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Comedy and the Virtue of Divine Puppets
Joseph C. Macfarland
The dean’s lecture in Annapolis, MD
August 27, 20211
A decade or more ago, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound was removed from the freshman
seminar reading list to make way for Aristophanes’ The Birds. A tragedy of one punished for
resistance to the Olympian gods was replaced with a comedy in which the Olympians are
overthrown. Without having been party to the deliberations, I heard it said third-hand, in
defense of the change, that it would be good for the reading list to have more comedy. It was a
thought—a sentiment?—I agreed with, without having an account why. Changes in the reading
list since then have not followed this principle: after trying The Birds and The Frogs for a decade
at least, the second Aristophanes play was removed again to enable us to read the whole of the
Nicomachean Ethics. (I will pass over other sins against comedy.)
The fact that the statement was made is peculiar: one would never expect anyone to
say, it would be good for the reading list to have more tragedy, or more epic poetry. If I were to
ask, “is reading and discussing tragedy an essential part of a liberal education?” You might
respond with a laugh—what would such an education amount to without Antigone or Lear?
Comedy as a genre somehow seems more likely to be neglected—whether true or not—and, as
a result, it seems to be more in need of defense as part of a liberal education. It’s not hard to
see why: education is a sustained play for the young in the service of something serious, a kind
of excellence. This is a pun borrowed from, among other places, Plato’s dialogue, The Laws.2
Forgive me for explaining this quite familiar play on playing: education, in Greek paideia, is the
sustained play, paidia, of children, paides, in the service of the opposite of play, the serious as
such, excellence. The seeming need to defend comedy comes from the sense that comedy is
1
For my understanding of The Laws, I am much indebted to members of an NEH study group in 2013 led by Rob
Goldberg, with Jeff Black, Joan Silver, Louis Petrich, Eric Salem, and Stuart Umphrey (forgive me if I have forgotten
any one). I also led precepts on The Laws (2003) and several plays of Aristophanes (2018), where I learned much
from my students. This lecture is not for quotation without permission: it is very much a work in progress, as the
notes make clear.
2 The Laws 643b-d; Strauss 1975, 17.
1
�just too playful, too unserious, to serve human excellence—and, in most cases, perhaps, this is
so.
Despite the seeming need to give an account of comedy, it might be wiser to resist the
temptation: we may view arguments in favor of books based on their genre with suspicion. For
example, whom should we trust on the excellence of tragedy as such? Aristotle? Nietzsche?
Aristophanes? Or none of the three, since none wrote tragedies? Who, indeed, can even define
the genre with sufficient certitude? Does tragedy have a form towards which all tragedies
aspire? Or is it emergent, malleable, historical? By “comedy,” do I mean performed dramas in
particular, say The Clouds or Le Misanthrope? Or prose narratives as well, such as Gulliver’s
Travels or Don Quixote? If we count the latter, perhaps we would say there’s no lack of comedy
on the seminar reading list.
Nevertheless, as is clear, I have already succumbed to the foolish temptation to attempt
to redeem the all-too-playful by weighing it down with an hour of seriousness (and not for the
first time). My starting point has been the following peculiar observation: as all know, in The
Republic, when Socrates and his friends are setting out the best city in speech, Socrates says
that the poets, Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians and others, must be excluded from their city
(377b ff.). The tales of the poets do not conform to the noble models set down by the lawgiver,
for the poets say that the gods are sources of good and evil, that they change shape and
deceive us, that the gods can be overpowered by laughter (388e), that good and virtuous men
wail in excess at the loss of friends (387d-388a), that good men praise drinking and eating (and
sex), and that many happy men are unjust.3
Plato wrote a comparable dialogue, The Laws: a conversation among three old men, it is
longer and more obscure than The Republic, in which an unnamed Athenian stranger describes
the second-best city in speech. The stranger is conversing with two Dorians, a Spartan and a
Cretan, the latter of which, we discover, has been entrusted by his fellow citizens with the
3
Republic 392b. This list is not complete. On moderation, 389e. Socrates notes the importance in the young to be
moderate in drinking, eating, and sex. This category seems more diffuse. For indulgence in sexual desire, he notes
the rapes of Theseus and Perithous (391c). Socrates connects this immoderation with Achilles’ disobedience to a
god, the river Scamander (391b). See also 606 ff.
2
�authority to settle a colony, to found the new city of Magnesia. This second-best city in speech,
is suspended somewhere between the best city simply, and the actual city that will be
established.
In the best city, “the things of friends are… common” as far as possible, or more than
that: women, children, and property are held in common; nothing is “private,” everything is
shared, even the things “private by nature” (739c). The laws make the city “come as close as
possible to unity,” and they contain the most correct and most beautiful definition of “the
extreme with respect to virtue” (739d). The best city cannot be realized; it is a “model” to be
looked at. The Athenian stranger therefore sets out a second-best city that, while still aiming at
virtue, is intended to be practicable. The second-best city allows the private by nature to
remain private: there is marriage, according to personal likes and dislikes, and families hold real
estate. In the second-best city, as in the best city, the poet is not permitted to create anything
that differs from the city’s conventional and just version of the beautiful and the good.4 In
laying out the education of citizens within the second-best city, the stranger therefore again
prohibits tragedy, for reasons that I will go into later, but he “ordains in law” viewing comedy as
part of the citizens’ education.5 “Someone who is going to become prudent can’t learn the
serious things without learning the laughable… one should learn about the [laughable] things
just for this reason… so that he may never do or say, through ignorance, anything that is
ridiculous, if he doesn’t have to.”6
So this, in short, is my proposed path into thinking about the worth of comedy: if
comedy and tragedy are equally prohibited in the best regime, why is comedy, but not tragedy,
part of the education ordained in the second-best regime? I confess, this one observation is a
small peg to hang my hat on; the comments about comedy in The Laws are brief and rare, and
it is likely I will blow the whole thing out of proportion. I am not insensible to the audacity of
holding The Republic and The Laws side-by-side for less than an hour—a proper treatment
would be as long as either. Among my other sins, I will speak at length about a genre of
4
The Laws 801c-d, cf. 660a. The poet is not entirely able to understand what is good, and must be audited by the
guardians of the laws.
5 The Laws, 816d-817d. On the incompleteness of the prohibition of tragedy, Strauss 1975, 112.
6 “Laughable” and “ridiculous” both translate geloios.
3
�literature without directly examining any work of literature in that genre: my wish is you may
correct this fault for me in the question period.
To get started, as a point of reference, I have to note another difference between the
two dialogues. For both, there are four cardinal virtues: courage, justice, moderation, and
wisdom.7 Moreover, the aim of the regime in each case is to establish not one of the virtues,
but the whole of virtue at once. As we know, the entry point for discussion of the best regime
(in The Republic) are questions about justice: what is justice? is justice nothing more than the
advantage of the stronger? Is the just man happier, in himself, than the unjust, not taking into
account any benefits of a good reputation? (Rep. 367a) By contrast, the discussion of the
second-best regime begins by setting aside justice, focusing instead on courage and
moderation. The stranger’s diversion from the path of The Republic could not be clearer: early
in The Laws, the question is raised, are the good things in life—health, beauty, and wealth—
good for only for the just [and pious], or also for the unjust? (661a-c) The stranger and his
interlocutor are not able to come to an agreement: the Cretan insists that health, wealth, and
tyranny can make one happy, even if one is unjust (661e).8 The argument nevertheless
proceeds on the assumption, untested, that the unjust life is less pleasant than the just life: in
other words, the whole argument of The Republic is bypassed.9 [As if to legitimate this path of
the argument, the stranger suggests that justice in practice arises from a mixture of courage
and moderation.]10
7
In The Laws, these are ranked lowest to highest; moderation outranks justice (631d, also 900e). Cf. Republic 427e
ff. Note, comparing the two lists, prudence (phronesis) in The Laws takes the place of sophia in The Republic—a
difference in context that warrants discussion (427e).
8 It would be more correct to say not that he asserts this to be true, but that he refuses to assent to the claim it is
not true. He feels some shame about it. The Spartan may not agree with the Cretan on this point (696b).
9 Yet another essential difference, in The Laws, the lawgiver, at the moment of founding, will not change anything
as regards the gods or temples (738c); the sectors assigned to the gods are laid out simultaneously as the plots of
land are assigned to families (737e, 740b), in other words, the conventional gods are admitted at the same
moment that the regime is acknowledged as second-best (739a). In The Republic, the philosophic critique of the
traditional gods is accepted from the beginning, that is, assumed in the critique of epic poetry, long before the
community of property or wives is revealed.
10 Laws 696c: the just does not grow apart from moderation. The view that justice is the advantage of the stronger
appears much later (890a).
4
�Setting aside justice, The Laws begins instead from courage and moderation. The
stranger is talking to a Spartan and a Cretan, and in their view, the natural state of things is
endless war: war between cities, war within cities, and war within the self (625d-626d).11 On
this hypothesis, virtue is victory over oneself (626e); in learning to withstand pains, fear, and
suffering in the internal war, one becomes able to endure the same in external war: one thus
acquires courage (630b-c). Focused on courage, the Dorian education does little to educate in
the measured enjoyment of pleasures; in other words, the education is deficient on the side of
moderation (634c).12
Courage and moderation thus come to sight as complementary virtues: courage enables
one to boldly endure pains and fears; with moderation, one enjoys appropriate pleasures
without becoming captive to them. Courage is useful in war; the pleasures enjoyed in
moderation are generally found in peace. Since war puts the existence of the city as a whole at
risk, courage gains great honors; the domain of moderation is the private life, the dining room
and the bedroom; hidden from view, the practice of moderation earns no accolades (696d). No
awards are given for eating healthily or drinking without effect on one’s faculties.
As complementary virtues, having courage without moderation is analogous to being
right-handed or left-handed: imbalance is common and perhaps natural;13 few human beings
are ambidextrous; few are as moderate as they are courageous, or vice versa (634a). In the case
of handedness, in fact, ambidexterity often provides no great practical advantage—doing
something with both hands equally is often no more effective than doing it with one or the
other—so a modest imbalance is easily endured. Differences in handedness are slight by
nature: it is only long, consistent habituation to one-hand or the other for a particular practice
that exaggerates the difference and makes us “like cripples” in the off-hand (794e; cf. 781c).14
11
The stranger later suggests that the Dorians are not wrong to attribute a primacy to courage at the origins of the
city, as terror is the general condition at the emergence of the city (791e).
12 Gymnastic training may provide some assistance in resisting pleasures (636a, 647d). The stranger notes
outstanding athletes who, for the love of victory, practiced moderation in subordination to their gymnastic
activities (840a-c).
13 Magnificence and courage are masculine-looking, the orderly and the moderate “should be proclaimed, in legal
convention and speech,” as feminine (802e). To my mind, the guarded way in which this is stated suggests some
uncertainty about the degree to which any differences in gender are by nature.
14 There is nothing in playing the lyre that requires the instrument to be held in the right hand or the left (Paul
McCartney strung his bass backwards). In this passage, the stranger is speaking about handedness and
5
�With the virtues, great imbalances entail significant risks: a very courageous man, capable of
enduring great fear and pain, may be bold enough to seek, obtain, and indulge in great
pleasures; he may be sufficiently fearless to be immune to shame, and prone to licentiousness
or tyranny (661e). Conversely, the moderation man of peace may lack the capacity for selfdefense and boldness in danger.15 Yet engaged with two Dorians, the stranger is principally
concerned with how an education in courage may be defective with respect to moderation
(635b-e).
In drawing the Dorians to consider an education in moderation, the stranger tells what
he calls “the myth of virtue,” a metaphor for the soul. Each “living being” is a divine puppet, a
marionette; he says, moreover, we do not know whether the puppet is, “put together for [the
gods’] play or for some serious purpose” (644d). The tendons or cords on the puppet are the
passions, jerking our limbs this way and that; the cords are strong as iron, with one exception:
there is a single soft and golden cord, the cord of reason [lit: calculation, logismos]. In this
metaphor for the soul, reason is most valuable but weak, unable in itself to command or
oppose any passion; furthermore, aside from the status of reason, there is no hierarchy in the
soul, no ranking of threads; reason has no natural ally; to follow the thread of reason, passion
must counterbalance passion. Take the passion of fear: one of our most common fears is the
fear of what others might think of us, that is, shame (647a). Following the gentle, golden cord
of reason, one tries to have fear and fearlessness, pain and pleasures, each in the right
measure, balancing them off one another (cf. 636d). In a tense balance, the person acting from
shame contemns pleasures while secretly desiring them (656a). Virtue, by contrast, is a
habituated harmony (symphonia) between the passions and reason (653b).
Given that an education for courage exists in Sparta, and given that one can hardly point
to a city famous for its analogous education in moderation, the education in moderation
appears to be a greater challenge for the lawgiver. Pleasures and desires are no less challenging
than pains and fears: [quote:] “every animal has a natural, erotic longing, is full of frenzy, and
ambidexterity literally, in gymnastics, but the metaphorical interpretation clearly applies (cf. 794d, 796c, on
Athena and gymnastic education for women; also 634a).
15 The Laws 814b. The strangers suggests that women who are not gymnastically trained are less able than females
of other species to defend their young; their education has made them worse than they would be by nature.
6
�[it] refuses to listen if someone says it ought to do anything except satisfy the pleasures and
desires… (782e).” Beyond the need for food and drink, the greatest need is the “erotic longing…
which makes human beings burn with complete madness,” with “an insolent flame” (783a). In
Sparta, the desire for food and drink is controlled through common meals, at least for the men:
the bodily needs, generally satisfied in the privacy of one’s home where few can see what one
does, are met instead in public, in the sight of fellow citizens, and are thus moderated by
shame. What then, is to be done about the sharpest of the three needs, erotic longing? How
can moderation be taught there? We might return from Sparta to Plato’s Republic, where the
family is dispensed with altogether. There is no private property, no household, no exclusive
marriage. Women are educated with men, and the guardians mate with guardians according to
a lottery, or at the judgment of the rulers. The most intimate matters are laid bare to serve the
city. Of course, in The Laws, it is the second-best city that is described; private property and
exclusive marriage are preserved. And so alternative means are devised to bring private desire
under public regulation: for example, to ensure that young people are well-matched in
marriage, they participate in choral dances, naked, so that, on the wedding day, there are no
surprises for the bride, the groom, or their families (771e-772a). He then flirts with the notion
of the matching brides and grooms, each with those with opposite characters, drawing an
analogy to mixing wine in order to make it less intoxicating (773d). Recognizing that this would
be laughed at, or even make people angry, and he leaves it out of the law. The stranger later
admits that the laws of the city can hardly educate in erotic matters without exercising a degree
of control over private minutiae that is laughable and brings the law into ill-repute (789e-790a).
What the city cannot control by explicit legislation, may perhaps be restrained through
reverential awe. The lawgiver can “enslave a certain desire” by having everyone whatever hold
the prohibition against it to be sacred—declaring the desire impious, shameful, and hateful to
the gods (838c-d). When everyone, at all times, says the same things about that desire, the
desire vanishes. To prove the point, he gives the example of incest: so uniform is the
condemnation of it that there isn’t the “slightest desire for this sort of intercourse” (838b); it
takes no great self-restraint to refrain from it even when we are unrestrained in other ways
(838a). Even when it is spoken about, as in tragedies or comedies, the speeches have the effect
7
�of reinforcing the prohibition (838c).16 So reverential awe successfully instills self-restraint in
erotic matters, at least in certain specific cases; it appears to be a functional substitute for the
virtue of moderation. 17 The stranger notes, however, that it is very difficult to create new aweladen prohibitions (839d). Moreover, the effect of such prohibitions may be not to prevent the
prohibited deeds altogether, but to ensure that they are well-concealed and never spoken of.
If reverential awe were a sufficient solution to the problem of how to educate towards
moderation, it is difficult to see why the lawgiver would ordain comedies by law, since
comedies tend to give voice exactly to the shameful things that reverential awe covers in
silence. In fact, comedy may put the conventional gods into question, attacking awe at its
source. The thought that I have wanted to test is that comedy may be an alternative means to
educate in moderation. Early in the book, before the description of the second-best regime
begins, the stranger persuades the Dorians, contrary to their own educations, that a wellregulated drinking party would be a way to teach citizens the moderate enjoyment of private
pleasures. Yet all discussion of the drinking parties disappears when the second-best regime is
constructed in earnest; perhaps comedy has taken their place. But before looking at the all-toobrief defense of comedy, let us consider the adjacent discussion of tragedy.
The entry point to the discussion of drama is a brief discussion of dance. The citizens
practice “serious” dances, imitating noble bodies in solemn movements; they do not practice
the dances that imitate shameful bodies in base motions (814e). Immediately thereafter,
tragedy is called the “serious” form of poetry, leading one to suspect that it, too, will be
admitted into the city. The stranger imagines the tragic poets coming to the city, whereupon
he, speaking to them in voice of the lawgiver, says: “Best of strangers… we ourselves are poets,
who have to the best of our ability created a tragedy that is the most beautiful and best; at any
16
The stranger adds: when incest is spoken of in tragedies, those who commit it punish themselves. Incest is
spoken of in The Republic; does this work contradict the general observation made in The Laws?
17 I have played a little fast and lose here: in 838b-839d, the stranger speaks of the “art” of making the laws
“sacred” (kathierow, to consecrate). I have assumed that the consecrated laws instill “the despotic mistress—Awe”
(despotis… tis aidws) in the citizens, although awe is described rather earlier (698b). The stranger says that the
early Athenians were “slaves to the laws” and therefore had a “strong sense of friendship” (698c, 699c), although,
it seems, neither prudence nor freedom (comparing the Athenians with the account of the Persians at 694b; also,
at 700e-701b, the Athenians gained freedom and lost their awe, becoming shameless and mindless).
8
�rate, our whole political regime is constructed as the imitation of the most beautiful and best
way of life, which we at least assert to be the truest tragedy… You are poets… and we are your
rivals as artists and performers of the most beautiful drama… so don’t suppose that we will
ever easily… allow you to come among us” (817b-c).
What could it mean that the city itself is the truest tragedy? That tragedy is an imitation
of the life of a great and serious (spoudaios) person sounds familiar, yet nothing is said about
what we might associate with tragedy, that the great person commits an error, that there is a
reversal of fortune and a recognition of error (Poetics 1448a1, 1452a15). The city [regime] is a
poem, an imitation of the most beautiful and best way of life, fated to fall. Falling short appears
to be essential to the regime as such. As we have said, what is being described is the secondbest city, itself already a deliberate retreat from the best (739a). The thumbnail description of
the best regime reminds us of The Republic, where two books are devoted to the description of
the gradual degeneration of the best regime from a monarchy into timocracy, from timocracy
into oligarchy, and so on, finally to tyranny. As each political arrangement coincides with a basic
human type, the structure of a soul, the decline of the regime coincides with a decline of in the
type of soul. The best regime is intended to reveal the soul of the just human being, and the
descent from the best regime reveals the fall of the soul as well, slipping further from the
highest form.18 Perhaps the regime is a tragedy, and the lawgivers are its poets, because
however high it aims in educating and fostering the highest human types, it inevitably falls
short of its goal, and the regime itself, and its citizens, decline.
It is not quite right to say that the stranger excludes tragic poets from the second-best
city, for the lawgivers themselves are tragic poets, and other poets, too, might be admitted if
they conceived of the best and most beautiful life in the same way as the lawgivers. It is strange
then that the citizens—who are themselves actors in the best and most beautiful tragedy, and
who never (or rarely) view a tragedy besides their own—should then be spectators of comedy,
viewing and laughing at “shameful bodies and thoughts.” Why is this? Let me give the all-tooeasy-answer first: the stranger says, “for someone who is going to become prudent can’t learn
18
A somewhat analogous degeneration of regimes is assumed The Laws as well. The stranger describes two fine
historical regimes, Athens and Persia, a fine democracy and a fine monarchy, and subsequently explains how each
degenerates into a different sort of tyranny. The accounts appear to fall in the genre of historical fiction.
9
�the serious things without learning the laughable, or, for that matter, anything without its
opposite” (816d). The citizens learning to be serious (spoudaioi) must strive for what is noble
and beautiful, and to do so, they should have some detached acquaintance with the shameful
and the base, precisely as what is to be avoided. Each of the virtues has shameful vices
associated with it that could find their way into comedy—cowardice or injustice, for example—
yet moderation seems to be the virtue that deals most of all with the shameful and the base,
the things that we strive most to conceal. Recall that in the best regime, the private functions in
which the desires are most powerful—food, drink, and sex—are brought out into the public;
the private is eliminated so that all the citizens can be united in their pains and pleasures
(464a). The functions, in themselves, are not beautiful, and it is not easy to see how they could
be performed in a beautiful or noble way.19 Comedy brings them out into the open: one sees in
the light of day the madness of erotic longing, gluttony, avarice, distorted bodily functions, the
ugly or the low in excess. Yet while shame is itself painful—it is the pain of having our faults
revealed that induces us to fight against some pleasures—laughter is pleasurable. In comedy
we contemplate varying degrees of the shameful with delight, in others, at a distance, perhaps
with a slight sense of superiority, but knowing we are not so far from the faults we observe.
This account, even if it is correct, is not sufficient. This apology for comedy accepts an
entirely conventional notion of what is laughable and shameful. Shame suppresses and
conceals desire; comedy becomes a means for revealing what is concealed, letting it be
uncomfortably seen, sharing in the pleasure of scorn, while still tacitly allowing that
concealment and suppression is proper. By this account, the laughable reinforces the
conventional notion of the shameful.20 One might then ask: if this were true, why might it be
better to educate in moderation through comedy than through reverential awe? The latter
suppresses speech about the shameful; the former gives voice to the shameful, brings it to
sight, dwells in it. It titillates as it chastises, it contemplates the shameful, with embarrassment
and with pleasure. Comedy could loosen the hold of shame and awe, in thought if not in deed.21
19
I am thinking of Aristotle’s treatment of moderation, in which, compared to the other ethical virtues, the
beautiful plays a very small role. It appears only once, at the very end (1119b16).
20 Benardete 1989, 115.
21 By analogy, the stranger says that one should never joke with domestic servants (oiketes), as it renders them less
ready to be ruled (778a).
10
�We have to go further into the variability in the laughable or the shameful. It was noted
already that the stranger, insofar as he is speaking as a lawgiver, is a poet, the author of the
truest tragedy.22 If we take the narrative as a poem, one notes that the features of any regime
that would trigger laughter change; what the listener might find shameful or base changes.
Each step one takes from the common regimes, to the arguably better ones, involves proposing
something laughable, often so laughable, that the step is thought to be impossible. If one were
to propose to an existing regime that all of the men should take their meals in common,
separated from their families, from their wives and children, in order to strengthen their
education, not just in their youth but throughout their lives, most humans would find this
absurd, not to be taken seriously, and not practicable, or at least not sustainable. And yet, as
the stranger points out, this was the way that the Spartans [and Cretans] had lived, for
generations, so that to them there would be nothing remarkable in it.23 The next step, which is
said to be correct according to nature (780c), would be to ordain that women as well as men
share in common meals—for it does little good to bring men’s lives into order through the
practice, and to leave the lives of women, private and concealed from the public, in
comparative disorder. Yet this, too, is laughable—laughable especially for the Spartan used to
common meals for men alone—it is laughable to compel “the race of women” to be “dragged
by force into the light” so that their public education be the same as men’s, when they have
heretofore been “habituated… [to] an indoor way of life” (781c).24 Of course, while common
meals are foreign to us (except in rare circumstances) as far as the education of women is
concerned, for us, here and now, the opposite is true: it would be shameful to exclude women
from public events, or from the education that goes with them, but to force them back into an
entirely private existence.
22
See also The Laws 811c, where the stranger, not as a putative lawgiver in an existing city, but as someone who
only discourses about the laws, says he speaks as a poet.
23 The stranger says that the institution, at its beginning, aroused “amazement” (780b). Laughter is mentioned
later. The laughable and the amazing seem related, as the word for “puppet” (thauma) means something that is
wonderous or amazing.
24 Benardete (2000) points out that common meals for women are separate from those for men (211; 806d-e).
11
�At this point the stranger’s theme becomes the malleability of customs and the
customary sense of shame, but in order to emphasize the malleability of customs, he dives
behind this to the variability of nature itself. He quickly notes, for example, that the climate has
gone through revolutions, and animals have gone through many transformations (782a). So it
should not be surprising if customary human practices should also have gone through strange
but great changes, such as the severity of human sacrifice, on the one hand, and the gentleness
of abstaining from animal flesh, on the other (782c). We laugh when our sense of shame is
violated, but we don’t know at first chuckle whether the laughable in each case is something
merely unfamiliar and contrary to custom, or unnatural or impossible: we would have to know
whether our hypothetically violated convention is aligned with or opposed to nature, and for
this we would need to know the natural with some degree of certainty.
As the stranger pulls apart the conventional and the natural, and attributes to both
some degree of variability, he presses on to still more laughable political measures. The
stranger proposes that midwives be appointed to enter into the homes of newlyweds, to
observe them and to make sure that their frenzied erotic longings are satisfied in a way that
they apply “intelligence” to the procreative act (783e-784c).25 (What this means is not
explained.) If the young people do something sinful or foolish, the midwives may exhort or
threaten them (784c) and report them at the temple of Artemis. The stranger lays out these
practices in apparent seriousness, yet one assumes with some sense of humor. If dining and sex
are both generally private, certainly moving private dining out into the public could not more
laughable than inserting public authorities into the bedroom.
In order to follow this pattern, in which laughable measures are proposed for the sake
of improving the city, one must pass briefly from discussion of the second-best regime, to the
best-regime simply, from the The Laws to The Republic. As all readers of the dialogue know, in
the “women’s drama,” Socrates is compelled by his interlocutors to consider several practices
that are progressively more radical than anything in The Laws, practices that, according to
25
Great pleasure leads to insolence and mindlessness (637a, 641b). The stranger digresses in order to explain the
plausibility of including women in the common meals, but then postpones completion of the discussion about
common meals in order to discuss procreation. It seems the arrangement of the common meals must be guided by
and arrangement concerning procreation, but the latter is never sufficiently defined to lead back to the former.
12
�Socrates himself, ought to elicit waves of laughter: (1) that women, together with men, young
and old (!), should exercise naked, sharing in the same education (452b; cf. The Laws), (2) that
all wives and children should be held in common, so that no parent will know its offspring, and
no child will know its specific parents (457d), and, finally, (3) that the philosophers rule as kings,
or that kings philosophize (473c). 26 The laughable character of each wave appears confirmed by
the way Socrates’ speeches cut across the plays of Aristophanes: first, the Assemblywomen, in
which the Athenian women, posing as men, come to rule the city and abolish private property
as well as the nuclear family, and second, The Clouds, where the extreme privacy and the
political ineptness of the philosopher are put on display. The first two waves of Socrates’s
discourse—the commonality of property and families—take the risk of entertaining seriously
what was perfectly farcical in the hands of Aristophanes, while the third wave flies in the face of
Aristophanes’ farce, to entertain in thought what even the comic poet would put beyond
laughable.
The ascent through the progressively more laughable proposals is simultaneously an
ascent, according to the arguments, towards what is best for the city: a city in which the
relation among its parts shows forth, writ large, the structure of a soul that possesses all of the
virtues (427e); a city in which citizens share all pleasures and pains, and which is therefore the
most unified (462b); and a city in which the rulers have knowledge, rather than opinion, of the
good. It seems necessary, in the wake of each eruption of laughter, to pause to take seriously
the laughable, in order to think what is natural, best, or highest.
Although the stranger—speaking in the person of the lawgiver—has referred to himself
as a rival to the tragic poets, the fact that the ascent involves repeated consideration of the
laughable might make his poem appear comic more that tragic. In fact, somewhat prior to the
discussion of comedy and tragedy, the stranger upsets the two Dorians by treating lawgiving
not as a serious enterprise, but as a kind of play, thus, elevating play over politics generally.
“The affairs of human beings are not worthy of great seriousness; yet it is necessary to be
serious about them” (803b). “I assert that what is serious should be treated seriously, and what
26
Only at the third wave does Socrates explicitly call it a wave of laughter. In the present reading, I am struck by
how little Glaucon is inclined to laugh at these proposals which Socrates anticipates as laughable.
13
�is not serious should not, and that by nature god is worthy of complete, blessed seriousness,
but… what is human, as we said earlier, has been devised as a certain plaything of god, and that
this is really the best thing about it. Every man and woman should spend life in this way, playing
the noblest possible games, and thinking about them in a way that is the opposite of the way
they [are] now thought about” (803c).
In the common opinion, war is the most serious human affair: the trial of war requires
boldness, virtue, and endurance. Yet, also in the common opinion, war is for the sake of peace,
and peace gives us time for recreation and play (803d). In the common view, the high
perversely serves the low. The stranger rectifies this, letting the low serve the high, elevating
the play of peace over the toil of war. The most serious thing is education, the kinds of play that
form one’s character; because the things that appear to be play are, in fact, the most serious,
one should spend one’s life at peace as far as possible. In singing, dancing, and sacrificing,
humans, “live out their lives in accordance with the way of nature, being puppets, for the most
part, but sharing in small portions of the truth” (804b). At this point, the stranger does not
explain the connection between the seriousness of god and the seriousness of human play.
The Spartan, not surprisingly, is alarmed by stranger’s assertion: “you are belittling our
human race,” literally, “you are making [humanity] base” (phaulos), making it fit for comedic
scorn. And why not? If the human is a divine puppet, a marionette, a plaything of the gods, one
might say that humans are merely players in the comedy of the god.27 Puppet shows are
entertainments for mere children, beneath even the youths who prefer comedy (658c). Yet
confronted by the Spartan’s sudden indignant outburst, the stranger does relent: “Don’t be
amazed… but forgive me! For I was looking away toward the god… let our race be something…
not base then, if it is dear (philos) to you, but worthy of certain seriousness” (804b, trans.
modified).
The stranger says we do not know whether we puppets are put together for a serious or
playful purpose, and so the discourse itself toggles back and forth—the stranger says human
27
Russon: since the stranger says the human is “devised as a plaything (paignion) of the god,” and Liddel and Scott
(1940) suggests “comedy” as a possible translation of paignion (citing Laws 816e; Pangle, “the play that provokes
laughter”; Bury, “laughable amusements”), this passage might be translated, the human is “devised as a comedy of
the god” (in Recco/Sanday 2013, 153). In the four types of entertainment—puppet shows, comedies, tragedies,
and epic—clearly puppet shows and comedies stand close to one another, as do tragedies and epics.
14
�things are not worthy of great seriousness, and yet also says that is it necessary to be serious
about them, in measure. In investigating the worth of play, let me not be understood to say
that we can afford not to take human affairs, including war, seriously—daily events testify to
the compulsion to do so. In the course of this oscillation, however—first attributing seriousness
to human affairs, then likening them to a puppet show, only to take them seriously again—the
degree of seriousness is diminished. This toggling is apparent in how the narrative of the book
itself is appraised. Is it serious or playful? As mentioned before, coincidentally, the Cretan has
been appointed to found a new city (702b). Magnesia will have the laws of Crete, although the
Cretan will adopt better laws if he can find them, and so he is eager for the three of them to
construct the city in speech as a resource for his actual political work. The actual city is a test, a
confirmation or a refutation (elenchus), of the city in speech (702b); by this account, the city,
Magnesia, is the serious work, the proof which then elevates the discourse from being a mere
prudent game for old men to “a serious pursuit for real men” (769a).28
The stranger takes a different stance: the stranger is happy to take on the part of the
lawgiver, for example, in his fictive conversation with the tragic poets, but when he is asked by
Cretan to join them in Magnesia as an actual lawgiver, he responds with silence (969d). He is
not a lawgiver, he only plays one. The stranger better appreciates the distance between their
discourse and the city: when setting out the city in speech, one can assume that whatever is
said is realized according to one’s thought (736b). The lawgiver of the city in speech has a
freedom “in act” that only a tyrant could have in a city in deed (710a, cf. 711d, 735d). In speech
one can enact the laughable, even the impossible. If one looks away from the obstructing
circumstances, describing the city is like telling a dream (746a). Even the second-best city, with
its concessions to necessity, is still only a model (746b). It is a “moderate game” for old men
(paidian sophrona; 685a),29 a “mythic legend” (mythologia; 752a), or an elaborate “painting”
that is never quite finished, always needing a little more detail (769d).30
28
The toggling between taking politics seriously and taking it as a moderate game is intended to mirror the earlier
described balance of courage and moderation, that is, not to be excessively right-handed or left-handed.
29 Cf. 769a, a “prudent game” of old men (emphron paidia).
30 The stranger says that he would never voluntarily leave the mythologia unfinished. But when he likens their
discourse to a painting, he says it is necessary to leave parts undone for others to finish. Cf. 889d ff., for a
discussion of which arts follow nature to a greater degree, and which to a lesser (e.g., farming, medicine, or
15
�In the serious view of politics, human beings are credited with greater agency over their
common life. In this mode, one would say that a wise lawgiver such as Lycurgus saw the benefit
of citizens eating together, both for the purpose of combatting luxury and for making the
citizens feel pleasures and pains in common. If, by contrast, one views the human being as a
divine puppet, a plaything, human agency is obviously diminished. When the stranger discusses
the founding of Sparta, he never names Lycurgus, and he attributes essential elements of the
regime to chance. For example, he says that the practice of common meals arose under some
accidental necessity, lost to history (691b-692a; 780b).31 The scope of the art of lawgiving is
narrowed.
Which is worthier of greater seriousness, the founding of the city of Magnesia, or the
moderate game of old men, a poem of spinning out laws in the best form that they can
conceive? The ascent in words alone from an existing regime to the best is a step-wise progress
through the progressively more laughable, a moderate game of thinking through how (and
whether) the city can imitate or realize the best and most beautiful life. For the actual lawgivers
and statesmen who bring into existence and sustain a city, as an imitation of the best and most
beautiful life, the story is a tragedy, the truest tragedy. Each step down the ladder of regimes
involves a failure of politics to imitate or realize human excellence. The more seriously we take
political affairs, and the effort to build the regime in a way that realizes human excellence, the
more lawgiver and statesmen become poets and actors in a tragedy. Yet the stranger in invites
his interlocutors to invert their viewpoint, to see the ladder of regimes not as a tragic descent,
but as a comic ascent. The narrative is a prudent game, occasionally comic and certainly playful,
even if the difficulties or impossibilities that prompt our laughter and amazement are also the
stuff of tragedy.32 If the city is already in some sense a tragedy, one might see the the utility of
gymnastics vs. painting, music, or lawgiving). If this is the view of stranger, nature may not tightly constrain law or
convention, which is why the laughable may be contrary to convention but not nature. Some caution is warranted
here: the stranger may be paraphrasing the atheist on a view that is in need of correction.
31 The Cretan accepts this explanation of common meals without objection, even though the dialogue begins under
the pretext that Minos gave the laws of Crete under the guidance of Zeus. The Spartan is silent. Cf. 709a-b: “no
human being ever legislates anything”! In reference to Sparta, the stranger attributes the character of the regime
to “a god” (i.e., to the chance birth of twin princes), and to an unnamed man mixed with some divine power
(Lycurgus?) who established the senate and the Ephors. The scope of the art of legislation is narrowed, but not
nothing.
32 Influenced here by Benardete 1989, 115: “The laugh, Socrates had implied, always signals tragedy.”
16
�contemplating comedy, if it frees one to pry into shameful and the laughable, searching for
what is best beyond familiar convention and to the limits of nature, to think through what is
best, without grief, even if impracticable or impossible.
How does all this pertain to an education for moderation? If we return to the “myth of
virtue,” the metaphor of the living being as a divine puppet, one notices something peculiar. As
noted before, under the Spartan notion of virtue, focused as it is on courage, virtue is ‘victory
over oneself.’ Virtue in this account requires a hierarchical account of soul: victory is virtue only
if the victorious part is better. Yet the Dorians give no account of the soul distinguishing the
better and worse parts, and no account of how the better gains leverage over the worse. In the
picture of the soul given by the stranger—the divine puppet—there is hierarchy only insofar the
thread of reason is golden, but not insofar as any part has leverage over any other. In leading
the Dorians to consider an education aiming at moderation no less than courage, he gives a
picture of the soul in which “victory over oneself” is impossible.33 Indeed, to state what has
been obvious, yet too easy to pass by, if we take the myth of the divine puppet seriously, it is
not clear that one has a particular power or agency through which to attain virtue. Perhaps we
have it only if the playing-gods give it to us.
When the stranger first pushes back against the Cretan, questioning whether virtue can
be understood as victory over oneself, he asks: in a civil war, which is better? A conquest in
which the victor destroys or purges the conquered? Or a reconciliation, where a judge brings
the good and the wicked into peace and friendship (628a-b)? Friendship is preferred. As noted
before, virtue is said to be a habituated harmony, or the consonance of reasons with pleasures
and likings, with pains and hatreds (653b). Internal friendship or consonance sounds like a low
state, but it is the necessary condition for prudence, the highest of the four virtues. Even if one
33
Cf. Republic 430e. Socrates introduces his discovery of moderation in the constructed city by pointing out the
ridiculousness of being “stronger than oneself” because one is therefore also “weaker than oneself.” Here,
moderation in particular is called a kind of harmony (431e); this virtue does not reside in a part, but stretches
through the whole. In The Laws, the stranger says the myth of virtue makes “somewhat clearer” what “superior to
oneself” means: it says what the best part is, but not how it acquires superiority. Perhaps I am not clear enough: I
mean to contrast the hierarchical picture of the tripartite soul in The Republic, where the focus lies on justice, with
less structured picture of the divine puppet in The Laws, where the focus lies on moderation.
17
�has speed and agility in figuring things out, cleverness is still “ignorance” when there is no
consonance among pleasures, pains, and reason; it is an ignorance not of the reasoning part
narrowly, but an ignorance of the soul as a whole (689a-d). Prudence is not a distinct faculty or
specific power of the soul, but a virtue of the whole, an acquired condition of it. Thinking well
does not enter and conquer the soul like a general at war, but arises out of and gains strength
from the friendly balance of pleasures and pains, good and bad. The stranger goes so far as to
say that lawgiver who aims at friendship, at moderation, and at prudence, aims at one and the
same thing (693c), eliding the differences between them.34 This is an excellence of soul befitting
a divine puppet, but to view the human as a divine puppet is to view human affairs staged more
as comedy than tragedy. Conversely, contemplating comedy may enable one to view human
affairs in the right frame of mind, being ready to make peace and friendship between the high
and the low, the noble and the base, to bring the threads into consonance. In this sense, the
acquisition of prudence depends on viewing and learning the laughable.
The climax of the dialogue ends with an excessively subtle joke. For reasons too many to
explain, the stranger proposes that a prison be established for atheists who come in a variety of
kinds. Some, although just by nature, are frank in speech about their atheism and spread
impiety by means of ridicule; others are unrestrained in their passions and full of guile; they are
agile learners with strong memories (908c).35 The prison is near to where officials of the city,
the guardians of the education, meet privately at night to discuss the sufficiency and goodness
of the laws.36 The proximity of the prison to the council enables these city officials to converse
with the imprisoned atheists. They discuss at length whether the gods exist and why, whether
they care for human things, and whether they can be persuaded by prayers (885b). The
arguments about the gods, conducted in private, are like a swift river that is dangerous to
34
Eliding the difference between sophrosune and phronesis. To be fair, the stranger also suggests that his
argument lacks precision at this point; a more precise account would delineate the differences. Yet I take seriously
the possibility that prudence is a virtue, not a faculty, that it has to be attained by the soul as a whole, and that
intelligence is also not a faculty, but something to be prayed for (687e).
35 They are frank in speech about the gods, sacrifices, and oaths. Ridicule, katagelaw, is to laugh down at.
36 It turns out that the most secretive element in the second-best city is, strangely, the feature best-known about
the book, it’s worst kept secret, and I assume, not by accident.
18
�enter; one has to be strong enough to ford it (892d-e). My description does little to convey how
puzzling all this is. The prison is called “the moderation-place,” and as the conversations are
said to be theological, one might wonder why the explicit outcome is moderation. Of the two
kinds of prisoners, one sounds like he might be a comic poet: frank in speech, naturally just, and
full of ridicule, the comedic prisoner is in the “moderation-place” although he may not be in
need of moderation.37
When the stranger first called living beings “divine puppets,” one imagined Olympian
gods pulling the threads, the way Aphrodite revenged herself upon Hippolytus by setting
Phaedra aflame, or the way Oedipus sought in vain to evade the oracle. Yet in order to defend
the existence of gods, the stranger argues for a different sort of god; he argues that, among all
bodies, there exists a self-moving motion that is prior to all other motions, and prior to that first
motion there exists soul. The existence of the gods is defended; the Olympian deities are not. In
addition, the gods are not moved by prayer. These inquiries appear to be the singing, dancing,
and sacrificing that is the most serious play (804b). It is natural for humans to pray that all
things come about in accord with their will (lit: command; 687c), but this may prove unwise, as
when Theseus begged Poseidon for revenge upon Hippolytus. The stranger says it is better not
to pray unless one prays with prudence, or perhaps one should pray simply to possess
intelligence (687e, 688c). In the end, we are divine puppets not because the playful-gods pull
on our threads, but because, despite our limited agency and lowly status—comically pulled toand-fro by passions—we may think our way, with as much precision as we can muster, to
questions about the divine, about the first things. If there are puppeteers at all, they appear to
be the poets and their rivals, the poetizing lawgivers.
The excessively subtle joke is that Plato coins a word, sophronisterion, the “moderationplace,” to echo a joke from Aristophanes’ The Clouds, in which Socrates and his students live in
the phrontisterion, the “thinking-place.” In the thinking-place what do we see? An analysis of
how far a flea can jump, the denial of Zeus’s existence,38 and how to win unjust lawsuits by
37
The first is called just by nature, the second is said to have good disposition by nature, euphues, that is, naturally
clever. Perhaps the comic poet has elements of both kinds of atheists (if the types can be blended), in which case
he would be in need of moderation. There are, in fact, three prisons; I have described only the second; it is not
clear how the different kinds of atheists are distributed among the prisons.
38 In favor of Vortex (Whirl, 380) or Chaos (Void, 424)?
19
�specious arguments. Here a youth is corrupted and becomes insolent, willing to beat his father,
and, as a result, the vindictive father destroys the Thinking-place. In the Moderation-place, by
contrast, the conversation of adults with incontinent youths leads [sometimes] to moderation,
to the salvation of souls (909a). The Thinking-place is dangerous to the city; the Moderationplace may be the salvation of it. While the comic poet jokingly placed the philosopher in a
house destroyed by lawless vengeance, the philosopher, in turn, put the comic poet in a prison
where he could converse with the best men of the city, or, perhaps, so they could converse
with him.39 There is so much I do not understand about this last little game, yet it might be said
at least that the philosopher thought better of the comic poet than the poet of the philosopher.
Sources consulted:
Benardete, Seth. Socrates’ Second Sailing: on Plato’s Republic. University of Chicago Press,
1989.
Benardete, Seth. Plato’s Laws: The Discovery of Being. The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Plato. The Laws of Plato. Trans. Thomas Pangle. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Plato. The Republic of Plato. Trans. Allan Bloom. Basic Books: New York, 1968.
Recco, Gregory, and Eric Sanday, eds. Plato’s Laws: Force and Truth in Politics. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013.
Strauss, Leo. The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws. University of Chicago Press, 1975.
39
Since the atheist I am calling the poet is not unjust or incontinent, he does not appear to be in need of an
education in moderation; that seems to belong to the clever, guileful, dissembler instead. Perhaps it is only the
frankness of his speech that requires moderation? Or perhaps the comic poet is a blend of the two atheists.
20
�
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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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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.
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Comedy and the Virtue of Divine Puppets
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 27, 2021 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the Dean's Lecture, but now called the Christopher B. Nelson Lecture.
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2021-08-27
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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 typescript of my lecture available online."
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text
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Comedy
Plato. Laws
Plato. Republic
Virtue
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English
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Macfarland_Joseph_2021-08-27_Typescript
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PDF Text
Text
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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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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.
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paper
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The Questions of Lear and Cordelia
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 7, 2007, by Louis Petrich as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Petrich, Louis
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2007-09-07
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Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. King Lear
Cordelia (Legendary character)
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English
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Petrich_Louis_2007-09-07
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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39e11fea1fcb27c9fbbe9e4f0100a4da
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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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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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
live YouTube webcast
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:52:03
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
<span>Ulysses: Does Your Life Matter? The Conspiracy Against Knowing Who You Are and How to Fight This Conspiracy with Amor-Matris</span>
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered by Annapolis tutor David Townsend on March 26, 2021 as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr Townsend describes his lecture: "Ulysses names Amor Matris—mother-love—as the passion most strongly opposing the tyrannical conspiracy against knowing who you are. Mothers are certain that their children deserve love and freedom. People infused with Amor Matris cannot be dominated without their consent. Tyrants cannot control people who love this deeply. Via the stories of the three main characters, Ulysses gives you a purpose-driven way to free yourself, your native land, your dearest associations, your working life, your family and friends, and your soul."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Townsend, David L., 1947-
Publisher
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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
2021-03-26
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 typescript of my lecture 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
Love, maternal
Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Townsend_David_2021-03-26
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/adf5352845b8da6c363701bf8ea67e69.mp3
ae5404b02b9c2083170b6ac4ad831d7a
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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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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
Zoom video conference
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:57:00
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The Problem of Language in <em>King Lear</em> and <em>Confessions</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Audio track from the video recording of a lecture delivered by Kim Paffenroth on February 12, 2021 as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Dr. Paffenroth describes his lecture: "This lecture considers how in these two very different texts, language is both necessary but often insufficient to communicate our deepest desires, how it both conveys and distorts our meaning. And also, how there are glimpses of language urging the characters beyond what they had previously meant or perceived."
Kim Paffenroth, Ph.D., is the Director of the Honors Program and professor of Religious Studies at Iona College, author and editor of books on St. Augustine, author of zombie-themed genre fiction, and a graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Paffenroth, Kim, 1966-
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
2021-02-12
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 typescript 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
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. King Lear.
Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430. Confessiones.
Contributor
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
Relation
A related resource
<a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7504" title="Video">Video</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Paffenroth_Kim_2021-02-12audio
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/47221c6ba08c7fb84e0ea8917d3e4fae.mp4
9cd5d49c8174244985ab0039a85e722d
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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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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.)
00:57:00
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Problem of Language in <em>King Lear</em> and <em>Confessions</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered by Kim Paffenroth on February 12, 2021 as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Dr. Paffenroth describes his lecture: "This lecture considers how in these two very different texts, language is both necessary but often insufficient to communicate our deepest desires, how it both conveys and distorts our meaning. And also, how there are glimpses of language urging the characters beyond what they had previously meant or perceived."
Kim Paffenroth, Ph.D., is the Director of the Honors Program and professor of Religious Studies at Iona College, author and editor of books on St. Augustine, author of zombie-themed genre fiction, and a graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Paffenroth, Kim, 1966-
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
2021-02-12
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 typescript of my lecture 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
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. King Lear.
Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430. Confessiones.
Relation
A related resource
<a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7505" title="Audio">Audio</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Paffenroth_Kim_2021-02-12
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/44af01d084367af610bcc50f07358648.mp3
ac44e4aa3acdde3df35a9fd89a063050
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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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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
Zoom video conference
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:05:32
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 greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself": Reflecting with Montaigne on Liberation of the Intellect and on Education in Times of Crisis
Description
An account of the resource
Audio track from the video recording of a lecture delivered by Walter Sterling, Santa Fe tutor on February 5, 2021 as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr. Sterling describes his lecture: "The lecture will blend reflections on education in times of crisis, including a discussion of the founding of the St. John’s Program, with an examination of Montaigne’s understanding of education and its ends. Montaigne, who lived through plague and civil war, is one of the few authors who can stake a claim to give birth to the modern individual. His response to the crises of his times was to cultivate a new literary form, the 'essay,' devoted to a new topic, 'myself,' and to send out a renewed or radicalized call for freedom of thought, independent judgment, and self-possession."
Creator
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Sterling, J. Walter
Publisher
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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
2021-02-05
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 typescript 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
Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592
Education--United States--Philosophy
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Relation
A related resource
<a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7485" title="Video">Video</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Sterling_Walter_2021-02-05audio
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/150b684e183eb974b8cbbe614d71cf1f.mp4
5eb1a2c213cd8165190a71ba31423016
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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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
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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.)
01:05:32
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 greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself": Reflecting with Montaigne on Liberation of the Intellect and on Education in Times of Crisis
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered by Walter Sterling, Santa Fe tutor on February 5, 2021 as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr. Sterling describes his lecture: "The lecture will blend reflections on education in times of crisis, including a discussion of the founding of the St. John’s Program, with an examination of Montaigne’s understanding of education and its ends. Montaigne, who lived through plague and civil war, is one of the few authors who can stake a claim to give birth to the modern individual. His response to the crises of his times was to cultivate a new literary form, the 'essay,' devoted to a new topic, 'myself,' and to send out a renewed or radicalized call for freedom of thought, independent judgment, and self-possession."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sterling, J. Walter
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
2021-02-05
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 typescript of my lecture 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
Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592
Education--United States--Philosophy
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Relation
A related resource
<a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7486" title="Audio">Audio</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Sterling_Walter_2021-02-05
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/89b849ef04ab118959d4c10bc7a0b8b6.pdf
df1e351180fe413f4f4c503ea6df510c
PDF Text
Text
This .naienai may De protected by
Gopynght iavi- (Title 17 U.S. Cod^
1794
DEPTH
AND
DESIRE
EVA BRAl'IN
St. John’s College
Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990
�St. John’s College Library.
.Apn.T.iolis. Marv'and-
DEPTH AND DESIRE
Eva Brann
Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990
y an old tradition the first lecture of the year is dedicated to
____the new members of our college, to the freshman students and
the freshman tutors. It is a chance to tell you something about the
shape and the spirit of the Program that governs St. John’s Collegeand not only to tell you but perhaps even to show you.
I think I am right in this spirit v/hen I begin by examining
the class-name I just called you by: freshmen. A freshman, my
etymological dictionaries tell me, is a person "not tainted, sullied or
worn," a still-fresh human being, where "fresh" means, so the
dictionary points out, both "frisky" and "impertinent." Later on in the
year you will learn a weighty Greek word applicable to persons of
frisky impertinence. They are said to have thvmos. spiritedness or
plain spunk, a characteristic necessary for serious learning. This
spirited frame of mind is perfectly compatible with being shy and
secretly a little scared. In fact, to my mind, it is a sign of quality in
newcomers to be anxious for their own dignity in the way that shows
itself in spirited shyness. It is our business, the business of the
faculty and of the more responsible upper class students, to help your
spiritedness to become serious, to emerge from the shyness- whether
it be of the quiet or the boisterous sort, to help you channel your
energy into a steady desire for learning and to direct your boldness
toward the discovery of depth and, moreover, to help you without
leaving you tainted, sullied, and worn out. I keep saying "help,"
because although great changes are bound to take place in you in
these next years- do but behold the seniors: unsullied, untainted,
unworn and transfigured- we none of us know who should get the
most credit besides yourself: the Program, our teaching, your
friendships or just plain time passing.
At any rate, the spirit of the college is invested in
seriousness, a certain kind of seriousness— not dead seriousness but
live seriousness, you might say. This seriousness shows itself on
many occasions: in deep or heated conversations in the noon sun or
at midnight, in marathons of effort and in the oblivion of sleep, in
devoted daily preparation and in glorious goofing-off, in the
B
1
�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
willingness to try on opinions and in the need to come to conclusions.
What does your school do to induce this very particular kind of
seriousness?
When you chose to come to St. John’s you were, perhaps,
attracted by the fact that the mode of teaching normal in higher
education is quite abnormal here. I mean lectures. Only one lecture
a week is an integral part of the Program, on Fridays at 8:15 P.M.
Now the chief thing about a lecture is that it is prepared ahead of
time. For instance, I began working on this lecture in March. A
lecture ought to be the temporarily final word, the best a speaker has
to give you at the moment. It should not matter whether the surface
of the speech is brilliant or drab, as long as it is a deliberate and
well-prepared opening of the speaker’s heart and mind to the
listeners. As such it carries authority. These authoritative occasions
are obviously important to the life of the school.
Yet our normal way is not the prepared lecture but the
focused conversation which is effervescent rather than prepared,
provisional rather than authoritative, and participatory rather than
reactive. Your tutors will not tell you but ask you; they will not
demonstrate acquired knowledge, but the activity of learning. One
reason why the teaching of new tutors- and some of your classes will
be taught by newcomers- is often most memorable to freshmen is
that their learning is genuinely original and keeps sympathetic pace
with yours. There is an irresistible but false local etymology of the
word tutor as "one who toots," perhaps his own horn. What the word
tutor really signifies is a person who guards and watches learning.
We are deliberately not called professors because we profess no
special expertise.
Since you will not be told things, you will have to speak
yourselves. What will you speak about? The Program will ask you
to focus your conversation on certain texts- they might be books or
scores or paintings. These texts have been selected over the years by
us because they have the living seriousness I am trying to speak
about. To my mind texts, like people, are serious when they have a
surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill
that desire. Here then, is my announced theme for tonight: the
depth that calls forth desire.
To delineate that depth I must once again distinguish our
kind of conversation, the kind associated with such texts, from the
2
BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
kind of fellowship to be found in other places. All over this country,
and wherever the conditions for some human happiness exist, there
are people who know all there is to know about some field that they
till with a single-minded love. This is the blessed race of buffs,
aficionados and those rare professionals who have had the grace to
remain amateurs at heart. They study history or race stock cars or
do biology or fly hot-air balloons. My own favorite fanatic is the
young son of a graduate of St. John’s. This boy is persistently in love
with fish, with the hooks, flies, sinkers, leaders, reels and rods for
catching them, with the books for studying them, with the aquaria,
ponds, lakes and oceans for observing them. When I first met him
he looked up at me shyly and asked if I knew what an ichthyologist
was. Since I knew some Greek I knew the etymology of the word
and could tell him that it is a person who can give an account of fish,
so he was satisfied with me. This boy may have his troubles but he
is also acquainted with bliss.
TTiis kind of concentrated bliss we cannot deliver to you,
except perhaps in limited extracurricular ways. Instead we, or rather
the Program, will drive you through centuries of time and diversities
of opinion, while depriving you of the freedom and the serenity to till
and to master a well-defined field of your own choosing. You will
study Greek and invest hours in memoiizing paradigms, but your
tutorial is not a Greek class- it is a language tutorial in which Greek
is studied only partly for its own virtues, and partly as a striking and,
for you, a novel example of human speech and its possibilities. You
will study Euclid and demonstrate many prepositions, yet your
tutorial is not intended to make you geometers but to allow you to
think about the activity of mathematics. In short, you will be asked
to read many books carefully and to study many matters in some
detail only to find them passing away, becoming mere examples in
the conversation. And these fugitive texts will almost all bear their
excellence, their worthiness to be studied exhaustively, on their face,
for we try to pick the ideal examples. This procedure is practically
guaranteed to keep you off-balance, even to drive you a little crazy,
since you will not often have the satisfaction of dwelling on anything
and of mastering it. How do we dare do this to you?
Here is a strange but unavoidable fact: Those who plow
with devotion and pleasure and increasing mastery some bounded
plot on the globe of knowledge often undergo a professional
3
�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
deformalion. They lose first the will and then the ability to go deep.
To be sure, specialists are often said to know their subjects "in
depth," but that is not the depth I mean. Let me illustrate with an
example I have a special affection for. I began my academic life as
an archaeologist, and the first thing archaeologists do is to dig deep
past the present surface of the earth, or rather they scrape it away
layer by layer. But with every stratum they scrape away they find
themselves at a new surface, the surface of a former age. They poke
into time- a magical enough activity-but they do not pretend to
pierce the nature of things. For example, there would come up from
the depths of a well-shaft an ancient pot. I would catalogue it by
naming its form, say; kotvle. a kind of cup; by giving its dimensions:
H. 0.108 m.; diam. 0.135 m; by describing its proportions: deep
bodied, narrow-footed; by interpreting the picture painted on it: a
rabbit- this is the pot-painter being funny- jumping a tracking
hound from behind; by conjecturing about the provenance and the
stylistic influences: made in Attica under Corinthian influence; and
by assigning a date: third quarter of the seventh century B.C.
Was I required to consider what I meant by dimensions,
proportions, styles, images, funniness, influences, places? Not a bitthat would have meant time out and profitless distraction from my
business, which was to know all about the looks and appearances of
the pottery of Athens in early times. What this Program of ours
offers you is exactly that time out, and that splendid distraction.
People will say of you, when you have graduated, that you have
4
BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
acquired a broad background. But your education will have been
broad only in a very incidental and sketchy way- certainly not in the
fashion of a close-knit tapestry that is a continuous texture of
interwoven warp and woof. Many of the books you are about to read
do tie into one another. Sometimes a book written by an ancient
Greek will (I am not being funny) talk back to one written by a
modern American, or the opposite— the strands that connect these
books seem to run back and forth and sideways through time. But
some books will stand, at least as we read them, in splendid isolation,
and all in all the texts we study do not add up to a texture of
knowledge: There is no major called "Great Books. How could
there be competence in a tradition whose moving impulse is to
undercut every wisdom in favor of a yet deeper one? There is not
even agreement whether this tradition of ours advances or
degenerates with time, whether its authors are all talking about the
same thing, though in a different way, or in apparently similar ways
about quite incomparable things.
Here is what the books do seem to me to have in common:
They intend to go into the depths of things. All the authors, even
those subtly self-contradictory ones who claim that there are no
depths but only surfaces, are deep in the way I mean. This desire for
depth, then, is what will hold your studies here together. There is a
word for this effort, to which it is my privilege to introduce you
tonight. The word is philosophy. The term is put together from two
Greek words, philos. an adjective used of someone who feels friendly,
even passionate love, and sophia. which means wisdom or deep
knowledge.
When I say that your school is devoted to philosophy, the
love of deep knowledge, I mean that all our authors want to dravv you
deep into their matter, whether by words, symbols, notes or visual
shapes. Incidentally, in a few weeks a lecturer, a tutor from Santa
Fe, will come and contradict me; he has told me that he will say that
what we do needn’t bear the name of philosophy at all.
Let that be a subject for future discussion, and let me come
to the heart of my lecture tonight. It is .he question what depth is
and how is possible. 1 think we are alj inclined to suppose that
literal, actual depth belongs to bodies and space and that people or
texts are deep only by analogy, metaphor cally speaking.
I want to propose that here, as sj often in philosophy, it is
5
�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
really the other way around: it is the body that is deep merely
metaphorically, as a matter of speaking, while the soul and its
expression alone are deep in the primary sense.
Certainly the depth of a body or a space is elusive. If a body
has a perfectly hard and impenetrable surface, its depth must be
forever beyond our experience— a kind of hard, inaccessible
nothingness. On the other hand, let the physical body have a hollow
in it— such caves are powerful allegories of depth and you will in the
next four years come across some famous holes: the grotto of
Calypso, the underground chamber in Plato’s Republic. Don
Quixote’s cavern of Montesinos. Now ask yourself: Where actually
is the depth? The containing boundaries of the hollow are all faces
of the body, and no matter how deep you seem to be inside the body,
you are still on its surface, just as I argued before about
archaeological excavations.
Now consider matterless bodies, geometric solids. Euclid
says in Book XI that a solid has length, breadth, and depth, but he
gives us no way to tell which is which: it depends on your
perspective- in fact all three dimensions are lengths delineating the
surfaces that he says are the extremity of the solid. What is inside
that solid, what its inwardness or true depth is, he does not feel
obliged to say. These are questions you might want to raise in your
mathematics tutorials: Can one gel inside a geometric solid? How?
Bodies, I am suggesting, are either too hard or too involuted
or loo featureless or loo empty to have true depth. Only divine or
human beings and the texts they produce- texts made of words,
notes, paint, stones, what have you- can be literally deep or
profound. For I attribute depth or profundity to that which is of a
truly different order from the surface that covers and hides it. And
it must be the inside and foundation of just that surface, so that we
can gain entrance to it through that particular outside and through no
other. Every depth must be sought through its own proper surface
which it both denies or negates and supplies with significance: the
surface that hides its own depth is never superficial.
Human beings seem to me the most obvious example of such
depth. All human beings have a surface, namely the face and figure
they present. I personally think that in real life almost all people
also have an inside, their soul, their depth. But there are some
famous novels in which characters are described who are nothing but
6
BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
empty shells. Against their impenetrable surface those whom they
attract by the insidiously unflawed beauty peculiar to facades that
hide nothing break themselves, or if they tear through, they fall into
nothingness.
However, these are fictions, and actual human beings have
by the very fact of their humanity an inner sanctum. We begin by
noting, casually, their face, their demeanor. As our interest awakens
we proceed to read more carefully, to watch their appearance
ardently for what it signifies. If we are lucky, they may open up to
us, as we do to them. If we go about it right, this interpretative
process need never come to an end, for the human inside, or to give
it, once again, its proper name, the soul, is a true mystery. By a true
mystery I mean a profundity whose bottom we can never seem to
plumb though we have a persistent faith )n its actuality. I think that
for us human beings only depths and mysteries induce viable desire.
For love entirely without longing is not possible among human
beings. Many a failure of love follovs on the- usually falseopinion that we have exhausted the other person’s inside, that there
is no further promise of depth.
It is not only in respect to living human beings that depth
calls forth desire. This college would not be the close human
community that it is if you did not get to know some human beings
deeply- which is called friendship. But such love is only the essential
by-product (to coin a contradictory phrase) of our philosophical
Program, a program that encourages the love of certain para-human
beings. These para-human beings are the expressions of the human
soul, our texts, as well as the things they talk about.
Let me take a moment to ask whether this particular desire
for depth I keep referring to is common among human beings or
even natural. I say it is absolutely natural and very common. You
will see what I mean when I tell you what I think is the nature of
desire. Desire seems to me to be a kind of negative form or a
shaped emptiness in the soul, a place in the spirit expecting to be
filled, a kind of psychic envelope wailing to be stuffed with its proper
contents.
Now take a long leap and ask yourself what a question is.
A question is a negative form or shap^ emptiness in the mind, a
place in thought waiting to be filled, a psychic envelope ready to be
supplied with its proper message. Questions therefore have the same
7
�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
structure as desires. In fact questions are a subspecies of desire: a
question is desire directed upon wisdom or knowledge. Therefore I
might go so far as to say that this school teaches the shaping of
desire— because here we practice asking deep questions. Now I think
that very many, probably all, human beings would like to ask such
questions if they only knew how. That is why the desire for depth is
both common and natural.
What we most often, or at least most programmatically, ask
questions about are those texts I have been mentioning. As I have
intimated, such a text, particularly a text of words, is a curious kind
of being, neither a living soul nor a mere rigid thing. What a book
might be, such that it could have genuine depth, is a question that
should arise over and over in the tutorials and the seminars. That
books do have depth is shown by the fact that they induce questions,
the directed desire to open them up. I want to end by giving a
sample of a deep text and a demonstration of the beginning of a
reading, a mere knock at its gate, so to speak.
The text is a saying by Heraclitus. Heraclitus flourished
about 500 B.C. He was early among those who inquired into the
nature of things, and he had a contemporary antagonist, Parmenides.
You will see from your sheets that Heraclitus said that it is wise to
agree that "All things are one." Parmenides said things that, on the
face of it, seem similar, but whether he meant the same thing as
Heraclitus, or something opposite or something incomparable- that
is a matter of ever-live debate. In any case, Heraclitus and
Parmenides together embody the great principle of our tradition that
I mentioned before; you might call it the "the principle of responsive
differentiation." However, I shall not try to talk about Heraclitus’s
actual wisdom tonight- that along with the previous questions; "What
is philosophy?," "What is a solid?," "What is a cave?," "What is a
book?," I leave to future discussion. I shall attend only to the
preliminaries with which Heraclitus surrounds his wisdom.
Heraclitus’s book is largely lost, though as far as we know it
was not a treatise but a book of sayings. Even in ancient times it
had a reputation for depth; the tragedian Euripides said of it that it
required a Delian diver- the divers from the island Delos (which
means the "Manifest" or "Clear") were evidently famous for diving
deep and bringing things to light.
DEPTH AND DESIRE
BRANN
The saying I have chosen goes:
oOk tuou dXXdc Tou Xdyou dxouaavTas
dpioXoydv 90ip6v laTiv Iv -irdvTa flvai
Transliterated it reads
ouk emou alia tou logou akousantas
homologein sophon estin hen panta einai.
On the surface this saying is in Greek and needs to be
translated. Since I have argued that surfaces are, like traditional
Japanese packaging, an integral part of the contents, they must be
carefully and patiently undone. Now to put Heraclitus’s Greek into
English is, up to a certain point, not hard. Your Greek manual will
tell you about the "accusative absolute" and about various infinitives,
and your Greek dictionaries will give you the meaning of "listening,"
of "wise" (which you are already familiar with in philosophy), and of
"agree."
But then you look up logos. "Logos" is one of the
tremendous words of our tradition, to which it is, once again, my
privilege to introduce you. Without even looking it up, I can give
you the following meanings: Word and speech, saying and story, tally
and tale, ratio and relation, account and explanation (that was the
meaning which occurred in the word "ichthyologist"), argument and
discussion, reason and reasoning, collection and gathering, the word
of God and the son of God. As you learn Greek you will see what
it is about the root-meaning of logos that makes this great scope of
significance possible.
But how are you to choose? You are
caught in a vicious circle: Unless you know what Heraclitus means
by logos you cannot choose the right English translation, and unless
you discover the right English word you cannot know what he means
by his saying. However, sensible people find ways to scramble
themselves out of this bind. Try a meaning that makes good
immediate sense: choose "reasoning."
Listening not to me but to my reasoning,
it is wise to agree that all things are one.
This yields a saying that is particularly pertinent to us, since
8
ov'er
dcor.
For
J
�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
look into each other’s faces, we must not get stuck on personalities.
Each seminar member has a right to say: "Never mind me, answer
my argument." Heraclitus is introducing a great notion into the
Western world here: Not who says it matters but what is said.
But there is more signifying surface to the saying. Listen to
its sound and notice that in the second line the word homologein
sounds like logos. "Agree" is a good first meaning but it does not
preserve the similarity of sound. Homologein literally means "to say
the same." Let me try that, and for "my reasoning" I will substitute
"the Saying."
BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
Here I shall stop. But although I am ending, I am not
finished— and neither, of course, are you. If you have in fact listened
not only to me but also to my argument, and if you are possessed by
the proper freshman spirit, now is your moment, the part of the
Friday night lecture that is the true St. John’s: the time for
questions.
If you listen not to me but to the Saying,
it is wise to say the same: that all things are one.
Now what sense does that make? What Saying? Whose saying other
than Heraclitus’s own? Suppose the translation did make sense, then
Heraclitus is saying that there is a saying that can be heard beyond
his own, a speech to which we must listen, a speaking that it would
be the part of wisdom to echo in what we say. What impersonal
speech could that be? Heraclitus in fact tells us not what the logos
is, but what it says, for he bids us to say the same: "All things are
one." What if this saying, of which no human being is the author,
where a power whose saying and doing were one and the same?
What if its speech were an act? Let me play with a third, somewhat
strange, version:
Once you have listened not to me but to the Gathering,
it is wise similarly to gather all things into one.
Here logos is translated as gathering or collection. It is the power
that gathers everything in the world into a unified whole, the
organizing power we are invited to imitate by giving a comprehensive
account of the universe in speech. The logos speaks primally; our
logos becomes deep by imitating it.
I think by now the text has begun to draw us through its
surface into its depth. You can see that it demands of you the playful
seriousness I mentioned at the beginning, a seriousness that calls out
all your capacity for careful attention to surface detail as well as your
willingness to dive into the depths.
10
11
�A NOTE ABOUT THE
TEXT
This lecture was written and
edited in WordPerfect 5.1.
All headings, subheadings,
and body text are set in
Times Roman. Typesetting,
editing, and printing were
done at the St. John’s Print
Shop.
�ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE PRESS
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
�
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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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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.
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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paper
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9 pages
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Depth and Desire
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 31, 1990 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Brann, Eva T. H.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1990-08-31
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text
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pdf
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College freshmen
Depth (Philosophy)
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English
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Brann_Eva_1990-08-31
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
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PDF Text
Text
FRIDAY NIGHT FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2019–20
St. John’s College | Annapolis, Maryland
2019 Fall Semester
Date
Speaker
Title
August 23,
2019
Joseph Macfarland, Dean
St. John’s College, Annapolis
The Christopher B. Nelson
Lecture
“Speaking Freely and the
Conversational Virtues”
August 30
All-College Art Seminar
September 6
Stephanie Nelson
Associate Professor of Classical Studies
Boston University
“The Eternal Present of the
Iliad”
September 13
Michael Zuckert
Professor of Political Science
University of Notre Dame
“Philosophic Anthropology
and the Emergence of
Liberal Constitutionalism”
September 20
Mark Alznauer
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Northwestern University
“Hegel on Reason in
History”
September 27
David Fung, pianist
Concert
October 4
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 11
James Lennox
Professor Emeritus
Department of History and Philosophy of
Science
University of Pittsburgh
“William Harvey and his
Aristotelianism”
October 18
Benjamin Storey
Associate Professor
Political and International Affairs
Furman University
“The Pursuit of Happiness:
Four French Thinkers on
Our Restless Quest for
Contentment”
60 COLLEGE AVENUE | ANNAPOLIS | MD 21401 | 410-263-2371
SJC.EDU
�October 25
All-College Seminar
November 1
Arthur Melzer
Professor, Department of Political Science
Michigan State University
“Philosophy Between the
Lines: The Lost History of
Esoteric Writing”
November 8
Ronna Burger
Professor of Philosophy
Tulane University
“Jerusalem and Athens:
The Family Drama in the
Bible and in Greek
Thought”
November 15
Zena Hitz
Tutor, St. John’s College
Annapolis, Maryland
“The Moral Fragility of
Human Beings”
November 22
Gail Weiss
Dean’s Research Professor of Philosophy
George Washington University
“Beauvoir’s Critical
Phenomenology of
Women’s (Limited) Agency
under Patriarchal
Disciplinary Regimes”
November 29
Thanksgiving Holiday
No Lecture
December 6
King William Players
“The Shape of Things” by
Neil LaBute
December 13–
January 5
Winter Vacation
No Lectures
60 COLLEGE AVENUE | ANNAPOLIS | MD 21401 | 410-263-2371
SJC.EDU
�2020 Spring Semester
Date
Speaker
Title
January 10,
2020
Antonio Meneses, cello and Paul Galbraith,
guitar
Schubert, Bach, and Brazilian composers
Concert
January 17
Sarah Ruden
Visiting Scholar, Author and Poet
University of Pennsylvania
The Andrew Steiner
Lecture:
"Vergil's Aeneid and
Augustine's Confessions:
Reading, Writing, Being
Human."
January 24
George Russell
Tutor, St. John’s College
Annapolis, Maryland
For Hume’s Select Readers:
The Books We Keep, The
Books We Burn, and Why
January 31
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 7
Mitzi Lee
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Colorado
“The Virtue of Justice in
Aristotle’s Ethics”
February 14
All-College Seminar
February 21
Karin Ekholm
Tutor, St. John’s College
Annapolis, Maryland
"Where Thought Lingers
and Love Plays: Art in
Eliot's Middlemarch"
February 28–
March 15
Spring Break
No Lectures
March 20
Parker Quartet
Salonen, Szymanowsky, Beethoven Op. 132
Cancelled - Concert
March 27
James Hankins
Professor of History
Harvard University
Cancelled - The Italian and
Humanists and The Virtue
of Humanitas
60 COLLEGE AVENUE | ANNAPOLIS | MD 21401 | 410-263-2371
SJC.EDU
�April 3
Ange Mlinko
Author and Poet
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of Florida
Cancelled - “Why Do the
Poets Still Speak of the
Gods?”
April 10
Bill Pastille
Tutor and NEH Chair, St. John’s College
Annapolis, Maryland
Cancelled - NEH Lecture:
“There to Here and Back
Again: The Down-to-earth
Mysticism of Plotinus”
April 17
Dashon Burton, Baritone
Cancelled - Concert
Brick by Brick: Changing
America Through Song
April 24
King William Players
Cancelled
May 1
Reality Show
Cancelled
Spring 2020 semester lectures and performances cancelled due to COVID-19 and campus
closure.
60 COLLEGE AVENUE | ANNAPOLIS | MD 21401 | 410-263-2371
SJC.EDU
�
Dublin Core
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Description
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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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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pdf
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4 pages
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Lecture/Concert Schedule 2019-2020
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2019-2020 Academic Year.
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Office of the Dean
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2019-2020
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text
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pdf
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St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.). Calendars
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LectureSchedule_Annapolis_2019-2020
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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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:38:53
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Friendly, Unfriendly Universe
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 10, 1982 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Kutler, Samuel S.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1982-09-10
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mp3
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English
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Kutler_Samuel_1982-09-10
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c84ebb2ceea1c524b0194146adb63862.mp3
d1b366827cfa211642ef2e0f5b9f3597
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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:54:43
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Desiring What is Beautiful
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 19, 1993 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Kutler, Samuel S.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1993-11-19
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sound
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mp3
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Kutler_Samuel_1993-11-19
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dfc816c55f411d28883e01b7919f77f6.mp3
70ac6788f4253b6178dc75e1dfdf7907
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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&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.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:49:59
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On Complex Numbers
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on December, 09, 1983 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Kutler, Samuel S.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1983-12-09
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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 typescript of my lecture available online."
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sound
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mp3
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English
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Kutler_Samuel_1983-12-09
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/32f24210cc711cd2e888738b35ab3974.pdf
f951d31d01076ed1283967a166a0d0e6
PDF Text
Text
The Pursuit of Happiness: Four French Thinkers on Our Restless Quest for Contentment
Lecture to be delivered at St. John’s College, Annapolis
October 18, 2019
1. Thank you all for the great honor of coming to speak at St. John’s. I’ve admired St. John’s since
my childhood in nearby Columbia; I have friends who were students here and friends who teach
here, to say nothing of all that I have learned from the scholarship of the faculty. Moreover, for
people like me who do the work of great books education on campuses where that project is less
central, St. John’s is a beacon—a standard of what liberal education can be. I thus come to this
campus upon which I’ve barely set foot before with an odd sense of homecoming.
2. Almost one hundred and eighty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville described Americans as “restless
in the midst of their well-being.” Although Americans, as he saw them, were “the most free and
enlightened men placed in the happiest condition in the world,” “a kind of cloud habitually covered
their features,” and they seemed “grave and almost sad, even in their pleasures.” “A man, in the
United States,” he writes, “carefully builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it
while the ridgepole is being set; he plants a garden and he rents it as he is about to taste its fruit;”
“he embraces a profession and he leaves it,” if he has a little leisure at the end of his year, “he takes
his restless curiosity here and there” across this vast country. The Americans he saw had an
incapacity for sitting still that revealed an abiding discontent.
3. Tocqueville’s observation on this point seems to become truer with every passing year. The
1830s America that looked to Tocqueville like a place of unprecedented human enlightenment and
prosperity looks to us almost premodern, with people working enormously hard just to feed
themselves, high maternal-fetal mortality, slavery, bad sanitation, and slow communication. Almost
two hundred years of advancements have made us immeasurably more prosperous. But they have
not made us measurably less restless. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness are all around us, starkly
1
�evident in the disturbing rise of so-called “deaths of despair.” Quieter forms of this unease are
known to everyone who spends time with the young, including the very successful young people
who graduate from colleges like this one.
4. There are surely many causes for this strange combination of prosperity and discontent. Some of
these causes are political and economic, and might have political and economic solutions. But
others are deeper—causes rooted in the constituent elements of our way of life. Today, I want to
consider the distinctive restlessness Tocqueville observed, and that we can still observe, in the light
of what I will argue is our distinctive way of pursuing happiness. That way of pursuing happiness
developed centuries before Tocqueville, precisely as a strategy for palliating the natural restlessness
of the human heart. I then want to argue that this modern way of understanding happiness, which I
will call immanent contentment, exacerbates the very restlessness it is intended to alleviate. I want
to suggest that the particular form of agitation that attends this particular way of pursuing happiness
explains much about the present state of both our personal lives and our politics.
6. I’m going to make this argument by briefly outlining a conversation among four French thinkers,
all of whom make an appearance in your seminars: the great essayist Michel de Montaigne, who
originated the way of pursuing happiness I aim to understand and assess; the astonishing polymath
Blaise Pascal, who offered the first and still most powerful critique of this way of pursuing
happiness: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who transformed and radicalized the Montaignean quest for
happiness understood as immanent contentment, and Tocqueville himself, who shows us what this
mode of pursuing happiness does to our politics when it becomes the default way of life for an
enormous modern nation. I will close by suggesting that we would be personally happier and
politically better off if we reconsidered some of the basic assumptions behind this modern way of
pursuing happiness.
2
�I: Michel de Montaigne and the Art of Immanent Contentment
7. This story of the modern pursuit of happiness begins in an era of profound unhappiness: the
wars of religion of sixteenth century France. Michel de Montaigne lived through eight such wars,
which convulsed France, turning neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, from 1562,
when Montaigne was thirty, until the Edict of Nantes in 1598—six years after his death.
8. Montaigne began writing his Essays in 1572, the year the wars of religion reached their low point,
with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on August 24. Montaigne describes that book, in which
he inaugurates the use of the term essay to describe a literary form, as a self-portrait. That portrait
offers a charming depiction of a self successfully engaged in the pursuit of immanent contentment,
against France’s backdrop of a blood and fanaticism; it is that contrast that gives the Essays their
pathos.
9. Montaigne writes the Essays in obedience to the Delphic injunction to “know thyself.” “I study
myself more than any other subject,” he writes, “that is my physics, that is my metaphysics.” Highly
personal though his book is, however, it is not without political import. It is by sounding the depths
of his own apparently peaceable soul that Montaigne discovers the deepest causes of the troubles of
his country.
10. “We are never at home,” he writes, “we are always beyond.” “Fear, desire, and hope launch us
toward the future, and rob us of the sentiment of what is, to amuse us with what will be, even when
we will be no longer.” Such is Montaigne’s depiction of human restlessness, which he knows
firsthand. As he tells the story, when he first retired from his political career to his chateau to
undertake a life of solitary contemplation, his own mind bolted like a runaway horse, giving birth to
all manner of chimeras and fantastic monsters. Montaigne is, himself, a restless soul.
11. To alleviate this restlessness, Montaigne seeks to teach us, and himself, the art of being at home.
The first lesson of that art is, as he puts it, “learning to die.” For Montaigne thinks that our
3
�restlessness is driven largely by our obsession with our own mortality. For his own part, Montaigne
wants to die without thinking about it, and tells us that death will find him “planting his cabbages,
nonchalant about death, and still more about his unfinished garden.”
12. Montaigne’s instruction in the art of dying well is a not particularly veiled critique of the
Christian concern with immortality. But it is much more than that. Montaigne sees much of human
ambition—the aspirations that drive philosophy, theology, politics, and even virtue itself—as a
misanthropic and cruel rebellion against the human condition, which fuels, among other things, the
political and religious traumas of his time.
13. Montaigne’s art of living is therefore an art of circumscription. “The course of our desires,” he
writes, “must be circumscribed and restrained to the nearest and most contiguous good things.
Moreover, their course should be directed not in a straight line that ends up elsewhere, but in a
circle, of which the two points grasp one another and meet in ourselves by a brief contour.”
Ambitious lives take the form of that straight line that ends up elsewhere; Montaigne seeks to bend
those energies back around so as to return to himself.
14. Elsewhere, he specifies what this art of circumscription looks like in concrete terms: “In
household management, in study, and in every other exercise, we must go up to the last limits of
pleasure, but guard ourselves from engaging still further, where it begins to be mingled with pain.”
Montaigne’s art of living is thus frankly hedonistic, but without the austerity thinkers like Epicurus
thought true hedonism implied.
15. The motto of the Montaingean art of immanent contentment is thus moderation through variation.
It is a life that seeks to achieve the ancient maxim of temperance, “nothing too much,” by adding a
gentle modern corollary, “nothing too little.”
16. Although Montaigne draws extensively on the classical and Christian traditions to expound this
vision of the good life, his departures from those traditions are substantial. Whether we consider
4
�the way of life of a philosopher such as Socrates, a citizen such as Cato, or a saint such as Augustine,
all of them are living lives guided by some “one thing needful,” some “pearl of great price,” some
virtue or activity without which life is “not worth living,” whether that one decisive thing is
understood as philosophy, citizenship, or holiness.
17. Where Socrates contrasted the good life with mere life, Montaigne argues that mere life is the
good life. We are “great fools,” he writes, to criticize a man for passing his life in idleness, or to
look down on ourselves for “having done nothing today.” “What?” he asks. “Have you not lived?
That is not only your fundamental occupation, but your most illustrious one.” This elevation of
mere life, which might look slavish to a Roman or hellish to a Christian, to the status of the good
life, is Montaigne’s great contribution to what we call modernity. In the wake of Calvin and
Machiavelli, Montaigne’s art of seeking our contentment immanently speaks to the desires, as Pierre
Manent has put it, of the millions of human beings who care neither for the salvation of their cities
nor for the salvation of their souls.
18. This new understanding of the good life brings a new understanding of the virtues in its wake.
First among these virtues is nonchalance, the cultivated carelessness that allows Montaigne not to take
anything too seriously. The Essays themselves, which read like an undulating stream of
consciousness without premeditated form, exemplify this rejection of the arts of orderliness. The
intellectual side of this virtue is skepticism, the doubt which Montaigne applies to everything,
thereby rebuffing the attempts of any and every good to take over his life. By so doing, Montaigne
is able to exemplify the virtue of frankness in his speech: a man without pretensions has nothing to
hide; he can dispense with caution and politesse and be straight with us.
19. Montaigne’s book was enormously successful—perhaps the most widely read book in Europe
during the 17th century. Many of the great thinkers of that and future centuries would warm
themselves at Montaigne’s cheering fire: Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, Diderot and Voltaire,
5
�Emerson and Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig. In the generations immediately
following Montaigne’s death, the Essays found an enormous audience among the rising class of
bourgeois gentilhommes, a newly ascendant social group looking for a moral model to replace the
chivalric ideal of the old nobility they intended to supplant. Many of them found that model in
Montaigne, who became the standard bearer for the way of life of the so-called honnête homme.
20. But it was from that social class that arose, in the 17th century, the man who was at once perhaps
Montaigne’s greatest reader and Montaigne’s greatest critic: Blaise Pascal, who would argue that
Montaignean self-knowledge is self-alienation, and that Montaignean happiness is a human misery.
6
�II. Blaise Pascal and the Inhumanity of Immanence
21. A “frightening genius”—that is what Pascal was called by the father of French Romanticism,
François René de Chateaubriand. A brief glance at his life will tell us why. Pascal was raised by a
father, Étienne Pascal, who homeschooled him with a gentle attentiveness reminiscent of
Montaigne’s “On the Education of Children.” Himself a serious mathematician, Étienne Pascal
senses that his son will be captivated by mathematics, fears that this infatuation will cause him to
neglect his Latin and Greek, and therefore withholds mathematical instruction during Pascal’s
earliest years. But Pascal overhears the talk of his father and the mathematicians who frequent their
home and begins to work at it on his own, inventing a private geometric vocabulary of barres and
ronds. According to his sister, Étienne Pascal discovers his son’s clandestine mathematizing when he
enters the twelve-year old’s room one day to find the boy deriving Euclid’s 32nd proposition for
himself. Étienne has a change of heart, and begins to instruct Blaise formally. The young man will
soon make significant contributions to the history of mathematics, not only with his works on
conics and the cycloid, but also with his treatise on what he calls “the arithmetic triangle”—known
to history as “Pascal’s Triangle”—which forms the basis of probability theory. At the age of
nineteen, he invents and presides over the manufacture of the world’s first functioning calculator,
capable of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers of as many as six digits. A handful
of these so-called Pascaliennes survive to this day, in good working order. (Try that with your Texas
Instruments in the year 2396). At twenty-five, he designs experiments on the void and atmospheric
pressure that deflate the ancient scholastic commonplace that “nature abhors a vacuum.” At thirtythree, he writes his Provincial Letters: daring, uproarious satires of the most powerful churchmen in
France, the Jesuits, and one of the greatest bestsellers of the ancien régime. He then sets to work on
an enormously ambitious Apology for the Christian Religion. Even though illness and early death will
keep him from making so much as a first draft of the book, his undigested notes, collated and
7
�published by his friends as the Thoughts of M. Pascal on Religion and Several Other Subjects, which were
Found after his Death among his Papers, will become a classic of French moral philosophy and one of the
most important works of Christian apologetics ever written. Finally, at the end of his life, he
collaborates with his friend Arthus de Roannez to give Paris the world’s first system of public
transportation, the five-cent carriages, donating all profits to charity.
22. Pascal’s mathematical and scientific genius, his literary and philosophic brilliance, his
technological and philanthropic contributions to the great Baconian project for the improvement of
the human condition are the unimpeachable credentials of a first-order modern mind. But Pascal is
no standard-issue modern innovator, however brilliant. For he perceives the disturbing existential
consequences of the modern scientific revolution as few have before him, or since. To Pascal, the
universe revealed by modern physics is a world in which man finds himself at sea, prisoner of a
meaningless nature that is utterly silent in the face of the human demand for the wisdom we need in
order to live well. The Montaignean quest for immanent contentment, intended to vindicate “nature,
complete without grace,” as one critic as put it, takes place in the context of a universe that science
relentlessly demonstrates to be no home for man. Pascal’s rejoinder to Montaigne is that truly
thinking through the scientific modernism Montaigne helped invent intensifies rather than blunts
our need for transcendence.
25. Pascal’s reflections on this existential dislocation derived as much from his moral insights as
from his scientific ones. He grew up among people who fashioned their lives after the Montaignean
pattern of the honnête homme—gentle, moderate, intelligent, curious sorts who were interested in
much but carefully avoided taking anything too seriously. Pascal’s examination of the lives of these
adepts in the Montaignean art of pursuing our contentment immanently suggested to him that they
were fooling themselves, and were far more discontent than they knew.
8
�26. We see this in Pascal’s great analysis of hunting and gambling—the latter a diversion particularly
beloved by some of his friends among the honnêtes hommes. Give the gambler his winnings or the
hunter his prey, he points out, asking only that he forsake his beloved activity, and you will make
him unhappy. And yet, if you allow him the game without the stake, or the chase without the
quarry, the charm of the thing will be equally lost. When we’re in the game, we long for the goal at
the end of it; when we possess the goal, we want the game to begin again. In motion, we long for
rest, at rest, we long for motion.
27. What we truly love, on this analysis, is diversion—that which gets our minds off of ourselves. But
our love of diversion drives not only our amusements but our most serious activities. “What is it to
be superintendent, chancellor, prime minister, but to have a position in which a great number of
people come each morning and from every quarter, so as not to leave any of them an hour a day in
which they can think about themselves?” Beyond making us feel important, responsibility is an
extraordinarily effective distraction, and distraction, at bottom, is what we desire.
28. Why? Because, as Pascal writes, “we cannot sit still in our rooms.” Pascal thus rediscovers the
restlessness that drove Montaigne to create his art of immanent contentment. And he discovers that
restlessness at work in the hearts of the greatest adepts of that Montaignean art. The love of variety
so characteristic of Montaigne and his followers reveals their abiding discontent.
29. What is the root cause of this inability to endure stillness, solitude, and quiet? Pascal tells us that
it is “the natural unhappiness of our weak and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can
console us when we think about it closely.” “We want truth,” he continues, “and find only
incertitude in ourselves. We want happiness and find only misery and death. We are incapable of
not wanting truth and happiness, yet we are incapable of truth and happiness.”
31. Pascal thus makes the case that human beings are naturally unhappy. That is, our unhappiness
does not arise from our particular failures or vices or strokes of bad luck; our unhappiness arises
9
�from the disproportion between the limitless character of our desires and the finite character of
every good we can give ourselves. We cannot cure our unhappiness, which is the natural human
condition. This remark has particular salience for Americans and Englishmen, for whom
unhappiness is, as Peter Kreeft remarks, the “truth we most assiduously hide.”
32. This unhappiness results from the distinctive human combination of finitude and intelligence.
We are as weak as reeds, Pascal tells us, so fragile that we can be killed by a vapor or a drop of water.
While this is true of every living thing, it makes man uniquely miserable, because of our unique selfconsciousness about the deadly facts of life. That self-consciousness makes our mortality and
ignorance seem like a kind of exile or loss of place, like “the misery of a deposed king.” There is a
massive disproportion between the thoughts our minds seem to have been born to think and the
deaths our mortal frames fate us to die. As Pascal writes, “l’homme depasse l’homme,” “man transcends
man.”
33. Pascal seeks to bring us to self-knowledge by making us aware of this disproportion, which he
sees as the mark of both our misery and our greatness— the misery of the sole being we know of
that necessarily lives with consciousness of its own death and folly; the greatness of the sole being
we know of that can think the thoughts “universe” and “God.” As Pascal writes, “if [man] exalts
himself, I humble him; if he humbles himself, I exalt him, until he comprehends that he is an
incomprehensible monster.” I think he means the term monstrous precisely: what we are cannot be
understood in natural terms. Pascal endeavors to show us this truth about ourselves so as to set us
in motion, in search of some answer to the riddle of our own beings. He hopes to make us “seekers
in anguish.”
34. If Pascal is right, the Montaignean quest to make ourselves immanently happy could reach a
successful conclusion only at the price of the obliteration of the human heart. Our unhappiness is
deeper, but our greatness is also vaster, than Montaigne imagined. Our hearts are restless not
10
�accidentally, not because of moral failures such as over-eagerness or inattention, but because we are
wayfaring strangers, not made to be at home in this world.
35. Pascal seeks to set us in motion, to make us seek, because he believes there is an answer to our
questions, a hidden God, whose strange story is the weird answer to the weird question that is the
human heart. But his appeal has never been limited to those who come to share his faith. Nietzsche
was the first in a long line of postmodern thinkers who could exclaim “Pascal’s blood flows in my
veins!” For the existential unease he describes so poignantly is the quiet but insistent companion of
our modern search for happiness.
36. The self-knowledge Pascal offers is a sad wisdom. In the years after Pascal’s death, Louis XIV
and his age decided that it was not wisdom at all. Both the Church and the monarchy turned against
Pascal and his Jansenist friends; Pascal’s works wound up on the Index of Prohibited Books, and the
Jansenists’ home at the monastery of Port-Royal was demolished, its tombs desecrated. As the
Promethean rationalism of the Enlightenment took flight, the eighteenth century seemed to forget
that the seventeenth century ever existed, and simply picked up where the 16th left off, as the great
French literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve put it. The eighteenth century philosophes, with
Voltaire as their leader, tended to rally to Montaigne and dismiss Pascal as a misanthrope. That
tendency, however, admitted of one great exception: perhaps the most capacious mind of the age,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
11
�III. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the Tragedy of Nature’s Redeemer
37. Rousseau set Europe on fire with everything from a hit opera to a bestselling novel to
enormously influential books on education, politics, and universal history. He did so in part because
he agreed with Pascal that modern man, in spite of all the delights Voltaire so memorably
celebrated—the vivacious wine, the delicate food, the splendid song, painting, and sculpture, the
carriages fitted out with excellent shock absorbers—is shallow, anti-social, and secretly miserable.
Modern man seeks science merely so as to distinguish himself; his refined amusements merely hide
his unease. True love and friendship have no place in his glittering society, which is in reality “a
society of smiling enemies,” as Arthur Melzer has put it. For thinking so, Rousseau came to be seen
by Voltaire, Diderot, and others, as a traitor, who uses the kinds of arguments and evidence the
Enlightenment developed to critique the Enlightenment itself.
39. Though Rousseau agrees with Pascal that modern man is miserable, he does not, however,
accept Pascal’s contention that such misery is natural. For Pascal, nature is fallen, but can be
redeemed by God. For Rousseau, man is fallen, but can be redeemed by nature.
40. To prove this contention, Rousseau performs a vast experiment, both in his writings and on his
life. He describes the huge, astonishingly various corpus this experiment produces as a “sad and
great system” of thought. I take him to be in complete earnest in his use of each of these terms.
His thought is systematic: in spite of its apparent contradictions, it can be understood as a
consistent, even zealous attempt to redeem Montaignean immanence by combining it with Pascalian
depth. Great, in that any such combination is surely a feat for the ages. And sad, insofar as his
attempt to do so fails. That failure is, however, the heart of what Rousseau has to teach us.
41. Rousseau’s system begins with his famous state-of-nature story, which is a genealogy of human
dividedness. We begin as natural man: solitary, mute, and almost mindless, but self-sufficient and
content with life, a truly unpremeditated Montaignean. Our efforts to win a living from nature,
12
�however, lead us into ever more frequent contact with one another, the ever-accelerating
development of our faculties, and ever-deepening interdependency. As we come to need others, we
come to care what they think of us. Eventually, amour-propre, our concern to attract the good
opinion, the admiration, and the envy of others, becomes the governing passion of human existence.
Because the face we put on for others, tricked out with words like justice, love, and the common
good, never matches the truth we know of ourselves, which is all passion, fear, and ambition, our
concern with their opinions leaves us ever more divided.
42. Having told us this sad story in his Second Discourse, Rousseau attempts to resolve the problem of
dividedness he describes through a series of experiments that consist in giving oneself,
wholeheartedly, to one or another alternative on his human landscape. Modern man, the bourgeois, is,
as he says, “nothing:” too self-interested to be truly social, too obsessed with the opinions of others
to be truly solitary. To become something is, in the first place, to choose. There are many
alternatives to choose from in Rousseau’s system; for the sake of brevity, I will focus on just two: his
citizen and his solitary.
43. Rousseau’s first great philosophic statement, the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, begins on a
famous walk he takes from Paris to Vincennes where his friend Diderot is imprisoned. Indulging
the bookish man’s bad habit of reading while he walks, Rousseau encounters, in a newspaper, an
essay contest on the question of whether the revival of the arts and sciences has contributed to the
purification of morals. His answer is a tremendous no, spoken in the voice of the Roman consul
Fabricius, whom he imagines denouncing the luxury of imperial Rome from the perspective of the
rough huts of the ancient Republic. Himself born in the Republic of Geneva, Rousseau attacks the
vain and cunning self-love of modern man from the vantage point of a human being wholeheartedly dedicated to the political community—the vantage point of the citizen.
13
�44. The citizen sees himself, as Rousseau puts it, not as Gaius or Lucius, but as a Roman. Good
social institutions extend the amour-propre of the individual over the whole community, through
cradle-to-grave immersion in the unceasing spectacle of public life, which produces an
“intoxication” that “raise[s] men above themselves.” By so doing, those social institutions allow
civic virtue to become not a pretense but an integral way of life, thereby overcoming the human
dividedness at the heart of Rousseau’s diagnosis of the problem of the bourgeois.
45. This picture of wholehearted civic virtue has proven powerfully attractive. But its achievement
requires, as Rousseau makes clear, “denaturing man.” And there is perhaps no modern author who
has done more to make the prospect of such denaturalization revolting to us than Rousseau himself,
whose history of the human race is self-consciously calculated to make us long for natural simplicity.
No reader of Rousseau could be expected to accept the prospect of denaturalization without at least
wondering whether we might recover a form of integrity that deserves the name natural. Rousseau
offers us a more natural model of integrity at the other extreme of his system, in the figure of his
solitary.
46. Rousseau’s effort to recapture the wholeness modeled by natural man stands at the heart of his
autobiographical writings, particularly the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Therein, he shows us how a
highly-developed, modern human being might recover the self-contentment known to natural man.
47. The greatest episode of Rousseau’s effort to recapture that contentment is his sojurn on the
small island called St. Peter’s in the middle of a Swiss lake. For the two months that he lives there,
Rousseau immerses himself in solitary, intentionally unproductive activities: botanizing simply for
the wonder of admiring plants, floating around aimlessly in a little boat, sitting on the shore of the
even smaller island next door to St. Peter’s, just listening to the waves lap.
48. Rousseau treasures these experiences because they provide him with just enough sensory
stimulation to “sense [his] existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think.” He thereby
14
�experiences what he calls “the sentiment of existence,” a psychic state in which he thinks of neither
past nor future; in which he feels neither desire nor fear; in which he thinks of no one else and does
not care what others think of him; in which he delights in the goodness of simply being. Though
civilized human beings often forget this fact, being, simply being, is good.
49. Rousseau’s depiction of this experience is surely inspiring. But when we examine it closely, it
proves to have a quixotic character. In the first place, although his description of his experience on
St. Peter’s island is a paean to solitude, he is not in fact alone there: he is dependent on the tax
collector and his family who are his landlords on the island. He is also dependent on Thérèse, his
faithful, much-maligned companion, mother of the five children he abandoned at a foundlings
hospital, whom he rarely dignifies with the name of wife. She is a living reminder that Rousseau
never achieves practical self-sufficiency.
50. Nor is Rousseau’s mind truly free from the concern with the opinion of others, from the amourpropre that is the source of human dividedness. This becomes clearest in another episode of the
Reveries, in which a botanizing expedition in the mountains leads him into a secluded glade where he
supposes himself completely alone, and perhaps the first human being ever to have set foot there.
Solitary yet joyfully immersed in the sentiment of existence, he compares himself to another
Columbus, planting his flag in this undiscovered country of psychic possibility. But the amour-propre
of a man who imagines himself in such terms remains very much alive—a point that is brought
home to Rousseau when he hears a clanking sound, bursts through a thicket, and finds a stocking
mill churning away just twenty feet from his undiscovered country. Rousseau’s quest to recover the
solitary, god-like wholeness and contentment of natural man achieves no enduring consummation.
51. Were we to consider the other alternatives within the Rousseauan system, such as the couples
Emile and Sophie, and Jean-Jacques and Mme de Warens, or Rousseau’s other great solitary, the
Savoyard Vicar, we would find that all of them have the same character as the citizen and the solitary
15
�walker: powerfully attractive in their efforts to transcend bourgeois dividedness, yet ultimately
fraught with contradictions that fatally undermine those efforts. All these thought experiments are
ultimately failures, and Rousseau was being precise when he called his system “sad.”
52. But a failed experiment can still be an instructive one. Rousseau is like a chemist whose
experiment blows up in his face, but leaves a telling residue in the beakers. The attempt to redeem
Montaignean immanence from Pascal’s attack by investing ourselves wholeheartedly in one or
another possibility on the Rousseauan landscape does not work. Redoubled dedication and renewed
singleness of mind cannot save the quest for immanent contentment from its failure to meet the
deepest demands of our nature.
16
�IV. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy and the Naked Soul
53.
To recapitulate: we began this brief tour of the thought of France’s moralistes with Montaigne’s
insistence on the possibility of immanent contentment—his attempt to demonstrate that human
beings can limit their aspirations to within the confines of this mortal life, and learn to live
pleasantly, peacefully, and reasonably therein. Pascal found in Montaigne a brilliant breviary of
human psychology, but nonetheless held him to be wrong about who we are and how we should
live, arguing that we are both greater and more miserable than Montaigne imagined—beings built
for anguished God-seeking rather than pleasant self-seeking. Rousseau sought to re-imagine
immanent contentment in forms capable of meeting the challenge of Pascal’s critique, from his
citizen to his solitary walker. His sad and great system demonstrates, however, that such alternatives
are destined to fail.
54. This great argument deeply informed the thought of our final thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville.
During his famous visit to the United States, Tocqueville read the prose of American life with the
poetry of these French moralistes resounding in his ears. He studied Rousseau daily, and was even
more devoted to Pascal; his great friend Gustave de Beaumont wrote that the minds of Tocqueville
and Pascal were “made for one another.” Tocqueville’s encounter with Montaigne was less
intensive, and largely mediated by Pascal. But when Tocqueville diagnosed the restless unhappiness
of democratic man, he was echoing Pascal’s diagnosis of the restless unhappiness of Montaignean
man.
55. In Democracy in America, we behold the spectacle of the great drama of the soul that takes place in
the pages of the moralistes scaled down to the prosaic, domestic scene of millions of ordinary
households, and multiplied over the expanse of an enormous nation. In this country, Tocqueville
sees immanent contentment become the standard of aspiration for millions, and it is as a reader of
Pascal that he made the famous observation with which I began—that Americans are restless in the
17
�midst of their prosperity. He sees the existential conundrum of the thinking reed haunting
American life from the mansions of Boston to the backwoods kitchens of the frontier.
56. Tocqueville also sees that, in a democratic country, so much psychic unease could not be
without political consequences. In the minutes remaining, I want to consider our unease and its
political ramifications by focusing on one particular aspect of the search for immanent contentment:
our hostility to what Tocqueville calls “forms.” Suspicion of forms accompanies the search for
immanent contentment from its inception in the thought of Montaigne. The unsettling political
implications of this hostility to forms were on display in the Jacksonian America Tocqueville beheld
in 1831, and are visible to us now.
57. Democratic human beings, Tocqueville writes, “despise forms, which they consider as useless
and inconvenient veils placed between them and the truth.” He never defines the term “forms”
precisely, but the meaning of it emerges from the portrait of aristocratic society he paints to put
democracy into relief. In aristocratic society, the observation of formalities structured all of social
life. One addressed people by their proper titles: “my lady” and “your grace,” “sir” and “madam.”
One went through the prescribed motions, from bowing and curtseying in the ballroom to kneeling
and crossing oneself in church. One had to dress one’s part, and know one’s place in the ranks of
men, so as not to dishonor oneself by placing oneself too low or give offense to others by placing
oneself too high.
58. The pursuit of immanent contentment is hostile to forms from its outset. Montaigne writes that
we “must tear the masks off of things as well as people;” and reminds us that kings and great ladies
go through the messy, funny, sad business of bodily life just like everyone else, from toilet to
boudoir to deathbed. His frank, unpretentious irreverence is essential to his effort to scale every
human pursuit down to within the circuit of immanence—we can glide lightly over the surface of
life because nothing deserves to be taken with the seriousness our formalities imply.
18
�59. Rousseau, for his part, takes this hostility to forms to his wonted extremes. His rejection of
bourgeois, Parisian life includes the rejection of all its finery, and he theatrically says goodbye to the
formal accoutrements of Paris when he quits the city: the watch, the sword, the linen shirts, all of it.
He comes to distrust even as much formalism as is required for articulate speech, trusting more in
inarticulate cries and gestures as the truest revelations of the human heart. He once chooses to
make his thoughts known to the staid David Hume through the highly informal act of leaping into
his lap and bathing him with kisses.
60. In America, Tocqueville sees this hostility to forms democratized. To refuse to observe
formalities is to take liberties, and free peoples enjoy taking liberties. There is nothing more
discordant to our ears than being told to “know our place.” Formal speech, formal dress, social
ranks, acts of intellectual or spiritual deference—all of them conflict with the defining belief of a
democratic age, the belief in the equality of conditions. And so we strip them away, often engaging
in a kind of ritualistic self-exposure that allows us to perform our liberation from social expectations
and encumbrances. Wearing flip-flops to class, asking other people’s children to call us by our first
names, the replacement of the organ by the praise band in church—all of it is a contemporary
manifestation of the nonchalance Montaigne celebrated so long ago.
61. This hostility to forms is not merely a matter of casual taste and impatience with rigmarole. It
has a philosophic side—an implied metaphysical materialism. Americans, as Tocqueville writes, are
often disposed “to believe that everything is only matter.” We find formality unpleasant and
unnecessary in part because we suspect that form is not real. Appearance and shape seem to us
evanescent and deceptive; what is real is the tangible, the material, the stuff of things; what is real is
matter, which has mass and volume. This belief has special power among us because it aligns with
one of the most powerful passions of the democratic soul, what Tocqueville calls “the love of
19
�material well-being.” Our love of improving the material conditions of our lives, our concentration
on those material conditions, makes us prone to the belief that matter is all that matters.
62. This moral and metaphysical materialism decisively shapes our understanding of ourselves.
Human beings disposed to suspect forms and trust in matter soon come to doubt the reality of the
soul, which Aristotle describes as the “living form” of an organic being. It is form or soul that
endures across the constant material flux of time and metabolism; it is form that constitutes the
unity and continuity of a person. Those to whom material realities often seem like the only realities
therefore come to doubt the reality of their very selves. They wonder if what is called the soul is as
illusory and meaningless as one of those aristocratic titles people used to get so fussy over; they
wonder if the soul they experience is merely a “powerless transient being[s] in an organically
generated cyberspace,” as one advocate of this view has put it. As the later Peter Augustine Lawler
wrote, democratic man comes to fear that it is his fate to be a “miserable accident perceiving itself as
such.”
63. To suspect that we are merely miserable accidents of course leaves us deeply doubtful of our
own reality as rational agents whose capacities for thought and action about and on the world are
real and potent. Doubt of the reality of our thinking, acting selves is the existential heart of our
unease. Turned outward, this doubt of ourselves takes of the form of a deep-seated suspicion of the
motives of others. If we have no confidence in the substantial reality of our own freedom and
reason, after all, we will not have any confidence in the freedom and rationality of others. We will
be prone to the view that the hidden play of material forces and interests really drive everything,
behind the masks of politeness, the appearance of fairness, and the rules of procedure.
64. Our suspicion of the motives of others, ultimately rooted in our suspicion of the reality of
ourselves, inclines us toward a dark, flat, and ultimately corrosive view of politics. Politics in the
Aristotelian sense—reasoned if intense negotiation between conflicting, plausible, and earnestly held
20
�ideas about the good—ceases to make sense when we understand ourselves not as rational animals
seeking the good, however errantly, and understand ourselves instead as pinballs passively bounced
around by hidden drives and forces. Public argument, seen in such a light, comes to seem a series of
performative gestures that merely divert attention from the conflicts of material interest that really
motivate everyone.
65. When we cease to believe that people are motivated by the principles they invoke, we treat them
differently. Conservatives see liberals not as people earnestly if misguidedly working to alleviate
entrenched injustice, but as insular cultural elites signaling their virtue; liberals see conservatives not
as people sincerely if mistakenly working to preserve traditional morality, but as rich white men
perpetuating their privilege. Those who invoke principles that might limit political conflict sound
weak or duplicitous. For to abide by such limits, we fear, is to be duped into observing arbitrary
constraints on one’s latitude for action that will not trouble one’s adversaries. The human beings
with whom politics deals come to seem like crude masses to be moved and manipulated by whatever
means necessary. We see no particular need to handle them with delicacy or respect, or to allow
them the freedom to seek a truth that cannot be seared into their brains by social pressure.
66. In such circumstances, vulgarity will come to be the political vernacular favored by all sides, and
political violence will enjoy an increasing measure of legitimacy. For crude words and fisticuffs are
nothing if not honest and unvarnished. The vulgar and the violent demonstrate that they are not
fooled by deceptive appearances, and understand the need to fight fire with fire.
67. In such circumstances, the whole architecture of separations that is the hallmark invention of
liberal politics comes to seem suspect. For the most fundamental separation upon which that whole
system reposed, the separation between the church and the statehouse, between transcendent
concerns and immanent ones, comes to seem an outmoded screen for corruption when immanent
and even material concerns are understood to be the only genuine and powerful human motives.
21
�68. Politics in what Charles Taylor calls “the immanent frame” thus comes to reflect the existential
unease of the souls that inhabit that frame. That unease drives political imprudence, abets hostility
to restraint, encourages vulgarity, rawness, and violence, and explains our growing impatience with
other human beings whom we find it ever more difficult to regard as separate and serious realities
that we are bound to respect. The defense of immanence, an ingenious invention of prudence that
once helped mark off the space that freedom and individuality require, comes to breed a new form
of imprudence, bent upon collapsing all such spaces. The deepest source of that imprudence is our
increasingly over-simplified understanding of ourselves.
22
�Conclusion: Liberalism and the Good Life
69. If the foregoing argument is correct, a revival of the fortunes of our shaky republican
government depends upon a rethinking of what we are and what we are living for. For the
restlessness that unsettles us, personally and politically, ultimately stems from our continually
frustrated attempt to achieve immanent contentment, which is a kind happiness incapable of
satisfying a being whose nature surpasses itself, as Pascal put it.
70. Such a rethinking might begin with a reexamination of the early modern thinker with whom I
began, Montaigne, and of the skepticism to which his case for pursuing happiness under the guise of
immanent contentment is conjoined. For that skepticism has become reflexive, and has unstrung
our very capacity for thinking about the kind of happiness beings like us might need.
71. Montaigne’s case for moderation through variation, for a life that takes nothing as the “one thing
needful,” depends upon his critique of all accounts, religious and philosophic, of a good life with
such a center. He presents that critique in the longest chapter of the Essays, his “Apology for
Raimond Sebond.” In reading it, one notices that he does not make his case for skepticism by
refuting, in any detail, any argument for a definite conception of the good. Rather, he draws
attention to the proliferation of such conceptions, piling up the most absurd arguments next to the
most reasonable ones until our heads spin. “Now trust in your philosophy,” he challenges the
reader, and “boast that you have found the bean in the cake, when you consider the clatter of so
many philosophical brains!”
66. This rhetorical strategy, as T. S. Eliot notes, is like a gas—it is an atmosphere we breathe in, not
an argument we consider. Montaigne wants to humble us by making us feel that our intellectual
lives are cosmically unsupported. While his reasons for adopting this strategy amid the theologyinfused bloodbath of his time may certainly draw our sympathy, the examination we have undertaken
of life lived within the immanent frame in which Montaigne encloses us should, I think, suggest to
23
�us that dealing with the problems of our time might require us to reconsider what reason can show
us about how we should live our lives.
67. Re-opening the question of what we can know about how we should live would involve reexamining the indications we have of the kind of lives that are suitable to beings with our distinctive,
upright, and open human form. It would also involve renewed consideration just how well the
various goods to which we are attracted might hold up as the abiding object of aspiration for the life
we will live with the nature we have been given.
68. I can think of no educational institution in the country that does more to raise such questions
and take them seriously than St. John’s College. The work you do here is thus not only of personal
and philosophic importance, but of the highest political importance. I am again grateful to you for
allowing me to offer you my thoughts today in what I hope is in accord with the spirit of this place.
Thank you.
24
�
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The Pursuit of Happiness: Four French Thinkers on Our Restless Quest for Contentment
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Typescript of a lecture delivered by Benjamin Storey, Associate Professor, Department of Politics and International Affairs, and Co-Director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University, on October 18, 2019 as part of the Formal Lecture Series. The introduction to Storey's lecture was not recorded.
Storey describes his lecture topic as follows: "In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that Americans are 'restless in the midst of their well-being'—strangely uneasy even as they enjoy unprecedented prosperity. This talk will consider the long French tradition of thinking about restlessness that lies behind that observation. It will begin by showing how the great essayist Michel de Montaigne seeks to quiet our restlessness by teaching us a new way of pursuing happiness, a way of life distinguished by the central place it accords to the modern virtues of skepticism, authenticity, and nonchalance. Turning next to Pascal and Rousseau, the paper will consider their separate and distinctive critiques of the Montaignean pursuit of happiness, which, in their view, deepens the very restlessness it is intended to palliate. The paper will conclude with a consideration of Tocqueville’s analysis of American politics in the light of his insight into the psychological unease of the American citizen, and an argument for how we might pursue happiness better by reconsidering some of the assumptions of modern skepticism from which we began."
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Storey, Benjamin
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2019-10-18
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online."
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Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859
Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778
Pascal, Blaise, 1623-1662
Happiness
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English
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Storey_Benjamin_2019-10-18_Typescript
Friday night lecture
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f9a90c9ccfecc17bc44cd35708b2299d
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Text
Speaking Freely and the Conversational Virtues
Joseph C. Macfarland
A lecture given at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
August 23, 2019
“Except for the requirements of common courtesy, there are only two rules [in
seminar]…” I am quoting from the Statement of the St. John’s Program… “First, all opinions
must be heard and explored, however sharply they may clash; second, every opinion must be
supported by argument—an unsupported opinion does not count.” Skipping ahead a little: “The
course of the discussion cannot be fixed in advance; it is determined rather by the necessity of
‘following the argument,’ of facing the crucial issues, or of seeking foundations upon which a
train of reasoning can be pursued. The argument does not necessarily lead to the answer to a
question. More often than not the question remains open but with certain alternatives clearly
outlined. The progress of the seminar is not particularly smooth; the discussion may sometimes
branch off and entangle itself in irrelevant difficulties. Only gradually can the logical rigor of an
argument emerge within the sequence of analogies and other imaginative devices by which the
discussion is kept alive. A seminar may also degenerate into rather empty talk, without being
able for some time to extricate itself from such a course. At its best, the seminar may reach
insights far beyond the initial views held by any of its members.”
About this passage, I want to draw two observations: first, it would appear that seminar
is characterized by the “freedom of speech” therein: “all opinions must be heard and explored,”
“the course of the discussion cannot be fixed in advance,” “more often than not the question
remains open.” We are committed to this freedom even at the risk of the conversation
occasionally devolving into “empty talk” or getting entangled in “irrelevant difficulties.” The
second observation: the phrase, “freedom of speech,” which carries so much weight in
American political culture, is not mentioned, not invoked, as if its presence were an unintended
consequence of other intentions. The freedom with which the seminar conversation moves
serves a deeper freedom of thought, the substance of a liberal education.1
1
From elsewhere in the Statement, about seminar: “The demands of the individual and those of the group are in
continuous interplay, setting limits within which the discussion moves with the utmost possible freedom.” And:
“These [the liberal] arts enable all human beings to know the world around them and to know themselves in this
1
�In the last several years, it has become common for colleges to declare their
commitment to freedom of speech or freedom of expression. Several years ago the University
of Chicago released a statement on ‘freedom of expression’; some version of this statement has
been endorsed by sixty odd colleges and universities. This past spring, the president of the
United States signed an executive order mandating that colleges uphold free speech lest they
jeopardize federal research funds. The order, as framed, will have little practical impact on
colleges.2 But observers of all kinds found the action alarming, as it seemed designed to ignite
partisan political skirmishes within the academy, and to demean the noble principle through its
patently partisan deployment. I feared that even to mention the president’s action could do the
same to the discourse I’ve embarked on tonight—should I have censored myself, lest I
introduce partisan strife? Can we hear the fact, without slipping into the mode of discourse
initiated there?
Regarding the more principled defense of freedom of speech in the academy, I will note
that in some respects the Chicago statement echoes our own and there is much to admire in it.
For example, “Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard
thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of
stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.” The conditions
for this hard thinking and strong disagreement require valuing civility and nourishing a climate
of mutual respect.3 The Chicago statement avers that “free inquiry is indispensable to the good
life.”
Yet in some respects, I find the Chicago statement does not suit a community of learning
as I understand it, the one I believe we share. While the statement begins by emphasizing
freedom of inquiry, it settles more firmly on freedom of expression. At the same time, not
world, and to use that knowledge with wisdom. Under the guidance of these arts, they can free themselves from
the constraint of prejudice and the narrowness of beaten paths.”
2 Chronicle of Higher Education, Andy Thomason, March 21, 2019: “But public colleges are already legally bound to
do so by the First Amendment. And private colleges will be required only to ‘comply with their stated institutional
policies regarding free inquiry,’ according to Politico, which cited an unnamed senior official in the Trump
administration.” (“Trump's hyped free speech order asks colleges to do what they already have to,” Politico,
Benjamin Wermund, March 21, 2019).
3 Although the statement pointedly adds: “concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a
justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some
members of our community.”
2
�coincidentally, it often emphasizes the value of “uninhibited debate and deliberation.”4 In this
mode, conversation is envisioned as a place for competition. The word “debate” is derived from
battere, a word in early Romance languages which meant, “to fight.” The English word debate
originally meant to “fight” or “strive with” in the literal sense; it acquired its current, figurative
sense—to dispute a matter of public interest—soon after.5 A debate is a “contest”; it has
contestants, judges, an audience. An invisible wall is erected between the participants and the
auditors—the speakers strive to persuade; they are not themselves available for persuasion;
the auditors—the judges, the audience—are passively worked upon by the persuaders. The
historical analogy may be to the lists, where knights in armor meet on chargers with pointed
lances; the modern analogy is to the courtroom.6 The adversarial arrangement is designed to
elicit arguments framed with maximum force, to clarify the choice to be made by a third party,
the audience or the jury. The freedom being articulated is a freedom of expression: each may
outwardly unfold his own conceits and supporting arguments without impediment. And from
time to time, it offers the ephemeral sweetness of victory.
The analogy to the courtroom reminds us that debate has a function essential to a free
political society, but one may still question its usefulness in shared, free inquiry. Often in
classes, we aim at a mode of understanding that is more secure, more certain, than mere
persuasion; we aim at demonstration or knowledge. Yet even when we tread the territory in
which demonstration becomes doubtful, and we must resort to judgment and imagination, we
still speak less to express ourselves than to find and articulate the obscure but solid contours of
our subject matter. Returning to the Statement of the Program: “The course of the discussion
cannot be fixed in advance; it is determined rather by the necessity of ‘following the argument,’
of facing the crucial issues, or of seeking foundations upon which a train of reasoning can be
pursued… Only gradually can the logical rigor of an argument emerge within the sequence of
analogies and other imaginative devices by which the discussion is kept alive.” Our dialectical
activity is not exclusively logical—it employs analogies and imaginative devices—but the
4
The brief document mentions “debate” five times, including in the introduction. Four times it appears in the
phrase, “debate and deliberation.”
5 OED online gives as an example of the figurative sense: “1609 Shakespeare Sonnets xv. sig. B4 Wastfull time
debateth with decay To change your day of youth to sullied night.”
6 OED: “1590 Spenser Faerie Queene ii. i. sig. M7v Well could he tourney and in lists debate.”
3
�underlying “argument” has enough of an inherent shape that we gradually conform to it as we
clumsily discover it. “All opinions must be heard and explored, however sharply they may
clash,” but, “every opinion must be supported by argument.”
The type of inquiry we pursue requires a small enough community that we can tear
down the barrier between speaker and auditor; each person in class speaks and listens; each is
mover and moved. Conversely, vigorous debate as a model for learning may become more apt
as the scale of the learning community grows: in a lecture hall, in a research university, in a
research field, we are almost always auditors. After the courtroom, this brings me to the
second analogy implicit in the defense of free speech: the marketplace. The tacit assumption
seems to be that we will accumulate the greatest intellectual wealth where the movement of
information is most free. In the commotion and competition of diverse arguments, true and
useful notions will achieve their appropriate market share, one trusts, so long as their public
expression is sustained and uninhibited.7 As John Locke said (in a work I will soon discuss): “For
truth certainly would have done very well, if she were ever left to herself.”8 The auditors, the
jury members in a courtroom, become consumers, and the discernment exercised by
individuals is replaced by an invisible hand or the wisdom of the crowd.9
It is a serious question, of the greatest import, whether the free expression of
competing ideas inevitably leads to the gradual prevalence of true ones; I am not able to judge;
I am intrigued by the notion. It is of limited use, however, in thinking about our classroom—
true, each participant, sharing in a common logos, will walk away with somewhat different
impressions and opinions, but the classroom is not a marketplace of ideas. The importance of
scale, from many to few, is noted in the Gorgias when Polus says to Socrates, “Do you not think
that you have been refuted Socrates, when you say such things as no one among human beings
would assert? Just ask anyone of these men [who are listening]”; to which Socrates responds, “I
7
A market is efficient when information about products, including prices, moves most freely; as a result, the
market itself is thought to be the best distributor and aggregator of information.
8 Letter Concerning Toleration, in, Locke on Toleration, ed. Vernon (Cambridge University Press, 2010), page 31.
Locke is concerned with the employment of government and law to persuade people about religion. On the
analogy between freedom in the development of property and in the care of the soul, page 18.
9 In fairness, the Chicago Statement does not allude to the marketplace. I do think the analogy is implicit in much
popular discourse about how free expression leads to the prevalence of correct notions.
4
�am not one of the political men… so do not bid me to put the vote to those present,” and, a
little later, “all other men agree with you except me, whereas for me you, being one man alone,
are quite enough to agree and bear witness… I put the vote to you alone and bid the others
farewell.”10
Occasionally engaged in conversations on this subject, I was struck by the question of a
colleague: why is it that, in reference to freedom of speech in the academy, we do not speak
instead about toleration? If one wishes to create an environment that cultivates openness to
different opinions, why emphasize one’s right to speak, rather than one’s obligation to listen?
Within the American regime, free speech and toleration share a common source, the first
amendment to the Constitution. They would seem to be complimentary parts of a coordinated
intention. Within our sub-political community, a very small college, could toleration be a more
fitting way to conceive of the space within which we pursue free inquiry? In order to think
about this, I wanted to turn to a classic work on the subject to assist me; and I note that there is
no such work on the program. And we might wonder why, when religious toleration is one of
the most distinctive and, I would say, valuable, features of modern liberal democracies—
answering this query is not easy. For the purposes of this talk, I will spend some time with
Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, and, though it is off-the-program, it has the virtue of
sharing many principles with the much more familiar Two Treatises of Government. This will
constitute the second part of my talk; the third will move further back in time, to the virtues
concerning “actions and speeches” in Aristotle’s Ethics.
I will sketch what I take to be several principles of Locke’s account of toleration and the
manner in which toleration is extended. This will bring us to a few surprising features in the
doctrine, additional questions about how it is extended, and how it is relevant to our own
community.
10
Gorgias 473e and 475e-476a, Nichols trans. (Cornell University Press, 1998). Of course, later, it is enough if only
Callicles agrees with Callicles (482b); self-agreement under sustained examination is the necessary but not
sufficient criterion for knowledge. Socrates is somewhat disingenuous here; he is, after all, conducting the
argument as a demonstration for Gorgias.
5
�Locke’s account of toleration has two starting points, one, his reading of the Gospel, the
other, his philosophy of politics. The Letter begins from the teaching of the New Testament.
Very simply, being a Christian requires charity, gentleness, and goodwill (3); Locke flatly denies
that persecution of others on the basis of their beliefs is compatible with charity and goodwill
(3-4). Christ sent out his disciples, “to subdue nations and compel them to come into the
church[,] not with swords or spears… but with the Gospel, with the message of peace[,] and
with the exemplary force of holiness” (5).”11 The word toleration, in its earliest sense, means to
“endure” or “sustain hardship” (OED), and, as Locke says, “the Gospel everywhere testifies that
the true disciples of Christ must expect persecution and bear it” (11). That is, even if one were
to set aside charity as a reason for toleration, toleration on its own appears to follow from
Christ’s teaching.
The second starting point for the account of toleration is Locke’s political philosophy:
“the commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for preserving and
advancing their civil goods… life, liberty, bodily health and freedom from pain, and the
possession of outward things” (JWG, 67). For the sake of this end, preserving civil goods,
governments institutes law, and rulers have the force with which to punish anyone who breaks
the law and “violates the rights of others” (7).12 The salient feature of Locke’s teaching, of
course, is that the power of government is limited: he aims to show, “that the whole
jurisdiction of the magistrate is concerned only with these civil goods,… that all the right and
dominion of civil power is bounded and confined solely to the care of these [civil] goods; and
that it neither can nor ought to be extended to the salvation of souls.”
With the exception of this last phrase about “souls,” all of this is familiar from the Two
Treatises on Government, and still more familiar as a principle of American government from its
first establishment. What is curious is that, although the Two Treatises on Government and the
11
For “compel,” Vernon refers us to Luke 14:23, “And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and
hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” This was evidently frequently referenced in
the polemical literature of the age. (Locke’s Latin in this passage, cogendas, differs from the Vulgate in Luke 14:23,
compellere; perhaps the polemical literature warrants the connection?) Quotations are from the Vernon
translation, except for those noted as being from the J.W. Gough edition (JWG): Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on
Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
12
6
�Letter Concerning Toleration were published in the same year, both anonymously, and although
both works rest on the same political principles, the Second Treatise on Government is silent on
the question of religious toleration.13 One might wonder, is the doctrine of toleration essential
to Locke’s philosophy of politics, or is it an optional, dispensable supplement?
Locke’s analysis of the question has as its primary object, the “church”: the “church” is
the entity whose toleration is being examined. Locke’s definition of “church” is laid out as if it
belonged to his political philosophy: a church is a sub-political association that is framed in
partial analogy to the commonwealth. A church is a “free [and voluntary] society of men,
joining together of their own accord for the public worship of God in such manner as they
believe will be acceptable to the Deity for the salvation of their souls” (JWG, 71).14 No one is
born into a church or bound to one by nature; each has the same liberty to leave it as they had
to enter (9). Every free association has its rules, and the right of making these rules belongs to
the association, or to whomever the association has approved by its consent (10).15 In terms of
this rule-making autonomy, Locke says the church is similar to an association of businessmen or
an association of “learned persons pursuing philosophy.”16 Especially in the case of the church,
membership is a free choice because the path to salvation is for “every individual to investigate
by his own efforts, thinking, searching, judging, and reflecting for himself, in sincerity of heart”
(sincera mente, 19).17
13
Both were published in 1689, the Two Treatises in English, the Letter in Latin. Incidentally, Locke’s authorship of
the Letter was revealed much before his authorship of the treatises. Also, Laslett notes passages in the Two
Treatises that correspond to passages in the four letters on toleration, e.g., II.3, II.108, II.134, etc. (Two Treatise of
Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1960, 1996). Although the Second Treatise does not
explain toleration, in the list of causes that might lead the people to resist their government, we find, in one
instance, “when their Estates, Liberties, and Lives are in danger, and perhaps their Religion too” (II.209, emphasis
added). In the following section, among the actions of the ruler that could prompt the dissolution of the
government, Locke includes, “that Religion underhand favoured (though publicly proclaimed against) which is
readiest to introduce [arbitrary power]” (II.210).
14 Elsewhere Locke does say that “true religion” comes into the world “to ground a life of goodness and piety…
holiness of life, purity of morals, goodness of heart, and gentleness” (Vernon, 3).
15 It is strange that, in discussing rule-making within the church, Locke mentions the importance of consent
(assensus, JWG, 73), but when discussing the commonwealth, he omits it—strange, since consent is such a central
feature in his political teaching (Second Treatise, ch. 8). Perhaps the Letter Concerning Toleration, written in Latin,
was intended equally for readers on the continent.
16 Societas literatorum ad philosopham; not quite following Gough (73) or Vernon (10).
17 “The only real way to spread the truth [is] to combine the weight of reason and argument with humanity and
good will” (15).
7
�The argument for toleration seems to be advanced as much as possible on the grounds
of political philosophy. According to Locke, the articulation of the civil power, including its
limits, is religion-independent: “Civil power is the same everywhere, and it can bestow no more
authority on a church if it is in the hands of a Christian prince than it can in the hands of a pagan
prince” (14). Political philosophy appears sufficient “to mark the true bounds between the
church and the commonwealth” (JWG, 65). In order to do this, one more principle is requisite:
“The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists wholly in
compulsion. But true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without
which nothing has any value with God; and such is the nature of human understanding, that it
cannot be compelled by any outward force [JWG, 69].” To Locke’s political philosophy is added
a principle from another part of philosophy: that the mind cannot be compelled by force. If true
religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, and if the civil power exercises a
compulsion which has no effect on the mind, then the civil power is simply incapable of
favoring one religion over another. “It is light that is needed to change a belief in the mind;
punishment of the body does not lend light” (8).
In judging whether a church should be tolerated, Locke identifies three salient features
to be considered: its modes of worship, its speculative doctrines, and its practical or moral
doctrines. Toleration appears to be unconditional when it comes to two of the three features,
modes of worship and speculative doctrines. Regarding matters of worship, most are
“indifferent in their own nature”: “the sprinkling of water, and the use of bread and wine, are
things in their own nature and in ordinary life altogether indifferent” (JWG, 107). They are not
indifferent to the members of the church who practice them, who regard them as instituted by
God. But since they are indifferent in their own nature, the civil magistrate has no cause to
prefer one over the other; and as they belong to the inmost beliefs of the worshippers, the civil
power is obliged to respect these choices. As far as the civil power is concerned, if a Christian
“should want to sacrifice a calf, that (I say) should not be forbidden by law… That does no harm
to anyone, takes nothing from any man’s possessions” (25).
Toleration is equally broad in relation to speculative doctrines: the ruler ought not
prohibit the speculative opinions of any church, “because they have no bearing on the civil
8
�rights of the subjects.”18 “Laws are not concerned with the truth of opinions, but with the
security and safety of the commonwealth and with each man’s goods” (JWG, 123). Locke
resorts to the principle I mentioned before: truth “does not need force to find entrance into
men’s minds, nor is she taught by the [voice] of the laws.”
The limits and perplexities concerning toleration enter with the third feature of a
church, its practical doctrines. Both the civil power and the church are concerned with instilling
good morals; while the commonwealth requires that its citizens have good morals, the church
appears more able to instill them.19 Locke admits that this may lead the church to infringe on
the commonwealth, or vice versa, but he asserts that such infringements will be rare; few sects
are likely to teach doctrines that undermine the foundations of society, as the given sect would
endanger the peace and respect it enjoys.20
As the force of the argument for toleration arises from demonstrating the limits of the
civil power, the argument of the Letter focuses on explaining why the civil power, the ruler,
must tolerate all qualifying churches. Yet, in Locke’s view, it is very often a church having
influence with the civil power that seeks to use that power to persecute a competing church.
The rhetorical objective of the Letter therefore is to persuade each church why it must tolerate
others. Locke emphasizes that toleration is, of its very nature, mutual or reciprocal: the
condition for receiving it, is granting it (36). If a church is intolerant towards others at home, it
cannot expect to be tolerated abroad; if it is intolerant now under advantageous political
circumstances, it cannot expect to be tolerated in the future under disadvantageous ones (15).
The aim appears to be to persuade churches not to avail themselves of the civil power in order
to suppress competing faiths. Or to put it more strongly, while the central argument for
toleration is mounted from the philosophical analysis of the powers of the commonwealth, the
18
JWG, 121. “To believe this or that to be true is not within the scope of our will” (JWG, 121).
Good morals “are a major part of religion” and “play a role in civil life” (31). For example, Christianity is opposed
to vices such as adultery, fornication, and lasciviousness (5), as well as bigotry and fanaticism (6).
20 “No doctrines, incompatible with human society, and contrary to the good morals which are necessary for the
preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate. But examples of these are rare in any church”
(JWG, 131). Locke does imply that if the civil power seizes civil goods on the basis of disfavored religious belief, the
result could be civil war (“Who shall be judge between them? I answer: God alone” [JWG, 129]; cf. Second Treatise
2.168, 2.241). Locke also considers cases where a sect deceptively teaches a doctrine that would give its members
civil power over member of another sect.
19
9
�rhetorical thrust of the work suggests that toleration ought to be practiced, most of all, in
society generally, below the level of politics.
Having laid out several fundamental aspects of Locke’s argument, let me ask a few
questions. First, how far does toleration extend? Locke is categorical in extending toleration to
Jews, Muslims, idolaters, and even pagans (41). “No one… should be deprived of his earthly
goods on account of religion, including [those natives of America] who have been subjected to
a Christian prince… if they believe they please God and attain salvation by their ancestral rites,
they should be left to God and themselves” (27). Locke impresses us with his humanity on this
point.
Famously, however, and a little shockingly to modern sensibilities, the Letter implies
that Catholicism should not be tolerated if, by its practical doctrines, it claims to limit the civil
power of the commonwealth, or to assert its own civil power (35).21 Locke does maintain that
there is nothing in the speculative doctrines of Catholicism to merit intolerance (31). This may
be a fitting moment to mention, as you may have recently heard, that our own Greenfield
Library holds a brief, very early document in Locke’s own handwriting, which considers the
advantages and disadvantages of tolerating Catholicism.22
Equally provocative to modern sensibilities is the total intolerance of atheism. “Lastly,
those who deny the existence of the Deity are not to be tolerated at all. Promises, covenants,
and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon or sanctity for an
atheist; for the taking away of God, even only in thought, dissolves all. Furthermore, a man who
by his atheism undermines and destroys all religion cannot in the name of religion claim the
privilege of toleration for himself” (JWG, 135). Here, too, the argument for intolerance appears
to be based on practical, moral doctrine: atheists do not keep promises or contracts,
21
Locke does not mention Catholicism explicitly when implicating these doctrines. When discussing another
doctrine that was attributed to Catholicism and would preclude its toleration, Locke hypothetically attributes it to
a Turkish Muslim instead (36). The letter seems crafted to leave open the possibility of tolerating Catholics, if those
doctrines were not held. Also: “Is worshipping in the Roman manner permitted? Then permit the Genevan also. Is
speaking Latin allowed in the marketplace? Then allow those who so desire to speak it also in church” (40).
22 Walmsley and Waldmann, “John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics: A New Manuscript,” The Historical
Journal, 2019; http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6528?_ga=2.23967930.1816383851.15666713691602710236.1564332443.
10
�presumably because they do not expect rewards or punishments in the afterlife. Yet the
doctrine for which they are criticized—that God does not exist—is speculative, not practical.
This brings into question Locke’s separation of speculative and practical doctrines: it turns out
not to be true that all speculative doctrines should be tolerated. Locke had said that the
commonwealth has no care of the soul; the intolerance towards atheism appears to contradict
this.23
As we are instinctively inclined to extend toleration further than Locke’s Letter, some
readers have endeavored to rescue Locke from the opprobrium of having been intolerant in
these two cases, and to discover in his various writings a more tolerant attitude to these
groups. I am unable to judge these interpretations. The intolerance of the Letter, however,
suggests that the attempt to articulate with precision the grounds of toleration inevitably leads
to articulating the grounds for intolerance as well. As the indictment of atheism implies, at the
very least, intolerance of whatever kind must itself not be tolerated. Insofar as we, inhabitants
of a liberal democracy, are strongly predisposed in favor of toleration, it is vaguely troubling to
think that, if toleration is not extended without limit, we must finally be resolved, at some
point, contrary to our disposition, to be intolerant.
A second question: is toleration extended exclusively on the basis of political philosophy?
Just as Locke said, “civil power is the same everywhere,” so he also says, “ecclesiastical
authority is the same everywhere”; everywhere it is true that the church “has no competence
in civil matters and no power to compel” (40). The Letter freely extends toleration to Jews, yet
it also notes that, in the Biblical commonwealth of the Israelites, there was no distinction
between church and commonwealth; in that commonwealth, the civil laws dictated religious
ritual and punished idolaters (28). The Biblical commonwealth appears not to meet the criteria
for a “church.” Locke himself argues in favor of tolerating idolaters, and he argues that idolaters
were in fact tolerated in the Biblical commonwealth (30). Toleration evidently depends on the
23
Locke originally said that the civil power is not concerned with “the salvation of the soul” (JWG, 67); later, it is
not the responsibility of the civil power if a citizen “neglects the care of his soul” (17). If “care of the soul” means
exclusively care for salvation, then perhaps it is true that the commonwealth has no care for the “soul”; but if “care
of the soul” includes speculative belief that supports moral rectitude, then it seems the commonwealth does in
fact have care of the soul, in contradiction to the earlier statement. The first interpretation may be correct.
11
�non-enforcement of some laws of the Biblical commonwealth.24 To frame the matter in general
terms: admission to toleration requires that each religion conceive of itself in a way
conformable to Locke’s definition of a church; that is, Locke’s definition of church is in some
measure normative rather than descriptive. The same might be said of Locke’s claim that “the
true… religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind.” Readers will approach this
question differently: some will say that all churches are conceived to conform to the contours
of Locke’s own church (whatever it may have been), that is, that the ultimate grounds of
toleration are theological rather than philosophical. I would be inclined to say that the specific
conception of a church is designed to attain a pragmatic end, civil peace and prosperity. Either
way, an objectively philosophical derivation of the nature of a church seems wanting.
A third question: what import would this conception of toleration have for our own subpolitical community, “our association of learned persons pursuing philosophy”?25 I turned to
Locke’s account of toleration with the hope of discovering a principle that could explain how
freedom of speech is enjoyed in a small community, without focusing directly on the right to
that speech. And in some measure toleration meets that end: as I said, the practice of
toleration is inherently mutual; it puts the emphasis on what you are willing to hear and
endure, rather than what you are free to say. Toleration requires something hard of us, to
endure heresy with equanimity, to hear speech that contradicts our most dear convictions
about the highest matters.
The doctrine of toleration appears most stable, most defensible, when it focuses on how
the civil power is—by its own nature—limited; that is, it seems that toleration is established
most securely at the level of political society. The activity of religion simply lies beyond the
scope of the state’s coercive power. Yet because we cannot be confident that every religion
would, from its own doctrine, conform to Locke’s specific definition of a “church,” the
argument for toleration below the level of politics, in society more generally, appears to rest on
24
Perhaps Locke thinks that this was the only such regime, and so, an exception easily excluded? “For the
commonwealth of the Jews was very different from others, being based on theocracy” (28). Locke is then at pains
to establish that, once the commonwealth was established, men were not punished for idolatry, that is, idolaters
were tolerated rather than punished by the civil power (30).
25 In addition to the philosophical society, at a lower level, Locke adds, the society “of men-of-leisure seeking
conversation and entertainment” (10).
12
�a moral injunction: toleration is charitable. Yet it likewise cannot be assumed that every religion
eligible for toleration will place the emphasis on charity needed to inspire toleration. In the
absence of charity, perhaps toleration can rest on vaguer notions of “humanity and goodwill,”26
but we would still be lacking a demonstration of “humanity” as a virtue. Personally, I am willing
to accept “humanity” as a reason to be tolerant, and I would recommend toleration to a peer as
a salutary condition for serious conversation, this despite the fact that, so far, I cannot
adequately delineate the scope or the grounds of that toleration.
I turned to Locke’s account of toleration in order to think about free inquiry and free
speech without depending on the right of the individual, but attending more to the
conversational culture where free inquiry occurs. The turn to toleration served those ends
insofar as Locke’s defense of it emphasizes mutual respect and forbearance more than
individual rights. But in the case of Locke, one might be little more than the obverse of the
other: if one person is obligated to tolerate the religion of another, in Locke’s framework of
limited government, doesn’t this imply that the other has a right to the free practice of his
religion as well as a right to public speech about it? So for the last part of this lecture I wanted
to push back further from the range of modern thought, again, in order to think about the
cultivation of free speech within a community of learning.
In antiquity, of course, there was no doctrine of rights—no right of free speech or
freedom of the press—and yet “free speech” is nevertheless a theme for our Greek authors. I
am thinking of the word parrhesia and its cognates. It is a compound word, coming from pan,
meaning “all” or “everything,” and rhesis, a “speech” or “saying.”27 Literally, it could mean, “to
say everything,” or, “to speak completely”; more colloquially, it means “frankness” or
“outspokenness.” An example from the Gorgias might be useful: Socrates credits Callicles with
his, “knowledge, goodwill, and outspokenness,” parrhesia, because he was willing to say openly
26
Humanity and Christianity appear separable: “The magistrate is not obliged to put off either humanity or
Christianity” (JWG, 69).
27 For the general conception of parrhesia, I have drawn on Michel Foucault’s “Discourse and Truth: The
Problematization of Parrhesia,” a transcription of six lectures from 1983
(foucault.info/downloads/discourseandtruth.doc). I have not much attended to the trajectory of Foucault’s own
thinking on the subject which leads to developments of parrhesia in Hellenistic thinking.
13
�what appeared shameful to others.28 And even without a doctrine of civil or natural rights, this
free speech was understood to be the inheritance of equal, free-born citizens in a democracy,
especially in Athens. The one who lacks it is a slave.29
So let me pose a question: where does “free” or “frank speech” fit in among Aristotle’s
account of the virtues of “actions and speeches”? These virtues are found at the end of Book 4
of the Nicomachean Ethics. Let me say a few words about the structure of that book. It
describes eight virtues; and, as many of you have observed, the first four—liberality,
magnificence, greatness of soul, and ambition—form a set. The first two deal with wealth, the
second two with honor; the first and fourth, that is, liberality and ambition, deal with wealth or
honors in moderate measures; the second and third, magnificence and greatness of soul, deal
with wealth and honor in extraordinary measures.30 The third virtue, greatness of soul, forms a
sort of peak among the virtues, both locally and within the Ethics as whole: worthy of great
honors, the great-souled man is the best of men, having complete virtue.31
Aristotle identifies the last three virtues in Book 4—friendliness, truthfulness, and wit—
as the virtues concerning “associations of actions and speeches.” Of these three, the first and
third, friendliness and wit, are sibling virtues: both have to do with pleasure, the first has to do
with pleasure “in the affairs of life”; the third, with pleasure in amusements.32 In between these
two, Aristotle inserts truthfulness—we will have to think about why these three form a set, and
why truth-telling is situated in between the two sibling virtues.
28
Gorgias 487a, also 487d.
Foucault, page 9-10, interpreting The Phoenician Women; on the need to inherit parrhesia, page 19. Gorgias
461a, Socrates to Polus: “you would certainly suffer terrible things, best of men, if you came to Athens, where
there is the most freedom (exousia) to speak in Greece, and then you alone had the misfortune not to get any
there.” Also see the Republic 557b.
30 Aristotle says, magnificence has to liberality the same relation as greatness-of-soul has to the virtue having to do
with moderate honors (4.4.1125b1). This virtue is without a name; it seems to be found in the way one might find
a “fourth proportional” in geometry. I have mostly followed the Rackham translation (Loeb Classical Library,
Harvard University Press, 1926, 1982), although I have also sometimes followed the Sachs translation (Focus
Philosophical Library, 2002) and the Bartlett and Collins translation (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
31 Ethics 1124a24. Thirty years ago I took an extended class on the Nicomachean Ethics with Leon Kass at the
University of Chicago. It is not possible to accurately trace or to properly acknowledge what I owe to him and to
others in the class for my understanding of this book.
32 Ethics 2.7.1108a11; also 4.8.1128b5.
29
14
�The last thing I will say about structure of Book 4 is that the fifth virtue, gentleness,
seems to serve as a transition between the first four—the virtues of wealth and honor—and the
last three, the virtues of “associations in actions and speeches.”
Having sketched the structure of Book 4, I ask: where do we find “free” or “frank
speech” among these virtues? Surprisingly, not among the virtues of “actions and speeches,”
but in the great-souled man. And it is also surprising how much Aristotle has to say about the
great man’s way of talking. Recall that he has wealth and virtue, he seeks great honor and is
worthy of it, and so he is “haughty towards men of position and fortune,” but measured
towards the middling sort. He cares more about truth than opinion; he speaks frankly and
truthfully (parresiastes and aletheutikos). If he did not openly say what he thinks, he would
suggest he was fearful; his outspokenness affirms his greatness and his disdain for others
(4.3.1124b27). With the humble sort of people he refrains from frank speech and, instead, he is
self-deprecating or ironic. In addition to this: he does not talk about other people, he is not a
gossip, for he does not wish to be praised in conversation, nor does he want to speak ill of
others. He has a deep voice and a firm way of speaking (stasimos lexis, 1125a13). He seems to
be not an eager conversationalist, and not likely to tell a joke.
Let’s turn to the so-called virtues of actions and speeches: why does “speaking frankly”
not appear there? After all, the great-souled man is said to be frank and truthful, and one of
three virtues under consideration is truthfulness: How does being truthful get separated off
from speaking frankly?
Of the first two of these virtues, friendliness and truthfulness, Aristotle says they are
nearly about the same things (4.7.1127a13). It is important to digress briefly and note, about
both virtues, that they do not have a name—like all ethical virtues, they are means between
two extremes, two vices, an excess and defect, and the virtues are known only negatively, only
by the absence of the vices. Now, Aristotle does fall into using provisional names for these
virtues, the ones I have been using—friendliness and truthfulness—but it will be important to
remember that they are nameless.
15
�Friendliness is the settled disposition of hitting the mean with respect to giving pleasure
to associates, and not giving them pain. For the reasons I noted, friendliness is seen more
clearly in contrast with its correlative vices: those who object to everything, who don’t care
whether they cause pain, are peevish and contentious (or eristic, duserides, 4.6.1126b15). At
the other extreme, those who never raise an objection, who studiously avoid ever being a cause
of pain to others, are obsequious or flattering.33 Now this virtue, the mean between
contentious and flattering, doesn’t have a name, but Aristotle says this is the sort of person
whom we often call, “a good friend” (epieikes philos, 1126b21); hence, the virtue could be
referred to as “friendliness.”34 The good friend is not someone who is always pleasant; he takes
into consideration what is honorable and what is advantageous; he does not join in what is
shameful or harmful; he will be somewhat unpleasant, or cause pain, when there is cause
(1126b31). In deciding whether to be pleasant or, if needed, unpleasant, he considers whether
the person he is with is a friend, a mere acquaintance, or a stranger, someone high in society or
low. I propose that we think of this “good friend,” the opposite of the flatterer, someone
occasionally willing to give pain in speech, as the replacement for the man of free speech. The
flatterer conceals his thought, or lies, in order to please; in the same circumstances, the good
friend, like a frank speaker, says what he thinks, but gauged to his audience.35
As I said, the virtues of friendliness and truthfulness are closely related, so let us turn to
truthfulness to fill out the picture. Once again, properly speaking, this virtue has no name;
Aristotle introduces only it as “the mean in relation to boastfulness,” a vice; it concerns those
who tell the truth and those who lie, in deeds and in words (4.7.1127a13). Aristotle has in mind
especially speech about oneself: at one extreme, the boaster exaggerates and gives to himself
qualities he does not have; at the other extreme, the ironic person makes himself out to be less
33
When Aristotle first names the vice, he names only obsequiousness (4.6.1126b12); only at the end of the
chapter, does he add the flatterer (kolax), when someone gives pleasure for the sake of gain (1127a10). In English I
believe flattery is often motivated by gain, but need not be, that is, its sense seems broader.
34 In Book 2, when sketching the virtues, Aristotle calls it “friendship,” philia (2.7.1108a28), not “friendliness,” but
in 4.6., he says this virtue is not friendship per se; hence, I am using the word “friendliness” in order to distinguish
the virtue from the relationship. It would be truer to Aristotle’s diction to use “friendship” in both cases, although
also more confusing.
35 Of course, the great-souled man also gages his speech to his interlocutor, either those comparable to him in
greatness, or those below him. The good friend appears to mix with those beneath and above him.
16
�than he is. Boastfulness is most common when one stands to gain something from deceit, and
deceit about one’s ability is hard to detect: Aristotle gives as examples divination, medicine,
and philosophy: boastfulness looks like an occupational hazard.36 He does not fail to remind us,
on the other side, that Socrates was charmingly ironic or self-deprecating.37 This truthfulness,
however, is not simply about oneself: Aristotle explicitly excludes from this virtue telling the
truth or lying about business matters and contracts; these cases would fall under the virtue of
justice instead (4.7.1127a33). Here he is discussing someone who tells the truth, not only about
himself, but when nothing particular is at stake. His speech is direct; he calls each thing by its
name (authekastos, 1127a24). He seems to be “a good” or “equitable person” (toioutos
epieikes) because he is a “truth-lover” (4.7.1127b3, following Bartlett and Collins).
The equitable truth-lover and the “good friend” form a reciprocal pair: one tells the
truth about all things, but especially about himself, and the other is generally pleasant, but tells
the truth to a friend even when it may sting. Or more likely, in a sound pairing, each person
plays each role, as needed. The condescending frankness of the great-souled man is replaced by
something equally truthful, but more equitable. They are lovers of truth, wary of false
appearances, but their truthfulness is not intended to communicate anything august about
their status.
Let us quickly consider the two virtues surrounding friendliness and truthfulness:
gentleness before and wit after. As I said before, gentleness marks the transition from the high
virtues of greatness of soul and magnificence to the virtues of action and speech. Gentleness
(praotês) is the disposition of feeling anger in the right measure and in right way. 38 The gentle
person is not quick to anger, nor does he dwell on his anger; he is not inclined to revenge, and
he is more likely to forgive (4.5.1125b31-1126a3). He is thoughtful or considerate about those
36
Ethics 4.7.1127b18. To be accurate, Aristotle says a “wise man” (sophos) not “philosopher.”
Aristotle notes that the Spartans are self-deprecating in a way that, paradoxically, turns out to be boastful;
perhaps this too is a danger for students of philosophy (e.g., Diogenes).
38 Here, too, Aristotle says that the virtue does not have a name, although, unlike in the earlier cases, he refers to
the virtue by the name he has given it (“gentleness”) from the beginning of his discussion of it (4.5.1125b26).
37
17
�around him,39 but in a way that is dispassionate rather than sentimental. He becomes angry
when there is cause, for someone who never becomes angry, who is not ready to defend
himself, is base or vile (4.5.1126a6).40 Gentleness is thus a virtue fitting for a free and equal
citizen; the ruler, by contrast, is likely to err a little on the side of too much anger; such rulers,
Aristotle says, are called “manly” (andrôdeis; 4.5.1126b2). The insertion of gentleness lowers
the pitch of the analysis from the great-souled man back to the liberal one, a free person, which
is where Book 4 began. Gentleness also seems to establish the dispassionate environment
where the good friend and the truthteller engage in commerce and conversation.41
The virtues of action and speech are concluded with wit. Wit discovers a “harmonious
way of associating with people—[the] sorts of things one ought to say, and a way of saying
them,” as well as the way of hearing them.42 Often jokers—buffoons—are called “witty,” but
true wit is distinguished by the addition of tact. The buffoon, over eager for a laugh, is oblivious
to the shame or pain caused by his jest; he resembles the contentious person, who, insensible
to the offense he gives, indulges in raillery and vilification. By contrast, the genuinely witty
person will say and give ear to those things fitting for a “free and good person” (eleutherios and
epieikes).43 Wit accompanied by tact distinguishes the free person from the base, the educated
from the ignorant. Others readers have pointed out that, Aristotle, making a pun, derives the
word “witty” from a word meaning “full of ‘good turns’ or ‘versatile’.”44 Wit puts on display the
graceful movements of character, just as athletics or dance displays the movements of the
body. The playful, well-turned phrase lands on what is base but does not dwell there; it drives
39
Apt to forgive is suggnomonikos; forgiveness is later associated with the minor intellectual virtue of
“consideration” (gnôme, 6.11, see 1143a20). The one who is forgiving is equitable or decent, epieikes. Note the
frequency of epieiekes in these chapters. I refer the reader to an earlier lecture, “Two Good Men in Aristotle’s
Ethics, or Does a Liberal Education Improve One’s Character?” which discusses the differences between two good
men, the virtuous or spoudaios and the decent or epieikes.
40 Aristotle notes that flattery is slavish (4.3.1125a2); it would seem that friendliness, too, befits the free person.
41 The arc of this part of Book 4 is shown by Ronna Burger, Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the "Nicomachean
Ethics" (University of Chicago Press, 2008), pages 87-89. Burger emphasizes the turn away from the noble in the
last several virtues of Book 4 and the appearance of grace in two of those virtues, self-deprecation and wit
(1128a31-32, 1127b22-24).
42 Ethics 4.8.1128a1, Sachs trans.
43 Ethics 4.8.1128a19. Sachs translates eleutherios, “generous,” pointing back to the first virtue in Book 4, liberality;
Rackham translates it a “gentleman,” as a free and liberal man is still a person of some stature.
44 Ethics, 4.8.1128a10. See R. Burger, page 89: witty, eutrapeloi; full of “good turns,” eutropoi. Bartlett and Collins
suggest “versatile.”
18
�one’s thinking beneath the surface. Wit is frank and open in its own way; it gives voice to things
we would normally be ashamed to say, but it does so with a grace and playfulness distinct from
the frank speech of the great man. In sum, the last four virtues of Book IV collectively transform
the free and frank speech of the great-souled man into something more gentle, nimble,
occasionally vulgar, but nevertheless truthful and revealing.
I would not want to exaggerate the effects of these virtues—we are loitering among the
last of the ethical virtues. We have probably observed or read novels of refined society that is
gentle, witty, and friendly in its conversation, without being illuminating or penetrating. These
virtues seem to establish the conversational milieu in which several intellectual virtues could be
developed, but naturally without guaranteeing their attainment. I have approached this
question from the point of view our attitude or stance entering a conversation, but in
retrospect it may have been wiser to ask what sort of demands participation in an illuminating,
penetrating conversation makes on us. What is required of us if our end is a shared logos that is
open and rigorous? Through my title I meant to consider truthfulness and friendliness (and
toleration as well) as “conversational virtues,” a term we loosely use now and again, but the
phrase “conversational virtues” refers equally or more often to strictly dialectical capacities
that are also required for penetrating discussions.
Finally, I would not want to assume the attainment of even these virtues: for all ethical
virtues, it is all-too-easy to get it wrong, to miss the mark going too far, or falling short. It is easy
to miss the mark, without knowing it: making a joke, I could be much pleased with my wit, only,
without knowing it, to have played the buffoon, and everyone in earshot too polite to say so.
And even when we hit the mean, we may not recognize it—one could respond to an affront
with just the right measure of anger, and nevertheless feel convinced that one has been too
irascible, or too gentle. Still worse, it does not help that several of these virtues do not even
have names—they may be too obscure to give us a clear target to aim at.45 It is quite hard to be
courageous in fact, but the nobility of courage is somehow vivid in our imagination, calling us to
it. The unnamed virtues lack this nobility, and they lack the same clarity in our imagination. The
tenor of Aristotle’s description is analytical rather than exhortative. The account reveals the
45
Again, R. Burger, page 89.
19
�parameters within which we inevitably act and speak, the structure inherent in the various
ways we go wrong. In speaking quite frankly, am I being unpleasant or offending my listener, or
growing too contentious, or making a fool of myself? Or being truthful? If I hold back, if I am
more guarded or self-deprecating, am I being too pliable, or flattering, or morose? Sometimes
we get it wrong, but if our conversation partner is gentle, we may at least expect to be forgiven.
Parrhesia is mentioned at least one more time in the Ethics, much later, in the
discussion of friendship. I have been discussing virtues, of course, and Aristotle clearly
distinguishes the virtue of “being friendly” from the reality of friendship. Someone can be
‘friendly’ to anyone; the friendly person gives pleasure and pain in due measure to all comers,
correctly gaging whether the other is familiar or a stranger, high or low in station. He acts
“friendly” not from the warmth of passion, but simply on the basis of his character. By contrast,
friendship is shared between two or more persons; each must hold the other in some regard
and must feel something for the other (4.6.1126b23). Those who are friendly with one another
might well become friends, even if just friends of utility or pleasure. Much later, in the
discussion of friendship proper, Aristotle considers unequal friendships and equal ones, for
example, what one owes a parent or an elder, as opposed to a brother: “we should pay to all
our [elders] the honor due to their age, by rising when they enter, offering them a seat, and so
on. Towards comrades and brothers on the other hand, we should use frankness of speech and
share all our possessions with them” (1165a30, emphasis added). The frank speech of the greatsouled man, who looks down on others, is eventually displaced by the frank speech of
comrades in friendship. This last kind of free speech, among friends, is what we wish for most
of all, although it will suffice, I hope, to avoid the vices of contentiousness and flattery, and to
practice toleration, however indeterminate its limits and grounds.
20
�
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Speaking Freely and the Conversational Virtue
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 23, 2019 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
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Annapolis, MD
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2019-08-23
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Toleration
Locke, John, 1632-1704. Epistola de tolerantia.
Aristotle. Nicomachean ethics
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Macfarland_Joseph_2019-08-23_Typescript
Christopher B. Nelson Lecture
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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Text
Our Polity
A lecture given at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
Joseph C. Macfarland
August 28, 2020
It customary for the dean’s lecture to do two things: to reflect on our common education, but,
more than this, to do so in a way that aims to exemplify the kind of learning that we undertake
in common, to deepen our understanding of some book or question. The longer I serve as dean,
the less time I find for such learning. So tonight’s lecture will not explore any particular book or
speculative question; instead, I mean to reflect on the nature of our small community, drawing
a little too easily from books we read in common, from many of my colleagues writings (past
and present), and from the ways we sometimes talk about our community, especially in
imaginative terms.
My talk has three parts:
1. Our polity
2. Liberal arts, and
3. The citiless
The first part: Our Polity
In speaking about our community we refer to the “polity.” There is a written document which
defines the parts of our community, its officers and directors, and their powers and
responsibilities; the document is called the “Polity.” But more casually we use the word to refer
to the community as presently embodied, the human beings who collectively make it up.
Parallel to this, a part of our community, the largest part, the student body, has their own
governing document; this is called “the Student Polity,” often “the Polity” for short, and in this
context, the body of all students is sometimes called “the polity.”1
There is a similar ambiguity at the origin of the word, “university.” When the first universities
came into being, the Latin word, universitas, referred to a number of persons joined in any kind
of association, for example, a “university” of barbers or a “university” of carpenters (Haskins,
9). In the middle ages, the students of Bologna, Italy, formed a student union, and in doing so
they coined the word, more or less as we now use it. They formed a union in order to gain
leverage in negotiating the terms of their residence in the city, and the responsibilities of the
1
The student polity is provided for in an article of the Polity per se.
1
�faculty in teaching them. The first “university,” as a student union, excluded faculty; conversely,
the first so-called “university” in Paris was a union of teachers, and excluded students.2
Our union of faculty, students, and staff, is not a “university,” [not a union], but a “polity.” St.
John’s has a charter that goes back to 1784, but it was in the early 1940’s, in the first decade of
the New Program, that a committee of tutors, consulting with the entire faculty, drafted the
first “Polity” as a supplement to the charter (JW Smith 48). The inaugural president,
Stringfellow Barr, asked the faculty, “to investigate thoroughly the type of polity that… would
be appropriately adapted to and coordinated with the aims of the program” (emphasis added).
I wonder if there is any other college in America—or the world—that sought to discover the
correct type of polity to serve its educational ends, or that continues to refer to itself in this
way? As most of you know, the word “polity” is a transliteration—via Latin—of the Greek word
politeia. And politeia is derived from the word polis, or city, a complete, self-sufficient political
community. For Aristotle, at least, the polis exists by nature and, like everything that exists by
nature, it has material and a form. The material of the city is the population, especially the
citizens. Citizens come to be and pass away, immigrate and emigrate, so that the whole
population, the material, is continually flowing. Yet through all this, the city, the polis, somehow
remains the same as itself (Politics 1276b12): it must therefore have a form separate from the
material. The word for the form of the polis is politeia: this is its enduring structure or
arrangement (taxis), a kind of fundamental law (1274b39; 1326a30). Cities come in many
forms, and there are different types of polity: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, and so on, and
mixed forms as well. Thus, Barr’s question to the faculty: which type of polity is adapted to the
aims of our education?3
Of course, there is an element of foolish affectation in our common use of anglicized Greek
words like this—entirely fitting for a college located in “Annapolis.” 4 If we speak with precision,
the college is not a city; it is not a complete and independent community; it relies in infinite
ways on the political communities within which it is situated; so we cannot have a “polity.” It’s
a metaphor. Someone wishing to speak with precision might say that the college is a not-forprofit business in the service sector. The central function is an exchange of goods: the student
tenders payment for instruction, and instruction concludes with a recognized, valuable
credential. The relationship lasts as long as the terms of the exchange are met: faculty and staff
2
Haskins, 18. The “college” (collegium) was originally a hospice or residence hall.
Of course, one of the six forms of polity is called, simply, a “polity,” and it is a mixed form, a blend of democracy
and oligarchy.
4 Coincidentally, Francis Nicholson, the colonial official who seems to have given the name “Annapolis” to “Anne
Arundel’s Town,” also founded the King William School, predecessor to St. John’s (Murphy, 3, McWilliams, 18-21).
3
2
�are obliged to perform services faithfully, to deliver the product; students are obliged to meet
the conditions necessary to be awarded the degree. As a friendship based on utility, it is only as
durable as the exchange. In referring to the college as a polity, we signal that our community is
not defined by or limited to the activity of exchange. Aristotle says the city is distinguished from
a business in that it nourishes a stronger kind of friendship, one that aims at living well, that
might aim at human excellence (1280b5-1281a8). So there is some truth in our metaphorical
claim to be a polity.
In other ways, too, from the beginning St. John’s has imitated the well-arranged polis. Forgive
me if I take time to say things apparent to many, but it is, I think, an opportune time to repeat
them. The polis is small by nature (1325b33ff.): the good administration of a city requires that
the citizens be acquainted with one another, that they know one’s another’s character
(1326b15); this cannot happen when there are too many. In fact, too large a city cannot be
well-ordered, cannot have good laws, cannot be a polis at all (1326a25). Moreover, there is
greater beauty in what is measured. If the population grows too great, the appropriate remedy
is to send out a colony, to send out citizens who will form their own their own polis, a new
independent entity, with its own form and material, sometimes even destined to eclipse its
parent in beauty or greatness, as Syracuse eclipsed Corinth. And so also the college, smaller
than it is now and wishing to be no larger, established a second campus with the expectation
that more would follow.
Another sign of the best-formed polity is that it attends to the education of everyone on a
common plan (1337a30). In Sparta, famously, all citizens enjoyed the same education; they
shared hardships and trials of all kinds, and meals and conversations as well, aimed at
developing self-control and excellence in war. The end sought was not high, but the fact that
the education was elaborately contrived and common in character distinguished the city from
all others. St. John’s is perhaps most distinctive for its education being in common. Its original
raison d’être was the rejection of the elective system: no electives, no departments, no majors.
In the university, by contrast students differentiate themselves by their major, and within their
majors, by their subfields, and by their electives as well—they project and confirm their
individuality by these choices. Their education is á la carte: everyone sees, discusses, and has a
taste of what others at the table are having. In our small polity, the education is common to
students and tutors alike—despite our widely ranging interests and abilities, we share the same
trials and rewards. There is no one among us with whom you cannot talk about what you are
studying and what you are thinking. The commonness of the enterprise compresses or erases
hierarchical distinctions—there are no ranks in the faculty; and each tutor and student
addresses all others as equals, for in the classroom, “reason is the only recognized authority”
(Statement of the St. John’s Program), and each one of us needs others for our own learning.
3
�The commonness of the education enables the members of the polity to become friends, albeit
in varying degrees. Each achieves some understanding of himself by being reflected in a friend;
this mutual recognition is realized through shared activities of all kinds, high and low: athletics,
dance, singing, or philosophizing (cf. Ethics 1172a3).
The city is by nature, and human beings are political animals by nature, because they possess
speech, logos: our sounds express not merely pleasure and pain, but the beneficial and harmful,
just and unjust, good and bad (Politics 1253a10ff). More than any concrete, true polity, ours is
constituted by this shared logos; it is our principal work. We discuss the pleasurable and the
painful, just and unjust, good and the bad, but for the most part not in the way that citizens talk
about these things. For our principal work is not the rectification of injustice, or the acquisition
of goods, but investigation and understanding of these things. Certainly, as friends of a kind, we
do not tolerate injustice among ourselves, but when we are focused on the execution of justice
rather than its form or idea, we have descended from the higher purpose of our logos in order
to attend to its low but necessary conditions. For our polity, like the city, is grounded on
exercising the human capacity for logos, but about the pleasurable and painful, or the just and
unjust, mostly as they are related to the true and the false [the pair not present in Aristotle’s
list of four, given above].
Finally, the college may resemble a finely-formed ancient polity in being largely indifferent to
the arts and technology, focusing rather on the development of character and abilities. The arts
and technology are always pushing forward, the new cleverly superseding the old, whereas the
laws of a polity, especially the unwritten laws and practices, gain strength with time and are
weakened by change (1269a20). The advance of the arts can bring wealth, but the best city
aims at wealth only as condition for the development of character and mind (1323a39).
Aristotle notes that the pursuit of wealth is often achieved through trade by sea, but with
wealth thus subordinated, the best city stands only close enough to the sea to allow some
trade, but far enough from the sea to deter the citizens from becoming mariners.5
Part Two: Liberal Arts
We sometimes say we study the “liberal arts” or practice “liberal education.” I will not concern
myself with whether “arts” or “education” is the appropriate noun—although it is a good
5
Politics 1327b8. In the best practicable government, the “polity” in the narrow sense, the citizens are largely
farmers (compare 1292b25 with 1298b34). The city in isolation can be happy if it is well-governed (1325a1).
4
�question—I will muse instead on connotations of the adjective, “liberal.”6 One of the first
notable appearances of the phrase, “liberal arts,” is in the works of Cicero, and the root of the
Latin word for “liberal,” liber, is familiar even to us Johnnies from our punning Latin motto,
Facio liberos, et cetera.7 Something is liberal when it is free, or befitting a free-born person. In a
classical polity, free-birth is the lowest and broadest criterion for citizenship; it is the criterion
for citizenship used in a democracy, the rule of the multitude, the rule of the poor. To be “free”
means to be a citizen, to have a share in the polity, not to be ruled tyrannically or
monarchically.8
A liberal art or discipline prepares the citizen for participation in the polity; in the best polities,
education aims at a good life or some human excellence (Pol. 1337a34ff.). A good education
includes arts that are necessary and useful, such as grammar, arithmetic, or gymnastic, but only
if they are not pursued so far that the mind or body becomes impaired or less disposed to
virtue. No art should be pursued to the point that it makes the student less free, more servile.
In this context, opposite of “liberal” or “free” is “base” or “vulgar” (banausos). Cicero
distinguishes the “liberal” arts or trades from “base” ones (sordidus): the base trades include
manual labor, retail, and services providing pleasure [e.g., dance]; those trades requiring
serious thought (prudentia) are liberal, such as medicine, architecture, teaching, and farming. 9
These quasi-aristocratic connotations linger in the English word “liberality,” the virtue
characteristic of a free person. The liberal person may not be wealthy, but he is at least free
from material necessity; he has the capacity to make gifts in a fitting and beautiful way.10 In a
classical polity, to be free, to be a citizen, while broadly shared, is still a mark of distinction, it
separates the free citizens from non-citizens, from slaves or resident aliens. Freedom does not
imply universal equality, but often entails some degree of elevation. It is not uncommon, of
course, for free citizens to elevate themselves precisely by denying this freedom to others: as
the notable freedom of the Spartans was contingent upon on the slavery of the Helots.11
6
See the fine 2015 lecture by Dan Harrel, “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art.” My own quick sketch: liberal arts are part
of a classical and medieval heritage; liberal education is a modern formulation, and can imply an aversion to the
traditional list of arts. Even Dante, to the seven arts, added physics, metaphysics, and ethics (cf. Convivio).
Furthermore, arts implies that we acquire skills and competencies, and that there are disciplines that we come to
know or master. Education appears to be a way to renounce this focus on skills and competencies in favor of
metastrophic recognition, coming to know that we don’t know.
7 Prior to Cicero, Aristotle refers to the liberal sciences (eluetherai epistemai; Politics 1337b15). It is hard to say
that the phrase or notion has a chronological origin.
8 Cite the Politics on the criterion of citizenship in a democracy; check Cicero, De republica 1.32.48 (cited by Lewis
and Short).
9 De Officiis 1.41.150ff. Compare Politics 1337b4ff.
10 Politics 1338a32: there is a sort of education pursued not as “necessary or useful,” but “liberal and noble”; at
1338b3, “great-souled and free.”
11 Compare Machiavelli’s characterization of stance of the Roman people to those whom they conquered
(Discourses, Book 2), or Montesquieu’s Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans.
5
�If it is base for liberal education to be too deeply engaged in the useful or necessary
occupations, it seems to follow that whatever serious disciplines are not in the least necessary
nor useful, and do not serve external ends, but are pursued only for their own sakes, would be
the most free or liberal. Here, of course, the freedom of the liberal art depends less on the
status of the human being who pursues it, and more on the inner character of the art itself.
According to Aristotle, nature seeks not only that we labor (askolein) as we should, but, when
not working, that we use leisure well (1337b30; cf. Klein 165). Insofar as a virtuous action is
done for its own sake, insofar as it attains beauty, liberal education may aim at it. But the
courageous act, even if beautiful in itself, is generally also useful to the city, sometimes
indispensable. The education of the free develops not only one’s character but one’s mind
(1337a38-42), and the activities of the mind, inasmuch as they are for the sake of themselves,
are more free. Geometry and astronomy are liberal arts because they culminate in free
contemplation. In late antiquity, when the liberal arts came to be defined as exactly seven in
number, architecture and medicine were excluded from the list for dealing with mundane
rather than celestial matters.12
The liberal arts under this second understanding pull away from the city and the citizen, away
from the community of the free. Political freedom may be a condition for liberal learning—in
order to study well one needs some leisure—but the liberal arts in this mode do not
reciprocally serve or augment that political freedom. One can certainly imagine a city where the
entire education is designed to foster the very highest activities of the mind—I mean Kallipolis,
of Plato’s Republic—but this effort results in a highly stratified society, a city with very few free
persons in it.13
The “liberal” in “liberal arts” skews in one way to the city—to the community of free persons—
and in another way outside or beyond the city, to the celestial, to speak metaphorically. The
opposing movements are still evident in the way we speak about liberal education today,
although transformed in important ways.
12
Martianus Capella, 346. Cicero’s De oratore is cited as one of the first appearances of the phrase, “liberal arts,”
has artes quibus liberales doctrinae atque ingenuae continerentur (3.32.127). In this dialogue, an interlocutor
points out the incompatibility between having the leisure to pursue these arts, and the employment of rhetoric
amid political responsibilities (3.32.131).
13 And in this city, those who engage in the highest or freest activity, are the least free, being compelled to rule.
Klein: “It is important to see that there is a definite tension between the exigencies of political life and the selfsustained goal of liberal education. This tension is very great” (169). The death of Archimedes makes us see, “the
ultimate incommensurability between this kind of searching and questioning, the basis of all liberal learning, and
the implacable conditions of our existence” (170).
6
�The founders of the New Program were not shy about affirming the importance of liberal
education for citizenship in a democratic republic. On the eve of U.S. intervention in World War
II, Stringfellow Barr wrote that, “colleges like St. John’s,” were established to teach students,
“to practice the liberal arts, to use their intellects, to reflect, to make choices, in order that a
free society might be able to govern itself wisely, freely, and justly, and not fall prey to a
government by force” (Report of the President, May 1941). Self-governance as a nation stands
on the self-governance of the individual, and education in the liberal arts strengthens and
disciplines the powers by which young people come govern themselves.14
This connection between liberal education and free government comes without the ancient,
quasi-aristocratic distinction between the free and the unfree, between the liberal and the
base. According to Scott Buchanan, writing in 1945, in a democratic republic, there is no
division of labor between “higher functions” and lower: “it is an integral part of the American
dream that each man in our society may and must perform the highest functions. These
functions consist in the intelligent free choice of the ends and means of both our common and
individual life. This is a most glorious and most difficult proposition to which we are dedicated.
Among other things it means that each man must have his measure of liberal education…”
(Catalogue 1945).15
I am not the first to note that Barr and Buchanan connect liberal education to free citizenship
more closely than is now common for us.16 They echo the ancients, that education prepares
adults to act virtuously as free citizens—as our motto asserts—but education here does this not
by directly shaping the character of citizens, but by cultivating intellectual freedom. Education
challenges and sharpens the mind, and insofar as the mind is strengthened and disciplined, it
supplies the means by which the individual citizen may choose to act well.17 A liberal arts
14
“We live and enjoy liberty that we may pursue happiness, and the man who penned this triune phrase was
perfectly aware of where that happiness law: in the fullest possible development, and use, of man’s most human
powers, the powers of the intellect.” Cf. Buchanan, “Liberal Education and Politics” (1944): “For various reasons
the European citizen of the republic of learning would not have said that liberal education is for everybody. That is
the great revolutionary American contribution to our knowledge of what the liberal arts are….”
15 Buchanan: “Inner freedom or human liberty is indicated, not primarily civil liberties and economic freedom
about which modern liberalism is concerned. But as all the founding fathers of our institutions have insisted, inner
liberal education is a vital necessity if free men are to maintain and protect their external liberties in a democratic
state” (“In Search of a Liberal College,” 1937, 4.1).
16 Recent versions of the Statement of the Program have tended to be more modest about the connection
between liberal education and democratic citizenship, emphasizing the intervening steps between developing
powers and exercising them in citizenship. The direct work of the college is the “pursuit of fundamental
knowledge,” which entails “awareness” of “social and moral obligations,” and incidentally confers “the means and
will” to become a “free citizen.”
17 “The aim of the liberal arts is the inner freedom that comes from knowledge of the truth, a freedom to match
and justify the freedom that we liberals seek in the outer world” (“In Search of a Liberal College,” 1937, 3.19).
7
�college supports free government only through the medium of its students, and through their
sustained intellectual development.
This emphasis on freedom through intellectual development marks, I believe, a notion of what
it means for an education to be “liberal” that is more at home in a modern democratic republic
than a classical polis. Civil government is now instituted for the purpose of preserving freedoms
enjoyed by its citizens: freedom of speech, of assembly, and of worship. The responsibilities and
powers of civil government are circumscribed: government seeks the safety of the state, and
the security of its citizens and their property; the force of government has no effect on the
minds of citizens; its laws do not touch upon the truth or falsity of opinion; limited government
carves out a free domain for religion and, in doing so, for speculative thinking as well.18
Education at St. John’s may be called “liberal” most of all on account of this intellectual
freedom, one fostered within a modern democratic republic. As is said in the Statement of the
Program, there are only two rules in class: “all opinions must be heard and explored, however
sharply they may clash; [and], every opinion must be supported by argument.” As participants
in the discussion, we are constrained to give reasons for our opinions, and we are constrained
as well by the necessities we encounter within the logos itself, but as the questions we ask
nevertheless often remain open—better defined in the wake of our analysis—we are each free
to pour over the contours of the arguments again privately, to draw our own conclusions, and
to live accordingly.
Our democratic republic provides the conditions for this exercise of intellectual freedom, but, if
Barr and Buchanan are right, our exercise of this intellectual freedom, in turn, serves the
preservation of the republic. Yet despite this reciprocal relationship, the fact that this freedom
is internal, that it has its roots in our hearts and minds, means that the cooperative exercise of
such freedom requires a large measure of detachment from the wider, fortuitous political
circumstances which foster it.
A liberal education eschews utility and specialization; it assumes a detachment from the
constructed world and contemporary polemics. Our direct task is studying and discussing books
that raise persistent questions about the greatest themes in human experience, books that
have stood the test of time and have elicited various alternative, coherent interpretations.19 It
18
Locke in the Letter Concerning Toleration: “It is light that is needed to change a belief in the mind; punishment of
the body does not lend light” (8). Note Buchanan: “The individual citizen of this secular republic, as pupil, teacher,
or official, as well as the universities and schools, enjoyed this same liberties and immunities from the political
state that the church enjoyed. Freedom of thought and freedom of religion have this common history” (“Liberal
Education and Politics,” 397, in 1944).
19 Cf. J. Winfree Smith, 24; Buchanan, 1945 Catalogue.
8
�takes a sustained effort to read such books well, and through this effort to grasp the arguments,
to be transported in thought, to pose these questions for ourselves, and to pursue them
wherever they lead. Such questions shake our assumptions and cause us to see what is familiar
and gaze upon it now, as if, for the first time; we become detached, disoriented, turned around
(Klein 162). The experience of detachment is the cost of thinking deeply and well.
Penetrating inquiry requires the greatest freedom from contemporary common opinions; they
require that one not just “entertain,” but hear and methodically think through seeming
nonsense and heresies. To comprehend what a number is, one has to take seriously the
thought that the square-root-of-two is not a number, or that one is not a number; or to think
clearly about the cosmos, one has to take seriously the thought, confirmed, after all, by all the
appearances, that the ground beneath my feet is motionless. And it is no different in the
religion, ethics, or politics: to think thorough what justice is, one has to take seriously the
argument that the best regime is the kingship of the wise and the subjection of the unwise. It is
natural to feel a rush of derision, as you read how the heavens revolve about the earth, or to
feel a shudder at the argument that inequality is natural. If, despite your prior opinions, you felt
nothing as you contemplated these jarring thoughts, you would not be taking them seriously;
following the argument would be reduced to a verbal game of maneuver. But we also suspend
these felt responses, lest they prematurely tether our thinking.
Is freedom simply the end? Perhaps not. We are also lovers of wisdom—let it be very briefly
supposed that, if wisdom were achieved, and opinion were replaced by knowledge, then
everything one thinks would be constrained by necessity, and freedom might be reduced to
actively thinking what is true. But as lovers of wisdom, and so lacking it, the range and nature of
freedom itself remains one of our persisting questions, and provisionally, at least, a more ample
notion of freedom is sufficient to animate our community.
As a tiny community of learning, we embrace the ethos of a Greek polity: small, intimate,
sharing a way of life with long established, unwritten laws, nourishing a kind of friendship, and
ambitiously aimed at human excellence. But this tiny community is not a city in fact. We
embrace the shared ethos of a Greek polity for the sake of an intellectual freedom that was
unknown to those polities, one native to our present democratic republic. We speak with one
another frankly, freely, for the sake of following the argument wherever it leads—as modern
free thinkers—but, as citizens of our tiny polity, we do so as friends, tactfully, generously,
gently, neither expressing nor provoking anger.20 We suspend—or at least mute—our private
religious and political commitments, in order to take our place in a community whose activity
20
Drawing on my lecture from 2019, “Speaking Freely and the Conversational Virtues.”
9
�and end is conversation that questions, challenges, and deepens those individual thoughts and
commitments.
Part Three: Citiless
A “campus” is a field. For centuries, colleges were not campuses, not fields, but walled cloisters.
Students were kept in; the public was kept out (Delbanco, 38). Students were sequestered for
the quiet, long work of study. Extra-curricular activities were intra-mural, literally, “within the
walls.” The oldest continually existing college, the College of Spain (1364), at the oldest
university in Bologna, Italy, was designed as a refuge for international students, the ultramontani. At St. John’s, of course, we have no walls—unlike our neighbors across the street.
Students do, however, often speak of another barrier surrounding us: the “Johnnie Bubble.” It
is transparent, difficult to discern, and so difficult to penetrate; higher than any wall. When I
hear it referred to, it’s with a measure of satire, and a pinch of unease. There’s no gate, no
porter keeping us in, but one may bristle a little at the thought of not being able to get out.
The bubble is an indirect consequence of deliberate choices: we choose to inhabit a small polity
that enables our common way of life, although it can get claustrophobic; and we deliberately
cultivate a degree of detachment from the world of human action. To read long and well is
already to become a little “lost in thought” (cf. Zena Hitz); we lose ourselves in books whose
original era and worldly stance is generally foreign to our own. One in every five St. John’s
students hails from another nation; the nation in which the college is located is not their own;
insofar as we lose ourselves in the books and in the arguments that we spin out of them, we are
all resident aliens, for a time more present to one another and more present to the voices of
our authors than to the active world. For the sake of conversing with one another and with our
distant authors, we are temporary exiles from the public world of political activity; for a time,
we are citiless.
It is this quality of being citiless, detached and immersed in the arguments, that keeps us one
“college” in two disparate locations. Campus cultures and extracurricular activities differ; the
books on the reading lists vary; but in our central work, as liberal artists, we are much the same,
as if the location is not essential. In some degree, the same might be said of all the alumni who,
in their busy lives, continue to put a high value on the reading and thinking they did here and
continue to do. Detached from the world, searching in thought for what endures, the cloistered
10
�becomes somewhat other-worldly, so that while the cloister contracts one’s community
materially, it surprisingly also expands it.21
At the college we have actively cultivated this detachment. Decades ago, according to lore, the
faculty discussed whether it was wise for the coffee shop to have a newspaper box. It sounds
comical now that each of us carries in our pockets more news than we can read. The intention
was serious: could heightened concern for the news of the day, the active world, distract us
from our shared work, the study of venerable books and persisting questions? The skirmish was
reignited about a decade ago, as inevitably happens, when considering whether wifi should be
installed around campus: by limiting wireless connectivity, many tutors sought to make it easier
for us put away our devices and converse, face-to-face, in person, over a book. The skirmish
was won, but the war was not, as the Johnnie Bubble does not repel electromagnetic waves.
A bubble, of course, is fragile; it can vanish in a moment. But we would not, on the other hand,
wish the barrier to be too sturdy: a bubble may serve us better than a wall. As the Statement of
the Program says, the books, “illuminate the persisting questions of human existence and…
bear directly on the problems we face today.”22 We would not devote the time and effort to
reading the books if they did not provoke and deepen our thinking about our present lives.23 If
our shared conversations were perfectly separated from our private, lived concerns, it would
imply an analogous complete separation of theoretical and practical wisdom. It would imply
that the question, what can I know?, is entirely separate from, what must I do? It is difficult to
reach clarity about exactly how much detachment is salutary for our inquiries because the
relationship between theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom is itself one of the persisting
questions that occupy us. It would be destructive of our inquiries to assume that “every frame
of thought is an ideology,” that every speculative question is nothing but a practical question in
disguise.24 But neither would we want to erase the practical import of our speculative
inquiries—we hold it in abeyance, rather, to preserve the freedom and the rigor of our
thinking—and then let it back in, when we are better informed. As conversation partners, we
live as if citiless, as if aliens, for so long as necessary to think well and follow the argument
freely.
21
I have in mind Arendt, The Human Condition 2.7.53.
The Statement continues: “They express most originally, and often most perfectly, the ideas by which
contemporary life is knowingly or unknowingly governed. Their authors can speak to us almost as freshly as when
they spoke for the first time, for what they have to tell us is not of merely academic concern, nor is it remote from
our true interests.”
23 The books “change our minds, move our hearts, and touch our spirits.”
24 Eva Brann: “It is the fashion now to claim that all is politics, and that every frame of thought is an ideology. From
this claim it follows that theory and practice are nearly indistinguishable, since every theoretical proposition is also
a political ploy.”
22
11
�This is all less dramatic than I make it sound. True, if humans were political by nature, then
someone without a city would not be human at all, he would be beneath politics or above it, a
beast or god (1253a25). But I have argued that the college has its fitting home in a democratic
republic, in which the scope of government is fundamentally limited. And as it carves out a
domain of freedom for its inhabitants, we are assured a limited domain within which we can be
citiless.25
There is a second way in which we are now citiless, by which I mean, of course, that I am here,
alone, in the King William Room, and you are watching me from your home. Just as formerly St.
John’s-Annapolis and St. John’s-Santa Fe formed a single college, now all of us Annapolitans,
still much more dispersed are trying similarly to remain one college. When the lecture ends
(soon), we will not mingle, shoulder-to-shoulder in the FSK Lobby, a cup of coffee in hand, and
gossip about last night’s seminar, or the lecture, or incidental pastimes, as the buzz of mingled
voices in the background reminds us that we are citizens of an incessantly talking polity.
Instead, you will close the browser window, the same way you exit Facebook or Netflix.
While we have always detached ourselves from the world in order to engage in serious study
and conversation, this detachment did not mean removing ourselves to ours homes, the private
place where we provide for and satisfy bodily necessities. As members of the college, our
detachment used to mean retiring to our metaphorical polity, where our lives remain public,
where we venture our thoughts and questions in one another’s presence, to be heard and
responded to. Instead, most of us are now “working from home,” trying to carry on our public
lives from a private place, which does not serve either very well. You appreciated the irony of
the story of the faculty discussion about whether to install wifi on campus: not a decade after
worrying about whether it would too easy to lose oneself in a screen, we have been furiously
upgrading the wifi and making infinite other technological preparations—never quite
adequate—so that we can converse only through screens.
Early in the summer, a colleague drew an analogy between the predicament of the college
in the face of the pandemic, and Athens before the onslaught of the Persians. The analogy
was hyperbole, of course, but instructive, and a hyperbole I will embrace for this reason.
The course he recommended was the course we only belatedly followed: that we abandon
the city and take to the ships; that we rebuild our city when the perilous threat has
25
If the modern democratic republic is originally designed to tolerate multiple religions, then each person is
permitted to be both a citizen of the republic and a citizen of the city of God, in whatever form of it he believes in.
Religious toleration creates the conditions for multiple, coexisting, extra-political societies; those societies may be
essential to the well-being of the republic.
12
�receded; that “we are Athens, wherever we are, in the Agora, on our ships, or on Zoom.”
The decision was a vexed one; in retrospect, the counsel seems wise.
When the Athenians had fled Athens and yielded the sacred ground to the Persians—the
Acropolis in flames—the Athenian general Themistocles sought to persuade the other
Greeks—Spartans and Corinthians—to keep their ships nearby, so that they could fight the
Persians at sea. A Corinthian responded that Themistocles was a “citiless man,” aner apolis,
and so he had no right to speak: losing one’s city means losing one’s voice in counsel.26
Themistocles’ famous reply: “True, wretch, we have left behind our houses and our city
walls, for it is not worth being enslaved for the sake of lifeless things, but we still have a
city, the greatest in Hellas, our two hundred triremes.”27 At first Themistocles appears to
say that the Athenians in their ships, without fixed harbor or home, alone constitute the
city—he does subsequently relax the claim to say that, by means of such a navy, they can
conquer or establish a new fixed home. So, at St. John’s we, too, have taken to the ships—
to Zoom and YouTube—and even here, if we read long and well, ask questions freely, and
publicly venture our thoughts before the faces of our friends, we can continue to do our
distinctive work, continue to be the finest college of liberal learning.
There is another side to the story, however: as Plato and Plutarch observed later, taking to
the ships transformed Athenian political culture. Themistocles turned the Athenians from
typical “steadfast hoplites” into “sea-tossed mariners,” from honorable warriors and farmers
into lowly rowers.28 A change in the dominant technology accelerated changes in the character
of the people. The qualities required for success shifted from steadiness and courage to
quickness, cleverness, and duplicitous maneuver. Recall Artemisia at the battle, an Ionian
fighting with the Persians: when pursued by the Athenians, she had her ship ram an allied
Persian ship, in order to deceive the pursuing Athenians into thinking she was on their side. And
prior to the battle, the very mobility of the fleet, floating on the water, gave each of the Greek
admirals a strong incentive to stealthily withdraw rather than engage, to seek safety rather
than risk an outcome here and now.
Themistocles’ wisdom liberated Athens, indeed, liberated all Greece. But by means of this
newly-recognized power, he contrived not merely to free Athens from the Persians, but to erect
26
Herodotus 8.61, cf. 7.104 (about Demaratus, a Spartan exile). Citiless is clearly an insult here. Compare Politics
1253a3.
27 Plutarch, trans. Perrin, 35; trans. slightly modified.
28 Plutarch, 13, explicitly citing Plato’s Laws. To be fair, Athens as a city of merchants and mariners is evident
already in the social strife described in Plutarch’s life of Solon: perhaps Themistocles (and the Persians) only
accelerated Athens’ development.
13
�a new empire over others, Persians and Greeks (Plutarch 55-57). Taking to the ships opened up
new avenues for Athenian ambition, and ultimately stimulated an unsustainable longing for far
off places. Themistocles himself was pulled back from his ambitious design by more measured
comrades, yet nevertheless his design forecast the future of the city, for better and for worse.
At the critical moment, it is true that the Athenians took to their ships and abandoned their
city-walls and their temples, but they did not go far, a few miles only to Salamis and then, in the
straights of Salamis, even upon the yielding water, they “stood their ground” behind a wall of
wood, in order to reclaim their polis—citiless no more.29
29
Themistocles urges Eurybiades to stand his ground (Herodotus 8.62); Themistocles tells Aristides that the Greeks
(in their ships) were unwilling to stand and fight (8.80), so they had to be compelled to do so, by inducing the
Persians to enclose their position. Of course, Aristides, exemplary for his moderation, and no mariner, joined the
clash of fleets by standing his ground on a small island in the middle of the battle (8.95).
14
�Sources referenced
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Aristotle. The Politics. Tran. H. Rackam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932, 1990.
Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Tran. H. Rackam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1926, 1982.
Brann, Eva. “A Manifesto for Liberal Education.” The Imaginative Conservative (online). March
27, 2015.
Buchanan, Scott M. “In search of a liberal college : A program for the recovery of the classics
and the liberal arts” [manuscript]. 1937.
Buchanan, Scott M. “Liberal Education and Politics.” American Scholar (1944): 396-398.
Cicero. De Officiis. Trans. Walter Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913, 1997.
Cicero. De Oratore. Trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1942.
Delbanco, Andrew. College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Harrell, Daniel. “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art.” SJC Digital Archives, given July 8, 2015.
Haskins, Charles Homer. The Rise of the Universities. New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1923;
Cornell University Press, 1957.
Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. David Grene. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Klein, Jacob. Lectures and Essays. Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College Press, 1985.
Locke, John. Locke on Toleration. Ed. Richard Vernon. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Martianus Capella. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. Trans. William Harris Stahl and
Richard Johnson. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
McWilliams, Jane Wilson. Annapolis, city on the Severn: a history. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2011.
Murphy, Emily. “A Complete and Generous Education”: 300 Years of Liberal Arts. Annapolis,
MD: St. John’s College Press, 1996.
15
�Plutarch. Lives: Themistocles and Camillus, etc. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. 1928, 2001.
Smith, J. Winfree. A Search for the Liberal College: The Beginning of the St. John’s Program.
Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1983.
16
�
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Our Polity
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 28, 2020 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
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Macfarland_Joseph_2020-08-28_Typescript
Christopher B. Nelson Lecture
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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The Gate of Speculation, is it Open or Closed? On the Possibility of Permanent Questions
Joseph C. Macfarland
A lecture given at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
August 24, 2018
I offer a sort of opening question in order to spur conversation: is our shared activity of
liberally educating ourselves one of asking and trying to answer permanent questions? What
kind of question is a permanent question, if there is such a thing at all?
Every seminar begins with a question; each night, a different question. Even when a
tutor begins the seminar on reading she has studied and discussed before, perhaps often, she
asks a new question. Sometimes I notice students writing down each opening question in a
small book, keeping a log of the opening questions for every seminar, generally only the
question, 256 unique questions in a row, a Johnnie menagerie. Our questions have variety
without limit.
Often we find ourselves asking a question, knowing that we have asked this question
before, perhaps among different friends, prompted by a different book, framed differently. In
fact, we read and converse on the tacit assumption that this is going to happen. We would not
endeavor to educate ourselves by reading a stack of old books if the questions aroused by them
did not intermittently recur. I return to the Meno because Meno’s question—can virtue be
taught, or does it come by practice, or by nature?—and Socrates’s prior question—what is
virtue anyways?—remain questions for me. I have opinions about the answers, but without
certainty. Or, to take another example: if you observe every facet and phase of Achilles’s anger,
you note its occasion and probe its roots, and you wonder at its dissolution, you learn
something not only about Achilles, but about ourselves; his anger is never duplicated, yet what
we are learning about persists.
In these two examples I effaced the difference between what is explicitly a question—
"can virtue be taught?”—and something that is enigmatic, but not formally a question. Is it
from the books themselves from which we take our activity to be asking questions, or from
another source? We spend six months poring over the details of a book that does not pose a
single question: I mean Euclid’s Elements. The Elements does not even do what many
mathematical works do: frame and solve problems. A problem is literally an obstacle; one seeks
1
�a solution, a way to eliminate the obstacle. A question seeks an answer; the question is not
something that is getting the way, to be dissolved. A question is the way one takes aim at an
indistinct goal, a way of finding a path. We find many satisfying answers in these books, yet
very often an answer is, for us, the occasion for further questions. We most of all dwell on
those questions where the answer is not easy to find; in which case, what we are occupied with
seems to be the question most of all. At the founding of the program, Scott Buchanan wrote a
list of five criteria for a great book. The third is that the book, “raises the persistent
unanswerable questions.”1 What is this “persistent unanswerable question,” present for the
author and present for me?
We try to understand the authors where they are: moment-by-moment our
conversations are immersed in the details of the text, transposing us for a time into the world
the author has opened up for us. When a question is prompted by something we read, we try
as much as possible to answer that question by looking to other passages in the book, to
discover how the book responds to it, to answer it in the expressions given by the book. Thus
displaced from the present, we gain a measure of freedom from contemporary, generallyaccepted opinions. Yet this displacement occurs in both directions—the reason I not only read
the question, but ask it, is because I have something at stake in it. I have opinions about
plausible answers, opinions that may affect how I act in the moment and how I mean to live.
Our interest in the books is not antiquarian—our aim is not to know what Plato thought, as
opposed to Aristotle, or as opposed to what “we” think now. If we let ourselves be transposed
from our familiar environment into the world of the book, we also transpose the questions we
find there back into our own surroundings inasmuch as we expect what we gather there to
improve our thinking, to make us a little wiser here and now.
Aristotle says that human beings are political animals by nature; let us assume that this
statement is questionable, as other program authors question it. On the one hand, I delve into
Aristotle’s books in order to think through whatever he could mean by political, aware that the
meaning could be somewhat specific to the social phenomena he is observing; on the other
1
Winfree Smith, A Search for the Liberal College, St. John’s College Press, 1983, page 24. Smith adds, “He cited
such questions as those about ‘number and measurement, matter and form, ultimate substance, tragedy, and
God’.”
2
�hand, I take an interest in this question on the assumption that there is sufficient congruence in
the political for any answer to have import and value for me no less than for him.
We neither force our authors to inhabit our world, nor do we concern ourselves much
with the historical conditions of theirs. We attend to the books in a way that is open to the
questions that we share, open to what spans the times. We read as if the questions that loom
largest are enduring, perhaps permanent. We labor with these books as if there is an absolute
of some kind toward which (or around which) we navigate in thought, whether it be what-is-bynature, an irrefutable proposition (e.g., Gorgias 473b, Metaphysics 4), an acute insight, or a
persisting question, possibly with equally persisting alternatives [alternative answers].2
In order to think about the form of a permanent question, I thought I would pick a single
question that has been raised by different program authors, and examine their respective
treatments of that question. I will observe the way the question is framed and addressed, in
order to think about what persists across multiple queries. The question I have chosen is—is the
world eternal, or does it have a beginning in time? Taken naively, it seems like a fair choice: as a
question about the world, it seems likely to be less contingent on social or historical
circumstances. As a question about what is eternal, it seems a fitting choice for thinking about
the eternality of the question itself. Of course, beginning from this particular example might
well skew my view of the class, if there is a class.
To pursue this, I am going to talk about two authors who are both wildly inappropriate
for the first lecture of the year: Immanuel Kant, who at this point is known only to seniors, and
Moses Maimonides, known to a still narrower and more select group: Santa Fe transfers. Still
worse, since Maimonides’ treatment of this question does not have the clarity of Kant’s, I will
spend more time with what is less familiar. I hope to sketch their arguments in a way that does
2
My thinking about this question was prompted a long time ago, first, by Strauss’s comments on an “absolute
horizon” for inquiry, a horizon of “fundamental problems” with “fundamental alternatives coeval with human
thought” (Natural Right and History, University of Chicago Press, 1953, page 35), and, later, by Gadamer’s critique
of this idea: “Critiquing the concept of the problem by appealing to a logic of question and answer must destroy
the illusion that problems exist like starts in the sky” (Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall,
Cotinuum, 1998, page 377). I benefitted much from Stewart Umphrey’s analysis of the permanent problem in,
“Natural Right and Philosophy,” in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, eds. K. Deutsch and W.
Nicgorski, Rowman and Littlefield, 1994, pages 275-295, although this lecture does not intersect with the direction
of that inquiry.
3
�not presuppose familiarity. What I have to say about each will seem insufficient to anyone
familiar with either. I trust that, suspended somewhere between the two, I can gain some
access to the question itself.
The persisting question framed as an insoluble problem
This dip into Kant’s thinking will be “quick and dirty,” which is to say, knowingly unKantian. I will leap straight to the middle of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, straight to what he
calls the “antinomies,” without having worked through Kant’s prior explanation of the grounds
of scientific knowledge—we will be having our desert before dinner. I will try to minimize the
jargon, even at the expense of precision.3
In what Kant calls an “antinomy of pure reason,” we find two evidently contradictory
statements juxtaposed: first, the world has a beginning in time and is spatially enclosed within
bounds; second, the world has no beginning and is infinite as regards space and time. Kant
provides a proof for each statement (B454). Each proof is negative; it proceeds by assuming the
opposite statement and then showing the absurdity of that opposite. For example, in order to
prove that the world has a beginning in time, let us assume that it has no beginning. On this
assumption, at each point in time there would have already elapsed an infinite series of
successive states of the world; but an “infinity” is precisely that which cannot be completed
through a synthesis of successive states; an “infinite series of successive states” is a
contradiction. Our assumption, that the world has no beginning in time, is proven false and,
therefore, the opposite is true, the world must have a beginning in time.
There is an analogous proof for the antithesis—the eternity of the world—it, too, is
negative in form and it is equally valid. The fact that the proofs are negative is important: as
Kant says, in “a dialectical combat arena… any party permitted to make the attack keeps the
upper hand” (B450). In this combat, there is no victor.
3
As members of the audience will not have read Kant, and I want the language to be as familiar as possible, I will
speak of “appearances” when the Pluhar translation of Kant says “intuitions,” “knowledge” where the translation
gives “cognition,” and I might say “experience” when I ought to say “possible experience,” etc. (The Critique of
Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar, Hackett, 1996). In addition, as this is a lecture meant to be read aloud, I often
italicize words for emphasis; the emphasis is always mine.
4
�In this metaphysical duel, the thesis and antithesis each has its partisans (B493). That
the world has a beginning in time is a foundation of morality and religion (B494); the thought
that the world suddenly begins is allied with the thought that not everything comes about
according to the laws of nature (B473). Some appearances can be attributed to a freedom
beyond nature, whether human or divine. In other words, that the world should have a
beginning in time is associated with the view that the world itself is a product of the divine will,
in an act beyond the laws of nature. The mere possibility that God freely created the world
underwrites the freedom with which we act and make moral decisions.4 Trusting in our
freedom, we have a reason to take this side of the contest.
On the other side, the eternity and infinitude of the world is championed by scientists,
especially empiricists (B494). The antithesis is framed to ensure that scientific knowledge can
expand without limit; that everything is by nature (B496-8). We have an interest on this side as
knowledge-seekers.
The fact that the opposed partisans each have an interest in the outcome helps to
perpetuate the contest, but it is not the cause of its persistence. The arguments on both sides
are valid, yet neither is true. The truth is an alternative that escapes the contrary, but not
contradictory, formulations (B531). The contest is perpetual because it cannot be decided in
favor of either statement.
The conflict arises due to an illusion (B534). In both cases we reason about the world as
if the world were an object of experience, but the world is not something available to
experience in this way. The world is an idea, a concept created by reason in order to structure
and organize all the things that we do know through the understanding’s grasp of possible
experience (B538).5 The world-as-idea is the “absolute totality of all existing things,” the totality
4
"Now, to be sure, we have in fact established this necessity of a first beginning, issuing in freedom, only insofar as
this is required for making comprehensible an origin of the world… Yet having once proved thereby… the power of
beginning entirely spontaneously a series in time, we are now also permitted to let different series begin
spontaneously, even in the midst of the course of the world…” (B477-78).
5
“We can in no way intend to mean that the series of conditions for a given conditioned is in itself finite or infinite.
For then we would by a mere idea of absolute totality—a totality provided only in the idea itself—think an object
that cannot be given in any experience; for we would confer on a series of appearances an objective reality
independent of the empirical synthesis” (B538).
5
�of all possible experience, a synthesis that therefore “surpasses all possible experience” (B4467, my emphasis; cf. B532-3, B384).
I should back up a moment and note that everything Kant says about this question
depends on distinguishing two faculties, the understanding and reason (B396). This is the
absolutely crucial part I have skipped over, and which I will shamelessly sketch. The first faculty,
the understanding, brings the wide variety of appearances under concepts, it unifies the
appearances by means of rules (B359); understanding is how we come to know objects and
make correct statements about them. The second faculty, reason, operates at a higher level; it
does not deal directly with appearances; it manages what is supplied by the understanding, it
brings coherence to these statements; in bringing order, it seeks the universal underlying
conditions of those statements (B363).
At first glance, the world looks like an object of experience, something grasped by the
understanding, but in fact it is a concept of reason, a notion that reason freely creates as part of
its work in bringing coherence to the statements of the understanding about the objects of
experience. This concept of reason, the world, is barely robust enough for us to raise a question
about its origin, and not sufficiently robust for that question to have an answer (B505). Thus,
contrary statements can be made about it without consequence. This idea of pure reason that
we constructively think, but do not experience, is inherently a problem (B510). Note that while I
began talking about questions, under Kant’s guidance I have slipped into talking about problems
instead. The idea of pure reason is a problem in a double sense: on the one hand, it is a
“problem which admits no solution” since neither the thesis nor the antithesis can be true; on
the other hand, because we can say “with certainty” that no solution is possible, we obtain a
“critical solution”; the illusion is dispelled (B508-510). The problem is perfectly insoluble and
therefore perfectly solved.6
One of the striking things here is that Kant appears to turn the word idea inside out.
Suppose we were to ask with Socrates, “what is virtue”? We wish to know not just what
qualities may be called “virtues,” but what the form of virtue is—its idea—what is it that makes
6
“No question whatever concerning an object given to pure reason is insoluble for this same human reason… for
the same concept that enables us to ask the question must also assuredly make us competent to answer it, since…
the object is not to be met with outside the concept at all” (B505).
6
�each so-called virtue a virtue? To answer the “what is?” question means to grasp in thought the
fullness of the idea. But for Kant, the idea is not the consummation of knowledge, not a fullness
of thought, but the opposite; it’s a problem for the understanding, a rift in the fabric of human
knowledge.
When reason connects an idea, like the world, to a thread of inquiries in natural science,
it does not expand knowledge; it simply indicates that this is where knowledge-as-such ends
(B498). Kant calls this method “skeptical” in that it aims to refute the dogmatism of pure
reason. It is Socratic, in that he means to delineate with maximum clarity what it is that we do
not know. He brings the contrarian dialectic of pure reason to a conclusion in “the Socratic
manner, viz., by the clearest proof of the opponents’ ignorance” (Bxxxi).7
I seem to have contradicted myself, saying both that Kant is Socratic in his treatment of
the ideas, and that he turns the Socratic idea inside out, from the consummation of knowledge
to its absence. Is Kant being ironic when he says his mode is Socratic? I think not. In many
Platonic dialogues, when we observe the responses to “what is…?” questions, even though
several possible answers are shown wanting, suggesting progress, one often comes away
thinking that the question has not been definitively answered. Even the question, “what is
knowledge?” is not answered. Perhaps even in the Platonic dialogues the idea signifies not a
fullness of thought, but a problem. According to Kant, the ideas even for Plato were framed
more as a ground for right action than for the sake of theoretical knowledge (B371).8 By
depriving reason of transcendent speculative pretentions, Kant has made room for a rational
faith that grounds moral action (Bxxx).
7
“Above all, however, [we see the value of] such a metaphysics if we take into account the inestimable advantage
of putting an end, for all future time, to all objections against morality and religion, and of doing so in a Socratic
manner, viz., by the clearest proof of opponents’ ignorance… Hence the primary and most important concern of
philosophy is to deprive metaphysics, once and for all, of its detrimental influence, by obstructing the very source
of its errors” (Bxxxi). Another passage that may allude to Socrates: “And what we allow as holding in regard to our
practical interest, reason may want to pass off as furthering our speculative interest; reason may want to do this in
order to break… the thread of physical inquiries and fasten it—with a pretense of expanding our cognition—to
transcendental ideas, through which we cognize only that we know nothing” (B498).
8
Incidentally, this is the context in which Kant suggests that he understood Plato better than Plato understood
himself (B370). The worth of the ideas lies not only in practice, i.e., moral guidance, but also in regulating and
guiding speculative inquiry. A cosmological idea (i.e., the world) is a rule for the continuation and expansion of
experience; even though the unconditioned (finite or non-finite) is never reached in experience (B537; cf. B672, on
the regulative use of transcendental ideas). “We interrogate nature in accordance with these ideas” (B673).
7
�So how might Kant’s account of the idea, understood as a problem, help us to think
about our own common experience with persisting questions? It helps us to see how a question
could be permanent; how arguments may be valid on both sides of the question; how the
question necessarily goes unanswered. The idea understood as a problem appears to give us an
object of thought that invites our inquiry, that has a determinate form, but remains elusive. The
enduring questions that we maneuver around in our conversations appear to have the insideout structure of Kant’s ideas, a sort of photographic negative for the mind’s eye.
Yet Kant’s account of the idea as a problem seems poorer than our naïve experience of a
permanent question. Having shown that the question of the eternity of the world is
permanently incapable of being answered, Kant does away with any interest we may have had
in raising the question. This is exactly his intention: by showing that neither side can grasp the
truth, he shows that empiricist scientists cannot do away with freedom, and defenders of
religion and morality cannot put limits on scientific inquiry. There is no reason for them to
quarrel, and little reason even to talk about it. He means to steer eager young minds away from
these fruitless debates: too often young people “with their desire for knowledge” waste their
time on this and similar quarrels, exercising their ingenuity by devising clever new arguments
and “neglect[ing] the study of well-founded sciences” (Bxxxi). I don’t think Kant would have
sent his children to St. John’s, although I could be wrong.9
The Stability of Nature and the Wall about the Law
Kant enabled us to picture the structure of a permanent question, but only by
transforming the question into a problem, one that is perfectly solved by being shown perfectly
insoluble. When the question is framed in way to exhibit its permanence, it seems to lose its
character as a question. With Maimonides, we see the question take on an analogous structure,
of parallel, undemonstrated propositions, but perhaps retaining its question-hood.
About the eternity of the world Maimonides says there are three opinions: first, the
opinion of the Law of Moses, that God, through his will, brought into existence out of nothing
9
Of course, Kant neither married nor had children.
8
�all beings as they are, including time.10 Second is the opinion is of all the philosophers, including
Plato, that it is not possible to bring a thing into existence out of nothing, and, hence, there
exists matter that is as eternal as the deity; the deity works on this matter as a potter works on
clay; out of this the earth and the heavens are generated. Third is the opinion of Aristotle and
his followers, which is the same as the preceding opinion, except Aristotle thinks the heavens
do not come into being, but are perpetual and everlasting (2.13.281-284). Without warning,
Maimonides adds a fourth opinion, the opinion of Epicurus and his following, who do not say
that a deity exists, and who think that all things come into being and pass away by chance
(2.13.285). The four opinions are quickly reduced to two: the opinion of Epicurus is said to be
irrelevant since the existence of the deity has already been demonstrated; and the difference
between the opinions of Plato and Aristotle is quickly set aside, on the ground that the essential
question is whether matter is created or coexists eternally with God.
I will briefly consider arguments for the creation of the world and for its eternity in
order to get a synoptic view of the question. As Maimonides’ treatment has many more
facets—there are, for example, four proofs of creation based on ten premises—I will take
longer, getting deeper into the weeds, while abbreviating even more.
Maimonides finds the proofs for the creation of the world wanting because the
premises are faulty (1.73-74). I will mention two premises. First, the authors of these proofs,
the theologians, do not admit the distinction between substance and accident, between a
nature that endures and a changeable attribute (1.73.200-201). The proofs, in effect, assume
that nothing occurs by nature; everything is only an attribute brought about directly by God in
an unceasing act of creation. They assert, “everything you consider a form is an accident… there
is no difference between the substance of iron and the substance of cream” (1.73.208).11
Second, the most important premise adopted by the theologians is not acknowledging the
difference between intellect and imagination; they assume that whatever can be imagined is an
acceptable notion for the intellect (1.73.206), and that what is possible or impossible according
10
The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, University of Chicago Press, 1963, 2.13, page 282.
This statement actually follows from the second premise mentioned here; it’s relevance to the first premise
signals their connection.
11
9
�to the imagination is possible or impossible simply. As a result, they do not recognize the stable
nature of what exists.
By contrast, for Maimonides, the difference between imagination and intellect is made
evident in mathematics. In mathematics there are things that cannot be imagined, but
nevertheless can be established by demonstrative proof. One example is the relationship of the
hyperbola to its asymptote: one cannot imagine that the two lines will come closer than any
given distance, and still never meet, and yet this feature of the hyperbola is proven
(1.73.210).12 Here, the impossible and the necessary are correctly identified only by means of
the intellect.13 This distinction between the intellect and the imagination is useful to the
believer as well, since by means of the imagination one may easily think that God is a body or a
force acting in a body (1.73.211, cf. 1.49.109), whereas it is the intellect that establishes that
God is not a body. But the intellect also puts limits on what may be believed: “the impossible
has a firmly established nature” that cannot be changed by any agent, including God (2.13.283).
Creation out of nothing is impossible according to the intellect, and it cannot therefore be
attributed to God (cf. 2.14.286).
Maimonides also raises doubts about Aristotle’s arguments for the eternity of the world.
The most important argument for the eternity of the world is that that motion as a whole does
not come into being or pass away; each motion is caused by a preceding motion; either this
series goes on to infinity, or there is an unceasing motion prior to all others (2.14.286).14 This
eternal motion is the motion of the heavens, which, being circular, has no contraries, no reason
to stop. Aristotle sought to refute Epicurus, who thought that the world, even the heavens,
came about only by chance (2.20.312). Thus, he sought to show that the heavenly spheres
move unceasingly through natural necessity (2.19.306). This is all familiar to readers of
Aristotle’s Physics. Against this Maimonides points out that the various heavenly bodies have
12
The imagination in each particular use seems wedded to a particular scale, but the infinitely increasing closeness
of the hyperbola and asymptote forever changes scale. What unfolds in thought cannot be coherently pictured,
but only thought.
13
In another mathematical example, the mutakallimun apparently do not acknowledge that the side and the
diagonal of the square are incommensurable (1.73.198). The dependence of this assertion on the relationship of
intellect and imagination is indirect.
14
Maimonides says the method is correct but not sufficient as a proof (2.17.297); his argument is rehearsed below.
10
�quite different motions—they travel in different directions and at different speeds; Aristotle’s
account of the permanent causes of motion do nothing to explain this variety. What Aristotle
has to say about the heavens is therefore only conjecture.15
Maimonides is at pains to point out that while Aristotle’s argument is not
demonstrative, Aristotle knew it was not demonstrative; he knew what it was that he did not
know.16 This awareness that he had opinion rather than knowledge distinguishes him from his
philosophical followers (2.15.290-2). According to Maimonides, “no cogent demonstration” can
be brought to establish either the eternity of the world or its creation in time, “this is a point
before which the intellect stops” (1.71.180). When there is no demonstration of either of two
contradictory viewpoints, he says that it is preferable to let this matter remain a “problem,” or,
if one accepts one of the two viewpoints, to do so without pretending it is proven (2.16.293-4).
When Maimonides says, “this is a point at which the intellect stops,” one is naturally
reminded of Kant’s account of the ideas of pure reason.17 As there are two fundamental
opinions, one religious and one philosophical, the question mirrors the simplicity of Kant’s
antinomy. Here, as well, neither opinion gains an undisputed, dialectical supremacy over the
other. The Guide of the Perplexed is peppered with analogous notices on the boundaries of the
intellect. “Man should not press forward to engage in speculative study of corrupt imaginings…
when the thing he seeks does not seem to him to have been demonstrated… he should refrain
and hold back.”18 In the face of such doubtful matters, “human perfection” is not-deceiving
yourself into thinking that you have demonstrative knowledge when you do not, and notaspiring to know that which you cannot know (1.32.68). He says that the intention “is not,
15
Guide 2.19.306-8; 2.22.320; cf. 2.3.254. The cause of the motions of the heavens are intellects. Thoughtthinking-itself does not “will” in the proper sense of the word because it is impossible that it will anything contrary
to what it does (2.21.314, 2.22.319). [This paragraph ends abruptly; probably more needs to be said.]
16
Guide 2.15.289-290; Pines cites De Caelo 1.10.279b4 ff. This awareness that he had opinion rather than
knowledge on this point distinguishes him from his philosophical followers, who dogmatically mistake the
argument for a proof (2.15.290-92).
17
Of course, only by substituting “intellect” for “understanding.” Much more could be said here.
18
Guide 1.32.70, cf. 1.32.66, 1.72.193, 3.436-7, etc. The most salient case is the true reality of God (1.52, 54, 56).
Each passage needs to be studied within its context; I list them only to draw attention to the trope. The affinities
between Maimonides and Kant have been explored by Shlomo Pines, “The Limitations of Human Knowledge
According to Al-Farabi, ibn Bajja, and Maimonides” (Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. I.
Twersky, Cambridge: London, 1979), although Pines focuses on knowledge of separated substances. Josh Parens
provides a critique of this view, together with a review of the literature, in Leo Strauss and the Recovery of
Medieval Political Philosophy, University of Rochester, 2016, pages 137-147.
11
�however, wholly to close the gate of speculation and to deprive the intellect of the
apprehension of things that it is possible to apprehend” (1.32.70). Maimonides’ coordinated
treatment of the two opinions, in which neither is demonstrated, has the double effect of
preserving scientific knowledge of the things that are, while also preserving observance of the
divine law. “For I reach the goal that every [theologian] desires, without abolishing the nature
of existence and without disagreeing with Aristotle with regard to any point that he has
demonstrated.”19
As neither the eternity of the world nor its beginning in time have been demonstrated,
the advantages of holding one opinion or the other take on greater significance. The eternity of
the world, especially the eternal motion of the heavens, has the advantage of making fully
manifest the stability of nature. In addition, the eternity of the heavens is the premise on which
is demonstrated the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God as pure intellect.
There is a very significant disadvantage to the eternity of the world: it “destroys the Law
[of Moses] in its principle,” for it denies miracles, and it renders meaningless the rewards and
penalties given by the Law (2.25.328). If the motion of the heavens is eternal and necessary,
then the basis of this motion, the deity as intellect, is unchanging; such a deity cannot will one
thing and then another (2.14.284). This kind of God cannot be the author of the Law because
laws do not exist by necessity; they require choice and particularization (3.26.509). There is no
necessity, for example, that one sacrifice a lamb in one circumstance and a ram in another,
even if sacrifices are useful (3.26.509).20
Maimonides means to protect the stability of the impossible and the stability of nature,
while also building a “great wall” about the Mosaic Law (2.19.303; 2.17.297-8). Both premises—
eternity and creation—are consistent with the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God
(2.1.252). In addition, creation is consistent with a God who lays down particular laws, whereas
19
Guide 1.71.182. For the sake of simplicity, I have said, “theologians,” where Pines gives, “Mutakallimun,” a
transliteration of the Arabic. The word is sometimes translated “dialectical theologians.”
20
Aristotle’s deity of pure thought, that moves the eternal heaven, acts only by necessity; it cannot account for
why one heaven moves east and another west, one faster, another slower; it cannot account for why the stars are
dense here and sparse there; these variations appear to require “particularization.” With belief in the creation of
the world, God is conceived as one who can will one thing and then another; miracles and the Law are both
rendered possible (not necessary or demonstrated, of course [2.25.329]). Note, Maimonides does not claim to
have a demonstration that the deity is one who particularizes.
12
�eternity can be the basis of demonstrable knowledge of God’s existence. One premise is
preferable, but both are possible, and human perfection is recognizing that you do not have
demonstrative knowledge of either.
From world to soul
While Maimonides shows that both the eternity of the world and its creation, have not
been demonstrated, he nevertheless affirms that he is among the followers of Moses, who
believe in the creation of the world, and he provides an argument in favor of this belief. The
argument runs thus: for each thing produced in time, the nature of the thing that has attained
its final state is different from the nature of the thing when it is being generated. Someone who
observes a thing only in its final state, cannot infer from its final state what its nature was
before, while it was being generated. For example, an orphaned male on an isolated island,
who has never seen a female of a mammalian species, could not answer the question, how did
he come to be generated? (2.17.295) Without viewing an embryo, one cannot know what is
generated first, the heart or the gonads, the veins or the bones (2.17.298). Aristotle, looking
only upon the nature of what exists, and seeing it in its stability and perfection, cannot conceive
an earlier state through which this whole was generated. But the inability to conceive this
earlier state does not entail that such a state is impossible, it does not render impossible a prior
process of natural generation (2.17.296). Maimonides’ critique clearly does not prove that the
world was generated: it is not intended to be demonstrative. It only establishes that, on the
basis of the nature before us, one cannot deny the possibility of the generation of the world.21
The argument is surprising if you think about it. For Maimonides, it is the theologians
who characteristically err in not correctly identifying what is possible, impossible, and
necessary. They judge what is possible on the basis of the imagination, when the intellect is a
more definite guide. The philosophers, by contrast, know about and are guided by the intellect,
and therefore understand better the nature of the possible, impossible, and the necessary
21
Furthermore, it establishes the possibility of the creation of the world in a way as that permits what exists to
have a stable nature. If the Mutakallimun established the possibility of the creation of the world in time, they did
so only in such a way as to render impossible the stability of nature.
13
�(1.68.166). But here, it is the philosophers who distinguish the possible and the impossible
incorrectly, thinking the generation of the natural whole is impossible.
The particular error in judging the possible and the impossible points to a deeper
difficulty. Every school of thought has some opinion about what is impossible, and in every
case, power over the impossible is not ascribed to God (3.15.461). For example, all men of
speculation think that it is impossible that God should create a second like Himself, or
impossible that he should annihilate himself. Some men of speculation, the theologians, think
that it is possible for an attribute to exist without being in a substance, and others, the
philosophers, think this is impossible. Faced with sorting out the various opinions about the
impossible, Maimonides makes a surprising concession:
Would that I knew whether this gate is open and licit, so that everyone can… assert with
regard to any notion whatever he conceives; This is possible; whereas someone else
says: No, this is impossible because of the nature of the matter. Or is there something
that shuts and blocks this gate so that so that a man can assert decisively that such and
such a thing is impossible because of its nature? Should this be verified… with the help
of the imaginative faculty or with the intellect? And by what can one differentiate
between that which is imagined and that which is cognized by the intellect?... Is there
accordingly something that permits differentiation between the imaginative faculty and
the intellect? And is that something altogether outside both the intellect and the
imagination, or is it by the intellect itself that one distinguishes between that which is
cognized by the intellect and that which is imagined? (3.16.460-1)22
In the case of the asymptotes of a hyperbola, or in the case of the incommensurability of the
side and diagonal of a square, the proofs are valid in spite of distrusting imagination; such
proofs help to establish that the intellect yields a conception of the impossible and the
necessary that is different from the imagination’s. But to establish that the two faculties are
distinct in several cases is not the same as distinguishing them in every case. It seems the
22
Elsewhere it appears to be the intellect which is responsible for distinguishing the two: “the intellect divides the
composite things and differentiates their parts and makes abstractions of them, represents them to itself in their
true reality and with their causes… the imagination apprehends only that which is individual and composite as a
whole, as it is apprehended by the senses; or [it] compounds things that in their existence are separate”
(1.73.209). It is not clear to me whether Maimonides thinks the intellect in itself cannot be known with precision
(cf. 3.9.436-7), or whether its “quiddity” can be known (1.68.163), but it is unclear in the actual exercise of the two
faculties where one begins and the other ends. This question is connected with other vexed questions in the Guide:
the nature of prophecy (as the prophet is one perfect in imagination and intellect) and the prophecy of Moses in
particular (whose prophecy is said to make no use of the imagination).
14
�philosophers who thought the eternity of the world was proven, somehow judged the matter
with the imagination even when they thought they were judging on the basis of the intellect. As
Maimonides says, “passions get the better of all sects, even of the philosophers.”23 The
distinction between the imagination and the intellect remains somehow indeterminate, leaving
ambiguities about the possible, impossible, and necessary.
I should give some context for the image of the gate: Maimonides gives an extended
parable about a ruler in his palace (3.51). People are scattered about inside and outside the
city. Some wander around searching for the gate, others have entered the gate and the
antechambers; I will not pause to lay out the several concentric rings. The highest rank, the
rank of the prophets, who are strongest in intellect, have entered the innermost court.
Maimonides says they ask questions and receive answers, speaking and being spoken to, in that
holy place (3.51.620). Set in this context, the passage I read a short while ago, about whether
the gate is “open and licit” or closed, presents a puzzle. In other passages, if the gate is open,
this means there is something that can be grasped by the intellect; if the gate is closed, then
the matter lies beyond the intellect. Here, closing the gate signifies that the intellect’s
determination of the impossible is correct. Conversely, opening the gate signifies that we do
not know if the intellect is correct in its determination of the impossible, and, yet, in this state
of ambiguity, the gate is there to be passed through, perhaps to enter the innermost chamber,
where the intellect attains its highest exercise, asking questions and receiving answers.
The question about the eternity of the world is a question about what’s out there, about
nature, rather than the self. One may have supposed this would make the question more
tractable, yet the objectivity proves illusory. The question about the world cannot be explored
in depth without opening a correlate question about the nature and the powers of one’s own
soul. Kant and Maimonides both show this in different ways. For Kant, the question concerning
the eternity of the world is a permanent problem because its insolubility is demonstrated on
the basis of the distinction between the faculties of understanding and reason. For
23
Guide 2.15.292. Here, Maimonides says Aristotle knew that the “gates” were “closed” regarding the possibility of
proving the eternity of the world.
15
�Maimonides, the question concerning the eternity of the world continues to perplex and invite
inquiry precisely because the faculties of intellect and imagination, however separate, lack a
final, satisfactory typology.
In a better form of this lecture I would put these two accounts of the soul to the test. Is
the power of imagination somehow active in Kant’s account of knowledge? Does this have
anything to do with reason’s “fictive” power in creating deceptive ideas? This is a gate I am not
prepared to pass through; I will make some observations while loitering in front of it. First, I
believe Maimonides is wiser for his caution. In solving the problem of the antinomy, Kant
employs a “skeptical method” which aims “to discover the point of misunderstanding” (B4512). The method is Socratic insofar as it seeks to know what it is that one does not know. Yet
“the skeptical method” has a dogmatic edge; Kant says it “aims at certainty”; it reveals not what
one person knows or does not know, but the limits of knowledge for human beings as such. To
accomplish this requires an unambiguous and satisfactory account of the nature of knowledge;
I am not confident Kant has it. Maimonides seems to reflect more accurately my experience
reading great books, that even those who rightly place a premium on distinguishing knowledge
from opinion, nevertheless may prove to have confused the two.24
Second, I would observe some differences in the way the question is framed by each
author. Kant’s frames each antinomy in terms of a single thesis and antithesis, the view of
natural science and the view of religion and morality, or, better, our view as knowledge-seekers
and our view as rational-moral actors. This framing is intended to subsume every possible
philosophy and every religion. It must be able to subsume under itself all previous speculation
on these subjects, if it is to put an end to the unfruitful exercise of ingenuity.
Maimonides’ framing of the question is immersed in detail, disordered and enigmatic.
He lists four opinions about eternity or creation; he quickly reduces them to two, but the third
spontaneously reemerges as a serious option. He argues that you cannot on the basis of the
present, perfect state of existence, deny the possibility of a prior state in which that which now
24
To be more explicit: Kant has answered definitively the question, “what is knowledge?” while Maimonides, like
Socrates, seems to lack a definitive answer to this question. It is the definitive account of what constitutes
knowledge that permits closing the question about the eternity of the world, or the lack of that account that keeps
the question open.
16
�exists, was naturally generated. In proving that Aristotelians lack the grounds to deny creation,
he (accidentally?) shows the viability of Plato’s view, that even the heavens were generated.
Several chapters after hastily setting Plato aside, we are told, “[Plato’s] opinion,” unlike
Aristotle’s, “would not destroy the foundations of the Law” or give the lie to miracles
(2.25.328).25
Similarly, although Maimonides speaks of “the opinion of Aristotle” on the eternity of
the world, the theory assumes the uniform circular motion of the heavens, and Maimonides is
acutely aware that mathematical astronomy had made great progress since Aristotle, even up
into his own times; he is also aware that astronomy contains important, unanswered
questions.26 He is doubtful of understanding the nature, causes, and motions of the heavens,
but serious consideration of the question concerning eternity or creation for him requires
serious study of the intricacies of contemporary astronomy and physics.27
Just as Maimonides does not frame the opinions of the philosophers or mathematicians
in generalized terms, so on the other side, he does not treat the question concerning eternity in
reference to religion and morality in general, but in reference to one religion, his own. The
creation of the world in time is a belief shared with Christians and Muslims (1.71.178). He is
clearly familiar with their beliefs, and the opinions he reports from the “theologians” generally
come from Muslim and, to a lesser degree, Christian writers. Despite the shared interest of the
25
In truth, this passage is perplexing. First, if Plato’s opinion were entirely congruent with the law, and just as
plausible as Aristotle’s opinion in accounting for the appearances, why not adopt the opinion of Plato about the
natural whole? Possible answers: Maimonides has confidence in Aristotle’s opinions about the sublunar domain
(2.22.319-320), and the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God can be demonstrated on the basis of Aristotle’s
opinion about nature. Second, elsewhere it is said that Plato’s opinion differs from the Mosaic law in the crucial
respect: it does not admit that matter was created. So why state here that it is compatible with the law? Plato’s
opinion, unlike Aristotle’s, does supply a deity who “particularizes” the natural world, and such a particularizing
deity could also be a possible source of law. These congruencies do not alter the fundamental difference, however.
26
Guide 2.24.322ff. Perplexities include the choice between the epicyclic and eccentric hypotheses, as well as the
uncertainty about the placement of Mercury and Venus relative to the sun.
27
Guide 2.24.327: “the deity alone fully knows the true reality, the nature, the substance, the form, the motions,
and the causes of the heavens. But he has enabled man to have knowledge of what is beneath the heavens… Let us
stop at a point that is within our capacity.” Maimonides refers to his admonishment here as an instance of “poetic
precociousness,” and he refers to his perplexity as evidence of his “extreme predilection” for investigation. I do not
by the comparison mean to imply that Kant did not study contemporary astronomy and physics, which he did: he is
known for his part in the development of the nebular hypothesis.
17
�three religions, he addresses the question within the context of the specific requirements of his
own, even the requirements of his own religion in his own times.28
Maimonides troubles over the details of mathematical astronomy and the variety of
philosophical and theological arguments because, even if nothing has been demonstrated and
the question remains a “problem,” it is not closed either, and so all the details still have import
for the question. Surveying the particular state of mathematics, philosophy, and his religion,
enmeshed in its details and the motivating context, Maimonides’ formulation of the question
loses something of its permanence and universality. Given the present state of physics, for
example, I could not learn from the Guide the truth of the eternity or generation of the world,
but I might see better how to reframe the question in the present.29
The Structure of a Persisting Question?
What is it that we are doing, when we ask questions that seem to be permanent?
Sometimes we come across a convenient, often three-word, formulation—oh, that’s the
problem of reason and revelation, or justice versus expediency, or fate and free will—and my
heart sinks a little, because the phrase, so formulaic, drains all import out of the conversation.
The crispness of the formula implies that it is futile to say more, that it has all been said already.
Without the attendant complexity, we lack the traction to think effectively or to care.
That kind of reductionism is rare around here, but the way we converse does introduce
a small measure of abstraction. The fact that we pursue our questions together entails that we
frame them in a way that we can share in them. Each one of us reads and raises questions in
reference to one’s own experience and circumstances, beliefs and hopes, but we articulate our
28
Some precepts in the law were framed in order to liberate the people from paganism; as paganism no longer
poses the same threat, the precepts should be interpreted accordingly. For example, despite the emphasis on
sacrifice within the law, prayer and fasting are preferable means of worship; contemplation of the deity better still
(3.29; “Silence is praise to thee,” 1.59.139; cf. 3.51.621).
29
What are the several views that physicists or philosophers hold about the natural whole? In the face of the rapid
progress of science, much in the Bible may be interpreted allegorically (2.30), but what must be accepted literally
so that the law may guide the community? Where are the conflicts? What has been demonstrated, and what
remains conjecture? This thinking about the importance of Maimonides situation for posing his question has been
influenced by Gadamer’s critique of permanent problems: “The concept of the problem is clearly an abstraction,
the detachment of the content of the question from the question that in fact first reveals it [the content?]… Such a
‘problem’ has fallen out of the motivated context of questioning, from which it receives the clarity of its sense”
(TM 376).
18
�questions in way that is meant to be meaningful for everyone around the table. We abstract
enough from our particular circumstances to pose our questions from the point of view of a
shared humanity. Or perhaps, every question is tacitly double, a question for me and for us,
close but not quite the same.
The abstractness of Kant’s presentation of the antinomy may be relatively far from the
way we pose persisting questions, but through its abstractness I think it reveals something
about the source of persistence of these questions. The dialectical contest of the antinomies is
played out at the boundaries between the secure knowledge of natural science and the fictive
power of pure reason, between the speculative enterprise of the understanding and reason’s
practical employment.30 Sometimes the boundary seems clear: in one vivid passage, Kant says
that, as far as morality is concerned, “experience is the mother of illusion” (B375): you cannot
derive what you ought to do from what is done; the boundary between reason and
understanding must be recognized and respected. Other times the boundary is less clear: recall
that, while the world is an idea, a concept of pure reason and not an object of experience, the
idea nevertheless subsumes the totality of our experiences, and so proves useful for organizing
our experiences and extending our knowledge. Metaphorically speaking, one has to cross over
the boundary from experience to ideas, precisely in order to broaden and deepen one’s grasp
of objects of experience.
Kant appears to have marked out, somewhat schematically, the territory of persistent
questions. Maimonides similarly passes from mathematically demonstrative arguments, to
hypothetical arguments, to probable ones, to poetical precociousness and allegorical
interpretations, and back again across the spectrum. Sometimes the aim is simply to know the
true reality of what is, sometimes he considers what must be thought for the individual to act
well or for the community to thrive. There seem to be two axes: one a passing from knowledge,
through opinion, to ignorance; the second passing from theory to practice. Unless I am
mistaken, for Kant, the two axes coincide: you cannot derive what one ought to do from what
is; the domain of pure reason, though prone to illusion, is also the ground of morality; wehre
30
For reason as a “fictive” power, B608 (“invention” in Pluhar; dichten in German). I believe there are other similar
passages.
19
�productive speculation [i.e., learning] occurs only on the side of the understanding. For
Maimonides, the axes are askew: what ought to be done is based on knowledge whenever
possible, on conjecture when not. Either way, in the kinds of questions I am talking about, it is
difficult to know where you stand on either axis: is the account before us demonstrative,
hypothetical, analogical? Is my interest purely speculative, or is it tacitly informed by how I
mean to act and live?
Moreover, in raising questions, we might put more emphasis on one axis than the other.
It probably struck you a long time ago that the question concerning the eternity of the world
may be a poor example of a persisting question, given that the prevalent view in physics today
is that the world, the universe, has a beginning in time. As I think is obvious, my own interest in
the question has been connected to another question, the question concerning how religious
belief may be weighed against philosophical or scientific inquiry. The cosmological question was
most explosive when religion and science appeared on different sides of it. The question
concerning eternity or creation led us back, on the one hand, to the question, “what is the
nature of the soul and its powers?” On the other, the question is motivated for many by the
question about philosophic inquiry and religious belief: “what are those principles on basis of
which I should act? How are they given or discovered?” The question concerning eternity leads
in two different directions, towards the study of the soul and the nature of knowledge, on the
one hand, and towards morality, religion, and politics, on the other.31 In this narrative, Kant
appears to prioritize the first, Maimonides the second. If several fundamental questions
intersect, how you answer one must be affected by the order in which you decide to treat
them, by how you prioritize them. Kant means to put an end to metaphysical speculation, to
complete metaphysics as a critical enterprise, but by marking out the multiple dimensions of
the space where these problems are analyzed, he is more successful in showing why we cannot
stop thinking metaphysically. The gate, of course, remains open.
31
I add “politics” because Maimonides aims to draw a “great wall about the Law,” that is, to preserve that which
binds and protects his community. There is a (less prominent) political dimension to Kant’s treatment of these
questions as well a community, perhaps a universal community, in which freedom is maximized (B373).
20
�
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The Gate of Speculation, Is It Open or Closed? On the Possibility of Permanent Questions
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 24, 2018 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
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Annapolis, MD
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2018-08-24
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Questioning
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Macfarland_Joseph_2018-08-24_Typescript
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3d4a67f1830d28336d570b7db681578f.mp3
844051e33d4cd77d620e40f16acde015
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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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
audio cassette
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:46:43
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
Poetry and Mathematics
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 2, 2009 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Kutler, Samuel S.
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
2009-10-02
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 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 typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Kutler_Samuel_2009-10-02
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7d2b32dbb0bd78a7e0db9027e6a4c52d.mp3
15f38a4dabe9a06174e82a04c0068478
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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
audio cassette
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:56:24
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 Republic of Letters and the Republic of Numbers
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 29, 2006 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Kutler, Samuel S.
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
2006-09-29
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 typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Kutler_Samuel_2006-09-29
Subject
The topic of the resource
Comprehension
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a01ab61d333e6ca848160c3be8e4bccf.mp3
467cae9f49777b5db231d907c5eb1b0e
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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
audio cassette
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:51:59
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
What Does Mathematics Have to Do with the Way We Lead Our Lives
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 7, 1997, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Kutler, Samuel S.
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
1997-11-07
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 typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Kutler_Samuel_1997-11-07
Subject
The topic of the resource
Mathematics
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f9219b72c780337ed9d6338c639ee6cc.mp3
b482491829b66340f9595f92f88a709f
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&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
audio cassette
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:53:00
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Memories and Memory
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 22, 2000, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Recording is not complete.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Kutler, Samuel S.
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
2000-09-22
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 typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Kutler_Samuel_2000-09-22
Subject
The topic of the resource
St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
Friday night lecture
Tutors