~':_.:'_:O..:_~===-=:=o_ ----- 0o __ ~co_ ~c_,__ ,,,- ,-.~'- ''- -=--~--=====--=--== -~~-~-··__'_,_·--~~~_:_~~ -- .. _c_, _________________ -'----------- --· -~---------~------- -~---- =---'--- __ __:__::-c,.::c:.:.::.::·:c•·· - -- _---------------------_ _ _ _ _ _ ,_____c.:_ _______ :_ _ _:c:.:..:c --------------------------- __ ]:_•·---·-------'-------·----'----'-'-=--'--' ---- - - - . ----------------------- =· ~:--=Nernrol'K"~:£ac:auemie-'S::=~-c~me~J.rMWN1BME~~ -,-_----------------------------------c··c-:,o,'-----'---'--·----,---------';-'----:o':_c· - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ----------------------------------- - - - - - - -~'-'--'--'-'------'----"-----'----'-----~--,-,------,---- -.---;----..-,-------·-· ---"--'----'------'--'--·--'----------"'' "'-"-------=--'-----------'-------- -·-~-.·------'----'-~--~--~-c ·----------------~--- -----~----"--------- --------- - --,----,---------,-,----,----,---,------.. -.. -- ----,--------~---,- ----------------------------- -c--·- - " -·--'-----'---·-- -----'-- ---~------;-------.--,-,--------,--, -,------"--------.-. -"c-= ... - .. ---,----------~-------.-- ----c=-~-- �HUMANISM Gary Tomlinson, "Renaissance Humanism and Music," European Music, 1520-1640 1. Philological humanism Girolamo Mei 2. Rhetorical humanism Vincenzo Galilei 3. Ordinary-language humanism Rinuccini, Corsi, and Peri29 HUMANISM Alterati (Academy of the Altered Ones) Giovanni de' Bardi Girolamo Mei Ottavio Rinnccini Jacopo Corsi "Pioneers in the theory of dramatic music" 3o �HUMANISM Camerata Giovanni de' Bardi Girolamo Mei Vincenzo Galilei Giulio Caccini 31 HUMANISM Camerata Vincenzo Galilei Giulio Caccini 32 �ViNCENZO 6ALII.m, DIALOGO D£l.J..A MUSICA ANTICA E D£l.J..A MODERNA, t5e 1 Do away with vocal counterpoint. Adopt monody (melody with simple accompaniment). Imitate nature (by following the patterns of speech) 33 ViNCENZO 6ALII.m, DIALOGO D£l.J..A MUSICA ANTICA E D£l.J..A MODERNA, 1581 "Kindly observe in what manner the actors speak, in what range, high or low, how loudly or how softly, how rapidly or slowly they enunciate their words ... how one speaks when infuriated or excited; how a married woman speaks, how a girl, how a lover ... how one speaks when lamenting, when crying out, when afraid, and when exulting with joy." 34 �WH1f FLORENCE? I. Long tradition of musical theater -INTERMEDI 2. Network of academies- CIVIC HUMANISM 3. Particular Renaissance worldviewMUSICAL MAGIC 35 MUSICAL MA6IC Angelo Poliziano, Orfeo (1480) 36 �MUSICAL MAGIC Neoplatonism Lorenzo de' Medici (The ~nu.5.u.u• Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) "music-spirit theory" Angelo Poliziano, Orfeo (148 �Titian Bacchus descending to rescue the abandoned Ariadne from her fate 1522-23 �41 HOW OPERA BE6AN AND WJn1 OPERA BE6AN Florence -why THERE.? ca.1600 -why THEN? �Roger de Piles, Abrege de Ia vie des peintres (1699) "One must think of painting as a kind of stage on which each figure plays its role." 43 Filippo Villani, DE ORI6J.NE (1381-2) Images formed by [Giotto's] brush agree so well with the lineaments of nature as to seem to the beholder to live and breathe; and his pictures appear to perform actions and movements so exactly as to seem ([when seen] from a little way off) actually speaking, weeping, rejoicing, and doing other things, not without pleasure from him who beholds and praises the talent and skill of the artist. 44 �Giotto, Lamentation (1303-6), fresco from the Arena Chapel, Pad11a ALBERTI'S COMPOSJTJO from Della pittura, 1435-36 Period /\ Clause + Clause PhrAase Aord Picture Bod~y 1\ 11ember + 11ember Plan/.\ane 46 �Alberti: "In my view, there is no painted narrative so filled with so great a variety of events that nine or ten persons will not be capable of acting them out quite fittingly." ~Della pittura 47 �The Last Supper, ca. 1200 Psalter illumination (Musee Conde, Chantilly) 49 ILeon:ardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1495-97 (Milan, Santa Maria delle Gn1zie:)l after restoration, 1997-2001 50 �after restoration, 1997-200 I 52 �Jacopo Tintoretto, The Last Supper, 1592-94 53 (San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice) 54 �55 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio Boy Bitten by a Lizard, c. 1597 (London, National Gallery) �Boy Bitten by a Lizard, detail 58 �Artemesia Genti1eschi Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1620 (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) Artemisia Genti1eschi SelfPortrait as La Pittura, c. 1630 �61 Nympha<:um (1583-93), by Bernardo Buontalenti, Florence ��66 �67 George Kernodle, ?W#t ~to 7~ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.) "Modem theatre grew out of the desire to see and hear with living actors the romantic stories and allegorical fancies already portrayed by the painters." 68 �Frank Kernodle, ';'UJ#t ,rt.a ta 7/eeattze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.) "Early opera grew out of the desire to see and hear with singing actors the romantic stories and allegorical fancies already portrayed by the painters." Baldassarre Peruzzi (!481-1537), stage design 69 ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 64 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource How Opera Began (And Why It Began in Florence) Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 25, 2011, by Barbara Hanning as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanning, Barbara Russano, 1940- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-03-25 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Opera. Italy. Florence. History and criticism. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Hanning_Barbara_2011-03-25 Relation A related resource <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/30" title="Audio recording">Audio recording</a> Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a5a902579fa049466a7a84dc7bca7452.mp3 0309ed0d979e41620c6c41738efeb698 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:09:43 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 Politics According to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (with Emphasis on The Brothers Karamazov) Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 31, 2000, by Donna Orwin as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Note: the audio cuts out briefly at 00:45:47. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Orwin, Donna Tussing, 1947- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000-03-31 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission has been given to make this available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910--Political and social views Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881--Political and social views Political science--Philosophy Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881. Bratʹi︠a︡ Karamazovy Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Orwin_Donna_2000-03-31_ac Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d34aed13624e9834bdf439cb45e0126d.mp4 9922934162c7493bde007b90830be93b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp4 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:17:48 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Genesis Chapter Three Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 2, 2022, by William Braithwaite as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Braithwaite offers this description: "The Garden of Eden story, about Adam and Eve, what they did and how they were punished for it, is the authoritative source for the Christian doctrine of original sin. Before St. Augustine and St. Paul appropriated it for this purpose, however, the story belonged to the Hebrew Scriptures of the ancient Israelites, and Judaism has no dogma of original sin. But even before ancient rabbis put the story in writing many centuries ago, it may, some scholars suggest, have circulated orally. If we try to imagine who first told the story, and to whom, and with what end in mind, what would we take it to be about, and what truth might we find in it? What does the story say to those who are not Christians or Jews, whether of another faith, or even atheist or agnostic? Seeking reliable speculations on such questions is the work behind this lecture." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Braithwaite, William T. (William Thomas) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-09-02 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Bible. Genesis Eve (Biblical figure) David, King of Israel Parables Solomon, King of Israel Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Braithwaite_William_2022-09-02_ac Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/568ad47ae544caa11b62da037a979e81.pdf cde1daa212da77f14795c8731c3144fe PDF Text Text 1 "YOU ARE THAT!" The Upanishads Read Through Western Eyes1 © Robert Druecker, February, 2008 The original title of this lecture-"'You Are That! "'-was a quotation, from the Chandogya Upanishad, of an exclamation made several times by a man named "Uddalaka" to his son Svetaketu. The "That" refers to a realm or state of being, known as "Brahman." One who experiences it is called a "knower of Brahman" (brahmavid). Uddfilaka was a knower of Brahman, speaking to his son out of his direct experience. The classical Upanishads are expressions of and invitations to this direct experiencing. So, understanding them is a matter of understanding what that experiencing is like, not a matter of believing or knowing some truths about the world. Thus, the lecture, in elucidating the meaning of its title, will convey a sense of the experience of Brahman, which is what the Upanishads as a whole are about. But, of course, their ultimate aim is not simply to produce understanding in this sense, but rather to eventuate in the actual experiencing of the Brahman-realm. Even Sankara, the most highly esteemed expositor of the Upanishads, a man noted for his theoretical acumen, wrote: . One should consider theoretical reflection as 100 times more efficacious than oral instruction, and meditation as 100,000 , times more efficacious than theoretical reflection. As for [the direct experiencing of the Brahman-realm], it has consequences which defy all comparison. · The revised title of the lecture is: '"You Are That!': The Upanishads Read Through Western Eyes." For I have followed Aristotle's recorrimendation to begin with the things .best . . . . known to us; where 'us,' in this case, ~efers to the St John's community. Thus,Part One will give a sense of what the Brahman-realm is like by elaborating on an analogous experience in Homer and Aristotle. Part Two, much of which will be delivered on Tuesday afternoon in the Conversation Room, will elucidate the experiencing of Brahman in a more direct way. �2 Finally, many of the writings in the Upanishads are dialogues involving a knower of Brahman. Yajfiavalkya is the central figure in the conversations in the oldest Upanishad. In working on this lecture, I have asked him, as a knower of Brahman, for some help. So, during the lecture Yajfiavalkya will be providing us with his sense of what it is in Homer or Aristotle that is analogous to the Brahman-realm. �3 Part One: vos1v and Jl.w:iul (Conjunction) A.Homer Homer frequently refers to human beings or gods waking up to, or realizing, the full significance of a situation (voEtv) or to their ability to do so (v6oc; in some uses). 2 Paradigmatically the verb in the aorist expresses an individual's sudden flash of insight. Resisting his parents' entreaties, Hektor has held his position, as he watches Achilleus coming toward him. He is pondering what might happen should he retreat or should he offer to return Helen; but then Achilleus closes upon him: "And trembling took hold of Hektor when the realization suddenly struck him [what single combat against Achilleus really meant], and he could no longer stand his ground there, but ... fled, frightened ... " (I, 22.136-37). 3 When the progressive aspect is used, it conveys the process of pieces gradually fitting together to form a wholly new picture, as when Theoklymenos tells the suitors that the ·realization is dawning upon him that there is an evil on the way which they will not be able to avoid (0, 20.367-70). Because of the intensity of the character's involvement in the situation, the experienced shift in significance is often accompanied by strong emotion, as seen in the Hektor-example earlier. When the insight concerns an individual object, instead of a situation, then the realization is always accompanied by such emotion; it is as if the shift in the meaning of the situation were compressed into a single thing or person. So, Menelaos, having caught sight of Paris, leaps down from his chariot. Then "when [Paris] realized the full significance of · Menelaus standing there among the champions, the heart was shaken within him'~ (I, 3 .29-31~ the full significance being that Menelaus is drawing near, full of an overwhelming desire to kill Paris. �4 'Realization of significance' has a variety of meanings that spread over a directional arc. 4 A character begins in a situation in which he has already seemingly recognized (ytyvrocnct::tv) the surrounding things or people as definite individuals that are familiar. Then their real significance is awakened to, a corresponding emotional impact is experienced, and a way of dealing with the newly perceived situation comes to light and the will to do so arises. Thus, the present naturally extends itself into the future. When the primary meaning is at either end of this arc, the other parts of the arc are co-present. Thus, when the emphasis is on present clarity of mind, as when Kirke tells Odysseus that no magic can work on his ability always to realize what is the real meaning of the situation in which he finds himself, the insightful character of his future aims, plans, and actions is also on her mind (0, 10.329). Or when the accent is on willing an action in the future, it iilVolves a clear vision in the present (e.g., I, 144-49). The realization of significance may or may not be prepared for by a thought process. But when it is, it itself is distinct from the preceding reasoning, in the same way as 'seeing' one of Euclid's proofs is different from figuring out how it is justified in terms of previous propositions. Yajfiavalkya now observed to me that realizing Brahman, too, could be characterized as including an emotional response, joy (ananda), and a way of acting, calm responsiveness to the whole situation. The realization may penetrate to great depth and extend {ar in space and time, like Theoklymenonos's referred to earlier or like that involving Athena when she speaks to Achilleus as he is drawing his sword to kill Aga.inemnon-the breadth and depth of which took a whole Dean's Lecture to elucidate a couple of years ago. The more intense the situation and the deeper and broader the realization, the more likely it is that the characters are raised above their ordinary abilities, so that they are able to see almost �5 all the implications and consequences of the situation with unusual clarity and to act with extraordinary foresight. This experience of being raised above the ordinary is a divine manifestation. 5 Homer most often mentions Athena and Apollo in such moments. For instance, Odysseus's sudden realization of the true meaning of return-its being the right time to reveal himself to Telemachos-is the presencing of Athena (0, 16.155ff). And Hektor's sudden waking up to danger when he was about to oppose Achilleus is Apollo's manifesting himself (I, 20.375ff). These two examples point to the difference between the two gods. Athena remains untroubled and serene in the midst of action while she is discerning at every juncture what the instant requires, is planning the deed with precision, and is poised and ready to bring it about energetically. Apollo, on the other hand, is associated with a cognitive attitude of stately objectivity and a ranging gaze, distance and freedom, clarity and good form. He is the god of the saving, or preserving, awareness (crcocppocruvri) expressed in the Delphic dictum, "Know thyself," meaning, 'Realize what human beings really are, that is, how great a distance separates them from the omnitemporal gods' (HG, 216-17, 215, 52, 57, 59, 78-79, 66). Yajiiavalkya remarked that such traits as serenity in the midst of action, the freedom of a ranging gaze, and saving, or preserving, awareness pertain to the Brahman-realm as well. In a manifestation of Athena or Apollo, the god is revealed as the very essence of the realization. That is, the realization's ultimate meaning is that it is a ray of the divine illumining · human life. Homer realizes that the complete lucidity in which we sometimes act Is a connection . with something superior to us, even though we think of it as a quality of our own minds. In decisive moments what a warrior realizes is both himself and the deity together (HG, 7, 247, 174, 184-85) . .Yajiiavalkya commented that in the Upanishads, this non-separateness of the human �6 and 'divine' is known as "non-duality" (advaita; BU, N.3,32): "Whoever meditates on a divinity that is other (anyiim) [than himself], thinking, 'This [god] is one (anyah), I am another (anyah),' does not know ['I am Brahman']." (BU, 1.4.10). Homer's recognition of moments in which the divine and the human are non-dual is sharply opposed to a view that would see Athena and Apollo as external 'causes' of the events he is narrating (HG, 213). Yajiiavalkya said that, somewhat similarly, we are invited to awaken to Brahman not as an external cause but rather as what is most profound in our experience. When the god is present in moments of non-duality, the warrior's ego and personality recede into the background (HG, 241f). That sort of impersonality, which also characterizes our moments of experiencing the truth of a Euclidean proposition, is inherent in the Brahman-realm, according to Yajiiavalkya. The divine coming-to-presence has been said to occur at "the critical moment when human powers suddenly converge, as if charged by electric contact, on some insight, some resolution, some deed." Lightning comes forth from the clouds to strike buildings or trees which have risen from the earth; so, too, the divine suddenly emerges from the background to shock an individual only when the individual has gone forth from himself toward the background (HG, 6, 210, 195). Yajiiavalkya noted that the instant1of recognition of the Brahman realm is _also compared to "a sudden flash oflightning" (BU, 11.3.6; cp. KeU, IV.4). Moreover, he thought that the going-forth toward the background might be, in some way, analogous to a 'movingtowards' Brahman, going-forth involved either in practicing meditation or in coming to wonder, 'Who aml?' While, in the examples given so far, the divine manifestation has come _in an awakening to significance or in an elaborating of a plan, this should not lead us to think that deity is �7 encountered in the inward turn. The appearance of the goddess is not, for instance, Achilleus' s pondering whether to kill Agamemnon or to check his anger (I, 1.193 ), but rather the resolution of his introspection in a flash of certitude (HG, 174, 48). Yajfiavalkya agreed that introspection neither characterizes the Brahman-realm nor is a means thereto. However, there is, he said, a different sort of inward turn which can facilitate its realization. There are many instances in which a god is there, at a moment when none of the characters is aware of it. But at times, when awakening to the full significance of his situation, a warrior may realize that his very awakening is itself the manifestation of a god. An interesting example occurs when Poseidon appears to the Aiantes in the likeness ofKalkas. At first neither brother is aware of the presence of a god; but, after Poseidon departs like a hawk, Aias son of Oi:leus realizes that some god, whom he does not recognize, has addressed them, while Telemonian Aias notices only his own increased strength and energy (I, 13.43-80). On other occasions the human being recognizes the god by name--sometimes only after the encounter, but sometimes already at its inception (HG, 207-08). A god may be especially 'close' to a particular individual in that the human being regularly displays the qualities of the particular god, as Athena acknowledges Odysseus does (0, 13.330-32; HG, 192-95). There is even one person who seems to be fully awake to divin~ presence-Homer himself, who sees events through and through even when the participants see only the surface. And often when the participants sense only that a divine hand is touching them the poet is able to name the god concerned and knows the · secret of his purpose. (HG, 195-96) According to Yajiiavalkya this variation, .among human beings, in the frequency with which, and degree to which, they notice the divine presence in moments of waking up to meaning matches a corresponding variation in noticing Brahman. �8 So far in Homer we have emphasized cognition. This is appropriate in that cognition in a broad sense is the way in which we come to realize Brahman. However, it gives a distorted picture of the world as Homer depicts it. For there are many gods-Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon, Hera, and others-who manifest themselves in the world in addition to the two who are especially associated with realizing significance. Moreover, the appearance of a deity often involves an inner phenomenon other than awakening, as when Hektor's body is "packed full of force arid fighting strength" (I, 17.211-12) or when Athena puts "courage into the heart" of Nausikaa (0, 6.140). Yajfiavalkya said that these phenomena of enlivening, energizing, and strengthening were included, along with realization, in what the Upanishads call the "Inner Controller" (antaryamin; BU, III.7.1). 6 Also, that Homer realized that they, too, were divine manifestations shows that he did not think of non-duality as limited to cognition. Second, a deity often manifests itself by affecting a character from outside. Most notably, Patroklos's aristeia was put to an end by Apollo, who "stood behind him, and struck his back and his broad shoulders with a flat ~troke of the hand so that his eyes spun" (I, 16.791-92). Yajfiavalkya pointed out that events like this might be echoes of Brahman as "pouring forth," or "emitting," all things (MuU, I.1. 7). He added that just as Homer recognizes the one Apollo both in his striking of Patrdclus and in Hektor's realization referred to earlier, so the Upanishads express the realization that the inner controlling and the outer emitting are one, in stating: "This Self is ... Brahman" (BU, II.5.19). �9 B. Aristotle and Averroes Now for help in thinking through the experiences highlighted by Homer, we turn to Aristotle. In moments ofrealization, we are in a state of what he called "being-at-work," what I'll call 'activity.' Activity is "complete over any time whatever"; it is not a temporal phenomenon. In distinction from it, a motion "is in time and directed at some end ... and is complete when it brings about that at which it aims" (NE, 1174a15-21). For example, whereas the activity of dancing is 'all there' at each moment, the motion of learning to dance is complete only when you've actually become a dancer. Homer's gods Athena and Apollo are manifested in activities of ours which would be "choiceworthy in themselves" (NE, 1144al) even if they didn't make anything in addition. The active state of our ability to awaken to significance is what is best and most powerful in us and is "either divine itself or the most divine of the things in us." When it is directed toward the most divine, timeless things, it is a pure beholding (NE, 1177a13-21). One living in this state of activity would be living a life that "is divine as compared with a human life." Hence, Aristotle said, "one ought to immortalize" (NE, 1177b25-34). That is, one ought to be as much as possible in this best state of activity, that of the immortals, like Athena, in Homer or that of the impersonal divine in Aristotle. Wlien we are in that state, we are for a period of time in the same state as the divine itself is in, over the whole oftime. 7 Moreover, "each person would even seem to be_this [best state of activity]" (NE, 1178al). "[A]nd so the person who loves and gratifies this is most a lover of self' (NE, l 168b33). Yajfiavalkya commented that the Brahman-realm, too, has the characteristics of not being a temporal phenomenon, of being a sort of pure beholding, and of being our true self. Moreover, it, too, is impersonal, not divided up into essentially different Athena-moments and Apollo- �10 moments. Finally, knowers of Brahman, living the life of their true self, are leading a life that transcends the human. Thus, most of us live in ignorance of our true self. But whereas Aristotle agrees formally with the implication of Apollo's "Know thyself," that we are ignorant of our true self, yet Aristotle's recognition of the true self as divine seems to contradict Apollo's insistence on the separation between the human and the divine. Yaj:fiavalkya said that when a similar contradiction is voiced in his tradition, the response offered is that the contradiction is only apparent. Someone who took the "You" in "You are That!" to refer to his ordinary sense of self, would be engaging in self-inflation. Students are encouraged to ponder 'Who am I?' as a practice, in order to shift them from the ordinary to the true sense of self. So, Yaj:fiavalkya said, he and Aristotle could both take "Know thyself' in a double sense: 'With respect to your ordinary sense of self, think mortal thoughts, but recognize that the true you is divine activity.' In On the Soul Aristotle began to sketch what might be entailed in realizing the Aristotelian analogue to "You are That!" namely, the immortalizing involvement in the best activity. One of Aristotle's foremost interpreters, Averroes has worked out a detailed portrait in color, which fills in Aristotle's black-and-white sketch in a way that has interesting parallels to 'the Upanishadic picture. To that portrait'we now turn.8 We shall now refer to this best state of activity by its customary name in philosophical texts, "intellection." In Aristotelian fashion Averroes began his account of intellection with what is clearer to us and ended it with what is clearer by nature. There are three main figures in his initial portrait-the "material intellect," the "disposed intellect," and the "agent intellect." Averroes followed Aristotle's comparison of intellection to the action of a craft, in which some material, like clay, receives a form, say, that of a bowl (OS, 430al0-14). When I acquire a �11 simple intelligible, such as, 'straight line,' it is received as form by the material intellect-which, not being corporeal, is material only in the sense that it serves as material-for. My disposed intellect, 9 now having the acquired intelligible as an active disposition ('€~t~), is in what Aristotle calls a first state of maintaining itself(' sxciv) in (' f,\I) its completed condition (r€A.o~), with respect to this intelligible. Henceforth, we shall misleadingly say that it is 'in first actuality.' The accomplished dancer, when not actually dancing, is a dancer in first actuality. When she is actually dancing, she said to be a dancer 'in second actuality.' So, too, when I am actively contemplating the intelligible 'straight line,' perhaps in the course of a demonstration, my intellect is in second actuality. According to Aristotle, "the soul never engages in intellection without an appearance" (43 la24), which Averroes takes to mean imaginative appearance. 10 Thus, when I am led up to (' cnayroyft) a particularly suggestive instance, say a good image of a straight line, that image is what specifies that the material intellect will receive the intelligible 'straight line.' Averroes said that the material intellect, as so determined by my imagination, 11 is "conjoined" with it and that my disposed intellect is precisely this conjunction of the material intellect with my imagination. One of the unusual features of Averroes's interpretation is that according to him there is only one material intellect. My disposed intellect and your disposed intellect are the results of its conjunctions with the different images in our respective imaginations; we actualize it differently. In this way the one material intellect is said to be incidentally many. 12 Moreover, since my imagination is corporeal, therefore, the intelligibles of mundane things in me and, consequently, my disposed intellect itself are generable and corruptible. 13 Yajiiavalkya observed that one might also say that the one Brahman is incidentally many individual selves (jfvatman). �12 Now, before the intelligible 'straight line' can be received by the material intellect, what is irrelevant in the image in which it is 'embodied' must be taken away ('acpmpsro). This abstraction brings it into the state of actual intelligibility. To elucidate this act of abstraction, Averroes referred to another of Aristotle's comparisons: The passage from potential to actual intelligibility is like a color's transition from potential visibility to actual visibility when the lights in a room are turned on. The 'light' that illumines the darkness of the image, producing the abstraction of the latent intelligible, is the agent intellect. However, this picture of the agent intellect as shining from the outside onto a potential intelligible embedded in an image is only the way it first appears to us. Averroes said that if we consider its role in the intellectual insights we have when we draw conclusions from the intelligibles that we have acquired-perhaps, that one and only one straight line may be drawn between two points-we come to a deeper view. In reality the agent intellect is related to the intelligibles of my disposed intellect as form to material. It is somewhat as though the agent intellect were a light 'full' of Color itself. What really happens when it shines on an image is that the image's conjunction with Color itself draws out of the latter a particular color, one which ) had been potentially within Color itself. Then that particular color is received by the material intellect. Even in my acts of intellecting simple intelligibles in the world, the agent intellect is incidentally in partial conjunction with my imagination. 14 I am to a degree intellecting it, so that it, then, is at work as the form of my disposed intellect. 15 For Averroes this understanding of the agent intellect meant that it is itself the source of the intelligibility of the corporeal world. For since the image arose on the basis of sense perception of things in the world, the potential intelligibles in my imagination are due to the potential intelligibles in the things in the world. Consequently, he took the agent intellect to be �13 Aristotle's unmoved mover from the Metaphysics (1072b18-30; 1075a5-11). Hence, there is only one agent intellect; and it is its very activity of unchanging, eternal self-intellection. Correlatively the potential intelligibles of things in the world are their actualities, their being-atwork maintaining themselves in their respective states of completeness. The agent intellect is responsible for their potential intelligibility in the following sense. For each of them its state of completeness is the closest state to the agent intellect's self-intellection that its materials are capable of attaining. 16 Yajiiavalkya noted that the agent intellect as responsible for all intelligible being is somewhat analogous to the one source of all existence in his tradition. But how can the self-directed intellection of the agent intellect be responsible for our intellection of the intelligibles in things outside of itself in the world, when it and the object of its intellection are absolutely one? As reflexively turned toward itself, it is not aware of the multiplicity of the potential intelligibles of mundane things as such. Yet it nevertheless does comprehend them, somewhat in the way that the craft of pottery-making, in a sense, comprehends the forms of all the bowls for which it could be responsible. But to be actively responsible for the intellection of this intelligible on this occasion, the agent intellect must also be 'turned outwards,' as it were, away from itself, in order to shine on the appearances of mundane things, in hu'man beings' imaginations. As outward-turned, prior to illuminating the appearance, it seems to be lacking any intelligible. And yet any one of them can be brought into focus from itself by an image. Thus, surprisingly, the agent-intellect-as-turned-outward is pure potentiality, pure material-for; it is the material intellect. Ill order to appear as such, that is, as empty of intelligibles of mundane things, it must become "temporarily ignorant of itself." 17 �14 This self-forgetfulness is concretely realized by its conjunction with our imaginations. By virtue of that conjunction, the agent intellect becomes 'ignorant' of being the self-intellecting source of all intelligibility; it appears, instead, in each of us in a double form-first, as our partially actualized receptivities for intelligibles (our disposed intellects) and, second, as light eliciting those intelligibles by abstraction from our images. At this point Yajfiavalkya interjected that the agent intellect's ignorance of itself seems to be in amazing agreement with the role of ignorance in the Upanishads: A knower of Brahman "knows knowledge and ignorance, both of them, together" (IU, 11). For Brahman, too, turns outward, so that ignorance, that is, awareness of multiplicity, is one of its aspects. 18 But Brahman is both knowledge and ignorance; the two are inseparable. 19 From the human point of view, as I learn more, the agent intellect becomes the form of my disposed intellect to an ever greater degree. In this way my three principal differences from it will decrease. First, in acquiring more intelligibles, my disposed intellect becomes less and less a partial view of the agent intellect. Second, in advancing to intelligibles which are less and less referred to the corporeal world, my disposed intellect becomes more pure. 20 Third, in coming to ever more encompassing intelligibles, it approaches the agent intellect's unitary VlSIOn. Ultimately, while still "in this life,"21 I may arrive at the point where I have acquired all the intelligibles. 22 Then I will have achieved a state of complete conjunction23 with the agent intellect. My disposed intellect will have lost all traces of individuality, 24 which are what made it my disposed intellect; it will have perished as such. All of me that is not intellect is "cut off' from my intellect, which is identical with the agent intellect. 25 In this sense the state of complete conjunction has been said to involve an "existential break" from the world. 26 Once again �15 Yajfiavalk:ya was surprised to recognize in this existential break an analogue in the Aristotelian tradition, at such a deep experiential level, to a prominent feature of the realization of Brahman. In complete conjunction I experience myself permanently27 as shining forth intelligibility, but this 'myself is not the self! used to think I was. For the conjunction removes what had been preventing my recognition of the ag~nt intellect as being my form. 28 Averroes said that then the agent intellect, united with us as our form, functions as our sole operative principle. 29 We might wonder what life in this state of conjunction would be like. One suggestion is that I might experience it as "a wakeful loss of rationality," a loss of consciousness of my humanity. 30 I would not be engaged in thinking things out; I would not be conscious of myself as an individual, as a member of the human species. Alternatively, guided somewhat by his own experience, Yajfiavalkya proposed that perhaps I might be aware of myself (what Aristotle in the Ethics poi.rited to as my true self) engaged in self-intellection, while simultaneously being aware of experiencing my ordinary self involved in its everyday activities against this backdrop. Yajfiavalkya mentioned two possibilities, the second of which was not analogous to his own experience. First, in each instance of intellection, I could perhaps experience the agent intellect as transitioning from unitary self-intellection to the offering of an aspect of itself to my imagination. Second, analogous to the end of the path outlined in the Yoga-Sutras (that is, kaivalya), 31 it could be that engaged in self-intellection I ignore and desist from everyday activities, and so, ultimately, wither away and die_. 32 �16 1 NEH-supported lectures given at St. John's College, Annopolis, on February 15 and 19, 2008 and dedicated to the memory of Ralph Swentzell, who did so much to further the study of Eastern Classics at St. John's College. 2 This and the following few paragraphs are based on K. von Fritz, "NOO:E and NOEIN in the Homeric Poems," Classical Philology 38. (1943), 79-93. 3 The translations from Homer are based upon those listed in the bibliography. 4 This "directional arc" is analogous, at a higher level, to Merleau-Ponty's arc intentionnel on ~e level of sensing (Merleau-Ponty, 158). 5 The following few paragraphs are based on W. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954). 6 The Inner Controller is depicted mythologically as follows: He entered in here right to the tips of the nails, as a razor slips into a razor-case .... When he breathes he is called 'breath'; when he speaks, 'speech'; when he sees, 'eye'; when he hears, 'ear'; when he thinks, 'mind.' They are just the names of his actions. Whoever meditates on any one of these does not know [the Self], for [the Self] is not completely active in any one of them. One should meditate on them as [being] simply the Self (BU, 1.4.7) 7 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1075a7-l l: "So, the condition the human intellect .. . is in at some period of time ... is the condition the intellection that intellects itself is iii over the whole of time." Cf.: "For the gods, the whole of life is blessed, and for human beings it is so to the extent that there is in it some likeness to such a state of activity" (NE, l l 78b25-26). 8 I am indebted to my colleague, Michael Blaustein, for a: very fruitful recent conversation about Averroes. This section is based upon the works of Altmann, Black, Blaustein, Hyman, Ivry, Leaman, and Zedler listed in the bibliography. Leaman and Zedler have been particularly helpful for the early part, but I have taken most of it from Black. In the later part I have relied heavily on Blaustein's working out of the details of the relation between agent and material intellects and have made significant use of Altmann and lvry, especially the latter's thoughts about conjunction while we are still alive. However, responsibility for any . errors that there may be in the interpretation of Averroes is mine alone. 9 OSl...11 Y ~('aql bi al-ma/aka), which means intellect in natural disposition, aptitude, faculty; intellectus in habitu. 10 Also: "the intellective [part of the soul] intellects the [intelligible] looks in appearances" (43 lb2). I accept Nussbaum's (1978) suggestion about the meaning of <pavwia. It is based on such passages as the following 428al, 7, 14ff, & 29ff; b30fi), wherein the link between <pav•o"ia and <paivi::cr0at seems compelling. 11 In fact, for Averroes the imagination or, more properly, the cogitative power-which, together with the imagination and memory; prepares what is given in sensation, so that, when illumined by the agent intellect, the intelligible look can appear through and in-form the material intellect-is a fourth intellect, the passible intellect (LC, 449.174, cp. 409.640). "The cogitative power has the following functions : it can make an absent object appear as though present; it can compare and distinguish the re-presented_objects with each other; it can judge whether a given re-presented object bears a relation to a directly presented sense intention" (Zedler, 1954, 441). 12 Zedler, 1951, 175. 13 Yet because the human species is eternal, the succession of human souls in which intellection ofintelligibles of mundane things occurs ensures the continuity ofintellection in the material intellect and the omnitemporality of the intelligible looks of mundane things as such. Through the repeated presentation of potential intelligibles in imaginative appearances, this succession "provides a replica in time and in matter of the eternal" intellection of the agent intellect (Zedler, 1951, 173). It is possible that the belief that souls migrate into different bodies in succession is a reflection in the form of popular myth of the truth of the omnitemporal unity of the material intellect in the multiplicity of disposed intellects (Altmann, 82). 14 The agentintellect in this incidental connection would be what Aristotle referred to as the intellect that enters from outside the door": "It remains then that intellect alone enters additionally into [the seed of a human being] from outside the door (0upa0ev) and that it alone is divine, for corporeal being-at-work has nothing in common with its being-at-work" (De Gen. 736b27). Cf: �17 But the intellect seems to come to be in [us] while being an independent thing, and not to be destroyed... . [I]ntellecting or contemplating wastes away because something else in us is destroyed, but it is itself unaffected (without attributes). But thinking things through and loving or hating are affections (attributes) not of the intellect but of that which has intellect, insofar as it has it. For this reason, when the latter is destroyed, the intellect neither remembers nor loves, for these acts did not belong to it but to the composite being which has perished; the intellect is perhaps something more divine and is unaffected (OS, 408bl8ff). What Averroes actually says is that the incidental connection constitutes a "disposition" [ ..il~I (Isti'dad), which means readiness, willingness, preparedness, inclination, tendency, disposition, propensity; dispositio] of the agent intellect, but one located within human souls. It is a disposition to receive the intelligible looks of mundane things. Thus, the material intellect is in reality the agent-intellect-as-havingsuch-a-disposition-in-human-beings. 15 "[T]he material intellect is perfected by the agent intellect and intellects if' (Blaustein, 285; italics added). 16 Based on Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072bl2: "[I]t is beautiful and in that way a source." 17 Blaustein, 214-15. 18 Aurobindo, 61-62 and 94. 19 Aurobindo, 58 and 72. 20 When my disposed intellect is actively engaged in intellecting an intylligible look, it is also intellecting itself, since, as Aristotle points out, the intellect is one with what it intellects, in that the second actuality of both is identical, as lumber's being built is one with the activity of building. In contemplating itself as informed by the intelligible look, my intellect is also directed toward the image, which specified which look was to be received, in the same way in which, when we look at a painting, we are directed toward the scene which we see in it. However, since the mundane thing toward which the intellect is directed via the image is not pure intelligibility, therefore, the disposed intellect's self-intellection is not pure selfintellection; its act ofintellection is not absolutely one with its object ofintellection (Blaustein, **). In this way it differs from the self-intellection of the agent intellect. For the object of the agent intellect's intellection does not point beyond itself. 21 lvry, 83. 22 What had been my intellect would now be either fully (Blaustein, 272, 283) or partly assimilated to the agent intellect. That is, either 'I' would be engaged in intellection of everything intelligible or, having abandoned all the contingent aspects of my intellection, I would be focusing solely on its formal aspects, which are supplied by the agent intellect, so that I would be participating in an aspect of the formal governing source of the whole (Leaman, 101-03). 23 Ji......wl (ittisal) = connectedness, unitedness, union; juncture, conjunction, link; connection; contact [from J.,..._, (wasala) =to connect, join, unite, combine, link, attach]. Continuatio =a following of one thing after another, an unbroken series, a connection, continuation, succession [from continuare =to join together in uninterrupted succession, to make continuous]. Wasala may be a reformulation of Aristotle's 0\St~. Altmann (83) states that the notion reflects Plotinus's cruvfut-rEtV [=(tr.) join together; II (intr.) border on, lie next to; combine, be connected with]. Consider: "[W]e lift ourselves up by the part [of the soul] which is not submerged in the body and by this conjoin at our own centres to something like the Centre ofall things .... [W]e must suppose that [our souls conjoin] by other powers, in the way in which that which is engaged in intellection naturally conjoins with that which is being thoroughly intellected and that that which is engaged in intellection ... conjoins with what is akin to it with nothing to keep them apart" (Plotinus, VI.9.8.19-30). Altmann (83n) also mentions that Plotinus refers to his experience of union as a contact ('acpi]). However, in Averroes "conjunction" is to be distinguished from "union": ..ib.wl (ittihad)= oneness, singleness, unity; concord, unison, unanimity; combination; amalgamation, merger, fusion; union [from ..i:.._, (wahada) =to be alone, unique; II to make into one, unite, unify; to connect, unite, bring together, amalgamate, merge]. In Greek the corresponding word is 'tvmcru; = combination into one, union. 24 In its perfected state as engaged in intellection of the agent intellect, the disposed intellect is called the "intellect that has arrived" (intellectus adeptus). 25 Blaustein, 272. 26 Altmann, 74, characterizing the position of Averroes' teacher. 27 Ivry, 83. �18 28 Blaustein, 284. Cp. further: "[T]he material intellect's awareness of itself even when it is not thinking of any intelligible form .... is itself kind of actuality, however empty. Averroes claims that this kind of selfawareness is in fact the obverse of the [agent] intellect's fully conscious awareness of itself; the material intellect's awareness of its own potentiality is a dim awareness of its actuality as the [agent] intellect." 29 It is interesting to note that with respect to conjunction, the agent intellect exercises all four kinds of responsibility that Aristotle describes in the Physics. It is responsible for my attainment of conjunction in functioning as my end (tf:A.oi;). Moreover, it is responsible for the motion oflearning, by which I approach conjunction; for my learning is really its producing intelligibles in me by revealing itself to me as the form of my disposed intellect (Blaustein, 276-77). Since the agent intellect is what I am more and more coming to intellect and, so, to be, it is also responsible for conjunction in the way a form is. Finally, it is also responsible as material, since the material intellect is ultimately identical with it. The same could be said of Brahman, with the key difference that its responsibility is not limited to the realm of intelligibility. 30 Blaustein, 272. 31 Patafijali, IV.34; see also Feuerstein's comment (p. 145). Kaivalya is "the aloneness" of seeing. 32 Finally, as far as Averroes' position with respect to individual immortality goes, there are two interesting possibilities. He may have thought that the only immortality was the impersonal immortality of the state of conjunction and that philosophers were orienting their lives accordingly. The belief in personal immortality on the part of ordinary people would then be the closest approximation to the truth of which they were capable. On the other hand, he may have held that while a few intellects may attain conjunction of, all souls are immortal (Zedler, 1954, 451-52). There is a somewhat similar divergence in the Upanishadic tradition between Sankara's position that the individual self is in a sense unreal and Ramanuja's view that individual selves, while not independent, are real. a �19 Part Two: Cit (Pure Awareness) To begin the final section, we return to Aristotle. In the Nichomachean Ethics, he states: [O]ne who is seeing is aware ('mcr8cive-rat) that he is seeing, and one who is hearing [is aware] that he is hearing, ... whenever we are perceiving [we are aware] that we are perceiving and whenever we are engaged in intellection (vocoµev) [we are aware] that we are engaged in intellection (l l 70a29-3 l). 1 To what aspect of experience is Aristotle pointing here? The prevalent view has been that he means that, say, perceptual consciousness is accompanied by a reflection on, or a thought about, that consciousness:2 'I know that I'm looking at you seated there before me.' However, this seems to occur only intermittently. Hence, an alternative interpretation has been proposed3 that perceptual consciousness is always selfaware, aware (of) itself,4 but not conscious of itself, although, at any given time, we may notice selfawareness to a greater or lesser degree. Yajfiavalkya emphasized to me that it is only through diligent practice that I could learn to recognize the difference between reflective consciousness and selfawareness in my own expenence. To clarify the difference bet_ween selfawareness and reflective consciousness, we shall draw upon some descriptions of experience by the philosopher J.-P. Sartre. 5 Consciousness is necessarily always aware (of) itself, but precisely as being conscious of an object beyond itself. "[T]his awareness (of) consciousness ... is not positional; that is, consciousness is not for itself its own object. Its object is outside or'l.t by nature .... We shall call such a consciousness 'consciousness of the first degree' ... " (S, 23-14). In this lecture 'consciousness' will always -mean positional consciousness, consciousness of ari object. Let us take as an example of first-degree consciousness my perceptual consciousness-ofthe-microphone-on-the-lectern-say, in the mode of staring-at. 6 That perceptual consciousness is not an object for itself, whereas the mike-on-the-lectern is an object for it. But in each such �20 act of consciousness, there lives an attentive presence by virtue of which the consciousness is aware (of) itself. When, as is usually the case, the attentive presence goes unnoticed, we experience only a dim awareness (of) consciousness. Yaj:fiavalkya interjected that in his tradition this awareness is called the "witness" (sakshz; SU, Vl.12-14) and the selfaware quality of consciousness is called "self-luminousness" (svajyotir). He added that this is what he was referring to when he said: "'You cannot see the seer of seeing; you cannot hear the hearer of hearing; you cannot think of the thinker of thinking; you cannot perceive the perceiver of perceiving'" (BU, IIl.4.2). And: "'It is the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the unperceived perceiver. Other than this there is no seer, ... hearer, .. . perceiver"' (BU, 7.23). I responded that Sartre seemed to agree with him that this awareness cannot be the object of consciousness: This sphere "is a sphere of absolute existence, that is, of pure spontaneities, which are never objects ... " (S, 77). As opposed to this selfaware, first-degree consciousness-of-objects, which makes up most of our waking lives, there arises from time to time "a consciousness directed onto [the firstdegree] consciousness, [that is,] a consciousness which takes [the first-degree] consciousness as its object." Sartre calls it a "second-degree" or "reflecting consciousness." Whereas in the previous case there was no duality at all to synthesize, here "we are in the preserice of a synthesis of two consciousnesses, of which one is consciousness ofthe other." When I think, 'Staring at this mike on the lectern is wasting time,' this act of reflective consciousness involves a synthesis of the thinking consciousness and the reflected-upon consciousness-of-the-microphone. Moreover, just like a first degree consciousness, second-degree consciousness, here, my thinking, is selfaware (S, 28-29). - When the thinking consciousness posits the previously unreflected-upon staring consciousness as its object, it is not its own staring that it is positing. What the reflecting �21 consciousness exclaims about the staring, concerns not itself, but the staring consciousness, which is reflected upon. Hence, what reflecting consciousness is turns out to be selfaware consciousness of another, prior, selfaware consciousness, which, in tum, is consciousness of an object that is not a consciousness. It is truly re-fleeting, that is, bending backwards, to look at an earlier moment of consciousness. The fact that it is not its own staring that the thinking consciousness posits in reflecting on the staring consciousness raises the question whether the I that seems to be thinking "is that of the consciousness reflected upon" and not, in fact, an I supposed to be "common to the two superimposed consciousnesses." Indeed, one suspects that the reason why every reflection possesses a sense of self is that the reflective act itself gives birth to the sense of self in the consciousness that is reflected upon (S, 28-29). 7 Sartre offers an example in order to test this hypothesis: ... I was absorbed just now in my reading. I am going to seek to recall the circumstances of my reading. . . . Thus I am going to revive ... also a certain thickness . of un-reflected-upon consciousness, since the objects were able to be perceived only by that consciousness and remain relative to it. That consciousness must not be posited as the object of my reflection; on the contrary, I must direct my attention onto the revived objects, but without losing sight of the un-reflected-upon consciousness, while maintaining a sort of complicity with it and making an inventory of its content in a non-positional way. The result is,,not in doubt. While I was reading, there was consciousness of the book, of the heroes of the novel, but the I was not inhabiting that consdousm;ss ... (S, 30; second set of italics added) Here Sartre reawakens the original selfaware consciousness and dwells in the awareness. That awareness is also a precondition for reflection. Should he reflect, 'I was absorbed in my reading,' then, instead of dwelling in the awareness-component of the original consciousness, he would, as it were, transform it into an act of consciousness, the object of which is the original consciousness, (of) which the awareness was aware. An I is present to that second-order consciousness. 8 So, we m~y call it 'self-consciousness.' �22 Sartre goes on to propose how, based upon this I of self as or reflection, I go on to construct a sense aunity, first, of states, like, for example, my hatred of Peter, then, of actions, like my playing a piano sonata or driving to DC, and, finally, of qualities, like my spitefulness. For instance, let us suppose a first-order consciousness of disgust and anger, together with the perception of Peter. If the self-consciousness reflected only on what was appearing in the firstorder consciousness, it would be thinking, 'I feel disgusted with Peter.' But instead, the angry disgust at Peter appears as a profile, or perspectival view, of a disposition, 'hatred of Peter,' similarly to the way in which a house will show itself to me in different profiles, depending upon where I am standing. The hatred appears to be showing a 'side' of itself through the momentary experience of angry disgust. For the self-consciousness the angry disgust appears to be emanating from the hatred. On a later occasion, perhaps, the hatred will itself appear to refledion as an actualization of a quality of spitefulness, which is in Me (S, 45-46, 51, 53). But in neither case does the self-consciousness realize that the hatred or the spitefulness is arising in the moment of reflection; rather it supposes that the state or the quality was already there in the first-order consciousness. 9 This process resulting in a sense of self leads me to say things like "my consciousness," when in fact "[t]he I is not the owner of consciousness; it is the object of consciousness" (S, 77). Yajfiavalkya noted that a process of construction of the sense of self (aham-kara) figures prominently in the Upanishadic tradition, too. It leads to the arising of many fears and desires, which, in turn, function as barriers to the realization of Brahman by keeping us 'glued' to objects. I responded that here, too, there is a remarkable agreement with Sartre, who wrote: "But perhaps the essential role [of the sense of self] is to mask to consciousness its own spontaneity. . . . Hence, everything happens as if consciousness ... were hypnotizing itself over that sense of self, which it constituted" (S, 81-82). �23 Usually we do not notice the awareness-aspect of consciousness because we are so taken up with what is appearing to consciousness. Yet on occasion awareness may stand out in our experience. For instance, some people are engaged in a heated discussion at an outdoor cafe. A nearby car suddenly backfires. Several of the participants may be so caught up in the conversation that they don't even notice the loud sound. Others may be startled and shift their attention to the street. But someone who was anchored in awareness would notice, but not be jarred by, the sound. Another example: On a good day the football quarterback Joe Montana, at the top of his game, would experience a pass play as follows. 10 He was conscious of the linemen rushing at him, of his receivers running downfield, and so on. But instead oflooking with hurried, anxious glances, he experienced an awareness spread over the whole unfolding scene. All the players seemed to be moving in slow motion, and everything appeared with great clarity and distinctness. He was keenly aware of his own body, the motions of his limbs and an overall sense of relaxation, as his arm drew back and the ball headed toward the receiver. 11 Taken by itself this example may mislead us into thinking that awareness is dependent on the attainment of a certain l~vel of skill, in this case, that of an MVP quarterback. But the previous example and the following one make it clear that this is not the case. A third illustration: Some automobile drivers-when they are not too distracted by their thoughts--experience freeway traffic as follows: 'First, one driver cuts me off; then a slowpoke is holding me up. My consciousness narrows to focus on the offending driver; and, irritated, I react by honking or suddenly changing lanes.' Another driver may perceive the same cars on the beltway as if they were moving in a force field. She is aware of that field as calling forth the alterations in her driving required in order to maintain a smooth flow of traffic. �24 A fourth instance: "Surgeons say that during a difficult operation they have the sensation that the entire operating team is a single organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it as a "ballet" in which the individual is subordinated to the group performance ... ~· 12 The following story shows a transition out of awareness into consciousness: Suppose a woman is engaged in sewing something. A friend enters the room and 'begins speaking to her. As long as she listens to her friend and sews in [awareness], she has no trouble doing both. But if she gives her 'attention to her friend's words and ·a thought arises in her mind as she thinks about what to reply, her hands stop sewing; if she turns her attention to her sewing and thinks about that, she fails to catch everything her friend is saying, and the conversation does not proceed smoothly. In either case . . . . she has transformed [awareness] into thought. As her thoughts fix on one thing, they're blank to all others, depriving the mind of its freedom. 13 This example enables us to avoid the misconception that awareness is incompatible with words. For it was a shift in the way in which she attended to speech, or to her sewing, that led to the woman's loss of the ability to attend to both simultaneously. A final case, as described by Merleau-Ponty (1945): Being most of the time in the consciousness-mode, we live in a world that "only stirs up second-hand thoughts in us." Our mind is taken up with "thoughts, already formulated and already expressed, which we can recall silently to ourselves and by which we give ourselves the illusion of an interior life. But this supposed silence is in reality full of words rattling around." However, occasionally we may "rediscover primordial silence, J.nderneath the words' rattling around." Then we pass from the mode of consciousness-of-objects to dwell in awareness. We experience "a certain emptiness," "a certain lack which seeks to fill itself," to be transformed into speech (213-14). Then there can emerge "an authentic word, one which formulates something for the first time"-such as "that of the child who is pronouncing her first word, of the lover who is discovering his feeling" (207.., 08), or of "the writer who is saying and thinking something for the first time" (214). In the mode of awareness, we can live through a sort of original emergence. �25 Words usually serve to keep our thoughts moving within already formulated articulations. They could be said to function like "preciptitates" (Niederschlage) 14 of previous 'chemical reactions,' whether our own or others'. However, when awareness becomes prominent, it acts as a catalyst, which facilitates a fresh chemical reaction. All the examples manifest an awake, keen involvement in experience together with an absence of the sense of self and of self-focused emotions and motivations from the foreground. And each of them foregrounds a different property of awareness in turn-'unstuckness' to objects, 'spaciousness,' not merely in the spatial and the temporal senses, responsiveness to dynamic qualities of the surrounding field, organic connectedness with who or what 15 is in the field, moving out of awareness with the arising of a directing I, and a sense of emptiness out of which newness arises spontaneously. We might say that a good seminar could give evidence of some of these signs of increased awareness. If over time the participants have developed seminar skills, as the surgical team developed surgical skills, it could become experienced as a ballet. Along with the development of those skills, some of the members may have cultivated their awareness to some degree, paralleling the range of levels of awareness in the operating team. That cultivation may e_nable them to experience "a certain emptiness," from which an "authentic word" may emerge with greater frequency. Such characteristics of awareness as those listed above have-led people in certain pursuits, such as martial arts, to seek to cultivate it, so that it will become reliably foregrounded. In developing a painterly vision, 16 for instance, one must learn to forget what things are, in order to see how they are actually appearing to the eye, which means, how they are coming into being before our eyes. As Merleau-Ponty says of Cezanne: "It is the mountain that he interrogates �26 with his gaze. What exactly does he ask of it? To unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it is making itself a mountain before our eyes." 17 We might expand on this account in the following way. As a potential painter's awareness becomes more prominent, she no longer sees things as already 'finished off,' but~ instead, as having a potential for greater 'aliveness.' It is as if they were calling to her to join in their emergence. Then she may heed the appeal and begin to paint. Now it is this particular ., piece of fruit before her that she captures "coming into being before [her] eyes" in such a way that it can do so later before our eyes. 18 Another example of the cultivation of awareness is found in psychoanalysis. Freud, in his recommendations on the proper attitude to be adopted by the analyst, counsels a state of mind characterized by, first, the absence of reasoning or deliberate attempts to select, concentrate or understand; and [second] even, equal and impartial attention to all that occurs within the field of awareness. . . . This technique, says Freud, " .. . consists simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same 'evenly suspended attention' (as I have called it) in the face of all that one hears ... " 19 That is, the analyst deliberately withdraws from consciousness-of-objects and dwells in the awareness component of consciousness. This open attentional attitude is to be distinguished, on the one 1hand, from a merely passive attention, in which the mind wanders freely from object to object, and, on the other, from a focal attentional attitude, searching for a particular meaning. 20 Partly because evenly suspended attention was criticized as unattainable,21 Freud's prescriptions to practice it did not become integrated into psychoanalytic training programs. However, Wilfred Bion, probably the most thoughtful psychoanalyst of the latter part of the twentieth century, forcefully advocated this practice in the following terms: [T]he capacity to forget, the ability to eschew desire and understanding, must be regarded as essential discipline for the psycho-analyst. Failure to practise this discipline will lead to a steady deterioration in the powers of observation whose maintenance is ~ssential. The vigilant submission to such discipline will by degrees �27 strengthen the analyst's mental powers just in proportion as lapses in this discipline will debilitate them. * * * * * * * * * * To attain to the state of mind essential for the practice of psycho-analysis I avoid any exercise of memory.. . . When I am tempted to remember the events of any particular session I resist the temptation.... If I find that some half-memory is beginning to obtrude I resist its recall.. .. A similar procedure is followed with regard to desires: I avoid entertaining desires and attempt to dismiss them from my mind. For example, ... it interferes with analytic work to permit desires for the patient's cure, or well-being or future to enter the mind. Such desires .. . lead to progressive deterioration of [the analyst's] intuition. [There is an aspect of ultimate reality] that is _currently presenting the unknown and unknowable [in the consulting room]. This is the 'dark spot' that must be illuminated by 'blindness' [that is, ignorance]. Memory and desire are 'illuminations' that destroy the value of the analyst's capacity for observation as a leakage of light into a camera might destroy the value of the film being exposed. 22 The effect of not following this discipline is to interpret what the patient says in terms of what the analyst wishes or already 'knows,' thus closing her off from what may be emerging for the frrst time in the current hour. Bion's psychoanalytic state of mind is comparable to Socratic ignorance. Both represent an opening of oneself, in a conversation, to notice possibilities springing up that would otherwise remain unthought. Another area in which a practice has been advocated for the enhancement of awareness is philosophy. In the early twentieth century, Edmund Husserl proposed pursuing wisdom by following a path that he called "phenomenology." By this he meant an account of the things I appearing to you precisely in the way in which they actually appear. Philosophy students sometimes think that studying phenomenology entails mainly reading books. However, learning to see the things appearing to you precisely in the way in which they actually appear takes practice. Martin Heidegger, Husserl's best known student, had great difficulty at the beginning of his study of phenomenology. It concerned the simple question how thinking's manner of procedure which called itself "phenomenology" was to be carried out.~ .. My perplexity decreased slowly ... only after I met Husserl personally in his workshop .. .. Husserl's teaching took place in a step-by-step training in phenomenological "seeing" which at the same time demanded that one relinquish the untested use of philosophical knowledge.... I �28 myself practiced phenomenological seeing, teaching and learning m Husserl's proximity after 1919.23 The phenomenological seeing that one would practice is founded on an act called "the phenomenological reduction." While it was instituted in the service of phenomenological philosophy, Husserl was aware of the effect it could have by itself upon the person practicing it: Perhaps it will even turn out that the total phenomenological attitude, and the [reduction] belonging to it, essentially has, first of all, the vocation of effecting a complete personal transformation, which would, in the first place, be comparable to a religious conversion, but which beyond that contains within itself the significance of being the greatest existential transformation to which humanity as humanity is called.24 Yajiiavalkya noted that the designation "greatest existential transformation"-like the earlier "existential break" associated with conjunction in Averroes-fits the experience of "waking up to" (pratibodham) Brahman as well (KeU, II.4). In characterizing the phenomenological reduction, I shall borrow the descriptions of the later Husserl's closest collaborator, Eugen Fink, because they are vivid and strongly suggestive of awakening to Brahman. 25 The phenomenological reduction is a two-part act (F, 41). Husserl called the first component of that act a "disconnection" (Ausschaltung), or an "epoche," a suspension ('s7toxft), of the "natural attitude," the attitude in which we take things for granted, or as a matter of course (selbstverstdndlich). Disconnection means that you deliberately abstain from all beliefs; you inhibit your accepting of all the things you take as what 'counts' (Geltendes) for you (F, 3 9-40). You cease living in acts of positional consciousness in Sartre's sense. As we observed Sartre doing, while remaining disconn.ected you turn your attention from the objects of consciousness to the consciousn~ss-of-objects. You are not caught up with objects, but are attentively.'spread' over the whole of consciousness~of-objects, without positing that as an object. And you alter your mode of attention from an active searching-for to a receptive letting-things-come. You are �29 learning to do something involuntary, somewhat like preparing to receive "the visitation of sleep," which comes in the way as the god Dionysus visits his followers, when they no longer are distinct from the role they are playing. 26 You are not gradually acquiring things in the way the disposed intellect acquires intelligibles. The disconnection includes the "nullification" of the sense of yourself as an empirical human being-it "un-humanizes" (entmenschlicht) you-in that it "lays bare the ... onlooker" "already at work" in you, into which you now "fade away" (F, 40). In the terminology of this lecture, you disidentify with your sense of self; and you pass into awareness rather than in consciousness. Yajfiavalkya interjected that, involved in the realization of Brahman, there is a similar correlation of the "de-construction of the sense of self' (nir-aham-kiira) with a fading away into the onlooker, that is, the "witness," which was already at work. You are now in a position to notice precisely what appears to you in just the way in which it appears. As with Freud's evenly suspended attention, all the phenomena are treated equally; none is assumed in advance to have priority over the others. As in the case of painterly vision, you are not imposing your knowledge on your experiencing; you are operating 'prior' to your identification of things or events. Your going backwards involves a sort of reversal of the outward-turning action ofthe~agent intellect. For, viewed on one level, the agent intellect elicited intelligibles from their latent state in the appearances, while the disconnection goes back behind those intelligibles, which, due to language, are already at work in our ordinary experience of the appearances. In its receptive attentiveness the disconnection has an 'empty' relationship to experience, perhaps somewhat like the agent intellect in its 'empty' state as material intellect. The second component of the phenomenological reduction is a leading-back, the reducing proper. 27 In it, "while explicitly inquiring backwards behind the acceptednesses ... with respect to your belonging to the world," the onlooker blasts open (sprengen) with insights your �30 "being held captive by your captivation" (Befangenheit) with the world. You experience this as a "breakthrough" (Durchbruch; FK, 348). As a result you discover for the first time that underlying all of your experiences has been a primordial conviction (Urdoxa in Husserl), an unformulated, implicit acceptance of the world and of yourself as belonging to it (F, 40-41 ). Here "world" refers, not to the collection of all things, but to what is originally given as a universal background, i:h the way a horizon is given for vision. While particular beliefs of yours may have occasionally broken down, that did not shake your implicit acceptance of the horizon. You are now sharing in the onlooker's awareness of the world, which is the "universally flowing and continuing [world-]apperception," the "underground" (Untergrund) out of which every act of consciousness springs up. In this sense phenomenology is said to make the ultimate ground of the world available to an experience (FK, 349, 352, 340),28 one in which we experience "how ... the world is coming about for us."29 Yajfiavalkya accepted that painterly vision, evenly suspended attention, and the phenomenological reduction are at least partial Brahman-experiences, ones that go beyond the spontaneously arising Brahman-moments on the football field or on the highway. However, he pointed out two differences. First, they are cultivated in the service of other ends, painting, healing patients, or pursuing wisdom, whereas realization of Brahman is the supreme end (BU, IV.3.22), pursued for its own sake. Second, in the other contexts awareness is to be actualized only on particular occasions, before the canvas, in the consulting room, or in the phenomenological "workshop," whereas one remains continually in the Braliman-realm. I responded that, according to Husserl, in going about the course of ordinary life, the phenomenologist has the epoche as "an active-dispositional30 attitude to which we resolve ourselves once and for all" and which "can be actualized again and again,"31 like the dancer's repeated re-actualizing of the dancing that she has as a first actuality. I told him that this raised �31 the question for me whether the knower of Brahman could be said to be Brahman in this dispositional sense. In the Upanishadic tradition you may engage in a meditative practice, in which you could pass through several stages. At the beginning you deliberately concentrate and turn your consciousness inward, whil~ endeavoring to dwell more and more in awareness. 32 You need to keep reminding yourself to notice the awareness, which is always there. Initially you cannot accomplish this while you are doing something else, because a thing or event always captures your attention. After a while you will be able to maintain this centering of yourself in awareness. While · your mind gradually has become dominated by awareness, you still occasionally experience moments of conscious reflection on the immediately preceding moment of awareness. 33 You are now "allowing the mind to fluctuate." 34 The following analogy may convey some sense of what that is like. "Suppose a neighbor were to ask you to look after her children .... When the children come you could take one of three different courses of action." You could abandon responsibility by telling them that they can do whatever they want as long as they don't bother you. Or you could try to control them by telling them what to do and not to do. Or, finally, you could~ allow the children to play. This "allowing" is not active, since you do not interfere. It is not passive, since you are present with the children ... in a total way. It is like a cat sitting at a mouse hole. It appears to be asleep, but let the mouse show but a whisker and the cat will pounce. It is only by allowing that one truly understands what allowing means. 'Allowing' brings awareness to the fore in a way that pushing away and controlling do not. 35 You are aware of movements from focused to unfocused consciousness, of shifts from perceptual to thinking consciousness, of fluctuations from consciousness-of to empty awareness, and so �32 forth, as well as of the reversals of all these. "Allowing is ... , so to say, what fluctuating awareness is 'made of.'" Eventually no reflection is experienced any more; this total wakefulness, completely purifies one of the 'sleepiness' which is what the 'habit' of consciousness really is. 36 To be aware you don't have to be conscious ofsomething; nor do you need to be someone, much less someone special. 37 Positional consciousness-of-objects, which was first for us, here shows itself to be, in fact, a derivative of non-positional awareness, which is what is first in itself. Initially consciousness seemed to have the component of awareness; but now we may say that awareness sometimes manifests itself partially in the form of consciousness-of-objects, while in itself it is pure awareness (cit). Again, this is quite analogous to what Averroes said of the agent intellect. In itself it is pure, having no reference to the world; but, through its outward turn, it conjoins itself to our imaginations, resulting in the emergence from it of particular intelligibles. Upon emerging from this absolute silence, you may be so forcefully struck by something in the world that you consciously recognize that you are just pure awareness.3 8 You momentarily become conscious of this objectless being "present with the children ... in a total way" as yourself. You are now conscious of havib.g arrived in the Brahman-realm.39 Yajiiavalkya interjected that this recognition is what is expressed in the words: "I am Brahman!" (BU, I.4.10). He added that this experiencing of pure awareness is what he was referring to when he had said: · "Though then he does not see [any thing], yet he does not see while seeing. There is no cutting off of the seeing of the seer .... But there is no second (dvitfyam), no other (anyad), separate from him, that he could see .... When there is some other (anyad), then one can see ... the other." (BU, IV.3.23 & 31) �33 I said to Yajfiavalkya that, according to this account, pure awareness seemed to be empty. He responded that while it is empty of objects, it is full in the sense that it is an experiencing of the moment-to-moment "going forth of things in different directions" (vyuccaranti), like "sparks from a fire" (BU, 11.1.20). Alternatively it is an experiencing of the whole's springing forth (sambhavati), which is like a spider's emitting (srjate) of a thread of its web or like plants' springing up from the earth (MuU, 1.1.7). It is as if in pure awareness we had 'gone backwards' to a point just 'before' things, self, and world emerge. I told him that what he'd said reminded me of a passage in Sartre: "Thus, each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo .. .. this inexhaustible creation of existence of which we are not the creators" (S, 79). Yajfiavalkya continued by pointing out that what he had just said about pure awareness being full is conveyed by the traditional name for the Brahman-realm, 'saccidananda.' The three parts of the one word express the oneness of pure existence (sat), pure awareness (cit), and pure joy (ananda). Since there is no 'of,' as in 'consciousness-of,' awareness is pure sat rather than being conscious of it. I said that Fink seemed to be giving voice to the same experience when he referred to the unique identity of the onlooker and the universally flowing worldapperception (FK, 355). As "there is ... no other (anyad), separate from him, that he could see," so there are no objects to separate the onlooker from the flowing world-apperception. Yajfiavalkya's report about the oneness of existence and awareness brought to my mind something in the Thomistic branch of the Aristotelian tradition, which could make that oneness partly understandable to me. I mentioned it to Yajfiavalkya: Thomas understood each of us to ·exist by virtue of a separate act of is-ing (esse), which is other than our essence, our humanity. A human being is, not by virtue of being human, but by participation in, or reception of, is-ing from, absolute Is-ing, just as a piece of wood that is afrre is so by participation in Fire (ST, Q.3, A.4r). Absolute Is-ing is like the Sun, and a human being is like some part of the air. Each �34 individual instantiation of the intelligible human essence remains illuminated, that is, continues is-ing, only as long as absolute Is-ing is shining on it (ST, Q.8, A.Ir). That is why Thomas states that what we ca// 'creation' is, in fact, an ongoing "flowing out, arising, springing out" (emanatio) (ST, Q.44, A.Ir) from absolute Is-ing. This much ofThomas's view can help us to understand how the Upanishadic experience of cit is an experience of sat. Jacques Maritain applied Thomas' s understanding of the distinction between esse and essence to interpret the experience of the knower of Brahman in the following way. 40 In reflecting consciousness we experience our soul in its acts. What we experience in reflection is not our intelligible essence but rather our self "prisoner of the mobility, of the multiplicity, of the fugitive luxuriance of the phenomena and the operations which emerge in us from the night of the unconscious-prisoner of the apparent self'(I45-46). But, as we have seen, the cultivation of awareness, instead of consciousness or reflecting consciousness, enables those on the path to realizing Brahman to pass from ordinary self-conscious experience "to an exceptional and privileged experience, emptying into the abyss of subjectivity, ... to escape from the apparent self, in order to reach the absolute Self'(I46). These practitioners "strip themselves of every image, of every particular representation, and of every distinct operation to such a degree that ... they reach not the essence df their soul but its existence, substantial1 esse itself'(I 48), "by an ... annihilating connaturality"(I46), in the absolute silence of total wakefulness. [F]rom the fact that existence is ... limited only by the essence that receives it ... one can understand that this negative experience, in reaching the substantial esse of the soul, reaches, at once, both this existence proper to the soul and existing in its metaphysical profusion and the sources of existing, according as the existence of the soul . . . is something that is emanating and is pervaded by an inflow from which it holds everything.... It is the sources of being in his soul that the human being reaches in this way." (153-54) Thus, through practice, in experiencing pure awareness (cit), the knower of Brahman has come to experience herself as the inflow of is-ing flowing out from abso.lute Is-ing �35 (sat). One might say that the transition from experiencing myself as witness to recognition of pure awareness is like going from having my finger on the pulsing of the world to recognizing my finger as the pulsing of the world. Yajfiavalkya added that Maritain's interpretation at least clearly distinguished the Sun of Averroes's outward-turned self-intellection of intelligible essences from the Sun of outflowing selfaware existence. Now we are in a position to say that when Svetaketu realizes "You are That," he is experiencing himself as the outflow of sat and recognizing as his true self pure awareness (of) the moment-to-moment flying out of sparks, which are 'on the way' to becoming things-and that this recognizing is that very going forth. Moreover, in this recognition Svetaketu is what is recognized: "One who knows the supreme Brahman becomes that very Brahman" (MuU, IIl.2.9; cp. BU, IV.4.13) and "becomes this All" (BU, I.4.10). As earlier we wondered what the daily experience of the state of complete conjunction would be like, so now the analogous question arises with respect to the Brahman-realm. In the discussion of the phenomenological reduction, I had raised the possibility that we could acquire pure awareness as a first actuality, in the sense of an active disposition. The knower of Brahman would then alternate between pure awareness and consciousness-of, in the way that I can 'turn on' my contemplation of the Pythagorean Theorem as I wish. This suggestion would parallel Aristotle's experience that we are for intermittent periods of time in the same state as the divine itself is in over the whole of time. The difference would be that instead of turning from one mode of consciousness, say, perceiving or thinking, to a different one, intellecting, the knower of Brahman would alternate at will between two different ways of total experiencing, between consciousness and pure awareness. It would be somewhat analogous to looking at the.well. known duck-rabbit ambiguous figure and seeing it now as a duck, now as a rabbit. �36 However, Yajfiavalkya said that living in the Brahman-realm is, instead, like a hypothetical double seeing of both the duck and the rabbit at once, rather than like a seeing of them in altemation. 41 The knower of Brahman is engaged with consciousness-of while simultaneously remaining in the realm of pure awareness. The following analogy conveys something of this: The ordinary person only sees the reflection in the mirror but the realized person sees the reflection as well as the mirror. "For instance you see a reflection in the mirror and the mirror. You know the mirror to be the reality and the picture in it a mere reflection. Is it necessary that to see the mirror we should cease to see the reflection in it?" Similarly, the realized one continues to experience the world in his realized state. Thus the realized person appreciates ''the distinctions" of sound, taste, form, smell etc. "But he always perceives and experiences the one reality in all of them."42 Brahman-knowers' experiencing of the everyday world inthe mirror of purified awareness enables their keen yet calm involvement in that world. In the analogy we could take 'seeing the reflection' to stand for consciousness of the world, and 'seeing the mirror,' for pure awareness. When I see the mirror along with the reflections, the latter are not being viewed 'from outside,' as they are in the mode of consciousness, but rather as emerging out of awareness. One might also apply the analogy to the self by saying that knowers of Brahman experience their ordinary selves, too, as being virtual images cast by the mirror. , 1 The mirror analogy may be applied to the modes of experiencing other than those encountered specifically in meditative practice. Consciousness-of-objects-whether perceiving, sensing, emoting, evaluating, thinking, and so on-and self-consciousness, too, are like a vision of things in the virtual space of the mirror. There are two fundamentally different modes of consciousness-of-objects, depending upon whether or not the object in question is an object in the true sense. When it maintains itself throughout a succession of acts of consciousness of it, it is an object in the etymological sense that it is something set or put (-jectum), before or over against (ob-) the act of consciousness. This setting-over-against is what is meant by 'subject- �37 object duality.' Such an object shall be referred to henceforth as an "Object." It has an identity, to which we may return again and again. The following example illustrates the different layers that may arise in perceptual consciousness-of-Objects. It begins with the emergence of an hnplicit Object from the background, continues with a prepredicative explicating of it, and goes on to various layers of predicative development in the following way. While I am engaged in seminar, someone's coffee cup may emerge from the margins of my consciousness and may attract my attention and become an explicit object of consciousness. My attention may travel from its color to a figure on the side, and then to its overall shape, and so on. 43 Then my interest may awaken sufficiently, so that I think, 'The cup has a circular figure on the side.' This shift represents a transition from the cup's just previously having become implicitly determined as having a circle on its side to its being grasped in an active identification as determined by the circle on its side. 44 Then I may think, 'The fact that the cup has that circular figure on its side is puzzling. I wonder what it stands for.' My thought may subsequently be led to such Objects as 'the circular,' 'shape in general,' and 'property.' 45 'Prior' to such perceptual consciousness of Objects and its developments, there is a sensory consciousness of objects, which has beer\. vividly described by Erwin Straus. 46 We sense objects in the same way in which we respond to the dynamic quality of a tone, which is "a state of unrest, a tension, an urge, almost a will to move on, as if a force were acting on the tone and pulling it in a certain direction."47 We are in a symbiotic relation (200) with the 'tones,' to which we respond with incipient movements as we do to dance music (239). This pre-linguistic, flowing realm is the ground from which Objects emerge (204). We live simultaneously in the . Objective and the sensory and may experience the tension between them, as the latter resists being fit into the former. Some people may be especially attracted to the loss of their stance �38 over-against Objects, of their self-consciousness, and of the sharp distinctness within the Objective realm (284, 275). Precisely because of its lack of subject-Object duality and selfconsciousness, sensory consciousness is occasionally mistaken for awareness by beginners. However, it is just another mode of vision of the reflections in the virtual space produced by the mrrror. All of the above are distinctions that can be clearly seen in the vision of that virtual space. In addition to seeing these, the knower of Brahman sees the virtual space and its reflections as emanating from the mirror. This second sort of seeing is pure awareness. While awareness is never totally absent from our experience, we notice it to varying degrees. Usually the degree to which we notice it is very minimal as when we seem to be, in Sartre's words, "hypnotized" by what we are conscious of. This is our 'default' mode of experiencing. When we are reading, thinking, conversing in seminar, dancing, gazing at a sunset, or "even stretching out a hand to open the door," we are absorbed in that moment's action. 48 When we are self-conscious, we are also absorbed in the self-consciousness. In absorption, awareness seems to have gotten lost; but it has only receded into the deep background. In some special moments, which have been called moments of "flow," 49 awarenes~ becomes prominent in an incidental way. We have not deliberately pursued it; it just happens. The flow experience may be spontaneous, as in the earlier examples of the driver and the woman sewing; or it may be skill-related, as in the examples of Joe Montana and the surgeon. One might say that, in the case of the skill-related flow experience, through practice the body's usual resistance to intended action is overcome. As a result consciousness as over against the body disappears, allowing awareness to become prominent. We move out of flow when the over- �39 againstness arises as the 'I' becomes active either in reaction-'Wow! This is so exciting!'--or in action-' If I bear down, I can keep this going.' As we saw in relation to painting, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, prominence of awareness may be deliberately cultivated in order to be able to engage in some pursuit. Here awareness is practiced, so that the practitioner comes to experience the witness as a disposition. Having it as a.first actuality, he or she can then activate it when engaging in the activity for the sake of which it was developed. Finally, in the double seeing of the knower of Brahman, pure mirror-awareness is permanently prominent as a second actuality; and there is a 'loose,' 'unstuck,' clear consciousness-of-objects as well. This is said to be the state of one "freed while alive" (jfvanmukta; cp. BU, IV.4.7). In virtue of the oneness of sat and cit, this double seeing is one with the out-flowing of existence. Thus, the freedom manifests itself in that one's awareness is active, or creative, with respect to the world, on the one hand, and one's action is responsive, or receptive, with respect to it, on the other-a reversal of the usual receptivity of consciousness and activity of action. 50 In the realm of action, this freedom is freedom to respond without a 'hitch' to the vectors in the field of experience, wliich are analogous to the directional arc involved in realizing the full significance of a situation mentioned in Part One. These field vectors include what Yajfiavalkya takes Aristotle to be referring to when he speaks of feeling feelings or performing actions as required (8c:i), in the required cases, with respect to the required people, in the required way, and for the required reasons (NE, 1106b 17-2 7). Another way of putting this is to say that the freedom of the knower of Brahman manifests itself in the ability to be able to move freely through the world with grace and effortlessness, which is called 'saving awareness,' crocppocruvri: 51 �40 For crocppocruVT) is precisely the virtue of general and unself-conscious self-possession, of universal grace and effortless command neither specified by particular action, which would transform it from crocppOcrUVTJ to some particular virtue, nor checked by any opacity, which would translate it into a mode of self-control. What could work better for its model than a pure [awareness ]?52 Knowers of Brahman have no inner barriers, which could get in the way -of their spontaneously allowing what is called for by the current moment to emerge. In conclusion, we note certainformal parallels between the role of Brahman in the Upanishads and that of the agent intellect according to Averroes. First, each is the sourceBrahman, of all existence, and the agent intellect, of all being, that is, of all intelligibility. Second, both are "self-luminous" and are responsible for 'seeing' in some sense. Third, the nondual relation between the individual self and Brahman is like that between the disposed intellect and the agent intellect. Fourth, a 'self-forgetting' 'outward turn' 'occurs' in the case of each of them. Fifth, both the experiencing of Brahman and the experience of intellection could be said to involve a breaking-free from my ordinary captivation by the images on the walls of a cavelike dwelling, an engagement in a practice, and, ultimately, an existential breakthrough to "immortalizing." In that breakthrough, in both cases, I deconstruct my ordinary sense of self and discover my true self as being both non-private (that is, not mine alone) and non-dual with respect to the true self of others. However, there are fundamental differences in other respects. Whereas in the one case the captivation is by opinions and by the perceptual world and is broken through in becoming free for intelligibles, involving a gradual movement of theoretical study, in the other case it is captivation by the mundane way of experiencing objects, whether in sensory, perceptual, or intellectual consciousness; and it is broken by a sudden shift from involvement in consciousness, whether first-degree or reflective, to pure awareness, a shift which may be experienced on a path of cultivation of awareness. Moreover, the nature of the one, impersonal, true self of us all, in �41 which we share non-dually in our immortalizing, which for Averroes is the self-intellection of the agent intellect, is pure awareness according to Yajfiavalkya. Finally, on the one hand, the material intellect may realize conjunction with the agent intellect, which is the source of all intelligibility in the world. On the other hand, in the Brahman-realm pure selfawareness realizes that it is non-dual with the continual springing up of all existence, both sensory and intelligible, of the world as a whole, including but not limited to the intelligible realm. Yajfiavalkya thought that the following comment on Aristotle by Mr. Klein might provide a fruitful direction to pursue in the question period: The receptive aspect of "vm:iv ... is the state of wakefulness, a state of preparedness and alertness .... Nouc; ... when it is ... one with the v01rr<i .... [o]nly then can be said to be wakefulness 'at work' ... " 53 Looking back to the beginning, Yajfiavalkya wondered how Homer's realization of the full significance of a situation, 54 Aristotle's reception of an intelligible, and Averroes's complete conjunction with the agent intellect's self-intellection would compare, with respect to their degrees of wakefulness, with dwelling in pure awareness. I asked him how he would respond. He said: 'Perhaps the major difference between the Upanishads and our three W estem thinkers might be that for the former the state of empty "receptivity is supreme, that is, even more wakeful than "wakefulness at work."' I rejoined: 'I'm not sure that I've really understood Averroes. But it might be that his account of complete conjunction is a good partial depiction of Brahman. Insofar as Mr. Klein was directing us to the experiential living-through of the moment in which the empty, receptive intellect is one with the revelation of what is a profile of the full, unitary agent intellect, we do seem to be pointed toward a face of Brahman, as it were, namely, the intellectual one.' Yajfiavalkya had the last word: 'What you may be overlooking is that the empty, receptive material intellect is an appearance of the outward turning of the full source of �42 determinacy, the agent intellect, whereas, in the case of Brahman, the full and determinate is an appearance of the outward turning of the empty.' 1 Compare: "Since [in all cases of seeing and hearing] we are aware ('mcr0av6µE:0a) that we are seeing and hearing, it must either be by sight that we are aware [for example] that we are seeing or by some other [sense]" (OS, 425bl 112). "To each sense there belongs something special and something common. For example, what is special to sight is to see, [what is special] to hearing is to hear, and similarly with the rest. But there is also a certain common power that goes along with all of them, by which one is also aware that one is seeing and hearing (for it is not, after all, by sight that one is seeing that one is seeing ... )." (On Sleeping and Waking, 455a12-5) 2 We may speak of self-consciousness in the sense of consciousness of myself only 'after' the construction of the sense of self, which is discussed below. 3 By Kosman, who also made reference to Sartre's La Transcendence de !'Ego. I had been planning to use Sartre to introduce the notion of selfawareness (seen. 4) as an alternative to anything in Aristotle. However, Kosman's article, which I came across a couple of months ago, made it possible to cite Aristotle himself in order to introduce this notion. 4 I write 'selfawareness' and 'awareness (of) itself' to suggest that the relationship between awareness and what it is aware (of) is not the same as that between consciousness and the object of consciousness. I am following Sartre's practice in L 'etre et le neant (pp. 18-20), where he writes 'conscience (de) soi' to refer to what I am calling 'selfawareness or 'awareness (of) itself'. 5 In La Transcendance de I 'Ego, from which the quotations are taken, Sartre uses only one word, 'conscience,' which I have rendered as 'consciousness' when it is positional and as 'awareness' when it is non-positional. Moreover, he does not here write 'conscience (de),' as he did later (see footnote 4). Gurwitsch (1941) endorsed most of Sartre's position, to which Schiltz then objected. They debate this issue further in Schiltz and Gurwitsch. .. 6 What is said will apply as well to consciousness that is imagining, remembering, judging, thinking, intellecting, feeling, or evaluating. 7 See footnote 9. 8 The last two sentences represent my understanding of Gurwitsch (1985), 5, second paragraph). 9 Gurwitsch (1941) pointed out that this account of the arising of the sense of self is inconsistent with the fact that reflection can accomplish no more than to render explicit the content of the reflected-upon consciousness (332-33). He later (1985) offered a corrected account of the construction of the psychical empirical sense of self (15ff). It is based on the recognition that both states and "qualities designate psychic constants, i.e., regularities of experience ... rather than mental facts which themselves fall under direct experience" ( 15), as they do in Sartre. 10 I remember many years ago reading an article by him in The Washington Post, in which he described his experience in somewhat these terms. 11 These characteristics are similar to those in the example of the violinist in Csikszentmihalyi: "A violinist must be extremely aware of every movement of her fingers, as well as of the sound entering her ears, and of the total form of the piece she is playing, both analytically, note by note, and holistically, in terms of its overall design" (64). 12 Csikszentmihalyi, 65. 13 Bankei, 58. I have substituted "awareness" first for "the Unborn" and then for "it," referring to her Buddha-mind. 14 This is Husserl's word (1964), passim. 15 It need not be living beings with respect to which we experience the connection: "The [mountain] climber, focusing all her attention on the small irregularities of the rock wall that will have to support her weight safely, speaks of the sense of kinship that develops between fingers and rock .. ." "This feeling is not just a fancy of the imagination, but is based on a concrete experience of close interaction with some Other ... " (Csikszentmihalyi, 64). 16 A popular book on learning to draw, tells us of a subjective state that artists speak of, which is characterized by "a sense of close 'connection' with the work, a sense of timelessness, difficulty in using words ... a lack of anxiety, a sense of close attention to shapes and spaces and forms that remain nameless." It is important for the artist to experience the shift from the ordinary state to this one. The student is encouraged to set up the proper "conditions for this mental shift" and to become "able to recognize and foster this state in" himself (Edwards, 46). These characteristics correspond quite well with the qualities of a consciousness in which awareness is in the foreground. 17 Merleau-Ponty (1961), 166, translation modified. �43 18 The articulation in this paragraph emerged in a conversatibn with Nina Haigney, just a few minutes before I delivered this lecture. It was an example of the sort of thing it attempts to articulate-a conversation, with awareness to some degree in the foreground, allowing for the experience of"a certain emptiness," followed by the · emergence, in two people, of an, a least relatively, "authentic word." 19 Epstein, 194. The quotation from Freud is from "Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis" (1912). 20 Epstein, 195. 21 By Theodore Reik in 1948; see Epstein, 199-201. 22 Bion, 51-52, 55-56, 69. 23 M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, quoted in Ihde, 15; italics added and translation corrected at one point. 24 Husserl (1962), 140.27-33; to maintain consistency of terminology, I substituted "[reduction]" for epoche. 25 The same view is conveyed, in different language, by Husserl himself(l962), Sections 37-42. 26 Merleau-Ponty (1945), 191, where, however, the expression is not being used to characterize the phenomenological reduction. 27 The distinction between disconnection and reducing proper parallels that in the Buddhist tradition between mindfulness (sati) and seeing distinctly in detail (vi-pa§yana). 28 Cp.: "And so also must the gaze made free by the epoche be .. . an experiencing gaze" (Husserl (1962), 156.1315. 29 Husserl (1962), 147.29-32. 30 I take habituell to correspond to an adjectival form of 't~t<;. 31 Husserl (1962), 153.36-37 and 140.19-20. 32 Sekida, 62 and 93. This stage in the yogic tradition involves eight members, the last three of which are concentration, meditation, and in-stance (samiidhi), which is opposed both to ex-stasy and to our ordinary counterstance vis-a-vis objects (Patafijali, II.29). 33 Sekida, 93; cp. Patafijali, I.42 and 44: coincidence wit hreflection (saviciirii samiipattih) 34 The quotations in this paragraph are taken from Low, 149-50; italics added. 35 When allowing the children to play, you are not caught up in their playing; so, you have a kind of distance from it. Yet you are 'with' them, accompanying them. Thus, your distance is of a different kind than the distance that occurs in Objectivation, where the Ob-ject is over against you (discussed below). Moreover, while it might seem as though the Objective, perceptual world were free of captivation, when compared to the dynamic, sensory realm (discussed below), in fact, the former is grounded in the primordial doxa of the latter. 36 Sekida, 62 and 94. The role that this experience of pure awareness plays in the upanishadic tradition parallels that of the "aloneness of seeing" (dr§eh kaivalyam; Patafijali, II.25) in the yogic tradition (Patafijali, III.50; IV.26 and 34). 37 Low, 40. 38 Sekida, 95. 39 This account ofrealization of Brahman is based on zen sources. However, as Shear points out, this experience of awake, pure selfawareness lacks any empirical qualities or content. As a result differing references to it as the · Brahman-realm or Buddha-nature are not pointing to qualitative differences in the experience (1983, 57-59; 1990, 392). 40 The page numbers given in this paragraph all refer to Maritain, Quatre essais. 41 Carter, 54. Sekida, 91-97, also depicts the corresponding state in the zen tradition in this way. Carter proposes the comparison with binocular vision. It is interesting that Bion, too, uses this analogy (Grinberg, Sor, and Tabak di Bianchedi, 35-36). 42 Sharma, 43; first two sets of italics added. The quotation is from Ramana Maharshi as reported in D. Goodman, ed., The Teachings ofSri Ramana Maharshi (NY: Arkana, 1985), pp. 42, 41. 43 Cp. the description in Husserl (1964), 124-25 44 Cp. the description in Husserl (1964), 206-08 45 Cp. the descriptions in Husserl (1964), tt#58-61, 80-82, 86-87 and in Husserl (1950), #10. 46 The page references in this paragraph are from Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne. 47 Zuckerkandl, 19. 48 Sekida, 91. . 49 Csikszentmilalyi. 50 YUASA, 68. �44 51 I believe that Kleist had the same phenomenon in view when he reported Herr C.'s words after two anecdotes, one about a graceful dancer who lost his grace when self-consciousness arose and the other about a bear, who effortlessly parried every thrust of Herr C. 's rapier with a graceful swipe of his paw: ' ... [I]n the same degree as, in the organic world, reflection becomes more obscure and weaker, giace emerges there ever more radiant and supreme.-Yetjust as. :. the image in a concave mirror, after withdrawing to infinity, suddenly comes right in front of us again, so when consciousness has, as it were, passed through an infinite, grace will again put in an appearance. Hence, it appears most purely in the human bodily structure that has either no self-consciousness or an infinite self-consciousness ... ' (Kleist, 67) That is, in our terms, grace emerges in the realm of animal, sensory consciousness, a realm which we can experience, but not enter completely (Straus, 284). And it emerges again in the realm of pure self-awareness, in which we are no longer caught up in first- or second-degree consciousness. 52 Kosman, 516; the ending in the original is "a pure, objectless knowledge." 53 Klein, 65. 54 Another question to pursue might be whether Homer's realization of full significance became narrower and more limited in passing over into intellection. ABREVIATIONS BU Brihadtiranyaka Upanishad CU Chtindogya Upanishad F Fink, E., Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory ofMethod. FK "Die Phanomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der Gegenwartigen Kritik." HG Otto, W., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion. I Homer, Iliad IU Isa Upanishad KeU Kena Upanishad LC Averroes, Long Commentary = Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De Anima. MuU Mundaka Upanishad NE Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; translation altered in some places. 0 Homer, Odyssey OS Aristotle, On the Soul; translation altered in some places. �45 S Sartre, J.-P., La Transcendance de /'Ego: Esquisse d'une descriptionphenomenologique. ST St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Latin text, Volume II, containing Ia, QQ.2-11. TU Taittitrfya Upanishad BIBLIOGRAPHY Altmann, A., "lbn Bajja on Man's Ultimate Felicity," Harry Austryn Wolfson Jubilee Volume, I (Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1965) Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, tr. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002) _ _,On the Soul, tr. J. Sachs (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2001). _ _,Aristotle's Physics: A Guided Study, tr. J. Sachs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). _ _,Aristotle's Metaphysics, tr. J. Sachs (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 1999). 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Leaman, 0., Averroes and His Philosophy (Surrey: Curzon, 1998). Low, A., The Butterfly's Dream: In Search of the Roots ofZen (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1993). Maritain, J., Quatre essais sur !'esprit dans sa condition charnelle (Paris: Alsatia, 1956). Merleau-Ponty, M., "Eye and Mind" (1961), tr. C. Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. J. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). _ _, Phenomenolgie de la perception (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945). Moore, G. E., "The Refutation ofldealism," in Philosophical Studies (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1965). Nussbaum, M., "The Role of Phantasia in Aristotle's Explanation of Action" in her Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Otto, W., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954). Pataiijali, The Yoga-Sutra ofPatafijali, tr. G. Feuerstein (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1989) Plotinus; Enneads, Volumes III, V, VI, and VII, tr. A.H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967-88). Sartre, J.-P., L 'etre et le neant (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1943) _ _ ,La Transcendance de !'Ego: Esquisse d'une descriptionphenomenologique (Paris: Vrin, 1966), originally published 1936. Schutz, A., "Scheler's Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General Thesis of the Alter Ego," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (1942), 323-47 .. SEKIDA, K., Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, ed. A. Grimstone (NY: Weatherhill, �47 1985). Shanna, A., The Experiential Dimension ofAdvaita Vedanta (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, (1993). Shear, J., "Mystical Experience, Hermeneutics, and Rationality," International Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1990), 391-401. _ _, "The Experience of Pure Consciousness: A New Perspective for Theories of Self," Metaphilosophy 14 (1983), 53-62. Snell, B., "Die Ausdriicke fiir den Begriff des Wissens in der Vorplatonischen Philosophie," Philologische Untersuchungen 29 (1924/1976). Straus, E., Phenomenological Psychology, tr. in part, E. Eng (NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1966. _ _; Vom Sinn der Sinne (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1956). St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Latin text, Volume II, containing Ia, QQ.2-11, T. McDermott, O.P., ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964). The Principal Upanishads, ed. and tr. S. Radhakrishnan (New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers India, 1994). The Upanishads, tr. V. Roebuck (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). UEDA, S., "Pure Experience, Self-awareness, Basho," Etudes phenomenologiques 18 (1993), 63-86. Upanishads, tr. P. Olivelle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). von Fritz, K., ''NOOI: and NOEIN in the Homeric Poems," Classical Philology 38 (1943), 7993. YUASA, Y., The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, tr. N. Shigenori and T. Kasulis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987). Zedler, B., Introduction to Aquinas's On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists (Milwaukee: Marquette University, 1968). _ _,"Averroes and Immortality," New Scholasticism 28 (1954), 436-53. _ _,"Averroes on the Possible Intellect," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 25 (1951 ), 164-78. Zuckerkandl, V., The Sense ofMusic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). � 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. 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Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 47 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource You Are That!: The <em>Upanishads</em> Read Through Western Eyes Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered by Robert Druecker, Annapolis tutor on February 15, 2008, as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Druecker, Robert Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008-02-15 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 audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library; make typescript copies of my lecture available for archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library." 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 Upanishads--Criticism and interpretation Brahman Yājñavalkya Homer. Iliad Homer. Odyssey Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Druecker_Robert_2008-02-15 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fc0c2b22d1a57702f792092af79d90ee.pdf 3f91ecdb13089d074879405dcbfd4a84 PDF Text Text “Walking the First Steps of His Camino with John of the Cross – An Exploration of the Dark Night of Sense” Robert Druecker INTRODUCTION John outlines a road, or camino, which one could walk who is seeking to arrive at union with God, insofar as it is possible in our present life. According to John what is possible in this life is a union of my powers and faculties with God, but not a permanent one (AMC II.5.2). The camino is known as the Dark Night of the Soul. It has two major aspects—the Dark Night of Sense and the Dark Night of Spirit. This lecture deals with the first of these. According to John a verse from one of the Psalms (46:10) is saying to us: “Learn to be empty of all things, that is, both internally and externally, and you will see how (cómo) I am God” (AMC II.15.5). External things are things the soul experiences through its senses, feelings, and imagination. As the soul moves into this first dark night, it actively works at releasing its hold on all particular things. Then at some point, it notices that, independently of its wishes and efforts, it is being led away from its efforts to let go into an experiencing of its tight grip gradually turning into a relaxed open hand. The soul is then entering the passive dark night of sense. It begins to experience God as flowing into it. Correlated with this sensed inflowing is the soul’s awakening to ways in which God is manifesting his divinity in the world. The lecture will be in four sections, with a conclusion. For the most part I’ll be taking you along with me as I begin walking the camino. Section I: THE STRIPPING OF OUR ATTACHMENT TO THE SENSES 1 �In the active dark night of sense, we “strip” ourselves of our attachment to the senses. John uses the following analogy, in order to clarify the meaning of this stripping: AS night deprives the eyes’ sight of the light which allows visibles to be seen by it, SO the dark night deprives the senses’ apetito of the savor, or liking, which allows things to attract it (based on AMC I.3.1&4). John’s word apetito here means something like our word “dependency,” as in a drug dependency, or “addiction” – an immoderate desire for something. 1 According to the analogy, my soul still has things, but is empty of them, in the sense that it is not preoccupied with them. As John puts it: “Although it is true that the soul cannot help hearing and seeing and smelling and tasting and touching, this is of no greater import, nor …, is [the soul] hindered more than if it saw it not, heard it not, etc.” (AMC I.3.4). When the light of my preferred flavors is turned off, my personal preferences for and concerns with things are deactivated. I now use things simply for their practical value and to satisfy my true needs. By being detached from my preferences and likings, I don’t fill my soul with images or memories of things, with hopes and wishes for them, with plans to get them, and so on. The reason, the inner logic, for turning off the light is precisely in order that my soul not become already filled up. For then there would be no “room,” no “space,” for my soul to become filled with G’s “light” in becoming enlightened (AMC I.4.1). The way it works is that if I’m not occupying myself with enjoying and pursuing particular things, then I’ll be filled with “food” that will allow me to taste “all” things. (AMC I.5.4), in a newly experienced state, called “loving awareness” (AMC I.5.7). For dependencies and enlightenment are contraries, as are closing tightly and opening loosely. The dependency orients me toward what is finite, determinate, particular, limited, thing-like, creat-ed, being (ens, that which is) (AMC I.4.2). This orientation makes it John of the Cross: Selected Writings, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 61, and San Juan de la Cruz, Obra completa, I, ed. Luce López-Baralt and Eulogio Pacho (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, S.A., 1991), pp. 125-26. 1 2 �difficult for me to become transformed into what is in-finite, in-determinate, general, un-limited, nothing, creat-ing, act of be-ing, of “is-ing,” (esse = ser, the is of that which is)—as I must if I am to realize union with God (AMC I.4.3). So, dependencies lead me, ineluctably, to turn toward the creaturely and, simultaneously, to turn away from the creative (AMC I.12.3). John says that when you turn toward some thing you stop “casting yourself on the all.” Moreover, if you are to hold the all, you have to hold it without wanting anything (AMC II.13.12). Thus, the deadening of my preferential likings allows me eventually to turn toward “the all” and to do so without wanting to get something out of it. Note that it is not the particular characteristics of the thing or of the liking that are relevant here. Even likings for religious and devotional activities and objects can bind me to and fill my soul with determinate, particular things, in the same way (AMC I.5.2). The way John sees it, there is a deepening sequence of involvements—from savoring and liking (gustar) to tasting and knowing (saber can mean both at once), from there to possessing (poseer), and, finally, to being (ser) (AMC II.13.11)—so that the light of gusto comes to anchor me—my understanding, my sense of self, and my will—in being like the creaturely (AMC I.4.2). Section II: THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION ON TYPES OF UNION In order to help us better understand the background for the contraries of closing and opening or of emptying and filling, John shares a theological reflection on union with God. There are two major sorts of union. One is the substantial union of God’s dwelling in each creature. This union is always there. The other is a union-by-likeness of the soul with God, a union that arises through a transformation of the soul. This second union is there only when there is a likeness of love, that is, when God’s and the soul’s wills are “con-form in one,” when the soul is transformed into God through love (AMC II.5.3). There are two varieties of the second union, first, a union with respect to my acts of will and, second, a union with respect to my habitual disposition of will. Union-by-likeness-of-act and union-by3 �likeness-of-disposition are the two versions of the second type of union. Hence, in order to live one or the other kind of the second union, I must strip myself of my creature-focused acts or dispositions of understanding, liking, sensing, and willing (AMC II.5.4). What continues throughout is an ongoing sense of the substantial union, one which does not, however, become thematic for me, one which I do not consciously register. It, nevertheless, contributes to motivating my entry onto the camino. Then as I go on walking, my recognition of the substantial union grows. John uses another light analogy in order to illustrate this theological reflection. A smudgy and dirty window on which the sun is shining appears dark, as we look through it; the sun lights it up only fairly dimly. A clean and pure window on which the sun is shining, on the other hand, appears bright, completely illuminated by the sun. In this second case the ray of light will transform and en-lighten the window, so that, according to John, the latter will “appear to be the same ray and will give the same light as the ray,” even though its nature is other than that of the ray. John says that the window is light “by participation.” The soul is the window; the light is the divine “light of God’s esse (ser),” God’s act of be-ing, or “is-ing,” 2 which is always “shining” on the creature (AMC II.5.6). Perhaps we might say that substantial union refers to God’s dwelling in, lighting up, or is-ing forth, the creature in each instant. Then when my soul becomes cleansed, it is able to become aware of this indwelling, of God’s continual creating of me; and, simultaneously, it can allow this creative activity to show itself clearly in the world. Section III: FOUR SHIFTS IN THE WAY OF LIVING A SPIRITUAL LIFE John introduces the word modo, in order to refer to the way I am walking along the camino, or, more broadly, the way one is living one’s spiritual life. My mode includes my ways of In many languages other than English, the form of the word itself shows whether it is referring to a being, a thing which is, or to an act of being, of “is-ing”—for instance, ὂν : εἶναι :: ens : esse :: étant : être :: Seiendes : Sein. In these cases one can immediately see whether the referent is the “is-ing one,” the “is-er,” on the one hand, or its “is-ing,” on the other. 2 4 �apprehending, feeling, liking, enjoying, sensing, acting, responding, etc., my “how,” as I am walking. Many religious people think that the modo appropriate to the camino is just any kind of self-reformation or withdrawal from the world. But what they are actually seeking subconsciously is, according to John, to have a feeling of delightful communication with God and of consolations from God. They are, in fact, pursuing themselves in God, rather than searching in God in himself (AMC II.7.5). But John tells us that as I walk I will not only eventually leave behind my beginner’s ways but will also abandon every such personal mode, or way, as I come to “possess all modes,” when I “pass beyond the limits of my nature.” Only if I accomplish this, will I become able to “enter what has no mode,” namely, God (AMC II.4.5). John focuses on at least four prominent ways in which I may be living the devotional life as a beginner—I rely on my faculty of imagination; I center my practice on discursive meditation; I make an effort to keep on working hard, in order to make progress along the spiritual path; and, finally, I relate myself to God in a way that reflects my earlier relation to my parents and significant others. I, as beginner, am expected, at some point on the camino, to notice the indications that I need to move on and to leave behind these four ways of practicing my religious life. If I follow through and do so, I’ll change from being a beginner to being a proficient, in John’s vocabulary. This shift will coincide with my transitioning out of the active Dark Night of Sense into the passive Dark Night of Sense. It is important to note that for John “the imaginative faculty and the fantasy” are each an “internal bodily sense” (AMC II.12.1). They are the primary senses that are active in meditation. For in John’s vocabulary, meditation is “a discursive act through the medium of images, forms and figures, made up and imagined by” the imagination and fantasy. It is discursive in that it involves a mental running about (dis-cursus), going from one religious image or devotional object to another (AMC II.13.4). 5 �In discursive meditation, for instance, I may imagine and meditate on “Christ crucified” or “God seated on a throne.” In doing so I wish to become inspired by thoughts and feelings that may arise in response to that object (AMC II.12.3). In The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, 3 we read: FIRST EXERCISE …. seeing the place. Here it is to be noted that, in a visible contemplation or meditation—as, for instance, when one contemplates Christ our Lord, Who is visible—the composition will be to see with the sight of the imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which I want to contemplate…, as for instance, a Temple or Mountain…. John’s directive, though, is that “the soul will have to empty itself of these images.” For it can fantasize or imagine only what it has previously sensed through the external senses, namely, created things. But created things “can have no proportion to God’s esse (ser)” (AMC II.12.4). That is, meditating and imagining ultimately orient me toward and preserve my similarity to what is limited, particular, determinate, and creat-ed—even though it is true that, at first, they had motivated me to step onto the camino (AMC II.12.5). I may be engaging in devotional work with my imagination when I am meditating discursively. Or, alternatively, I may perform a daily ritual or recite particular prayers, such as saying the rosary. In these ways, too, I am working at generating the proper emotions and motivations for leading me to turn to God more often and to deepen my love for God. Although I see myself as working, in these ways, to gain “spiritual sustenance,” John tells me that such nourishment “does not consist in working (trabajar)” of any sort. At this stage I am not being “fed” through imagining, meditating, reciting prayers, or doing spiritual reading. I must rather “allow the soul to be in quietude and repose” (AMC II.12.6). Unbeknownst to me an opposition has arisen between what I think I’m doing and desire to be doing, on the one hand, and what I am actually doing, on the other. For it turns out that even my initial project of stripping away my preferences and likings (DN I.7.5)—or, in fact, any aspirations, or efforts 3 Trl. Fr. Elder Mullan, S.J. (NY: P.J. KENEDY & SONS, 1914), trl. modified; [45] - [47], italics added. 6 �(pretensiones), to please God or to have a more intense sense of God—is actually distracting and drawing my soul away “from the peaceful stillness and sweet ease” (DN I.10.4). A beginner who once or twice lets herself go and rests in such inner calm often reacts by forcing herself to get back to work on the devotional project. In John’s view this betrays a misunderstanding of her current location on the camino. Because she has not made the shift of modes, she thinks that in not meditating she is being idle and lazy (AMC II.12.7). She may subconsciously have what has been called “a gaining idea,” 4 an egoistic expectation of spiritual gain. She thinks she is here and God is there, and she is making an effort to get there. Her sense that she was getting closer to gaining the sought-after closeness to God used to give her emotional support (arrimo). But, now, when her devotional life has lost its “juice” (DN I.7.5), she feels negligent or sinful (DN I.9.6; 10.4 & 2). She thinks, If I don’t feel I’m working, that must mean I’m not doing anything at all (DN I.10.1). However, in my enjoyment of the new state of “stillness and idleness, or ease (ocio) (DN I.10.1), I may, instead, feel that there is no progress for me to make. I may gradually realize that if I let go of my sense of myself as the doer, gave up caring (descuidado) about any inner or outer works, and stopped “trying to do anything” (DN I.9.6), then I would be where I thought I was heading. The shift in modes to which the beginners are being invited at this point is the major shift from the active dark night of sense to the passive dark night of sense. In the latter, John says, “their faculties are at rest and do not work (obrar) actively but rather passively, by receiving what God is working (obra) in them” (AMC II.12.8). The difference is like that between continuing to labor at the work (obrando) of 4 S. Suzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (NY: Weatherhill, Inc., 1973), p. 41: “We say our practice should be without gaining ideas, without any expectations, even of enlightenment. This does not mean, however, just to sit without any purpose. This practice free from gaining ideas is based on the Prajñā Pāramitā Sūtra. However, if you are not careful the sutra itself will give you a gaining idea. It says, "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form." But if you attach to that statement, you are liable to be involved in dualistic ideas: here is you, form, and here is emptiness, which you are trying to realize through your form. So ‘form is emptiness, and emptiness is form’ is still dualistic. But fortunately, our teaching goes on to say, ‘Form is form and emptiness is emptiness.’ Here there is no dualism. When you find it difficult to stop your mind while you are sitting and when you are still trying to stop your mind, this is the stage of "form is emptiness and emptiness is form." But while you are practicing in this dualistic way, more and more you will have oneness with your goal.” 7 �walking the camino, on the one hand, and enjoying (gozar) that walking as a resting in the end-state, on the other (AMC II.14.7). John points to three “signs” that I am now being invited to accept and experience this major shift. One is that, to quote a song by the Rolling Stones, from a while back, I can't get no satisfaction 'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try. Precisely because I continue in my mode of trying, I find that I no longer feel satisfied after engaging in my activities of fantasy and imagination and of discursive meditation. A second sign I notice is that I even feel disinclined to take them up again. The third sign is that I now actually like to remain alone in inner peace (AMC II.13.2-.4). My familiar devotional life has become “arid.” I experience life-giving water only when I am at rest, not at work, not meditating, not imagining. John highlights typical reactions that beginners may have when their familiar devotional modes become “tasteless” to them. Some may become irritable and peevish, like a spoiled child; others may blame themselves for the loss of taste and feel angry at themselves; yet others may “kill themselves,” figuratively, by performing physical penances (DN I.5.1 & .3; 6.1). When I consider what I now prefer and compare it with what I used to like to do, I notice something very interesting. Remaining in inner peace is something I cannot do, or, rather, something I can do only by not doing (wéi wú wéi 為無為, Dao De Jing 63). I can enjoy it only if I don’t seek to enjoy it. As John says: “It is like the air which escapes as soon as one wants to grasp it in one’s fist” (DN I.9.6). If I want to do anything on my own, I will only end up blocking the refreshing idleness (DN I.10.5). If I come to notice what John says is there in my experience, I may vaguely sense that instead of having to work to attain my goal I am already there. According to John all the changes in mode are the result of God’s taking my soul out of the state of beginner and placing it in that of proficient, making me a “contemplative,” instead of a meditator (DN I.1.1). 8 �John proposes an analogy that can serve to characterize all four modes, and especially the last one, which we’ll look at now. The beginner’s sense of self-in-relation-to-God has been like that of an infant in relation to its loving mother. She “warms her infant with the heat of her breasts, nurses it with good milk and tender food, and carries and caresses it in her arms” (DN I.1.2). Based on its experience the infant has formed a complex of feelings, attitudes, dispositions, images, memories, behaviors, etc., in relation to its mother. We shall borrow a term from Carl Jung and call such a complex an imago. Then we could say that the infant had formed—and was still forming—its Mom-imago. In going beyond John’s analogy, we might introduce a parallel Dad-imago, a voice of authority, forbidding and judging, punishing and rewarding. According to Jung, even much later in adult life, when the parents are dead, the individual still experiences them as powerfully present in their imagos, “as important as if they were still alive.” His or her “love, admiration, resistance, hatred, and rebelliousness still cling” to those imagos, which often bear little resemblance to the way the parents actually were, so transfigured are they “by affection or distorted by envy.” 5 My beginner’s religious experience of God has been characterized not only by feeling comforted and nurtured, giving rise to an analogue of the Mom-imago, but also by feelings of prohibitions, of rewards, of reprimands, and of forgiveness, generating an analogue of the Dad-imago. My complex sense of who-God-is-in-relation-to-who-I-am will be referred to as my God-imago. As is the case with Jung’s parental imagos, my God-imago is not limited to a visual image or to a representation or concept of God, but includes the emotions I feel and the memories and attitudes I have developed in relation to God. From the cradle on I have been unwittingly fashioning this Godimago from strong feelings, attitudes, and meanings, originally called forth in me by my everyday exchanges with my parents, and other family members, neighborhood and school friends, and so on. 5 C. G. Jung, Jung Contra Freud: The 1912 Lectures on the Theory of Psychoanalysis, trl. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 52. 9 �These real and fantasized interactions have made their contributions to my God-imago. I, as beginner, have come to sense God as a living entity whose experienced “communications” to me I interpret as they show up my thoughts and feelings and in the events of my life. 6 At the beginning of the camino, my initial love of God was needed in order for me to become capable of taking the initial steps of working at stripping my dependencies of the liking for sensory and temporal things (AMC II.7.2; 14.2). But the feeling of God’s presence led me to relate to God as to an actual individual entity (ens), though an invisible, non-worldly one. This, in turn, led me to desire consolations and rewards or to fear reprimands and punishments from the “God” that I’d projected. I tried to “manage” my relation to God in a transactive way. But the God-imago to which I have oriented myself cannot be similar to or proportionate to God (AMC II.4.3). For no creature bears a likeness to God’s esse (ser), although there are “traces” of God in creatures (AMC II.8.3). For this reason John’s analogy implies that a shift away from my God-imago is needed. He depicts it as follows: As the infant grows bigger, the mother gradually takes away the pleasure of her caress, and, hiding her gentle, delicate love, puts bitter aloe juice on the sweet breast, and putting the infant down from her arms, makes it walk on its own feet, so that, by losing the attributes of an infant, it may give itself to more important and substantial things (DN I.1.2; cf. 1 Cor 13:11). Just as the mother’s weaning induces the infant to alter its Mom-imago, so does God’s intervention of “weaning” bring on the new experience of distaste and aridity. I hear this tastelessness as a “call” to set aside my old God-imago, which accompanied my previous devotional practices. Now I leave behind i) feelings of dejection when God seems no longer to be consoling me, ii) concerns to obey God by This understanding of the formation of the child’s God-imago follows the view of Ana Maria Rizzuto, first presented in “Critique of the Contemporary Literature in the Scientific Study of Religion” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (1970). “God-imago” is used above instead of her term “image of God.” Rizzuto says she introduced her notion of the image of God, in order to distinguish it from the philosophical-theological concept of God. In contrast to the image of God, “the concept of God comes to us through whatever teachings, readings, liturgies, etc. have been presented to us.” “Although concept and image may converge in some respects, they may also diverge significantly in others.” Rizzuto later expanded her account in the book The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 6 10 �following spiritual maxims, or iii) feelings of closeness from meditating on my favorite religious images (DN I.3.1). In walking on its own feet, my soul reorients itself away from looking off to its God-imago, as Comforting, Prohibiting, Rewarding Parent. Instead, it becomes sensitive and responsive to the way in which it is now taking each step on the camino on which it is walking. What I used to feel as the disobedience of prohibitions I now re-experience as a barrier to beginning to live a life beyond the natural. Ideally my soul soon comes to realize that its previous mode was motivated by “fondness for itself and for all things” (DN I.Exposit.1). It senses that, at bottom, as John puts it, it wanted God to want what it wanted. So, what it did not enjoy was not God’s will and what it liked was God’s will. It was measuring God by itself (DN I.7.3). Now God is weaning it “from the breasts of all these enjoyments and likings” (D I.7.5), and from its God-imago in toto. Section IV: INTO WHAT DO THE FOUR CHANGES OF MODO SHIFT? Having considered the four modes out of which I, as beginner, need to pass, in order to become a proficient and to enter the passive dark night, we now look at the into-which. There is a single mode into which God is leading my beginner’s soul. That one mode has been referred to above as the inner peace of contemplative, loving awareness. John writes that the state of contemplation is one of “attention,” of “awareness (noticia)” 7 which is, first of all, “general …, without particular intellectual insights (intelligencias) and without When speaking about contemplation, John of the Cross doesn’t regularly use the ordinary words (conocimiento, conocer, saber) that are translated as “knowledge” or “know.” Instead, he uses a word, noticia, which is the Spanish translation of the Latin notitia, derived from a verb meaning become or be acquainted or familiar with, be aware of. He seems to have in mind the sense in which Augustine notitia in his Confessions. Augustine first used the verb in Book VII.x.16 in reference to an experience in which he entered into what is innermost (intima) in him and “by some sort of eye of [his] soul … saw … unchangeable Light.” He then says: “One who has become aware of (novit) the truth has become aware of this Light, and one who has become aware of this Light has become aware of eternity. Love has become aware of this Light.” Eternity is not the sort of “thing” of which we can acquire knowledge, whether cognoscentia or scientia. But, as least briefly, he and his mother 7 11 �understanding (entender) what [the attention and general awareness is] about,” and, second, “amorous and tender (amorosa)” (AMC II.13.4). It is general not in the usual, conceptual sense, according to which a genus is more general than a species. Or it is not that I’ve turned from imagining this or that individual devotional image on my wall to recognizing a group of them as particular instances of a certain kind of religious object. 8 Rather when my mind is not focused on objects, either sensory or conceptual, it is turned toward “the all,” in a state of “clear and simple” awareness. Contemplation might be experienced as “amorous and tender” in being like a look of warmth and mutual understanding between two friends, in contrast to an objectifying gaze. It would be analogous to an affectionate caress, as opposed to a medical palpation. 9 An artist recognized her periods of amorous awareness, when, by the way in which one looked at a thing, it was possible to bring about an intense feeling for and belief in its living reality. … a complete transfiguration of the common sense, expedient view where … people and things existed mainly in terms of their usefulness; it brought a change to a world of living essences … offering a source of delight simply through the fact of being themselves. In short, it was a transfiguration comparable in a small way to the transfiguration of falling in love. 10 My amorous and tender awareness, then, would be “a transformation of the world,” 11 in which I experience people and things as more alive and more real, in the way a lover or an artist does. became aware of, or “touched,” “the Wisdom by which all things were made,” which is “eternal” (IX.x.24). Thus, our experiencing eternity much more like touching than grasping or grabbing, as in conceptual knowledge. Later in Book X (xix.28 – xxiii.23) he uses both verb and noun in conjunction with his desire to come in contact with God and to remain attached to Him. He realized that in order to pursue that desire he had “to pass beyond memory” (xvii.26), to awareness. Here Augustine used notitia to refer to awareness of the following things: 1) of the blissful life, which he was seeking, in seeking God, and which all human beings want: “Where have they become aware of (noverunt) it? … I don’t know how they became aware of it and so have it in I-know-not-what notitia.” 2) of numbers, which human beings have in a different kind of notitia, than that of the blissful life. 3) of eloquence, which even some who were never eloquent wished, from an inner notitia, to have, when they happened to experience others being eloquent. 4) of joy, the notitia of which stuck so fast in his memory that he could be mindful of it, even when he was sad. All human beings have had an experience of joy, and that’s what they call the blissful life. It is the notitia of that which they have in mind, when they want the blissful life. The above examples suggest that John of the Cross may be using noticia to refer to a preconceptual, undifferentiated sort of familiarity, an awareness that is obscure in that sense. 8 Here John is not using “general” to refer to knowledge by concepts—as in “the concept of body includes heaviness”—as opposed to particulars known by perception—for instance, “this book is heavy.” 9 The two examples in this sentence come from Erwin Straus, who offers a wonderful discussion of the contrast between detached and involved awareness in Vom Sinn der Sinne (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1956), pp. 329-350. 10 M. Milner (Joanna Field), On Not Being Able to Paint (Madison, CN: International Universities Press, 1957), p. 21, italics added. 11 This is how J.-P. Sartre characterizes the way emotions alter our experiencing of the world. See his The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (NY: The Philosophical Library, 1948), pp. 52-58. 12 �Moreover, in the state of contemplation, I do not experience an object of consciousness, do not encounter anything as if it were standing opposite to me, the subject of consciousness. Contemplation is “pure” in the sense that it is “pure of object-plus-subject.” My awareness is one with that of which there is awareness, in a unity out of which both subject and object subsequently emerge. As a state of mind without “yet a subject or an object,” it is prior to the correlation of subject with object: 12 “The moment of seeing a color or hearing a sound … is prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the effect of an external object or that one is sensing it, but also [prior] to the judgment of what the color or sound might be.” 13 In this sense contemplation would be an immediate experience. 14 At the very beginning of each moment of awareness, there is a fleeting instant of pure awareness just before you conceptualize the thing, before you identify it…. It is that flashing split second just as you focus your eyes on the thing, just as you focus your mind on the thing, just before you objectify it, … and segregate it from the rest of existence…. just before you start thinking about it— before your mind says, “Oh, it’s a dog.” Instead of focusing on what I perceive, imagine, or think, in order to cognize it, label it, and think about it, in contemplation I “experience a thing as an un-thing … experience a softly flowing [instant] of pure experience that is interlocked with the rest of reality.” 15 Understood in this sense contemplation can be seen to open me to what is in-finite, in-determinate, un-limited, un-thing, and, thereby, to prepare me for selfaware union with the divine creating, God’s esse, or is-ing, as was stated in Section I. CONCLUSION My soul is “holding” its “direction-toward (advertencia) God together with [its] loving God.” John analogizes this holding-together to my holding my eyes open, in order to allow the light “to be communicated passively” to me, just as God “is being communicated passively to the soul.” This “divine 12 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, “DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?” (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971), p.5. Also: “The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject…, the other becomes the object.” 13 NISHIDA Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, tr. M. Abe and C. Ives, modified (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 3-4; italics added. 14 Such selfawareness is not to be confused with self-consciousness—the reflective I think which “must be able to accompany all my presentations” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B132)—in which pure contemplation first splits into subject and object. “Selfawareness” is an attempt to translate into English Sartre’s “conscience (de) soi,” which he uses to refer to the pre-reflective I think. See his “L'Être et le Néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris : Éditions Gallimard, 1943), p. 20. 15 Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2011), p. 132; italics added. One way to sense what this instant of pure experience is like would be to compare “what you see with your peripheral vision as opposed to the hard focus of normal or central vision” (p. 132). 13 �light” “is being poured” into my soul (se le infunde), in a way beyond the natural (AMC II.15.2-3). Thereby my will “is changed into life of divine love” (LFL 2.34). Now my soul experiences what God stated in the Psalm referred to in the introduction: “you will see how (cómo) I am God” (AMC II.15.5). My soul sees how God is God in seeing the world in a fresh way, beyond the natural. In order to convey how God is God, John (LFL 4.6) turns to the depiction of Wisdom in the Book of Wisdom (7:24-27): “‘Wisdom is more mobile than all movable things’ … because she is the origination and root of all movement; and … ‘remaining within herself stable and permanent, she makes all things new (innova; καινίζει).’” He says that this means that “Wisdom is more active than all active things.” In this movement, according to John, my soul is the moved. It has been “awakened from the dream of natural vison to vision beyond the natural.” From its new perspective—from which it is seeing how God is God, how Wisdom is Wisdom—it has the loving, general awareness (noticia) of that stable divine life as originating and as making all things new, each instant. Each instant it experiences creatures’ movements as being in tune (armonía) with God’s moving (LFL 4.6), as emanating from “God’s being-atwork (ἐνεργείας)” (Wis 7:26). Key to Abbreviations AMC – Ascent of Mount Carmel DN – Dark Night LFL – Living Flame of Love 14 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 14 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Walking the First Steps of His Camino with John of the Cross: An Exploration of the Dark Night of Sense Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 11, 2022, by Annapolis tutor Robert Druecker as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Druecker describes his lecture: "According to John a verse from one of the Psalms is saying to us: Learn to be empty of all things, both outward and inward, and you will see how I am God. Outward things are things the soul experiences through its senses, feelings, and imagination. As the soul moves into this first dark night, it actively works at releasing its hold on all particular things. Then at some point, it notices that, independently of its wishes and efforts, it is being led away from an active doing into a receptive undergoing. Its tight grip is gradually becoming a relaxed open hand. The soul is entering the passive dark night of sense. It begins to experience God as flowing into it. Correlated with this sensed inflowing is the soul’s awakening to ways in which God is manifesting his divinity in the world." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Druecker, Robert Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-11-11 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 audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual 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 John of the Cross, Saint, 1542-1591. Noche oscura del alma. English Mysticism Purgative way to perfection Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Druecker_Robert_2022-11-11 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a9152d8c3d33dffbb94407e3f8bb01dc.mp4 f2fa870f99f78ab33c0cdbea8682b6e4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Zoom video conference Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:22:39 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 Looking in Freshman Lab III – Looking Into The Constitution of Bodies: How Does the Supposition of Particles Help Us to See? Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2022, by Annapolis tutor Robert Druecker as part of the Formal Lecture Series. The lecture is the third in a three-part series on Freshman Lab. Note: The title frame at the beginning of the lecture reads Looking in Freshman Lab II, but the lecture is Looking in Freshman Lab III. Druecker describes his lecture: "This is a lecture specifically for first-year students. It will tell a story of how the presupposition that particles exist is used and made precise by a succession of chemists, from Lavoisier through Mendeleev. Does it enable us to see anything new in the phenomena we encounter in the laboratory? How does its contribution to seeing compare with that of Archimedes’ and Pascal’s mathematical approaches to weights and fluids?" Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Druecker, Robert Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-04-13 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual 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 moving image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Particles Chemistry--Study and teaching Chemistry--Experiments Relation A related resource <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7629">Looking in Freshman Lab part I (typescript)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7350">Looking in Freshman Lab part I (video)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7628">Looking in Freshman Lab part II (typescript)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7627" title="Looking in Freshman Lab part II (video)">Looking in Freshman Lab part II (video)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7630">Looking in Freshman Lab part III (typescript)</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Druecker_Robert_2022-04-13_ac Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/235f0dc0152010d8b003fd3d1fbce82d.mp3 a4909475386df417dd9fda7a626df453 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:21:56 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Toward a Revival of the Mixed Constitution Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 16, 2022, by Patrick Deneen as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Deneen is a professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, where he holds the David A. Potenziani Chair of Constitutional Studies. He is the author of <em>Democratic Faith</em> (Princeton University Press, 2005) and <em>Why Liberalism Failed</em> (Yale University Press, 2018).<br /><br /><span>This lecture is also part of the Steiner Lecture Series, which is made possible by a gift from the Steiner family in memory of Andrew Steiner, an alumnus of the college from 1963. The lecture series was established to bring notable speakers to campus from a variety of disciplines and endeavors, in recognition of Steiner’s intellectual versatility, and for the sake of continued learning.</span> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Deneen, Patrick J., 1964- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-09-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John’s College permission to: Make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Political science--Philosophy Constitutional history Constitutional history, Ancient Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Deneen_Patrick_2022-09-16_ac Friday night lecture Steiner lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ac54c4a9f8e21ccd6096baa14b782f2f.mp3 90735c35823694c77438ef15e1f0a1e9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:54:50 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Octaves: The Variety of Sameness Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 19, 1997 by Elliott Zuckerman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Zuckerman, Elliott Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997-09-19 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission has been given to make this available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Music theory Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Zuckerman_Elliott_1997-09-19_ac Friday night lecture Tutors